Upgrade - 332: The 2020 Upgradies

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

As the year comes to an end, it's time for the Seventh Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2020, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.

From RelayFM, this is Upgrade 332 and welcome to the most prestigious night of the year. The biggest event on the calendar. It is the Upgradees Awards. This is the 7th annual Upgradies for the year of 2020. This episode is brought to you by DoorDash, Pingdom, SaneBox, and Hover. I am one of your hosts. I am Mike Hurley, and I am joined by my co-host for the awards this evening, Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Jason Snell.

Hello, Mike Hurley. How are you? I am fine and dandy, my friend. Fine and dandy indeed. You know how much I look forward to this event. I have been very excited. I'm working away over the last week or so to get everything together for today. And I'm very excited to start our award category shortly.

But we do have some things that we, you know, we have the intro of the awards, you know, to kind of get everyone settled in. People are still taking their seats, getting their drinks. Warming up. We're warming up. So I have a couple of Snell Talk questions for you today, actually, because I had one that I thought of, and then I also found one that was award related. So I thought, if we don't ask you now, I might not ask you for a year. So my question to you jason is if you could give an honorary upgrade award to a winner in a category that we do not already have for this year what would it be and who would it go to i like that you're asking this at the beginning because that

means that i really can't give it to anything even remotely close to what we cover yeah because we don't know as we'll get to in a, we don't know who the winners will be. Unlike other award shows, this just happens as we go. I am going to give an award for the best helpers of 2020 to public health professionals, frontline healthcare workers,

and vaccine scientists for all that they did in 2020. Because, you know, 2020. Yeah. The scientific community, the medical community this year, I mean, it's surely going to be in our lifetimes just an unprecedented effort. You know, I would expect that we will probably not see anything again

on this kind of scale. I sure hope not. Let's just assume i i feel better just assuming that this is a one and done uh good and you know like you're completely right right like the health professionals and the health care workers the way that they step up like that and i have kind of been astounded by what i have learned about kind of medical science this year in the sense of like, the entire world focuses on a problem

at the same time with unlimited resource. We can fix it. Yep. And I think that, you know, that what we've seen with vaccination technology and research this year is kind of astounding. And I hope that there's some stuff that's learned from this whole process that could be applied to other things so i completely i you've

picked the very best uh honorary upgradey award and winner uh for 2020 i think yeah i think so and stitch asked when and in what category do you think that Apple TV Plus would win its first big award like an Oscar or an Emmy? Take that, Golden Globes. Take that. They won. They did win an Emmy, right? But was it a supporting actor Emmy? No, wasn't that the Golden Globe or was that the Emmy?

I think that was an Emmy. But let's assume as a bigger award what do you think apple's biggest award could be i know you're right he won one for supporting actor emmy so emmy already they there's there's your there's your answer my get my answer for both of these generally is it's probably some less visible category um i was gonna actually say documentary might be a good example of that right um. If we're talking about the Oscars, especially, I think it'll be something that is a doc or a short or something like that that's in a smaller category that we've seen Netflix win those awards before. Like, maybe it comes out of Apple's collaboration with Oprah or, you know, I don't know what it's going to be, but that,

that would be my gut feeling is that it's going to be something like that. The Oscars are going to be harder, right? Because they're going to want to, you know, it's that whole premiering things in theaters. Presumably that will be a rule of again, at some point and the Emmys,

they've got one, but you know, I would also say, you know, documentary visual effects are always a place where they've got some of these visual effects series, like for all mankind, where they might actually have a chance in a category like that. And, uh, while we're talking about the Emmys and like major awards, um, I would, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen obviously, but I,

Jason Sudeikis would get my vote, um, for best actor in a comedy for Ted Lasso so I wonder if they will if if there will be some Emmy recognition for Ted Lasso on the way I wonder if they could with a show like Ted Lasso pick up an actual like best comedy right because that's like the major stuff isn't it yeah it's the big yeah the big awards is I think that's a separate question but it's like will Apple win a major category in the Oscars or the Emmys and what would it be in? And I think that that would be my answer is it's probably an acting award in a category. But I think Apple's going to get nominated in some of these categories. Their slate is good and getting better and it'll be fascinating to see what they are.

But Ted Lasso is the one that I'm looking at now because that seems so obvious to me, which of course means that they'll probably not even get nominated because that happens all the time with the Emmy Awards. There's nothing more Emmy Awards like outrage about not being nominated, or Oscars, quite frankly. If you would like to send in a question to help us open an episode of the show,

just send out a tweet with the hashtag snow talk or use question mark snow talk in the relay fm members discord so before we get into the awards let's talk a little bit about the upgradies why do we why do we have this award show why why do we have it why have we been doing this thing for so many years wanted to do it when we started the podcast which we started in September, we got to the end of the year and you said, Jason, let's do a best of the year award show. And we'll call it the Upgradies and we'll make it the first annual. And I said, no, you can't call it that. You have to wait a year before it to show that it's annual.

And you agreed, which was big of you. And so, yeah, you really wanted to do it but this is a thing that i always did at mac user and mac world we had the eddie awards and so we always had an annual product cycle where we wrote down winners and nominees and had debates in you know in various conference rooms about like what should be the winner in various categories. And I always thought that was a fun process. It was also a lot of work, and I got really tired of it at the end, and I made other people do it instead of me.

I actually ran it for a little while. But I think there's something to that. And what's ended up happening here is that we've taken our sort of end-of-the-year review show and a way to talk about some of our favorite stuff from the year and wrapped it in this kind of award structure that replicates a little bit of that kind of back room, the conference room experience of discussing our options out in public, which is obviously not something we ever did at Macworld or Macuser for the Eddie Awards. That was all very secret. And then there was just a ceremony for a long time.

There was actual like tuxedo formal ceremony where actual statues were handed out. But here on Upgrade, you get to hear the back room conversations about what we should give the awards. And I think that's part of the fun of it. Yeah, so we have been, and then over the last few years as well, one of the changes that we made was to take nominations from the Upgradies. So if you listen to the show,

you've been listening to the show recently, you've known over the last month or so, we have been taking nominations from you. We had, I think it was over 1,500, 1,600 people cast their nominations. So thank you very much if you took part. And I really like that because we get a lot of feedback and there will typically be applications and things, whether it's stories or media, that gets recommended that I otherwise wouldn't have considered. And that's really great. that I otherwise wouldn't have considered.

And that's really great. So we will do as we do every year. I will read out for every category the top three in the Upgradians voting. And then we will also talk about our own personal nominations for the categories as well. We use our nominations and the Upgradians nominations

for the two of us to decide on who we think is worthy of the win in each category. So it's really good to have that. Sometimes the Upgradians can be the casting vote. Honestly, sometimes the Upgradians have been the entire vote, and I expect that there'll be some of that as we go on throughout the evening. So if you want to see who has won every single award in Upgrade East history, there is a website which is built for us by a wonderful friend of the show and moderator of the RelayFM members discord,

Zach Knox. And Zach, me and Zach work together on this. And Zach does all the work. Zach just asks me some questions, frankly. And I'm very thankful for that. So that's at UpgradeEast.com. I recommend not going there right now because probably by the time you're listening to this, all of the 2020 winners

will be there. So kind of keep, wait, wait until you finish the show, then go look at the 2020 website. It's really great because we put in every category of every year and you can see every single winner, which is fantastic. and one of the one of the quirks of the upgrade is is our audience being the wonderful uh nerds that they are have some things that they love so much that they will vote for them constantly forever so we uh introduced the lifetime achievement award a couple of years ago and the way that this works is if any winner continues to win a category the same category uh three times so if you win best ios app three years it doesn't have to be in a row but just in total you get the lifetime achievement award for that category and you are no longer able

to win it so this stopped from certain apps and especially podcasts from winning the same award every year. As it stands right now, we have three Lifetime Achievement Award winners. And part of being Lifetime Achievement Award winner is you get the recognition every single year in the Upgraders as being one. So our three Lifetime Achievement Award winners are Best iOS App, which is Overcast, Favorite Tech Podcast app which is overcast favorite tech podcast which is the accidental tech podcast and favorite non-tech podcast which is the flop house so they are our current lifetime achievement award winners in their respective categories i like how you blamed the listeners for this when we pick the winners so it's really on us more than the listeners we get very excited

about things that's a good point well it's our what i didn't say is that we are also the same kind of nerd right who i see you to you got to make that connection there yeah that's that's a very good point we're all the same uh so yeah we you know got it nailed it there are certain podcasts for example that we love or apps that we love, and we would just keep awarding them over and over and over again. So it's a good way to force us to think about some different things and to pay attention to different things. All right, before we get into our very first category, let me take our first break of the evening and thank Pingdom for their support of this show and for helping us put on the Upgradees this year. Today's internet users expect a fast web experience.

No matter how good your content or how effective your marketing, they're going to bounce if your website is loading too slowly. With real user monitoring from Pingdom, you can discover how website performance issues affect your visitors' experiences so you can take action before your business is impacted. How your visitors experience your website differs depending on the browser, the device, the platform that they're using, and you want to identify how visitors are experiencing your website so you can make informed optimizations and deliver a great performance to those who matter

most. Real user monitoring is an event-based solution, so it's built for scalability, meaning that you can monitor millions of page views without compromising the fidelity of your historical data or breaking the bank in the process. Get live visitor insights with real user monitoring from Pingdom. Go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM right now for a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Then when you sign up, use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get an awesome 30% of your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. So we move into the first category of the evening for best overall iOS app. So this category is open to any application released at any point.

They can pick up the best overall iOS app. We have from the Upgradians, Jason, at 4.2% Things from Cultured Code. Things is an application that has come up quite a lot, and I don't believe has ever actually won one of the upgradies. I don't think neither has it actually been a runner-up in the past, but from my memory, I know that it's always there. It's always voted pretty highly from the upgradians. It breaks into their votes.

At 7.1% of the vote, we have Carrot Weather from Brian Mueller. Carrot Weather is a previous Upgrady award winner from 2017. So could be picking up a second win here tonight. Good luck, Brian Carrot. Okay. 14.6 for apollo for reddit from christian selling another application that is it has been a two-time runner-up um weirdly uh in the newcomer ios app it's won that twice i'm not sure exactly how that's happened jason but it has happened i think the app was uh re-released at one point okay but you know sometimes there are irregularities in the voting process but apollo is there with 14.6 percent of the vote from christian satlick this is for the best overall ios app jason what nominations are you bringing to the table today i have four and i'm reminded

one of the great things about the lifetime achievement award winners is it reminds me that we have these categories where you don't have to have done anything. You just need to continue to exist and be great. And you can be nominated and possibly win. And I'll know when it's time to stop. When you say, Jason, that means this product is now a lifetime achievement winner. And then I have to stop. But until then, I can just keep mentioning my favorite apps. That's the beauty of this process. The audio editor, I use it for podcasts. I edit The Incomparable on Ferrite using an Apple Pencil. I love it.

It's great. I can't wait for it to be on the Mac. That'll be nice too. But the experience of sitting with my iPad and a pencil and editing a podcast can't be beat. It's my favorite podcast editing experience is to do it using Ferr fair right so i'm going to put fair right on my list all right was a runner-up in 2018 it's because i keep mentioning it and it keeps not winning but i'm just going to mention it again it's great it's amazing um i want to mention drafts now i am not i am, so I've had an annual subscription to drafts for a little more than a year. They did a special involving Stephen Hackett's St. Jude campaign and I bought it then.

And I thought, well, I'll try it out for a year and it's a discount and all of that. And then I just re-subscribed for another year. I'm not one of these, I think there are a lot of people who are sort of like in the drafts life cycle their lifestyle they're like super into it and it's funny how sometimes the more fervent uh fan base an app has and this is true for other things too obviously the less accessible it seems because all the talk about it ends up being about why it's great to do these incredible things and you put your whole life into it

and it changes the way you think and, you know, that happens. See? Notion. Exactly. Exactly. And there's lots of examples of that where it's like, it doesn't actually say,

the fact that there are rabid fans of something doesn't actually say if that app is accessible or not. It says a lot about its depth and complexity and how interesting it might be, but the app could be pretty accessible or not accessible at all. And you wouldn't know. And so I've spent the last year using drafts for some things and I like it. I've written a bunch of articles in it. I use OneWriter mostly when I'm on the iPad writing,

but OneWriter has some bugs in the latest version of iOS. The cursor does weird things and goes weird places. And Drafts is rock solid. I was able to very slightly modify all of my automation stuff in shortcuts to work with Drafts. And the big problem I have with Drafts is that it won't let me sort of sync out to a uh to a text file on dropbox you can export but it's not quite the same as a sync because i do move from mac to ipad and i want to be able to write my articles or edit my articles in either place uh so you mean like if you're writing an article in drafts you would maybe

want to be open it in bb edit but you would need exactly right file in dropbox article in drafts, you would maybe want to open it in BBEdit, but you would need it to be a file in Dropbox. I have drafts on the Mac. I'm not interested in writing in drafts on the Mac. Sorry, I'm not. I'm going to write there in BBEdit. I actually have changed my workflow in drafts. I'm now using a shortcut that will save a copy of the current draft to the Dropbox so I can get there. And I also do have drafts on my Mac, and I can open it and then take it out and put it in BBEdit where I want it to be.

So I've got some workarounds for that. I wish there was a way to say just sync this with a file provider so I can go back and forth. And I get why philosophically that's not something that Drafts wants to do. But as an iOS app on its own, the great thing about it having that depth and having those people who believe in it is anytime I want to do something in Drafts, I can do it. Like there's a way to do it. That amazes me. So I'm not using the depths of it like some people are. That amazes me.

