Upgrade - 361: It’s Not an Artistic Exercise

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

For the first time Jason is (mostly) off this week! After discussing who’s winning the streaming wars, Myke challenges John Siracusa to describe his ideal Mac, asks Merlin Mann to share what he’s excited about, and answers a #myketalk from Jay Miller. But don’t worry, lasers return later on.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 361 today's show is brought to you by privacy squarespace calm and hello my name is mike hurley and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. I'm joining you as always, Mike. As always. No change to that. You're always here. I am always. I have been on every episode of Upgrade up to now, including this episode. Including this very episode and nothing will change that.

Why would we even mention that? That's strange. It is weird to spend so much time talking about that. about something that's just been a given for 361 episodes like why even mention it thing it's weird oh well we should probably stop talking about it it's also a shame it's the summer of fun oh no there's nothing summer of fun today no right technically i heard the music technically it is the summer of fun but we haven't got anything special it's just me and you super normal episode nothing different's gonna happen in the middle as we usually say It is the summer of fun. But we haven't got anything special. It's just me and you. Supernormal episode. Nothing different's going to happen in the middle. As we usually say on this podcast,

supernormal. Just supernormal. Regular episode with no differences. But enough about that, Mike. How about a hashtag Snell Talk question for me? Of course, like every episode. Matthew asks. Matthew doesn't always ask this.

Every episode we have one. This time, Matthew's question is... I'm really tired of the spell talk question being the same every single time. I have to answer it because Matthew won't stop. How do you arrange your apps on your Apple Watch? Do you use the grid, which is dubbed the honeycomb by many,

or the list? This is an easy one. The moment the list was available, I switched to the list and I used the list because I hate the grid. I think it's too small. It's difficult. I think it's confusing. Alphabetical list for me.

Alphabetical all the way. If you would like this, that was a very easy one. Very nice and quick one today. I was going to throw in. I actually would like the option to do that on App Library too. Never see the folders? Not to complain about app library but i don't find those folders useful okay i don't find the app library like oh we've

categorized your apps in various ways that you weren't involved with and you can use it to browse like if you like that great i'm glad it works for you it apparently works for whoever invented it at apple but i i find it useless and i would really rather, I think, have an alphabetical list on that page as an option, because I would choose that. I think I would like it too. I do use it, but I think if I had the choice, I would go to default to show me the list immediately, I think. If you would like to send in a Snell Talk question to help us open an episode of the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk or use question mark Snell Talk

in the RelayFM members Discord. I would like, we would like to thank everybody who purchased an Upgrade Summer of Fun t-shirt over at upgradeyourwardrobe.com. Depending on when you're listening to this episode, if you are listening on Monday the 12th, it will be available until 5 p.m eastern time so you may be able to just squeeze in an order um if you didn't and you missed out be faster next time

uh thanks to everyone who did buy one uh we hope that you enjoy them when they arrive uh hopefully in time for you to have some summer days come back oh uh great news everybody it's actually 8 p.m eastern 5 pac. You just got three hours more. So you got three more hours to do it. So if you are a first day listener to Upgrade, you still got time to get that sweet Summer of Fun t-shirt and also the other Donkletown shirts. Let's do some upstream.

But there's actually been an article that you've wanted to talk about for a while. It's kind of like a special segment. somewhere fun yeah sure uh joseph adalian at vulture spoke with a selection i always think of him as joe adalian but you know whatever okay well you know i was going with joseph maybe it is it. It's an interesting spelling of Joseph that I'm not too familiar with. We'll go with Joseph. At Vulture. Vulture spoke of a selection of Hollywood insiders to get a sense for how the industry

is currently perceiving which streaming service is the most powerful or influential right now. So this is cool because what Joe has done is... What if I say now I'm confused? We're going to go with Joe. TV Mojo, okay? TV Mojo. What TV Mojo has done is not a financial analysis of estimated number of subscriptions.

It's not a critic's analysis of who's got the best content. It's we talk to people who work in the business about how the streamers are perceived in the business. does it combines what is perceived as being a success and also sort of how people in hollywood sort of rank their preference in terms of i think maybe even up to like who they would work with and it along the way beyond the ranking i think it's really interesting to see how people who this is their business view how it's going for all of these streamers so i have a list of seven i picked out some of the uh what i thought were the key kind of opinions uh levied by these insiders they were all unnamed and they're people that work somewhere in hollywood or maybe in war street but in the hollywood kind of sphere of war street you know maybe their investment or something right and the and the the opinions varied i thought like the people who are outside of

hollywood but are more like money people had sort of different opinions than the people who are inside and i think that's instructive but it was it was very interesting for that yeah it is so uh in number seven which is the bottom is peacock needs more money for content marketing is well liked by talent and also has poor international offerings yeah um it's funny that we're recording this uh now we're we're a week and a half away from the olympics peacock was meant to launch with the olympics as its launch strategy and the olympics got delayed a year. Mm-hmm. So, and the story mentions this. It's like, the Olympics might get people into Peacock that are not there now. Yeah.

But, yeah, there's this feeling like, one of the people said that they've got a Mike Schur show and a Tina Fey show, and it still doesn't seem to be making much of an impact. Mm-hmm. And those shows are pretty good, by the way. Rutherford Falls and Girls 5 Ever are actually pretty good. Like, there's good content, and AP Bio is on there, which is a Peacock original now, which is a show I really like. I think Peacock's actually got some interesting content going on.

But like they said, it sort of feels like there's not a lot there in terms of the original content, and the marketing hasn't been there. I imagine the Olympics is going to see their enormous Peacock marketing push. NBC is also experimenting they they took the giants phillies baseball series a few weeks ago and they moved that off of the cable channels and onto peacock and it was very much a sort of let's see if we can encourage people to try peacock out kind of situation so And they also have their partnership with the WWE as well. Right. And there's a lot of soccer, especially the English Premier League. Some of that's on NBC's broadcast channels and cable channels, but a lot of that stuff

is on Peacock now. They moved it from their other kind of streaming that they were doing. Well Liked by Talent is an interesting note because I think that's the idea here that NBCUniversal is actually really well known and has good relationships with talent. That's not the issue, right? They're not a bad group to do business with, but your concern is that you're going to make a show for Peacock and then it's going to fall off the map when you do that. Is anybody talking about Rutherford Falls? Is anybody talking about Girls 5 Eva? And the answer is, I don't know, a little bit.

Those are fun shows, but they're on Peacock and maybe somebody will discover them at some point. But it's early days yet, I guess, for Peacock. But this is brutal. Like, there's some encouraging talk here, but I mean, it's seven of seven. That's rough. It's pretty rough.

Hulu. I love this comment. Why does Disney need two streaming services? Which is a very good point. Several people basically said, I don't see why this needs to exist and why it isn't going to end up being the star tab on Disney Plus. Or maybe in the US, they'll actually call it the Hulu tab. But for those people who don't know, there is a service that Disney owns in the rest of the world called Star

that what Disney is doing is it's got more adult content on it. It's not just the Disney branded stuff. And they've created this Star tab essentially inside the Disney Plus app. And that's where that other stuff lives. But it's not everything that's on Hulu though. No, because Hulu was originated as a way for legacy broadcasters to put stuff on streaming and they all kind of went in on it together and that's breaking up. But what's going to be left is some catalog content, but also all of this kind of original material that isn't a great fit for the Disney brand. And it feels like ultimately, I think I agree with the sentiment in this article,

like ultimately it doesn't make sense for Hulu to exist and that it's probably gonna just fade into a tab in Disney Plus. Even if the app persists, that they're gonna really kind of focus it on like one app that has all this content in it in one place. There's a comment in there about FX on Hulu, which is the idea that they're taking John Landgraf,

who's the development executive who powers the FX and FXX cable channels. And he's been developing shows that are originals on Hulu. And somebody in the article basically says they got to give it up, which I thought was funny. I was like, well, why?

But yeah, there is a kind of question of what's the coherent strategy here for Disney, especially given that they have disney plus um and you you've tucked this content into disney plus under a you know adult tab basically like not just not for we say adults and people like oh adults it's like not for kids right it's got edgier stuff that's not for kids. Why wouldn't you just do that in the US? So what I read from Hulu, the comment about Hulu was really like, why does this exist, right?

It's more existential questions about Hulu. Number five is Apple TV+, which I think is probably higher than I would have expected. But reading the comments made me think that it should be higher than five. Yeah, I think the comments are very much in line with you, which is people really are actually thinking Apple TV Plus is doing better than they thought. But that wasn't enough for it. Also, the article's structure and the point totals that it,

because he kind of did this on, on a point system. And so you ended up with, um, like certain categories were like catalog and there isn't any. Yeah. Um, so it, it,

Apple TV didn't score as well, but they did. The comments were pretty positive in the sense of like, this is promising. And in fact, one person said they're aiming to be the HBO of streaming video on demand, which we've talked about for a few years now, that that seems to be absolutely Apple strategy is high quality originals.

That's what the whole promise is. It's high quality originals. And the people quoted in the article are like, they got the money. They are spending the money well. They're making good decisions. They're doing better than we thought. But there needs to be more. Like they need more breakthroughs.

They need more Ted Lasso's. They need more of that kind of thing to break through. But yeah, pretty positive stuff about Apple TV+. I feel like what they want Apple to do, and I think it's what we would ask them to do too, is to basically do what Disney's doing, where it's like you have hit show after hit show, and as soon as one ends, another one starts. You don't have to have 20 shows going on at once, but you have to have something happening all the time that makes people stay subscribed and they do have loads of content that's coming like not low but they have they have content rolling out all the time but it isn't all of that top tier quality of say the morning show um for all mankind ted lasso i would say mythic quest in that one but maybe it's not as popular

so a studio exec said the arrow's going up and says i was dubious but they're one massive hit away from becoming real which i think i think that's about right like ted lasso was a breakthrough but like what's the next step what's the thing that pushes them over the edge and they haven't quite got there yet but they could get there i guess they're hoping for foundation right apple right and right and a bunch of people are saying look they've got the money they're hoping for foundation, right, Apple? Right. And a bunch of people are saying, look, they've got the money. They're spending it. They're fulfilling their side of the bargain. One PR exec said they need more, but I have to think they will get many, many chances, right?

The idea is Apple has so much money that if they keep trying and keep pushing here, they will eventually get the thing that they're seeking. It is funny that they talked to two Wall Street analysts, one of whom said, this product is in need of a reason to exist. And the other one said, dollar for dollar, it's the most impressive content slate since they launched. And that's the one who said they're trying to be the HBO of streaming video on demand. And so Wall Street analysts are split. And actually, I think I could agree with both of those statements because on one level,

it's sort of like this product doesn't need to exist, but Apple's decided they're going to do it and they're doing a pretty good job. So yeah, I mean. Maybe that person thought they were talking about the Apple TV box, you know? I don't know. Could be. I don't like the remote, said Wall Street analyst. Number four is Amazon Prime Video.

And like the comments of this one is what made, was surprising to me because it seemed like they were much more negative about Prime Video. That Amazon executives are a pain to deal with, which we could have guessed from that book, right? We were talking about a few weeks ago. But apparently when they make a decision, they go all in on it.

And that's what people respect about them. Their promotional efforts are bad. Like they have stuff, they have like, I think they were referencing like an oscar-winning director working on a show um i think it was a director i don't remember after mayor but they had oscar winners working on a show and nobody knew anything about it oh this is the this is barry jenkins's show yeah this is this is something that i've heard before and when i was doing tv talk machine uh with tim goodman we talked about this a lot, that a lot of people in Hollywood, the frustration they have with streaming video

is that is in promotion and is making that ripple where people are talking about it. And if you, and this is one of the knocks on Netflix too, is that there's so much on Netflix that you produce it and does anyone know? And this set about Amazon Prime Video is perfect, which is like Oscar winner, Barry Jenkins just did a show for them.

And it was like a tree falling in the forest with no one to witness. Like that is a challenge with all of these services. It's the advantage Apple has in not having too many originals is that they can really put their promotion behind them. But the volume play may work. It works for Netflix in a lot of

ways, but it doesn't make friends in Hollywood if you're seen as being kind of like just filling in what is extruded out of the Netflix pipe this week, right? They want to feel special. And I would argue that there's value in, like, if you're going to spend all this money making this thing, you want to promote it so that people know it exists and they see it. And you have the show from an Oscar winner and nobody even knows that it exists that's not great they referred to amazon though as a sleeping giant like they have all this money and they have stuff in the wings right like that's the thing is they haven't spent a lot of money yet or or maybe more truthful is they are spending that money rapidly now but we haven't seen all of it yet yes but it seems like the like lord of the rings is an example of this right like there

they have a lot of power so i i think this is one of those cases where amazon ranks highly more for its potential because of the power of amazon than anything else because it does sort of feel like its current state is kind of like its great advantage is that Netflix did all the hard work to establish this category. And then Amazon just kind of rolled into it. And that was a lot less effort, but that they, they have for, for a company this powerful, they ought to be doing more. And I think that's about right. Like I watched some stuff on prime video, but very very rarely like it is one of my least watched streaming services and and it shouldn't be that way like it shouldn't be that way my my thing

about them is it's almost impossible to browse the app it's so bad yeah the app is so hard to deal with because they're also trying to sell you stuff. And they're trying to sell you stuff, yeah, which I think is a mistake. I feel like they need to do the Apple TV thing and have an originals, a real originals interface that is totally separate from the sales interface. But instead, they kind of intermingle them. I think they have something called included with Prime, maybe. But it's just a mesh. I don't like the app. It's just not very helpful.

