Upgrade - 368: Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

It's the first-ever Upgrade Call-In Show! This week, Myke and Jason answer listener questions about Apple, themselves... and popular dance steps. Go ahead caller--we're listening.

From RelayFM, this is Upgrade, episode 368, and today's show is brought to you by Pingdom, Discourse, DoorDash, and Amazon Music. My name is Mike Hurley and I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike Hurley. Big show today. I'm listening. You're listening. Ah, that's good. That's good. Oh, baby, you hear that?

Toss salads and scrambled eggs. I know what you were trying to do there. So we are doing our first ever upgrade call-in show today. So throughout this episode, you're going to be hearing questions from our upgradians. And we're actually going to start with our hashtag snow talk question. Jason, can you cue it up? Is the caller there? Hi, Mike and Jason.

It's Ellen from Australia. My question is, when you're all able to get together again and have a big party, what's the canonical dance move that everybody knows? In Australia, it's the Nutbush. I had to look into this. Me too. The Nutbush, because, you know, I was worried. What are we talking about here?

We might not be able to run that in the episode. Yeah, for sure. The Nutbush is a dance that is to a Tina Turner song called Nutbush City Limits. And for some reason, this line dance has become very popular in Australia. And it is expected that all Australians know how to do the Nutbush. So I'll put some links in the show notes to both a video showing a bunch of Australians doing the Nutbush and the Wikipedia article. Is there one that immediately jumps to mind for you, Jason? Like a dance that everyone knows.

A dance that everyone knows. Well, first off, I tend not to be around places where people are dancing. Like if people start dancing, that's my cue to get out of there. So I don't know if there is. I'm sure it varies from, right? Like they're novelty dances. So there's certain phases of time where everybody knows. Sure, the Macarena.

You're dating me. But yeah, that's true. That was a dance craze. And there was a period in there where every uh dad knew oh what was it that every dad knew how to do that you know there's always the and then they embarrass every child with it now i can't even remember what it was there's dance crazes they happen i don't i don't have an answer here if i was forced to try to do a dance move of any kind it would be the robot just for irony reasons so i was trying to think of a dance like a like a group dance that

was equally perplexing i think to non-prone people don't live in the place you know like to everyone outside of australia it is absolutely perplexing that the nut bush is caught on so much so jason i would like to tell you about a dance called oops upside your head which is performed to the song I Don't Believe You Want to Get Up and Dance, parane, oops, retitled to Oops Upside Your Head because of the dance that came afterwards.

I've put a link in the show notes to a video here. It is, unfortunately, I didn't do a very good job really looking around wikipedia to find a good video and the main issue is because every video on uh youtube i should say where people are doing this dance they are incredibly drunk uh in in the uk this is typically done at weddings and you have to do this at the point where uh everyone is so drunk that they'll do it so i was ended up finding a like from a uh kids music youtube channel so it's much more tame which is a good thing in oops upside your head everybody sits down on the ground in a line so you sit directly behind the person behind you and mostly the song is you hitting uh the ground with your hands and clapping over your head and like moving backwards and forwards it's very strange i cannot describe it to you you just

have to watch it um there's lots of shimmying everybody knows how to do it everyone knows when this song starts at like a wedding in england it's like everyone's down on the ground. We all know what's going on. It's the same as like if there was a conga. It's that kind of idea. Yeah. I remembered what the dance move is that every suburban dad knows

and embarrasses their kids with and it's flossing. Oh, Jason, no. Yeah. Oh, Jason, no. Not me, but I can't tell you how many suburban dads I saw who learned how to floss so that they could embarrass their children. That upsets me.

That upsets me greatly. That was a great way to open the show. We do have some, before we get to many, many more questions today, we have some matters to settle. But usually you can send in a question to open the show with the hashtag Snell Talk. Just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk or use question mark Snell Talk in the RelayFM members Discord. I would like to give our upgradians an update on our fundraising efforts for St. Jude this year. As of recording, we have raised over $70,000 in our campaign, which is absolutely unbelievable. Thank you so much to everybody that has donated so far as we continue to work our way towards our fundraising goals for

this year. I want to tell you a little bit more about St. Jude and why we do this work. So September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and for the third consecutive year, we are all supporting the life-saving mission of St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. Their mission is finding cures and saving children, because cancer kills more children under the age of 14 than any other disease. Doctors from all 50 U.S. states and around the world refer their patients to St. Jude because they have the world's best survival rates for some of the most aggressive childhood cancers. St. Jude also provides thousands of free consultations for doctors treating children worldwide, including kids in your community.

This September, you can join RelayFM's efforts to raise the funds and awareness needed to treat and defeat childhood cancer by donating at stjude.org. Any donor making a single gift of $100 or more will receive an exclusive RelayFM sticker thanks pack at the end of the campaign. an exclusive RelayFM sticker, a thanks pack at the end of the campaign. And if you do donate and your company has a corporate matching program, please send us an email and we can have that amount routed through to the campaign. If you just email steven at relay.fm with any proof of your corporate matching, that will get added into our campaign total.

So also as well, if you are donating, check if your company has a matching scheme. So we'd really appreciate that. So throughout September as well, if you are donating, check if your company has a matching scheme. So we'd really appreciate that. So throughout September as well, there's going to be a bunch of milestone live streams put on by Stephen and myself. You can go to stjude.org slash relay. You can find out what they are, when they're going to be. So go to stjude.org slash relay.

Let's cure childhood cancer together. I got some follow up and little items for you, Jason. There's one thing that we kind of just have to cover today, but ultimately I think it's kind of ridiculous. Honestly, I'm happy we have such a busy show so we don't have to spend a bunch of time talking about this. I actually haven't posted about this on Six Colors either because there's really nothing that I would say other than that this is nothing. And don't try to ascribe more meaning to it because there isn't any. Apple settles a class action lawsuit with u.s developers they put out a big

press release about this a bunch of newspapers and stuff wrote some stories i really liked a piece by ben thompson today on chatechory i think it was the daily update basically saying like apple tricked a bunch of large media companies into thinking that this was something that was really good for developers but actually kind of nothing changed and maybe some things kind of got worse i want to run through the things from this class action lawsuit this settlement that was made that apple have stated they're going to maintain the small business program for three years in its current form. This is where they give developers who make under a million dollars 15% instead of 30%.

I think this is worse for two ways. One, it's saying it's for three years. Was it going to be more or less? Who knows? In its current form, the current form isn't good enough. So hooray. They've reiterated a bunch of App Store search rules and reiterated that they're going to keep their rejection appeal process in place. Apple has stated that developers can email customers about other payment options. I think we'll come back to that one.

They're adding more price points, over 500 possible price points for a developer. They're going to make an annual transparency report, and they've created a $100 million small developer assistance fund. This is branding for the payout for this class action lawsuit. So developers, if they meet the conditions required,

can apply to receive money. And then by taking that money, they cannot take any further legal action against Apple for these things. But the lawyers who did all of this work are apparently trying to take 30% of that $100 million. Of course. So it's all great.

The thing that people originally thought was exciting, but it turns out just isn't, is that developers can email customers about payment options. This is no change to anything that really like, really, I mean, Apple tried to have some rules, but there was no way that they could have discovered or enforced these rules before. They don't give you an email list. You have to have acquired the email list. Anyone could have emailed their customer base and said, oh, by the way, you can pay us on our website. I don't think it's made a difference to absolutely anything. But now it's like,

if you were worried Apple was going to kick you out of the store over this, then they can't now. This is... So essentially, there was a class action lawsuit. The people suing were not going to get anything out of Apple. So they settled. The settlement

lets Apple announce that they settled a lawsuit, which makes... And you're exactly right, it makes a lot of people who don't know a lot about the current situation in the App Store think that there's progress here. It makes Apple look like they are settling with developers and solving these controversies that are out there, when in fact the settlement essentially doesn't require Apple to give anything away other than this hundred million dollars which is spun as rather than as a settlement as a an assistance fund so it's

actually spun as apple helping developers um there's essentially nothing changes here it is it is it is a pr maneuver to make apple look like it's changing when it's not changing. And that PR move is to signify to the people who think that Apple have to change their what's called steering provisions, which is where they make you pay. They don't allow you to tell people to pay outside or whatever. This makes it seem like they're backing down on that. But really, they haven't changed anything at all no because all of the restrictions are they're agreeing to allow developers to do something that developers already basically could do

um and the rules about what developers can't do like there's a lot of a lot of stories sort of made assumptions especially initial stories after this was announced by apple and and of course apple did did this as a press release and a briefing and all these things to steer it in the way that they wanted it to be covered. And so people took it as being maybe what Apple said of being a big deal. And the truth is that a lot of the details when you burrow down into them are completely unchanged from how it was before. So while there may be some little things that happen, at least in the US, because this is an American lawsuit, and I believe only covers the United States anyway, really, it's nothing other than Apple PR. And if there are small changes, they're so small as to be immaterial or beside the point, right? Like adding more price points is maybe a change, but doesn't,

it's not what this is about, right? It's Apple giving ground on something that doesn't matter. And that isn't what people are watching Apple for. So this is a, this is essentially Apple reaping a PR benefit out of this class action lawsuit. They pay a hundred million dollars and they get to look like they're burying the hatchet with developers when it's actually this one class action suit.

I mean, and honestly, like James Thompson's posted in the Discord, this just makes it even more BS than it currently already is. All of the, even those rules

about the email, it's like US only. So like, you know what? We've already given this more time. I don't want to spend the rest of this episode getting angry about this because I just, I will. No, the point I think we need to tell people

who listen to Upgrade is, if you saw a story over the weekend that said Apple was burying the hatchet with developers and making substantive changes to the app store in order to make developers happy, that's not true. That's not true. That's not really what happened. And we're basically not in any different state

than we were before, unless Apple's PR move here somehow provides a fig leaf for politicians or whoever to say, oh, Apple's shaping up. But anybody who knows anything about this, including all the developers we know, all the people like the Coalition for App Fairness people were quoted in a lot of these stories.

It's a nothing. It's just nothing. Let's do a couple of Apple TV Plus headlines for Upstream. Ted Lasso cleaned up at the first annual, they called it that, Jason, HCA TV tv awards i was so excited i i tuned into their youtube channel for a little bit and they called it the first annual hollywood critics association tv awards who are the hollywood critics association what is that that's a well founded in late 2016 says the apple press release very prestigious yeah this. Yeah, this is a new thing.

This was a rebrand of a previous award ceremony, I think. I was looking into this. But this was a legit, like, this seemed to be something that people were excited about before today. I tuned in and they had a bunch of people there. This seems to be a deal. I don't know why. But Apple won, or Ted Lasso lasso for ted lasso best streaming

series in a comedy best actor in a comedy for jason sudeikis best supporting actor for brett goldstein who plays kent uh roy kent uh best supporting actress for hannah waddingham who plays rebecca um that they got all of those for ted lasso so far they also uh rupert grint for servant won best actor in a streaming series for drama so that's pretty good outing and i think this is gonna be you know look we said this before the start of a very big award season for ted lasso yeah speaking of ted lasso uh i was on an episode with you and brian hamilton wife, Adina, uh, of football is life, which is the incomparables episode by episode recap podcast of Ted Lasso. And so you can go and check that out.