But I'm not using the depths of it like some people are. But I've been very impressed that whenever I need to try and reach for a tool to do something that I want to do, they're available. And like you said, in keyboard shortcuts and like it's got all of the nice stuff. So I've spent a year with drafts and I'm very impressed with it. So I wanted to mention it. Yeah, I will say the same thing about drafts in the sense that I don't use it very much, but I use it for a few things. And it fills some holes for me with automation that otherwise would be really tricky. And the way that I've been able to get those to work

is by purely having the idea and searching for it in the drafts action directory and someone's already done it. This is definitely one of those applications where it's like, if you can think of it, it's been done already. Like if it's possible, somebody's done it and you can install one of those actions and get it to work for you so drafts for me is more of a bridge between things but a very useful one yeah and for me it's it's i'm also

not using it as the way that it's sort of done on the label but i enjoy it uh it's very good i've been very impressed with it my entire story of writing on ios is essentially trying to find something that will replicate what i want from a writing app that i get from bb edit and there's nothing there's nothing that does that there's nothing that does it exactly the way that i want to do it and i obviously don't use 90% of BBEdit's features either, because it's primarily a development tool, and I use it as a writing tool. But all the various Markdown editors in iOS, none of them quite get it right. A lot of them have scripting involved, which is great. And that's why I use OneWriter. And that's why I have used Drafts. But the problem is uh the downside of having an app that really supports user automation is that sometimes i'm not saying this always

happens but sometimes the developer says i don't need to build features for my app because you can build them yourself or get one from a friend in a script it's like well no no search and replace should not be a user script right it should be a feature of the app and and and i can go from there and that's the problem i see with a lot of these ios apps that are uh that don't have a lot of functionality and some of the ones that do don't do it just don't work the way i want like ulysses is a good example where ulysses is a really great app but the way that it wants to hide the code from you, especially like hyperlinks, I don't work like that. I don't want my hyperlink text to turn into a block that you have to click

on to open to edit as an item. I want it to just be text and Ulysses doesn't want to do that. So I get why, but it doesn't work for me. So my adventure of attempting to find an iOS writing app continues. But drafts has become, I'd say I'm writing in drafts maybe half the time and in OneWriter half the time. I sort of go back and forth. I get frustrated with OneWriter. I go to drafts. But it's given me time with drafts to be impressed about how good it is. Okay.

I have two more I want to mention. One is Libby. A lot of people don't know about this, especially if you're in the U.S., though. Libby is an iPhone app, essentially. I don't even know if you can use it on the iPad. I don't. I only use it on the iPhone. But it is a – oh, no, it is.

It is on the iPad. I will use it occasionally there. It ties into your local library. It's part of the Overdrive, if your library has that. And it's great because this is an app that lets you check out audiobooks from your local library. And they download into the app and you use it to play the audiobooks. So, you know, if your library has audiobooks available, you may not even know this. You can use this app.

It's super easy to use. This stuff used to be very complicated, and now it's very easy. So you can check out an audiobook and just, and then listen to it, and then check it back in without going to the library, and it's just on your phone, which is presumably where you want to play an audiobook from. I also use it. It's the best interface that I've found to find what books are available to borrow to use on my kindle from the library and you use the libby app to find those books and to put them

in your wish list or to check them out and send them to your kindle and i do that all the time too so i'm using my local libraries features some disclaimer my wife works at my local library but and she's the one who turned me on to this thing but it's great it's a really nice app and and for people to use library services especially this this year when um going into libraries is probably not happening um there's so many digital services that are available and this is a great app it legitimately is just like it's so it's so convenient to have it on your phone so libby there it is very nice um and um and finally i want to mention scriptable which i spent a lot of time using this year scriptable is uh an app that lets you write and execute JavaScript on iOS. But the killer feature this year, of course,

is that Scriptable supports widgets. So you can write your own widget to do whatever and put it on your home screen. And I did that a couple of times. I wrote a widget for air quality using air sensors, local Purple Air air quality using air sensors, local purple air, air quality sensors during the wildfires here and made that into my first GitHub project. And a bunch of people are using a version of that now, which is awesome.

And it sits on my home screen and it tells me what my air quality is. And then I also wrote one just for me that uses all the data from my weather station. On my Mac, I've got it in a menu bar, but on my iPhone and iPad, it's in a little widget that's powered by Scriptable. So that's pretty incredible to be able to build something that is living on my home screen and is updating regularly,

and I made it myself for me. That's pretty incredible, and Scriptable lets you do that. So you mentioned widgets. My three nominations for best overall iOS app all have fantastic widgets. And it's how I actually mainly interact with these applications now, either by looking at the widgets on my iPhone or my iPad or tapping the widget to open the application. So Timery, honestly, I think Timery is one of the best iOS apps of all time because it is so well made for its purpose. It has absolutely everything that you need if you want to time track and it does nothing more, nothing less. And it is perfectly built

by someone who, Joe Hirabar, who clearly understands how to do this kind of work. It's very rare that I use an application where I feel like the maker of that application works exactly like me. And Timery is an example, I think, of just a very well-executed, simple application that has powerful features in it if you want to dig through it super good the widgets are fantastic Joe has done just a superb

job with charts and stuff so allowing you to see statistics of your time tracking and you can create as many widgets as you want you can arbitrarily change the colors of them to whatever you want you can label them. You can turn certain projects on and off on the widgets. So you're just, you know, so like, for example, now I have a widget that shows me all of my time track today, one that shows me all of my time track this week, and one that shows me all of my time track this week just for podcast recording and editing. I like to have that data. It just lives in my today view. I can scroll down and get it whenever I want it.

It's just there. It's just superb. Absolutely superb. The other one, again, actually for me, all three of these, they're like my personal hall of fame of applications. Carrot Weather is the next one. This is the only nomination from me or you

that matches with the upgradians carrot weather is just superb it's such a great application it is one of those applications that now i never open because the widgets are just perfect like brian has done something with the widgets and carrot weather that it's so incredible where the widget type that I use people always ask me which one it was so I'm going to just double check the name of it because I don't want to get it wrong so like there's a bunch of different types of widgets that you can use a carrot and the one that I use is called the forecast widget and it changes throughout the day between a bunch of other types of widgets that the app can give you so like in the morning i will get what the weather is for the day and then later on i will get the like in the day i'll

get the weather for the next few days because towards the end of the day you just want the weather for the week and if it's raining the application the widget updates to show me how long it's going to rain for it is an absolutely superb implementation of this feature. And it's just, I'd never need to open carrot weather anymore because the widget is exactly what I need all the time. Fantastic. And then talking about fantastic,

fantastic cow is my next is my next choice. Fantastic cow three gave me the two things that I really desperately wanted from this application. I mean, I've used Fantastical since the original. I wanted to have an iPad version that looked like the Mac version, and I wanted the calendar sets from the Mac version on iOS. They added these, they refreshed the design, they added some new features in. Some of these features I use, some I don't use, but I appreciate what they're doing. Like they have the ability for you now to like create an event and like with a bunch of options and send it to people and they can choose what event they want and it blocks it all out in your calendar. It's clever stuff,

but it's not a feature that I need. And then the overall design, polish, and then the widgets, just superb. You know, like I have a widget now where I've got a calendar and my kind of next upcoming events. It has a little heat map on it, which I wasn't sure about at first,

but I've come to really like the heat map on the widget, which shows kind of where my busy and empty times are. So yeah, absolutely superb update that the app saw this year. So Fantastical is my third and final nomination for this category,

which I think this category is going to be tricky now, Jason. So yeah, I think so. After hearing, so I would say after hearing your nominations, I definitely could imagine Drafts as the winner here, personally. I don't know if you feel any different from hearing mine.

Well, you should like Ferrite more. That's number one. Okay, so Ferrite, I really appreciate Ferrite and what it's doing, but I do not use it. Right? I imagine a world where I would, but I don't want to take the time to learn a new application until I get the benefit of having it everywhere.

So if and when Ferrite makes its way to the Mac, I am then going to choose to learn Ferrite where I'm on the Mac primarily and then use the iPad as a separate thing. For me personally, I couldn't edit a podcast on my iPad with the precision that I want the way that you do

because I just don't think ergonomically that would be good for me. Now, I know for you it works and for anybody that does it, it's awesome. This is just a mic problem. Okay. You know? All right. But I love Ferrite. I love Ferrite. It is a superb application. awesome this is just a mic problem okay you know all right but i love ferrite i love ferrite it is

a superb application some of the the interfaces not to my personal tastes but i appreciate its power it's a mic problem a mic problem um well the the listeners the upgradians did vote second for carrot weather and you mentioned carrot weather i also use carrot weather and i like it a lot although i i don't like it as much as you and i don't like the widgets as much as you in fact i'm using weatherline just for the widgets because i think they're better than carrot weather's widgets um just the way that the data is presented i think is better in Weatherline because it's more readable and shows me the ups and downs of the high temperature, which is exactly what I want.

Interesting. And carrots don't do it for me. I do like carrots overall. The carrot watch app is also superb. I do have that. So yeah, you're right. This is a difficult one. I think Fant fantastical is an

interesting point i don't love fantastical on ios as much as i do on the mac honestly i i'm much more frustrated by how it works on ios um i don't think it's as good as the mac version um so i think it's fair we can pause fantastical right because right? Because I love it everywhere. You love it on the Mac. Maybe we'll talk about it later. So we can knock Fantastical out. I'm going to understand that Timery is not going to win this, right? I know that, but it's important to me. But it is an application that you need to use to understand it.

Sure. Timery is a previous winner. It won. You gave me the ability to give it the newcomer ios app last year oh so so this is interesting so an app that i don't use i i checked off the box so there's a precedent for that i let the app that you love so much there's a lot of precedent of this where me and you bargain the things that we really care about that isn't this is not new it's true like look what i'm saying is so i think the winner of this category needs to come from me and you because i don't use apollo i don't know if you use apollo i don't know i have it i have

used it i find it too fiddly my problem is more with reddit than apollo that makes sense apollo makes reddit more usable for me but my problem is reddit and if i personally if i was leaning towards one of yours i would lean towards drafts because i am aware of the amount of effort that has been put into an application over the last couple of years and I think that it deserves the recognition for that. All right, well, my favorite is FairRite. What do I have to do to get you to pick FairRite as the best overall iOS app? Well, I mean, I could just put one in my pocket for later on.

So I'll give you FairRite, but... Dangerous. See, this is it, people. We're in the horse trading. You're in the room with us now. This is the beauty of Grady's and you don't like books so Libby's out it's a very interesting

thing but like I even struggle to just understand how renting books from a library works if you're not in the library we don't need to get into this conversation today so here's my thing I think we are deciding for the winner and the moment and then and the

runners-up between carrot drafts and ferrite that's where we are so we just need to decide which one of those three is going to win it yeah um i cannot imagine the fact that ferrite has never won an upgrade is that right it's never won ferrite has never won no firm. Is that right? It's never won? Ferrite has never won. No, Ferrite has never won an upgrade. Oh, actually, wrong, wrong, wrong. 2015, it won Best Newcomer. Okay. All right. Well, then I'm going to say,

let's give it to Drafts. Let's do it. I think it's worth it. I think it is a worthy winner. So we're going to say that the winner of the Best Overallos app for 2020 is drafts with the runners-up being carrot weather and sorry mr carrot sorry brian carrot close so close can i make a confession about carrot weather one of the things i don't like about it is the

thing that made its name which is the snarky forecast i don't like them no i think that's unpleasant i turn them off immediately yeah honestly i i know people like it but um i think that's kind of unpleasant i turn them off immediately yeah honestly i i know people like it but um i think it wouldn't be a bad idea to move away from that well i think and i think i think perhaps it's getting de-emphasized over time but i get it it really did make people pay attention to it yeah got and that's what you want that's the name of the game but it actually prevented me from using it for a long time because although the functionality was great i think some people don't take it seriously yeah anyway it's a great app i think it would be a shame to get rid of it because it's where the the kind of like the the app sure whole thing comes from but i think having it turned off by

default might be the right option going into the future well Who are we to tell Brian Carrot what to do? Brian Carrot has had a very successful career, so I'm sure that Brian gets it. It's a great app. Regardless. Also, why has Toggle not bought Timery? Why has that not happened? What is wrong with them? I don't know. I don't think I want it to

happen because I don't trust their application development team because they do not do a good job, in my opinion, with any of their apps. You know, if they wanted to buy Time Marine and let Joe continue doing Joe's great work, that would be great. But otherwise, I want it to live forever. All right, so let's move into our second category. I don't think we're all going to take this long, but that one was surprising.

Best newcomer iOS app. The Upgradians voted with 3.3% for Hay from Basecamp. 4.5% is Reader 5 from Silvio Rizzi. And at the second largest percentage of the evening, 38.5% for Widgetsmith from David Smith. What are your votes? 6.5% for Widget Smith from David Smith. What are your votes? I nominate a few here.

So NetNewsWire got revived this year. A new open source version from Brent Simmons and the Open Source Project. NetNewsWire 5, it's really good. I use it every day. I wasn't using RSS until NetNewsWire 5 came out and I now use RSS on my iPad every day. So I'm going to throw that in there. It is new. It is NetNewsWire, which has been around forever and yet new. I want to mention an app called Longplay, which looks at your Apple Music Library and shows the albums in it. And the idea there is it's a way to visual... Steve Jobs would have loved it. And the idea there is it's a way to visual,

Steve Jobs would have loved it. Let's just put it that way. It's like lots of album covers. You can sort them in different ways by recent or by most plays or by things that you've not listened to in a while. And then you tap on the album cover and it plays that album straight through using the music app. Or I think you can, I don't you can do spotify because i don't think it has the apis for it but using the music app it basically will play that album so it's like a single album browsing and play interface i think it's really clever i like it a lot uh widget smith yeah right like like the 39 of upgradians yeah absolutely i would just like to correct myself jason it's actually the third largest. Okay. There was a late entry.