And I search and I find things that are, oh, they do have this. Oh, no, they don't. They want to sell this to me. Exactly mesh i don't like that this is not very helpful well and i search and i find things that are oh they do have this oh no they don't they want to sell this exactly i don't want to buy it i just want to stream it that's frustrating number three is hbo max uh the brand has been tainted but it's still an important one especially to creators hbo is important um they have great content with some more on the way but hbo max itself needs some awards for that kind of like extra acclaim and it's believed they will get them so this is interesting because for all of the the tumult around hbo and hbo max and at&t and all of that the truth is hbo is still executing with high quality content and h Max is finding its way, right?

They quote an agent as saying, you know, the Flight Attendant and Hax are two HBO Max originals that really could have been on HBO and have done a good job of finding a niche. Hax is great. And then Mare of Easttown, which is on HBO proper, uh, also really good. They're all going to clean up at the Emmys. Um, so like creatively, I think the feeling is that HBO is actually executing pretty well. Um, the challenge is that HBO Max is also about volume as the studio exec says, um, which means just by the nature of not being entirely about quality, but also being about volume, it makes it, as the exec says, not as niche, not as cool. And that is, that's their challenge, right? Is how do you build an HBO Max brand that is more expansive and yet still has some of the cachet of, um, of HBO and it's a different version of Amazon's problem, right? Which is how do you do, uh, this prestige high quality original thing and also have kind of your volume business.

And can you bring those together? Can you separate them? How does that work? But, um, but yes, for a service that's been kicked around a lot, uh, here it is at number three with fairly positive words from the people involved. I think that maybe shows you how Hollywood views HBO still. I see this as two things. One, they probably do have, outside of Disney, maybe the best just in quality of catalog. Like the catalog's so good because HBO's stuff is so good. Plus they brought in some extras like Friends or whatever, right? They have a great catalog. And I think at the moment they're just riding on that name,

but they've got to back that up, right? They're riding on that HBO name in the industry. The advantage that they've got is that they do have this content generation engine that is HBO that has been generating a lot of great content and they've been handed more money to generate more of it and put it on the streaming service. And so they've got a lot of potential, right? I think that that's maybe what the Wall Street analyst who's quoted in this article is saying, which is they've got a lot of potential because they've got this great library and they've got the content machine. They just need to spend the money to generate more of that stuff, but that they have a lot of potential here, despite all of the hiccups that have gone into launching HBO Max. Number two is Disney+. They've had an unparalleled success rate since

launch with the content that they've been producing. They understand scale and marketing better than anybody else. They have realized that they need more content, and they're executing on that. And they were very smart to not drop four series at once the netflix model because they dominate weekly conversation online and again this is from the perspective of people in the biz and not necessarily consumers but i think that that i agree with that statement about they're smart to not drop things yes in a in a in a binge but instead do it weekly but you can see that especially from hollywood's perspective having the conversation be dominated like it matters it goes back to that that statement about nobody talking about

the amazon release like having people talk i think it matters to everyone i think it's a great way to do marketing but if you're in the business it really matters that every week people are talking about whatever show got dropped on Disney Plus. You know, they say bet against Star Wars and Marvel at your own risk. We've talked about this and I think it is important. Like franchises really help. Like if you don't have a franchise, it's hard. And Disney owns a lot of the big franchises.

And this is this is kind of the challenge that they've got. franchises and this is this is kind of the challenge that they've got um the i thought that these positive statements were also really interesting because just as we said apple seemed like it is is a more low rated than it should be based on the tenor of the comments i think that's the equivalent of an up arrow it's kind of like on its way up disney plus is ranked number two but i would say is rated number one like it feels very much like the only reason disney plus isn't number one is that they haven't been out as long as netflix yep 100 they just don't have as big enough catalog they have a lot of stuff right but they don't have i think what disney plus is for me is really missing is a lot of TV shows. There are a lot of movies, but they don't have a lot of TV shows. Obviously, that is what they are 100% focusing on now, it feels like, right?

Rightly so. They're doing a great job. We spoke about it before. There's been varying quality of the stuff that they've released, but it's all been good to great. They haven't released something bad yet. I appreciated that the Wall Street analyst who said they have quickly realized they need more content and that the other analyst said, watch out. Amazing success with a limited amount of content. And so the idea here is they are like we complained about early on about how Disney Plus seemed to be leaning way too heavily on their library and not on their originals. But I think that's a function of them wanting to get out there as quickly as possible. And the best way to do that was with the Disney Vault.

And so they launched a service that was mostly catalog just because it got them out there fast. But that the perception in Hollywood is now they understand the game they need to play. They need to play as original material and they're going to it, and they're already starting to execute on it. And once they get that up, that machine running at full blast, they will be hard to compete with. And I think that's true. I think that is absolutely true.

And then the last one, of course, is Netflix, referred to as the Kleenex of TV. Oh, talk about damning with your praise. It's like they're ubiquitous, which is great, except once you're number one and you're ubiquitous, you're also kind of boring. I'll echo that with Netflix in the industry is not considered sexy anymore.

They're like Walmart. Yeah, and the idea that unless you're the big show that Netflix is choosing to promote, nobody knows you're there. And again, the idea that unless you're the big show that netflix is choosing to promote nobody knows you're there and again if you're viewing this from the perspective of i want to make deals i want to sell my show um because you're in the business there's this feeling that like unless you can make an a-list deal with netflix they're kind of like your first choice and your last choice, if that makes sense. Like first is, can I be A-list at Netflix? And like, if I can't be, maybe I want to be somebody

else's A-list before I go back to just being in the pipe, right? In that extrusion of content, in the weekly extrusion. Because like it's money and you're on Netflix and that's good. And maybe some good will come of it. But you probably would rather be a heavily promoted show on HBO Max or Apple TV Plus or Peacock even than being a not promoted show that gets dumped on a Friday by Netflix. And they seem to cancel quite a lot of stuff that otherwise I think should work. Like a good example of this for me is Next in Fashion, which was hosted by Alexa Chung and Tan France. They did one season of it. It was like a fashion show

competition thing, kind of like a Project Runway type deal. And it had one season and they cancelled it. And it's kind of like, if you like, Queer Eye is one of your biggest shows. You should be able to make anything with any of the Queer Eye hosts work. But it seemed like they weren't really marketing it.

And I feel like I've seen a lot of people that make Netflix shows talk about, like, please watch it and share it with your friends, right? They're doing their own marketing because they're afraid that they're going to completely missed and that's the danger we like i like next in fashion it was really a very good reality like reality competition show and netflix knows like within a few weeks netflix has made its it's canceling shows after they're like on for two weeks because it it you know they don't even get a chance to find an audience because they know that basically if you aren't found immediately you'll never be found and yet if you don't get promoted enough uh it's it's a real conundrum because there is a reality producer quoted in this story who basically says this is

where you want to go because the budgets are great they're easy to work with and everybody even your grandparents know what netflix is the producer says and i i think that especially for reality where you want to have kind of a broad appeal and you're used to getting bad budgets, that Netflix would be a good place to go. I think it is a real live by the sword, die by the sword kind of situation though, where it's good money and everybody knows what Netflix is, but also you may realize that you get one shot at it or maybe you get two seasons and then you're gone. And it's very unlikely that you're going to be the bell of the ball but you will get your money and make your show and be on netflix forever and that's something apparently as well they've had some

executive changes and are losing some love in the industry after these that the new executives uh are more budget conscious or like tougher to work with right that they they had a uh had a programming who they who they said lost a lot of luster and then her successor came in trying to cut prices and that would be you know that's a frustration to agents and this agent says also i don't know why you wouldn't want shows to last longer than three seasons there's some bafflement there because right's another Hollywood thing, right? Which is if you cancel these shows that are successful after three years, like so many people in Hollywood make all their money from a hit show going a long time. And that's when the money's made, like when you're on like season seven.

Right. Because you've got the leverage. And Netflix seems to be of the opinion that for most of their shows is like, nope, we don't want that. We just want more, more one, two, three season shows and then out because then the product is Netflix and not your show. And then Netflix has all the leverage. So I think that's interesting. We should mention Paramount Plus and Discovery Plus aren't on this list, not because they

finished eighth and ninth, but because they decided any platform that hadn't been up for a year, and since Paramount Plus is technically new because it is more than CBS All Access was, they didn't get on this list. But maybe Joe will do this list again next year, and that would be fun. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Privacy.com. Like me, I'm sure you've been there. You've been online. Maybe you've been on social media. You find a product that looks interesting to you. You go to the product page and you want to buy it.

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Makes it a no-brainer. So go to privacy.com slash upgrade and sign up for an account today. New customers automatically get $5 to spend on your first purchase. Go to privacy.com slash upgrade and sign up now. Our thanks to Privacy for the support of this show and RelayFM. All right, so Jason, finally, he's on holiday right now. I've got him off the show, mostly. So he thinks the show's over, but it isn't. I've always been super jealous of the episodes that Jason does when I'm away, because he brings in wonderful guests. So that's

what I'm going to do for the rest of the episode. Later on in the episode, I'm going to be joined by John Syracuse. We're going to try and understand exactly what John's perfect Mac would be what I'm going to do for the rest of the episode. Later on in the episode, I'm going to be joined by John Syracuse. We're going to try and understand exactly what John's perfect Mac would be. I'm also going to be joined by Merlin Mann. We're going to check in with Merlin to see what hardware and software products are exciting him right now. I'm having an extravaganza of an episode. But before we do all that, as all Upgradians know, you've got to start with a little warm-up. So we're going to do the first ever hashtag MikeTalk segment.

And to help me out, please welcome my friend and podcaster jay miller to upgrade hi jay hi mike happy to be here so what have you got for me if you could redesign any tech accessory what would it be and what would you do with it i know exactly what this is. I want an Apple Watch that isn't a watch. So I've been wearing my Apple Watch again recently because I'm tracking some fitness stuff, but I kind of don't want any of the other features. And I also want to wear the watches that I like the look of more. So I want basically like just a band, like pure fitness tracking. That that's all I want I want all of the sensors that they currently have plus more of them and it can interface with my iPhone if I need to get any information from it like I was thinking they could basically just make some nice like

bracelets that just look like the Apple Watch bands but just go all the way around you know like there's just no watch in the middle of it. And like maybe there could be some way to put a time on it, like they could have some LEDs that shine through the band if you really wanted that. But you could just turn it off. Like all I want is all of the really great like the I always find the step count is more accurate because I'm always wearing the watch like where sometimes I'll leave my phone down. more accurate because I'm always wearing the watch, like where sometimes I'll leave my phone down. The exercise stuff, like I enjoy all of the activity, right? Like the fill in the rings and stuff like that. But I don't always want to wear my Apple Watch every day because I have other watches that I like more. So if I was given the power, I would redesign this product, maybe make

another one. Yeah, let's not kill the apple watch but just a pure like apple fitness band that's what i want you mentioned filling in the rings i i actually had the same idea but instead of a band it would be just a ring kind of similar to those like silicon rings and and some people have tried this before yeah they're also those like there's a sleep tracking one right like there is like a there is a product that does this kind of stuff. Yeah, so I think Apple could do it. They could make a thicker ring, a thinner ring, something that's discreet.

But I'm also with you. If you can't do a ring, just give me a band. I don't mind. I would love a band. I actually have a Series Zero watch that I stopped wearing when the Series 2 came out, and I just never got a new one. So I'm definitely on board with you there. Jay, thank you so much for that question. I really loved it. It's nice to get questions

as soon as you start podcasts. What a novel idea. Maybe hashtag mic talk should become a more regular thing. Maybe it should. Hey, Jay, you've got something cool coming to RelayFM pretty soon, right? Do you want to tell our listeners about it before we let you go? Absolutely. So for those that do know of me, I've been doing productivity stuff for years now. Never professionally, always as a fan. And recently, I got with my great friend and unicorn of the internet, Kathy Campbell, and we said, Hey, we should do a productivity podcast that doesn't focus on the apps, but focuses on the people and provides the connection between what we'd hope to get done and what ultimately gets done. So I'm happy to announce that coming very, very soon, like this

same week, we're going to be releasing our podcast, Conduit, which is full of puns, full of encouragement, full of excitement, and hopefully full of a lot of connections. So you can go and check it out for yourself right now. You go to relay.fm slash conduit and you can subscribe. Go check it out and support this new show that we've got coming here on RelayFM. Jay, thanks so much, man. Absolutely, Mike. Anytime. This episode is brought to you by Calm. Business leaders know that healthy, happy employees create successful companies no matter what industry. And Calm for Business can help your employees be their best selves at work. At Calm, they want to help you kickstart your mental well-being initiatives. Empowering employees

to stress less, rest better, and build resilience should be a year-round priority. And with Calm for Business, companies can partner with the number one mental fitness app to provide support and tools for their employees. Today, I'm having a pretty busy, stressful day. These are the exact kinds of days where I know how helpful it can be to take a minute and relax so I can better focus on the work I have left to do. And Calm has a ton of great options, whether you're looking for something to help you relax, to center yourself, you know, like a guided meditation, or something to help you sleep better after a long day. There really is something for everyone to try.

I would think that taking these moments for yourself is really important, and Calm makes that incredibly accessible to do. Calm has a library of content specifically designed to help work teams stress less, sleep better, and build mental resilience. This includes lo-fi music playlists, which I think is awesome for working to, quick breathing breaks, guided meditations, and hundreds of soothing sleep stories to feel relaxed and more prepared for whatever comes your way. They even have programs tailored for mental health and productivity, like their Mindfulness at Work series. Millions of employees at over 600 companies like Lincoln, Iterable, and Universal Studios use Calm for business, and Calm is available globally.

