Upgrade - 340: Secret Sauce

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

New iPad keyboards make us notice the magic of the Magic Trackpad, AirPods might be getting an unwelcome makeover, and the butterfly keyboard isn't really gone as long as we remember it.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 340 today's show is brought to you by squarespace linkedin jobs and literati kids my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello michael hurley i have a hashtag Snell talk question for you from Ryan. Is it from me? It's from Jason to Ryan. No, that's not right. When can I turn the tables and we can do Mike talk? Or sorry, Hurley talk.

Hashtag Hurley talk. Whenever you want. Okay. We can do it whenever you want. All right. I'll think about it. This question comes from Ryan and Ryan says, what apps do you run in your menu bar? What does that mean?

Well, when you look up in your menu bar, which I don't know if you know this, but the menu bar is at the top of the Macintosh screen. Oh, like the Macintosh! Yes, the Macintosh operating system. The Macintosh operating system. It has the thing on the top right-hand side and that's where little apps,

little app icons show in the menu bar. What's up there? Are they apps? Are they all apps up there, though? That's what confuses me about this is what apps are in my... See, I think some of them are, right? Because I have some that run with the apps closed. Is the clock an app? If I click on it, I get the notification sound.

Yeah, I think people don't care that you have the clock there, right? Because everyone knows you've got the clock there. I think what people are looking for is like, what are the third-party applications that Jason Snell deems important enough to give that permanent real estate? Okay, well,

I've got the control center. Again, not allowed to not have it. Next to that, I have the PCalc widget. Very good widget. It's new from PCalc. It's a widget. It's new from pCalc. It's a widget. It lives in your menu bar. So you don't have to launch that

whole giant, enormous, complicated pCalc app and instead can just use it in the menu bar. It's otherwise pretty much exactly the same. I have an app that I wrote about recently on six colors called

home control it's up there that is an app that lets me uh change like home kit things with keyboard shortcuts on my mac right so like i can turn on the the floor lamp in my office with a like control escape or something like that it just just turns on. It's pretty great. I have Fantastical, which is telling me that I have a Zoom meeting right now. Oh, that's this one. I have a bunch of widgets from Swift Bar, which is the app that I've written about

that lets you put little scripts in your menu bar. So those individual items aren't apps. They're little scripts I wrote, plug-in scripts I wrote for Swift Bar. So I've got the air quality outside in my neighborhood, and I've got the current temperature, and I've got how many people are listening on the live stream right now. I've got all those in there. And then I use Bartender. So that's all that's visible by default. And then hidden away to the left, that's all that's visible by default. And then hidden away to the left, if I move my mouse over there, is some other stuff.

Dropbox, Time Machine, Downlink, which is the app that puts the satellite picture on my desktop. Keyboard Maestro is over there. And that's about it. Very very nice it's a good collection that's some of those are apps actually yeah well everything before the bartender fold as they call it sure anything i have one password there um i also have alfred in there and i don't know why that is in there like why i have it on the top part so i'm now moving it to the uh the hidden part in bartender yeah there you go and there's a lot of junk in the hidden area yeah there's a lot of stuff that i just generally don't need to see don't want to see not interested yeah bartender is a indispensable indispensable application because there's just stuff that I really wished wasn't in the menu bar

and I can't get rid of it, but Bartender will let you do it. If you would like to be like Ryan and help us open a future episode of the show, just send in a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk. It may be considered, or you can use question mark SnellTalk in the RelayFM members Discord. Follow-up. People should go and check out follow up episode 143 of liftoff which features an interview with ron moore the creator of for all mankind with

jason snell and steven hackett i have listened to all of it up until the spoiler part because i actually haven't been able to watch the first episode of for all mankind yet so i'm waiting for that but it was very good. Very good interview. Very interesting. I could tell how excited you were in it, which was fun for me. Try to get my excitement there without asking him detailed questions about you know, Klingons or

Cylons or Scottish people or any other thing that he's done on television. All of the inconsistencies in each episode. You know? Yeah. In episode 17 of series 3 of Star Trek Discovery that's where it ends for me.

That was as close as I could have gotten. Yeah. No? What did I do wrong there? In season 5 of The Next Generation you indicate that Worf is going to inherit his family's Klingon titles. But then in season six, you suggest that he has no claim to his family lands back on Kronos, the Klingon homeworld.

How do you explain this inconsistency, Ronald D. Moore? Is this an actual inconsistency that you know? No. I mean, there's probably something like that. I mean, those are your kind of comic book guy Star Trek nerd questions that you know no that's i mean there's probably something like that i mean that's that's the those are your kind of uh comic book guy star trek nerd questions that you would get asked in right and and be like dude i wrote that script in 1991 and that was a long time ago that's i was listening to um the flop house this weekend and they were talking it was it was one from a few weeks back about

the etiquette of meeting somebody who was or working with somebody who was in a bad movie they were talking to the guy who is the showrunner of brockmeyer which is a very good uh tv comedy that i liked a lot and he was talking about how in brockmeyer he was working with amanda pete who is in oh uh studio 60 on the sunset strip and he asked her a question about it uh sort of embedded in it being that it's bad and she was uh not aware that it was considered bad uh not not really interested in hearing that it was bad because she had such a good professional experience doing it and the point of it was like what's the etiquette of of talking to people about bad movies and and and i enjoyed the fact that the larger point of it is if you're an actor or even a

writer it was a job and they paid you and you're going to evaluate it as like oh i had that job for a year it was a good job in her case it was i got pregnant while doing the job and they they really treated me well and and they were very professional about it and like all these things that are about your job not about the end product uh that everybody else knows about and i was thinking about that in the context of run more it's the the every science fiction convention is like here's somebody who worked on an episode of star trek 50 years ago for literally for seven days um and 50 years ago they were asked questions about what it was like it's like do you remember a week you spent on a on a temp job in 1967 like probably not probably not i can't imagine what it is like to be in those environments

and have to answer those types of questions like at conventions and stuff anyway ron moore ron moore grew up as a huge fan of the original star trek and then ended up writing for star trek what next generation in deep space nine so he gets it he he understands fandom um but i read an interview i didn't ask him about star trek but i read an interview when he was making the rounds last week where somebody asked him about if he'd seen any of the modern star treks and he was like no basically i'm real busy but also i'm you know putting you know he's he's trying to think about the stuff that he's doing and and like he says i'm i'm doing science fiction shows like for all mankind i do not have the brain power to when i'm when i'm doing something for pleasure it's going to not be science fiction right because

he's working in the that's like the business right now so i thought that was funny also allows him to not insult like if he says yeah i didn't like it like i mean he's a working producer better than better to not comment best not he maybe has the other stuff uh but it was a lot of the conversation that uh you and steven had with ron uh before you start talking about season two is kind of how he goes about making the parallel world of For All Mankind match up with the accurate world or anchor it with the accurate world. And it was fascinating to hear his thought process, but also his excitement about space stuff. I just thought it was really cool.

It was a very fun interview. And he just sounded like a regular dude, right? Like he just sounded like a nice guy. So I can imagine it was a nice experience getting to talk to him too. it was he's not much older than i am um he's a little bit older but not much older than i am and so he had a lot of the same experiences i did where you kind of missed the apollo moon landing era but you had the sky lab and space shuttle era and you can given given that you can see why he sort of said it would be fun to tell the story of what it happened if we all you know we kind of kept going and to tell the story of what it happened if we all you know we

kind of kept going and kept pushing it instead of what really happened which is that it all just kind of slowed down and and ground to a halt which is you know unfortunately the legacy of that era i found it kind of interesting and then when he was talking about that you could hear like a like a twinge of sadness to it yeah like that and i can see now i can see like oh one of the reasons he made this show is because he wanted the space like exploration to continue so he just made a world in which he did exactly it's kind of fun so that's episode 143 of liftoff here on relay fm there'll be a link in the show notes uh but you should go check it out and also if people are really liking for all Mankind season 2, Dan Morin and I are doing a weekly

podcast over on The Incomparable, episode by episode. And those are dropping on the Fridays when the episodes come out. What's the name of the show? It doesn't really have a name. It's just in the TV podcast feed. So it's the For All Mankind. If you go to theincomparable.com, you'll see the For All Mankind as one of the tiles of one of the episodes. You can just click on it. You can subscribe directly to the For All Mankind feed if you want to.