It's episode 16 of the show for series two, episode six, the signal, which was a really interesting episode. And I'm very happy that I was able to, to be a part of the recap for that one. Yeah, we have a good time.

That was a fun, fun time. A lot of podcasts this weekend for me but that was a good one and the problem with john stewart will be debuting on september 30th they had a little teaser trailer that i enjoyed today i enjoyed this teaser trailer way more than i did the uh teaser sketch that they did yeah yeah and they also i don't know if this was news or not. I couldn't remember. But one of the jokes in it, I won't spoil it, but it references like,

why didn't I just start a podcast? And there is going to be a companion podcast, which is actually available to subscribe to now in Apple Podcasts. Yeah, of course. I'm excited for the show. I don't really know what to expect, honestly. So I'm pretty jazzed about it.

Yeah, yeah, it'll be good to see Jon Stewart again. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by our friends over at Discourse. Discourse was founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood from Stack Overflow, Robin Ward, and Sam Safran. It is a powerful, flexible, open-source community platform where discussions are searchable, so you're able to find all of the relevant details for your project or community. The platform is designed with moderation in mind, helping you keep the discussion on track and high value while minimizing the impact of trolls, and it integrates with Zapier, Patreon, Memberful, and so many more.

I've spent a bunch of time looking in the Mac Power Users discourse forum so they have one for Mac Power Users and I really love how easily and neatly everything is presented and laid out. Like now that I have seen and used discourse I never want to look at any other old looking forum again. Like this is what everyone should be using. What I like is that not only can you choose different ways to display things, like hot topics or latest topics, everything's nice and searchable and it loads really smoothly and fast and doesn't feel like it was made 30 years ago, like a lot of forums do. Discourse offers a 100% 14-day free trial. After that, plans start at $100 a month.

And the folks over at Discourse are giving Upgrade listeners 50% of your first two months after you start your subscription. So just go to discourse.org, that's D-I-S-C-O-U-R-S-E.org. Use the coupon code RELAY2021 when signing up. That's discourse.org and the code RELAY2021 for 50% of your first two months.

I also want to mention that they have a new offering called Discourse for Teams. This is perfect for small teams or businesses looking to use Discourse to collaborate, because it is a private, focused Discourse instance with added features like a new sidebar, automatic icebreaker tools, team updates, and more to help groups of people work together more effectively. There isn't currently enough code for the teams, but the plans start at just $20 a month. If you want to learn more about that, you can go to teams.discourse.com. Our thanks to Discourse for their support of this show and RelayFM.

All right, let's get to our Ask Upgrade Out Loud questions. We have so many, it will probably be the rest of the entire show. Kick us off, Jason. All right, here's our first one. This is Chance from Illinois. I wanted to ask if you think the 12-inch MacBook could make some sort of comeback in the future with an M1 chip. Thanks for answering, and happy summer of fun! I'm Chance, and this is my question.

I like his presentation. Chance has an incredible voice. So good, very good, and good work on Summer of Fun, Chance, but it wasn't. Yes. It wasn't enough. It's not your strongest. Summer of Fun! That's it, you really got to do it.

I left you hanging there. Oh, that's fine. Summer of fun! That's how you really got to do it. I left you hanging there. Oh, that's fine. Summer of fun! Yeah, you can see Chance was embarrassed to be shouting that so loudly. He was. So they held it back. 12-inch MacBook, Jason. I mean, this is what we all thought was going to be the first M1 Mac for a time.

Well, I'd like to tell you there's a chance. Oh, no, I don't have a little uh sound effect for it's probably all for the best um the 1200 yeah i mean i would love to see apple make a proper light thin macbook air basically that is um that is even smaller than the one that they've got. I'm not sure it's ever going to happen, but I would really like to see them sort of differentiate the MacBook Air from the MacBook Pro. The problem is that the rumors suggest that there is a new MacBook Air coming and that it's going to be another 13 inch MacBook Air. Um, the 13 inch MacBook Air isn't much, um, bigger than the old 11 inch MacBook Air in most dimensions, but every time I, cause I have

a 12 inch MacBook here at home, every time I pick it up, I realize, oh yeah, the MacBook Air could be so much thinner and lighter. I hope they do it someday. I think there's room for it. Um, my fear is that they look at, at the popularity of the 11-inch Air compared to the 13-inch and just don't think it's a place they need to go. And then the 12-inch MacBook also didn't apparently sell that well because they didn't keep it around. But I would love to see it because thin, light, tiny laptops are awesome. So I hope so uh if i had to predict i would predict not but i think there's still a chance and i'm gonna hold that hope for that i mean they can always make or not not necessarily but they can always try to just make the 13 inch physically smaller it's still

you know just keep trying to make it smaller and smaller would help. I think I would also like it because I really love that form factor of a laptop. I think the problem is just in the market, like the overall market, 12 inches is strange for a laptop. Like there isn't a lot of competition there. And I think that that could end up harming Apple because people probably want to have a decent size screen on their laptop. And it kind of feels like the industry is settled on 13 as that size. And people ascribe some amount of value to screen size too. I think that's the problem is some of us look at it and think, oh, wow, if I could get a 12-inch MacBook that's super thin and light and all, that would be great. But I think a lot of people say, well, yeah, but there's this 13-inch, right?

Like, there's the bigger one. I want the bigger one. Also, interfaces, like, I don't know. I feel like Apple is maybe not comfortable with an interface on a Mac that small, that they want them all to be a little bit bigger than that. And all the bulk of the laptops that Apple sells are 13 and 15 or maybe soon to be 14 and 16. But in the range of 13 to 16, it's already 16. But there's the rumor that the 13 Pro is going to be a 14. So let's just say Apple's comfortable with 13 to 16-inch laptop displays.

And the 14-inch MacBook Pro is enough to start differentiating it from the Air, and they redesign the Air, and they're happy with that. So that's the most likely scenario for sure. What's our next question? This one is for you. My name is Brent, and I'm from the Kansas City area in Missouri. My question is mainly for Mike. I know that you used to do most of your work on an iPad,

and you now have switched and do most of it on a Mac. I'm wondering what kind of pain points did you have going from the iPad back to the Mac? Thank you, Brent. So I think one of the things that was beneficial for me is I was still a heavy Mac user when I was a predominantly iPad user. So it wasn't like, like, if I switched to Windows, it would have been a nightmare, right? It's like I tried to work out how to reuse a computer again. So it wasn't really that harsh, but there are some things that were trickier. So, I mean, I've spoken about this before. I don't think I'm ever going to get used to just how messy windowing can be on a Mac compared to the iPad. I mean, and you can say, and I agree that the iPad can be too limiting

at times, but I sure would love something in the middle. And I've never found a automatic window resizing application that I've liked. Like it's just, there's just something about it. This doesn't sit with me, but I can, I can live with it. The biggest thing was the lack of shortcuts for the Mac. So I'm super excited about Monterey. I'm thinking like I like to not install the latest version of macOS like straight away, but I feel like I'm not going to be able to resist shortcuts. And so we'll probably be putting it on all of my devices pretty quickly after it comes out.

And I would say overall, I feel like some apps were like kind of missing on the Mac. Like even though there are apps on the Mac that obviously I cannot get on my iPad, which is obviously an important thing. But I feel like there was some stuff where I kind of had to use the web browser more because the web browser isn't really good enough on iOS.

So companies make apps and then the apps have additional features or feel different. Like, for example, I kind of wished that I didn't have to use Google Docs and Sheets in the browser. I would actually prefer an application for them so I could just open it and close it. Because otherwise I have all these like Google google sheets in tabs open all the time when it would be much nicer for me if i could just open an app and they're all there instead like just a little thing but something that i would prefer but overall i will say that my transition back to the mac has been pretty seamless so far and i'm actually really happy

i have just something you just said made me think of a, I know they've got a lot to do this summer, but a future direction for the Safari team, which is why do we have to have single site browsers? Why is that not a feature of Safari? I should be able to take a

site or a very particular tab and say, can you put this in a separate or a tab group item in the doc or a tech? Yeah. In the doc, right. You don't need to even call it an app, but say,

put it in the doc so that I could take Gmail or Google docs or whatever. And maybe I can do it per domain, or maybe I can just do it per tab, but say like, put this in the doc. And why, when I mean put it in the doc, I also mean

that if i quit safari it either doesn't close that thing that's in the dock or it says would you like safari to stay running i see that you've got other things in the dock right like i don't know why site single site browsing is not just other than that it's a little esoteric but like that's such a great feature like why the web is so expansive people do so many different things with the web i appreciate that they've done tab groups but the the reason i don't keep things alive i don't want to keep things alive in safari and i always prefer an app or a single site browser is because it's so easy to close browser windows and lose the thing that you were working on.

And it's cluttery and it would allow you to manage it. So I'm just going to throw that out there, a half formed feature idea that I would really love it if Safari would embrace the idea that maybe you need more dock items, not necessarily for every website, but on a user choice basis to, to put things in the,

in a separate, it's not even a separate process. I mean, all Safari windows are a separate process anyway, but the idea that you would have like another organizational instance that you could hide and show that would appear in the doc to bring it forward. And all of those things that we use the doc for instead of all of these sort of,

you know, hacks to make a WebKit or Chromium fake app that loads a web page because those are never really that great. Zach's made a great point in the Discord. They already do this on iOS for single pages. That's true. You can go to the Mac too

and put multiple pages in it or something. That's true. That would be, yeah, you can save it to your homepage and then it acts like it's an app. What we're looking for here, Apple, is a sweet solution to this problem. Can you help us out? I like that idea that instead of us trying to struggle with this, what if we said, can I take my Google Docs

and just make a kind of a fake app that you can put an icon on it or whatever? But like, it's really just Safari. It's just in a different space, in a different place. but it's really just Safari. It's just in a different space, in a different place, and it's in my dock. Let's get on to the next question. All right. Hey, this is Brad from Missouri. What do you think the current state of HomeKit is in terms of priority at Apple? Do either of you use HomeKit primarily or something else? I'm all HomeKit. I use Home home bridge to bridge my stuff to home kit i use the home kit app i have some home kit automations not that many but some i have it

wired to various controllers uh as well like switches and things and my tv set up for a while when i still had my uh i still do have my tivo it's just sort of deactivated and i'm i'm playing the shows off of it that i want to watch before we unplug it and it's officially discontinued. That switch, I had a little smart switch that like sets the receiver and the TV to the right thing so that the TiVo works. I'm all using, I'm using all that stuff.

Now in the long run, Homebridge, like Homebridge exists because a bunch of people made smart devices that didn't work with HomeKit the Matter Alliance is supposed to change this but it's not here yet it's delayed as well isn't it in the meantime I am reluctant to buy

any tech that does not work with HomeKit I'm open to the idea if I can find a Homebridge plugin for it to give it a try but I'm really trying to limit myself to HomeKit stuff whenever possible. In fact, this came up because we were having some issues with my smart lock, which turned out to be that it's bad at telling you that its batteries are dying. And it starts to behave weirdly. It doesn't just shut off.

