Upgrade - 384: Don't Fear the Laser

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

With Myke on assignment, Dan Moren joins Jason to discuss the features Apple hasn't yet delivered in 2021 and its product lineup for 2022. Then Jason breaks down the new e-readers you could use to read one of Dan's novels.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 384 upgrade this week is brought to you by fitbod amazon music and smile i'm jason snell i'm always here but i'm not usually doing this part but mike hurley remember him he is on assignment he was in los angeles last week now he is in hawaii basking in the sun drinking up the tropical rain whatever he's doing there uh so instead we have brought in a special guest host making his only the second appearance ever on Upgrade. It's very special guest, novelist, Macworld columnist, Clockwise and Rebound co-host, and my co-conspirator at Six Colors. It's Dan Morin.

Hi, Dan. Hello, hello, hello, Jason. Oh, no, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You can't. Don't. Just don't. Hi, Jason.

It's welcome to Upgrade. It's been since 2016 since you were here. I know, five years. I'll be due back after this in another five, and that'll be nice. No, it's great to be back. I actually listen to Upgrade pretty much every week. It's one of the few shows I do listen to every week, so it's always a pleasure to get to come on and actually talk to you so you can hear me instead of just yelling at you and Mike. And Dan and I, in addition to writing at Six Colors, we do a weekly podcast for Six Colors members every Friday. So it's not like Dan and I don't talk every week about tech stuff, but we're doing it here on Upgrade this week. And as always,

we're going to start with a hashtag Snell Talk question. I got to pick it, no less. And it's this. It's from Wes. What is the oldest question in Snell Talk? How old is it? And why does Mike keep skipping the question? And that brings us to this Snell Talk question from listener Graham, sent April 6th, 2017.

After you appeared on the podcast, Dan. Favorite law of physics? Okay. Thank you, Graham, from 2017. And I don't know. We're going to have to leave it for Mike to answer why he keeps skipping this question and many other questions because it's a spreadsheet he could delete stuff at the top and say I'm probably not going to answer a question like the

the Wes also asked about ask upgrade and the oldest ask upgrade question is from January 2020 and that's ridiculous right I think the answer there is Mike has just not gone through and cropped out the ones, you know, questions about like, what do you think is going to be in the iPhone 12 or whatever? It's like, maybe not.

But January 2020 is great because it's like, oh, man, do you think we'll ever see another global pandemic? I can't wait for WWDC this year. I'm going to San Jose. Are you? Yeah, exactly right. So to answer Graham's question from 2017, there's only one answer that I can give to this question. And that is my favorite law of physics,

if we can call it that, is Snell's law, a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of incidence and refraction. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's right. Snell's law. And you can't prove it wasn't me who did it. So that's my answer.

Snell's Law. That's a good answer. The gift of Relay is something you can give this holiday season. I just wanted to mention this to people out there who are listening, kind of thinking about becoming a Relay FM member and haven't yet, or maybe you've got a membership-hesitant friend and you want to gift them a membership. You want to unlock the doors of upgrade plus or if you're a fan of dan's show clockwise you could upgrade your membership and unlock the doors of clockwise unwound uh become a member of clockwise

either way or some other show on relay i guess that's not hosted by us but you could do that too if you wanted to it's fine Now is a great time to do it until December 17th. All of our annual plans are 22% off for new subscribers. You just go to giverelay.com to learn more and set up your gift. This includes, of course, Upgrade Plus. You will get a year of ad-free episodes with bonus content every single week for just $39. Try it yourself or give it to a friend who has not yet been exposed to the amazing things that we talk about, like Dan and I talking about tea in this episode.

So just givearelay.com. Yeah, check it out. All right, we have some follow-up. So fun. Dad let me drive a car. It's great. Why are we careening off this cliff, Jason? I don't know how to drive.

Ironically, I do know how to drive, and Mike does not know how to drive. But he knows how to drive a podcast, just not a car. That's true. I want to follow up on the Apple headset is something we've talked about. But also really, technically, this is our weekly What's in Mark Gurman's Bloomberg newsletter this week segment, since Mark is very kind enough to mail that one out on a Sunday, and then upgrade happens on Monday, and we get to read Mark's newsletter and figure out what's going on in there. Most of his newsletter this week was actually him complaining about how he got jerked around in his iPhone rebate, which is, I thought, an interesting choice. But there's a bunch of juicy stuff in the stuff that only goes

to Bloomberg subscribers. Or people who repackage Bloomberg subscribers. Yeah, I was going to say, fortunately, Mac Rumors has taken those segments and blown them out into not one, but three separate stories. Now, that is something uh about this but i wanted to start with the ar headset because mike and i have talked about that a bit and what mark says is it will be positioned as a dream for game developers it will be for media consumption and he expects apple to work with media partners to create content for uh vr on the device and third communications look for animojis and a vr facetime like experience to be the new age zoom um which i ar facetime sorry to people like ben thompson who think it's great ar facetime sounds as appealing as those ar meetings in metaspace

where you're a floating torso i just don't get it i don't get it i don't think i don't i don't know that so i don't know i've talked to other people my co-host over at the rebound uh lex friedman says that basically whenever he is uh like on facetime and his kids are on facetime they always want to do like the animoji thing and i get like all right i guess that that is a possibility like there are but i'm there's not a lot of kids in meetings i guess they do have zoom for like classrooms and stuff but who's gonna let them use the animoji stuff for that i i just it's a gimmick but it's not a thing that's actually useful i mean i don't know i i i think

that there is uh and all those things make sense in terms of like they seem well set up for what a vr headset is but i'm not sure that they are all things that Apple will execute well on and or are things that people want. That's my question. Yeah, I think that's the great mystery. Now, I have an Oculus Quest 2. Is that right? Yeah, that I got for Christmas last year. I gave it to the family.

My son and I both play it. We didn't get my daughter or my wife to to use it other than like momentarily but i think it's a lot of fun um i think the uh so i'm interested in this the the media partners to create content that will be watched in vr i'm curious watching vr content is very weird i will tell you one of the things that i have enjoyed and i think there is an opportunity for something in this headset, especially since it's supposed to have very high quality displays, is I've actually watched a couple of 3D movies on it because it's got the two different eyepieces. So you can watch a 3D movie and you can watch it in a 3D space or you can be floating in a void or whatever. 3D movie and you can watch it in a 3D space or you can be floating in a void or whatever.

And as somebody who is always skeptical about 3D movies at the movie theater, it is actually kind of cool to have that experience. And, you know, the home 3D movie experience was really bad because of the 3D TVs and all of that. So I do wonder if one of the things Apple might do is get everybody to dust off all their 3D content and put that in a, you know, basically in a version of the iTunes Store or a version of Apple TV Plus or something like that. I don't know. Will the third season of C be in 3D for VR?

I don't know. Seems like an interesting choice for a show, given its subject matter. I think the interesting things here are, one, you know, obviously they have a huge content arm now. So, like, spinning up deals for content for, stuff specifically tuned for vr ar like that's a thing they can reasonably do i always have questions about this as an experience because fundamentally when you're putting on a headset and sitting there and watching something is a experience that like

you're not going to share with other people sitting around you probably unless i'm sure apple would love you to all buy headsets so everybody in your family little bobbing and emojis in the theater seats great uh but it does make me think um with apple's huge push on shareplay this year that maybe that's a gateway for them maybe they're envisioning this as like a well now that we have shareplay for you know all these other of course we have shareplay for our new headset you can log into the metaverse and watch a movie with your your pals who are across the country and all show up in your as your avatars or whatever you'll see a little in emojis in the sense yeah maybe that's plausible what a lot of what we do when we're dealing with rumors like this is try to connect the dots and and i think you and i have both written articles about how Apple is really good at, although they like to keep secrets, what they are really good at is laying groundwork.

And if you can connect the dots, sometimes it's unexpected and sometimes it's clear. But I think that that is a good dot connecting that you just did there, which is this idea that SharePlay and that VR headset, you put those together and you end up with that shared media consumption thing in a virtual space. I think if they are still believers in SharePlay in a year, I think that that's what they'll have to do. Plus at this point, by the time they roll it out, it's probably, again, like you said, groundwork laid for something that may get announced later this year um and i think shareplay also links into the idea of if you're going to do gaming on this having some sort of multiplayer experience where you interact with people and like have a conversation you know

like you're chatting on facetime while playing a game with someone i think that that makes sense as well the gaming thing is is extremely dicey because although it is a place where obviously vr has been most successful right now as you guys have discussed and as you and i have discussed apple's relationship with gaming historically is very iffy and and thinking that they're going to sort of put this platform out there and they're like it's going to be so great that people are going to flock here and make amazing vr games maybe but i don't have a lot of faith built in. When Apple has been successful with gaming, it has never been

really on purpose, but it's been because of their creating a product that had a superiority over other products. And their success in the iPhone has been that they have provided so much graphics horsepower and also so many users

that it has driven people to the iPhone game market. And I think that's the scenario that you would have to look at here, is that if Apple doing an AR headset or a VR headset drives more sales of VR headsets than any other developer ever. And you can take your iOS games, especially, and convert them fairly readily for this format. And it's got the advantage of Apple Silicon. So it's actually maybe the most capable untethered VR headset out there. You know, what you hope is you put all that together and the developers are like, well, we have to be there.

But that's a big leap, right? And it requires you to build it in for them to come. And are they going to come? Because Apple, yes, anytime Apple has done a very careful, like, here is our game strategy. It's sort of been, eh, okay. Whereas if Apple just sort of sticks to what it's good at and says, we made this great platform and people love it,

then the game developers say, we want to be there. Right. And I mean, they've tried this and to a certain degree, I mean, Apple Silicon Max, you know, there is the ability to port your games from iOS over there. I don't think that's been a particularly successful platform as a result, at least so far. So far, maybe as the transition sort of completes and there are more and more devices running on Apple Silicon, people will, you know, developers will find it more attractive to move their iOS games over there. But so far, we haven't seen like a mass exodus of iOS games onto the Mac OS. And the Mac is stuck in that regards because it's got that doesn't have the touchscreen interface of iOS, which helps make it very compelling in a lot of the games that you play mobile. And it doesn't traditionally have the stuff that that console or pc gamers want to use or want to play so they've always been a little stuck in the middle there and i think i don't know maybe like you said it's never something

that they've really succeeded at when they've tried to do it but sort of when they make a great product that people want to use the games seem to follow yeah it's it's this really interesting um conundrum of like apple cares about games but apple caring about games is not what makes apple succeed at games apple doing other things is what makes apple succeed at games and that's just always been that way since the mac days it's just always been that way um anyway that may 2022, uh, may be the year of the Apple headset at last. Um, we'll see. It's been rumored so long, but unlike the Apple car, it seems to be, uh, like maybe on the conveyor belt and slowly headed in our direction or in the pipeline.