Okay, yeah. I'll put something in the show notes for you. I can do that, yeah. It's theincomparable.com slash T-e-e-v-e-e slash mankind mankind all right that will be in the show notes not the wrestler mike not the wrestler mcfoley see wrestling knowledge last week thank you last week sort of you made a reference to i don't even remember how this happened we were talking about nintendo and how people say well maybe apple's happened we were talking about nintendo and how people say well maybe apple's gaming strategy can be like nintendo and you're like apple is not nintendo and i said no it's not i have no characters including for many reasons including that they don't have a you know decades of beloved gaming intellectual property and i tried to

imagine what that would even be and the best i could come up with was The Adventures of Dog Cow and Spinning Rainbow Cursor in Finderland. And then probably within 20 minutes of the episode publishing, Justin Hamilton created a browser-based game called The Adventures of Dog Cow and Spinning Rainbow Cursor in Finderland. Unbelievable. It's a silly little Mario-esque type game. Yeah. It's a silly little Mario-esque type game. Yeah, the ground is the aqua scroll bar from early OS X, and then the platforms are little aqua scroll bars too. And you're a dog cow, but your friend, the little spinning rainbow cursor,

is right above you, and it fires off bolts to attack the Windows logos that are coming at you, and you want to collect a lot of G3 iMacs. Obviously. That, mm-hmm. Clearly. How else would you make it? It's incredible. I'll be linking the show notes.

Go check it out. Justin is... It would have been a hit Flash game in 2005. Let's talk about some upstream stuff. Apple's got a bunch of things going on. So Apple and Skydance are going to be partnering on a multi-year film and TV deal. So this deal brings

with it the movies Luck and Spellbound, which were both set for the theater, but that was obviously changed. And the beginning of my understanding from a report and deadline is that this report, sorry, this deal started the process of what would eventually become this overall deal with Skydance to work with Apple on multiple projects. Going forward, these will be exclusive to Apple. Obviously not everything Skydance does, but they will be things that are exclusive to them. They're not like, hey, do you want this movie we made?

There's a TV series that they're working on called The Search for Wandler, which is based on a book. John Lasseter is going to serve as producer on all films and shows under this deal. Now, we had spoken about this previously because it was rumored that they might be working together when these two films were being shopped to Apple and that there might be something going on. And we brought up at the time that this could be of concern to people because John Lasseter has a checker pass for sexual misconduct while at Disney and Pixar. And we were wondering, how would this be dealt with?

And the way it's been dealt with is that he's going to be a producer and executive producer on all the projects. Yep. If you want to check out a longer conversation about this, we spoke about it a little bit in episode 331. There are going to be lots of people with lots of very valid and upset opinions about this, I'm sure. It's an intriguing thing that they're going into,

but this is the way it's going to be. Like, John Lasseter's high up at Skydance, and apple's made the deal with them and he's gonna have his hands in everything we talked to this whole issue through in 331 so people should check that out if they would like if they did not hear us talk about it the apple tv app is now available on chromecast this landed just in time for for all Mankind. This was previously announced in December. We did touch on it, but now it is available as of last week. It works via Google TV, which I didn't know about until today when I started looking into this for the show. Google TV is basically the Apple TV app, but on Chromecast. So Google have created an app which collects together content

from companies and shows you them like all in one view, right? And all of your other Chromecast apps and services can plug into it and Google TV acts as a kind of front for it. So that, you know, this is a little thing that they have. Google has had many, many, many, many television-based things. Oh my God. And the way that they're doing it now is just to bundle it into Chromecast, which is probably good because people like Chromecasts and people haven't liked any of Google's other things. Right.

So you need Chromecast with Google TV and then inside there will be an Apple TV. It's like little nesting dolls. But you can get the Chromecast. And the Chromecast, my understanding, is much more widely available than a lot of other alternatives to Apple TV hardware. So it should be more available in some countries

where they don't have alternatives. And yeah, and in fact, even I think Apple TV channels is available. So like the nesting dolls continue, right? You've got Chromecast with Google TV, with Apple TV, with Apple TV channels. If you really want to keep going down the stack, that is available to you.

Apparently. It's interesting. It's like $50, the Chromecast with Google TV, and it does 4K, does HDR, Dolby Vision you know this is like a $50 way to get into the best way that you can watch this

content that Apple produces this is what the Apple TV does 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision so you know just to refer back to what we were talking about a week or two ago it makes again the case for the Apple TV difficult. You get a remote with buttons on it. You know, it's like the whole thing.

Imagine. Fancy. Apple also had a big day. They unveiled their 2021 content slate as part of the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour. I'll put a link in the show notes to Apple's kind of press release. But there was a lot that they announced lots of new shows and movies, some we knew about some we didn't, some featuring more information

than we knew, some featuring more costs than we knew there's too much to go through honestly there's a lot of A-list names as part of this whole slate of programming I think one of the things that was most interesting to me and to others is some teasers of the foundation series um which is i think probably going to be their next like top tier show um you know if you look at like sea and morning show and for all mankind seems like they're they're definitely uh starting the hype for foundation yeah uh early but there were some fun little details that come out so mythic quest is back on may 7th which i'm excited about and was surprised that it's that

it was kind of like we didn't know anything and then it's like two months away uh ted lasso season two is going to be in the summer also very pleased about that and the morning show is returning in the summer now that is way later than they expected, right? Like you can, I mean, we've spoke about this before, but that it was impacted by COVID stuff and they went and rewrote a lot of stuff and now it's coming in the summer. Like this, I think Morning Show was supposed to be out

by now, you would expect, right? Right. So moving it all the way to the summer, I think is an effect of them going back and redoing some of the show. But I'm pleased for that. It would be more relevant again so i'm excited i'm excited about it i really enjoyed the morning show so i'm looking forward to more yeah we're in an interesting period where content is starting to roll out that is was made during the pandemic and like during either like light parts of the pandemic or you know like last summer and fall

and like it's interesting now because you're like well is this a pre-pandemic thing or is this a is this a during pandemic thing like uh it's fascinating to see because it's getting hard to tell right and some things i was struck by um in oh what show was I watching that, oh, in WandaVision, there is a reference to quarantine in the latest episode. And I had that moment of like, they shot, I think they shot most of this before the pandemic, but they obviously didn't shoot all of it and made some changes. and made some changes and there's going to be we're going to be dealing with a lot of that um i think this year where we're going to see stuff and and wonder you know they won't probably tell us but like wonder what what was the story behind this did they stop halfway did they shoot this all before did they shoot this all during like it's interesting to to watch that and and try to imagine maybe we'll be able to tell by people's haircuts well actually that's the funny thing is that they have continuity people who that's all they do right is match what you look

like in another scene because they do shoot everything get shoots out of order anyway it just doesn't usually shoot like movies shoot out of order over the course of sometimes months and they they get everything to to sync up but you know if you do it over a year, you can make the haircuts probably match better than you can make if somebody gained or lost 15 pounds or something like that. That would be more visible, but I don't know. Looking forward to it regardless. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. 2021 is looking up. New beginnings means new opportunities to grow your business. If part of your strategy is adding new members to your team, LinkedIn Jobs finds the right person quickly. And to make things better, your first job post is free. LinkedIn is an active community of

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no matter where the day takes you. That's how LinkedIn Jobs can help you hire the right person faster. I think it's really great that you can do that, that have everything available to you just when you're on the go. I can imagine if I was filtering through a bunch of applicants, just being able to dip in and dip out of that just seems really great. The thing is about LinkedIn Jobs, like for me,

and I'm sure for many people out there, LinkedIn is the first place that I think about when it comes to connections within business. It's like it is a way that people connect with each other in the business world. And so having like colleagues and potential colleagues all in one place seems like a no brainer to me. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn jobs. And now you can post a job for free. Just go to linkedin.com slash upgrade. Once again, that is linkedin.com slash upgrade to post a job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Our thanks to LinkedIn Jobs for their support of this show and RelayFM.