A tradition like no other, Mike, is you trying to compare vote totals and then having to correct it. I think that happens every year, too. Yes, there's a lot. It warms my heart. I think that does happen every year. And I'll throw in the Fitness Plus app, actually, the Apple Fitness app with Fitness Plus, because I think that some of the stuff that they did, they have done with that service, which doesn't really have a category and the,

uh, and the live data from your Apple watch streaming to your iPad, uh, it's pretty clever. So those are the four that I wanted to mention. I have one and it's widget Smith. Yeah. It's there's so much to it,

right? Like there's the whole story and the fact that David Smith is a personal friend of both of us. And that would be fine. You know, like Widget Smith probably would have always made it into this category for me anyway, because I love David's apps and David does a great job. And I was using Widget Smith through the beta period. It was powering some widgets that I had on my home screen.

But then Wid smith became the most popular app in the world for a couple of months and so you know like just the the fact that the the story and then what david has done with it since and how much better that application has become at doing the things that people want it to do i think is actually kind of astounding like that over the time that Widgetsmith has been available, I continue to add more and more widgets to my home screens based on the new types of widgets or the new types of themes that David is creating.

And this isn't just a case of like, I want to keep supporting my friend. Like I'm now, like I have a little countdown timer on my home screen until new year's and stuff like that now and it's like all this like really just beautiful design for the themes that david has been working on like i just think that it is it is an astounding app that caught lightning in a bottle and then in true underscore fashion he has capitalized on it and has just made it the best possible version of itself that it can be i think it's astounding yeah well so here's the funny thing um if this was like a six

colors piece where i was picking my favorites net newswire wins because net newswire changed how i consume information on my ipad in the morning like it's great i'm so glad to see that it's back if you haven't tried it give it a try it's free open source project and they're doing a great job can i ask yeah what is it about net newswire compared to say like i use reader and what do you find from net newswire that makes it just so good for you part of it is just that it seems to work the way I want it to work. I think maybe part of it is that it is, because of Brent's long history with RSS,

it is a, I found a lot of RSS readers to be very featurey. And in a way, it's sort of like our previous conversation, in a way that I'm sure they have lots of users who really want all of these features, and I don't. And what NetNewsWire is to me is simple and does all that I want it to do and nothing else. Okay. If it does have a reading list or stuff like that, I don't know because I don't use those features.

of reading list or, you know, stuff like that. I don't know because I don't use those features. I just kind of want to have some subscriptions and, uh, and a readable area and be able to tap through to view it in a web view. And like, it does exactly what I want. And after bouncing off of lots of RSS readers, this simple new net newswire, I didn't bounce off of, I mean, that's sort of how I have to put it is I have tried over the years. Have I tried the latest version of all of the RSS readers? No, I haven't. But over the years, I've tried lots of RSS readers on Mac and iOS, and none of them have stuck. So that's why. But in this case, since this is not my picks, but a collaborative process, this is what separates us, by the way, from whatever happens on Connected, your other podcast, where it's like a blood sport.

Here, as with our drafts, gentlemanly, a collaborative process. Widget Smith was on my list. It was your list. And it was number one on the Upgradians list. So, of course, Widget Smith is the winner. And it is a worthy winner like just you know i just want to say it again like i'm obviously keen to award my friends sure but i think it being the most popular app in the world kind of negates that this is not a popularity contest for the world it's a popularity contest with upgradians and you and me but it's still one though so there you go so what are we

gonna i say we pick net news while five as one of the ones up and would we pick another one um i want to put long play on the list because that's just so rare it's so rare that i see a new ios app and i'm like, oh, this is delightful. Like the platform's been around so long now that a lot of times you're like, oh, it's another one of these or it's another take on this. And I'm sure there have been apps that have done this in the past, but like this one really stuck with me as an enjoyable way to kind of float things back to the top of my music library. I'd never heard of this application before or it hadn't stuck in my mind.

And it sounds like a really fun little idea. So moving to the best overall Mac app. The category, one of the two categories that we created the Upgradians voting for because we would struggle with these. Yes. And here we go again, 4.2%.

Things from Culture Code, which funnily enough, the exact same percentage of the vote that it got for the iOS category. Just found that funny 5.4 safari from apple sure and 6.2 fantastic gal from flexibits some familiar names there i have a bunch of nominees in this category and this is you mentioned we turned this over over to the upgradians let's just say that the last five years, especially, oh, kind of rough for the Mac, right?

Dark period there, not a lot going on. Things have picked up a little bit. I'm encouraged. Things are picking up. So I've got some apps I want to name that I've used on the Mac in the past year that I think are great. Because again, this is one of those categories where, like, literally, I should just put BBEdit in my personal hall of fame. It's the app I use the most on the Mac. I love it I think are great. Because again, this is one of those categories where like literally I should just put BB Edit in my personal hall of fame. It's the app I use the most on the Mac.

I love it. It's great. It keeps getting better. It's amazing. I know I'm sounding like one of those people that turn me away from apps because they rave about them. It's like, no, no, it's too deep.

I can't go there. But I'm not going to mention BB Edit because I don't know. It's like the air we breathe. I want to mention Descript, which is the podcast editing app that lets you edit by editing a transcript of what people said and it turns it into edited audio. This, when it was first announced a few years ago, I was like, that's interesting, but I don't believe that it would work. And I tried it out and it was okay, but not great. And the transcript quality isn't great because, you know, machine-based speech to text is not,

it's still not great. You can pay extra to get a good transcript, or you can be cheap and get a bad transcript. And I'm cheap. So I have a bad transcript, but I came back to it because when I was planning on using the, uh, building the 20 max for 2020 podcast project with lots of interviews, I thought, how in the world am I going to do this? And I started to think I'm going to need to get like a transcript with time code and then like highlight the stuff that I want to take out. And I started to do that. I thought, this is ridiculous. And then have somebody cut out all those bits and put them in. And I thought, wait a second, isn't there an app that does this? And I started using Descript and I use it for

every episode of 20 Max for 2020. Couldn't have done it without it. It is kind of magical. It's not perfect. It's got some issues. I wish it was better in a few ways, but it was a lifesaver for me. And I cannot believe how good it is at what it does. It seems like something that would be impossible. It needs some cleanup and their editor there, they've got an inline editor and it's not great. And it doesn't handle conversations very well in terms of like visualizing them. It's a lot of steps to kind of trim so what i ended up doing was exporting the final piece out into logic where i felt like i had a more capable editing system but i could not have done those podcasts without this app and it really is for anybody who is editing audio that fits within what Descript is good at. It's amazing.

I think Merlin uses it for Roderick on the line. He does. Merlin also uses it for lots of stuff. You see him making clips from shows and stuff out of it. It's very clever. It can create things that you can share. I want to echo that I've used Descript for a couple of things. One thing of mine was it was an episode of a show,

and I had that feeling like, oh, I think there was a curse word that I didn't cut, and Descript allowed me to search for it. I had cut it, but otherwise it would have been a two-hour process of re-listening to the show again, right? And I think it's very powerful. I think the stuff that you've been doing for 20 max for 2020 is great what i don't like about it uh is the thought that people have i think also the thought that they try and put out into the world from their marketing of like this is all you need to edit a podcast and i do not agree with that

because things like removing ums and removing ahs and stuff like that, just removing them with a machine, I guarantee it's going to sound weird in places. It requires finessing. It's good that that feature is great and I use that feature but I think you're right, which is

the challenge that they've got moving forward and I think they know it at Descript is they're not great as an audio editor. And I look at it and think, well, I know Logic and I have Logic. So why would I ever use their audio editor? Because it's just not that good. I see, you know, in the long run, they can't say our product is stage one of a multi-stage process that leads to a different product that we don't make right they can't do that so they're just

going to have to get better at building their audio editor and other workflows to smooth out all that audio because that's i mean when if you listen to 20 max for 2020 and you heard me say brian hamilton provided post-production help i basically handed my logic files to brian and and brian went through every single dialogue edit and smooth them all out because they're not good enough like that's the downside of descript is that you you need to do extra work it while amazing and and really magical it's not up you know it's not really up to my standards um out right straight out of the app you got to do extra work and you can do some of that work in the app but it's not very good or you can take it to another app still though magical use it all year great um final cut pro i'm going to put on

the list because i made 20 20 max for 2020 videos as well and i do all the total party kill videos and stuff like that and i just want to It's not new, but it's amazing. And on the M1 Max, it's even more amazing. It's so easy for me to build video projects that look exactly like I want. Although professionals have famously complained about

the Final Cut Pro X interface since the day it started. I love it. It works. it's understandable to me and in fact there are aspects of it that i wish um other apps would pick up because i occasionally am in a different app and i think why is it not doing this there are problems with it it's audio support is terrible it's shameful that that you can't apply a master compressor to a project and stuff like that. It's bizarre. But it's great.

So Final Cut Pro on my list. I want to mention Pixelmator Pro 2. New version this year. They're doing wacky machine learning stuff. Really great app for photo and image editing um they just yeah they're they're right on the forefront of trying to push machine learning stuff not just into ios but into the mac so i want to mention pixel meter um i'm going to throw audio hijack in again also not a not a hall of famer yet right mike not a hall of famer yet no um it would be if it won this time it's one two times

i i just i don't know what to say i have to mention it every time because catalina so two reasons one is catalina really broke audio apps and the rogue amoeba apps specifically catalina made a bunch of changes completely broke them uh so part one i spent all summer after i moved to catalina to write about it having to use a different computer to record podcasts because i need audio hijack i have to use it um and it made me understand how much i appreciate it part two they also spent all summer working with apple to get it running again after apple basically broke it with the changes it made to catalina and they got it out the day that that or not catalina big sir they got it out the day that big sir came out which is amazing and then it took a little bit of time to get it working on M1, but now I believe it's working there now too.

So although it's not new, it is kind of new. It is kind of the story that I missed it because of Big Sur. I appreciate the work they did to get it to work on Big Sur because it was not easy working with the new security restrictions in Big Sur. And then finally, I already mentioned it before for iOS, I prefer the Fantastical version on the Mac. I think it's much better than the iOS version. I love it. And that's what I use. And you know me, a lot lot of my scheduling a lot of my planning a lot of my to-dos are in a calendar and it's fantastic cow so that's my uh long list of potential winners in this category yeah i have two we spoke about them already uh fantastic cow three and audio hijack would be my two here so i think we have something interesting we've

Fantastic Hour is on all of our lists Audio Hijack is on both of our lists putting Audio Hijack in this year would lock it up for lifetime achievement it's not a reason to do it but it's an interesting one but

you know Fantastic Hour 3 is really, really good. Yeah. Yeah, and people were mad about it. Remember that? Yeah, but... Yeah, I know. People were unhappy that they moved to subscription. Maybe I'm going to upset those people here. But I actually think that the way that they handled the move to subscription was fair. They messed up some things. There were some issues with the actual transition, which upset people, which I understood there were some bugs in the way that they did it. But my understanding is, by and large, they kind of locked the features.

And if you wanted new features, you'd have to pay. But all your old features were kept in place. Now, I will say that was the messaging that they spoke about. If there is asterisks to that, then fine. I am a paying subscriber, and I'm very happy with it and honestly as well I paid for that application however many years before Fantastical is one of those types of apps

that you kind of want to be around forever if you use it all the time I have no problem in paying for it I have no problem in supporting the development for the application I'm more than happy to pay for these kinds of tools so maybe I'm the wrong audience to find that kind of stuff uh bad but no i actually think that it's good for the application because what you know i i talk about this kind of stuff a lot like what is the business model well the business model is they need to continue to make money to make the application. I want the application to stay around. I'm happy to pay them.

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I agree. I think there were some rollout issues and there were some bugs and it led to some misunderstandings and there were features that were fundamental features that were marked as not being available, but there was some confusion there.

So, I mean, they were trying. Yeah, that's my feeling is they tried really hard to get it right while still also doing what was right for their business. And they didn't necessarily execute 100%. But I think most of the criticism was not coming from the people who were dealing with the shakiness of some parts of the rollout. I think it was from people who were offended that they had to pay for software. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was from people who were offended that they had to pay for software. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know what to do. I mean, it seems weird to me to say that the best overall Mac app this year was a calendar. That was pretty good. What do you think? So Audio Hijack is fantastic, right? I love it.

I use it every day. But they didn't do anything new this year. No. I mean, it's best overall, so it isn't, you know. When did they add the broadcast block? That wasn't this year, was it? That was when you had your bachelor party, so that was a while ago. Oh, yeah.

It was literally at your bachelor party when the beta came in we spoke about it on the sofa yes well my my argument is that i missed it when they broke it and that i'm impressed that they got it unbroken given what apple did to to big sir which is great like like look you know i'm not saying that you always have to continue to add new features for software to be good because maybe audio hijack is feature complete i personally don't think it is i think that there is still stuff that they can do with it yeah the point that i'm making with that is like fantastic i had a major new version this year which changed a bunch of stuff about the app i think that they made a bunch of features the application better and nicer to use so i would say that again this it would be better that way

it's on my list it's's on your list. And it was number one in the hearts of the upgradians. So let's do it. Fantastical 3 is the winner of the best Mac app for this year. I think it's easy to put Audio Hijack in as a runner up. Do you have another runner up that you feel particularly should be here? I would like to put Pixelmator in here personally well that was not going to be my choice okay what would yours be no let's do it let's do it i was going to put descript in there but again i'm also cognizant of the fact that two podcasters giving out awards give a lot of awards to podcast and audio tools and that's maybe overdone so let's

do that what pixelmator have done with pixelmator Pro and continue to do is technically very impressive. And they're doing stuff that's truly new. So I think that it deserves some kind of recognition. So the final software pick, well, the final app pick we have games coming on later on is the best newcomer Mac app. This is a category that was interesting. Definitely a lot of new Mac apps this year, but not as many as I thought there was going to be. So we have at 6.4% of the nominations from the upgradients is Craft from Lukey Labs. Craft is the note-taking application that's become quite popular this year. 9.8% of the vote is Overcast from Marco Arment.