It just sort of stops stops doing some stuff. Sometimes when the batteries get low, we play some batteries and it's good. And that's good because while I could buy another lock, two things. One is Wirecutter updated their pick for the best smart lock. And it's a really interesting lock that's got a fingerprint scanner on it, which would be super great for easy access. You just walk up to the door and put your thumb on it and it opens. I love it. But it doesn't do HomeKit and there's no HomeBridge plugin for it.

And I thought, do I really want to, like, I could use it because I don't do a lot of HomeKit stuff related to the, to the smart lock, but I do have one automation related to it that I think is kind of nice where if it auto unlocks the lock at night, the lights turn on inside so you can see where you're going. So I would really rather wait. And then number two is Apple announced their whole home key thing and the idea that you should be able to do UWB, right, ultra wideband U1 chip kind of smart locks,

which are going to be way better than the Bluetooth LE stuff that's out there now. And I really want to wait for that. But part of my hesitation about getting a new smart lock is actually that the one that is the most recommended now doesn't do HomeKit. It's like, I don't think I want to go down that route where I've got, you know, we'll open the amazon app for this one like no i don't i don't want to do that i want it available on all of my assistants and my watch and all of those things i like home kit that's like my

preferred but in the past i've tried to get devices that would at least cover like amazon echo as well just in case. And there are actually quite a lot of products in certain categories that you can use with multiple. Ultimately, I find a lot of the home automation stuff to just be too tricky right now. So I'm like crossing my fingers and hoping that Matter ends up solving all of my problems. Like Homebridge, for example, like I set up Homebridge here at the studio and then all of a sudden one day just stopped working because for some reason the clock went out of sync on the little box that I used and it was just impossible to ever fix.

And so I decided, well, what happened to me was exactly what I thought was going to happen, which was something was going to happen with my Homebridge set up one day and it was going to make me never want to use it again. And that thing exactly happened, which is why I would never, had never planned to bring that to my home because I'm not going to inflict that on my family. I only use Homebridge because I bought, like I don't buy, like I said, I don't buy stuff and think, oh, well, I'll just attach this to Homebridge. Like if it matters.

Hey, was that a pun? It matter. Yes, that was not a pun, but sure it does. It matters to me that something is HomeKit enabled unless I'm not planning on really using it using a smart buying decisions, right? Like I don't want to have to keep using Homebridge forever. It's a back, like I have an old Nest thermostat, right? It's like, it's on Homebridge now, which means I can see it in the Home app. That's great.

But I wouldn't buy a new thermostat that didn't support HomeKit. That's not going to happen. So it needs to be, now maybe I will be able to buy like another Nest thermostat sometime that supports Matter. And so it works with HomeKit and everything is good. But I totally, I'm with you.

I mean, HomeBridge is fine, but I'd really rather not have to rely on some software running on a computer somewhere in order to stitch my whole smart home together. Before we move on, a bit of breaking news. I don't think we have time to cover this today, but I'll just put it in here for the sake of it. Apple have acquired a classical music streaming service called Prime Phonic. And they're going to be, I think, offering a separate application and having this content available. But yeah, interesting. They're going to take down Prime Phonic later this year. They're going to integrate a lot of the classical content into Apple Music now, and they are apparently going to release an Apple Music classical app. And we used to,

Kirk McElhern, who still writes about this, and I can't wait to see what he says about this story, because he's like the classical streaming music beat guy for Macworld for years. He was our go-to to write all the ways that Apple Music and iTunes never, ever really understood how classical music fans listen to music. So I think this is kind of cool because I know that background and I know that Apple, you know, for all of Apple's talk about loving all kinds of music, Apple's never really been very good at classical. And this purchase basically gets them classical music knowledge and technology, lets them integrate it to Apple Music. And I think it's telling that they're going to do a classical music app because Apple's kind of mental model of how music works is not a good fit for classical.

So fans of classical music, and they are out there, and I know some of them, and I know how frustrated they've been by the digital music revolution because it has not been as good for them as it has been for those of us who like pop music. Classics like the Eagles, right? The Eagles, Dire Straits, that kind of thing. Classical music is like Jimi Hendrix, yeah. Yeah, that's basically a Star Trek joke. You made a Star Trek joke there. I think that that's how they refer to popular music

in the future is classical music. Who's our next caller? Hello, Mike and Jason. Eric from Vancouver, Canada calling in. I thought as a former siri enthusiast it would be fun to ask what area feature or service do you feel apple could be doing a much better job with immediately photos jumped to my mind and you are much more of a photos person than me oh boy yeah i have to be but there was just when i when when eric said service because i think all the other services kind of kind of

i think mostly okay for what i want to use them for but it's just there are some features for photos like two major features for photos that other services competing services do a better job with and it's surprising to me that Apple don't yet offer this functionality, which is like proper family sharing, like actual real family sharing. Like we can have a library and we all get to share it. They have built so many features to not do family sharing. And they're all really weird.

Like all of the sharing stuff that's available right now is really strange and i would very much like to have a family like a full family sharing feature or even just like for me like to just quickly have like a way to opt some photos into being shared amongst the family you know like which is not really a thing that happens now there has to be very much this like and then they put man i've installed the ios beta on my phone now um and that like the for you feature with adding images directly to my photo library is i think genuinely one of the worst features apple has added to ios in a very long time i i don't want messages like i don't want images that are sent to me in imessage to show up in my photo library even if they're from events where you were present but that's not real but

then i'm gonna save them if somebody sends me a message right and i want it you don't like that they show their they show up at the library automatically you want to just have that be me i think that may be an option but you're right the idea is i found it there's an option it's only for events where you were present right it's only so it's not people text you things they don't that's not true like i mean i know that's what they said but it's like for example that's how it's supposed to work like adina sent me a picture of something at home while i was here at the studio a couple of days ago and it's in my library huh yeah that's not supposed to be it's location and time yeah and that's not what happens like or like you know like uh like another one like

adina went to the dentist and she sent me a picture of her smile afterwards she's at the dentist i'm at the studio now like maybe it's because it's like it knows we're in a family together or whatever but this isn't what i want like if i want whatever images i want i will save them like i don't need this stuff and they have that nice feature now in messages where you can just tap it's so good yeah i love that but then all these random images start showing up in my library like i don't want that that's not so good and i mentioned this before i want better control over memory features apple have added some more things like don't show me this person i don't know why i have to be reactive why i can't be proactive like why can i not proactively say

like go in and say don't ever show me this person or this event or this time period in memories like because you may be able to do it for a person let me see i could find that one out but there's still like there are things you can say like don't show me this event or this place or anymore but like i want i want i want much more like proactive stuff than that. If you can do it for a person, I don't know how it is. No, it's just like feature less. Like that's it.

Oh, yeah. OK, never feature this person. I don't know why. If you press feature less, it pops up and says, would you like to never feature this person? It's like, OK, well,

I don't know why we've got less and never. So you can do that in iOS 15. You can go into the faces area you can select the little three dots do feature less and then choose to never but like that's not everything like i still want time periods all kinds of stuff i don't know why i have to do this stuff after the fact but for me anyway with photos it's much more the sharing stuff just isn't good enough i think yeah i think you you nailed it and eric mentioned siri and we beat on siri but like siri needs to be better um that's that's just like

i think that's the easiest one is siri needs to be better and i would say more broadly i don't know some of their learning stuff doesn't impress me every now and then i get impressed when it's like it's suggesting me something an app or a or but like i don't use the siri watch face and that's not the voice siri that's like apple's device intelligence and it just does not impress me um i think all that stuff needs to be better but um i think i think you make a good point about photos photos has gotten a lot better i think the last few years in terms of some of this stuff but it's got a long way to go hi jason and mike i'm manoj from manco canada a hypothetical scenario let's assume both of you are given a choice to replace an Apple-provided official app

with an indie app. What would it be? We're big in Vancouver. I love it. So we can replace any app that Apple ships with one of our own. Where are you leaning? I don't know. This is hard for me to pick one i could have i think i could have a few honestly fantastic al for calendar yeah that's a good one

um pocket cast overcast castro for podcast and it will literally pick your poison like i'm fine uh obviously p calc right but the calculator over p calc sure james was just in an article about Sure, literally. Pick your poison, like I'm fine. Obviously, PCALC, right? Sure. The calculator over PCALC. Sure. James was just in an article about actually this kind of thing on The Verge. I'll put that link in the show notes in case people want to read it. Oh, you mean friend of the show James Thompson, author of PCALC?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think Fantastic Hal would be my number one choice, and number two would probably be Overcast, think fantastic how would be my uh number one choice and number two would probably be overcast or literally any other podcast app other than apple podcast is fine the other ones i think are better sometimes i think that castro is the most apple-like podcast app in the sense that it's opinionated and opinionated in a way that I feel like Apple would be opinionated about, like, it looks really good and it has a way of working and you're going to use it that way.

And I don't mean that negatively. I mean, that's the kind of stuff that Apple does, is be like, why is it like this? Because we think this is the best way. Like, all right. But as a third-party app, it's a little bit different. But yeah, Fantastic Cat would be the number one example. Dan Morin and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago um about calendar stuff and how bad like i i'm actually using mime stream the email program which also i would say is is uh which is by somebody who used to work on apple mail and it just works with Gmail now. But like- It's so good. It's like Apple Mail, but also good. And on the Mac, like you look at calendar and you look at mail and you look at some of these apps

that have been around forever. And I don't understand, like Apple must just think that they're good enough as it is. But I find that funny given how aggressive Apple is about updating like notes and reminders like the notes and reminders people are possessed with getting better and i i um i actually wrote a piece about this last week on six colors about how like they added in smart uh collections which which they you know apple's always sort of basically implied that you

don't need smart albums and photos and you don't need to be able to edit smart playlists and music on on ipads and iphones because it's too complicated and then they're like nope we're in ios 15 we're putting in smart lists for reminders and like we're going to show you this huge like this is how you do this kind of thing right when you yeah and we're we're just going to embrace it in fact i i immediately had the thought which is next year in ios 16 they're going to do their take on um on rome and notion and obsidian and stuff like that i think i was 16 the notes notes is going to be totally about like linking between notes and stuff and they'll do it again in an apple way where it'll be like super sanded down smooth and and and and all of that but i think they're they're still going to do that and i won't be

surprised when that happens at all because the notes and reminders team are really pushing things forward whereas and safari you know we can complain about safari but like they tried trying new stuff whereas like mail is just dead and calendar is. And there are so many frustrating things in Calendar that Fantastical has picked up and is doing. And then you go over to Calendar and you're like, oh, right. It doesn't do any of these things. And I mean, I know Fantastical has esoteric features too. That's how you survive as a third-party app. But some of Fantastical's features really should be table stakes. And yet the Calendar app is just like,

meh, good enough. And that infuriates me is the system apps that Apple seems to have decided are good enough and that they don't ever want to revisit again. Because Mail is my favorite example and I don't have a replacement for it.

There are a bunch of apps that are trying this, but the fact that Apple Mail has never even once tried to understand that maybe you want to auto filter things on iOS or you want to have it do a kind of a learning based filter or defer messages for a while or, you know, like you could or have a priority inbox or like there are all these things they could try that a bunch of other people have tried in the last 15 years. And instead, Apple Mail is like, it's not that different from the Next Mail app that was its origin, right?