So we're going to talk about keyboards and trackpads now. So we have something to talk about with Bridge because you wrote a little article about Bridge and some stuff that they've got going on with a beta version of iOS. But there's also a Jason Snell story time that we want to get to before that. You know, my wife is a children's librarian. Normally she does the story time in this house,

but I also sometimes have story time. There you go. From my pals, my Upgrad my gradient pals i just wanted to i went to the apple store again it's one of those stories mike where i leave the house it's very exciting when i leave the house happens almost never went to my local apple store um because i decided to embrace the butterfly keyboard Apple service program. Okay. I don't know if you've done this,

but Apple has this program for people who have the butterfly keyboard on their laptop. If it's four years or less from when your laptop was originally purchased, Apple will take it in.

Check it out. If it's got like keyboard problems. Repeated dropped letters. Stuff like that. Which I think is basically every one. But Apple insists it's just a small percentage. So Lauren's MacBook Air 2018 model model has a butterfly keyboard obviously and uh she said to me i don't know a year ago six months ago um i was like are you having keyboard issues

and you know it's okay the the the you know letters double a lot and i'm like that's you are it's not okay those are those are issues I downloaded Unshaky, which is this little utility that like tries to sense when a letter is pushed multiple times in a very short time window and basically ignores the additional presses, which is very clever as a workaround to try to solve some of these issues. to try to solve some of these issues. And last time I checked, it said like, and Shakey has solved thousands of these mistaken presses, right? But the bottom line is it's a butterfly keyboard and it's got a lot of these issues that are famous for the butterfly keyboards.

Apple has a program. And I thought, well, before it expires, I should, she uses this laptop. I should probably actually take advantage of the fact that Apple has a keyboard service program. Now, in the pandemic, she's mostly been using it at her desk, and I got her a stand and pulled out one of my many keyboards that I have. I have lots of keyboards in my office and a trackpad, and she's mostly using it that way now, but she still will use it in other places. And her using a good keyboard only magnifies how bad the, the, the bass keyboard is. So I decided to do the thing.

I went online, it says, go to the, you know, genius appointment list for your local store. If you've got a nearby store and I signed that up, I, you know, and they're like, all right, come, come in tomorrow afternoon. And I go to the mall, um, and put on my mask and it's an outdoor mall because it's California. And there are two lines. There's the Genius line and there's the Picking Up Products line. I wait in the Genius line for five or 10 minutes and I get called into the store. The store has been completely remade where there's basically just you can't get into the store you can get into this sort of it's almost like a little lobby area they've created that's got a lot a bunch of like teller windows or a friend of mine described it as being like

going to a racetrack it's the place where you place the bed at the racetrack it's uh or in a cartoon or a movie about racetracks so like there's a little window with a person behind it that you're directed to and i say keyboard service program it's already on my thing and she asked me a lot of sort of unnecessary questions about my laptop while she's wiping it down with little moist towelettes um but you know it went pretty quickly because i know the answer they wipe it down in front of you yeah she wiped it down before she even like opened it up and i don't even know why she opened it up it's like there's the keyboard service program it's got double characters all over the place and please just do the thing with the keyboard service program um and have you backed

it up yes all that um but it went pretty quickly after all of that and she did after the wipe down and uh i went back home and she's like well we'll well, our tech will analyze it and then we'll call you. And I'm like, why would that happen? Like, we all know what's going on here. Well,

I got a call probably five minutes after I got back home from somebody saying, yep, saying, keyboard service program, so we're going to mail it out

to the place where, and it'll be like 10 days. And I said, okay, great. Do that. did i offer you anything like so because here's my thinking on this right for for a lot of people this is their computer right so if you do this you have no computer for yes two weeks indeed yeah. Yeah. And I don't think they offer you a loaner. I don't think they do.

I certainly didn't get offered one. I don't think they can. And yes, that's a problem. And that, I think, suppresses the use of this sort of process. Because I know with some stuff like AppleCare, they'll basically, especially they've been doing it more recently, they will, you you know you give them your card information and they'll take like a hold and they'll send you a device right uh and then

you just send them back the other one and they will uh they'll refund you or whatever and once again not ideal because you're going to have the money uh just sitting around it you're at least with you know you haven't you've not got no phone for two weeks and this is a this is a 2018 model so they don't make it anymore and anything like i i don't know i agree with you i think that given that this is essentially a product recall it would be awfully nice if they offered something like that but they don't although it would be kind of torture for anyone doing it because it'd be like here's a brand new macbook pro yeah and it's so amazing and then in two weeks time you have to uh give it back mail it back david in the in the discord

points out quite rightly that the reason that they do the little uh quick kind of check before they tell you yep keyboard program we're going to send it out is they want to make sure it works and isn't busted and you know that it basically is a functioning laptop for all sorts of other reasons before they put you in the keyboard program but in my case it's a perfectly fine laptop that has a butterfly keyboard that's its that's its core flaw um by the way the next day i got a phone call which was really funny a voice call and i decided to answer it because i've gotten a couple of these calls from unknown numbers in California that have actually been related to Apple Store and Apple stuff. So I'm like, all right, let's just see. I'll take a

chance. It's probably a spammer, but let's give it a shot. And it was a person, a live person, who said, this is so-and-so with Apple, and just letting you know about your laptop that's been sent in for the keyboard service program, that due to extreme weather in the united states it's going to face delays it'll probably take us a little bit longer to look at it than we might have thought and i'm like okay like so you know we'll take it and i'm like fine this is one of those things where i don't it's nice that it's a real human being and not like a just a recording but i have nothing to say to them it's like all right like thank you for telling me fine really yeah and i did get one something similar to that a couple days before about my appointment that was from a real person

but was just they let the voicemail so i'm in the i'm in the system, the Apple system now, and that laptop is gone to who knows where to do who knows what. Right? Like, meanwhile, back at home, I should say, Lauren is currently using, as we speak, in fact, my M1 MacBook Air. That was an interesting issue because I had this moment where I realized this is probably going to take more than, or it could, before I had gone there, could take more than a couple of days, right? This is probably a longer kind of outage.

So I backed up her MacBook Air to Time Machine, the new fresh Time Machine backup. I got an external drive that I have, an external SSD, that I formatted, and I downloaded the Big Sur installer and installed Big Sur on it. And then I restored her time machine backup to the external drive running Big Sur. So basically, she's booted off of an external drive on an M1 MacBook Air that is essentially a backup, a replication of her computer. And probably when it comes back, she'll just migrate her back and it'll be on Big Sur because she was on like Catalina or Mojave or something like that. And doing, you know, cloning a Big Sur drive is problematic and having it be bootable anyway. The old school way would have been to just clone her drive and then boot off of it. But the M1 Macs only run Big Sur and they're Apple Silicon, so it's more complicated than that and all that. So in any event, it works.

I've got it booted off of an external drive. It's basically her computer updated to Big Sur, it's it's basically her computer updated to big sur as far as she can see running on that external drive and it it will do the job for her in the meantime um and yeah she's going to get a big sur upgrade out of it because i don't i think after working on it for probably more than a week she's probably not going to want to just go back even if that her drive is still intact she's probably not going to want to go back to her even if her drive is still intact. She's probably not going to want to go back to her hard drive as it existed two weeks ago. So the question that remains is what will happen to this laptop when it comes back? What's going to happen to it? I know that probably a lot of our listeners have been through this, but I haven't been, so I wanted to at least talk about it.

I haven't been, so I wanted to at least talk about it. By the way, this program covers, and I'm going to quote here, eligible MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models for four years after the first retail sale of the unit. So basically, if you have a butterfly keyboard laptop and you bought it in 2017, let's say, time is running out if it hasn't run out already for you to do this program. Time is running out if it hasn't run out already for you to do this program. And I would say if your keyboard's weird and you have a way to keep doing whatever it is you're doing before this time runs out, you should do this program, right? Because Apple gave you a keyboard that it acknowledges doesn't work right. You should probably take advantage of the program while you can. doesn't work right, you should probably take advantage of the program while you can.