So Overcast, previous Lifetime Achievement Award winner in the iOS category, is now finding itself in the Mac category because of the M1 Macs. And 13% of the vote is Nova from Panic. What have you got? So many. Again, I think I'm feeling better about the mac than i have in a while

i'm gonna mention that net newswire 5 again it's brand new uh i'm gonna mention swift bar which is the replacement for bit bar that puts information up in your menu bar i love it i love bit bar it's sort of trailed off in development swift bar is a new version of it that adds some nice new features um messages on big sir it's great we got we got features in messages what uh pixelmator pro two although there were a bunch of great pixelmator pro updates in the one range that also came out this year that i would throw in there including their uh support for apple script yes indeed in 2020 a major mac app added support for apple script it's true true story uh fantastical three could technically be in this category although we already gave an award

i want to mention service station which is this great little utility that lets you um it's for me basically uh it lets you attach uh scripts into the right click menu in the finder and a script or apps and assign them based on file type and so like if i right click on a an image on the desktop one of the items in the list is open in photoshop which is almost always what i want to do but there's also like an upload to six colors and it's right at the top level not in a sub menu and that that will kick off a script that will upload it to six colors and it's just a nice little little mac utility that lets you customize all sorts of stuff that happens when you right click on a file in the finder like it that's fun and it's in the app store too because when i hear about apps like this i get a little bit concerned right like if they're doing something weird but i always feel better when i see that

they're in the mac app store yeah and so i use that's what i use now for all of my like weird automations but i also use it for a bunch of quick launches like the photoshop one's a great example where i've just assigned to a bunch of image types like put just put open in photoshop at the top level because i do that so often and a lot of you know JPEGs are going to open in preview if I double click them and I don't want to change that association there's it's complicated anyway I could imagine with PDFs like I don't want to open every PDF in PDF pen but I do frequently yeah and going to right click open with that's annoying so yeah okay exactly saves you a little step I want to mention bartender for bartender a long time stand long-standing mac utility that lets you simplify your max menu bar i already said

i put a lot of things using swift bar up in my menu bar but there's too many things up there and bartender lets you organize them and hide them hide a bunch of them bartender for like audio hijack had to be you know basically rewritten Sur. And it's different, but it still does everything that I wanted it to do. And I love a longstanding Mac utility getting up to speed. And Bartender 4 did that. And I will mention Nova as well, which people mentioned. This is basically the new version of what was Coda. Panic sold the

name coda to a startup and changed their coda to code editor and now that it's got a name for the new version which is nova i have it i bought it it's very impressive especially if you do web development um i was using it for some of my web stuff too. It's just such a good Mac app. And it's so rare to get these. It's so nice to see these big professional focused on the Mac apps. And although this is kind of a legacy of Coda, it's also technically a new app. So that's a lot of new Mac apps. So I would say for me, if you take everything you said about NetNewswire five and i'll apply it to reader five um i absolutely love reader like the design of it is just works so well for me it's a beautifully

designed application and i use it on ios a lot but i also use it on mac a lot um i like that there's parity between the applications on each on each um the platforms, but they have different features in places where it makes the most sense. Like, for example, the share menu isn't that good on the Mac because it is on iOS, right, with extensions and all that kind of stuff. So the developer, Silvio, put in some actions that you can perform just in the toolbar of the application.

So one of mine, the main thing that I do is I take articles and save them to Apple Notes so I can refer to them later when I'm sitting down to do my show prep. And on Reader on the Mac, there's just a little icon that I can press with the Notes icon on it, and I click it, and it's

going to save it to Notes. It's stuff like that. But just overall, the polish and the design of this application is just fantastic. I absolutely love it it i think it's beautifully designed and is truly excellent on all platforms and i wanted to put it in here the mac i would also like to give um a nod to two of yours so messages which is great but i don't want to give it the win here but i love messages on the mac uh the reason i don't want to give it a win is because we're only saying this because apple let messages get so bad like nothing is great about the new messages

app except for the fact that it finally exists right no you're right it's the classic thing of like if apple does a bad job for a long time and then finally does a good job or its job is that a word worthy no it is not probably not probably but you know like message is notable because it's a catalyst app and i don't think anybody notices it people will tell you they notice it and maybe they do some people are much more particular many of my friends i don't even i don't even know right it's like it's a mac app to me like i don't see how it could be any different but i wanted to mention bartender 4 as well because bartender 4 you could see they had to start again but i actually prefer the way it works right where you like hover over and it

expands and i think they've done a really good job and from going back to the beginning of an application starting again i actually think they've rebuilt it to a better place than the previous versions of bartender so i would tip my hat to them because i think that was an incredible achievement that they achieved the bartender 14 so what are we going to do well okay so we can both agree on bartender yep but you and the upgrading is going to agree on nova yeah nova's not for me right like sure it's on Nova. Yeah. Nova's not for me, right? Like sure. It's barely for me. Yeah.

It's barely for me. Exactly. Right. But it's so, it's so impressive with what it does and that it's a, um, an actual Mac app. I love how many options there are,

but there aren't as many options as there should be. Cause there should be more iOS apps in this category. Um, we're going to talk about that. We'll get to that. I think for their service to the Mac and for the fact that this app is uh is so impressive uh we should give it to to panic yeah for nova i i really like the idea of giving panic an award because they are very very good at what they do and i think award worthy um let's put bartender four in as a as a

runner-up and what do you want to put any other runners up in here i mean i would put messages in as a runner-up um why don't we put uh since you like to have how i described it let's put service station in there just as a little you know you know what i agree with that that's a great idea because i've got, I've left the tab open in Safari for that because I'm going to be checking it out after the show today. So that concludes the app portion

of the show. I think probably the highest contested set of categories, but we still have many more to come, so who knows. This episode is also brought to you by our friends over at SaneBox. I really love SaneBox because it helps get my email under control. Email can be, for so many of us, a huge time waster at work. You can spend so much time tending to your inbox that actually,

a lot of the time, becomes like half of your job. There have been studies that have been found to say this, right? Like people know that what they're doing is spending time in email. And that isn't necessarily a bad thing, except for the fact that we all know that we get so much more email than we need. We get emails that don't need answers. We get emails that really should never have come to us in the first place. You know, you can kind of get that like gray area between like what is spam and what is meant for you.

There's that whole area in the middle. It's like, I don't need this email, but it's not spam. This is the kind of email that SaneBox can really help you get under control. It automatically gets these emails filtered for you. So you just see the messages that need your focus. You don't have to switch email apps because it works in whichever way you'd like to do email, whichever client you use, whichever service you

use. It has some fantastic features like the same black hole feature, which is something that I use a lot. I get myself on these mailing lists that aren't real mailing lists. It's people telling me how much someone should be on my podcast that they've never listen to. And I can't get rid of them because it's not like something I can unsubscribe to, but these people keep emailing me. But if I drag their email into the same black hole folder, I never hear from that person again because SaneBox filters it out

before it ever arrives in my inbox. Super excellent stuff. I also use SaneLater, which is that's where SaneBox analyzes my email and the things that it thinks that I don't need go into the SaneLater folder but as soon as I do something with them it will move them to where I need it to be

and also SaneNews which collects up all of my email newsletters but there's so many types of filters that SaneBox can apply for you it's really really awesome go and see today how SaneBox can magically remove distractions from your email inbox

with a free two-week trial go to SaneBox.com slash UpgradeFM today to start your free trial and get a $25 credit of distractions from your email inbox with a free two-week trial. Go to sanebox.com slash upgradefm today to start your free trial and get a $25 credit. That's S-A-N-E-B-O-X dot com slash upgradefm. Our thanks to Sanebox for their support

of this show and RelayFM. Game of the year time! From the Upgradians, 7% of the vote goes to Among Us from Inner Sloth, which is

probably one of, if not the most popular games in the world this year. 7.1% goes to The Last of Us Part 2 from Naughty

Dog, which is a PlayStation 5 game. And 18.3% is Animal Crossing New Horizons from Nintendo. i usually let you get what you want in this category and so it will be this time i will mention three games that i really enjoyed this year two of which are ios games so i'll mention them again yeah i mean there is we do

have an entire category for ios game of the year you are performing the sin that many of our uh upgradians performed this year i don't know why we need to put ios games in the game of the year category when we have an ios game of the year category but nevertheless let me not let me not speak of them then i will not speak of them now i will speak of them in like two minutes but exactly i will say the game that i i played all the way through and dearly love this year and it's not a game, but it was the game of the year for me, not on an iOS device. And that was something called Astro Bot Rescue Mission, recommended to me by James Thompson. I played it on the PSVR, and it was delightful. It was so good as a virtual reality platformer where you you control a little robot and you stand there and watch the robot and a platformer controlling a remote character in a platformer is

what all platformers are doing it in a 3d world where you're standing inside of it and having to look and be like can i jump from there to there how far away is that it was great it's such a great game and now anybody who bought a ps5 i think it comes with this astrobot game no it's a different one no it's in the it's called astro's playroom no no that's what i that's what i meant this astrobot not. Not this game. This Astro Bot has a game. Oh, yes. This is Sony's new character. Yeah, so there's a new Astro Bot adventure

if you get a PlayStation 5. It's this guy. It's adorable. This little robot, so cute. And the VR experience for a first VR game that I'd ever played, just breathtaking. So funny to see how you translate a traditional, originally 2D platformer into a virtual world.

Oh, so good. Played the whole thing all the way through. And you know me, Mike, I don't do that with games. Don't play them all the way. I don't invest hours and hours in console video games. It doesn't happen. I played Astro Bot all the way through. Loved it.

It's a super great game. It's a 2018 release, but that doesn't matter. But it doesn't matter for me. It's my game of the year. Exactly. And that's perfectly fine because it is fantastic. And the reason that Astro's Playroom exists is because Astro Bot Rescue Missions is so good

and people loved it so much. Like Sony, I understand that they have a fun little character here and they keep doing really fun things with it. I think this is the third game they've had Astro in. I think so. And Astro's Playroom, if you get a PlayStation 5 at any point in the future, Jason, I don't know if that's the thing that's entered the Snell household yet

or is planning to, you're going to love Astro's Playroom, my friend. Like if you like Astro about rescue missions just gotta find a uh find a ps5 that's the problem my son what for christmas got a uh open up one of his presents it's a piece of paper with a picture of a ps5 on it saying oh you will get a ps5 oh it's so sad i feel for him i really do i really feel for him i know how hard that's been for a lot of people again i think we're going to talk about that later on in the episode, too.

My game of the year is Animal Crossing New Horizons. It's, you know... It's not... It's the game of the year in many ways, isn't it? It's difficult in the sense... Actually, the way that I try and describe Animal Crossing as the game of the year,

the emphasis is different. It's as the game of the year. The emphasis is different. It's like the game of the year in a way that games aren't typically game of a time. It's emblematic of this year. It came out just as lockdowns were happening around the world. So people stayed back and played cooperatively. It is a game that is continued to be played in my household it came out in march we play it every day uh it's beautiful it's fantastic i animal crossing new horizons would have been one of my picks a game of the year regardless of

the pandemic because i love the series and have done for years, and it is a vastly improved version of Animal Crossing to the games that it has preceded. It is not without fault, but that's Nintendo always. Nintendo always have faults, and honestly, it's part of their weird charm that their games are never really perfect. Because even the best Nintendo game, in my opinion, ever made, Legends of Zelda Breath of the Wild, is also not a perfect game, perfect because even like the best nintendo game in my opinion ever made legend of zelda breath of

the wild is also not a perfect game because it has basically no story which is really weird uh but animal crossing new horizons is a phenomenon it's been a phenomenon is one of those rare games that has broken out into popular culture and people are buying switches to play it has broken out into popular culture and people are buying Switches to play it. And Nintendo has done a very, very good job over the year of adding in new stuff to keep you coming back to it. So I would desperately love to give

Animal Crossing the upgrade-y. So it shall be. Thank you very much. What are we going to go with runner-ups? I don't know. I think we don't know give one to Among Us because it is so prevalent sure it's also an iOS game but

you know it is on other platforms I get it but it's also an iOS game it is primarily not an iOS game it has an iOS version but like the game in the way it's popular is like played on PC, but lots of people play it on iOS too. It being cross-platform,

I don't think means that it should not be in this category, in my opinion. Okay, then fine. It's your category. Let's put Astro Bot into Jason. Sure, why not? Make me feel good. Great.

Look, it's a great game. I'm not going to lie. It's fantastic. It's a fantastic VR experience and I love VR experiences iOS game of the year time, the Upgradians voted thusly at 3.3%

The Last Campfire by Hello Games at 19.6% Among Us from InnerSloth and at 22.1% Good Sudoku by Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger. You had a bunch of games that got brought from your Game of the Year category into your

iOS Game of the Year category. So what are they? Yeah. So here are my three nominees for iOS Game of the Year. Good Sudoku. I didn't play Sudoku before this game. This game professes to teach you how to play it. I know how to play sudoku now how about that it did it i'm pretty good i'm pretty good i'm not great the puzzles the hard

puzzles are really hard the highest level puzzles i knew hints for but um it taught me this game and it's a lot of fun and of course beautifully uh designed i like that game a lot i wanted to nominate round guard which is an apple Arcade game. We talked about it here. It's a roguelike where you're like a pinball, but it's a person and you've got different things you equip because it's a roguelike every time. Roguelike Peggle.