If you want to use that metaphor instead, there, there are more, um, Mark Gurman reports though, but wait, there's more. There's an overview on a bunch of other 2022 plans, iPad updates, including an iPad Pro with wireless charging, an iPad Air refresh, because it's a little long in the tooth now, and maybe redesigning the base iPad to be more in line with the other iPads in terms of thinner and maybe no home button on the front of it and maybe a flat side so they can put Pencil 2 on it instead of the original Apple Pencil, which is what it currently uses. That's interesting. I mean, I've been kind of waiting for them to get their ducks in a row with the iPad lineup because, you know, they release new models of iPads at different times throughout the year. And so therefore, they're never quite in sync. Like the iPad Air right now is a very tricky device to recommend because it is expensive for what it is. And once you get into sort of iPad Air price range, an iPad Pro starts to look

very appealing for only a modest, you know, additional fee, whereas the base model iPad is a great value, but it is definitely like the tech of yesteryear in many ways. I mean, it's inevitable that it has to get revised into something that looks like all the other iPads, and the iPad mini already went there this year. So it feels like, since it's inevitable, next year is as good a time as any. And I think Gurman's report suggests that Apple may have been shooting to get that out this year, and it just was not something that they were capable of doing. So they kicked it down the road a year, but that we should expect to see that. And I think that's about right.

I don't expect massive changes to the iPad Pro because they just did some pretty impressive changes other than bringing mini led to the um the uh smaller ipad pro model um but i'd be surprised if it like gets a complete remake because they just sort of did it and it's state-of-the-art now in a lot of ways other than dropping presumably like an m2 processor in there just like whatever is powering the new macbook air that he has has talked about and that also he restated here. Yeah. It is then very interesting. Like if Apple does redo that base level iPad with a lot of the benefits that you see, you know, new design, et cetera,

Pencil 2 compatibility, what is then the story we're telling about something like the iPad Air? Will the iPad Air come down in price to sort of bridge that gap a little better? Or are there going to be additional features to the iPad Air that won't be in the base model? Like I think they need to figure out what their positioning is for that line.

I'm a big fan of identifying product differentiation. I think that it's a thing that is really important when you understand what Apple is doing. And that has been the challenge with the iPad Air, especially as it's kind of an iPad Pro, but not. And what's the optimal price? Because what they really want to do is design the iPad Air in such a way that they can price it in the right space in between the Pro and the iPad. Because it is honestly, like the base iPad, it's going to be, people will buy it for their kids

and it's going to go into schools, but it totally is the classic marketing thing of good, better, best, which is you get people into the store with a low price and then you upsell them on the mid price. And the mid price is the one that most people buy. And that's the iPad Air. It's like, it looks kind of like an iPad Pro, but it's not quite, but still it looks really nice. And this one looks like an old iPad. They have to judge the right gap between those products in terms of features and price so that people are kind of motivated to spend a little more money and get that mid-range. Whereas the Pro, like I do wonder sometimes if the iPad Pro is going to keep getting more expensive because that's another,

unfortunately, as somebody who uses one, that's another way that you could differentiate it or spread it out from the iPad Air is to say, well, yeah, but the iPad Pro costs so much more than the iPad Air. Right. I think they, I but the iPad Pro costs so much more than the iPad Air. Right. I honestly think the Air, if they could hit that target point about like $500, $499 for sort of the intro level Air, that's the traditional price of the iPad, right?

Going back to the original iPad, $499. I think that's where you want to be because you're just enough over that $329 price point that it's like you're going to get more for your buck, but it is more expensive. It's not the bargain basement sort of thing, but it keeps it well south of sort of the ipad pro gust right and then you get that that base ipad the goal of base ipad is to have a as low a price as possible to get people into the ipad line i think it's one of the reasons the

ipad has had its comeback is that apple has realized that instead of having over the last five years or whatever instead of having like an ipad in the middle you need something that's cheap and you also then can create something that's much more expensive and profitable but the like hardcore people are going to buy it i'm one of those people and i love my ipad pro i love love it love it um my m1 ipad pro with the big one with the mini led it's gorgeous it's amazing so i'm happy to spend that money every few years on one of those but there are a lot of people who even looked at the standard ipad back in the day and were like it's too expensive i can get this amazon this terrible amazon tablet but i can still get it for a six-pack right remember that when they were offering six packs yeah the quantity solves all

your problem right yeah well i mean i know one tablet one bad tablet is bad, but six bad tablets is also bad. Worse. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Mark Gurman, since we're in the Gurman recap section. The Gurman zone. Friend of the show, Mark Gurman. He's been on the show. Apple Watch update, he says, you know, Series 8.

He's also, this is a really good newsletter because it's very much like him wrapping up his reports from across the year in a kind of a nice package. Not a lot of these are new, but it's all in one place. So for Apple Watch, he says, yes, there'll be a Series 8. He says there'll be an updated SE model and the new rugged Sports Edition watch that is aimed at athletes. Now, Mike and I have talked about the Sports Edition. I think that's such a great idea because instead of creating a rugged something or rather around like a rugged case or something like that, it's like, no, why don't we just take the guts of an Apple Watch and put it in a completely different design for athletes? And you can, same software, probably same hardware, or mostly the same hardware. Maybe the sensors are different, but like the shell is totally

different. And so many watch lines out there in the world, like you think about your, you know, G-Shocks or something like that. Like there are active watches that are rugged and that are for sports. And Apple's just sort of had their little metal rectangle so um the that rugged model makes a lot of sense to me yeah i know i i agree i think it's interesting to do the differentiation based on something sort of more aesthetic i would expect it to have you know a different watch face or something kind of like the partnerships they've done with the nike watch faces yeah exactly and maybe some different sensors or some different little things but you know ultimately it will probably be a Series 8, I would guess, on the inside.

Yeah. But in terms of the tech, but the outside would be totally different. Yeah, I think it's the equivalent of doing different case materials, right? I mean, in some ways, you've done your ceramic, you've done your titanium, and then it's like, oh, here's our rugged case, whatever that is. Time for rubber or rugged or whatever it is. Updated SE fascinates me so many people who talk about apple all the time have been talking about this weird dichotomy

between the that very very very old series 3 that's still kicking around and the se and the perception that we thought we all thought when the se came out that it was going to replace the the three and it didn't and a year later it still didn't. And so when I hear updated SE, I actually start to wonder, does that mean better or does it mean like cheaper to make so that they can get really get rid of the Series 3? Because I have a hard time imagining them selling the Series 3 in the fall of 2022. It feels like it's got to go. It's so old. I would think that what you'd want to do with the SE is make that product that is, uh, that maybe the first SE shot a little too high. Um, but I, but I honestly don't know because I'm, I'm still kind of baffled by the fact that the SE is still kicking around in the middle and, and the three is still kicking around at the bottom. So I don't really know what they're up to here, but they have two paths to go.

It's just like the iPad, Dan. It's just like the iPadad they got the two paths do you do you make it an affordable kind of mid-range watch or do you drag it all the way down so you can get rid of your low-end old model well the question is differentiation again like what is the purpose of this is it as you said to be that base level model that is going to get people in the door and you're saying like yeah you can buy can buy one for $199 or something. Right. Uh,

I'm sure they would love to have a watch that's compelling down there, but then what do you take out so that it's not cannibalizing sales of the more expensive watches? Right. I mean, right now it doesn't have, I believe the always on screen, right.

Which is sort of in the, you know, both the more recent ones. Um, the, the three being around especially is weird because with the SC, I think with the three, the SC and the 7, you have different screen sizes, right? Because the 7 got larger again.

So the SE is basically a Series 4-ish with a couple slightly different capabilities. Yes. And then there's the 3, which, again, makes no sense. 3 is there to hold that price point, but I cannot imagine a lot of people are buying it so yeah i don't know i i think it will depend in some ways on what other features we get rolled into the eight uh because apple does a thing of you know sometimes they keep around older models sometimes they have something like the se that's sort of like we've kind of packaged a bunch of older models into one you know rather than keeping our old series six around or something or series five we have

an se that has some of the features of the five but also lacks some of the features that the seven and high-end watches are still have yeah and that if i had to pick one thing that would be my guess about the se is they will update the internals a little bit they'll but they'll still use that screen that is that sort of second generation apple Watch screen. And they will try to make it so that they can finally get the margins to the point where they can make that their low-end model because the 3 is just going to be so long on the tooth at that point. As someone who wears a Series 4 and still,

the SE was such a weird product because it felt like, well, it's a very lateral move for me. It doesn't actually get me any of the features that I wanted. No, because it felt like well it's still a it's a very lateral move for me like it doesn't actually get me any of the features that i wanted no because it's but it's it's weird too because i mean it is not just literally a rebranded series four it's exactly like in between series it's a very weird it's a strange product i mean that's that's kind of the se thing for apple in general with the phones and i yeah it's i see why they're doing it, but it does run into problems where now they have sort of backed themselves into a corner. So it'll be interesting to see how they update it. And fourth in our list of ways that we use all of the parts

of the Buffalo, the Buffalo being Mark Gurman's newsletter, um, recapping his, uh, plan, uh, five new Macs for 2022, he says, uh Apple, including, well, let's see here, a high-end iMac, yay, with Apple Silicon, sit above the 27-inch iMac, a significant MacBook Air revamp featuring the M2 and a new design, colors, maybe, colors, an updated Mac Mini, that's the, you know, replacing the Intel Mac Mini that's still there, folks. The high-end Mac Mini is still there. So replacing that. Maybe replacing the low-end one or not.