Problem being, do you need to actually do things with a computer in the interim? And who knows how long it'll be? Putting in there. So this is one of the things that's the great mystery. I believe, depending on your model, they're swapping the keyboard with something different. But I'm unclear whether all of these models are getting the kind of final form of the butterfly keyboard, where they did, again, it's still a butterfly keyboard, but they put different kind of stuff on the switches and stuff to improve materials. Improved materials, yeah, that's a great phrase.

But I'm unclear if the improved materials are even compatible with the older models. Like, can the 2018 Air that my wife has, does it get the improved materials are even compatible with the older models. Can the 2018 Air that my wife has, does it get the improved materials or does it just get... Good name for a band. The improved materials? Yeah. I saw them open at the Film War. Okay. I vaguely remember

that there's some models that can get the improved materials and some that can't. This is the part that's frustrating, right? If your bad butterfly keyboard gets replaced with another bad butterfly keyboard, you know, it's presumably still going to go bad. It's like resets the clock on it, right?

Yeah, exactly. It resets the clock is exactly right. So, you know, what a mess. I would say it doesn't feel particularly generous to me that apple sets the four-year clock on this too um because like what what they're really saying is after you've had a laptop for four years at the key if the keyboard which is your only input method if you want to use it as a laptop is totally busted and doesn't work right too bad you had your four years seems strange to me me. Like, I don't know,

not particularly generous. It's nice that they've got this program, but, and you could argue that it's good that they've got the program. Of course it is, but also they've got these keyboards that are really unreliable and not great. So, but I will say also just just, it's another reminder that although, like when we were talking about the Apple report card, everybody's like, yay, the butterfly keyboards are finally gone. They're not. They're not. Because until May of 2020, Apple was still selling butterfly keyboard laptops, which means this program will presumably be in effect until the middle of 2024, when the last butterfly keyboard laptop has its four-year date since it was initially sold at retail.

So you could argue that we're going to be living with the butterfly keyboard until at least 2024. Anyway, I'll report back on when this thing gets back. Whenever that is, I don't know if it's in a pile of snow in Texas somewhere or where it is or what's going on with it. But it's been interesting to go through it. And I'm very glad that we have the luxury of having a laptop that I can basically use as the replacement for this in the meantime. And that is a luxury, and I totally admit that, and that's one of the challenges with even like, well, Apple's got a program, so that's fine.

If you've got to give away your only computer for an unknown amount of time so that its keyboard works, that's not great, right? That's not great. Has Lauren expressed any kind of opinion on the uh m1 macbook pro a macbook air uh no okay uh other than to say am i gonna feel like my computer is really bad when i get it back and i think the answer is no and i think the answer is no really because although this is an M1 MacBook Air, it is also booted off of an external USB drive. Right. And therefore, external drives are not the fastest.

You've basically leveled it out. I'm trying. I'm trying. Don't make it look too good. But there is a possibility that she'll get hers back and be like, this laptop is garbage. Get me a new laptop. I'm like, all right. Well, you know, if it comes to that.

So Bridge, we've spoken about Bridge for a long time on this show. We were both longtime users of Bridge keyboards. But not in about a year. Funny how that happened. Because Apple released the Magic Folio, Magic, oh my gosh, Magic Keyboard. I really struggle with the name of that product

because there are so many other products that have existed throughout history called Magic Keyboard. oh my gosh magic keyboard for some i really struggle with the name of that product because there are so many other products that have existed throughout history called magic keyboard and indeed the most important part of the magic keyboard is the trackpad the trackpad um and so i really wish that they would have given it a completely different name than the one that they gave magic keyboard oh yeah and when i write about it i have to say magic keyboard for ipad yeah is that what they call it magic keyboard for ipad well to say magic keyboard for ipad yeah is that what they call it magic keyboard for ipad well it's magic keyboard for ipad pro is initially what they called it but now one of them is magic keyboard for ipad pro and ipad air because it fits both it's

but really as you say like the identifying feature of the magic keyboard is the trackpad that's right because they have had lots of keyboards before some of them were smart um so but not magic talking about bridge products because of the introduction of the magic keyboard because we had loved bridge for years because it basically turned our ipads into laptops it had great adjustability and put a keyboard right there front and center. Then when Apple released their product, they put a trackpad on it, which was exactly what you wanted. We were speaking about it in the time. There was all this space

at the bottom of the bridge keyboard where my wrists went, and it would be lovely if there was a trackpad there. And they make them for Windows tablets. They make a bridge keyboard with a trackpad. And we were hoping they would do it. And this is the funny thing is they did do it before the Magic Keyboard because they were taking advantage of the...

Assistive touch. There we go, the assistive touch cursor. But by the time that bridge had got that product to the point where it's ready to ship apple dropped the second shoe and released the full-on cursor support and the magic keyboard so at that point we kind of moved on but also unfortunately for bridge the bridge pro plus which was the product that they released, was a very bad product to use because of some limitations around what they could do with the trackpad. So you reviewed the original one. As a refresher, it was basically that they had to kind of emulate a mouse rather than let it be a trackpad.

Is that right? Right. That's my understanding is that the iPad and iPad OS didn't support Bluetooth trackpads. It supported Bluetooth mice. And so they were faking trackpad support, but their trackpad was really sort of behaving like a mouse and there were lots of limitations and so when i tried it like it didn't do multi-touch gestures the two-finger scroll was really janky um cursor movement wasn't precise it just wasn't very good and this was with the cursor support because it was in i remember writing about it in that window

where the cursor support came out but the the Magic Keyboards hadn't shipped yet. Remember? They announced it, but they weren't out yet. It was in the early days of the pandemic. They weren't quite out yet. And it was clearly not good enough. And it pained me to write that article because I've liked their keyboards for so long, and I've written about how much I like their keyboards. And then I used their trackpad and basically said,

this isn't good enough. Like I wouldn't use this. I would rather not use a trackpad than use this trackpad. Right. It just wasn't not good enough. And then you get the magic keyboard and the magic. Cause the, the question was hanging out there like,

well, what will the magic keyboard feel like? And the answer is exactly like the magic trackpad on laptops and desktops. Like exactly. It is the full Apple Trackpad experience. So, you know, basically at that point, I stopped using the Bridge keyboard and I just used the Magic keyboard for iPad. Because it had the good trackpad.

And also the keys were good. Although, you know, arguably I think the bridge keyboard ergonomically is better. I think the keyboard is as good or better. The laptop feel is nice. It definitely is shaped like a laptop. You can move the hinge like a laptop. It's got a broader range of... More traditional range of uh viewing angle you

could say right then the magic keyboard which has obviously got the kind of multi-fold design and doesn't and it hovers over the keys and stuff it's it's a different kind of feel they got function row so you can do brightness and stuff that is not on apple's keyboards for ipad uh you know there are all sorts of reasons, but bottom line was, but this one's got a good trackpad, so I'm going to use this one. And it's been like that until basically last week. So the 14.5 beta came out with the ability for companies like Bridge

to have an improved uh experience right it's it's so bridge isn't talking about it nobody's talking about it but you can read between the lines which is something happened in this ipad os beta that allows them to do a trackpad. And it's not quite the... Like, Logitech has their case for the iPad Air that has a trackpad. But it's smart connector-based. So if I put two and two together, I guess what I'm saying is that, obviously,

smart connector-based trackpad input was working saying is that obviously smart connector based trackpad input was working before, but for Bluetooth based trackpad input for a non Apple trackpad, uh, I guess this, I don't know if it's that, or if it's that it's a device that's doing both keyboard and trackpad as one Bluetooth device,

but something is going on where they literally require the latest ios ipad os beta in order for this to work so clearly that's a very strong indicator that they literally could not do this until apple did something inside the operating system that we don't know what it is yeah but they do now have a you can sign up for getting on their test flight and their test flight is for an app that is a firmware updater and you have to be on the latest uh ipad os beta and you run the firmware updater and your bridge pro plus keyboard gets uh a firmware update that um makes it behave like a trackpad instead of like a mouse you you know, pretend mouse that's actually a trackpad. And it basically behaves the same as the Logitech product does, except it's Bluetooth instead of smart connector. Basically behaves the same way, which it surprised me because I did a lot.