Roguelike Peggle, exactly. It's really good. My only hesitation here is I played it a lot and then they did an update where they added all of these other gameplay elements and i just stopped playing it because i was getting close to doing everything i needed to do using the gameplay elements that i knew and i felt like they swept the rug out from under me and rather than having it be like once you're done with this you can turn on this feature or add this new thing in they just changed the game and i literally have not played it since then okay so i don't know what that says about how uh game updates should work but it really turned me off but i had enjoyed it up to then it was a it was a lot of fun and a fit as i said in

the episode when we talked about it it fit with the way that i want to play a lot of games which is i want to be able to sit down and feel like i played a complete sort of session and have it be relatively short and if i have a little more time i can play another session of it right then but what i don't want to do is feel like i'm making an enormous commitment um and round guard was good for that and then speaking of that a similar thing um two spies two spies is that is my favorite ios game of the year okay it is uh a turn-based spy versus spy program they just got an update to do season one it's a it's like a almost like a board game it's a strategy game but if you've got ios

devices in your house you know you play against someone else they're on their device you're on your device you're kind of sneaking around europe trying to find the location of the other spy and assassinate them before you are assassinated um it's uh it's really good and you may know the developer because alan pike from steam clock software is it's it's uh i think it's his baby or at least he is one of the parents of two spies it's really good and a lot of fun and i had enjoyed playing that with the computer opponents and in my house uh against my wife where we try to assassinate each other on two spies oh nice uh okay so i'm gonna bring the mood down a little bit um i have realized in creating the upgrade my nominations for the upgrade is that one of the side effects of 2020 for reasons i have no idea

why is i haven't really played any ios games this year Jason. I don't know why. Too much time in Animal Crossing. I don't even think it's that, because it would have been that case between March and May, but Animal Crossing now, for me, is at most 10 minutes a day. And Two Spies is a game that I've had installed on my devices forever and have needed to play.

I've dabbled of a few right like i played round god i played a bunch of the apple arcade games but no game this year has really stuck with me that i feel like i have an ios game of the year like good sudoku is great but i don't like sudoku right yeah you. It's just a shame for me because Zach Gage, who I think is the best iOS game developer of all time, in my opinion. I can appreciate that Zach Gage is a good Sudoku

who worked with Jack Schlesinger on this. Nope. I know it's fantastic. I've tried it. It's fantastic. But it's just not for me. So I don't have one. I've tried it. It's fantastic. But it's not for me. So I don't have one.

I don't have a pick. Well, I am going to declare Two Spies the winner. Great. It's great. It's an iOS-only game by indie iOS developers. It's really fun. They just did a big upgrade uh with better ais and stuff um we should definitely put a good sudoku as a runner-up and i'd actually like to put round

guard as a runner-up too because i like that but we could we could put among us in here we already gave among us one yeah let's put round guard in as the runner-up so two spies is the winner with good sudoku and round guard as the runners-up. So Two Spiders is the winner with Good Sudoku and Roundguard as the runners-up. Because Roundguard is a game that I liked, but I think the difference is every iOS game that I've played this year, I've bounced off of very quickly. I don't know why,

but that's just the way it's been for me. Favorite movie of the year, the weirdest category. Oh boy. The weirdest category. It's worth noting, we cut off the awards uh mid about a week ago a couple of movies have come out since then soul and wonder woman um which people may have wanted to vote for but they couldn't so in the upgradians voting at 10.1

is palm springs so good uh i've yet to see that but it's on our list to watch soon it's so good it is seriously if you haven't seen it it's on hulu in the u.s don't be turned off by the fact that it's it's andy sandberg some people don't like andy i love andy sandberg though so here's here's my pitch just really quickly for palm springs which is, you know, Groundhog Day? This movie isn't Groundhog Day, but it's the closest thing you're ever going to find. How about that? I like it. I'm up for it. I want to watch it. We're going to get it. I think it's on Amazon here now on Prime Video. Yeah, it was bought at a film festival, so Hulu took it in the US and it's elsewhere in other markets.

13.6% for Tenet. Christopher Nolan. I'm not sure about this one. I wonder what our upgradians are doing at movie theaters, but, you know, you do you, I suppose. And 15.9% is Hamilton on Disney+.ney plus ah yes i'm not surprised by that i'll just say it like now uh hamilton is one of the only movies i've seen that came out in 2020 and i loved it um i think hamilton uh kate has pointed out to me that that tenant is out on dvd

now so maybe i'm hoping people watch but not No, but not when this was voted on. Oh, really? I don't think so. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. It's a shame. Hamilton was just fantastic. I love Hamilton.

And I love the movie version. I think they did a fantastic job with it. I've watched it a couple of times since it came out. I'm super into it. So it is my pick. And very likely would have been one of my picks no matter what 2020 looked like well i also didn't see very many movies this year watched watched a lot of tv didn't see a lot of movies this year so this is a tough one i wrote down three i wrote down hamilton okay i wrote down palm springs and i wrote down soul ah okay i

haven't seen soul yet it's really good it's really good available on disney plus worldwide um where disney plus is available disney plus is the winner of the favorite movie category this year clearly i well i mean or there's hulu with palm springs palm springs well but they got two though is what i mean from yeah well that's that's for sure that's for sure but i'm gonna go with you i think i think my most delightful film experience of the year was watching hamilton on release day because they did a really good job as somebody who loves that show and has seen it in person three times they did a really great job with that production all right right, so let's do that. And let's declare Hamilton as the winner.

And I would say Soul and Palm Springs as our runners-up in this category. That sounds good. Hamilton, a movie due to be released in theaters in 2021, pulled forward and wins. Yeah, this is an interesting story that one got. Funny year. Favorite TV show show and there's

been a lot more action in this category than the movie category for sure 0.1 is the queen's gambit from netflix great i was surprised to see how i get up there honestly i haven't seen it yet good on you it's a good good very good show liked it a lot 14.3 percent the mandalorian from disney this is the way great show this is the way if you would like to hear what we had to say both me and jason about the mandalorian if you subscribe to upgrade plus we had a whole big conversation in it and then on this week's episode of the incomparable you spoke about season two of a fine hell of folks yes yes including two from the uk but not you not me other people other ukians and this one is the highest percentage in the upgradians picks of any win in any category for the whole of 2020 at 46.5 tiger king

that actually didn't come up very high which is surprising i think people forget that was this year yeah ted lasso yes yes i mean it was the obvious winner what i will say is i am surprised at the gap between ted lasso and the mandalorian i am a little bit too but um and i so this is funny cause I wrote, I just wrote down Ted Lasso in our document. It was like, clearly it's Ted Lasso. I wasn't really thinking about it. You wrote down three shows and honestly, Mike, I think those are my three favorite shows of the year. So I think, I think you got it. I think you nailed it. Ted Lasso, The Mandalorian and What We Do in the Shadows.

What We Do in the Shadows. We did an incomparable about that, too. I can only assume that the reason that What We Do in the Shadows didn't appear very high in this list because it didn't is because a lot of people haven't seen it. Because if you've seen that show, it's the best comedy. I think it's the best comedy of the year. Ted Lasso is a comedy, but I don't think it's as funny as What We Do in the Shadows. Right. No. What makes Ted Lasso is a comedy, but I don't think it's as funny as what we do in the shadows. Right. No.

What makes Ted Lasso great is not only is it funny, it is heartfelt. Yeah, exactly right. But what is great about what we do in the shadows is just funny. It's hilarious. And one of the most clever interpretations of the premise that I've seen. Yeah. There are things in that show. One, the movie is fantastic.

You don't need to have seen the movie to watch the show because it's different but they live in the same kind of universe but the there are things about vampires in that show which is so cleverly made it's it's brilliant um it is i i think we've talked about it briefly on this podcast and i said it's the closest to this is spinal tap that i've ever found in terms of tone and for somebody who owns this is spinal tap in like eight different forms of media and considers it you know what it's one of my favorites to say that this is the closest i've ever seen to getting the vibe of this is spinal tap uh except it's about vampires instead of rock stars who aren't as different as you might

think um it it's it's great it's legitimately a great show it's and it's hilarious it's just hilarious it's hilarious i love it so ted lasso clearly is our winner let me just say i want to just say something okay man laurie is about a tv show thanso. Now, understand what I'm saying here. You can have favorites and bests, right? Ted Lasso is my favorite show of the year. I think The Mandalorian is the best TV show that I've seen this year. Well, that's a weird dichotomy, and I don't actually agree.

That's how I feel, right? You can listen to that Mandalorian episode of The Incomparable. I love The Mandalorian. I understand. I've seen all of it this year right so you know yeah right that's true you did it really fast so what i'll say is i think season one has a i liked season one but it reached a crescendo where i sort of the last couple episodes where i realized i really loved it season two i liked all the way through and yet at the same time

i don't know i think it suffers every individual episode of the mandalorian season two i liked all the way through and yet at the same time i don't know i think it suffers every individual episode of the mandalorian season two is great i think it suffers a little bit from in hindsight being being plotted to create spinoffs sure sure sure and i didn't i think that it actually is weakened a little bit by the fact that it's trying very hard to sort of merchandise itself and its characters. It's selling the other people more than Mando. Just in hindsight, you're like, why are there those guys in X-Wings that are kind of like the Highway Patrol? And why does Cara Dune get a badge? Sorry, spoilers.

It doesn't matter. Why does Cara Dune get a badge at one point? And is Boba Fett around? it doesn't matter. Why does Cara Dune get a badge at one point? And, you know, is Boba Fett around? Like, you start to think, wait a second, are these all spin-off TV shows of The Mandalorian? And the answer, friends, is yes, they are. So, I don't know. But it was great. It was great. I think Ted Lasso is fundamentally the best show of the year, but The Mandalorian is legitimately a great show. I enjoyed it a lot. Ted Lasso is the easy winner of this. And I think that, as you say, right, we agree.

The Mandalorian and then what we do in The Shadows are our runners-up. Yes. But shout-out to The Queen's Gambit and that 8% vote. I enjoyed that a lot. That vote that was that was i enjoyed that a lot that was a show that i really enjoyed this year it was very well done on netflix but a good year for tv like and 2021 is going to be an even better one i think yeah i got i got a long long long list i discovered taskmaster this year and i love taskmaster too that's such a great show so a lot of good good tv that's why i haven't seen so many movies is that there was a lot of good tv this year i think it's going to be a trend going into the

future right yeah tv if they can make more episodes of tv i think we're we're about to enter a soft spot where the pandemic is going to um make it hard for there to be as much new tv but we'll see there's still a lot your favorite category this is like game of the year this is the flip side this is where i pick the winner favorite book yeah that's right yes i mean okay so in upgrade plus today which you can subscribe to at getupgradeplus.com you get ad free versions of upgrade and additional content in upgrade plus today we're going to talk about how I compile the lists for the Upgradians votes. The book category is the hardest one to put together because the variance in the way that people answer this question,

whether it's the title and the author or the title and no author or the way that they write title and author, this is very hard to put together. Nevertheless, four point and plus this is the one that typically has the lowest votes for the winners because there's so many answers put in so 4.2 percent is rhythm of war by brandon sanderson nine percent is a promised land by barack obama and at 9.5% is The Aleph Extraction by Dan Morin.

I love that Dan wins this category from the Upgradians. The Upgradians love Dan Morin. They do. They do. And they should. More than Barack Obama is what we've learned.

More than... Well, it's a 1-2. It's a tight 1-A, 1-B. Yeah, and Obama. 1-A and 1b i have two that i'm going to mention and then i will declare a winner and books by two of my friends will be the runners up are you ready okay my favorite book of the year is a book by Arkady Martine called A Memory Called Empire it's a science fiction novel it won the Hugo Award this year I read it in January it I was just looking through my goodreads it's one of two books that I that I marked this year

as a five star um it's great I mean it's great it's it's weird it's not I'm sure it's great. I mean, it's great. It's, it's weird. It's not, I'm sure it's not for everybody. It's the, it's, you don't have to have read anything else to read it. It's about, it's a science fiction novel about somebody from kind of the outskirts of a giant galactic empire going to the Capitol. And, uh, there's a lot of weird things that happen and the capital, the culture of this empire is very strange. But the book is, it's a fun ride, but it's also got a lot to say about culture. And I mean, it's in the title, about imperialism. And it was great. It was legitimately great.

It's a first novel too, blows me away. This is her first novel. Loved it. So that's going to be the winner so that's the that's gonna be the winner because it's the best book i read this year okay period um i want to plug the aleph extraction of course olive olive the olive extraction it makes olive oil it's an olive extract did i say it wrong no it's all olive i'm told it's aleph ale Aleph Extraction. Okay. I don't know. Aleph Extraction. Sorry, Dan. That's my fault.

Dan, buy Dan's books. Buy Dan's books. Yep. So let's make that an honorable mention because the Upgradians wanted it. And I'm going to throw in a nonfiction pick that I think people will like if they haven't read it. It's called The End of Everything,

astrophysically speaking, by Katie Mack. A book about all the different ways that the universe can end, one of which is probably how it will end, but we will all be gone by the time that happens, probably. Don't worry too much about all of it, but it's a very entertaining book that tries to deal with some big issues in science in a way that regular people can understand. And it's funny because Katie is funny. And yeah, it's really good. So I'll throw that on the runners up lists. But Memory Called Empire is the winner. This episode is brought to you by Hover, one of RelayFM's longest running sponsors. When you have that one big idea, where are you going to go? Look, your business starts with a domain name. For many entrepreneurs, Hover is that first big leap, and it's a great one because Hover have over 300 domain name extensions to choose from. So no matter what it is you're looking to build, there is a domain name

waiting for it. It's going to fit perfectly. They have excellent technical support that can answer any questions that you might have and help you get up and running quickly hover are dedicated to getting you online and not upselling you and this is one of my favorite things the user experience the user interface super clean really easy they give you free who is privacy so bad guys don't get your information on any domain that supports it and i love just how easy their dashboard is to use so one of the things that i'll typically do with hover is i have an idea and I create a domain name and I want to forward it somewhere. Like for example, Upgradies.com was born on Hover

and it's forwarded over to the platform that we use it for. The same as Upgradies.vote, which is a domain that we own. So every year I forward it to the Google form. And it's so easy for me to go into the Hover dashboard and set these forwards to where they need to go. I really, really love it for that..inc is a new premium domain name extension for businesses that want to be taken seriously. If you checked if your brand name is currently available, don't let somebody else beat you to your brand's.inc domain. From small startups to large enterprises, brands are taking notice of the credibility of this.inc domain. Over 56%

of Forbes' most valuable brands have registered their domain names, including PayPal, Fox, Amazon, Walmart, Facebook, and many, many more. Millions of company names entered.inc. Now your domain name can too. Upgrade your domain to the perfect match and join over 56% of Forbes' most valuable brands and register your.inc domain today. But Hover have, as I said, over 300 domain name extensions. They have what you're looking for. Go to hover.com slash upgrade and you'll get a 10% discount on all new purchases. That's hover.com slash upgrade. Make a name for yourself with Hover. Our thanks to Hover for their continued support of this show and RelayFM.