I'm actually kind of curious if they continue to differentiate and have sort of like the silver one and the space gray one. And there's a Pro and a not Pro. He says a new version of the entry-level MacBook Pro. So that 13-inch model. That is weird now. Interesting choice there. Touch bar. Touch bar needs to be removed

and uh and a new mac pro there it is with apple silicon so um that's his that's his drop on those five max for 2022 which sounds about right that's sort of what we're expecting mostly things that we've we've all sort of assumed are coming because they fill gaps that are in the current lineup right specifically the high-end iMac and the new Mac Pro are both things that need to make the jump as well as the high-end Mac Mini. Interesting that they are revamping potentially that entry-level MacBook Pro. It does make sense from a price point perspective,

but it also is weird because is it going to be a 13-inch MacBook Pro? Is it going to follow the design language of the new ones? I mean, now that you've got a 14-inch in the mix, I'm kind of curious about what that product is exactly. Because it sits weirdly between the MacBook Air and the new fancy MacBook Pros. We're back to differentiation again, right? Exactly.

And then the MacBook Air revamp is most interesting because it's the sort of, that's the next gen a new processor potentially and also it's the first one that we'll see like a second generation uh apple silicon model right i mean since the m1 air was one of the first ones to roll out um and i'm intrigued because that that will probably be a much bigger departure the m1 air was essentially the pre-existing Intel MacBook Air, but just, you know, with different guts, basically. Right. So, yeah. I'm intrigued by the 13-inch MacBook Pro because I do think there's a way for them to differentiate it. And the way is they put an M1 Pro in it.

So the M2 continues to be low power, but has great efficiency. And that's in the MacBook Air. And then right now the M1 is the MacBook Pro. It's like, why is that Pro then? What makes it Pro? And the answer is it's thicker. It's got a fan. That's about it.

But they can easily refresh the 13 to have the same chip as the 14 and the 16 and take the touch bar out. And maybe it doesn't have the fancy screens that the 14 and the 16 and take the touch bar out and maybe it you know it doesn't have the fancy screens that the 14 and the 16 does but it's more affordable than the 14 and the 16 while still offering a base model with a you know with a bind obviously a pro chip instead of the m1 or m2 chip and that i think that's enough right to call it a macbook pro and to price it up from the air but let it be an entry into the pro space. And then maybe they, you know, it's got enough of the cooling system in there that they can let you spend more money on it and and and spec up that process. I want I do wonder about them updating it without changing the design at all, because it does feel very old.

It does feel very intel in its design it does i i mean if they end up revving the air and the you know now they've got the new macbook pros it starts to feel a little bit like that old uh was it like there's like an old non-retina one or something macbook that stuck around for a long time it had like a dvd drive in it and stuff and it starts to feel a little bit like that it's like well we kept it here for a reason we want to hit that price point and provide certain power whatever but it it definitely feels like an older version but when we talk differentiation i think that's it right i think that's it's like you want the fancy new 14 with the gorgeous screen that is like uh uh extended dynamic range screen well you're gonna have to pay for the 14 the 13's got the old screen

and the you know it doesn't look as fancy and it doesn't have all the fancy ports um maybe it's got some different ports than it currently has but still it's just there are a lot of ways like that that thing doesn't need to be cutting edge but maybe having a a pro chip in it instead of an m1 could be enough there's a little slot in there for it to differentiate is like i want uh i want a pro model but i don't want to spend a lot of money you end up with uh that 13 inch model that's a compromise i'm not saying model that's a compromise. I'm not saying that it's a great product, but I'm saying I can see Apple doing it. If that makes any sense.

I'm like, yeah, we can do that. We can put that in there. And a new Mac Pro. I like the confidence here from Mark Gurman saying, yeah, that's going to happen. We don't know the details of exactly what that is. You know, he keeps on saying that it's like a smaller design, which is not surprising necessarily because the current Mac Pro is very tall and what would go inside.

And I will refer you to about 10 different episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast where they have combination of analyzed and wish cast exactly what could be inside. I listen every week. I think it's fascinating. But like, there are lots of decisions that Apple has made with this product. combination of analyzed and wish cast exactly what could be inside i listen every week i think it's fascinating but like it's there are lots of decisions that apple has has made with this product that we don't know about that will lead and and this is i always bring up the peril the

parable of the three blind men and the elephant where we get individual information and we don't know what we're seeing um and i feel that with the mac pro like there's there's probably some stuff that they made decisions by where that report of the small Mac Pro were like, oh, right. That's what it is. But we don't know what it is yet. So I'm looking forward to year of 2022. It's the year of the Apple headset. It's the year of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, apparently.

Big year. Sounds good. Sounds good. I'm looking forward to 2022. Maybe it won't disappoint me. Oh, now you've jinxed it all. The track record is not great. One last thing before we move on, which is the Upgradees, the eighth annual, a shocking name, the eighth.

And it seems just like yesterday I was telling Mike we couldn't call it the first annual Upgradees, and now here we are. The eighth annual Upgradees. The voting is open. all at the first annual Upgradees. And now here we are. The eighth annual Upgrades voting is open. You need to help us with nominees because this is the thing where you get to have your voice heard. And also you get to remind us of things that we may have forgotten about for the year, products and stories and other things like that. Go to Upgradees.vote to nominate now. And you can also find all of our previous winners at Upgradees.com. That episode announcing the Upgradees will be recorded and released on December 27th. It's

our last episode of the year, as is traditional. Voting is going to close on Tuesday, December 21st. So you've still got some time, but definitely send us your favorites by going to Upgradees.vote. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Fitbod. It's very normal for people to start considering their health and fitness around this time of year, but between balancing work, family, and everything else you have going on, it can sometimes be hard to make fitness a priority. What you need is a program that works with you, not against you. That's why you need Fitbod.

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announcing features in June, knowing that they will ship it at some point during the OS cycle, but not on day one. It's a lifespan kind of thing. Like iOS 15 is kind of a thing that's going to continue evolving until they basically get to iOS 16, pretty much. Exactly right. Like it's just sometimes they'll do that. They'll ship it right before the other thing. It's like, no we we did this thing i know that wwdc is next week but

that thing we promised last year here it is so don't complain about it next week because we did announce it this week so so yeah the i i like their the the discipline that they're also not going to ship something that they i mean other than shortcuts huh uh zing there but they're they're less likely to ship something broken um and more likely to just defer it until it is you know there's that it's there's only one chance to make a first impression kind of thing that's i think there's truth in that that you roll out a new feature and it's busted and people like well i'm never trying that again so you kind of want it to work the first time out the door but But there is a large catalog of things that Apple announced in June. Many of them meant to be here by the, you know, in the fall.

Later in the fall is the classic line, later in the fall. Well, later in the fall, we are about two weeks away from it not being fall anymore here in Cupertino fall anyway. Much less 2021. Or by the end of the year, which is another, another way that they often phrase this stuff. So I thought we would go down the list. You, your article definitely went through all of these and let's, let's do a little check-in on where all this stuff is. So SharePlay. Yeah, we, we talked a little bit about SharePlay before in regards to the headset, but it, so it came out, it wasn't in the original iOS 15 release. It got released in 15.1 a few weeks ago at this point.

It is still not available on the Mac, but it is in the Monterey 12.1 betas, which have gotten pretty close. I think the assumption is they will probably ship. If they didn't ship basically as we started the show today, then maybe later this week or next week, I would have to guess, I would assume they will make that cutoff of fall. But it's definitely, it's interesting because it was something that they hyped a lot, right?

It was a, if you look down the sort of list of features, that was the one they spent a lot of time on this year. And for good reason, I think. It was very much tied into the pandemic, I think, in terms of how they were rolling that out. But it also took a while to get out there. And then I think there's also been some question of the uptake of it so far.

I'm not sure how many people are actively using SharePlay, which is perhaps a whole separate kettle of fish. I am looking forward to it being on the Mac because I do use the Mac all the time, even though this is probably a more iOS-centric feature. I keep meaning to try out SharePlay, but of course the challenge with SharePlay is you need to try it out with other people.

I mean, I guess technically you could have two devices and how sad is that? Like, I'm sharing it with another device with another Apple ID, yay! That's not using it, though, right? I mean, that's us testing it and fiddling with it, but it's not a thing where it's organically getting used. And I think, you know, it's interesting you say that you obviously use the Mac. Do you do FaceTime a lot on the Mac?

I do it more than you might think, but it's mostly because my daughter calls me at random times and I'm working, and so I will just answer on the Mac because what else? But yeah, I don't initiate FaceTime calls from the Mac ever. And so I can think of it being interesting. I mean, I think as I've talked to you about before, I do a podcast with my friend Lex Friedman called Not Playing with Lex and Dan, where we watch movies and record a podcast as we watch them. So for that circumstance, it seems like, oh, SharePlay is perfect, right? That's exactly what I want. So we don't have So for that circumstance, it seems like, oh, SharePlay is perfect, right? Like that's exactly what I want. So we don't have to fiddle with like, we got our Zoom call up,

we got a sync playback, you know, rather we can just sort of call and hit a play button and you're off and running. But other than things like that, I mean, I just, I don't know if this is something that just, it doesn't have a lot of application for me or whether it's a more broad, like doesn't have a lot of application for lots of people. So a more broad, like doesn't have a lot of application for, for lots of people. So I'm glad that we'll have the feature parody on the Mac and the iOS side. I think that's smart. And it does raise all these interesting questions of where are they going with

this? Is this something there, you know, if this is this big an initiative, it doesn't have another shoe to drop. Is there something coming with the headset? But yeah, I'm,

I'm glad that it's sort of getting out there, but it did take longer for something that they spent a lot of time talking about during WWDC. App privacy report. Yeah, this is actually in the iOS 15.2 beta. It's another thing that they touted pretty highly. Sort of comes on the heels of the app tracking transparency stuff

they did earlier this year with the end of iOS 14. Of course, that kept getting pushed back and pushed back in terms of implementation. And of course, it really pissed off Facebook. I think this would probably be pretty similar. It is in the 15.2 betas. I was actually looking at it the other day on my iPad, which is still on the beta train, because I was curious to see. And I was kind of blown away to see. I had watched like one episode of Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime. And there was like the Prime video app definitely had like way more phone homes than almost anything else, like twice as much as the next thing down on my list. That said, I don't use my iPad every day all the time. So I will be more interested to see when I'm using it on my phone exactly how that pans out.

my phone exactly how that pans out. But it is basically a screen that tells you how often all your apps are checking in with their servers at home or asking for permissions to certain things and then how often, right? So in a lot of cases, it's like, how often does this app want your location? How often does this app want your access to your microphone or things like that? So I think that's interesting. I think it's a really good addition. I'm kind of curious to see just how much it pans out in terms of our developers going to try and find ways around this. Like, I mean, it seems pretty like sketchy if they do that. But like, I can't imagine Facebook necessarily wants to report all the stuff it's apps are asking for. We're this is a screen where you can go in and say, show me all the apps that are accessing this particular sensor or are using this kind of activity down to a domain level. Yeah.