And it was Steve Jobs' Mail app. And that's why Mail exists, is that Steve Jobs wanted them to build the Next Mail app on Mac OS X. And so they did. And it is a direct line from that, build the Next Mail app on Mac OS X. And so they did. And it is a direct line from that more or less. And I don't know, it's just it's so disappointing when Apple abandons these system apps and sort of just says, yeah, good enough. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Amazon Music. Since you're listening to this show,

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listening habits change, there's always something new for me to find. Whether it's something tech-focused or news-focused, comedy, or even friends playing D&D, there is a podcast to listen to. I also love listening to podcasts all the time, wherever I am. Having an app in my pocket opens the world to me for whoever I want to listen to, and all my favorites are available right there in Amazon Music. I was poking around a couple of days ago, listening to some stuff. Everything's there. I could search for it super easy, find the podcast, press play, done. If you've never tried Amazon Music Unlimited, now is a great time because for a limited time, new customers can try Amazon Music Unlimited free for 30 days, no credit card required. Just go to amazon.com slash upgradefm. That's amazon.com slash upgrade fm that's amazon.com slash upgrade fm to try amazon music unlimited

free for 30 days one last time amazon.com slash upgrade fm it renews automatically but you can cancel at any time terms apply our thanks to amazon music for their support of this show and all of relay fm let's get our next question all right here it is hey this is joel calling in from peters canyon regional park in tustin california for my out loud upgrade outgrade question if i'm looking to get a new mac this fall am i better off with a decked out macbook pro that i want to use at my desk and away from it or a mac mini and a macbook air for the same price thanks bravo for the outgrade it didn't matter what question joel had this one was going in the episode if you don't remember in august of 2020 jason and i created a fake scout soundscape in

an episode called outgrade where we pretended to be outside. It sounds like Joel was actually outside, which was better than what we did. But all right, so which Mac? So which would you have if you were in Joel's situation? Two Macs or one Mac? I have lived both of these lives. I think, okay, two things.

One is, the premise here is you buy a more expensive, more capable Mac, or for that price, you could buy two cheap Macs. I'm not sure, like, yeah, I guess there's a way to do that. If you bought a super pricey MacBook Pro when it comes out versus what, you a 24-inch iMac and a or a Mac mini and a MacBook Air I think you're going to be happier with a more powerful Mac and if it's a laptop you can get an external display and you can dock it which is jankier than the alternative but you can can get a dock, you know, get a Thunderbolt dock or something like that. So you have one plug to plug it in and that works pretty well. And I, I've done that for a long time. And the most important thing is even in this era where we have iCloud and Dropbox and things like that, I have, so, you know, Mike, I went several years

where I basically never used my MacBook Air, my old MacBook Air, other than occasionally for like a big deal podcast interview in New York City, like the ones that we did, some stuff like that where I did it. Mostly it just sat here at home and I didn't use it. And recently I've been using my MacBook Air, my new M1 MacBook Air more. more. And what it's reminded me is I go to my mom's house in Arizona for a week and I'm opening up my MacBook Air ready to do my job. And I do a thing that I always do on my iMac at home and nothing happens because that keyboard shortcut isn't set up or that macro didn't sync, or I didn't put in the right SSH key or like whatever it is. And it's always happening because those two computers are not in sync. Even every time I open it up, there's something where it's like, oh yeah, this doesn't work on this computer.

So those are my reasons for saying you probably should just get one really really good computer instead of two okay computers and the benefit's going to be that you don't have to keep it in sync i agree with you very much on that point like i run two macs right now with one mac at home that never gets used unless i'm in an emergency because because i couldn't move it because who knows the pandemic if i have to record at home. And these computers just are never in a similar state to each other. In a little bit, I'm going to actually come back to this idea of using a laptop and plugging it in because that's also not a perfect experience. I'll talk about that.

We've got a question later on, which I want to touch on that a little bit more. We've got a question later on, which I want to touch on that a little bit more. But I think I would suggest that unless you have some needs that dictate a difference in hardware, you know, like that maybe you need an incredibly powerful machine, but you want a lightweight laptop, you know, then that's fine. But other than that, I would recommend like you just get one powerful computer, whether it's a laptop that you take with you, or it's a desktop and you just only ever work on the desktop. So shout out to Nate for plugging his stuff in his question. It's always good.

Nate was smart because I'll say most plugs, there were many plugs, got edited out. Got cut out. I couldn't cut out nate's because of how he was talking otherwise he was saying hi i'm nate and like he wouldn't have it would have sounded weird when i try to get it out that's a good work the conjunctions of where he what of the site that he wanted to promote and his status as an educator which was key to the question were phrased in a way where they flowed from each other.

So you beat us, Nate. Bravo. You got it through. So well, well played. We'll get you next time. Yeah.

Yeah. You'll get yours, Nate. Um, I, so the question is about Apple and education, but I feel like we could even pull back and just say, this is a question about Apple in various markets,

which is I've learned over god way too many years of of following apple that apple what makes apple great in in a sense is its focus on its core markets and you know modern apple i would say this was a little less true in the 90s when the Apple did have less focus. And in the 2000s, when they were coming back, they started to lose this. But the modern Apple of the last 15 years, especially, the focus is on the end user and delighting the end user and making a product that regular people who buy a computer will like or a phone or a tablet. That's what they care about. And they build their products. It's in their DNA.

They build their products that way. That's what it's for. And everything else is, I don't want to say an accident but it's beside the point so like i did back in june i did that uh the report card about apple in enterprise oh yeah yeah yeah and one of the things you know that comes up in something like that is oh apple doesn't really do this and they have this thing but it's not and like apple's got making a lot of effort in the enterprise market and that's all true but at its core the computers that it's selling the phones that it's selling into the enterprise market are just the computers they make for regular people like they don't they don't they don't do anything beyond that that's what apple Apple is about. And so your question, Nate, about Apple

and education, I would say Apple might make a move there versus Chromebooks, or they might not, but it'll only happen because of where Apple wants to take the iPad. That's it, like for everybody. And so if Apple's vision for the future of the iPad happens to take it in a place where it's going to do well in education, then it will do that. But it's not going to steer the iPad in a particular direction for the education market. It's just never going to do that because it's not going to steer its products, I think, anywhere for anything other than the idealized customer, which is a single person who walks into an Apple store and is delighted by a piece of hardware. That's their core belief. That's what they build the products for. And

everything else just comes, you know, even though Tim Cook and Luca Maestri will get on these analyst calls every quarter and say, like Luca does, he's like, let me give you some examples of Fortune 500 companies that have adopted our hardware, right? He's reading from his thing, and he'll be like, this bank got iPads for all of its tellers and this airline is using ipads for their flight manuals and they boast about it and i get it but in the end that's not luck but it's it's adding things on the edges building around the core which is this idealized customer that they want to delight with their hardware. So that's my long-winded version of saying, will Apple make more of a go of it in education? Maybe if its vision of the future aligns with what education wants. And I think the reason that Chromebooks are doing so well in education is because it doesn't right now.

To build on what you were saying which i actually kind of i hadn't thought of it like that and i do like it like apple are not going to ever make an education focused ipad neither are they going to make changes to the ipad line that will make it more appealing to the education market right because then that changes the product for everyone and they're not going to do that. Neither are they going to make a low-cost MacBook that would be more appealing to the education market, right? The most that they will do is what they currently do, which is keep products around for education customers that other customers can't buy, which are older versions. But that's probably not also what you want. Because what Nate was saying, repairability and stuff like that like it's just not apple's bag like the the last the last product that apple i can remember

that apple made for a targeted market was the emac which was for those who don't remember the imac made the transition from the g3 imax that were based on a crt to the g4 imax that were a lcd and so they were a lot more a floating display on the little Chrome arm. And then ultimately they went to the iMac that we know of today. They were a lot more expensive. And education very much is like selling that MacBook Air with the education price for a while after it had even stopped being sold to other people. even stop being sold to other people. The iMac G3 was very popular in schools and the new iMacs were not rugged, right? They had the little Chrome arm and stuff. They were not perceived as being particularly rugged to handle classroom environments. And they were more expensive

than the education customers wanted to pay. And so what they created the iMac, the iMac was kind of just a G4 version of the G3 iMac. It did have a new enclosure. That was a case where they built a product just for education, because I think somebody, one of their education people came to Apple when they heard about the G4 and they're like, no, no, no, no, no.

Do you realize how much money we make selling iMacs to schools? You got to keep making the iMac for schools. And they're like, all right, well, okay. And they sold the eMac for a little while, but that was a long time ago. And in general, they don't want to do that because they want to make products for everyone. And their thought, that was 2005. Their thought is if we make a great product for that idealized customer, who's walking into an Apple store, it is a great product for everyone. It's not always true, but I think it serves them more often than it doesn't serve them.

So that, you know, that's, that's, you take it, take the good and you take the bad with Apple's philosophies, but that's definitely Apple's philosophy there. Talking about Apple's philosophies. Uh, what's our next question? Oh, a little, uh little foreshadowing. Yeah, like you've heard these questions before, which we have, because he said. I'm just guessing. Hey, Mike and Jason, this is Taylor from Atlanta, Georgia.

I'm finishing up my master's thesis, which cites both of you extensively. And I was wondering if you would be interested in giving your take on my research question. Basically, I'm looking at the debacle around the trashcan Mac Pro, the iMac Pro, and the new Mac Pro to try and figure out how Apple's definition of Pro has changed over the last five years and how much you as podcasters and we as fans of the company have impacted that. So again, if you tell me you're citing me in your master's thesis i will include your question

in the show that's just a thing that you're gonna get for free from me thank you taylor and so i there's a couple of parts to this question i want to attack that second part last i do believe that the mac enthusiast market forced a change at Apple, right? Like, I don't think that I'm alone in believing this, but the whole Mac roundtable, let's re-commit to Macs and professional. That happened because of the general upset from a certain part of the market.

Like, clearly, Apple made the decision that they made because it was a small part of the market. Clearly, Apple made the decision that they made because it was a small part of their market. The problem was it's an influential and loud part of their market. And there are benefits to it that these people are your evangelists. They're the people that make purchasing decisions in enterprise. Make them happy. And it actually is fun that it goes back to education. So it's an often used argument for the education market which i do agree with that by getting these products in people's hands when they're young they will buy them in the future the thing but the thing apple doesn't need now is to show young people that that you should have an iphone or an ipad because that's what they care

about most because all young people want that anyway so they don't really need to evangelize it there. But I do think that the general consensus in this community that we're a part of pushed Apple towards making what I think and we all think is the right decision into recommitting onto what Pro meant for them. Yeah, I think there's some truth in that. Pro has always been a marketing term for Apple. And so I think it's always, on one level,

it's always just meant the best, the high quality, the thing that the pros care about. And therefore that means that it is a little more expensive or maybe a lot more expensive, but it's like our best work because pros are demanding. We had an ad campaign. I don't know if it's still going on, but it was an ad campaign for a for uh gmc trucks in the u.s and the slogan was we are professional grade now i don't love that campaign i didn't love that slogan but i think it's instructive because what they're trying to do is not sell like they're gonna sell trucks to people who need big trucks but they're also selling trucks to people who don't

need big trucks it's people that aspire to need to big trucks which is similarly to these products it's like that's where prosumer comes in right yeah or they like the idea that this is going to get them the best truck because the pros have to rely on this truck and they're not going to put up with second rate stuff uh they're gonna have the highest grade like the use of grade on right professional grade like this is what the pros use and that's why i like it so apple has played that game for a very long time and they play it more now in the last five years i would actually say to taylor's point uh look at the iphone right we We now have an iPhone Pro, right?