Thanks to Hover for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. about our favorite Apple products of the year. Upgradians voted thusly. At 12.3% is the Magic Keyboard for iPad. 13.1% for the iPhone 12 Mini. This was a surprise to me, Jason. I didn't expect the Mini to not only get this high, but it beat all of the other iPhones by quite a margin. And at 30.8% of the vote is the M1 MacBook Air. Oh, this is a really tough category.

It's been a great year for Apple hardware. It has. It has. great year for apple hardware it has it has my list is the upgradians list okay all three of those are the three that i wanted to nominate okay do you have a different order well i haven't ordered them yet but i do i do have a different order all right and this this is gonna this is gonna be i don't i'm not sure what we're gonna do because i think my favorite oh oh i don't i can't even decide i think we have we have the life-changing hardware coming up i could make a very strong argument that the magic keyboard for iPad Pro

is life-changing hardware. Okay. It has improved the way that I use my iPad Pro a lot. Mm-hmm. It might be my favorite Apple product of the year, but I'm very torn because that M1 MacBook Air is amazing

for what it does and what it costs. It's amazing. I love it. But the magic keyboard, I just, I just, because the MacBook air came out recently and I love the iPhone 12 mini too. Don't get me wrong.

I love it too, but the magic keyboard came out a long time ago, but it's just so good. I think it might be my favorite, but it's close. What about you? Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. M1 MacBook Pro. I don't have an Air.

iPhone 12 Pro Max. Of course. That's my three. Now, this is difficult. This is genuinely very difficult because the magic keyboard feels like it

wasn't this year for a couple of reasons one of them is that you know so much has happened like the magic keyboard came out at the very beginning of lockdowns it was March that it was announced. I think it shipped in April.

But also, I have products that were kind of like this one for a while. You know, like what it allowed me to do. Magic Keyboard is obviously so much better at it by integrating the trackpad. And it really did change how I use my iPad. The big way. to change how I use my iPad. The big way. But quarantines

have actually moved my computer usage back to the Mac. So I'll tell you right now, Jason, I have not used my 12.9 inch iPad Pro in about two months. Scream emoji. I use my 11 inch ipad pro sure nearly every day for stuff

but it's not work really anymore if i'm working i'm using a mac and look at you these days the mac that i choose to work on is an m1 macbook. And I adore it. I adore it. Touch ID is amazing. Yep. Right? Mm-hmm. The screen is fantastic.

Mm-hmm. It's incredibly fast. I plug it into monitors frequently. Perfect. Works great. There's a little bug, but it works super great. Sometimes I have to just like

turn the monitor on and off again. I don't know why it happens, but sometimes I end up with half of the laptop screen on the monitor screen. Whatever. It's not a problem. Don't care. It's just the ways in which I work have been forced to change because of the environments

that I'm finding myself in more and more and it just happens to have happened at a time where I am more interested in the Mac than I have been in years because the Mac is more interesting than it has been in years so I expect that over the next year things are going to rebalance a little bit but i do expect that from now for the long long-term future i will be using the mac more than i have done it's a platform that i'm using to do my work rather than it just being the platform that i use to do my like recording right like i'm talking about everything else I used to do on an iPad or on a Mac. So I'm very torn. It is for me

between those two things because the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro is really brilliant. It's an absolutely brilliant product that totally changes how you use the iPad. But the M1 MacBook Pro is so much better

than my other MacBook Pros that I've had in the past. Like, by a country mile, that computer is better. And so I am really genuinely struggling with what I would pick here. But then I have the problem of the M1 MacBook Pro isn't the product that's going to win it anyway. Like, if it's going to go to one of them, it should go to the MacBook Air. But I don't want to discount the fact that the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro turns the iPad into a different thing. My iPad usage doesn't work anymore without the Magic Keyboard.

Here's the funny thing, just behind the scenes. I think both of these products are going to get some level of acclaim in the upgradies because there are two categories coming up as they should. Yeah. So we, this is the, again, we're back in the,

in the, in the room where it happens, trying to figure out how to do this. Personally, I think that, that Apple's best achievement this year is the M one. Yeah. I, I am going to endorse that and say, let's choose the M one MacBook air. It's the achievement this year is the m1 yeah i i am going to endorse that and

say let's choose the m1 macbook air it's the favorite apple product of the year it's so exciting it's so incredible you know they this product potentially changes all of computing now you know it's funny we'll talk about 20 maxs or 2020 later on, but, you know, one of the episodes is the MacBook Air, and what the MacBook Air did is change the category of laptops. They changed laptops, right? They became thin and light, that was the thing. The M1 is probably going to be a similar point, where, like, no, no, computers should be arm-powered, right?

Like, it's time to move away from x86, because look at what this can do and we could be in a i think i think personally we could be in that kind of area uh let's go with magic keyboard for ipad pro as a runner-up and i'm happy to put the iphone 12 mini in there as well as a give me in the gradients what we want yeah look i look it's it's kind of like for every reason that you would give the Mini, except for one, is the same reason that I go for the iPhone 12 Pro Max. The one reason that's different is there hasn't been something like this. But it's the point of people that love that phone, really love that phone.

You know what? That's the same for me, right? Because the iPhone 12 Pro Max is everything I want out of an iPhone. So it's a similar reason. So I'm happy to grant that. There is a whole world of technology, though, Jason, that is not made by Apple. So we have our favorite non-Apple product of the year. At 4.2%, the Peloton Faithful will come out for the Peloton Bike Plus.

At 6.2%, it's the Xbox Seriesbox series x microsoft i think will hurt a little bit here by having two consoles um and if there was only one console i think they may have been bumped up a little higher but they would not have toppled sony i did actually do the math on this they would not have toppled sony at 17.8 with the sony playstation 5 and it's the upgradians pick for favorite non-apple product of the year what have you got jason snell um i have two things that i got basically for christmas okay although one of them was a little bit earlier i'll just mention them because uh these are the the nonApple products that I've enjoyed this year so far. One is I got a new Roomba.

Okay. Listeners to Upgrade will know that a couple of years ago, I got a Roomba just to try it out, a low-end Roomba. I got the i7 this time. I got the one that knows where it's going. It's great. Do you have the thing where it empties itself?

Yes, I do. Oh, all right. We need to talk about this. Not now. Yeah, it sounds like a jet engine taking a jet plane taken off it's ridiculous but it's it's the best and having the ability to say hey uh little robot go clean the back of the house go clean the bedroom okay all right we're gonna talk about this later people are working in the front of the house it's fun um and i got an oculus quest 2 okay yeah see the psvr convinced me that uh vr games are fun and the quest and i didn't want to and i and the quest is the best and it doesn't

have cabling like the psvr it's such a hassle to make sure the cables are all set up right and it doesn't have that also i didn't camera and i yeah and you have to set up the camera and i didn't want to pay even more to get the PlayStation move controllers. So I was just using a standard PlayStation controller. Whereas the quest comes with two hand controllers that are essentially like the move controllers. Yeah.

So, um, it's, it's really good. I've only had it for a week, but, um, I'm very impressed with it.

It's a lot of fun. VR games are fun i played vader immortal over the weekend uh did a little beat saber which is hilarious it's very fun and yeah i'm i'm very impressed that it is just being able to map out the fact that it's got i mean we should talk about it later um the fact that it's got i mean we should talk about it later um the fact that it's got a basically an ar mode where you can see what's around you so you don't like step on things and then paint on the floor where you want your current play area to be it's so smart it's so good and and having had the psvr experience i have appreciation for all the things that it does

well because the psvr as much fun as it was to use that for the games that I played on it was you know janky the PSVR is super janky it's janky in so many ways like half of the hardware is old hardware that they repurposed

you know like the move controller and the camera they had those for different things like oh this could kind of work except for the headset all of the other components were not built with vr as the focus and it suffers for that where the oculus products are built that way um i have the original oculus quest and it is the best vr experience that i've ever had because it's freeing because you're not tethered and you can do whatever you want which is great

I had a PC in my office at home and I had an Oculus Rift but I didn't have a lot of space there's nothing I could do about it and the Quest you can play in the living room where we have the space and it's fantastic so I endorse the quest as a

product yes i know that facebook on oculus yeah i don't want to hear it i don't love it but i also as marco uh got one too and he was saying he said yeah i know facebook sucks also i'm on instagram and i'm not leaving there and that's owned by facebook so you pick and choose what you want to do with with facebook and i basically don't use facebook but I do use Instagram and I use WhatsApp but I don't use Facebook and if people want to be like no Facebook in my life that's fine I have decided

that I'm not going to draw the line at this product or at Instagram for that matter that's fine for me Playstation 5 yeah it's very, very good. You can find one. Sure.

Yeah. If you can get one, good for you. I do have one, and I love it. And I got the 48-inch LG OLED TV from their C series. So happy because, you know, OLEDs tend to be over 50 inches. Too big for where we watch TV. We'd be too close. We tried it.

We got like a 50-something inch LG TV. We're too close. The 48-inch LG OLED, perfect for our space. I absolutely love this TV, and it's the perfect pairing for my PlayStation 5. Super good. Even the speakers of the television are really good in a way that I've not seen from a TV before. I know it's never as good as having a sound system,

but it really does have great sound coming from the TV, which is great because that's how I play my games, right? I use the HomePod for when I'm watching stuff on Apple TV, but I can't play my Switch or PlayStation with that. Sounds great. I really love it. I like the LG TV UI. I don't use it very much, but it's great.

I love that I have, it's in HomeKit, so I can turn my TV on and off and change my inputs on my iPhone. Love it. Fantastic. Really great. All right, so picking the winner for this i think playstation 5's got to be in the mix yeah um i mean you love it and the upgradians love it and i have no opinion and i i don't need to pick a vr headset or a roomba so i'm okay with just

giving it to the playstation 5 let's go playstation 5 is the winner with oculus quest 2 and mike's tv and the 48 inch lg oled tv i think my tv from two years ago was the runner up in this category so like our tvs always get to be runners up in the upgrades it's the law now 2018 jason's 4k hdr tv that was that was the winner in my document right it's a great tv like the og ola tvs are great and i'm so pleased that they created something for people that don't have big rooms it's a great product now we move into worst gadget or most disappointing technology of 2020. The mean awards. This is an interesting one, Jason.

So we have a 4.7% 5G. I get it. Yep. 5.6%, the MagSafe Duo charger. I have a problem with this pick, which I'll come back to in a minute. 5.8% MagSafe. Now, I was not expecting MagSafe to be here. Now, I can imagine it's maybe people carrying over the frustration of the removal of charges,

which is part of what's going on here. I don't think that Magsafe is disappointing as a technology the magsafe duo which is the little case thing yeah my problem with it being here is i i struggle with products in this category if people have never used them right i mean the reputation for that product is not great but very few people have never used them right i mean the reputation for that product is not great but very few people have actually used it and and that's the thing like our friend federico loves it but federico's situation means it works great for him so he has a metal nightstand so it magnetically attaches so like federico's in best case scenario for that but i i struggle with that to say like oh that is the worst gadget of the

year because it's not a gadget that people i think have used in the numbers that voted for it genuinely i'm very surprised that magsafe was at the top of the upgradians list do you do you share my surprise yes i don't understand why. I have the MagSafe charging puck. I like it. If you're Qi charging, it's better than any other Qi charging solution. Except,

there are parts that are bad, right? The cable's too short. That's annoying, right? But I don't think that that would then say that all of MagSfe is a disappointment but the upgradians are going to do what they're going to do jason and that's right we love them but they they voted high on it but what what are your disappointments well i think there are a few that haven't been mentioned yet that i want to mention airpods max uh case again, I haven't used.

But people seem to hate it. You know, I don't hate it. I know why people don't like it. It's not great. But you can just not use it. I use it. It's where I put my AirPods Pro when I'm done with them. My AirPods Max when I'm done with them.

It's fine. But there you go. I haven't used it when I'm done with them. My AirPods Max when I'm done with them. It's fine. But hey-ho. I haven't used it, so I have no opinion. Here are the two that I am more seriously going to promote. One of them is in the list, which is 5G. I think this was the year that iPhone users got to see what a marketing scam 5g is um and and is it disappointing and bad i don't know maybe depends on how you want to argue it but the fact that um 5g is sort of a

scheme to get people to pay more on their on their phone bills and has been sold by the entire wireless industry is this thing you've got to have that doesn't actually have benefit to most users because the 5g speeds aren't that great. And the places where the 5g speeds are great are essentially like Wi Fi hotspots. They're very small, and 5g will be necessary over time. But at present, I would say 5g is disappointing, there might be a better category for 5g marketing than this but there it is and then the other one that i came up with which i know is near and dear to your heart too is the ability to run ios apps on apple silicon max which was short was mentioned in in june uh briefly mentioned when it rolled out uh not really emphasized by Apple PR. And then when we all started using it,

discovered why, which is it's kind of half-baked. And most of the apps you want to use aren't in the store. So it was a super disappointment and probably my biggest disappointment in tech this year, personally, because I thought this was going to be huge and

it's a it's a technical failure and also a store supply failure because everybody seems to have opted out yeah it's like i think as we spoke about it at the time there are many applications that i know would run great but the developers just don't want to put them in the store and i find that disappointing and i know i know that there are some apps that just don't run very well because apple support isn't very good but you know i've used enough of these apps to know the ones that do and don't work and this has been a major disappointment for me this year like you said on all fronts from the technology that's available to the take up of it because Because I really thought that this was going to be absolutely transformative for the Mac.