It's not the nutrition label. It's like the analysis of what you ate. Yeah, exactly. And where it went. It's interesting. So it's in the beta.'s it's in the beta and again probably coming soon 15.2 i'm guessing probably ships whenever monterey 12.1 does so probably in the next week or two is my guess you would you would think it's pretty close before everybody goes on yeah on

holiday vacation yeah yeah exactly all right um now i I've been informed by Apple that by a footnote on Apple's website that when you die coming later this year, you'll be able to basically mark somebody to take your Apple ID and all of that over if and when you pass away. So that there isn't sort of a sudden lockout on an account. Nobody knows. Nobody can get into it. Yeah. This was briefly in the betas very early on. And I know because I actually put in like I set it up and printed out like a piece of paper that had the recovery code on it. And then I think it got removed in subsequent betas. But I still have like my printout of like like I put my wife in charge or whatever.

I was like, here, you can have my account if you decide to that. I am no longer with you and you need access to it. I think this is a great program. I mean, it is something that I know a lot of people struggle with. I have, you know, I remember one of my cousins trying to, like, cancel an AOL account for one of his deceased parents. And them being, like, constantly trying to, like, get him to renew. Well, maybe. He's like, no, she's not going to need it anymore.

Sorry. to like get him to renew well maybe he's like no she's not going to need it anymore sorry like and and that is a it's a terrible situation to be in when you have to deal with all these other stresses so having an ability to uh set this up and and get access after the fact is i'm sure super beneficial but it is one of those things that requires a good uh education program too like people got to know it's there uh and i'm guessing a lot of us will probably end up helping setting to set this up for right for loved ones i assume that after people update to ios 15.2 when it's final prompt or something there was going to be a little thing that comes up that says hey digital legacy you're you you're gonna die uh don't lose your let's think about what's important here, your Apple ID.

Yeah, it's when that dialog box has a countdown clock on it that I think is really unsettling. Yeah, well, it's going to be an animoji of a skull. Grim Reaper animoji is going to come up and say, thumbs up. Yeah, it's a super important thing. One of my earliest memories is my mom getting upset when we would get mail for her father yeah um who had died when i was two years old right and i i definitely remember that she would get upset about that and like stop sending it and and and you know she gets she gets mail from my my dad now who passed away a few years ago and and she's like he's not going to take advantage of this offer

you know it's not gonna to happen uh but that uh that so this is important stuff and uh we'll get it it's a separate thing too from there was also an account recovery thing uh rose like trusted contacts that is that is in ios 15 where you can designate other people if you lose your phone or something to like help you get back into your account right but it's sort of a similar idea but like you know different different use case yeah uh ids in wallet the idea this is our our please uh please tap the nfc reader with your driver's license which uh eight states and i think they said the tsa originally like also has yeah i signed on to this but this sounds like it's not it it's because you've got all these big bureaucracies and you've got all these security questions and all that.

That sounds like a 2022. We're going to we're going to put it in the 2022 hopper with the with the headset and the right. The what else is in the hopper? The Mac Pro. It's in there. Yeah. Even even then, I think it's going to take a while before it actually gets out there. I mean, this is dealing with large institutions.

And we saw this a little bit with Apple pay. Like, you know know it takes a while to get everybody to sign on it requires like some time to get critical mass and start going and it's even worse when you're dealing with like government bureaucracies right so i will tell you where we're going to see this first um i've recently discovered that at some airports it's not all airports but at some airports i no longer need to present at the security desk a boarding pass because the boarding pass is linked to my ID. So they scan my ID, and the ID says, yes, Jason has a flight at this airport on this day. Let him through.

And convenient until, of course, it's inconsistent, so it's not convenient because then you go to the next desk at the next airport and they're like, I also need your boarding pass, sir. And I'm like, oh, right. Okay. You don't have the new stuff. But this is my prediction is we're going to see another round of that, maybe even with those kiosks that already are like that, where there will be like an NFC tap thing. And you'll basically, because they said the TSA is on board with this. I think it's all related. They're going to, you're going to tap with your ID and it's going to correlate that with your ticket

and they're going to look at you and have you take your mask down so they can see your face and then you're going to be ushered through. Like, it's like, that's all they need. I think that will happen probably the soonest of everything because it's the one bureaucracy

that needs to start rolling it out and somebody will report, oh, in this random airport, I actually got to use this feature for the first time. But in terms of it being more than that, I think it's going to be a long time. Yeah. And I'll point to, you know, I wrote a little bit on Six Colors about the digital vaccine cards. And I feel like this sort of links in with that to a certain extent in reminding us how fractured the u.s setup is in terms of it's very unequal in terms of where you can get these things so i think it will be interesting to see this rollout i've also seen that with the with the id where they'll just scan

that and it reminds me a little bit actually of traveling in some uh some places in europe too where even to get on the plane sometimes i feel like you have to scan like your your passport or something like that like it like takes a barcode or something. So I think this is an interesting feature. And obviously they talked it up a lot. They posted a thing a couple months ago now going through essentially like not in details the spec, but like here's how it's going to work. But yeah, having all or a preponderance of states sign on is going to take some time. So, you know, if you're in one of those eight lucky states so far uh you'll be an early adopter potentially yeah congratulations congrats i guess

yeah um swift playgrounds new version that lets you develop things in swift playgrounds and submit them to the app store later in 2021 i forgot this was happening really until i wrote this piece i was like oh wait yeah there was like a new version and they and that was a big deal because you can write apps on the ipad for the ipad uh there were rumors going around last week that some developers were essentially getting invited by apple to like check it out in beta private beta yeah yeah uh which suggests to me that it's probably pretty far along so maybe they'll make that 2021 date maybe that shows up when the 15.2 and 12.1

get released possibly um i thought it was interesting that that didn't you know people talked about it so much and it didn't really materialize yeah i'm surprised that they didn't make it and maybe they will at some point a public beta or a test flight for that any developer with can sign up for and even do a thing where it's like well you can sign up for it now but you can't submit yet right like or you can only submit right into test flight and it's not going to go in the store and do that kind of prolonged testing because it seems unlikely that they would do a closed private beta and then just roll out and say go to town people put this thing on the app store. Like, I don't think, I think there's got to be a bunch of steps in between.

A lot of these, and then what we're going to talk about next, it's sort of like, it's not that it isn't coming. It's that I'm not sure it's at step two, and it needs to get through three more steps to get out. And so it's going to be a while. Along with that, the X xcode cloud which they talked about where you can like build stuff in the in the cloud that has been they announced it as a beta so it was it was announced as a beta and that they're gonna ship it's a paid service too right yes you have to pay for that so that's that'll be free as a beta but then you have to pay i think is how that is going to work but yeah um so the big one is universal control, which in some ways, I think a lot of us thought

was one of the coolest things that they announced. And this is the, for people who don't know, it's the technology that is kind of stitching a bunch of stuff that Apple has already built. It's like that, you know, seeing them lay the groundwork because it's sort of like AirDrop and it's sort of like screen sharing and it's sort of like Sidecar.

But what it is, is you can put multiple Macs or Macs and iPads together and use one set of controls and move your pointer and use your keyboard, but move your pointer from one device to another, to another across their screens. And it's like you're using one surface of device, but it's actually the individual devices. So the simple example is I've got my iMac here, I put my iPad Pro next to my iMac. And when I move my trackpad, the cursor or pointer, whatever you want to call it goes off of the iMac screen and pops over into the iPad. But it's not sidecar, I'm using the iPad and its software and its apps. So what I'm really doing is sort of having my keyboard

and trackpad control the pointer on the iPad. It's like a KVM switch almost. Right, but you can also drag and drop things, which is the AirDrop part of it, right? And the clipboard is shared across them. But it's the idea that you can, as somebody who's used my iPad Pro with Sidecar, it just makes it a Mac monitor, right? And I always think to myself, well, if I'm going to do this, I should just use the iPad apps because I like the iPad apps.

Why am I putting a Slack window that's got some lag over there when I can just run Slack on the iPad? And this is the answer to that, which is, yes, you could just run Slack over there. And when you move your mouse over there or you start typing over there, it's the same keyboard you're using for your Mac. You don't have to switch to some other device. Anyway, very cool feature. And this is what I was saying before about the steps is, hasn't ever been even in a beta and yet is supposed to come later this fall which i'll remind you is two weeks away is the end of fall i think we say it's not happening at least in the fall and it basically seems impossible it is search uh for universal control in the system preferences app and it will open the displays control panel and depending on if you click the right way it will actually bring

up i just did it allow your cursor and keyboard to move between any nearby Mac or iPad. Beta, which the beta clearly means they're going to ship this as a beta when it ships. But when you click the checkbox, it gets a little dark while you're clicking and then you let go and it doesn't check the box. And then there's separately push through the edge of a display to connect a nearby Mac or iPad, and that's grayed out. So it is in some recent betas as a setting you can't choose. Yeah, I love that.