We didn't used to have Pro iPhones. We have iPhone Pro now. What does that mean? What is a Pro smartphone? And they talk about like Camera Raw and they got better cameras and all that. But the point of it ultimately is just this is the best of these. MacBook Pro is the better of the Mac laptops. The Mac Pro is the highest end desktop.

iPhone Pro, iPad Pro, right? It just is the Mac laptops. The Mac Pro is the highest end desktop. iPhone Pro, iPad Pro, right? It just is the best one. It's on the cutting edge. It's got the best stuff. It is the most expensive, but you got to pay for quality. That's what it means. Anything else about like particular markets? Like it is, the idea there is you're paying for better stuff now apple recognizes that like ios developers are their maybe top market for mac pro purchases you know pro mac products because you've got to use a mac to develop an ios app um i think they know about those high-end applications for Mac hardware that drive Mac Pro sales. I think they're more aware. I think they lost the plot a little bit.

And to your point, I think that's what the Mac Roundtable was about. They used to be sort of viewing the Mac as just kind of this legacy platform that they were going to let kind of ride off into the sunset and not worry about it too much. Sort of like Apple Mail, like writ large. Burn. But that they changed their mind and they're like, no, no, no, we're going to make an effort here to sort of integrate the Mac with our other platforms. And we've seen that over the last few years. And some of that is about worrying about the pros who use their hardware. But I feel like, you know, in the end, going back to the previous question, what they're really mostly thinking about is those idealized customers who want the best and aren't necessarily using it, but they want the best anyway. And so professional grade.

Yeah, it's like Apple focus a lot on their who are their professionals as like movie like filmmakers and photographers like that seems to be that one of their main things talk about pro it's always like here it is in a music studio it's the glamour it's the glamour right it's like we use we made a short film with an iphone pro and we you could edit it and it's 4k hdr and most people aren't going to need that but isn't it amazing that this phone's so powerful that you can do it so you can want it too but like yes there yes, there's, that's the glamor aspect of it, which is you show off and Apple's done that for 30 years too. You show off the product of things made on the Mac and say, this is, again, the message is not directed at VFX

artists or filmmakers or iOS developers. It's at the general public. But the point is, these people use our tools to make these amazing things. That's how powerful they are. Don't you want the same tools that the pros use? And so they're very happy to use those high profile examples. And in some cases, commission people to do high profile projects so that they can show them off and say, look, they made this film. We paid this director to make this short film on an iPhone 12 Pro. I think they did. So yeah, I think, so what is Pro? Ultimately, number one, it's just a tag to create an aspirational aspect to the higher end feature laden version of a product because that really works. And then secondarily, Apple is aware of high profile markets that it wants to serve with their

products, especially on the Mac side. I hope that helps and I hope I won't be removed from the thesis now. Hi, I'm Marlies from Groningen, hometown of AFC Richmond's legendary Jan Maas. If you had to carry a second phone for work, what would you pick? Marlies? So mine's easy because it's the second phone that I currently own,

which is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3. Ah. I just got it last week. Those folding phones are looking pretty good now, right? I was pretty surprised when Jason sent me this message in Slack the other day to that exact effect. And I was surprised. I mean, yes, they are.

They're getting closer and closer towards being something you can actually use as opposed to something you need to baby. I forget where I said this, and I'm not sure if it was upgrade last week or not, but I feel like we've reached that milestone now where the Apple folding phone is probably coming in the next year or two. I think so. Because the Samsung phones have gotten to the point where they're exiting the, this is sort of a joke and experimental, and entering the, this is actually good phase. this is sort of a joke and experimental and entering the, this is actually good phase. And that's generally when Apple just kind of like give them a year or two and then they pop in and say, yeah, we've been working on this for the last five years too, but we didn't sell them until now. And then, and they'll roll their thing out. That would be my guess is that we're going to see a

folding iPhone in the next couple of years. So you'd go with the Z Flip? Yeah, I really like it. It's my favorite Android phone that i've ever used and it's also different like it's different enough without being too wild like the the z fold which is a larger one which becomes like mini tablet is really cool but it's not a phone like it's it's like a whole different thing and i don't really know where i would use that so much but the z Z Flip is much more of a, yeah, I can use this. It's a phone. It does some stuff that's really cool. And it does stuff that the iPhone just can't do, which I also kind of like. Yeah, but that's what I would pick.

I have an iPhone 12 mini. So my second phone would probably be like an iPhone an iphone 12 pro or 12 pro max right because right i got i got the little phone it doesn't have all the cameras it doesn't have all the space it works for me most of the time if i had a second phone to carry around having one with a big screen or bigger screen and the extra camera would be nice. I might consider an Android phone. I do have, I, you know, I always try to keep an Android phone around for reference. And then of course, unfortunately, very quickly, they don't run the latest version of Android and you have to buy a new phone because that's an Android thing. I will also admit to being curious about the two new

Samsung things because they both look interesting in different ways. I think I would probably be more like Federico and be interested in the fold that sort of is basically a tall phone that turns into a small tablet because I'm more tablet-y than phone-y. But, um, uh, in the end, I mean, if I have to have a second phone um it would probably be an android phone just because i do like to keep one around but if i'm living the iphone life i would just uh i would just get a pro phone because i don't have a pro phone pro is important to me it's

professional grade very callback you're a professional who's our next caller hi jason and mike this is ian from glasgow and my question is do you think apple will ever allow end users to boot mac os on an ipad or will they persist with most people buying the same hardware twice oh now that's a scottish accent oh that's that's a real one that's not that james thompson fake scottish that friend of the show james thompson that's a real scottish accent right there let me tell you i love it oh mac os on an ipad is the dream alive uh i can't see it i i they could do it right like they could totally do it i think i feel like this year might have been the year for them to do it and they didn't do it uh so i just don't think they i i you know why buy one device when you can buy two devices from apple i feel like is there

is their attitude there i would love you know what i would love is i'd love to get to the point where they allow you to like virtualize mac os inside the ipad which they can do the m1 you know is is probably capable of that like where regular people you're not going to boot into mac os and regular people are never going to do this but if you're a power user or a developer or something like that they will provide like an app maybe you have to be a registered apple developer that is basically virtualization of mac os monterey, let's say, inside an iPad so that you could, on a high-end iPad Pro with lots of memory, you could have a little sort of like macOS app that was running on your iPad. That might happen someday. I don't think booting into macOS is a thing that's ever

going to happen. Have you heard of Microsoft 365? Yeah. this is a pretty new thing that microsoft's doing where you can access a version of windows from anywhere you can get to a web browser and they have an app on ipad i would like something like that i mean honestly what i would want is some kind of native thing it's only getting worse now that the chips are the same like it makes it more annoying like i would pay apple whatever they would charge me to have one laptop that could i could dual boot into like i desperately want that but i don't think they're ever going to do it now i think the time has come and gone for that like i don't know what it is that would have to happen for them to create it. I still think one day, like, I still believe this, one day there will be a unified operating system, and that's when we'll get it.

But I don't think that's anytime soon. But I still think it. I mean, my dream laptop is that, you know, you detach the screen from the MacBook and it becomes an iPad, and then you reattach it and it becomes a Mac. But I also don't think that's ever going to happen. All right. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Pingdom. We use Pingdom here at RelayFM because we want to know when our website's working because like we have a website like so many people do. It serves a purpose, whether it's driving people to your products, whether it's selling something, creating sales leads, having contact forms that people can fill out, that kind of thing. But you don't want your website to be down, people trying to come to it and failing. There's

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at checkout, and you'll get a huge 30% off your first invoice. That's pingdom.com slash RelayFM for a 30-day free trial, and the code UPGRADE at checkout for 30% off your first invoice. That's pingdom.com slash RelayFM for a 30-day free trial and the code UPGRADE at checkout for 30% of your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom from SolarWinds for their support of this show and RelayFM. Who's up next? Hi, this is Ben from Boston and continuing with the alliteration, I want to talk about batteries. Specifically, how you both think about the batteries in your devices over time. Whether you've adopted any of the persnickety best practices for battery longevity, like keeping them between 50 and 80 percent or using the slowest charging apparatus available, and how often you replace them. health to allow users to set a maximum charging level so the nerdiest of the nerdy can rest easy knowing that when they go to bed and plug their phones in overnight they won't charge all the way to 100 percent wow i know there are a bunch of android phones that have that feature like the

kind of like niche android phones uh have this thing where you can you can say how much you want it to charge to uh this is one of the things I thought, okay, Ben, I will amplify your call, but I will have to say on the show that I do not care about this. Yeah, I don't do any of this. I never think about it. I don't think about it.

My device should be doing it for me. That's what I think. And that is Apple's philosophy on this. Apple is doing some battery nerdery. Like there are battery nerds at Apple. And they are doing battery nerdery behind the scenes, right? Like things are happening. Like it doesn't charge your phone up to 100% all the time.

And it doesn't keep feeding electrons into it. Like it hovers, right? Could they be more aggressive? feeding electrons into it it like it hovers right could they be more aggressive maybe they're balancing the idea that they want your phone to be ready when you go and if they if they only charge it i don't want to be caught out yeah you don't want to pick up your phone and and go out for a long day of doing whatever and it's only at 80 right you don't want to do that right and they have to fight against that. I think there is some. Is it on the Mac in the like they are they are experimenting with using their kind of intelligence to guess when you usually I think.

No, actually, I think up earlier in the night to full. So my point is, I feel like it's probably not that important and you can easily overthink it and that Apple doesn't want users to worry about it, but that behind the scenes, Apple wants to build a system that can intelligently do the right thing in the right circumstances to maximize battery life i do i do think that they're doing that i mean i don't do chi charging just for a bunch of reasons with my phone like i don't really into it uh i so i have a chi charger that i use for my uh airpods like just because whatever but like i don't i don't do that I don't do the MagSafe or anything. I have 98% battery health on my one-year-old iPhone, which I think feels pretty good.

I understand why people want to manage this stuff. It's just not something I want to have to think about when it is something that I do believe that the device manufacturers should be doing the work on. And this is the ultimate Apple thing, right? Like Apple doesn't want you to worry about it. There is, by the way, in the iPhone, it's optimized battery charging. And that's this feature above 80%. It won't do it until it's sort of trying to learn when you need it. This was one of those things that they got in trouble with the throttling years ago.

Yeah. So it's a feature and you can turn it off. And they're trying to disclose more what they're doing, but they're always trying to figure out ways to do this. Apple is never going to give users that level of granularity, I think, because they don't think that the hardware manufacturer should have to leave the management of the battery.