Mike, I spent a lot of time last week looking at my hands. Have you ever really looked at your hand, man? Seriously, though, if I would say this to anybody, look at, stop for a second when you're using your trackpad and look at it and look at where your fingers are and you'll be like i do that because i discovered all sorts of very quirky finger motions that i've completely internalized that i built up over decades of using trackpads including using my thumb to click which is clearly because apple used to have the button underneath the trackpad and so you click it with your thumb yeah and i've never stopped clicking with my thumb okay it just happens on the bottom of the trackpad now so

and I do this thing where I've got my thumb on there and then I move with my I move with my index finger and then I before the index finger is even done moving I lay my thumb back down and then once it stops I click it's this very I videoed

I videoed myself doing mousing gestures to try and figure out what was going on. And what I learned while doing all of this sort of stuff is the Bridge trackpad and the Logitech trackpad have limitations that are not on Apple's Magic trackpad or the trackpad in the magic keyboard for ipad so that's interesting right like there's not a universal it turns out one of the things i learned is apple's really good at uh trackpad firmware and they have there's a lot of secret sauce in the magic trackpad and the one that really got me is i do a lot of two fingers scrolling um the one that really got me is I do a lot of two fingers scrolling, um, with my two fingers down vertically. And that works great on the magic track pad on the bridge and the Logitech

track pads doesn't, it doesn't see them. And in fact, you have to kind of rotate until you have to be less than 45 degrees, um, horizontal for it to see the two finger scroll. That's like really weird. Isn't it weird? And now if all trackpads ever required you to be at 45 or less and not at 90 degrees, I would have trained myself a long time ago to not do that.

Right. And I would have trained myself a long time ago to not do that, right? And I think this is the key here is, can you train yourself to do, retrain yourself to use the trackpad in a way that is not the way you use it with the Apple trackpad? The answer is absolutely yes. It's sort of a subset of motions that these trackpads support, not just the bridge, but the Logitech. But I do find it fascinating, right? Like it revealed a level of secret sauce that I wasn't aware was there in Apple's firmware. And so this new trackpad firmware, it's pretty good. And I would say it's pretty good, but there are going to be little quirks where you're going to say, oh, I need to move my fingers slightly differently in order to do this than I would on a Magic Trackpad. And it's almost half the price of the Magic Keyboard. So there's lots going for it. But the bottom line is also that if you want the best trackpad experience on an iPadad the magic keyboard

is the answer because it does have that secret sauce that um that the third-party device is not just the bridge but the the logitech one that was sort of blessed by apple even that one doesn't have all the secret sauce i kind of don't understand what the point of that is. Like, if they are holding it back from being as seamless as it could be. I think it's a question of what is Apple's responsibility as a platform owner to the makers of third-party accessories, right? Like, if I get Bluetooth trackpad made by whatever technology company and attach it to my Mac, I don't think I would have these same kind of issues. I don't know. I think maybe you would.

Or a mouse or something. Well, but a mouse is going to behave like a mouse. I think you might. I think what this reveals is that Apple considers some level of the intelligence that it's putting into its trackpad firmware to be proprietary and that it really does want the best trackpad experience to be on apple hardware and for all we know i mean because i don't know this i don't know if you know this bridge might be able to make their experience better like they might have to do some stuff with their firmware where they can get it closer that's that's absolutely true And I don't want to reveal too much,

but I used a few different versions of their firmware in TestFlight before they announced this. And there's certainly power that they have and control that they have. But what struck me is there may be limitations that are just limitations on anybody who's not Apple. And obviously, Apple has. Not only the resources.

To fine tune this firmware. And a huge user base. But it's really also. That they've been refining this stuff. For decades. Right? Like the first trackpad. On a PowerBook.

Was in the 90s. They had had a long time, and with the original Magic Trackpad and with the second Magic Trackpad and the fact that, you know, two-thirds, three-quarters of the Macs they sell are all laptops, so they've all got trackpads. Like, Apple's been at the trackpad game

and satisfying lots of customers and finding lots of quirks,ks probably in how people use their fingers on a track pad for a long time so they should have secret sauce and you know they could potentially share that with others but i think they could also just not and and it's i don't know whether it's a technical thing or or it's a decision uh on their part. But it's something that I hadn't really expected when I went into this. I assumed that a trackpad was a trackpad. And that's not true. I mean, we already knew.

Also, I'll say the software update thing. You can use a magic trackpad 2 via Bluetooth with an iPad, and you don't need the latest public beta of iPadOS, right? So Apple's trackpad works great via Bluetooth, whereas the Bridge trackpad needs a software update, an OS update, to work via Bluetooth. Why is that? I think in the end, it's the same thing, which is home field advantage of Apple as the platform owner. And they're pouring more of that secret sauce in there, which is their stuff is the best stuff on their platform. And they like it that way. This episode is brought to you by Literati Kids. Great children's books open new worlds of discovery. With Literati Kids, your child can explore uncharted places

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The most joyful way to foster a lifelong love of learning. One more time, that is literati.com slash upgrade. Our thanks to Literati Kids for their support of this show and RelayFM. Got a couple of Mark Gurman reports. These are small reports. I think we could maybe come up with a name. They're like Gurman Lights or something. I don't know.

Little Gurman Bites. Gurman Bites. Mark Bites. Mini Gurmans. Apparently, Apple is working on a magnetically attached battery pack for iPhones with MagSafe. This has been in development for a year. There's been stumbling blocks, as there always is. The key difference here is that this product is not a case, as we've seen in previous years, just a battery pack with MagSafe on it, and you put it

on and it charges up. The report also references that plans for reverse wireless charging on iPhones as a potential feature has been put on what seems like an indefinite hold. So this is the idea. So this is like two little things in one here, but the second part is that, you know, you could charge your AirPods on the back of your iPhone. It was the thing that we all thought,

well, many of us thought that they would add and it seems like they're not. But what do you think about this MagSafe battery pack? I don't know. What I've heard is that it's not very efficient that this kind of charging technology is not very efficient and so you'd be better off with a battery pack with a that you plug in but that said you know it's part of the magsafe ecosystem right you know attach this thing and i think there are others out there that do this already. I think some companies make like Qi charging battery packs, right?

Like that. So that is a thing that you can get. But I guess one of the benefits that you would get with MagSafe, of course, is that you don't have to be delicate with it, right? Like if you're just Qi charging on a thing, you've got to like hold that thing all together and make sure it doesn't come off. But with MagSafe, it's going to attach it's it's attached and aligned and and maybe you can even put it in your pocket and it will stay attached and yeah i i am not a big battery

pack person i'm no alex cox for example this with a battery pack but i think it's fine and i think apple should be doing this this is a continuation of apple's whole thing with mag. But I think it's fine. And I think Apple should be doing this. This is a continuation of Apple's whole thing with MagSafe, which is they're not just rolling out an iPhone feature. They're rolling out a sort of constellation of accessories, right? Accessories from Apple, accessories from third parties. And they've had success with their battery packs in the past, battery cases. so why not do this too it'll be undoubtedly more expensive than you know any alternative but also it'll be the one from apple so people will buy it it will be baked into the system like that but i always liked the

battery cases oh my god how many more times do you how many more times do you think you can conceivably get that into today's episode? Like if you're not forcing it. We're talking about Apple. Apple is, I mean, what's the secret sauce going to be? I think that's the whole game plan. I have used the battery cases for the last couple of iPhones. I don't have, obviously, any need to get a battery case or pack for my current iPhone because usually I would use these when I was traveling. need to get a battery case or pack for my current iPhone because

usually I would use these when I was traveling. I reckon I might be able to get this entire life cycle of my iPhone without any kind of battery pack or case on it. But this is a interesting method of doing it. Again,

I've mentioned this before, I'm not super into wireless charging as a technology uh it kind of i don't know things get hot and stuff like and i'm always hearing about apple's always having problems with these products keep catching fire you know like at those in in german's report they said like oh in these early stages they were having overheating reliability issues with this product it's like yeah i'm not surprised everything seems to go wrong when chi charging is introduced so i don't think this one's for me i'm a way away from being a chi charging person i still charge the good old way of a cable um but everybody else that i know including everybody else in

my household loves magsafe uh but it's just not my thing. Plus, I'm a PopSocket person, which is another big reason. Oh, boy. It's incredibly difficult to try and make that all work out. I have the MagSafe wallet. I bought a MagSafe wallet. You did? I did. I like it.