I found that by accident one day, too, because I could type Universal Control with taking displays. I accidentally put my screen to sleep at one point, and then I woke it up, and when I woke it up immediately, the dialog box was there suddenly, and I was like, what, there's not even a button for it. Where did that come from? Why doesn't it click?

Why doesn't it check? Yeah, it's so annoying. And there was, was i guess a beta where you could kind of there was like a terminal hackery stuff you could do to sort of enable it but it didn't work very well and yeah i mean it's somebody somebody put out a a thing where it was like there was like a secret preference that's like a a serial number for it's basically it's an apple internal something that you can pop somewhere and then it turns on the feature but like no don't do that yeah i wouldn't recommend it i mean it's clearly this was a lot harder i think than than the like the demo promised a high degree of difficulty right like the essentially this will be seamless and we know that apple loves to do seamless stuff like this and say

it just works right that's the old catchphrase. Ah, yes. Clearly it was not just working, I think. One of the things that I mentioned in my macro piece is that they chose to set the bar very high for themselves, right? They didn't, they could have, I mean, I don't know if it would have shipped yet because I don't know where they're having issues, but it struck me at the time, and it still strikes me, that they could have made this one of those features

that's kind of like sidecar, where you have to go like, all right, I'm going to connect to another device and this device and then i'm going to place it to the right of my screen and now it works and they they said no no no you're going to have your device in proximity and because of all of our uh airdrop and related um stuff all that proximity based stuff we're going to know it's nearby. And then you're going to push the cursor off of one of the sides of your Mac screen. And from that, we're going to infer the location of that device and do all the connection behind

the scenes. And it will seamlessly pop with a little animation out of the shell of your Mac and appear over on the iPad. It's like, that's awesome. That is Apple kind of at its best of like, we can figure this out. Computers can do this. We don't need to ask you. We don't need to throw up any Chrome

that configures any of this stuff. And that's fine, but that's harder. Hard, yeah, yeah. The degree of difficulty, very high. Like you said, they set the bar extremely high for themselves. I think this high. Like you said, they set the bar extremely high for themselves. I think this probably, as we said, this probably ended up being much trickier to implement

or to get right than they initially thought. And so I'm not shocked that they haven't come out and said, like, by the way, it won't make it. They don't do that. They're not going to come out and say, well, it's not going to make it by the end of fall. But yeah, you're not probably going to see it. I have to believe maybe the next round of betas because otherwise, when are you going to ship it? This is it. My prediction is going to be that they're going to ship 12.1 and 15.2 of iOS, and they're going to then the next day basically

drop the next round of developer betas and it'll be on in there that's my prediction is is that they don't want to mess up the current betas because they're about to ship them yeah but then they will and they'll be able to say you know it's now in beta and and and will be released publicly and it's like okay well we got it out by the end of the fall in that we put it in a public beta or a developer beta by the end of the fall. And again, there's no cop that's going to pull them over by the side of the road if they don't ship it by the solstice, right? It's not going to happen.

It's just us writing about it. But still, it would be nice to see it. Yeah, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The Apple, it's feature cops. Feature cops coming this fall on Apple TV+. Excuse me, Mr. Cook. I'm going to need to see your status of universal control.

I hope you've got a legacy contact filled out. I got some legacy notes. Loves those. Oh, he does. He loves them. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Amazon Music. Since you're listening to a podcast, I think it's safe to say you like listening to podcasts. You will find a ton of binge-worthy podcasts on Amazon Music.

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Renews automatically. Cancel anytime. Terms apply. Thank you to Amazon Music for supporting Upgrade and all of Relay FM. Now, Dan, I mentioned earlier that you last appeared on this show in 2016. Episode 85. What a world it was back in 2016. A classic episode about Kindles and Amazon Echoes

called Talk to the Cylinder, episode 85, April 2016. And I thought maybe we would revisit that a little bit. I wanted to start because Mike doesn't, again, Mike doesn't read books and he doesn't want to talk about e-readers. I wanted to start by saying that I reviewed a load of e-readers recently on Six Colors. Thank you to John Gruber for linking to my review,

which, you know, sometimes the Daring Fireball links, I expect. Other times I am taken completely by surprise and I was taking, I saw that on Daring Fireball and I expect. Other times I am taken completely by surprise. And I was taken, I saw that on Daring Fireball. Really? Okay, great. I mean, it's great. And there aren't that many people.

Here's another fact. There aren't that many people who review e-readers who care enough about it and are in a position where they've got a platform where they can review e-readers. The Verge does. And there are a few places that do, but not a lot. And I do care about it. So I called up, I bought a Kindle because Amazon, I can never, despite their sponsorship of this and the fact that we know high-ranking Amazon executives now, executive anyway, I can't get them to send me review units of Kindles. So I just have to buy them or in the

case of some of them, buy them and then return them. Thanks, Amazon. Copo actually sent me their new e-readers to review, which was really great of them. I bought one, but they sent me the rest, and that was awesome because I wasn't going to buy them. I wasn't going to buy like eight e-readers. And so you can read that review on Six Colors, but basically the Kindle paperwhite is uh probably the best choice for most people at this point i have i have switched over to the kobo platform for a bunch of reasons i think it has better typography i think the software is better it's got a store just like amazon does you can use the mac app caliber with aM plug-in to convert your Amazon books so that they play on the Kobo. It's, I guess, technically not legal, but I think if you're just place-shifting your own books that you bought, I'm okay with it.

You should be okay with it. And the Kobo has some other features. Most notably, I think, the fact that the Kobo Libra has physical page turn buttons, which I really like, and Amazon thinks is a premium feature. Buttons to turn the page are a premium feature that only should exist on the highest end, the Oasis, the highest end Kindle. The ghost of Steve Jobs has gotten to the evil market. Yeah, war on buttons, Amazon. Well, I guess this would be, if Steve Jobs had lived a little longer, perhaps he would have realized that buttons were a premium opportunity.

People will pay. That's right. They'll pay for buttons. Let those seconds pay for buttons if they want to. But anyway, so I love the Cobra Libra 2 because it is priced like $100 less than the Kindle Oasis and has buttons. It's not as nice as the Kindle Oasis. than the Kindle Oasis and has buttons. It's not as nice as the Kindle Oasis.

The screen isn't flush, so it's sort of recessed a little bit around the bezel, which the Oasis isn't. The Oasis has a metal back. It's a nicer piece of hardware, but it's also $100 more expensive. So I think if you're somebody who cares about the convenience of not having to tap on the screen, the problem I have with tapping on a screen

and not having a physical page turn button is first off, you're just holding your e-reader and then you've got to reposition your hand every time you turn the page in order to tap on it. Also, you can do mistapping, whereas with the Kobo, you can turn off tap to turn the page. So you can only swipe to turn a page. And it's delightful to not have mistaken taps turn the page of the book you're reading. And you just keep clicking that button. It's's such a natural you leave your thumb that you're holding the e-reader over the button and then every time it's time to turn the page you just go and it it's very civilized and that's why i prefer the kobo libra i have a libra as well i bought um after i think your first review the first version of it uh while back. And I like it a lot.

I've been using it more and more as my default e-reader. I do have a Kindle still that I use. And sometimes I jump back and forth because it just depends where I have a book. I'm living that Captain Picard, multi e-reader tablet lifestyle. I love it. It's weird, right?

Because it's like now, I used to have a stack of books on my nightstand. Now I have a stack of e-readers. It's a little weird. But I did just buy for my wife's birthday, which is today. I bought her a new paperwhite because her old Kindle

finally bit the dust. And I ended up, for a weird confluence of events, I ended up using it this past weekend while we were traveling and she was reading something on my Kindle

because it was only available on my Kindle. So that was a very fun story where I bought her a new e-reader and then I used it all weekend. So how did you like the paper white? Because it's solid. The screen is really nice. The flush screen on

it is really nice. So my paper white is a little older, but it has the flush screen, but this one has a much larger screen on it, which surprised me. So they shrunk the bezels a lot. I was using it without a case. I like it a lot. It looks great. I think the typography has improved even since the one I have, which is only a lot it looks great i think the typography has improved even since the

one i have which is only a few years old yeah the process the processor is better too so it's faster in it and the screen looks better yeah yeah i think i think my biggest complaints about it are i do think the ergonomics of it are annoying the bezels are so narrow that it's actually kind of hard to hold i have to hold at the bottom or i have to like put my entire hand like around the back yep which is uncomfortable i can do it but it's uncomfortable or you gotta two-hand it which is yeah or you got to hand it and i'm reading it like in bed and i'm constantly if you hold it by the bottom you're always worried like it's gonna tip out and hit you on the head in the face yeah sure um i so that frustrates me a little bit and i actually will say and maybe this is i don't know if this is a hot take but like i

think the kindle software ux has gotten worse like i was trying to figure out how to turn some features off and being like where are like there's the stupid feature that comes like enabled by default where it's like um like social like the highlights where it highlights things other people have highlighted right and tells you like 100 people have highlighted this phrase and i hate it i hate it and i could not i was like going through all the preferences like where does this turn off? And it turned out to be in like a totally separate section of the, like you could only view it in the preferences when you were in a book and then look at the viewing preferences

like while you're in the book. And I was like, this is so dumb. So I was like, this frustrates me. I think that those, you know, just their setup has gotten so complex because they're trying to leverage all these like internet and social aspects that i think it's just a bit of a mess whereas i think that kobo actually has a much leaner much cleaner ui in a lot of places so i guess this is part of the risk of becoming the dominant you know uh device maker in a in a market is that you don't feel as pressed to like improve things, at least from a

software perspective. But it is a fine piece of hardware. I enjoyed reading on it. But I do think I, having gotten used to the Kobo, I feel a little bit more spoiled when I have to go back to my Kindle. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The paperweight, you know, one of the challenges in reviewing products, and you know this too, is you've got to try to look beyond yourself. And bad reviews often come from people who are just reviewing it for what they're interested in. And, like, I am trying to look beyond myself and say that I still think the paperwhite, because of the—there's the cheap Kindle. I don't think that's good enough.

I think the paperwhite is a good Kindle to buy. It is cheaper than the Libra. It's got some very nice features and so because the bezels are so narrow and because I like page turn buttons, I am not going to use it.