One of the apps I really wanted to have running on my MacBook Air, one of these iOS apps, is from my cable company. And it's the ability to watch basically live TV and put it in. And they have a website that'll do it, but the website is very bad. And I wanted to be able to put it in picture in picture and all that. I was very excited to discover yesterday that something happened, either the 11.1 update or an app update, where all of a sudden it works. It didn't work before it launched, but it sort of didn't do anything. And then it started to work. And I was very excited. And I sent a note in Slack

to you and Steve. And I was like, hey, finally, some good news about the iOS apps on Mac front. And then I looked in the App Store and guess what? Since I downloaded it, it has been removed from the App Store. So no one else will be able to take advantage of this app that I can use because they've removed it. Because of course they have. I think iOS apps on M1 Macs is going to be the winner of this category. I think it does.

I think it does. I want to put 5G in for sure. As a runner-up. I don't want to put MagSafe in, personally. Alright. Don't want to do that. Let's just leave it there. Let's leave it there. Most life-changing hardware. The Upgradians

voted with 8.3% for the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. 9.8% was AirPods Pro. So a lot of upgradings got AirPods Pro in 2020. And at 10.9%, Apple Watch. Yeah, fascinating. The Apple Watch always scores highly in this category.

And I understand why. Like if you've just gotten an Apple Watch and you're new to the Apple Watch and there are a lot of people new to the Apple Watch, it will have a big impact on your life I just wasn't expecting it again to be

to not just be in the running but to win the category yeah it's a it's a perennial right because it does have if you get an Apple Watch or you're using your Apple I, I could argue that it's my most life changing hardware this year because it's gotten me to actually start running and stick with running and run a couple of 5Ks and stuff like that. And that's mostly because I can do it the way I want using the Apple Watch and the fitness app and tracking and having it remind me and stuff like that. But you know, that happened a few years ago for me, but I get that for different people, you could, you could phrase it different ways. Yeah. I have a nominee here and it's something that we talked about earlier, which is the magic keyboard for iPad pro and iPadOS cursor support together really did change my favorite piece of

hardware, which is my iPad pro for the better. And I, um, going into 2020, I would never have believed what happened in the spring, not talking about the pandemic, talking about cursor support added to iPadOS and this first party keyboard with trackpad for iPad designed for iPad. That's, uh, it was amazing and I still use it all the time and i love it so for me that's the uh i agree with the 8.3 percent of upgradients uh the magic keyboard magic keyboard is going to win this category but i have a personal pick um yeah which is big thing in my life this year has been building custom mechanical keyboards it's become my new hobby it's an interest that i absolutely love it's been my covid hobby right lots of people interest that I absolutely love. It's been my COVID hobby, right?

Lots of people have had one. This has become mine. And it was really sparked by my first kind of entry in this world, like at the custom mechanical keyboard, like the luxury keyboard world, as it were, which is a keyboard called the U80 by a company called rama it is absolutely wonderful uh i use this keyboard nearly every day um still and i absolutely adore it i love the design i love how it feels to use um it's an absolute beast so heavy because there's this

huge brass weight in the back of it um it really is just a superb product wonderfully made and i adore it so it's just a personal thing here because it you know this this hobby has changed a part of my life this year it's given me entertainment and interest and intrigue in a time which has been challenging um and this one was definitely the one that really kind of set it off for me so we will go with magic keyboard for ipad pro as the winner in this category very easily um what about the runners-up i would say your keyboard and the apple watch i think so yeah see because just with the magic Keyboard, right, like just to double down, just to make the point that you

made again, but it really changed what it meant to use an iPad and it's gotten even better by the fact that it's not just for iPad Pro anymore, right? The iPad Air 4 also can use this product, which is

fantastic because it really does fundamentally change how you use the iPad in excellent ways, and especially the cursor support as well that goes along with it. It's really just superb. This episode is brought to you

by DoorDash. You have so much on your to-do list. Laundry, emails, errands, who knows what else. Give yourself one less thing to worry about by by DoorDash. You have so much on your to-do list. Laundry, emails, errands, who knows what else. Give yourself one less thing to worry about by letting DoorDash take care of your next meal. DoorDash is the app that brings you food

you're craving right now, right to your door. Ordering is easy. You just open the DoorDash app, choose what you want to eat, and your food will be left safely outside your door with their new contactless delivery drop-off setting. With over 300,000 partners in the US, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Australia,

you can support your local go-tos or choose from your favorite national restaurants as well, like Chipotle, Wendy's, or the Cheesecake Factory. Chipotle. Oh, I said Chipotle. I don't like that. Chipotle, Wendy's's or the cheesecake factory jason can you tell me a little bit about your use of doordash chipotle was my favorite character on star trek voyager anyway um the that's deep cut star trek nerds know what i'm talking about so

um new year's eve coming up and i want to tell you a little story which is that um christmas eve Eve, I made dinner and we had like a bunch of sides and stuff. And then we did it again for Christmas Day. And Lauren and I were walking yesterday and I said, I don't want to do that again. That was too much work. order in and I'm going to place that order in advance. I'm going to market for when we want it to deliver and we're going to have our local Indian restaurant. I think we're going to do Indian. We're going to have it brought to us at the time we specify on New Year's Eve and we're going to have our family meal at home. We're not going to even, we'd stay in our PJs if we want to and they'll bring the food to us.

So DoorDash lets you do that. It's pretty great. Right now, listeners of this show can get $5 off and zero delivery fees on their first order of $15 or more, which is super easy if you're doing the New Year's Eve thing like Jason. When you download the DoorDash app from the app store and enter the code upgrade, you will get that $5 off and zero delivery fees on your first order. Just go to the app store, download the DoorDash app, and use the code UPGRADE. That is one last time, U-P-G-R-A-D-E, for

$5 off your first order with DoorDash. Go download it now. And thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason, we are coming up to our final set of categories for the evening now. We have some tech stories,

tech screw-up up categories and then the hotly contested podcast awards and the upgrades so we go for favorite tech story of the year now there's also a particularly difficult one to uh do the grading for because people just write sentences ideas it's. It's a tricky one. However, I was able to coalesce the answers together. At 3.1% of the votes is the Apple

and Google exposure notification system, which was a favorite story of people for this year. 11.5% is, quote, app store controversy. This includes, hey, is, quote, app store controversy. This includes, hey, Epic, Fortnite, and many of the other app store-related issues

that there's been throughout this year. But with 44.3%, the transition to Apple Silicon and the M1 Macs. Yeah. So I put two stories down, and sometimes i look further afield from apple but in this case i i'm going to stick with apple for 2020 because i want to do that and these are i think fun uh stories the apple silicon transition is absolutely on my list because this was the year that it happened they announced it and they made it happen we'll continue but like

this is the year that it happened so that's's a great choice. Good job, many upgradians who chose it. The other one I'll throw in there is iOS customization, something that we've talked about a lot. The idea that with iOS 14, you had the ability to build these widgets and it led to this wild and some changes to shortcuts. And we ended up in this wild place where there was a huge trend this fall toward people customizing their iPhones, especially. The icons, the widgets, the whole thing. And that pent up user desire

to make their devices their own. That is not new. People have wanted to personalize their devices for decades now, but finally they had the tools to do it, and they did. So I think that's a big story for this year too. Yep.

I will also say Apple's second transition has been fascinating and is setting up for what I'm sure to be is a very interesting 2021 i personally have really enjoyed uh the comings and goings of all of the app store controversies this year oh boy enjoy is a strong word for it what i mean by enjoy is like i found it fascinating i found the back and forward fascinating, all of the stuff that it dredged up,

like these emails from Apple executives to each other. And I think there's been a lot of intrigue in it. And as a person who finds the comings and goings and machinations of big companies interesting, this has been like catnip for me this year really this story and again not going away but i think we've seen a lot of the fireworks already and then i have also loved the ios customization stuff but also coupling that with widget smithSmith seeing the rise of that application

and being able to stand by and watch one of my closest friends go through all of that was kind of incredible to me so I could not include it here I think it's very easy to go with Apple Silicon transition as the winner with iOS customization and App Store controversy as the runners-up.

I think that seems pretty cut and dry to me, unless you disagree in any way. I agree completely. Cool. And look, the Apple Silicon transition, I think, was always going to be interesting, right? Like, however it happened, good or bad, or even if it was just

oh look this was easy and everything's the same but we got we all got a lot more i think than we were expecting from this right like the the products and the way it was all done really just absolutely fascinating and really fun to talk about so now we move into our favorite tech screw up of the year so with some interesting ones in here 7.8 is cyberpunk 2077's terrible launch this one unbelievable uh honestly too much for me to even try and summarize but this is a video game it's been waiting for a long time, delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed, came out, was okay, but buggy on PC, absolutely abysmal on many consoles, then it turned out that there was like, the reviews were much better than the game would seem to indicate, because all of the reviewers only got PC review codes. Nobody got to see it on consoles.

They didn't see how bad it was. And then the footage and stuff that was being shared from the developers seemed to be not console, the way it was running on the consoles. And then the next-gen console patch and version got delayed again, and there was a lot of crunch at the development studio and lots of reports of people being working for so much time. Then the developer... I'm trying to summarize it here.

Then the developer said, basically, for PlayStation owners, if you want a refund, fine, ask Sony. Sony seemed to not have agreed to that and ended up just pulling the app from the store and refunding everyone absolutely bananas now there's like a class action lawsuit from the investors in the company CD Projekt Red

huge story big disappointment for a lot of people including me I was really looking forward to this game but I've decided to just leave it for now maybe I'll come back to it at some point when it's maybe running the way I want it to so, wild story one of the worst console

launches for controversy that I think I've ever seen 9.9% is the App Store controversy so everything surrounding Hay and Epic that we were talking about earlier is considered by our gradients to be screw-ups on all sides i think uh probably yeah i interpret this at least personally

i interpret this as that that this is um on all sides is a good way to put it that apple is partly responsible for the screw-up here because apple um has well i would say manly responsible yeah you're no i think you're right. I think this is really an own goal on Apple's part, that they could have avoided this controversy if they had wanted to, and it feels like they left it for a long time and only now are attempting to evade

and avoid this controversy when they could have done it sooner, but they were stubborn. And while I had a lot of criticism for Hay and Epic and other places this bottom line is that apple is being scrutinized by powerful forces like governments and you know important regulators and they could have avoided so much of this and instead they just sort of walked right into it and uh and that's why

that would be how i would classify it in the category of screw up yeah yeah because like you know i would say is their job to avoid this as the as the runners of that it's like the owners of that platform um but yeah there we are with that one. Also, 22.2% from the Upgradians, Quibi. You know, it's a great choice. Yeah, Quibi's a great choice. That is a spectacular

screw-up. Quibi. The whole... Yes. Quibi. Yep. It's just terrible. I mean, we saw it it coming we knew it would happen i i think we did an episode where maybe it was an ask upgrade question there was a question about quibi and and it was like does quibi have any chance and it was just launched and i think the

answer we gave was no no no it's a disaster it's it disaster. It's going to be a disaster, and it was a disaster. And don't let anybody tell you that it was the pandemic. It wasn't the pandemic. It was that it was a bad idea. Yeah. It was always a bad idea. It was a bad idea from when we first heard about it. I'm sure the pandemic didn't help, you know i i love the thing i've heard

bear thompson say many times and i put it here it's like the pandemic just accelerated things that were already in motion quibi was not going to work it just wasn't um and maybe it died faster because of the pandemic like maybe they would have been able to get more investment but then maybe people called on them because it was maybe a bad time to invest i don't know but absolute screw up what are your votes here quibi is a great one and i'll throw in a couple others are these screw-ups i don't know um 5g conspiracy theories okay yeah i don't know if that's a tech screw-up or not i mean 5g i've already expressed that my skepticism about 5g in general but some people express their skepticism

about 5g and being convinced that it's like mind control uh anyway that was that was an interesting story and then related to that also there are people who believe that all wireless devices are used for mind control. And my favorite story perhaps of the year about this is people who bought, you can buy on Amazon, Faraday cages for your Wi-Fi routers, which will block the signal from them. Which is amazing because they're not useful if you block the signal i don't understand what you'd use like what i don't just don't plug it in yeah but is is people is the story that people don't understand technology and blame it for all their ills a tech screw up or not i don't know i don't think so quibi is right down the middle as a tech screw up so i'll just throw i just wanted to mention those other stories i i would say we we go with quibi as the screw up uh and then again

app store controversies and cyberpunk yeah in there because that works for me that cyberpunk one is kind of incredible what a year yeah but quibi man my word just brother to you all right here we go podcast time favorite tech podcast i hate this category i hate these categories you know why i hate them because i don't listen to podcasts as much anymore because i don't have a commute and it's it's very hard my my podcast listing is very much what my podcast listing was with a few exceptions when we started these categories and so it's painful it's painful because i just i don't have as much to contribute i'm not out there trying a bunch of different podcasts that's why we have no time i don't have time i would say for me it's been really easy this year for these categories because i've actually consumed new shows for a couple of the categories because there are new shows and they're

easy picks for me um in in these categories so the upgrade ends 7.7 percent of the vote for favorite tech podcast goes to the talk show with john gruber 13.6 is upgrade which again i will only assume here jason you know i think it's easy to assume the upgrading just think they can't vote for upgrade and i don't know this continues a delightful trend where upgradians never pick upgrade as their favorite tech podcast but always like their second favorite i think that's amazing and hilarious and uh it it amuses me to no end 25.6 percent uh goes to connected which is another show that i host here at relay fm well well that's the one with all the japes right all that all the ludicrousness runner up last year runner up 2017 winner in 2018 and of course atp not allowed in this category because it won every time uh i have three that i wanted to mention so more text

which is uh which is cortex with more stuff in it i i listen to that it is not every episode thank you but i i enjoy it for the sake of voting um if a show has a member show which is a different you just rolled it into put them all together that's fine i'm just saying i listen to more text thank you um i also listen to connected again not every episode i don't have the time but a lot and i also listen live sometimes which is also fun and you guys have a uh a great rapport you've had it since you started um you're all okay so the people on connected are not quite you in real life they're a little bit exaggerated for the for the fun of it for the james yes exactly even yes even federico he's not quite that wacky in real life, but close. It works really well.