Huh. Okay. Yeah, I like it. Instead of having to put my phone and my wallet in my pocket, I put my phone with my wallet in my pocket. Those rare instances where I go outside yeah you see i just have that all set up feeling like you lose one you lose both you know oh i mean that's okay yes that's i suppose that's true and 5g forget about it it's time forG. Apple has engineers working on their own radio system for 6G.

4Gs. Apparently, Apple have decided they want to be ahead of the curve when it comes to 6G. But this is a sign of what's coming to them in the future anyway, that they are not going to be using partner products for modems and radios. You know why, Mike? You know why apple wants to know why because they want to put in their own secret sauce oh look at that you did it i'm proud of you really because it was so soon and it's still legitimate yeah but this was you know we you

remember from the qualcomm story and then apple buying up intel's modem division they are moving this way anyway 6g is about 10 years away so i expect that before 6g is even a thing apple's using their own 5g modems in maybe the iphone 14 or something right you know this is definitely in their future we should take bets about what year at&t will declare their latest 5G technology as 6G? I reckon it's like 4 or 5 years away. Okay. Because

if 6G is 10 years away, I could imagine about halfway through that period of time it will become spoken about more and they'll just be like, here we go, 6G time. In 2026? Yeah. What better time than 26 for 6G? There you go. Except it won't be 6G.

It'll be AT&T. Well, AT&T will call it that. 5G, branded as 6G. So what does AT&T call 5G? They call it 5G and then 4G is 5GE. Is that how it works? Oh, I think they call it like 5G Plus or something. I don't even know. I don't plus or something. I don't even know.

I don't have 5G. I don't have it because it would require me to go on a much more expensive plan. And also, I don't leave my house. Yeah, it's not needed for now. I guess technically I have AT&T, so I do have 5G. It's just not really 5G. You have AT&T's 5G, which is the real 5G as we know it to be. It's the one that's everywhere.

It's the one that's everywhere. It's the one that's everywhere. This is a non-Mark Gurman report. I saw this reported on Mac Rumors. I've seen a bunch of websites reporting on this too. There's a claimed leaked image showing the design of AirPods 3. This has come from a website called 52 Audio. Now, obviously, we can't corroborate

the reliability of these images, but they do seem in line with rumors from Mark Gurman and Ming-Chi Kuo on what Apple's next AirPods could feature and potentially look like. Now, what I want to do just for the purpose of this discussion is just assume that this image is correct,

because I think it just makes it more interesting for discussion for us to just... Let's just take as read that the images that are in this article are correct. And this is what the next AirPod is going to look like. I'm very skeptical about these, but... Well, we can talk about that skepticism, even in the idea of these being real or not. Because it's about the product itself.

Because I think there is a potential that it could go this way. And the key design detail that is shown here that we're talking about is that the AirPods 3, so it would be the addition to the standard AirPods, the revision to the original design, is that they're basically going to look just like AirPods Pro. So much smaller with the in-ear silicone system, so the earphones go in your ears. And if they they do this this is a big departure from the current airpods design which i think would make a lot of people pretty upset because not everyone likes the in-ear headphones you know i well okay so my skepticism here is also not just what's this source, but also what are AirPods Pro if these are AirPods? Like, what's the difference?

Because this looks very much like Apple's going to do new AirPods, their AirPods Pro. Like, I don't... How are these differentiated from AirPods Pro? What's left? How are these differentiated from AirPods Pro? What's left? 52 Audio claimed that these AirPods 3 feature the pressure-believing system that AirPods Pro have,

so they've got, like, it equalizes the pressure. But it seems like that's it. So it doesn't seem like there's active noise cancellation in it. We assume probably no transparency mode. And so let's imagine that that's what it has for now. But they do have the touch control indentations in these renders or images or whatever they are. So that's a feature.

So noise cancellation is the difference between AirPods and AirPods Pro? I think that that would probably be safe to assume would be the thing. All right. So that might be it, right? Basically just lesser AirPods Pro. Mm-hmm.

But isn't that... So, you know, on that, though, isn't that the Apple thing to do? To, like, make AirPods, quote-unquote, better, and then make AirPods Pro better still? It is. I think the question, and maybe where we're getting hung up,

is this concern that AirPods and AirPods where we're getting hung up is the this concern that airpods and airpods pro don't fit the same and that people for whom airpods fit are going to be sad because the new airpods don't don't fit them now i i'm reminded that when airpods pro came out apple made a big deal in the in the launch of saying uh we this is all based on our research into the shapes of ears worldwide and it's a much better shape that's compatible with more ears than uh our old airpods so that might be their premise is that airpods should be shaped like airpods pro because it's a better shape that fits more ears it will be a real bummer for the people for whom airpods pro don't fit comfortably but airpods do so i love my airpods pro but me too my left one falls out all the time doesn't matter what

size tip i use doesn't matter and my left ear has always been the ear that has bothered me with these types of headphones. And AirPods Pro are not uncomfortable for me like others are, but the left one just doesn't stay in. This never happened with standard AirPods. They never fell out. But the left one falls out.

So maybe my ear canal is misshapen or whatever. But this is the thing, right? So some people don't like it. And for some it just doesn't work like for me now if that annoyed me enough i would stop using them but i find the transparency and noise cancellation features to be so good and the touch sensitivity to on the on the stalks of the things to be so good that i'll take it right it's like fine i will use it. But I would be surprised if... Not surprised. I would be, I think, a little bit disappointed

if this was the only option. Have you tried some other ear tip kind of thing on your left ear for AirPods Pro? Foam is fine. Sony Silicon, I have the issue with foam. If I use foam tips, they're fine. the issue with foam if i use foam tips they're fine but i just don't really like foam tips have you tried uh federico's thing where you put the foam under the silicone and so it it's providing the kind of like the push that phone does but no i haven't

tried that federico really made some companies day by yeah by writing about that yeah writing that and talking about it on connected but um that might be something to try uh as an aside i um there's a company that i use that makes uh custom silicone ear tips that i use for my headphones and they offered uh a version that you that works for airpods pro and i thought well that's really interesting it turns out it's literally an in-ear tip and then there's like this this like thing sticking out that is where you put the airpod and and they really expect you to like walk around with airpods pro just sort of like bouncing around on the outside of your ears. Oh. With the little hole.

So they didn't make a little connector to go into the plasticky thing, like the little clip there. Oh, that's a real shame. It's really bad. That's so hilarious. That must be so uncomfortable too. Yeah, it's not. It's really bad.

So now, basically now I've got a pair of earplugs they're very nice earplugs just you can snip off the little outside part and uh it's a very nice earplug go take it to concerts when i go to concerts again i could easily imagine them changing the design and i think they should change the design like the overall physical shape and size and look to look like airpods pro because they're the cooler ones but I just think it would be a shame to remove the plastic

ear design that they had before you know yeah I get it I mean Apple is not afraid to do that and I can tell you that if this is what they do they will absolutely say that these are shapes that are more compatible with more ears

and that the the removable tips if the if they've got the same removable tip design they'll say and you know the removable tips help you get a better fit and more people are going to be able to use have access to airpods than before but it fundamentally, even if that's completely true, there will be people for whom the new AirPods won't fit that the old ones did. And that's, you know, the question here is, is Apple trying to make a product line of headphones for people who have different desires, like one that goes in your ear and one that sits in, you know, outside your ear and one that goes over your ear, or are they following their other instinct which is to sort of make everything uniform and yeah i'm with you i would rather see apple spread out their headphone design

choices for ergonomic reasons than have it all be sort of like well we only make one airpod shape and this is it so i will ask you now do you do you think they will do this with silicone in ears on airpods the future version of airpods 3 do you think that that is what apple will do i think it's the most likely scenario is they will because they'll be so proud of this design that they came up with for airpods pro that they're going to want to roll it back. And there might even be some savings in having the AirPods and AirPods Pro be kind of the same for a lot of this. I think there's a chance that it's not true. I really do. But I think if I had to pick one, I would pick that it's true.