I bought it and I used it and then I returned it. I'm like, no, I'm not going to use it. But I still think, I understand that a lot of people just don't care about the page turn thing as much as I do. I don't really understand it because I think ergonomically having a button to turn the page is so much better. So much easier. And then you can turn off the taps, which is even better because then there's so many mistakes. You get a little speck of dust on the screen and you're like, I can't touch the screen. The dust must remain because I'll turn the page and then right so like but but yeah if you're just

somebody who's very casual e-reader user or maybe you only read some of the time or you read at the beach or whatever like that that paperwhite screen is the screen is good the hardware is solid it's waterproof like it is it is the definitive e-reader for people who don't who don't care so much they're not precious about their e-readers they just want a kindle to throw in a bag and it's got everything that amazon has they've got their unlimited and they've got if you're primed there's some books that you get and all that kind of stuff is wrapped into the kindle platform that make that a good product yeah it's got the new, it's got the ambient backlight too thing, right? Where it changes warmth depending on time of day or something like that.

So, I mean, like, that's cool. The Kobo has that as well. I actually think the Kobo, again, implemented a little better, but I'm glad that it made its way to the paperwhite because it is a nice feature. You know, my favorite feature of Kobo. So I like Kobo. Like I said, I think the software is better. I think, yes, the new Amazon software update hit me right after I got that paperwhite. It opened up and it looked

perfectly normal. And then it said, I am updating my software. And then it rebooted. And I'm like, what happened? Who are you? How did you get in here? It actually, and its home screen looks more like the Kobo home screen, which I thought was really funny. And the settings are all over the place. Kobo software, I do think is better is better it's not perfect but i think it's better um it's typography is way better when people ask me why i choose kobo number one reason is the typography i i think there's something about the way that amazon looks really good i don't know why font rendering i don't know either amazon's font rendering and its default fonts there's something wrong there because the cobo like a book the cobo just the type is all crisper my go-to is georgia i think because i think it looks the best i agree it's so crisp and clear it's like i'm reading on paper in a way that

the amazon fonts are blocky i don't get it it's so strange it's the literally the same e-ink screen so i don't understand that i don't know what they're doing and my number two by the way is libraries and i wrote a whole piece of six colors that i'll link to in the show notes that explains because i hear i say kobo's better at library books than kindle is and i hear from all the people who own kindle's going what do you mean it's fine and and that's because i'm not saying that it doesn't do it i'm saying that kobo is better at it with kindle you go to the libby app on your iPhone, and everybody who has a local library, get the Libby app. It's super good. And I always want to extol its virtues. You log into your local library, get a library card. They're free. Go to your library. You might even be able to sign up online and not even go to your library.

Libraries are great. You put that in there. They've got a selection of audiobooks and eBooks that you just check out and use. Audiobooks, you just play them on the Libby app. It's great. They're free because they're from the library. EBooks, what you do if you've got a Kindle is you go to Libby and you say, yes, I would like this book. And then you tap send to Kindle and it opens a web view of Amazon and you log in if you're not logged in and you have to say, choose what Kindle you want to send it to and you press the button and then it loads another page that says, I sent it. And then you sync your Kindle and it shows up.

It's fine. Kobo, so the company that does Libby is Overdrive. Overdrive is the preeminent library system for e-books and audio books in the US. Overdrive used to be owned by Rakuten, the same company that owns Kobo, for five years. It's not anymore, but it was for about five years. And as you might expect, they had pretty good integration. They built in good integration. So on the Kobo itself, you can tap View My Overdrive Holds or Browse My Library's Collection

of Ebooks. If you do a search, you can search the Kobo store or you can search Overrive and find the books that are in your local library that you might want to read. And even if you're searching the Kobo store, if you find a book before you buy it, if you tap the little ellipsis button, it'll say, check this book out on overdrive. If it's available from the library, instead of from buying it from the Kobo store, like it's just nice. It's just nicer. It's not that Kindle doesn't do it well. It's just the Kobo store. Like, it's just nice. It's just nicer. It's not that Kindle doesn't do it well. It's just that Kobo does it nicer.

So those are the reasons that I have that and the fact that that Libra hardware is so good. My Libra tip, by the way, which I really love and I discovered either did not know about or had forgotten is adjusting the backlight. That's it. That was it? That's what I was about to say. I tried to do it on the Kindle. I was just always, oh, this backlight.'s it that's that was it that's what i was wiping up down left i tried to do it on the kindle i was just oh this backlight i was like oh come on

put your finger down on the left side of the screen on the kobo and then slide it upward the brightness goes up so good it's got a brightness up down gesture that i use all the time and yes dan when i was testing out the paperwhite, I kept being like, why won't it do it? Although I go to a menu and you got to hit the little buttons. Yeah. I will flip it and say that these E-Ink screens also support dark mode, which is a really weird thing where it puts, you know, it's what you expect. It uses the E-Ink screen is black and white, but it makes it the whole background black and the, and the type white. Now, because it's a reflective screen and there's backlighting, it's still kind of bright,

but it is a little bit dimmer and the typography isn't as good, but it's okay. And I will give Kindle credit here. Kindle, if you tap on the setting icon from while you're reading the book, you can just tap dark mode. And to do that on the Kobo, you've got to go like, you've got to tap settings ando you've got to go like you've got to tap settings and then you've got to go to page two and then you got to check the box and it's just it's more swipes and taps to get where you need to go so advantage kindle there i guess but i mostly don't use dark mode and and that that brightness shortcut is the best it really is great i i was a huge huge

thing for me uh I actually discovered, why is my screen getting, ooh, hey, this is useful. And by the way, I should say there's also a Kobo Sage, which is a new, it's a bigger e-reader, and that one's got the flush screen. Lauren is using that one. It's really nice. So it's more like a trade paperback size, whereas the smaller ones are more like a paperback size a little bit. A big screen. whereas the smaller ones are more like a paperback size a little bit a big screen um lauren uh likes it because she can make the type bigger and not have to change the page every two sentences yep and it's uh it's a it's it's really nice uh if you're looking for something bigger so i guess what i'm saying is don't default to kindle look around a little bit the kobo stuff is really good

and it has some advantages especially if you want those-turn buttons and don't want to buy a Kindle Oasis to do it because it's $100 more. And also Kobo, I'll point out just as a burn for Amazon, the Kobo products just come without ads, whereas the Kindle products you have to pay extra to take the ads off. And to see your book cover on the front of the Kindle, which is… They did add that feature, which is nice. I know. It's great.

But you have to pay extra. It took forever, and you have to pay for it. So I know that's not a huge account in its favor. Ooh. While we're talking about books, I think we need to have the obligatory Dan is a novelist conversation. You've got a book coming out next year. Do you want to tell people where they can order it and what order it and yeah sure this is uh the nova incident it's the latest installment

my galactic cold war series which i've been writing for quite some time now uh it is book three or four depending on how you count do you want to know why go to my faq at my website it explains it um it comes out in july of next year i'm very excited uh so it's the uh next installment jason has read this book i have or or an earlier version i'm actually i read a draft it may be very different now i don't know it's totally different there are there are rhinoceroses and unicorns now no uh i actually am working through the manuscript notes for my editor uh this week um so i'm ready to get the wraps on that. But it is, I think, kind of a fun thriller espionage story that takes place on a sort of on the planet on which a lot of these adventures have not been set before.

But it's like the home of the Commonwealth. Yeah, the Capitol. It's got a it's got like sort of a more thrillery feel to it. I think that's I agree i'll describe it all your books are kind of like spy thrillers except in a sci-fi setting and so i feel like if if you like both of those things like i know you do that's your sweet spot but i i'd say if you like um spy stuff or thriller stuff and are turned off by sci-fi you might want to um give it a try because it said it is you're you're mishmashing the genres a little bit but i think it's clear that these are and they're fun

too they're fun and funny uh it's not all just kind of bleak um spies you know you know the sad spies it's not a sad spy story some of those le care spies are they're very sad they're very tortured they're very tortured yeah your're very tortured. They're very tortured, yeah. Your characters are sometimes tortured, but also sometimes are wisecrackers because you can't help yourself. That's true. It's a little bit more like,

I think my blurb on the cover, which is from our pal Anthony Johnson this time around, says it's like Mission Impossible in space. So that's a pretty good sum up of, it's kind of what you're looking for. But it's available now for pre- looking for. But it'll be it's available for now for pre order in pretty much every place whether you want your stuff in ebook, you know, you can get an Amazon, you can get it on Kobo, you can get it at Barnes and Noble.

It's available in paperback from all those places as well as your local independent bookstore, I'm sure we'll be happy to order for you. I always recommend checking out indiebound.org, which lets you search for local bookstores near you. And this time, for the first time, I am doing signed paperback copies through my local bookstore, Porter Square Books. There is a link on my website for where you can pre-order one of those and I'll sign it. I'll even personalize it. It's a thing you can put in. And I happen to know that because Jason did jason did this i did it yeah i did it i i put a personal engravement in there that you have to do and it says something like for jason i owe it all to you so which i have to write it's the law it's the law now i did this um i

bought joe posnanski's book the baseball 100 and i bought i love this trend and i bought it from his uh kansas city City hometown indie bookstore. And he went to Kansas City. He lives in North Carolina now. But he went back to Kansas City for an author event for the release of the book. And he went into the basement of the bookstore. And it was completely full of his book. And they said, you have to sign all these and inscribe them.