Right now, Calm is offering a free well-being ebook for HR and benefit leaders, and one month free after you attend a free demo when you go to calm.com upgrade. That's right, a free well-being ebook and one month for free after attending a free demo when you go to calm.com upgrade. Get started today at calm.com upgrade. Go there now. Our thanks to Calm for their support of this show and RelayFM. John Syracuse, welcome back to Upgrade. Thank you for having me.

This is a treat for me to have you. I am with Jason out of the picture this week. I am running. That makes it sound like you had him murdered. Like I don't want to say. Jason out of the picture. He's gone. So I'm running through all of the things that I want to do.

And I was looking back through the times that Jason's had you on most recently when I've been away. Because obviously we had like a year, more than a year, where you haven't been on the show with Jason because I've been around every single week. So I was looking through the show notes of those previous episodes and they all for the last like three years prior had all had some reference to our Macs. It was like first of like, what could it be like to have an iPhone processor and an iMac?

And then like, that was like in the description of the first one. And it's like for the next two, our Macs, oh, maybe they're coming because obviously we thought and knew they were coming for a long time. So now that they're here, now that we know what they are,

now that we have, I think, a much greater idea of what the future of the Mac can be. So I wanted to know what is the perfect Mac for John Syracuse as of 2021? Yeah, I hate making car analogies with computers, but I always talk about cars in my other podcast, so it just tends to happen. And I think it's tempting to,

when considering something like this, to look at the computers I've had in the past, kind of like you'd look at the cars that you've bought in the past and say, what kind of vehicle would appeal to this person? Well, let's see. It seems like they've owned a series of these things, so we should make another one like it. So if you look at the Mac that you've bought in the past and say, what kind of vehicle would appeal to this person? Well, let's see. It seems like they've owned a series of these things, so we should make another one like it. So if you look at the Macs I've owned or the ones that I really liked, these

big tower Macs that I've had, you know, basically since the blue and white G3 when I started buying Apple Towers, like I couldn't afford a 9500 or an 840 AV or a Quadra 700 tilted on its side. So the blue and white G3 was my first tower Mac, and I've pretty much stuck with them since then. So you would think it's like, oh, with this computer of your dreams, what would it look like? It's going to be kind of like the one I'm sitting next to now, some big honking tower with lots of stuff in it.

But I think that's probably a mistake. And, you know, what you mentioned about the ARM chips and the new iMac built around the arm uh chips there is a bunch of new possibilities and you have to consider that what I've purchased in the past has mostly been based on what I've been offered not necessarily the question you're posing which is like if you you know if you had to make your ideal computer what would it be like now there is the angle speaking of cars of lot of people, like they keep buying big trucks in their heart of hearts. And very often they will tell you outright if they're self-aware enough, they just want a big

truck. Like the bigness is the feature, right? Do you need to carry a lot of stuff? Do you need it to be super high? I just like big trucks because they make me happy because they're big and I want a big Tonka truck to ride around and whatever. whatever right but i don't think that's the case with me like i don't i'm not wedded to a huge computer that you could you know live inside right you can put seven mac minis inside the thing and there's tons of stuff inside it i'm not wedded to that i don't need it in the way a lot of people need really big trucks that are very high off the ground i just that part doesn't appeal to me it's always been for me about the benefits that that i'm getting and it just so happens for the past several generations to get those benefits apple has been closest to providing them in these giant tower cases so and i don't know have you have you ever had one of the big tower max you've

mostly been i never i've never had a tower mac no i've obviously had and have pc towers but my max have always been either a laptop or an iMac yeah you got the big gaming pc now i guess but again i feel like that you know if you could have gotten all the same stuff that you have in your gaming pc in a slimmer quieter case would you have done it no because it was part of the fun oh that's right it was like a little project yeah all your rgbs and silliness anyway yeah that's that's another you know anyway so i'm i'm not particularly into that aspect of it so when thinking of my ideal computer, I have to think about what benefits am I trying to get? Why do I keep buying these tower computers?

What are they giving me that a Mac Mini or an iMac or whatever wouldn't? And you could probably divide that into two things, like the benefits that you get when you buy it and then the benefits that you get over the course of ownership because I tend to own my computers for a while. I don't like the turmoil of replacing my system with a new one. I just want to get a thing that I really like and keep it. I'm the same way with cars. Benefits of time of purchase.

The easy ones to start with are capacity. And you might think this is leading you down the road of a tower computer again. Ah, capacity. You've got to have all that room. But let's list some of the things that I'm interested in the capacity of you've got ram obviously uh storage uh the number of ports how much cooling you can put through the thing um lots of apple's computers are very limited in capacity on those fronts particularly m1s where so far uh you know or the arm max so far uh 16 gigs of ram has been your limit which is

pretty tight and you know we assume the new ones will have higher limit i use the macbook pro most of the time the one and i have 16 gigabytes of ram in my macbook pro and i keep getting an error message to tell me i'm running out of system memory it suddenly started happening in the last week i don't know why and i keep getting a like a little box and it's showing me all the apps it's like which ones do you want to force quit and it's like hang on a minute whoa what is this i've never seen this before on a mac yeah that that sounds like something is going wrong but still 16 gigs is not not a lot um and then there's also the flexibility of a desktop by which i mean desktop computers like as opposed to a laptop right uh you know i

didn't say this up front but it should go without saying that i'm talking about a desktop computer i don't want to i wanted to check this because i wondered if we were going for a big reveal here but i think what you're saying is not necessarily that you don't want a desktop so it doesn't need to be the biggest that is possible but desktop is your desired perfect format right yeah because like well i just talked about capacity and you could say well you know as we'll get to in a little bit you want a lot of capacity but that could be in a smaller thing right it could be a laptop or it could be you know in a mac mini size thing or whatever but the flexibility you get from a desktop you know i don't need the portability so what am i getting for the fact that

i have to plug it into the wall and i can't carry it anymore you get flexibility obviously in having an external monitor i mean you could say you could use it with a mac mini but like you're separating the monitor from the computer so you can you know change them independently so let's say for instance somehow you'd found yourself buying a horrendously expensive apple monitor you'd hope that you could use that monitor for several Macs to sort of spread the cost over the next decade to make you feel better about this purchase. And then you could change out the Mac that's behind it, right? Right now I've got the, you know, 2019 Mac Pro connected to this Pro Display XDR. I fully expect that Mac Pro to disappear and be

replaced with an ARM Mac, and I'm not going to change the monitor if I can at all help it, right? So that's flexibility internal storage is another piece of flexibility when you have something portable they tend not to give you lots of places inside the thing to add storage you get whatever storage you get but it's not like you can add more stuff in there whereas a desktop computer that doesn't have to go anywhere or be carried you can in theory make room inside the actual thing for new storage now the mac mini doesn't currently offer that it could you can imagine a mac mini especially an arm one if you look inside the arm ones like there's a lot of

empty space in there you can imagine that mac mini with like a m.2 slot for another ssd or something right there's room inside a desktop computer to add more storage. Obviously in a tower, you have way more room to add more storage. You know, all sorts of drives you can fit in there. That's a flexibility you don't get from a laptop. And then the final benefit that I'm looking for at the time of purchase is this kind of under the realm of capacity,

but it deserves its own item, which is video capacity in terms of like, you know, video card performance, GPU. And that's important because Apple tends not, has never historically really given, cared too much about GPU power on anything but the highest end computer. And GPUs are such an important part of lots of different big markets, obviously gaming, but even video and even some computational things and gpus

constantly advance and get better and better and if you're stuck with whatever gpu the thing came with that's not great but even if even if you're setting that aside because we're talking about benefits on day one anytime you've ever looked at apple's line of computers and said well i want a quote-unquote good gpu you always had to pick the most expensive one, it was literally your only choice that had like a slot where you could put a real GPU in there. You know, again, historically, Apple has not really played in the high end GPU space, they haven't offered their own GPUs, they always been buying them from either NVIDIA, or AMD, sticking them inside their computers. And those companies are fiercely competitive,

and are constantly making better and better GPUs. and if you wanted a decent one at the time of purchase your only choice was to get the usually one and only computer that apple would sell that you could stick a real gpu from you know amd or back in the old days nvidia inside there i care about it mostly for gaming um but i would just feel better having a big gpu that drive a big screen, let's say, because, you know, the number of GPUs that can drive a 6K monitor over that single cable is small, to have multiple displays if you're into that, or even just for computational stuff. So I'm looking for those benefits. And historically, they've been in a giant tower computer.

And then over the course of ownership, say years later, what else do you care about? And this is the upgradability thing, right? What if I get all those benefits in day one, but if I'm going to keep this computer for many years, don't I want to be able to swap things out of it? Wouldn't I want like a socketed GPU and all my RAM to be in sockets and, you know, the SSD not to be soldered to the motherboard and, you know, all this other stuff that I want to swap in and out? I don't really relish upgrading. It's just a means to an end. And so when I look at the things that I just listed, you know, storage ports, GPU, RAM, all that stuff, like I don't expect to be able to upgrade the ports, right?

That usually you can. I mean, I could I could put a PCI card and put you more USB ports or whatever. And storage, that's something you probably want to upgrade but if you have a certain number of storage slots storage just tends to get bigger over time anyway so you can just take out the existing storage and put a new one in the same slot you know exactly yeah it's not really something you have to think about in the same way right like it's not like oh the only way i can get more storage is to physically double the amount of disks i have it doesn't you don't have to do that you can just get a bigger disk if you just as long as you have like literally just one storage place where you can remove a thing you know take a thing and you know that over the course of that life of that computer you'll be able to take out whatever's in there now and put in another thing that just holds more stuff because that's just the way storage tends to go ram is an interesting one because i feel like i don't necessarily need

upgradable ram if i'm given sufficient capacity to begin with uh you know there's always thing if you want to buy a computer for not too much money and you get like a small amount of ram and you upgrade it down the line but in theory i can just buy the computer on day one with enough ram that i think it will last for 10 years and have it be soldered to the motherboard or you know whatever it's stuck on the system on a chip and m1 parlance or whatever now the current crop m1s don't offer anything close to that amount as you're finding out but this this mac Pro I got with 96 gigs of RAM, I don't think I'm ever going to upgrade the RAM on this Mac Pro unless I use it for like 15 years. Because I think that 96 gig is going to hold me

for my usage until I eventually replace the computer. So I don't need that to be upgradable. Yeah, I feel like that's probably a pretty good amount. I think you're probably okay. I mean, it depends on what you're doing. Like if you're doing some kind of scientific computing, you need these huge data sets and memory. Like there's a reason the computer holds 1.5 terabytes. Yeah, but we know you're probably okay i mean it depends on what you're doing like if you're doing some kind of scientific computing you need these huge data sets and memory like there's a reason yeah but we know you're not doing that like you know yeah there there are always reasons but like i think for you 96 gigabytes of ram is probably as you say would be good for the 10

years if you were to keep that computer for 10 years right and and you know it is upgradable and i could add more um and it would have cost less if i had bought less and added more over time and my other tower computers i have purchased them with less ram and added more ram over time but i feel like both ram and storage like the upgradability is needs are pretty limited i'd be fine with if especially if it was super fast ram i would be fine if that was like on the system on a chip neck you know like the m1 style as long as there was enough of it. So I feel like, okay, I'm all set with that. And as long as there's something replaceable to storage, I'd be okay. GPUs, on the other hand, GPUs change a lot. Every year, there's better and better GPUs. It's not, it's very predictable. You know, next year, the GPUs are going to be better than this year. And then three, four or five years, the GPUs are going to

be worlds better. So I really feel like thepu has to be upgradable for longevity somehow or at least maybe there's a gpu that you can't upgrade but like the storage there's a place where you can stick another gpu right that is upgradable so something some kind of interchangeable gpu because it's very difficult to buy a machine up front and have a gpu that's going to last you in five years, right? Because eventually, you know, if you buy the best GPU you can, five years later, there's some game that's going to be chugging on that GPU, which is kind of disappointing. It feels like of those things, you know, excluding the idea of moving from x86 to ARM, of those elements, CPU, GPU, RAM, it feels like there's still the most amount of movement occurring in GPUs on a you know year

over year or multiple year over year basis as you say right like games continue to get more demanding and that is a casual or like a regular use case where most people's regular use cases of what is taxing a cpu is not is not continuing to grow at that same kind of level right like the cpu improvements can typically be a bit more incremental and smaller over a longer period of time it feels like than gpu yeah because the gpus obviously are working on a problem that is you know nearly infinite parallelism like you know if you could just give me more things to crunch pixels there's always more pixels for you to crunch. And you can usually do most of them in parallel, right?

Whereas with the CPU, it's working on algorithms that have inherent data dependencies. There's a limited amount of parallelism that you can extract from workloads of doing actual sort of computation and conditional logic, right? right whereas you know if you give me however many pixels are on a 6k display and say i just need you to you know crunch through those and do 3d calculations and now add on top of that the the sort of not going to say fake but the uh the ray tracing like functionality that they're adding to game engines like give give me more execution units give me me more, you know, flops on my GPU, and game developers will use them. And it's easier to do. Not that it's easy, but it's easier

because as soon as you can fit that number of execution units into the silicon chips within the cooling envelope, they just print more of them. They just, you know, how many execution units do you have, right? And kind of similar with RAM, how much VRAM, or depending on how the RAM works or whatever, right? So it's quote-unquote easy to keep making a the ram works or whatever right so it's it's quote-unquote easy to keep making a bigger and bigger gpu and so that's what happens every year

they just keep making bigger and bigger ones as as much as the manufacturing technology of silicon chips allows them to do that without starting a fire inside your computer and bigger and bigger is right like the new series you know like the new nvidia and amd cars they are physically massive like they are massive people are having to buy completely new cases for their computers because they just don't fit like they are huge and they got tons of fans on them they're mad they are massive i mean it's kind of like farming or solar panels it's like if you give me more fields i'll just plant more wheat right and so it's like how much how much field can you give me? That's the only limit on the capacity of wheat, right? Or how much acreage do you give me to put solar panels, I can make more electricity, if you give me more land to put more solar panels on.