I think that it will be too. And I hope that they have transparency mode. Well, I'll tell you, if it's got the airflow path, then there's some degree of transparency already, right? Like, that's letting air in from the outside. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you've ever used AirPods Pro and just

turned it off because you can turn transparency and noise casting off it's like an offsetting and that is too isolated for me it's a natural isolation to that and i don't feel comfortable and wouldn't feel comfortable being out in the street with that isolation level yeah i mean covering you know covering up your ears with headphones makes a difference that the earbuds don't do so absolutely yeah i don't know i don't know what they're going to do because you would think that if you can put in transparency mode then you're basically you're basically doing noise canceling right like is that hardware any different it's the same hardware um i don't know

i don't know i my skepticism about this report is that it looks an awful lot like it's just sort of a uh rebadging of some airpods pro and saying this these are the new airpods and that could very easily just be a lazy um you know goal of getting attention for a fake rumor yeah i agree with you and i wouldn't have included this at all if if reliable people like mark german and ming chi kuo have said things that are similar to this right yeah there's a lot of detail we don't know but the idea of them moving towards this one type of design seems possible um it's possible i would soon probably i would probably advocate against it because saying that the canal phone market and the earbud market are as different as the earbud market and the headphone over over ear headphone market

are different right canal phones i love them I love sticking little headphone things in my ears. It's great. But some people hate it. And I get it. I get that. And so why would you not give those people, I don't care how much better it is, having people have to stick the silicone tip of an earphone in their ear canal, like that's a deal breaker for a lot of people. And as you point out, there's also a safety issue if it's covering up their ability to hear their surroundings. So I would advocate against it, but it doesn't mean they won't do it. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. They will let you easily create a website for your next idea or project. With Squarespace, you can register a unique domain name to give your site

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Brantz asks, to avoid confusion between Apple TV the app and Apple TV Plus the service and Apple TV the hardware, what would you rename the Apple TV hardware if there was a next generation coming? I guess the first question is

would you or should they rename Apple TV to something else? Well, yeah yeah i think it's really confusing um but i think that they can't go too far away i liked um ben thompson and john gruber came to this idea of like call it apple tv arcade or something if you're gonna focus on games right um give it some differentiator just because apple tv app, Apple TV plus service. There's a lot of Apple TV going on here. Give it something to differentiate it.

I guess technically it's the Apple TV 4K is what it's called, but that's not, I don't know. I don't have a good answer. I would say what's its focus and give it a name that reflects that focus. So it could be Apple TV Pro. It could be Apple TV Pro. It could be Apple TV Home. If it's got home features, it could be Apple TV Arcade. If it's, they're going to try to pitch it for Apple Arcade and bundle

it with a controller or something like that. But it would be nice if they stuck a modifier on it. Sure would be nice. I would like a modifier for that, but realistically, I would like a brand new name so I don't have to say the first two words. But the likelihood of that occurring is very slim. It's very low.

Right. Because I don't want to have to get to word three before you know what one I mean. Yeah. Oh, there isn't a third word. Well, then I know what you mean. If the third word is completely unrelated. Yeah, like Ryan's saying in the chat, just call it ITV.

Yeah. That was the original name, in case you didn't know that. But they faced issues with the ITV company here in the UK. Indeed. So they called it Apple TV. And I believe,

you can correct me if I'm wrong, it was the first product to get the Apple logo name. I think you might be right. And very clearly that was a Steve Jobs thing, right? Where Steve Jobs was like, oh, it's ITV, whatever. And they're like, we can't call it that. If not the example, a very prominent example of Apple deciding that using I in front of everything was something they should stop doing and then brand everything. Apple followed by a generic was something they should start doing.

I stood for Internet, Internet TV, Internet pad. Sure. Richard asks, what are your thoughts on Clubhouse especially as a complement and or evolution of podcasting do you have an opinion about Clubhouse Mike? oh yeah of course I do you know I do I want to point people to a tweet that I

very much enjoy from a friend of the show Lex Friedman which said saying Clubhouse's podcast is like saying parties are plays. And I just thought it so beautifully encapsulates my feeling about Clubhouse disrupting podcasting. Now, I see a lot of people saying, like getting upset about this because they say, you know, like, I as a podcast producer take umbrage to this because my podcast is so lovingly edited with music and et cetera, et cetera, right?

Like, and then people equate this idea of like, oh, people that make highly produced podcasts and people, when they hear that, think it has to have music underneath it. But I would say that what we do is still highly produced, heavily edited. But I would say that what we do is still highly produced. They're heavily edited. And it's not the editing part for me that is why podcasts and Clubhouse are different. It's just because it's audio that you listen to on your phone doesn't mean that it's a podcast,

nor that it will necessarily take people's time away from podcasting. It's like Apple Music is not podcasts, but they're both audio I listen to on my phone. I find it strange how, especially it seems like this happens a lot in Silicon Valley and especially when anything's VC related, everything has to be something else. It has to disrupt something that already exists.

It has to be a better version of something we already have and I don't know why it has to be that way like it is perfectly valid to say that Clubhouse is a new thing that exists and will be its own thing and like isn't that a better thing to say than to be like oh this is now gonna kill podcasting it's like twitch doesn't kill youtube videos but that's what's going it's like that's how i think of it of like youtube videos are by and large these highly produced things that take

a lot of time and effort to put together and they're concise and they've been a lot of crap has gone into them and then you have twitch streaming which is typically more free form there's less work that goes into it beforehand there's no work that goes into it after the recording is done and it's just there and you can have it on in the background like that is the comparison like clubhouse is to twitch that podcasts are to youtube and like so that's what's going on. It's the same medium. It's audio, but they're different. The only things that are similar is that it's people talking.

Conversations aren't disrupting podcasting. I just don't understand why we have to have these... Oh, this is the discourse that Clubhouse is now shaking the ground of podcasting. It's not going to happen, right? But Clubhouse can be its own thing, which is very successful.

And I hope that it does for people. It's a new medium. I don't feel any draw to it myself, either as a creator or consumer. I have an account. I've checked it a few times. I've listened to 10 minutes of one Clubhouse. I don't think it's for me. I think as a creator, I don't have anything I feel like I could bring to Clubhouse that I wouldn't just have as part of one of my many shows, right?

Like, why would I do a thing on Clubhouse, right? Like, that is content content which i would produce in the medium for podcasting but i'm keeping my mind open right like i always think back to instagram and instagram stories like i didn't use them for a while i had accounts but i didn't really use them but then i did because then it like i found a place in my life for it so i'm not like saying for me oh i'm never going to use Clubhouse, nor do I care about it. It's kind of just right now, I don't know what I would want it for. But that doesn't mean it's not good.