And he said, oh, my God. And they said, and then tomorrow when you come back, there will be more because we couldn't fit them all in here. Yeah. But I love it because it's authors supporting their local indie bookstores and you get something from it, which is you pay for them to ship it to you. But the author will personalize it. And so I'm glad that you're doing that with the Porter Square bookstore. doing that with the Porter Square bookstore. I know when we talk about this and we talked about eBooks just a minute ago, people always ask like, I want to make Dan happy. How do I make Dan the most amount of money? And is there a difference? Is your personal preference buy a paper book from

an indie bookstore or is it, it doesn't matter or what? So, you know, there's a lot of math that goes into publishing contracts. And I think the best thing for readers is like not to worry too much about it. Buying the book is the most important thing. It's the best way to show your support. Honestly. Also, it's not fair that they put math in publishing contracts because writers don't know math. I don't, I don't know. Some of the numbers are larger than others. I, uh, it's very tricky, but I mean, the short answer is they all help in different ways. I think that there's a lot to be said for paper books, even though the royalty rate on those tends to be lower. And I'd be happy to

have a long conversation. If you're really interested, Junan, we'll do a... I don't know, Jason and I will talk about this somewhere else about books and publishing because it's super fun. But the short answer is that the sales really help. And the most important thing is pre-ordering is great because it goes into first week sales. And first week sales tend to be the largest number of sales, right? The same way a movie box office is biggest on opening weekend. And that is the kind of thing that registers interest for the publishers to say, oh, look, there's a lot of sales happening this opening release day for this book. Maybe we should uh

consider handing that guy another publishing contract or something like that so that's the most important and then after that i think it's a matter of your preference as a reader it's where you like to read your books if you're an ebook reader yeah buy it on ebook if you prefer a paper backer you want to sign copy do it yeah order one of those that's great you want to order all of them yeah that's fantastic order all of them do it, that's fantastic. Order all of them. Do it. I will say there is, even though it's not available for pre-order yet, there should be an audiobook version.

I don't know exactly when it's going to go for pre-order, but I will be posting about it on my website when it does. So yeah, keep your eyes out if you're looking for that. All right. And one last thing. We talked about paper whites and Kobos and things like that. Do you have a preference or do you go, are you all over the place in terms of reading books in paper, reading books in e-book?

I used to read a lot more books in paper. It's cut down a lot, especially in the pandemic. I think just the ability to get books quickly, like the instant gratification aspect, just got huge for me during the pandemic and being able to say, whether it's at my library or just buying a book in e-book, just being able know go and say i got it i'm gonna start reading really removed a lot of barriers i do like reading on paper and i do do it occasionally i think also the other part of it is just like having recently moved like uh realizing i have a lot of paper books and acquiring new ones is probably uh lower down on the priority list these days yeah i think that's fair.

For the record, I know I talk about e-readers a lot, and that's because I don't read paper books. I will occasionally, there'll be a book that'll be at the library in paper, and it's not available as an e-book, or it's only available to purchase, and I will have my contact at the local library, being my wife, bring it home for me but and so i've read a couple library books in paper in the last couple of years but basically i'm 99 on ebooks now it just and and because i got into the whole overdrive library thing that's actually been delightful because um there have been occasionally there are these lists of books like there was NPR put together a definitive sci-fi fantasy reading list of the last decade or something like that. And there were there were a handful of books on there that I hadn't read that were at my local library.

And I added all those in and I will sometimes see other articles that list books and I'll put them in there. And then it's this sort of delightful thing where eventually that book will pop out. You know, my turn in line basically comes up and they'll say, here it is. And that's actually been really great because there's this sort of random, it's like a playlist on shuffle. Conveyor belt of books. Yeah, of random books that will come in an order, just a totally random order. Books that I said that I was interested in, but I don't remember anything about them because i just read an article about them and i put them on the list and then they come based on who's in the line and when it's your turn and so that is that has actually been

delightful because now in addition to the ebooks that i buy i've got all these library books that just pop in and say here i am and of course you can say ask me again in three weeks or something like that they that's pretty easy to do but i do love that so it is it is the weird thing with ebooks though that like my wife and i were both reading books on our e-readers this weekend and they both ended up being very long books and i feel like that's the weirdest thing because you can't tell anymore right like you got a paper book it's like oh look it's a thick paper book it's gonna take me i'm gonna like dive into this now you're reading just a book on screens like i have no idea actually in terms of uh of superiority of kobo that that's another thing that I really like is that they put the page number of how many pages in the chapter at the top. And at the bottom, they tell you what the page number is of the book

overall. And there's a progress bar at the very bottom. And that's the way you can tell you're reading a long book is you read a few chapters and then you look down at the progress bar and you're like, oh no, how big is this book? But, you know, this is page 8 of 723, and you'll be like, yeah, okay. It's a long book. Just lower the font size. Make the font smaller and the page count goes down. Please, no. My eyes are not as good as these.

No. Well, you can make it bigger, but then the page count goes up. That's how it works. Oh, man. I know. This episode of Upgrade also brought to you by Text Expander from our friends at Smile. Do you ever type the same thing over and over and over again? I know I know. This episode of Upgrade also brought to you by TextExpander from our friends at Smile. Do you ever type the same thing over and over and over again? I know I do. Could be customer support answers, sales emails, document edits. You type these things repetitively

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and saying more and less effort. TextExpander is going to save you time. Again, computers are here to do our work for us. Let them. TextExpander will let you. And as a listener to Upgrade, you can get 20% off your first year. Visit textexpander.com slash podcast. To learn more about TextExpander, that's textexpander.com slash podcast. Thank you to TextExpander from Smile for supporting Upgrade and all of RelayFM. Dan, you know what time it is? What time is it, Jason?

It's time for Ask Upgrade. Thank you. Those are space spy lasers. Thank you. I appreciate it. Our first question comes from Michael, who says, do you use an external trackpad with your Mac? And if so, which one?

I still have the original Apple Magic trackpad with the AA batteries, but I think it's finally dying. My keyboard is a Keychron K2 for what it's worth. What trackpad should I get? I have never used a trackpad that is not Apple's trackpad, and I can't imagine ever using a trackpad. With the exception of I bought that Logitech keyboard for the iPad, the one that had the trackpad built in last year when the Magic

Keyboard came out. And the trackpad on that was not great. Not great. Yeah, I use a Magic Trackpad too on my Mac. I had an original Magic Trackpad. I love it. I would never, honestly, never switch from that for anything. And I don't know if Michael is a laptop user, but remember when Apple made that change where they went to the sort of virtual trackpad where it just vibrates when you click it and they got rid of the diving board effect where you can't really click at the top of the trackpad because it hinges from there. So you have to click down lower on it. Well, when they changed that on the laptops, they also, that's what the Magic Trackpad 2 is. It's that vibrating, you can tap anywhere on the whole thing and click and it

works. There's no diving board or anything like that. And it's a really good product. And that's what I use too. I have also learned the hard way. You mentioned that iPad case. I have tried a lot of iPad cases with trackpads in the last year because they added pointer support in iPadOS. And so everybody's like, hey, we can do our own trackpad keyboard combo now. And I've used the one from Logitech and I've used the one from Bridge.

And what I've learned is Apple puts a lot of secret sauce in its trackpad stuff because two-thirds of the Macs they sell are laptops. And they've been using trackpads for a very long time apple has spent decades at this point perfecting first trackpad gestures and then later multi-touch trackpads and then later um the the one that they've got now where it's that's kind of virtual it's pressure detection and all of that like apple has poured so much effort into its trackpad software that's been invisible because if you only ever use an apple trackpad you just think it's what a trackpad is yeah if you use a ever use a pc trackpad if you are a bounce back and forth it is wow my wife has a pc for work and i occasionally i want like use it and show her something and i like i can't it's, nothing works like I expected to. And so using those, the otherwise perfectly nice products, the trackpads are decent on the Kensington and the Bridge models.

But they're not, like, I realized there were things that I do with my fingers on the trackpad that I do on a non-Apple trackpad. And the trackpads get confused. They don't do the right thing. and the trackpads get confused. They don't do the right thing. And I can aggressively move where my fingers are or change how I do it because I've been trained by Apple's trackpad software too, right?

That's also been happening secretly in the background. The short answer is you think it's invisible, but it's not. If you use Apple products, if you used an Apple Magic Trackpad, if you use Apple laptops, get a Magic Trackpad 2 for your desktop. Not only is it great, I'm a big fan of trackpads, and I love that all the gestures that I used on laptops for all those years also work at my desk.

I also think, and listener David, member David in the discard points out that it's funny, he says that Apple's mice are so bad when Apple's trackpads are so good. I think it goes to the fact that most Mac users, and that includes people at Apple, are using laptops, and they all have the Apple trackpad. And then it is such an easy step to go from there to using a trackpad on your desk, which is what so many of us have done. And I'm pretty sure that the people who work on Apple's input devices are probably more trackpad people than mice people. And also that if you have to justify working on one or the other, like the trackpad is built into two thirds of the Macs you sell. It has to be the priority. It's been so long since I've used a mouse regularly and everything.

I really, and then when I go back to them and find them and like have to use one for some reason, I always find them annoying. I don't know. I don't. Yeah, I don't. I've moved on. I haven't used a mouse since the 90s, I don't. I've moved on. I haven't used a mouse since the 90s because I got,

and I know I've told this story, but basically one of my bosses at Mac User back in the day had a Kensington Turbo Mouse. And when she left to go to work for a different magazine, I got that thing. And at that point, I was a trackball person

until the moment that I became a magic trackball person. I had a trackball at one of my jobs for a while, too, that they got for me. What killed the trackball is the innovation of the scroll wheel, because you could do the two finger down scrolling on a trackpad, but on a trackball, they put a ring around it.

It's weird. They tried to bring a scroll wheel into some of them at one point, and it's like, no, that's not a thing. We all agree it's better than the ThinkPad eraser nub. Yeah. No, I think Casey, not Casey Liss. Casey Liss loves that thing.

Casey Liss is wrong. A little nubbing. You heard it here. Yeah. Well, he hates it. He hates everything. But he loves that ThinkPad nub. He does.