Also, users, you know, some of what users want to do is more like, it's not necessarily right. I think that's the challenge. And it's not just that there are rumors that go around that are inaccurate about the right way, quote unquote, to do battery life. Also, what you'll see if you follow this stuff over the long haul is there will be something that's true about the batteries eight years ago and it's and it stopped being true four years ago and people are still doing that behavior and now it's detrimental to the health of the battery or it makes no difference in the health of the battery like quitting all of your apps

yeah people don't know the truth uh of what's in the detail of behind the scenes on the hardware, right? They don't. And then when you do learn something, sometimes it's no longer true anymore, but they don't really talk about it. And you continue to do it almost cargo cult light because you heard it was the right thing to do once, but now it isn't anymore. And that's why I think the right thing is to just be like, no, we're going to take care of this for you.

And honestly, yes, a hardware manufacturer that lets users tweak those settings and sort of abandons the need for it to do it itself is not doing its job. That is the job of the hardware manufacturer to have the battery use be as smart as possible. Let's get a nice cola. Hey guys, Dan from North Carolina. I'm curious if you know whatever happened with target display mode on iMacs. In the last couple years, Apple's been presenting itself as a very environmentally friendly and conscious company, but their current crop of iMacs are all turned into paperweights when the processor is no longer up to snuff. off um yeah so target display mode died when the 5k iMac came out because the 5k iMac especially the initial 5k iMac like nobody had really done that before and it was really janky technology to get that 5k display and uh building in a somewhat niche feature like target display mode was not something that they i think could do or at least could reasonably do target display mode was not something that they, I think, could do or at least could reasonably do. Target display mode, by the way, in case you don't know what this is.

Oh, yeah. Okay, sure. Hold down the T key on an older iMac and it turns your iMac into a monitor. You can plug a cable into it and it reads as an external display on another Mac. So here is my answer, which is Apple has an answer for you and it's AirPlay for Mac in Monterey. And I think going forward, that's what they're going to do. I wonder if they will ultimately get to it where you can literally just boot and hold down a key and it turns it into an AirPlay display. But I think that's what they're going to tell you. And there's going to be a little bit of lag. But I think that's what they're gonna that that's gonna be their solution is if you've got

an imac that can run monterey you can you now have an imac that is an airplay uh target and then you can just airplay use it as an airplay display as a second monitor and that will work um it's not the same it's not but um i don't know if they're going to invest any money in building in something more sophisticated than that it would be nice it would be nice if they brought back target display mode in some way um but because i agree they like i've got this beautiful 5k imac pro here and i'm gonna buy uh an apple silicon mac at some point in the next year and either this imac is going to buy an Apple Silicon Mac at some point in the next year. And either this iMac is going to just kind of sit in a corner or I'm going to sell it. But like this screen is gorgeous, right?

I could keep the screen. But how do I do that in a way that's satisfying? So, yeah, I hear you. And I wish Apple would do something. I wonder if the AirPlay display target thing is something that might lead to a little bit more of a official beaming sidecar kind of thing where you sort of like take over the display in a future version of Mac OS, but I'm not sure they're going to have a dedicated hold down a key to boot and enter into mode and if they do i'm skeptical that it will be the target display mode i think it's more likely that they'll hold down a key and it'll boot into airplay display mode which might not be what everybody wants but that may be what they're willing to do to provide

some follow-up real-time follow-up to hopefully stop the follow-up target display mode oh target display mode no target disc mode is hold down yeah right command display mode is hold down command f2 everybody's favorite everyone's favorite easy to close those emails everybody definitely always an f2 key on every keyboard it is only for imax uh basically in from mid-2014 back to about 2009. That was the era of the target display mode, which means that the era of the target display mode was five years long, and it's been seven years since then.

So, yeah. And Apple would say, well, it's not a paperweight. Just recycle it with us. That's what they would tell you. Or just give it to a friend or something. And those are good uses too, but it would be nice if you could repurpose that screen. It's true. It sure would be.

Hi, David Schaub from Vancouver here. Apple has frequently tried to achieve a single cable going from a Mac to its display. How important is it to you that a single cable can connect your Mac and external display? Another Vancouver. Yeah, oh and external display? Another Vancouver. Yeah, we are big in Vancouver. This is a thing we have noticed with the RelayFM members discord. There's a lot of Canadians in the RelayFM members discord, like a disproportional amount of Canadians we have discovered,

which is something that was unexpected. Like we have a current events channel, and we were initially concerned that it was going to be all American politics. It's actually quite a lot of Canadian politics. It tends to be the majority of the conversations that occur in that channel. I love Canadians.

Like we all share the same queen after all. So single cable display. So for a desktop for me, not important. Don't care, right? Like this, you know, if I have a Mac mini, I don't need everything to flow through one cable. If there's going to be multiple cables, that's fine. For a laptop, very important.

And it doesn't work very well for me, my MacBook and my dock. Like I have a CalDigit dock and it's plugged in by Thunderbolt. And every single day, no matter what I do, when I sit down and plug that thing in, I have to unplug my monitor unplug my monitor back in again and it will work if i don't do this it will not work once i do this

it will work this might be because i have a usbc monitor and a thunderbolt dock but you know whatever like it should work but it doesn't i'm gonna refer david back to our previous conversation where i mentioned having a laptop instead of two computers and this is what i did reasons why and i had a i had a when i set up my office here first before i bought the 5k imac i had a uh a thunderbolt dock attached to a monitor and all of my peripherals and ethernet and all of that and one plug to plug in uh to do everything and today it used to be one plug plus power and of course on today's laptops it's one plug including power which is even better uh yeah i love it uh i would if i was using a laptop as my only computer i would absolutely try to set up a one plug setup at my desk for sure.

This is why I want, like everyone wants an Apple display, is why I want an Apple display is because I'm confident I would get the plug one cable in and it would work situation. I find it all very frustrating. I don't really know why this experience has to be as it is. I've figured that Thunderbolt was going to make all that easier, but it doesn't look like it has. And it's really hard to get Thunderbolt monitors, which is why I have a USB-C monitor, because most of them aren't available, especially in the UK.

Some of the LG display ones, they are available in America, not available in the UK. So I have an LG display, but it's USB-C, and I think maybe that causes some issues, but it shouldn't. I think it was about time that we heard from Canada, eh? Mm-hmm. Pitter-patter, let's get at her. Hello, Mike, Jason, and Relay. I am JD from Michigan, United States. I'm calling in to ask your opinions on the supposed layout of the cameras on the upcoming iPhone 13 and 13 mini in their diagonal form. Do you like this better or worse than the iPhone 11 and 12 design? So, wow.

I'll put a link in the show notes to a MacRumors article where they have some images of this, and I'll explain this. So on the phones that have the two cameras, the 12 ones, it's one on top of the other on the left-hand side, right? And then they have on the right-hand the flash and has some i think it's a microphone on the dummy versions which have the people that have these dummy versions tend to always be correct it's like mkbhd makes a video about i think this is like comes from case manufacturers these two cameras on the iphone 13 models they are opposite each other, like, diagonally. So, one in the top left, one on the

bottom right. I prefer them stacked on top of each other, I think. I'm pretty sure I don't care, but I would say that I kind of like that they look like a two on a six-sided die now. You rolled a two. Rolled a two. All right. That's all I got I don't think I care sorry you don't need to care that's totally fine it's actually part of the reason I put it in there this is the thing it doesn't bother me so much

if I had to make a choice which is to answer JD's question my choice is I prefer the other one but it also doesn't bother me that much because all of these camera bumps are just their own variants of ugly and it's just what ugly are you willing to accept? Yeah, it looks like a domino as well, you could say. The dot's on a domino. So we'll call this the domino camera bump from now on.

Domino camera bump. Sure. Good evening. My name is Dee Griffin-Jones from Athens, Ohio. A lot of people are asking if or when the Apple car will be released. But what I would like to ask you is what? What ludicrous luxury features do you think it'll have that will make it exorbitantly expensive? I like this question.

Mm-hmm. Thank you, D Griffin. I don't know. What do you think, Mike? My inclination is to say that it's more likely that the Apple car will seem fairly standard with a ludicrous price. And everybody will say, wait a second. Why does it cost X when it doesn't have all of these ludicrous features that are on other cars that's for sure right like that's one thing one thing is it will be expensive and it

will be lacking something and things and that will make people mad but i did have a couple of things that i could imagine them doing one is like similar to what you were saying apple will do some kind of groundbreaking thing that nobody else does that will be more expensive and make the experience worse in some way. Like I'm convinced of this because Tesla has this issue, right? Tesla do these things all the time.

Like people hate that new steering wheel thing, the yoke thing, right? And they're doing it because they're Tesla and they're saying it's better, but everybody seems to think it's worse. It's terrible. Right? Yeah, it's stupid stupid but the other things i could imagine is the materials in the interior especially will be quite premium maybe more than they need to be and there won't be a basic version and i expect there'll be some kind of like wild ar features in the dash oh yeah like there'll be a heads up heads up projection or something and

and it will be like you know you know like how we had that rumor of like the the uh headset with the two 8k displays in it which is like way more than it needs um similar here right like it will be some kind of like 8k ar feature which is like just like so much more complicated than is required i think there will definitely be a feature that makes everybody say um why did you do this nobody wants this i mean that's sort of like what you said about the tesla yoke but you know right something that's like apple has prioritized it and they think it's really clever and everybody else is like i don't know why you did that that that's usually a given right a baffling decision or or uh just something that they prioritize i'm thinking like how the tesla

has the um they got rid of the vents for for your air conditioning and heating and replaced it with like a slot that runs the entire length of the dash it's like it's it's clever and interesting but it's also like oh that's unusual right like i think there'll be things like that some of which maybe will be like oh yeah that's very clever and others will be like why did you oh why no buttons there'll be no no no physical controls at all instead everything is controlled with siri or something yeah or some touchscreen stuff with touchscreens but there'll be no buttons and this is the thing that already frustrates people right uh no buttons like i've seen videos of the tesla thing like you know they got like the even like the park reverse neutral drive is on the screen now and watching somebody do a three

point turn in one of the new Teslas looks hilarious to me. No, it's such a bad idea too. What are they doing? Yeah, I think you're right. Apple will do some things like that. I would love to believe that Apple will not make the mistakes that Tesla has made and realize that physical controls are important and that they'll do some physical controls. But my fear is that they'll do some physical controls but my you know my fear is that they'll do some things that make us pull our hair out and and war on buttons is always a good thing to guess from apple i mean honestly i don't even think about this because i don't think it's even close if ever yeah this car thing just just my own take on it like they're trying like sure try it but

like this i still remain unconvinced about this whole topic that's fair today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at doordash you want chinese food tonight somebody else wants pizza and maybe your flatmate they want froyo well there's something for everyone on doordash it will connect you with the restaurants that you love right now and right to your door. And now you can actually also get grocery essentials. Everything you need with DoorDash can just be delivered to your home in under an hour. Drinks, snacks, other household items sent straight to you. And ordering is super easy. Just open the DoorDash app, choose whatever you want

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which is that Lauren was going out to a friend's house for dinner. They did a backyard gathering of a couple of friends of hers. So we, and I said to her as she was getting ready to go, oh, do we have food in the house for me and Julian? And she said, I don't think so.

And I thought, well, what am I going to do about this? I don't really want to go out. I was already drinking a beer at this point. I'm like, I don't want to get in the car. I don't want to do anything. I just, I, and you know what happened? It's DoorDash. DoorDash happened.