I just don't think it's for me right now. But the main thing I wanted to get across is I don't understand why people have to say that this is now coming after podcasting because I just don't see the line there yeah i i would say only in the broadest sense which is people have a limited amount of time in general and a limited time to listen to audio in particular and that is everything competes with everything else in in the broad way and in the narrow way. If you have X amount of audio time, then listening to music, listening to podcasts, listening to Clubhouse,

listening to the radio, listening to audio books, that's all in that bucket and you can't do all of them. And then more broadly, there's only so many hours in the day. In a more specific way, I agree with you. It feels like a very different medium. It's social conversation. There's a broadcast aspect to it. I think in the end, one of the things that I'm most skeptical of is these live talk shows on Clubhouse. Because that, to me, sounds like early days of television putting a stage show on television. Where it's like, that's not what this medium is. This is a social medium where people can talk and have conversations and somebody's in there trying

to turn it into essentially a call-in show from the radio or a live podcast stream like the one we do. And is that clubhouse to have an audience on an exclusive service that you have to give them your information and set up an account and then you can go in and you can listen to a bunch of other people talking live like is that disruptive in any way um i would say no i would say that there's probably something really interesting about making this an easy to use way to listen to live audio because we know that's hard like we do a live stream for this podcast but a fraction a tiny fraction of our listeners listen live and we love them yeah and nor would we want to bring this to clubhouse because then we're not using clubhouse for what clubhouse is for which is right if we did this podcast on clubhouse and didn't

have if we did this podcast on clubhouse and didn't have other people talking about it if we didn't turn it into a phone-in show then it's not clubhouse right it's just a podcast stuck on clubhouse which i i would think is bad right like i don't think that's using what it's that would be us trying to change it into something that it's not um what it is is it viable or not it's hard to tell honestly it's kind of hard for me to to see right now through the haze that is the stink that is caused by the worst in tech industry bro culture which is coming off a clubhouse in waves like it feels very much like we've we've disrupted silicon valley's disrupted the world with clubhouse and then you look at it and you're like oh it's talk radio i see or oh it's discord it's talk radio. I see. Or, oh, it's Discord. It's literally Discord, except this company owns it and owns your information instead of you signing up for Discord.

So I have a great deal of skepticism for how Clubhouse has emerged because I feel like to some degree it is tech industry hype. And what's the reality of it? And if there's something there, what is it? And it strikes me that as a place, a social graph for live conversations, it seems interesting to me. Like Lex said, a party, right? A party is not a play and Clubhouse is not a podcast. It's different and they serve different purposes. And I don't think plays are going to kill parties and I don't think parties are going to kill plays. You use them for different things. If a play and a party are going on at the same time, you have to choose

which one you want to go to. That's always going to be the case. You only have a limited amount of time. But looking at Clubhouse, I, you know, setting my skepticism aside, I feel like the whole thing

that it enables is for people to have, to be part of a conversation. And that's a very different thing than what we do on a podcast. But again, it's a very valid thing of its own. And it seems like it's really gaining traction in a lot of communities.

Now, it was in this weird beta. I mean, at the moment, right? But I'll get back to it in a second. The beta is all very VCE. But it seems know i log in and i look at what's happening and it seems like there's lots of different types of communities that are using clubhouse now but for me right now it feels like a fad now all things that are new feel like fads and then they catch on and this one may catch on but right now it still feels fad-like to me. And I'm happy for it to continue. I don't need to be right or wrong.

I'm not saying it is a fad. I just get that feeling from it. It's very buzzy right now, but I'm not sure this attaches in the long term like a like something like a instagram i i'm just not sure about this as a as a long-term medium that people will keep wanting to consume wanting to consume and continue to want to create. My skepticism is also because I have at least not yet witnessed what the secret sauce is that makes Clubhouse more powerful than literally every other tool that exists that does voice conversations. Is it the social layer because you've been able to open up chat rooms and even audio chat rooms for a very long time so is it just that they've

made it uh easier to connect socially it's really easier to easier to jump in yeah but is it is that enough that it becomes the only one because there's the feature argument too which is if this is if all they're doing is putting a nicer interface on that then literally every other social media um will copy it and that's going to be hard for them but i also will say what is there are we transforming into a world where boy in the 2020s what people are really going to be doing is jumping in uh audio chat rooms and waiting their turn to have conversations with other people. Maybe,

but that's been available on the internet for a while now, and people do use it. Is this different enough that this is the thing that makes it catch fire? Maybe it is. I don't know. As you said, it doesn't intersect

with my interests either you know i i'm on the record i actually found it uh when when larry king died i found this article that i wrote about larry king's show on cnn like 20 years ago that basically was me explaining i hate colin shows i hate them i hate them as a viewer as a listener i hate them i don't really want to hear the random people on the phone i i you know i tune into an interview show to hear the interview and then they're like let's take some calls and i tune out i'm not interested in the calls i'm just not sorry not so and other people are, and that's fine. But like there's, it's got a whiff of the Colin show on here. It doesn't really work for me, but as a social medium where people get to step up to the mic and talk, and if that is content that is good and that people really like

being a part of it when they're listening and also when they're talking, then there might be something here. I do wonder if, if it's the social media glue and the easy interface that's the thing that this isn't just going to get knocked off literally everywhere and there won't be anything left on Clubhouse. But I'm open to it. I never want to be somebody who looks at something new that comes along and say, oh, well, that's dumb. But Clubhouse is something that I look at with a great deal of skepticism because I'm not entirely convinced that this is something that a lot of people give feedback if they can make it easier for podcasts to bring on listeners to ask questions live and stuff like that and then archive it so because most people don't want to listen live they want to listen later live is a very narrow thing

and then it's gone like if they can solve a bunch of those problems could it become like a way better way to do live podcasting than currently exists? Yeah, sure. There's a lot of possibility there. There's a lot of people that have clubhouses are going to turn their clubhouses into podcasts. Oh, for sure. The medium, it's the method, is how you get a larger audience that way. And that would be my argument about the people who are doing Clubhouse as a talk show ultimately doing it wrong, because that sounds like they're basically importing something from another medium into this and then potentially, in order to monetize it, exporting it back out to where it should have been.

And that's not great. been and that's not great Brandon asks do you think Apple ever ramp up the tactility of Mac OS with the Taptic engine like they have on the iPhone all of the little bits of contextual feedback are one of my favorite details of the iPhone

and I can't help but hope it arrives as part of future M series hardware refreshes I don't think this will happen because I think Apple already tried this on the trackpad and nobody really uses it and it's not very good. And I think part of it is that it's indirect input instead of direct input. And although they did the thing where you're dragging over something and you get a little buzz on the trackpad um it's not the same as when you're using your hands on the screen it doesn't there's something about the indirectness of it that i think doesn't really translate it's like a hand-eye coordination thing maybe yeah i feel like it's more

likely that they're just going to remove a bunch of the vibration stuff um from the trackpad and leave it i mean it does have the fake click. The fake click is a vibration. So there is that in there, but I don't do the fake audio click, but the buzz when you click is- Well, I turned off the fake audio click after the last week's show. But it still does a little quick vibration.

Yeah, I love that. That is the click because it's not actually clicking. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that until you said that because my initial thought was like, yeah, I mean, I really love the Taptic stuff too. I would love to have more of that in the Mac. But you're right. I think what makes it nice is that it feels like I'm seeing a thing happening under my finger. Like, that's how it feels. Like, I'm moving the switch. I can see my finger move the switch and my finger feels the switch moving. I don't feel as connected to the pointer on my screen right like i no it's yeah interesting maybe it's just just look like a fake finger right that's what we all want no don't do that um i think yeah so i'm i'm skeptical that that will happen um because of that because it's

indirect and i don't think the effect works that well and although i like the taptic engine stuff on the iphone a lot i'm not sure i mean because i've tried it i've tried it with like logic and garage band and stuff on the mac and it just doesn't not sure. I mean, because I've tried it. I've tried it with like Logic and GarageBand and stuff on the Mac and it just doesn't work for me. It just doesn't. Maybe it could be implemented better, but my feeling is like they built that in already

in the Magic Trackpad and it doesn't, nobody cares. If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, just send in a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which you can get access to if you become a member and support this show. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com and you will get longer episodes of Upgrade every

single week with no ads if you sign up for Upgrade Plus. If you have already, thank you so, so much for your support. If you'd like to check it out, find out more, go to getupgradeplus.com. I would like to thank Squarespace, Literati Kids, and LinkedIn Jobs for their support of this week's episode. If you'd like to find links and stuff like that, they should be in your podcast app of choice. But if not, you can find them on the web at relay.fm. slash upgrade slash 340.

If you'd like to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. And I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.