Hi, Casey. Brantz writes, with the rumors about an updated iPad Pro next year with wireless charging, mentioned earlier in this episode, how do you think Apple will handle that? A glass-backed iPad sounds too heavy, so maybe an exposed MagSafe ring, sort of like the clear iPhone case? Brant, I think when you think iPad Pro, you've got to think MacBook. You've got to think that it's not a big iPhone. It's a thinner laptop. And so I'm going to say, I think that if they do iPad with a MagSafe charger or wireless charging of any kind, it's going to be MagSafe and it's not going to be lay it down on a pad. It's going to be either a puck or it's going to be a magsafe connector like the new laptops

have maybe even the same one maybe possibly you think it you think it's gonna have two ports is that where that's going do you mean like a magsafe plus the usb and usbc yeah yeah uh maybe it already has i mean technically it's got the smart connector on the back so it would be uh one way to do it would have it be a magnetic smart connector that also is a charge connector that seems interesting to me because i can't imagine them putting a magsafe port on the side and a usbc i mean like they have to be on opposite sides maybe i don't know it seems it seems i think they could i mean it's not really a port right it's just a little yes yeah that's a good point yeah but if you wanted to do charging via the smart um by the magic keyboard then what you probably want to do is use the smart connector so could they do a new version of the smart connector that also has more robust because

you can do transfer power transfer over smart connector but it's it's terrible you don't want to do it but they could do something like that and then they could potentially have something that's more like a magsafe charging puck like like uh the ones that they sell but not not like a chi charger necessarily i just don't hard to line up right like yeah i just don't i think it's more likely that they would do something that would that would connect like magsafe yeah and make a physical connection and charge um that's that's my guess it kind of surprises me they didn't come up with a way and maybe this was just super complicated but it surprised me they didn't come up with a way to like put the usbc port like inside like have like a magnetic ring around the usbc port or something so you could use it for both like i don't know i that seems intriguing

to me i'm surprised they didn't try to do something or maybe they didn't it just didn't work out but that's what i would say is is don't think iphone think ipad smart connector or think mac um in a new mac mag safe although i will say uh traveling with that macbook pro for thanksgiving i i was reminded of a thing that used to happen with my magsafe laptops which is i would then lay it down on the ground leaning up against something and it would lean up against it and pop the mag safe charger off of it. And I'd be like, no.

And then I have to put it back on and try to get it in an angle where it doesn't pop it off. And I try to imagine doing that now with my iPad. And I'm like, that's the one thing that makes me sad about my M one air is it doesn't have max. It doesn't have max. Yeah,

it's true. Mork probably from Ork, writes, do either of you, I think he means you, Dan, own printers? If so, what do you use them for? Printing photos? Rough drafts of blog posts? Sure, yeah, I print out all my blog posts.

They're not real until you print them out and nail them to your front door. Yeah, like Martin Luther. I own a brother. I'm looking at it across the room. HL2280. It's an old multifunction. It's a beast.

It's got a flatbed scanner in it. And it is technically not even mine. I am custodian of this printer because it is the printer our MIT Mystery Hunt team used to use when we actually were in person. So I would lug it over to MIT for our weekend puzzle solving annual event. And I would set it up in there. And then the rest of the time it would live in my house. And I would use it when I occasionally need to print something

out. And I briefly had another brother laser jet that but we sold it when we moved. So I just have this one because it's got the scanner in it i use it to print like documents occasionally when i need to print something out it's fairly rare these days it's not even plugged i'm looking over the cords just lying on the ground it's not even plugged in did you say 2180 2280 dw oh 2280 dw is a it's pretty big and it doesn't it doesn't have it's pre-airprint which is really annoying so i i've used printopia for years with it because it's the only way like i don't want to set up having to like print to these things that i uh i also have a laser printer although i am the owner of it um i'm not just a custodian

i'm just a guardian it is the hp color laser jet pro m255DW. Ooh. Yeah. They're so good at model names, these printer makers. Yeah. It's a color laser. I resisted buying a laser for a long time. I used to have. I had a personal laser writer, too, back in the day, and I loved it when I was in grad school. But I ended up, after a series of inkjet printers that were disappointing and dealing with the ink and all that,

I decided to buy the laser printer. I actually, my mom likes to print pictures and she lives in the desert. And we bought laser or inkjets for her and they were complete failures. And I finally said, I'm just going to buy a color laser for her because the ink dries out in the desert. If you don't print on a regular basis, if you wait a week or two, the ink dries out and it all jams. And so I bought her a color laser and I went back when I visited her the last time, there were new pictures on her wall

that she'd printed out with a laser printer. And in setting it up, I thought, I should not be afraid of the laser. I should, don't fear the laser. This is Ask Upgrade. The lasers are our friends. So I bought one of the same model, that M255DW that I had bought for my mom. And it's great. We don't use it a lot, laser this is ask upgrade the lasers are our friends so i bought one of the same model that

m255dw that i bought for my mom and it's great um we don't use it a lot like i don't i don't print out my blog posts and and go over them in red pen um that i haven't done that in years but uh there are documents that are required in places or it's convenient sometimes it's a coupon for parking at the airport. More of those things are on apps now, but they're not all on apps. Some of them, they really want to see a piece of paper. Every now and then I have a boarding pass that it refuses to text to me for some security reason. And so it says, no, no, no, you have to print this.

I'm like, okay, I'll do that. My son has stuff for school sometimes where he has to do that. Shipping labels are a great one it's honestly just a it's a convenience to have it i mean like there are like you said there's just so many weird edge cases sometimes shipping labels is a good one i definitely printed out a bunch of returning stuff at amazon even that is less needed now like right my my local whole foods you can just hand them something and show them a barcode and they'll be like yeah we'll take care of it. And it's weird.

I have a lot of those where it's the, you know, I need to print. Somebody sent me a product that I'm returning and they've given me a label to print. Sometimes they print it themselves, sometimes not that's already labeled for UPS to our local UPS store, walk in, place it down, or to our local post office and walk it and place it down and walk out to the place where they collect the boxes where you don't have to interact with anyone or wait in line. Then do those things, right? And talk to somebody and have them print a thing for me. I don't want to talk to them. I just want to go online. I want to print out the thing. I want to tape it on.

And I want to walk in and say, here you go. Or for FedEx, just leave it outside the door and say, come get it. That's what I want to do. So printers are great for that is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. They still have their utilities. And I love having a laser printer.

I had a StyleWriter way back in the day. Yeah, good times. It wasn't a great printer. And Amar asks, do you use tap on your Mac trackpad or do you use click? What do you think, Dan? I didn't come here to be attacked, Jason. So this is a matter of dispute over on the rebound. I have tap to click on.

You monster. I know. I know I'm a monster. I don't end up using it that much but i do like it's i've tried to think about whether i do do it even consciously and i'm not sure i do think there are some cases where i feel like a tap is a thing i want to do that is like it's weird in my head it's like less committing than a click it's like i want to bring a wind to the foreground but i don't want to like click a button in the window so i'll tap

on it it's it's totally like a weird a weird mental thing for me but i do have it on but i use both all right it is weird so i'm glad you admit i'm glad you admitted that um i think that tap to click is the work of the devil knew that was coming i i i don't you know people should like what they like. I don't like it. That's my answer is I do not like it. I think it's easy to misclick with tap to click. True. I really like doing it where I, you know, I actually click and it clicks and then everybody's happy.

We all know what a click is. We all know what a click isn't. Tap to click. It just gets in the way. So that's my answer, Amar. I use click. I do not use tap. Whereas Dan doesn't care, apparently.

Or uses them for different things, which is even weirder. You get into weird habits with these computer things. It's true. This is what I learned when I used those third-party trackpads is, oh, I had to take video of my hands making gestures, and I'd be like, oh, that's what's happening. That's why it's doing that weird thing that the Apple trackpad knows is fine. But the other trackpads, like, there's an extra finger here. sometimes i keep because it used to be because you have to click at the bottom of the hinge track pads and because it used to be that there was a track pad with a physical button under it i click with my thumb at the bottom of the track pad that's just always stayed with me and sometimes uh and i never really realized this sometimes i lay my thumb on the bottom of the track pad while i make other gestures and those third-pads are like, what's this thumb doing here? And it teleports back and forth.

And Apple's like, don't worry about it. That thumb's not doing anything. And that's entirely because of that long legacy that dates back to when the button was below the trackpad. It's my own personal problem, but I was trained into that behavior and I haven't been trained out of it. It reminds me of our friend Lex's,

I think he was the one that said this years ago, using other people's computers as hell, which is, I think a great, every time I sit down at my dad's computer and it doesn't have like natural scrolling on and I'm just like, ah, you, so, so you haven't lived until you've have John Syracuse in your office and he needs to print a boarding pass. And so he sits down at your computer in your office. Cause that's, that's a moment of like, I may die. I may die because John Syracuse is sitting in my office using my computer and he's not going to like it. And he, for listeners, he did not like it. So Jason, what are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing with it? Why is this on the is on the desktop here yeah oh yeah i got it all from dad i did i did he judged me he judged me i was found wanting all right dan um

thank you so much for guesting for mike this week i appreciate it where can people find you and the stuff that you do i mean they would have an easier time avoiding me uh my you can find me in so many places uh obviously i write with jason over at Six Colors. Co-host Clockwise right here on RelayFM. I co-host The Rebound, which you can find at reboundcast.com. For more on me, you can check out my website at dmorin.com, which has not only a list of all my podcasts, but also links to all my books, including The Nova Incident. And you can pre-order your copies there, including your signed copies.

Yes. You can find me on Twitter at dmorin. And obviously, also over at The Incomparable with Jason doing a bunch of other podcasts. And if you haven't listened to The Rebound and you like Connected and you enjoy the japery that goes on at Connected. Oh, do we jape? The Rebound is real full of japes. There's lots of japes. Anything with molts, first off, is going to have that.

And then Dan and Lex are also there with the Japery. So if you're fans of that sort of podcast, theoretically a tech podcast, but that has become overwhelmed by Japery, try the Rebound. You get a second one. I will say, I don't know if Connected goes there as much, but we are on the R-rated language side, though. I will warn people about that. If you want a filthier version of Connected, uh but with all americans then that's the that's here you go except for the occasional canadian and the occasional scoutsman who drop in well you can also find me at six colors.com and on twitter at jay snell remember to vote and help us with the upgradees at upgradees.vote

and of course you can give the gift of for $39 a year for new plans to you or to your friends at giverelay.com. And we will be back next week. And Mike will be back and horribly jet lagged, but he will be back. Thank you to our sponsors, FitBod, Amazon Music, and TextExpander from Smile. And we will see you next week. Until then, Dan, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock. Bye, Jason. Clock lasers.