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Super convenient. And again, I just watched the little car coming down the street on the app until it reached our house. And then the Dasher set it down and we waved from a distance. And then I ate a hamburger. And Julian got a hamburger and a shake. So everybody wins with DoorDash is what I'm saying. You got to look your wife dead in the eyes.

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subject to change terms apply. Our thanks to DoorDash for their support of this show and RelayFM. Who's next, Jason Snell? Well, our next call, Mike, comes from Simon. G'day, Mike and Jason. This is Simon from Albany in Western Australia. And I want to know, do you ever have dreams about unreleased Apple products or software?

Oh, it's Simon from the AUS, as you said. I love it. I love it. This is so good. You've got two Australians in today's episode. Do you think Simon does the nutbush? I'm certain of it. So I had a dream last night.

It wasn't about a product or service. Let me tell you, by the way, Stephen Hackett has wild dreams. He sometimes tweets them. Oh, yeah. And they're usually about like Apple related things. Because he has a dream journal. So he actually writes the stuff down. Yeah.

I'm not a good rememberer of dreams. So I actually don't know if I have these kinds of dreams. Of all the skills to lack that's probably a pretty good one to not worry i'm fine with it but i did have a dream last night about apple so i just wanted to share it uh their website got hacked apple's website got hacked and they started by changing all of the leadership images like that's that's what they did so it started off like first johnny ive back, which was funny. Like Johnny Ive, his image was there. And then it changed to a picture of Johnny Ive

with electricity coming out of his head. And he was wearing like Matrix style Neo glasses. So it was like a whole thing. Then all of the- Did Johnny Ive hack Apple? Was it him? Maybe. I'm going to put a link in the show notes actually.

Matt found this. I'm going to put a link in the show notes, actually. Matt found this. I forgot about this. Stephen posted one of his best ones, a WWDC-related dream to 512pixels a while ago. I'm not going to read it because it's too much. I'm just going to let you go and read it. It's so good. You've got to go treat yourself to that. Violence is done to Apple executives

in that dream. Yeah, it's bananas. And then also then the whole website ended up getting hacked and the images started to look like so if you have if you're a member of a bunch of discords uh on the left hand side there's like a dock right and they have all the images then app all of apple's images look like those and then the website just went all weird so that was my dream last night uh i don't generally have dreams about apple stuff believe it or not but what i do have is uh classic stress dreams where you're unprepared for something

so the way it works is it's an apple event that i'm late for or forgot about or i can't get in or i get there too late it's always something like that so it's a physical event it's usually it used to be infinite loop i suppose those dreams are apple park now but the idea is that it's uh an apple event and i've overslept or i am in the car or i forgot or i get there late and it's always it's the it's the late for school didn't do your homework kind of dream adapted for an apple event i had one like this uh which was related to wwdc where for some reason i needed to do like a dramatic reading of some kind that tim cook needed me to do from a book on stage, and I didn't do a very good job, and he was really mad at me.

So that was my thing like that for some reason. I don't know. I feel like this is a perfect transitional question because the rest of our questions for today are more personal questions. So, pew, pew, pew, pew, I guess. Yeah, sure. I need to fire off the lasers at some point,

so there it is. We're in the personal segment. We get our one lasers per episode quote or limit. Yeah. Hey, Mike and Jason. This is Colin from Bonita Springs, Florida. I'm just curious on how you two first met,

and more importantly, what were your first impressions of each other when you did meet mike how did we meet i was thinking about this jason so i mean there's there's like different there are different levels to this because of our lives right like the first time we ever had an interaction i interviewed you on right one of my old podcasts i don't remember when it was whether it was on the show that i used to do with my friend terry or whether it was after that i honestly do not remember it was this is going back a very long time now oh yeah so there was that i mean obviously i was aware of you before you were aware of me

because i'd been following your work for years when you were at Mack world and stuff. The first time we met in person was at a WWDC. You invited me to the Mack world party. So one of the, every year at WWDC Mack world used to host this party on the, on the, is it on the roof of the offices? Yeah, it's a terrace terrace so it was off the

side of our our floor there are a couple floors above it but like the the the building kind of gets smaller at the top so that there's this big terrace out on the sixth floor that that is where we were yeah so there was that and i know i went to that but i think the first time we had any kind of meaningful meeting was at the UL conference in like 2014. Does that sound about right? Yeah, I think so. The one, the first one that was in Killarney instead of Kilkenny. Is that right? That was the first one I went to.

Yeah, that's the first one I went to as well. And I think that's the one because then the rest of them were at the Europe out in Kilkenny but that one was in Killarney so many Irish names that are so similar and that's where we had our chat and you were talking about pens and then we were also talking about stuff and that was our first like real in-person thing but yeah i guess i guess i must have invited you to the mac

world party so that was our first in-person and then before that we had a podcast it's the whole thing so we barely remember that how about first impressions um i mean it doesn't count for me because i was aware of you before right right? Like very aware of you. I mean, but like the impression, I get that the biggest conversation that we had was when we sat down and we had a very big in-depth conversation about what we wanted to do in our futures when we had breakfast one morning.

It's true. Which was probably the genesis of Upgrade going all the way back to them. I mean, and I just left that experience just believing what I already thought, that you were very interesting, very kind, and very smart person who I dreamed of working with one day, and here we are. Oh, that's very kind. Well, Mike, I've got some great news for you.

Love it. I still have all my old emails. Okay. Oh, wow. All right. You're going to work it out? And so on February 19th of 2012 at 12.04 p.m. Pacific time, Mike Hurley wrote, Jason, the name of podcast, is a TED podcast based in the UK.

Every week, me and my co-host Terrence have a guest on to interview and discuss the latest news with an apple slant we usually record on wednesdays at 8 p.m our time which i believe is noon for you we have our 100th episode coming up on march 14th and i'd love you to be a part of it we can be flexible with the time if necessary thanks man all the best mike wow look at that all right so there is on this uh relay fm re-hosts a bunch of shows that were pre-relay fm shows that show became a show called command space in august of 2012 so it's a few months later i had you back on the show but i wasn't on steven filled in for me because i was sick yeah and that's i i kept thinking that the first time i was on your podcast you weren't on but that's not true it was the next time when it had become

command space that that i was on without you um the i think it's also telling that my response to you was literally um wednesdays at noon i i would like to say wednesdays at noon. I would like to say Wednesdays at noon are good for me, but I look out a few weeks and they don't seem to be so good. I might be able to do February 29th or March 14th. If you want to move to another time, I can probably find something better. So my response was not like, hey, thanks for being on. Who are you again?

It was like, here's when I'm available. It was just kind of open door there. So isn't that nice? And then you sent me an email saying, are we still okay for tomorrow? And here's what we want to talk about. The new iPad. Which one? I don't know.

2012. Twitter buying Posterous. And the upcoming angry bird space are we excited or do we have red bird fatigue we definitely had red bird fatigue at that point i'm exhausted even now about that so that's march 2012 which mike nine years ago god so that my my memory is that you were one of these people in the Mac, Apple space who is doing stuff

and wants to talk to me and I had a very much an open door kind of policy of like, sure, sounds great, but that's fun. Right?

So that was it. And we had a good, and then we had a good chat. Like there weren't many people doing that, like. Yeah, and I was interested about,

I was interested in podcasts, right? And I didn't't have my own podcast but we had the mac world podcast and you know we had the studio set up at mac world which is i think where we did that um interview i think i went into the the pod cave at mac world and uh so yeah that's our i guess that's our story and then and then yes i obviously i appreciated your your diligence and your interview style and then we got to have that chat at all which which was really the kind of kicking off of our larger relationship. Yeah, sure. Exactly. Yes. Hey, this is Lisa calling in from Tennessee in the U S. And my question is if you could go for a week long vacation in any fictional

world, where would you go and what would you do there? Oh, wow. This is man, I struggled with this question. I've been thinking about this one a lot. I want to say the key here is I want very little chance that I'm going to die. Right? Well, then you're going to pick something really boring. No, no.

I just, and if I go to a fictional universe, I want to go to the part of it where bad things don't happen. Right? Okay. Like, if I want to a fictional universe, I want to go to the part of it where bad things don't happen. Right. Like, okay. Like if I want to go to star Trek, I don't want to be like on the enterprise where I'm going to wear a red shirt

and die. Right. I just want to be on like an awesome planet. Okay. That is awesome. And futuristic and cool, but probably not going to be bombed by Klingons. Right. Like that's what i want

for my vacation in a fictional world um so and i would probably pick a a fictional world that is like futuristic and and awesome that that sounds like what i would do so yeah i would probably pick star trek but i again i i just want to make this clear. I don't want to be on a starship wearing a red shirt or really on a starship at all because they blow up sometimes. I don't want to do that. I don't want to be taken prisoner by alien menaces. I don't want to have to separate the saucer and crash into a planet.

I don't want to do any of those things. I just want to hang out on like risa the pleasure planet for a week a week on the star trek pleasure planet sounds great oh boy um harry potter i thought about it a bunch after voldemort is dead yeah yeah sure but you just be a muggle you wouldn't you wouldn't even know it was you don't know that you don't know that oh so harry potter but you're in with the magic people maybe but i still you know a world with magic and it seems really interesting like i originally thought of like like the marvel universe but realized that's probably not good like no i wouldn't be able to experience any of the good oh no no no so i thought that that harry potter would be kind of cool maybe i could

be a magician uh a wizard magician a magician what a wow i don't know uh wizard some i don't know i thought it'd be kind of kind of cool no that's good that's good i i like that idea at all so that's that's a that's a good one magician yeah you know Yeah. You know, hi, Jason and Mike. I'm listener James calling in from New York city. My hashtag ask upgrade out loud question is inspired by some of the discussion from last week's episode. If you could write and publish a book without needing to worry about all the actual logistics of fitting such a passion project into your life right now, what would that book be?

Um, well, I've, I've written some books. And so it would be a novel that I would write or have written or I would write to completion. My problem is that I wrote drafts and then they just sit there and they need to be rewritten. And I haven't rewritten them because I left my job. And as an independent worker, one of the problems I struggle with is spending a lot of time doing work. I already work a lot, and I generally am working on things that are projects that I've committed to and that are ongoing, and I don't have a lot. It's hard for me to basically say, now I'm going to spend a day, a week, or whatever, working on my novel.

or whatever working on my novel. And I've tried a few times and it just hasn't happened. But if I had the ability, that would be, I'd get some of the stuff I've already written into shape and or maybe start something new. That's not maybe exactly the answer

that you wanted, James, but that would be the answer is that I would finish one of these novels that I've written or I mean, they're finished, but like I'd rewrite them or I'd write something new. I mean, I have great dreams

of writing something fictional like so many people do, right? Like I would just, just i would adore it like to create a world of my own and write something about it i don't have any particular idea like anytime i've ever thought about it it just depends to me what is the thing that i'm most interested in right now you know like what is the world that interests me the most uh i don't have a particular thing, but one day I would, I would love to try and do it one day to write some kind of fiction, but I don't,

I don't know what that would be. All right. That's fine. That's, that's we'll just put it out there. Now our next question, it comes from Justin and it is labeled Star Trek. My name is Justin calling in from Iowa in the United States.