That's the only limiting factor. And so the limiting factor for GPU is how much electricity and power and heat, and how much space because if you if you said you have, you know, a thousand times the power budget and, you know, obviously a thousand times the cost and a thousand times the space, I can give you a thousand times the GPU. Like it's, again, it's an embarrassingly parallel problem. There's always more work to be crunched through. So obviously Apple and, you know,

and card makers in general try to constrain themselves to reasonable size tower computers. But as you noted, and card makers in general, try to constrain themselves to reasonable-sized tower computers. But as you noted, this generation, they're really pushing up against, well, even in a large tower computer, can we get a few more millimeters here and there? Like, you know, what is it?

The 3090 is just sort of comically large, and as you noted, it just doesn't fit in a lot of cases that people bought those cases and think, this will fit any GPU that we need. And this happens periodically. Like when GPUs went from single slot to double slot to just being like, look, half your case is going to be taken up with the GPU and it's cooling solution. Right. Or even even Apple with the MPX modules.

Right. Which take, I don't know, like triple height, double height, quad height, whatever. They have these huge heat sinks because they don't have fans, which I love. But yeah, so something something upgradable in GPU is really important. So I feel like GPUs, some kind of bay for internal storage, and then I don't expect to be able to upgrade my CPU, even though that's been a thing in the past. And RAM, if I can buy enough of it up front,

I'm fine with that. And then I feel like the final aspect of this thing that I'm describing here is the intangible one, the equivalent of i just want a big truck which is aesthetics and build quality which we mostly take for granted with apple stuff especially the high-end stuff you assume it's going to be nice sturdy quiet ish right no particularly delicate parts you'd hope the ports are inconvenient places which we can't take for granted with Apple, unfortunately, right? But for the big tower computers, for example,

maybe some ports on the front or the top so you don't have to reach around the back for all of them. You want it to look nice on the inside and out, which I appreciate. It's just, again, it's the big truck thing. There's no reason that I care that the inside of my computer looks nice, but it does make me happy. If you've seen the inside of any of the Apple's tower computers,

again, starting with the blue and white G3, where you opened it up and you saw the parts laid out, that was cool and convenient. And the current 2019 Mac Pro makes the blue and white G3 look like it was slapped together by a hobbyist. Like this thing is a work of art inside. There's no visible wires anywhere. There are no fans in any of the cards it's beautiful silent everything is color matched and just precision machined it's it's an

amazing work of art and no this doesn't actually make the computer quote-unquote better at doing any of its stuff but it makes me happy and if i'm gonna be spending this much money on something kind of like buying a nice car you wouldn't buy a nice car and say well it's it's got a quiet ride and it's very fast and it's comfortable to ride in but i hate how it looks nobody spends 100 grand on a fancy car that they hate the looks of similarly i feel like when you're unless you're doing it for like work and you need it for your quote-unquote job right no one buys a high-end computer like a sort of hobbyist high-end computer where you don't actually need it to do anything you just want it because

it's cool you don't buy that computer if you hate how it looks and i feel like i wouldn't buy a computer that fit all my criteria if it was shoddily built or hideously ugly or something like that which again people think is weird when it comes to computers but no one bats an eyelash about it with cars no no one buys a car they don't like the looks of right maybe if you need it to be a work truck or something you're going to use it to like drive into the forest and haul timber but for your daily driver luxury sports car whatever you yes you look at all the other criteria of how fast is it and how much mileage is it whatever your criteria are but then you also got to like how it looks because you don't want to spend a

lot of money on something that you find ugly or seems cheap feeling or whatever so that is my final bit of criteria so given all of that i can imagine a much much much smaller computer than the one i have now because if all you need is one or two internal storage bays a swappable gpu and then you can have ram and system on a chip in you know totally unupgradable you can get one that's like a half or a quarter of the size of this mac pro and be perfectly fine and you know driving my 6k display is not that big of a deal anymore because what now you know the macbook air can do that now like it's nothing with the arm chips in everything. So these rumors of a half-size Mac Pro, that might be right up my alley. It really depends, though, on the GPU because you can make this box smaller,

but the GPUs, especially if Apple's not making them itself, if it's still an AMD GPU, AMD GPUs have a certain minimum size that will dictate how small a box you can fit around this stuff because they're going to be like long PCI cards and they're going to need a lot of vertical space for cooling and all that. So I do worry about that. I'm not going to be happy with the Mac Mini.

That's what I'm saying. Do you think they will still have GPUs from third parties? See, when I look at the 2019 Mac Pro and the people who actually need like the dual vega 2 cards like they actually use those because you know having four of those makes their work take you know a quarter the amount of time that if they just had one right i i don't know how you sell those people on the idea that okay well we don't sell amd stuff anymore and there's an apple one and the apple one is great it's even faster than one of those vegas and they'll say okay but is it faster than four

like because right now it takes me you know x amount of minutes and you're telling me it's going to take like x times three amount of minutes that's not an upgrade for me and i guess as well for a lot of those uh use cases the software is tuned to work perfectly on the hardware or whatever, right? I can imagine that that could be the case. And unless, you know, if you don't feel comfortable with that or confident with that, then it's not going to help you how fast Apple's GPU is. Yeah. I mean, that's Apple's, usually their pitch is like, okay, well, you know, if you use our software with our GPU, it's way faster than if you use third-party software with AMD on. But I just don't see how, you know, again, it gets down to just sort of, you know,

acreage in the wheat or solar panel thing, right? How many square millimeters of silicon are in a 2019 Mac Pro with four AMD Vega GPUs in it? There's just, like, in terms of how much power that's drawing from the power supply, how much heat it's generating, and the literal number of transistors at a certain point no matter how great apple's one gpu is you you you can't compete with four times as much surface area and silicon chips maybe if you're really good you can say well you know if you have this amount i can give you like three quarters of that amount and be faster because you're Apple and you're better at it. But if you're just going to be one GPU versus four, I don't think Apple is going to be four times as good as the best third party GPUs that are out there.

So, you know, so the choice Apple has is we can say, well, most of our customers don't need that. It's such a narrow slice. Those people were just going to say, look, we don't serve your needs anymore. Sorry. Or alternately, they could just keep serving that market by saying, yeah, we have great GPUs, but also we have a bunch of slots. And if you want, we'll sell you a horrendously overpriced Apple version of a third party GPU that you can stick in those slots.

And that seems like the most straightforward solution. Like, why give that up? They spent all this time with 2019 Mac Pro. 2019 Mac Pro does not have one slot it doesn't have two slots and it's a huge number of slots in there it's giant and they fill them with stuff including their afterburner card and you know multiple gpu whatever you want to put in there to for apple to come out with this product and then five years later say, eh, nevermind. That's going to be a difficult conversation. And that's exactly the reason why pros don't trust Apple with this stuff.

They say, Oh, you made this great computer that fits our needs. And then you change your mind a couple of years later and say, Oh, well, since we're not doing third party GPUs anymore, we think one Apple GPU is good enough for everybody.

So get in line or just go to PC and people will just go to PC. So I really hope that the rumors of a quote-unquote half-size Pro Mac and a full-size one are true, that they will offer both of those, and you'll know which one you need. Do you, you know, do you just want, like, the needs that I described, where you can get away with a half-size one and be happy as long as the GPU is upgradable? You know, or let's say, even if the GPU is not upgradable, but the computer isn't expensive enough that you can buy a new one more than once every 10 years that's another option apple could go with i'm not sure they're gonna go with that one um but yeah i can see myself with a smaller quieter computer

that has just the kind of flexibility that i need swappable gpu some internal storage uh and i would be perfectly happy with that but i'm not sure all of the 2019 mac pro customers would be but we're not asking them we're asking you so we don't have to worry about all those people right now and i think also in in my old age now if you'd ask me the same question like a decade or two ago i probably would have wanted all the things to be upgradable and I would have wanted all that empty space because I'd be like, well, who knows

what I'll want in the future? This is kind of part of the narrowing of the possibility space of aging. It's like, am I the type of person who will ever fill all those card slots?

When you're in your 20s, you're like, I might be that. Who knows? Someday maybe I'll be making music or maybe I'll have a bunch of, you know, cards in there

that connect to sound interfaces or maybe i'll have five gpus and i'll be doing you know it's like at a certain point you're like okay well i'm not going to do those things i'm not interested in them so the number of things you need your computer to do for you becomes better defined let's say rather than just saying narrower and i feel like now at this point in my life i know which things i will want to upgrade and which things i want and like you know there is an element of just wanting to make sure that your time spent at your computer will be of a working computer right and it's not that you're gonna have to spend a bunch of time troubleshooting the thing that you put in there or whatever right like it's that time is is more limited than when

we're younger i suppose yeah that that's part of the internal storage discussion too is like why do you care about internal storage like it's just with current technology it's part of my backup regime is i need to have like a local time machine backup and then a local like clone of some kind right just because history has shown that when i screw something up that's the fastest way to get back up and running is to not have to go to your cloud backup provider to get all that stuff uh and the only way to do that with current technology is either to have some minimal amount of internal storage that you can put you know buy third-party things and shove them inside

your computer or to have a bunch of boxes on your desks and i hate that i hate the boxes on my desk not so much they're going to go with a Mac Mini or an iMac, but that's exactly why I want a computer with some kind of internal storage, because I can make all that disappear and just have my one computer that has all my stuff, a time machine backup of my stuff, and a clone of my stuff all in one box. And I don't think that's too much to ask.

All right, so I feel like we have very thoroughly set the stage. So I am now going to ask all right so i feel like we have very thoroughly set the stage so i am now going to ask you a series of questions and i just want you to tell me what you want from these things right so format desktop laptop big small what is the format of this dream computer of yours it's a desktop and i'm gonna say medium okay so we're talking like obviously much larger than a mac mini and much smaller than your current mac pro yeah because i all these tower computers there has always been enough space for like like a rabbit to live in there along with all my computer stuff i've never filled all the slots i've you know okay what about

the design what do you want it to be aesthetically do you want it to be a small version of what you currently have or would you like if in an ideal world would you want something different so these these things you know fashion trends come and go in the computer world and i think in the desktop world we've been kind of overdue on the apple not really because we got it with the trash can but like i feel like it's it's time for the pro tower line to swing back in a darth vaderish direction i'm kind of liking the idea of a matte black thing right i know that the trash can was black and shiny but it was actually kind of like a chromey silver thing and it wasn't quite the aesthetic i was

looking for and we've had silver computers for a while i'd be happy with a candy colored like you know blue and white g3 style tower as well but i have actually kind of been hankering for a darth vader style black tower computer for a long time now and i i feel like the trash can was like a near miss and we're talking fully black right like we're not talking any of apple's vast variants of what grade can be no not space black like actual black like the black book like the the black macbook true black it just just black no midnight green mixed in no blue mixed in just black now the screen in an ideal world are you keeping your screen or do you now want a screen to match i mean i feel like the apple's aesthetic is like on the xdr is neutral enough that it will match it would match a black computer certainly it has a black surround on the

screen here right like the bezel is black the base is neutral silver and you don't really see it that much so i think that you know matching obviously it's not going to match as well as this thing does but practically speaking i can't see the back of my xdr so i know that it matches the front of my mac pro but that's just an academic like someone could have come and shaved off all those things i would never notice it's facing facing a wall i can't see it so i don't need it to be matchy matchy as they say i just need it to be in fitting with the aesthetic and i think a a matte black tower connected to this thing would look fine that said a lot of the reason i am keeping this monitor is because it costs so much

money uh if it was cheap i would replace it with the matching one right but it's not cheap so you really got to get your money's worth out of these monitors even like think of my last monitor it was a 23 inch apple cinema display that i think i used for at least two different computers it didn't really match any but the first one but you know you just you just keep using it just because it seems like an investment and it gives you the flexibility to reuse it so money no object I'd you know want it to be replaced with like a ultra thin ultra bright OLED 8k display that matches my computer exactly but that doesn't seem like it'll be in the cards money wise so i want to talk about specs obviously i'm going to assume that you are not like desiring to

keep an intel processor inside this dream computer of yours do you have any kind of feeling as to how big an apple silicon processor you want you mean like physical size or like number of cores i mean if you have a desire for physical size i would be interested to know but i did need more cores i mean if you do have a feeling for how physically big you want it to be i would like to know that but really more of like cores the size actually is the thing it's not size so much as like the bigger it is the more heat it puts out and the more cooling it needs and so i do like the arm chips low power because it lets you have a quieter computer right so i what i wouldn't do is spend every ounce of that

low power advantage on adding more square millimeters of silicon to the point where you use all the cooling capacity of the case. So the case I have now has tremendous cooling capacity. You could put a huge ARM chip in there and cool it, but I wouldn't do that. I would say let's not make literally the biggest ARM chip we can to fit within the cooling capacity. Let's instead make an ARM chip that's kind of medium-sized and lower the cooling capacity.