It is a very funny podcast. I think if somebody said, I want to listen to tech podcasts, but they have to be funny, I'd say, well, you want the rebound and connected. Those are your kind of zany apple themed podcasts it's like a different type of entertainment it is yeah it is although we have fun here we have fun here but it is different um and not not as wacky we're not as wacky as connected is so i like i enjoy connected because of the that dynamic um and all of the ridiculous things that you guys do on there. It's great.

You could have just stolen the draft from us, but you didn't. Instead, you made a bizarre Byzantine rules-based competition. Some of the rules don't even matter and it doesn't... Anyway, it's written down on parchment. We're doing it again in a couple of weeks.

I know. And the one tech podcast that I picked up this year is Dithering, the subscription-only podcast. Well, I mean,

all podcasts are subscriptions, but you have to pay for it from Ben Thompson and John Gruber, 15 minutes, three times a week. And I've really enjoyed that. And also 15 minutes

is about how, as long as I can, that's my, that's my shower podcast. I can, I can listen to that while I'm in the shower and get my quick download of tech stuff and then move on

because I have too many podcasts in my queue. My favorite tech podcast of this year is Dithering. Now, I will just say, we're going to talk about 20 Macs later for a good reason, but I love dithering. My favorite episodes of the talk show were always the ones with Ben Thompson because I like the balance that they bring of technology and business.

Plus they disagree a lot, which I like. And I also enjoy that my opinions change between the two of them. So it's, it's always interesting because I'm sometimes on one side of the argument, one sometimes on side of the other. I do also really love that it's 15 minutes and it's three times a week. It's like perfect. Or like making coffee,

doing the washing up, taking a shower, that type of thing. I think it's a genius idea. Excellently executed. Yes. I love it. I really, really love it.

So as somebody who edited Clockwise, every episode of Clockwise for like, I don't know, 150 episodes, 200 episodes. I don't know when I stopped doing Clockwise, but that's a 30 minute show. And although we would underrun, we couldn't overrun. And dithering is 15 minutes minutes not a second less or more

and so one of the things i really enjoy and jim metzendorf i believe edits that podcast who edits some relay shows and some incomparable shows um i enjoy it also because i can tell how i love seeing how jim has to fill the time to get it to 15 by having that. Sometimes that stopwatch clicks for a long time. I love it. It's hilarious because it's really hard to hit it right on the dot. And he does it. But sometimes the clock goes on a long time and it makes me laugh.

So, yeah, I think it's a great newcomer, but also a great tech podcast. And I'd be happy with it winning.'s not in the upgradians picks it appears later on uh which is interesting i'm not going to petition for connected to win which will upset steven look i'm so thankful that the upgradians over a quarter of them voted for Connected. I love that. I understand it because I listen to shows like Connected. If you like Connected, you really like it because it's that kind of show.

You're in it and you love it. But I cannot give myself an award. I just can't do it. I want to win awards. Who doesn't? But I don't want to give them to myself. So if I... Does that mean that you shouldn't...

Have you ever gotten an upgrade-y? Yeah. I think you have. Yeah. Connected has won. Right. So I insisted on it, and then it's a gentlemanly thing. I'm like, no, no, after you.

Yeah. And I allowed... And I sort of bestowed it upon you. But you're not going to bestow it upon yourself. No. Okay. Well, in this case, though, I think dithering is the answer. I think dithering should win.

It's true. There aren't many shows where I think to myself, oh, is today the day? Yeah. And that is one where I think about it. I'm like, oh, is today a dithering day? And those don't queue up for me. No, I listen to them immediately. I listen to them every single day.

I listen to them immediately. This is the same, actually, with the Stratechery Daily Podcast, which is another one that I picked up this year that I love. All right. And for runners-up, I'm going to say connected and upgrade. Let's give ourselves a runner-up. Always the bridesmaid. Well, we can't we've set we've established that one of us can give an award to the other one but we can't give it to ourselves no and unless like steven breaks into the upgrade is to give

us an award so here's the conditional set upgrade needs to get over 90 of the upgradians vote for us to give ourselves the award all Precedent has been set. The campaigning for the 2021 Upgradies has begun already. For your consideration. Favorite non-tech podcast the Upgradians voted. This one's wild. This is like the books one where it's just like here is

1500 different shows. 3.7% of the vote goes to Reconcilable Differences. 4% of the vote goes to Reconcilable Differences 4% of the vote goes to Dubai Friday and 4.5% of the vote goes to Cortex Wow, this is a hard one as well because

again, I don't listen to that many podcasts and my podcast that I listen to all the time it's in the Hall of Fame which is the Flophouse Yes, so that leaves me I'll list some, I've mentioned some of these in past it's in the Hall of Fame which is a flop house yes so that leaves me I'll list some I've mentioned some of these

in past Upgradies the Pawscast with Mike Schur and Joe Posnanski 13 Minutes to the Moon which is a BBC podcast that was originally released last year

about Apollo 11 but they did a new season this year about Apollo 13 really well done very good podcast Reconcilable Differences, again, one of those podcasts that I don't listen to every episode, but I do listen sporadically when I have the time

and is delightful. And we know those guys. And I want to mention Dan Morin's podcast, A Complicated Profession, about The Mandalorian, episode by episode, over on The Incomparable. I listened to every episode of that too and really enjoyed Dan and his guest and he had a different guest every time breaking down what happened in The Mandalorian. And that is a sign of a show that I really like that I want to listen to the episode by episode breakdown

as the show's being released. For me, My Brother, My Brother and Me, I've got to give it another nod i love that show um but for me also the besties and you may remember the besties i've spoken about it on this show before because it became a spotify original right it is no longer a spotify original interesting uh from what i could piece together from what they said on the show Spotify did not want to renew it huh so this is answering a question of

if you do not have a lot of listeners on Spotify and you're a Spotify original they will get rid of you which is what it seems has happened here with the besties they have now got the show back they moved the feed which is cool the feed got the show back. They moved the feed, which is cool. The feed got moved, so Spotify

will do that for you. They're out on their own again. They put all the old feeds, all the episodes back in the feed, and now they're trying to build up their audience base again. And one of the things that I like that they said on the show, and I think it's going to be interesting, is we're going to find out what happens to a listenership when you go exclusive

and then don't. So, this is like these questions we've been asking for as long as Spotify have been doing this stuff is what happens to a listenership? If you were a podcast that people listen to, then you went exclusive. It goes down. And then how do you get it back again? So I encourage people to go listen to the besties. It is video game podcast. It's the best video game podcast I've ever listened to i adore it justin and griffin michael roy chris plant and

russ froschdick previously all at polygon the show was started when they're at polygon and it is the idea of the what if the world's best friends played the world's best games i love it it's just a superb show it's very funny very entertaining and uh very cool i love it so that's uh i think this one's going to be tricky what i will say you've got rec diffs the upgrading has got rec scalable differences i have really been enjoying rec diffs in quarantine or corn as they call it like i i really enjoyed the show show more than I ever have during this period. I take a lot of comfort listening to Merlin and John

talk about how they're getting through the pandemic. I don't like listening to stories about John's toe. I could do without those. But aside from that, it's a great show and look I would give it the nod here Jason it's not won before let's do it

Reconcilable Differences was a previous runner up and is the winner of the favorite non-tech podcast this year what do you want to go with for the runners-up? I would like to put the besties in here because... Do it. And which other?

A complicated profession. Cool. They are runners-up. More runners-up-ness for Dan Morin. Okay. Final award of the evening. This one is for favorite podcast newcomer. We've reached the end. You know, these award shows,

they tend to run long. The Upgradians, 5.6% to Test Drivers, which is a show that hosts Austin Evans, and I'm very thankful for that, so thank you to everybody that put that in there. I wasn't expecting it, and I'm very thankful for it. 11.1% of the vote goes to 20 Max for 2020,

which is Jason's podcast, which completed today. Yes. If you're a member, it completed today. And if you're not, it'll complete Thursday. That'll be,

this is the week. This is because you, Mike, you see, I've run out of 2020. Yeah. Just in time. Huh?

See what I did there. I had to start at some point. I had to start because I was going to run out of 2020 and that's in the name of the show. So this is the week. I guess we have to release the episode on thursday uh i do and in fact it is coming out thursday because also i did that last week too because the holidays on the fridays so i moved them to thursdays but it does get me in on on december 31st Yeah. 16.1% goes to Dithering. Yes. Makes sense that it's here.

I understand why people put it here rather than a favorite tech podcast because it's new. But I think that show, honestly, for me, I like it so much that I wanted to honor it there. Plus, okay,

my vote here is very simple. It's very clear. It's 20 max for 2020. And I think that it fits better in the newcomer because it's gone. It's gone now. It's not going to come back. You genuinely...

Put a year in it and that pretty much limits you. Have done an absolutely outstanding job with this show like thank you when i say all that stuff i said about dithering of where is dithering and as soon as it comes out i listen to it is exactly the same for 20 max this is not just because you're one of my closest friends because i don't feel this way about every project that all of my friends have ever made, right? Where it's like, not just that I enjoy it, but that I enjoy it enough that I will stop listening to shows that

I'm halfway through to listen to the next episode of 20 Max. Because you have created an audio documentary series about the Macintosh with excellent production values. You have done some truly wild things in tracking down old CEOs of companies.

It's very well edited. You know, that's to the work of you and Brian as well, for the help that Brian's given you. But I know that really you've brought the story together. Right. You've done an absolutely excellent job with the show. Thank you. Thank you.

It was meant to be a creative challenge. It was more challenging than I thought it would be. And I'm very happy with the result too. I absolutely am. It was not part of the original plan to even do it. And I am doing it. I'm very appreciative. I got to mention that I'll mention here,

there was a site discoverpods.com that named the 71 best podcasts of 2020. It's an interesting number, 71. Why 71? But 20 max for 2020 is on there, so I'll take it. I'll take it. We're top 71. I want it to win this award. You won't give it to yourself, but I think 20 max for 2020.

Strangely, not too many minutes ago we we established that one of us can give the other one an award and that that i have previously given you one so i think it's clear that i will accept gratefully also i don't have anything else to put in this category no thank you so 20 max of 2020 wins our favorite podcast newcomer of the year. We have Dithering and The Test Drivers as our runners-up. And thus concludes the upgradies for 2020. Look, 2020's been a tricky year. All right?

Let's put it lightly. Doesn't mean there hasn't been good things. And I'm really happy with the list of stuff that we've had here today because there's been lots of great content. There's been lots of great news and products and technology. And I'm very pleased that we've been able to assemble a list of these things for you here. I would like to thank the many, many, many upgradians who voted in the upgrades this year. And also everyone who has supported us this year by listening to the show.

This is our final episode of 2020. We're going to be into next year which i'm excited about into 2021 um i also want to give a extra special thanks as well to everyone that has become a member and supported upgrade this year it's been we've really enjoyed putting together upgrade plus and we thank you for your support yeah it's been a challenging year obviously for everybody and um one of the delightful things that has happened this year is that so many people when we rolled out the new membership system so many people decided that they were going to support upgrade directly and you know can't i think mike and i cannot be more grateful to you for doing that we really do appreciate it and for everyone you know, the bottom line is you kept listening and we thank you for listening because I think a lot of us didn't have lost some of our podcast listening time. So we appreciate you continuing

to listen to this show, 332 episodes in. Thank you to everyone who chooses to listen to Upgrade. We know that there are many podcast choices out there many of them we mentioned and so thank you so much for listening to this show and another year in the books but it was i think in terms of this podcast it was a good year and very few things i could say that about but in terms of this podcast i think it was a good year i would also like to thank simon buckmaster for his incredible work on the Upgradees artwork this year and all of the artwork that he has created

for this show over the course of our time, all of our wonderful chapter artwork Simon has created for us and we're very thankful for him Zach Knox for building Upgradees.com where you can see the winners of every category of every year

and also Zach puts together our draft scoreboards and scorecards where you can see the winners of every category of every year. And also, Zach puts together our draft scoreboards and scorecards for us as well. And also, thank you to Chris Breen for creating the theme song for this episode and every other theme that we have. You know, the regular theme, the summer fun theme, all put together by Chris. Thank you so much for listening

to the Upgradies for 2020. We would like to wish you a very happy new year. Thank you very much to our sponsors for this episode. DoorDash, Hover, SaneBox, and Pingdom. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell.

Ah, special one. Oh, and I won the draft, too. It's not necessary. We know this already. We, Jason Snell. Ah, special one. Oh, and I won the draft, too. It's not necessary. We know this already. We don't need to. You giveth and you taketh away, right? Yeah. Thank you.