My question is for Jason. Do you prefer the earlier episodes of SG-1 when they are outmatched against the Gua'uld, or would you like the later episodes where the Tauri have Asgard and ancient technology? Also, do you like Atlantis and Universe Universe or do you only like SG-1? So Mike, this is Stargate. Nuts! It's not Star Trek at all. I was like, Star Trek question, interesting.

And then he says SG-1 and I'm like, oh. Nice pronunciation of the Goa'uld. I thought that this was the spinoff, but it's not. No, this isn't the Star Trek spinoff. That's Voyager, right? Like I got Voyager and Stargate mixed up in my brain.

There's lots of Star Trek spinoffs. Yeah, I know. But all these things were on TV. And there's lots of Stargate shows. And I didn't care about any of them, right? So to me, it was all Star Trek. I'm just, yeah, I know. This is a recurring bit on The Incomparable

where Steve Letts assumes that all science fiction TV shows are Star Trek. Me and Steve are in complete agreement about this all right yeah love that star trek babylon 5 anyway uh justin thank you for your nerdy stargate question i do love stargate i like the early years of sg1 i found the um other spinoffs to be not as good. I thought the later years of the main show were not as good. I did watch the spinoffs, but I didn't particularly enjoy them. So my real love is in the first five-ish, five, six seasons of the original show, which is awesome. And I bought all the DVDs and I have them on my Plex and I watch them as comfort food because they're very enjoyable and comfortable. And I hope that at some point here,

somebody brings that franchise back because that was a lot of fun. That's a fun, fun sci-fi franchise, although not Star Trek. I'm glad we had this talk. Jason and Mike, my name's Michael and I'm from Vancouver, BC.

What are your favorite sports ball uniforms of all time and which ones do you like the least? Vancouver again! I know, these Canadians. Wow, they're on it. You start here. We should change the show somehow and make it all Canadian focused. Believe it or not, I actually do have an answer for 50% of this question. of an answer for 50% of this question. A sports jersey that I adored at the time and still really do love

is the Italian national football shirt for the Euro 2000 championship. It was made by a company called Kappa. And the thing that made this shirt very different is that it was very like clingy like the the shirt was very clingy almost like a surf shirt you know like you a shirt you wear for surfing and it was very fashionable at the time i had a very different collar that kind of thing and i remember like people like me wanted it because it looked really different and interesting and i owned it i ended

up buying a replica shirt and loved it. I don't have a great answer here because I have too many answers. I think this is a great question. And I wonder if Michael is actually already aware of this, but I actually reader, and I'm going to throw it out there for people who don't know. UniWatch, uni-watch.com. The obsessive study of athletics aesthetics. If you're somebody who cares about uniform designs. All-time favorites. I don't know. I have lots. That's the problem.

I like a lot of the classic designs. My favorite baseball team the san francisco giants have a classic home uniform that i really like that's like off-white it's kind of a cream color and it's got the block giants on it in an interesting font and like it's a it's a beautiful classic uniform um i'm not a yankee fan but you know that is a classic um i love the new san diego padres jerseys that are brown they brought back their brown and yellow color scheme my favorite american football jersey is probably the powder blue san diego chargers jerseys because they're gorgeous um i just i

like them a lot um i have a lot of opinions about ugly jerseys, but like there's so many bad jerseys. There's so many bad uniforms out there that I'm not sure I could. I mean, the worst dressed team in baseball is the Arizona Diamondbacks. Their uniforms are terrible. I'll do a shout out to the Indianapolis Colts. I think they have one of the best NFL uniforms. It's super simple,

but you don't mess with the classics and i gotta be honest mike i don't like most soccer kits because i just can't get over the giant ads on them and it makes me sad because they they try really hard to give them um personality there's some really nice Euro 2020 uniforms, by the way, that were doing very subtle background patterns and stuff. But the major leagues, it's so dominant by the advertising they put on it that it's hard to focus on the little bits around the edges where they're trying to give you something nice to look at. So that always makes me sad. And I know that's just, it's a cultural thing and probably those giant ads

are coming to every uniform ever, but I think it takes away a lot from that. I have lots of opinions about uniforms. I think that is the benefit of the national teams is that they don't have

sponsorship on their kits. Yeah, and there are lots, but honestly, Michael, I would have to take, I would have to do like hours and hours of research to even begin to formulate a list because I have so many opinions about this. So anyway, I threw some out there, and that's just how it's going to be. I'm sorry.

I'm sure I'm going to kick myself that there's some terrible NFL uniform that I'm not thinking of that is really bad, but I'm not thinking of it. So, oh, well. Hi, Mike and Jason. This is Kim from Budapest. I have a question for Mike. Have you ever tried to convince Jason to try any fountain pens? And if yes, how was the result? Thanks. No. There is a bar that people have to cross before i will consider trying like getting them to try out fountain pens very few of my friends have across this bar like i will try and get people to get better pens in their lives but there is so many things that i would have them try out before we would get to fountain pen i do have um better pens in my life than before i met you yeah i do i have some i have some very nice pens now in my little uh pen holder on my desk that i don't

use that often but when i do i i don't use pens very much i mean that's the the truth of it is i don't use pens very much i don't hand write things much at all but i have come around to the idea i mean i already had i was already using a nicer kind of like a gel pen but now i have some nicer actual like metal pens too uh if you're going to use a pen you should use a good pen i think but um but yeah i'm not even close to the bar of something like that because like your your your work with with me is just to have me have decent pens. Literally, it's just don't embarrass yourself. Put down the Bic disposable pen.

Get a nice pen. And I have some nice pens now. But that's nice for me anyway. But nicer than what I might have been using before. I think that's far enough. I think you're wise to do that. You've got to know your limits. Yeah. Where we come together is on keyboards, but that's probably a discussion for Upgrade Plus. If you would like to

listen to us talk a bit about keyboards today, which I think we will, go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up $5 a month or $50 a year. You get longer ad-free versions of every single episode of Upgrade. And that brings us to our final question. Hey there, Mike and Jason. This is a friend of the show, Zach from Virginia. If you had to award an Upgrade-y for the most fun Summer of Fun bit, not including this call-in show, what would you award that to? That could be, you know, most fun to record or edit,

the most summery of all of the bits, or just the concept that you thought you know most fun to record or edit the most summary of all of the bits or just the concept that you thought was the most fun zach is responsible for the uh scorecards so is an actual real friend of the show i also want to contrast zach with chance because chance was big and zach is very small um just different it's it's been fun to hear everybody's voices these are the bookends I have a feeling that you and I are probably gonna pick the same one which is

the backward episode downgrade it was the first big one where like this episode and others we mentioned outgrade earlier and then also the holiday specials where instead of just having a topic an entire episode is doing something weird and yeah this is one of those downgrade 254 july 2019 um i think i

even said this at the time but like as a kid growing up as a teenager i watched uh late night with david letterman and they did all sorts of format-breaking episodes, including one where they rotated the picture 360 degrees during the episode. So by halfway through, the whole picture was upside down. And they didn't care. They were trying stuff out. And the downgrade idea, I just got a real kick out of the idea that we're literally just doing the show with the segments reversed. So we would say goodbye. Um,

and then we would do ask upgrade and like, it would go all the way back to the start where we would say hello. And that would be the end of the episode. And then theme played backward. Like, so it was a perfectly listenable podcast. All that was different was the sequence in which we did things. But I love,

I love doing that. That was such a great moment of like, yes, we can do some weird things with the show and it's going to be fine. And since then, yes, the Outgrade was a lot of fun. A lot of those kind of high concept episodes. And this one is going to be high up on the list now too,

having the call-in. We do have some other high concept ideas for format breaking episodes that we will do at some point. Might not be this year because we may only have two weeks left. concept ideas for format breaking episodes that we will do at some point. Might not be this year because we may only have two weeks left. I suspect that the summer of fun may rapidly be coming to an end. If Apple were to announce an event for the 7th or the 14th, we may rapidly have to enter into draft and iPhone mode. So this might be the end of it.

I don't know. Yeah, on that note, we are expecting that we'll be doing an emergency draft. We spoke about this earlier. It's down to Apple and when Apple announces their event. And for these virtual events, they've been announcing it seven days before and they've been Tuesday events,

which means that they would make the announcement after we've recorded that week's upgrade. If that continues to happen, we will once again have to do an emergency draft episode where we make our draft selections. And then we will do our post event episode where we also talk about who won the draft. And we would prefer not to do it that way.

We would prefer to have a little more warning warning but that's just how it's been yeah i don't think that this is going to be any change i'm almost convinced this will be a fully virtual event i don't think that there will be an in-person element so apple will most likely only give one week's notice in that guard so basically i'm expecting either this week, Tuesday or Wednesday we find out, or next Tuesday or Wednesday we find out, and then we'll have to do a draft episode towards the end of that week.

So I think that's it. I think that is a great success. I think we'll bring this one back. I could imagine this being... We've got way more, by the way. I will say we didn't answer all the questions uh if your question didn't get answered it wasn't because it was bad it just some of the questions were good questions but neither of us had answers to them and if we don't have answers to a question there's no point

putting the question in uh right but thank you to everybody that did send one in i think we will definitely do this again um i can imagine this being something that we would do in future summer of funds uh because summers of fun it was great and this wasn't like some of our other episodes where it's really really hard to do this this wasn't like really complicated to do it was pretty straightforward actually so that's good thank you to farago from roamiba. That's right. Yes. Yes. All the Rogamiba products were very helpful in putting this together, Farago and Audio Hijack and Loopback to make it happen. But I have the whole setup for The Incomparable when we do our clip show at the end of the year where I play in clips from previous episodes, and I'm just using that same setup here. So that was actually fairly easy to do so so yeah i think we'll bring this back at some point we could do it we could do it as an ongoing but the truth is i think that then we wouldn't get very many and it's better off having a special window that opens and then people send in for that episode and then we close the window again is it i'll be i'll be real right like people say why don't you just ask a great every time because it's so much easier for

me to pick the questions and edit the text than it is for me to pick the questions edit the audio and get the audio like it's just easier for us to do it this way and and i don't i i'm not sure if the audio questions add that much more i don't know i'll leave a pin in that but it's it's unlikely that we would switch to audio questions for Ask Upgrade. Because as well, I know not everybody's going to want to do that. Some people would just prefer to send their question via text. Right. On TV Talk Machine, we mixed and matched a little bit.

But I will tell you that what happens is that people forget to send in questions for a while. And we already had that. You don't get the burst of questions that we get from this. So like I said, I think it may be more fun to occasionally do an Ask Upgrade Out Loud episode and just have people do their questions then. If you would like to send in a question for a regular segment, just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade and we'll be doing more of those next week thank you so much though to everybody that did send in a question uh we really really appreciate it and thank you for making this episode so summary and funnery uh thank you to doordash pingdom amazon music and discourse for supporting this week's show and thank you to everybody that supports us with an upgradegrade Plus membership as well. We really appreciate that. If you'd like to find Jason online, you can go to sixcolors.com.

And he's at Jason L on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. I'm at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. Don't forget to go and check out our fundraiser for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. Go to stjude.org slash relay and you can donate. And we really, really appreciate it. And so will St. Jude. So thank you so much for everybody that has done and will do throughout now and throughout September.

We'll be back next week with another episode of Upgrade. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. They're calling again. Good night, everybody. Good night, Vancouver. We love you. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Frazier has left the building.