Say, okay, we don't need so many fans. The fans don't need to be as big. They don't need to spin as fast, right? I'm not saying do what you did with the cooling capacity say okay we don't need so many fans the fans don't need to be as big they don't need to spin as fast right i'm not saying do what you did with the m1s which is like we can have a computer with no fan because that's not the trade-off i want to make on a desktop right so i would expend half let's say half the cooling budget making the chip bigger but then i'd stop i would not use all of the cooling budget of even a half-sized tower right because that's then you're losing some of the advantage, right? I'm not mining for Bitcoin here. I don't want every ounce of performance. I do want some, you know, quietness, right?

And in terms of number of cores, I would say maybe double the number of cores that I have now would be fine. What do I have now? I have eight core, 12 core. I don't even know. I bought as many cores as I could afford. I have 12 core. Um, yeah, 20 core. Uh, you know, cause the type of stuff I do on my computer can take advantage of multiple course because I'm doing lots of little things, you know, even now, and I'm just talking, you know, you know, I'm recording in Skype and I'm also recording an audio hijack, right. And the networking stack is running and maybe, you know, Google docs is like this. There's always something to be using these CPU cores. Um, and then every once in a while like compiling an xcode i can use them all at once right and that will actually give me a benefit of actually making the time i have to wait for

my computer to do a thing to be lower right yeah and of course core counts are different now right because we have energy and efficiency you know performance and efficiency so you you know you wouldn't want to have necessarily the same amount of cores you would want to have some more because they're not all the same as it used to be yeah i'm not sure how they would do that breakdown in terms of low power versus high power ones i would imagine there wouldn't be too many low power ones because the whole point of low power if you had like 20 low power cores it's like well that's not really low power because if you're running all 20 of those at any given time that's not low power right there's a certain beyond a certain number of low power cores beyond which you probably shouldn't be using any more low power cores right

so i think maybe four or eight low power cores or whatever you that's plenty and then just fill the rest with the high performance ones because when you want to be in low power mode you're going to turn off all the high performance and maybe you even turn off some of the low power ones right just enough to get by yeah but again a desktop that's less of a concern just for the numbers the reporting that mark german had was that there would be 20 or 40 core variants with 16 high performance or 32 high performance so four and eight efficiency cores respectively yeah as we discussed on on atp like a lot of that has to do with the sort of uh economies of scale of like they're not going to make one bespoke 40 core cpu it's going to be made up of these tiles essentially and each tile comes

with a certain number of high and low so you end up being a little bit oversubscribed on low performance just because your tiles all have a certain they basically have enough low performance cores for a macbook pro on each one of the little tiles so when you get four of those tiles guess what you get four times the low the low power cores as a macbook pro but not because that's the optimal number it's just because it's not worth it financially for apple to make a custom cpu just for the mac pro it's much more economical for them to take the macbook pro cpu and take four of them and shove them together right yeah so just find something to do with the other ones for the mac pro it's much more economical for them to take the macbook pro cpu and take four of them and shove them together right yeah so just find something to do with the other ones right like

you've got them now so just find something to do with them yeah like obviously you'll use them you'll use them in burst mode when you're doing a bay activity use everything and then almost all the rest of the time maybe they're just not doing anything ram so my this experiment with 96 gigs like i bought this this way just because i was spending so much money it's that uh the thing Ram? ah, throw it in. It's a $30,000 car. What's $150 for the floor mats? It's still $150, but next to the $30,000 car, it seems like less. It doesn't actually change size. So it's a, you know, a bug in our ability to reason about price. Ram was similar. I got this thing with a huge amount of Ram, even though I know that I overspent on it because Apple charges an arm and a leg for Ram. But honestly, I just didn't want to have to think about, I want Ram to be off the table. I just want Ram to be a thing I don't have to think about anymore. And so far,

a year or two into using this computer, I never think about RAM. I never look at my RAM. I never think about it. It just, it doesn't exist for me anymore. RAM is not something that I ever, ever, even, even when I was running, I put it into Windows and ran Unreal Edit 5 for the Unreal Engine 5 demo. I don't know if you've seen any videos of that. I didn't think about RAM the whole time I was doing it. I thought about my video card, which was on its knees trying to do this processing at 6K,

but I just don't think about RAM. So I feel fairly confident that there is an amount of RAM where it becomes a non-issue for my personal use and so 96 is the right value maybe for 2019 for 2021 2022 128 right like i mean it really depends on the price because you know what apple does with the ram especially if it's on the system on a chip the price might go up you know in a non-linear fashion and really cause problems but somewhere around 100 gigs of ram i feel like is the 2022 starting point for saying i won't have to think about ram for five to ten years what about a gpu then what what would you be going for

here is there something on the market now that you're aware of that you would like? Or do you have like a particular thing that you would just like to be focused on? So I admit that I am attracted to the idea of an Apple GPU that tries to compete with current high-end GPUs, if only because of the sort of advantages, you know, the sort of M1 advantages where you're sharing the very fast RAM, you're on a system on a chip there's lots of areas where that there there's a performance advantage to having that arrangement the obvious disadvantage is as cool as that is on day one come next year it's outclassed by whatever the new nvidia card or amd card is so it's just a fact of life like every year amd and nvidia come out with new cards and apple historically has not been that fast and either way if it's part of your new cards and Apple historically has not been that fast

and either way if it's part of your system on a chip you're not getting that upgrade unless you buy a home new Mac and these are companies that are doing a very good job right now in what they're doing the perceived things like Intel with their CPUs they're not doing so great but Nvidia and AMD are doing very good with graphics cards everybody's very happy

which is why you can't buy them yeah and they're they're competitors to each other like it's not like one massively dominates over the other although if you asked nvidia they'd say they dominate in like ai and whatever but either way like they at various times are jockeying for the lead and so they they push each other to do better every single year they don't take a year off they don't say this year's cards we're just not going to change it and they have architecture changes from whatever pascal to the tempest i don't remember all the code names but they have architectural changes of the rdna versus rdna2 and all that stuff but every year they just keep making it better and better so there's pretty much nothing apple can do on a built-in like

thing Apple can do on a built in, like integrated into the system on a chip GPU that will not be eclipsed by a third party GPU next year. The only move Apple has is to not allow third party GPUs at all as in don't have any slots or don't support third party GPUs. In which case, like, well, tough luck. If you want a Mac, you get what you get and you don't get upset but what i would prefer is to have a really great built-in apple gpu maybe that i could get away with not with just using that for the first year but then a slot for an mpx card or some other similar apple flavored slot that i can put a you know one of the things i love about the gpu i have and here now is a 5700 xt or whatever the hell it is it's an amd card but it's apple's mpx module that again has no fans on the card you you get the card from apple and it's just a huge card with a gigantic passive heat sink on it and i love

that a it matches my case b when i stick it in there it does not make my computer appreciably louder yes the fan in front of it might have to spin at faster RPM, but it is so much different than in my previous Mac Pro where I would buy a GPU and it would have a cooler on it with a terrible fan that would get noisier and noisier over time and I could replace it with a third-party cooler. I just don't want to deal with that at all. So that's my ideal.

Built-in great Apple GPU that is competitive with the best gpus for the first year and then a slot underneath it where i can buy something from amd or who knows stranger things happen maybe one day nvidia and shove it in there two or three years down the line when the built-in apple one is struggling and do you have any particular desire for specific ports on the machine yeah i think one of the advantages of having a desktop computer is there are fewer excuses for why you can't have let's say another usb port right because there's plenty of acreage to put holes in your computer you're not like on a laptop where the sides are so small that you can't even think of where you can stick another hole or the imax

even the imac i feel like all right it's clear that that design was as thin as possible and that's a direction to go but none of the computer i'm describing as thin as possible is not one of the goals of any aspect of this computer whatsoever so there's no excuse for you they might be going for as small as possible but that doesn't preclude io as an issue yeah even if they're trying to go small it's not an artistic exercise to to make the computer disappear or be very slim that's not going to happen you want you might want to to not waste any internal space and to make a smaller computer or whatever but at the scale we're talking about here there should always be room for a full-size headphone jack a bunch of

usb-c ports like all that good stuff um i i always want more usb like if i just look at what i have around my desk i don't have that much stuff connected but i i you know i do have a usb hub for things like keyboard and mouse which i still use wired and you know the plug that i use to plug my phone into and the little plug that i plug my you know dedicated camera into which still uses usb mini because camera manufacturers are backwards um those are all connected to a usb hub part of that is because my computer is far away from them but part of it is just because i'm kind of out of usb ports right like i there's thunderbolt port on top of my computer that i use for you know i put a thumb drive in my thunderbolt port or whatever but there's notbolt port on top of my computer that I use for, you know, I put a thumb drive in my Thunderbolt port or whatever,

but there's not that many plain old low speed USB ports. So I would prefer if there were more of them for peripherals that don't require high performance. But other than that, the port set that has been available on all my tower max has been mostly adequate for what I, what I want to do do there's a lot of space in the back a lot of different things you can plug it into at this point I even have like I have four no more than that I think I have five places I can plug my monitor into I just have the one monitor but it's just it boggles my mind because now we've you know unified on the Thunderbolt standard and

everything that the video cards themselves have multiple Thunderbolt ports where you could I could in theory hook up multiple 6K displays. And then you can even plug the monitor into a thing that's not a port on the video card on the Mac Pro because of the whole Thunderbolt bus on the inside. Like the top card on the 2019 Mac Pro that has USB and stuff on it,

there's a Thunderbolt port there and you can plug the monitor in there and it works, which boggles my mind as sort of an old school computer user thinking of plugging your monitor into someplace other than your video card and it works. i didn't know that i figured you just had to plug it into the video card no you can just plug it into that little add-on because it's all thunderbolt

bus right it's the magic this is one of those things i understand but i still don't feel like i can get my head around that it doesn't seem right at the same time and then you what my question was like because i have two gpus in my mac i have the one that i bought it with and then i have which one who has it you know you can go to about this mac and you see it does pick the big one it's just it's just weird i mean i'm sure there's some setting that you know or some policy or whatever it's not picking randomly but yeah yeah if i don't plug it into the card how mac do you decide which one to use it's using some weird on board graphics chip that it's got in there somewhere you know it doesn't it doesn't care all right so look long time listeners of atp know

you know you took a long time to upgrade your machine but you were ready to go right when the this mac pro came out you were ready and so you just went for it and you know and it was expensive you spent a lot of money you got it the way that it was if apple announced say next june this exact machine which gives you all of the specs that you've just listed here how soon would you buy it i would be pretty tempted to buy pretty soon i would probably let the rest of the world try it out and tell me if there's some horrendous problem but i i know i've emphasized this a bunch of times but this monitor was really expensive and i'm gonna get to reuse that part so if i'm just replacing the

computer part you're just saving money if you think about it yeah because the computer part especially if it's a half size one that is presumably less expensive because it doesn't have 12 pci card slots and all that stuff right i think and you know again the the arm chips are going to be so much faster they already are so much faster than the currency on and presumably like the four it's going to be so much faster than my currency on and presumably like the it's going to be so much faster for less money than i paid for this one it's going to be really hard not to just say this actually isn't like buying a whole new system i'm just swapping out one component i wouldn't even need to change any connectors because like everything that's plugged into the back of this computer presumably will still plug into whatever replaces it maybe it won't have usba i'm not sure but anyway i'm going to

be very tempted to only keep this computer around for like maybe three years or something if the replacement comes and is reasonably priced and i feel like oh you know i can i can get at for less than the cost of this monitor i can totally replace my computer because as you know i mean you've already switched over like once you start using these rmax and we do have an m1 macbook air on the house once you start using them itACs, and we do have an M1 MacBook Air on the house. Once you start using them, it's very difficult to intentionally stay behind in Intel land just because everything is so much faster in M1.

And that's setting aside the stuff of like, you know, Touch ID or potentially in the future Face ID and all these other benefits that come with the M1. All the features of Monterey that only work on the M1, the neural engine stuff, it's really hard to stay away. And I knew this going in. I knew this when I bought this thing. I said if this is the last grade x86

Mac, I'll still be content with it. And at this rate, I will definitely be using this thing for at least two years, probably three, before I even consider a new one. But two or three years in, I'm going to be looking pretty hard at what those new Mac Pros are. Thank you very much john syracuse sir can't wait for you to buy me this computer i'm very excited oh that was the conclusion of the show you buy me the computer of my dreams i'll tell

you what if they make everything you've listed here then i'll think about it uh i've i've listened to too many of your podcasts i know how you weasel out of the precise wording of the rules and everything there's no way i'm gonna win this bet it's just pointless i feel like if there was one I've listened to too many of your podcasts and how you weasel out of the precise wording of the rules and everything. There's no way I'm going to win this bet. It's just pointless. I feel like if there was one person I know other than my co-hosts on my various other shows that would appreciate precise rules, it would be you. Precise rules. Precise for the purpose of never paying out.

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Merlin Mann, thank you for joining me. Mike, thank you for having me on. It's been a while. It's been a very long time. I think it's been never on this show, which is part of the reason that you're here. Now that I've got rid of Jason for the week, I can bring Merlin in.

I think I was on an upgrade once when Jason was away. I think there was some Snell talk. No, wait, I talked to Snell. It was you who weren't there. Yeah, Jason always brings in people when I'm away, but I don't go away anymore. Jason goes away, so the tables have turned. Now, one of my favorite things about you, Merlin, man,

is your enthusiasm for things. So it's one of the things that I have loved about your work for many, many years, more years than you probably want me to mention. Like new hardware, new software, back from the Macworld show four days. You know, I've always taken great kind of inspiration from your enthusiasm. I think it's one of my favorite things about you.

And it's something that I've tried to make a thing that I will try and do for things that I like too, because I think people like to hear that stuff. So I'm always excited to know what you're excited about. So that's what I want to talk about. Like if there are any new little gadgets or pieces of hardware that you're enjoying, any apps and services,

like this is the stuff that I want to know about. What is tickling your fancy right now? You contacted, thank you very much, first of all, but you've contacted the right fellow because I am additionally, I'm meta excited. I'm excited to talk about what I'm excited about. So that works out fine. It's, this is actually, but it's also to your, to your, I don't know, you know, me, I love my big philosophical points. The thing that you said kind of at the top, it's something I think about a lot,

like, how do you, how do you maintain your curiosity and your, you know, your plasticity, you know, keep trying new things. Kevin Kelly recently said something along the lines of, you're only as young as the last time you changed your mind, which is something I try to keep in mind. Well, that's much better for me as a fortune cookie than a life principle because I'm not that good at it. But what's funny, though, is, for example,

this week on Dubai Friday, a show I do with Alex Cox, my challenge this week is what I call harness your horses. And I've been watching that movie, What Happened to Miss Simone? And long story short, Alex and I both have weird brains. And we were, I was just saying, like, is there a way that we could figure out how to take the stuff about us that's weird or psychically challenging or emotionally strange or chemically, you know, problematic? And how can you turn that into a mutant superpower? Like, how do you basically go to the Professor X school of, you know, mental health and take something that could be a real liability and turn it into, you know,

something that's really good for you? And that's a way that I actually do think about this stuff, which is I love little projects that keep my demon dogs at bay. I'm always excited to play with new stuff, you know, probably to a fault. The balance that I do try to strike though is like, you know, it's, you know what they used to say when you're kids, it's always, everybody's, it's always fun until somebody gets hurt. I try to stop myself before I get hurt.

That's the main thing, right? So this goes way back to like the 43 folders days of like one of my early realizations that not only should I not spend all of my time, you know, uh, messing around, but I shouldn't encourage other people to spend all of their time messing around. And so the, the thing, the lesson in this for me is like, how do I strike this balance of doing the stuff that will keep me not young, but will keep me plastic and keep me interested and keep me curious. Cause gosh, it's so easy to lose your curiosity. Even if that's just, you know, playing with a new calendar app for that matter. How do I do that?

But then, you know, I have to say this is the neat thing about becoming an old man maybe is like I have crossed a certain kind of Rubicon where I've said to myself. I have crossed a certain kind of Rubicon where I've said to myself, and this actually goes to something you said on Upgrade recently, where you were like, you know, if you want to get the betas, it's a toy. Have fun. Get the betas. Just do it. Yeah, contra Jason's whole, like, I have to do this for my work. It's contra everybody, right?

Yeah, I know. Don't install it on your work phone. Like, just install it on the work phone. Who cares? I know. It's like, especially these days, what's the worst thing that can happen? So mainly, if we leave town and when we leave town, I don't want my phone to be broken. But here's the thing, though, man.

You only go around once, dude. You know? What? What are you? I mean, yes, do backups. Do all the things in life. Like, don't waste your day. Don't procrastinate unless you mean to procrastinate.

There's all kinds of. But, you know, a thing I found myself saying on Roderick, that's very related to this kids, kids don't play with blocks because they're trying to get into a school. Kids play with blocks because blocks are fun and blocks are always fun. And isn't it okay for us to do things because they're fun and because they keep us curious and they keep us stimulated and excited and engaged with what's happening in the world? Like, do we need a reason to have fun? Do we have to say it's for my work? So anyway, those are all competing thoughts in my head. But you know, the overriding principle, I think in some ways is, well, do your stuff,

do your work, do your fun. And if you like who you are, why would you feel terrible about how you have fun? You know, it's okay. You know, if you don't like who you are, would you feel terrible about how you have fun you know it's okay you know if you don't like who you are you'll never have fun yeah that's you've got something else to deal with first and then so with all the philosophy out of the way yes i have i have jotted down innumerable things that i am excited about um some of which are for my work and others of which you know they're not but you know start anywhere so hit me give me which, you know, they're not. But, you know, start anywhere. So hit me. Give me something. Well, you know, gosh, the most boring one that I should just get out of the way but is kind of interesting is, like the great Casey Liss,

I'm the sort of person that's always like, I don't think I'll need that thing that was announced. I don't want that. You know, that's my pre-WWDC, you know, mindset. And then I'm watching it and I go, hmm, that's kind of cool, but I don't need that. And long story short, like, I bought a new iPad. Do I need a new iPad? Not really.

But let's just say I got a good iPad. Partly because it was one that was available, you know, that didn't take a month to get. It took two hours to get. Big one? Yep, big and big. Yeah. to get but big one yep big and big yeah so i get the i got the i got the i got the large one and i got the you know the big lots of space on it which i believe has a role in some of the power stuff in the ram stuff right so it has more i got the tricked out one and it's really really

nice and it's having the beta on there and playing with that i won't dwell on this but the the interesting uh side impact of that though is that that had me, it means I have this older, not the huge iPad that my wife has, but, you know, the 12-inch, right? I've now made that a sidecar monitor. And I'm looking at it over here. My texts are over here hanging in midair on this mounting system that I would like to tell you about. And it's great. So, like, I've got my new iPad, and I'm using the pencil, and I'm trying to finally, Mike,

I'm trying to finally get good at the stuff you nerds understand and I don't, which is the multitasking stuff. I'm really setting myself to trying to operationalize that. But it's also neat because now I've got my old iPads over here, and when I get universal control, I'm going to be the happiest boy in the world. Yeah, that's going to be pretty sweet.

Yeah, I like that. So do you use the sidecar very frequently? Until three days ago, not at all. Well, you know, it's the canonical example for me, and I think you were on this bandwagon too, is like, I mean, how much do I use iMessage stickers today? You know, I don't. All I really care about is I wish they'd add back a permanent button.

Please give me a permanent button for photos. And please take away the thing that records my voice. That's all I really want out of messages. But for three or four days, oh, yeah, I made me emojis. I added clothes. I don't use any of that. That's kind of how I felt about Sidecar because I didn't have any need for it. And I didn't have that much hardware that would do it.

And now, though, yeah, I am playing with it, partly because I think probably like everybody who's a beta cuck, I've got all this stuff where I'm saying, oh, is it in there yet? Is spatial audio in there for FaceTime yet? Is universal control? Right.

And so when a new beta comes out, I check that out. So I'm very excited about universal control that looks extremely promising to me but in prep for that i thought i'd play more with sidecar and it's great i can't believe how well this thing works like i'm not using the ipad for anything but that the old ipad yeah anything but that but it there's nothing to do it just it shuts off when the computer's sleeping. It turns on when it's on, and I've just got this extra little window that is really bigger than the screen I had

on a lot of Macs in the 90s. Oh, yeah. In addition to this, you know, whatever, 27-inch monitor. It's really great. But, like, you start finding uses for it, like what we used to call a palette monitor. Like, you keep all your Photoshop palettes over here or whatever, or your Dreamweaver stuff.

Yeah, it's really neat. The reason I mention that here is it's a little bit of like you would see in Snooker. It's a little bit of a bank shot. Because I do get a new iPad out of this with a beautiful screen and all the things, crazy fast. But now the old iPad still finds a use. It's kind of neat like that. And because it's Apple and the stuff mostly works together, it's very accommodating of being reused for cool things.

I think that's actually a pretty good use for old iPads now. And will continue to be more of one. Now you've got a 13-inch monitor that you can move around and put whatever you want on. It's pretty great. I've thought about, because I'm also really into this dorky home assistant thing, I've thought about someday using an old iPad to make a control panel.

That might be a bridge too far. I certainly could not have that at home. My family would not tolerate this Jetson stuff on the wall. But it'd be fun to try here at the office is to use something like, I don't know, like HomePlus or Homey or one of those things to create a control pad. But I'm not quite there yet. But that's an easy one because bricks are fun. Blocks are fun.

I like making things. iPad, good. What are you rolling with right now, if I could ask? I'm mostly using my 11-inch. That's the one that I use most of the time to be my iPad. That's my walking around iPad. That's what goes in the bag.

I got a very Mike Hurley orange cover for mine that I really like. Oh, it feels so good. Yeah, but no, those are just in the pocket for sitting on the couch. Such a good size. And that's where I have it. I have it on the couch at home

and whenever I'm sitting reading or doing anything, that's the device that I use at home. I have my 12 i'm sitting reading or doing anything uh that's the device that i use at home i have my 12.9 inch here at the studio um and i've been finding some new uses for it recently with like looking at kind of product designy type things like it's been using the apple pencil and you know being able to sketch stuff out and highlight things this has been really useful for me actually uh but there's definitely been something that 12.9 inch ipad for me is is a bit of collateral damage of moving kind of most of my processes back to the mac again right i heard you talk about that because for a long time you were you were so vatici for a while where you were and i think

you actually coined that phrase right that was it the dual ipad lifestyle was that multi-pad yeah that's it that's it and so that was saying but like you you keep your mac like running clean now because you do use your mac for a lot of stuff is that because of changes in availability of hardware or is it because of your work or what combination of things leads you to going oh yeah like in my case i started using my old big ipad less because guess what i got an m1 macbook pro that is just it. It's tiny and perfect. That really tipped it over the edge. The M1 MacBook Pro tipped it over the edge, but for me, it was part of ergonomic changes during COVID and with my studio that it just meant that I was finding myself just at desks more and then I wanted a monitor a good height work and so it just you know it just ended up

being like really for this setup that i want the mac is best for that um and then the m1 kind of just pushed it over the edge like just because it is just such a stupendous computer in every possible way it really it really is a joy to use but you know i, you still always, it is neat as all of this technology makes occasional, you know, steps forward in both power and, what's the word I'm looking for? The way that Apple stuff works with other stuff. It's cool, though, that you could always, if you're in a pinch, you could grab that big iPad and do all kinds of stuff that you could not have done even five years ago. Right? It's just, I don't know. That's exciting.

I'm pretty pro-Apple right now. So what else have you got going on? Oh, let's see. I'll burn through a couple of these. I think I mentioned to you that Elgato, I love Elgato and Eve. Like Eve, like the Eve family of smart devices, I think are really impressive right now. I had reason to, so Eve makes, so what, like what? They make stuff like, they make the Eve room,

which is, you know, I don't know how much you know about me, but I'm always interested in knowing what the humidity is for some reason. Things like that, air quality. There's one called the Eve weather that can live outside and tell you what the weather is, but they also have amazing new ones with thread compatibility. They have like a door and window sensor that's really cool so you not only get a door and window sensor out of that but you get another little uh node on your thread network which is cool uh and then like i say what's the other one oh eve energy is my go-to now for smart plugs and it all works together um it's i find it all very easy to use i think it's super cool but what's funny is, as owing to a strange

coincidence of like getting more into next level smart home stuff combined with doing some mostly sort of, um, abortive, but you know, uh, I don't know, one of my projects has been like doing more stuff with video. And what does that mean? Well, I mean, the irony is I ended up mostly just using my iPhone to do video, but I needed good lighting. So what did I do? I got some Elgato lights. They make these really good lights. They make key lights and spotlights.

I have a hair light behind me now, like a gentleman. But they also make all kinds of other great stuff. They make a green screen that I got that's really neat. But the thing of theirs that I'm really excited about is so dorky. They make this thing called the multi-mount. And it sounds like you might know i might have heard of this i have seen i saw this product when i was looking into some gear for twitch streaming so similar to you um and i'm i got a little bit confused by it if i'm being honest it looks like dr octopus yeah skinny doctor yeah i mean and it's not by any means unique but as with uh as we've talked

about a little bit offline there's sometimes something that seems like a commodity product you end up getting like a real preference for this one and not those ones and this one's just really neat so long and short of it is you get this thing called it starts with the multi mount which is which which um you know uh has a little screw mechanism to clamp it to your desk. And it's got two telescoping. And so the idea is you mount stuff on it. Like it could be cameras, could be lights, could be whatever. And all the stuff works with other stuff.

So you start out with this telescoping thing that you clamp to your desk, which is cool. And they're all about these ball joints, the kind of thing, sort of like on a 12 south iPad thing, you know, you get that little grommet thing, you screw the little dingus onto there, and then you got this ball joint that can move around freely in something like 360 degrees. But it's not just one of those, it's multiples of those. So you can you can get straight long arms that attach to the side like sideways attached to the pole, right? You can get short, you can get short ones, you can get long ones, but then you can combine, it is essentially like

Lego or as Jason would say, Micronauts. You can just combine all of these little things together to make exactly what you need. And, you know, I have this tub full of, you know, stuff for use with cameras and mics, you know, all the different kinds of things that you could attach to other things. And I just sent you a photo of this. So like right now, the thing that I use as a mount for my camera is a multi-mount attached to like a camera cold shoe, which goes to a double ball joint, which goes to a Joby, you know, what's it called? GorillaPod, you know, one of those mounts. And then I have this really, really great actual mount by this company called Ulanzi, which I had first thought was one of those made up Amazon fake companies.

But it's actually this beautiful, beautifully made mount that you screw your phone into. So now I have this like total mobility stuff. And that's how my iPad is hanging. My iPad is hanging off the arm of a multi mount. It's just a really neat way. You could put your lights onto your Elgato lights onto there. You could have a monitor up there, you know, like I have a monitor for my Black Magic camera.

That can live up there. And I don't know, it's like, it's Lego for stuff with holes, basically. This looks pretty cool. So like, I do have, like I have a couple of their key lights and I have them on their individual stands and I can take up quite a lot of space on the desk

when you have the two stands. But I like this one because it can clamp. So you can get a stand for it. But what I really want to do is just clamp it. I actually might get one of these. I need to sit down and, like, really look at it because it's like, how many attachments do I need? I don't know.

I know. I went overboard. But no, they have, like, a little, it's almost like buying a Synology. have like a configurator like what kind of what kind of dork are you oh i'm a streaming dork show me all the streaming dork ideas but if you want to be like have stuff like an overhead camera this makes that a lot easier yeah and also you know what it really does it encourages you this sounds again dorky but it encourages you to think in more than a couple dimensions because instead of just going like how high or low in the air near my eyes will

this go you have a lot of options now especially if you have a couple arms on there that was stuff that's not too heavy you can think much more creatively in my case about finally getting over the top of my monitor so that the camera was someplace that was comfortable and had a good eyeline which is difficult to do if you all your only option is up and down you know it's i don't know it's kind of neat it's been fun to play with i like stuff where i can do something with my hands keeps keeps me out of trouble i will agree with you actually like elgato is one of my kind of favorite companies at the moment like they remind me a little bit of dji in that dji completely own drones right there's just right there's just nobody that other companies come along and they try and do a thing

and then dji just makes a better version if they haven't already got a better version of the works and i feel like elgato are just continuing to stretch out into different areas of content creation like tools for content creators and they make just excellent products i mean and now it's like a full-on like they keep acquiring these companies too right like they make i find them to be a very intriguing company right now they do a lot of cool stuff i think yeah i agree sometimes you see a company like that and it feels like they're doing the opposite of what algada does where it's like you know especially in the smart home space where you're like well you make you make a thing for like um turning off your hose you know but you also make like high you know super high-end speaker cables you're like i don't understand where you're going with this but

alga i i don't love that word prosumer. But for example, you take something like a camera tripod. Like for camera tripods, like if you're just messing around, man, you probably don't even need a tripod. But if you get a tripod, you can get by with like a $16 Amazon tripod. But I finally bought like a halfway decent tripod. Like not like, you know, it's not like a Wes Anderson tripod, but I, I can't believe the difference.

Like using it, it feels so much more solid. Uh, it's just, I don't know. It makes me feel like I, I, uh, it improves my posture a little bit. Cause I'm like, Oh, like I'm going to take this more seriously. I'm going to put this away and store it. Well, I'm going to like keep it all that kind of stuff. And I feel like with the Elgato stuff, stuff with this multi mount multi mounts by no means a unique entry into the market it's just that it is it's better than a lot of other ones and it does work

together yeah you end up trusting that company a little more good company thumbs up have you got any software stuff that's intriguing you right now i do i well yeah i mean i'm so basic um i think yeah you and i have talked about this on slack i can't tell you how much every day i continue to be delighted by the script yeah you are i'm in deep the person that i know that uses this right like i know a lot of people who work in the audio space and this is an audio editing tool that has a lot of interesting stuff that it can do you're the only person that i know that uses it but you really use it and it is intriguing yeah well you know i just real quick so for folks who haven't heard of this i learned about this through adam lissagor who had done one of his

famous wonderful commercials really good commercial for Descript. What is Descript? Well, you know, for most of us who are doing stuff with primarily audio, but some video, like you're going to need an app, like even like GarageBand, where you got swim lanes. But most people are using Logic, right? Most people who are editing podcasts are using Logic, correct? I feel like at a certain point, yeah,

it's going to be one of those two, GarageBand or Logic. Well, GarageBand, the current GarageBand does not play well with podcasts as a thing anymore. That's why I was using the version from, I want to say, 2013 until it was just no longer, it wasn't 64-bit or whatever. So Descripto, it's such a weird app. I'm not recommending this. I'm just saying I love it more than my family. If you could check it out and see what you think, but it does several very novel things.

One of the things is that you take some audio, the way I would use it, like coming from things like GarageBand or Logic. So I've recorded, the example that I do every Monday, I record a podcast with John Roderick where I just, we record both sides. You toss it into Descript and the first thing that's interesting is when you throw that in

it says, do you want to transcribe this? And you're like, yes, please. What? Yes. So they have an AI-based transcription service that turns that audio into what looks like one swim lane of waveforms. But guess what? Above that is a Microsoft Word or, sorry, bad example, a text word processor like transcription. It looks like a script. You see John said this, Merlin said that, et cetera, et cetera.

It's not 100%, but it's pretty good. Now, that's pretty neat. Like you get pretty okay good transcription. You can certainly recognize what's happening, but then it gets good. First of all, that swim lane that looks like one swim lane, that's actually all of your tracks. It's just showing it to you as multi-colored waveforms visually at any point you can right right click or control click on that and go edit and actually go in the same way you would in logic go on you know delete parts but here's the here's the here's the marquee feature that is actually amazing is you can edit the text of the transcript and when you edit the text of the transcript. And when you edit the text of the transcript, that's reflected

in the audio. So if you want to remove silence or you want to remove a word, you can do all of that right up, like it's a word processor. And it does a really capable job of that. Now, if you don't like exactly where it thought that edit should be, you can always go in. It's non-destructive. So you can drag a little bit left or right to fix that. You can drag in other audio. And I don't want to go on about this, except to say, y'all might want to check this out. It's become so huge. I've talked about this, you know, ad nauseum on Slack, because I use it for so many things that are not the production of a podcast, right? So yes, I do rhetoric online like that, because I don't want to edit a podcast. I'm not a monster. I'm not Jason Snell.

I just want the thing to go up on the internet. But so that's great. That's great for that. It's perfect for that. Yesterday, remember when I was really late giving Jim the ads for Reconcilable Differences? All I do is pop open Descript and you create what's called a composition. I went in and recorded them right there, hit a button, exported everything. I can export it to Wave and then bring it into Forecast if I want to make it into a podcast.

But Mike, here's the money shot. This is what I really love is every show that I do, I have the sole or primary role. I would say, well, kind of with, yeah, I'm doing my Friday too, of like coming up with the titles that seemed good and, you know, finding links to things and, you know, generating in the case of reconcilable differences, writing the show notes eventually. Right. So I always just toss the audio for anything I've done into there. You cannot even believe how much easier this makes everything. So anybody, hi, I'm Merlin. If you've ever heard me on a podcast,

there's a bit that I do sometimes where I'll say something that I regard as funny and then kind of mutter the word title. Guess what? That now enables me to go in and find everywhere I ever had a title mostly. That's clever. That's very clever. Not all the time. You don't want to be too cute.

But Mike, how many times, how many times, as Tim Robinson says, how many times has this happened to you? You're recording a podcast and you make some, oh, believe me, this is John Syracuse's stock and trade. John is very good at generating work for his co-hosts. Oh, we'll put that in notes. Oh, we'll put, is that, who will put that in notes? We will, will we?

Oh, why do I bother telling you that the episode is staged on the Relay CMS and you can put in links like an adult? No, I gotta find everywhere John Syracuse had promised to put in, I don't know, he likes to play that video game where you wear a dress and put cursed swords into a vault. I don't know what it's called.

And everywhere that John or me or whomever says things like, we'll put it in show notes. I'll find that video. I think I read an article about that. Well, guess what? It's all text in Descript. So text means search. So I go in and I look for anywhere, look for the word notes, look for the word video, look for the word article, etc. And it's not perfect, but that's a real good way of making that so much easier. And then you've seen this on Slack as well. So I kid, but he is my worst friend. I'll go to Syracuse and I'll say, hey, look, here's the titles I found. Go ahead and edit away in the CMS. And you've seen what I do. I drop in an MP3 of every time I captured a title,

what i do i drop in an mp3 of every time i captured a title i also went in and highlighted that text in d script such that i could say grab every highlight make a new composition called titles export that because john is like me has a terrible memory and now he can hear in context everywhere that a title came up it's that fast it's that yeah this is the thing that that impresses me the most of it because like sometimes you have your title on, and John will be like, I don't remember that. And then you just drop in a link. It's like this is the exact moment it came up. It's like when your Instacart shopper sends you a photo of a shelf.

I guess it's helpful. I don't know. They don't have any bread. What do you want? But anyway, I don't want to go on. But there's a thing Alexandra and I talk about sometimes. Well, one of the running bits on Dubai Friday is there are so many things in life that we need a word for, like a sniglet. We don't have a word for that.

I need a word for the shame of adding items to an online order to get free shipping. I need a name for that terrible phenomenon. Why did I buy a pound of shrimp? Oh, I had to get to $35. I am the worst. I need a name for that. shrimp. Oh, I had to get to $35. I am the worst. I need a name for that. One thing I need a name for is things like software and services that I have almost no reason to need or use, but I love using like that ASCII art generator monodraw that we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

But what's neat about Descript is if I didn't have a reason to use Descript, which I gratefully do, and it helps me so much in my theoretical work, even if I didn't have a reason to use Descript, which I gratefully do, and it helps me so much in my theoretical work. Even if I didn't have a reason to use this, I would use this. When I very first got it, I did it to make supercuts of Mabim Bam and Blank Check. Because again, now I can go through and find every time in every Mabim Bam Best Of episode that somebody said the word boys. And I can make a supercut of every one of those mentions or i can every time that david sims on blank check goes oh boy i can find all of those it's a joy to do it's the same feeling you've got where like like the first time you ever use a scanner like back

in 1991 was the first time or 1990 probably first time i ever used a scanner i was like this is magic how did how did the pictures of words go into the machine and then turn into text well this is like that but it's for speech and it's it's a playground because you and they're constantly improving it yes it now works with video right and and if you it also has a functionality called overdub where you can have it learn your voice and simulate your voice so if you want to change it's well it scares me so much they're trying to be responsible about it, but you know, um,

and then, but it also will do stuff like if you change something, uh, like it'll try, it will try to adjust the speed of the video so that it accommodates the, at least the amount of time. Yeah. If you're doing video,

but let's say you just have to go in and you, you, uh, you know, you biff the offer code, you know, and, uh, you could go in and fix that. Anyway, long story you just have to go in and you biff the offer code, and you could go in and fix that. Anyway, long story short, sorry to go on, but this is reflective of how much I just treasure using this app. And I'm just always so excited. Obviously, I'm excited about things like

drafts, what Greg is doing with that, and constantly just grinding to make that better and better, what Gus does with Acorn. There's all these apps that are like why would I use anything else for that but then there are also still people out there swinging for the fences and it makes me really happy and I hope they don't get acquired and get it ruined by Spotify or something I have used Descript for a couple of things in the past like there was one episode of Cortex where I was convinced there was a curse word I hadn't removed. You went and did a search? Yeah, I dropped it into Descript, the translation, and I did the search. And I had removed it.

I had beeped it out. But that was like, that's really great. I think for me, I think I don't know if I value it as a audio editor, which is, I think, a way that they try and position it i don't think that you know command f um delete is going to produce a good sounding yeah you can do stuff like strip like remove silences but then that also means anything that it didn't recognize as a word and a lot of the things i say aren't actually words yeah like hmm like if you cut all that out it's going to sound really overworked

it's going to sound very over edited terrible like and also at the same time like the transcription stuff is good but it does not produce automatically a transcription that's worth publishing it totally does not absolutely not but you can do interesting things with it it's just you know marketing is marketing and they put their foot their best foot forward in certain circumstances you can do these things but it's then it's not reliable enough for that stuff however you can do right really cool stuff with it like all the things that you've mentioned but these are like ancillary tasks to but then the other the other part that i i don't have a reason to use but i think is interesting is there's all this team stuff,

which keeps improving. So stuff like, if you're on a team of people working on this, you can have things like sort of review and approve. But then they just keep adding, last thing, they just keep adding things that just delight me. I forget what the key command for this is.

It's a chord. But jump to the next edit, jump to the previous edit. That's probably the kind of thing you could do in Logic that I don't know how to do. But I spend, I always, I'm so, as much as I could care less about editing a podcast, I am a little bit anal about lining up stuff

like when the music hits, when the ding hits at the end of Roderick and making sure I fade out the beginning in a way that has the right amount of silence of John saying hello or whatever. And I do go and it seems I'm really not picky about this stuff, but it seems unbelievable to me when people put out a podcast with like 40 seconds of silence in it. And it's like, oh, dude, like, did you not go to every transition and make sure it was okay? And this makes that

really easy. So anything you can do to make your work exciting, you know, that's a, that's a, that's like a hundred year app that comes along and changes your game and makes you excited about doing something you used to despise so double thumbs up to uh descript lyra bird and descript yeah tell me a couple more okay you got it you got it i'll do some odds and sods here um hardware software you know i i i found myself typing this and going god this has got to be the most boring thing I could possibly mention. But it's the boringness of this product that makes me love it. And I imagine you've got to have some of these sitting around.

Samsung makes these little solid state hard drives. Oh, yeah. They're basically a little bigger than a credit card and the thickness of probably six credit cards. Right? Approximately. They got the blue ones. They got the black ones.

The T5, right? T5 and T7, yeah. And they're USB-C. And I have come to really love and rely on these things. I mean, they're not crazy cheap, but you're going to get, what is it? I want to say like 200 bucks for an eight terabyte SSD, something like that.

I think these are the perfect. The T7 is 300, I think. But the T5 is, I think. Yes, exactly. You can, as Snell says, you can tape it to the back of your Mac and forget about it. You can use it as a thing

you just keep in a bag because you're going to need it someday. But listen, friends, get your heads around this. It's an eight terabyte SSD. It's bananas. If I have really big movies at the office that I want to bring home to put on, I mean, I'd rather not have to burn every bit of bandwidth I've got, you know, having sonologies just do something that mundane.

So sometimes I'll bring something home like that. But yeah, absolutely. One of those hangs off the back of my Mac Mini now for Time Machine, one of my Times Machine. I just want to mention that because, first of all, for somebody of my advancing years, that is a technological wonder that you can get a solid-state hard drive of that size

for that amount of money. And then once you have them you find sure find uses for them it's great for doing video on the black magic or my canon camera that's it's you know unparalleled for that but i just want to mention it because you know we all struggle with these little the mundane parts of our life and can you find the hammer that you can live with well this is definitely the hammer that i can live with that's that's one that's kind of boring but you ever heard of home pass home pass no from the people who make home run and stuff like that oh yeah i've come across this yes i didn't think i needed this i scoffed at this i publicly scoffed at the idea of this product and then i bought it the other day and now i wish i'd had it for five

years home pass does does a cool thing well on the on the face of it, it does one thing and does it well, but it's a very cool thing, which is it keeps track of all your HomeKit codes for you. And I thought I was doing a good job with that using Apple's Photos app, but I did not do a good job with that, Mike. I have the codes, but I don't know what they're for. Like, I didn't always write it down.

With this app, which you buy once and then it's available, $3.99, I believe. It's available on all your Apple platforms once you've got it. You get this app. And boy, what do I say five years ago? Because if I had had this, even two months ago, when I was moving from Wemo stuff to Eve stuff, it would have been so great to have this. What do you do?

You say, okay, well, do you already have a device that you want to get the code for that's that's obviously the big one for me you say okay well get permission to go to home kit right and then uh say okay this is the eve room over my desk and you take a photo of it and now it's in there and it remembers it you can even then hit a button to add it to an NFC tag for use in the future. It's so handy. But if you're starting out with this, if you're just getting going with HomeKit, please get this app because it works with HomeKit. Meaning when you are adding it to your HomeKit system, you can take the photo right then. Set it and forget it.

You're done. It's all captured. This will not matter to you until a day it super matters to you so you think why would you need to store the codes well i'll tell you why once you've set everything up and you've plugged something in and it's underneath the desk and something's going weird and you want to reset it you have to climb under the desk unplug it to get the code if you're lucky if you're lucky like okay so like but then you know the great example of those is wemo where uh god i'm so mad at belkin and wemo they really screwed that pooch so bad over the years it's gotten stupider and stupider and i've finally given up but

anyway with wemos there was a time where first of all like you said it's not the size of a one plug it's like the size of a baby goat it's just this huge thing. And I was using rat tails just to get it onto a power strip, Mike. I had like, it looked like a Medusa of pain. But anyhow, but guess where they put it? It's on the back right next to the plug when it's supposed to be plugged in. And you're like, oh, God, really? Now, Eve, Eve, Eve stuff, they're real good about putting it like in a place. But there are innumerable kinds of devices where if you didn't keep that little piece of paper, you are SOL.

You know what I mean? So anyway, that's a dumb one, but I really liked it. I got one more that's really stupid. I want to say I heard about this from, I'm almost positive it was Dan Frakes. And sort of along the lines of Descript, as in like, what is this black magic? Dan Frakes saw this app called Brickit. Have you seen this? I don't think so.

Brickit. Brickit is, as I understand it, is an app made by fans of Lego building black bricks. And Brickit, I can't believe this works. And I did not believe it worked until I tried it. Okay, try this. If anybody out there, especially people with dumb babies like me,

you've probably got butt tons of Legos. Everybody reaches a fit of peak. It's not like you're gonna keep your Apollo on your desk all the time. Sometimes you just have giant boxes and boxes and boxes of old Lego pieces. You spread this out on the floor. You take a photo of it.

And it scans the entire thing and tells you what bricks you have and what you could make with it. No, it's impossible. Try it. You're looking at it and you're going, okay, this is cute. This is cute. This is going to be like one of those basic misdirection party tricks where you pull a quarter out of my ear or whatever.

You go, okay, look at the point of the floor. And it goes, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, skin, skin, skin. You have 117 Legos. You could make this dog. How cool is that? No. Yeah. It's called Brick It.

Check it out. And again, it's a community-based, we're not affiliated with Lego app. I am, I'm going to guess, I imagine it is leveraging some bananas library that's out there that you can do something cool with. And they, I'm guessing they adapted it to this. I mean, you've got to assume that the people building this, they just want to be hired

by Lego, right? Like everybody's dream is to be one of those Lego residents who gets to make fountains at Disney World or whatever. Like the designers or whatever they're called. They have that YouTube channel, which is really nice. Yes, yes, yes. Because this looks like a free app. Yes.

I mean, surely. I'm not here to say it's perfect. I can't say it's perfect, but here's what I did. I went into the closet. I grabbed two heaping handfuls of old Lego, many of which are from the Friends collection, which any Merlin man Stan will know is my favorite. I love the Creator series and I love the Friends series.

Friends are the ones that are for girls. That has all the good stuff. You can make a hot dog stand and it's so fun. Anyway, two heaping handfuls. I laid down like a towel and just spread them out real thin so that each one is visible and exposed. And like I said, I can't say that it's perfect, but I did take the same amount of Lego, mix it around, make it flat three times, and it was

within five Legos of like 117 three times. That's wild. It counted more or less correctly three times. So I would even say plus or minus 10% would be bananas good. You should try it. It's really fun. I'm going to download this and just throw some Lego on the ground and see what happens. Throw it on the ground, man. I mean, you should try it it's really fun i'm going to download this okay just

throw some lego on the ground see what happens throw it on the ground man i mean you know it's really though you know if if you ever have kids ending up in your life watch out for those brown legos because boy they'll take a man out they will really take a man out they hurt a lot when you step on a brown lego the brown ones hurt more and i couldn't even tell you why maybe it's sepsis i don't know marlin man thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Mike, for everything you do, for your audio work and being one of the suits. It's my favorite podcast network. It's a joy to have proximity to you. Thanks for having me on. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform to build your presence online and run your business. They have everything you need from websites and online stores to marketing

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They have these beautiful templates that use drag-and-drop tools that you can customize to make your own. So you can make it look and feel how you want. You can change the settings, the products you have on sale in just a few clicks. And everything's optimized for mobile as well. So it's going to look great on every device. You can use Squarespace to turn your big idea into a new website, give it that place to shine. You can showcase your work with their portfolio designs, publish your blog posts, promote your business, announce an event, and so much more. I have used Squarespace for so many of these things myself in the past. I find it so easy to go there and actually get what I want at the end of it.

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That is squarespace.com upgrade. And then when you sign up, use the offer code upgrade, and you will get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of this show and RelayFM. Mike!

Oh! Mike! Oh! Hello! Hi, Jason! Yeah, hi, Jason! Hashtag AskUpgrade, right? Yeah, I've been waiting here for up ask upgrade come on what's going on nothing snap to it mike ryan asks do you ever re-listen to podcast episodes not the ones that you appeared on per se but do you just do you ever re-listen to stuff i mean the listening i definitely don't listen to ones that i appear on which is also weird right because that means

we talked about this our listeners know remember more about what we say than we do because we don't listen to ones that i appear on which is also weird right because that means we talked about this our listeners know remember more about what we say than we do because we don't go back and sometimes listeners do i very very very rarely ever listen re-listen to a podcast episode it it has happened occasionally with like a particular favorite but there's so many podcasts out there that i struggle to even keep up with the new episodes of my favorite shows so i have re-listened to a couple of Flophouse episodes that are kind of classics. Somebody mentions it. What I actually prefer is when somebody's done like a video, like an animated version.

My way that I relive the funniest moments of the Flophouse is that there's a Flophouse YouTube channel where this guy Tony Oaker does these animations of classic bits. And those I will watch again and again. But that's the most reliving of a podcast I usually do. I have some shows that I have listened to a couple of times. They're more narrative.

So it's kind of like reading a book again or watching a movie again you know um and i've and like you right there are some shows some of my favorite shows of all time like i have an episode that i might have listened to multiple times um but outside of that for most of the stuff that i do listen to there kind of isn't really much of a need i think to listen again again for the majority of podcasts that I enjoy. I do appreciate that some people do it. I know that there's at least one podcast that I'm involved with that gets re-listened to by people every year, which is there's an incomparable episode that is the human centipede. And it is our holiday music episode.

Right, okay. And I have heard from, I mean, it's dozens of people who say that it is their go-to holiday listening tradition. Is they listen to this podcast episode that we did, like back in 2013. is they listened to this podcast episode that we did, like back in 2013. And as a result, I have gone back to the master files and generated the highest quality version of it using modern technology. We love high quality versions.

Well, people were listening to the unedited version of it. And I put a huge amount of work into the edited version. And then people are like, nope, we want the unedited version, which is really depressing. Right. Because it's like, but I tried to have it make more sense and be this edited version. People are like, nope, I just want to hear the whole thing go off the rails. And it's funny. So I went back and I like, I denoised those tracks.

And I like, I did an official, we'll put a link in the show notes. Enjoy it over the holidays, Crackling Fire and whatever else you can listen to this episode where we're terrible and say terrible things about holiday songs. But it's fun to be that because people check in every year and are like, I'm listening to it. And that's fun. I'm glad people get that out of it. I haven't done that with anything. I don't have a designated podcast listen that I do on a regular basis. Chris wants to know, how do you use tech for following and watching baseball at home,

on the go and at the ballpark? You want to take this one, Mike? Yeah, when I go out to the ball game, I make sure to have my special baseball communicator with me at all times. It's literally a baseball that talks to you. Yeah, and it's like, you don't understand what's going on here so let me help you let me tell you how the baseball works um how do i use tech for following watching baseball i mostly watch baseball on regular tv because it's not available in apps for my local team when i want to watch a baseball

game and my local team isn't playing i use mlb at bat i use the apple tv app which just got worse but it still works i have the app many apple tv apps recently yeah seriously i uh i will check in with my favorite team like looking at the score and stuff or even playing uh the audio of like the radio broadcast or something um at the ballpark not so much other than like occasionally i'll look to see like if there's a highlight or there's something i missed when i was out getting a hot dog or something like that but i don't know i mean the tech has made it my favorite thing about tech and baseball is that i can watch those other games and i will sometimes put those on in the background when i'm working. Or if I'm eating lunch or something like that,

if there's a game going on, I'll just pop it on. Or if the Giants aren't playing and there's another game in the evening, I might pop that on for a while, see different teams go see close games or interesting things going on. And that part has been the most fun, is buying the MLB package

and watching out-of-market games. But otherwise, I just, you know, I'm using the the app to if there's a game i didn't catch i will watch the highlights like the next morning or or that evening if it's a day game on my ipad that's about it i would assume that chris was also interested to know if you use any apps or anything to score games when you're at the park uh no. When I go to the ballpark, I do like to keep score, and I have a paper scorebook for that. I have

two of them from a bookstore that is out of business, and I filled one up. The last game we went to this year, the first game we went to this year was the last page in that book. So that book has got a lot of great memories in it, a lot of great history. But now I just have the remaining pages in the other book.

And then I'm going to have to get a new score book, which is a problem for another day. I'm going to have to figure out what I want in a new score book. But I do that on paper. I did it for my daughter's softball team. I used an app because it generated stats and stuff and i could email it to the coaches and stuff like that but and that was fun but like for watching a game just for fun it the reason i do it is because it's paper and pen and it's just sort of fun and focuses me and is also a souvenir at the end and b Brian asks, if Apple removes the lightning port from the iPhone,

do you think it would live on in things like the keyboard and trackpad charging method, or do you think they would also replace that with USB-C as well? I think that once lightning disappears from the iPhone, it will start disappearing from everything. from the iPhone, it will start disappearing from everything. I actually think it would go the other way around. I feel like it might be lost on the iPhone. Well, okay. So the premise here is if Apple removes the lightning port from the iPhone, what will happen to the rest of the stuff?

I think you might be right. Although to be fair, they did just release new trackpads and keyboards and their lightning charger. It's still there. Yeah, that's an interesting thought. It's still there. So while logically I might say that, maybe it would be the other way around.

Maybe they would keep it as a weird peripheral charger for longer, but I would just assume that the iPhone would lose it last because it makes perfect sense to have keyboards and trackpads charged by USB-C because they have loads of stuff that charges by usbc now i don't i don't know what is up with lightning and where it's going it does feel like kind of unnecessary but we have it so i mean i would love to be able to just and the thing is the moment they do it it's still going to be years of transition right

so that's that's the thing is i would like to be in that transition because I'd like to get to the other side where I don't have all these lightning cables around, but that's just how it is. So if you would like to send in a question for us to answer on an episode of upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade or use question mark, ask upgrade in the relay FM members discord, which you can get access to.

If you subscribe to upgrade plus go to get upgrade plus Discord, which you can get access to if you subscribe to Upgrade Plus. Go to getupgradeplus.com and you'll get longer episodes of Upgrade every single week with no ads as well. I would like to thank Privacy, Squarespace, Calm and Hello for their support of this episode. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com

and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. I'm at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. I would like to thank all of the guests I had on this week's episode. You can find the rest of their projects in the show notes. What? No, nothing.

Wait, did you hear that? No, it was nothing. Nothing, nothing. No. And thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody. Thank you.