Upgrade - 387: The 2021 Upgradies

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

As the year comes to an end, it's time for the Eighth Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2021, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.

from relay fm this is the 2021 upgradies awards and these awards are brought to you by squarespace zocdoc and memberful my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by my co-master of ceremonies for this year's upgradies awards jason snell hello jason snell hello my fellow co-master it's pretty good right co-master of ceremonies that's weird but oh it's fine what else would you call them like people that host an award show just hosts co-hosts yes but i wanted to make it different to normal because this is especially thing co-master of ceremonies it is then this is the eighth annual upgraders awards which is a great thing to have gone eight of these now it's hard to believe so in a couple of years 10th yeah it's gonna be great i know if you don't know what the upgraders are every year we award

some of our favorite apps media and trends in technology with recognition. Some of these awards, I guess, would be considered good for the recipients. Some may be less desired. Unlike other award ceremonies, which are just people reading out the winners of each category where the deliberations are done in secret, we go through our process here so you get to hear how we reach our verdicts. Both Jason and myself come to each category with our own selections, and we take into account the results of our public nomination that we've been running for the last month or so, and we give the top three winners in each category, kind of nominations in each category,

as voted by the Upgradians, and we take those into consideration as we make our final decision on who wins in each category uh thank you to everybody that did put in their nominations over the last month or so it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of you so thank you so much for doing that and thank you for compiling all of those many nominations mike because oh it was a fun little task to do during some holiday downtime if you would like to see a history of all of the previous award winners over the last many years of the upgrade you can go to upgradies.com and find that that website is lovingly built and maintained by a friend of the show zach knox i would also like to give a couple of other thanks before we start the artwork for this year's uh upgrade ease which of course

is laser inspired was provided and produced by david dooley and the theme song for the upgrade ease was created by upgrade composer chris yes yes composer of the show composer of the show our in-house composer chris breen uh We also have a selection of Lifetime Achievement Award winners in the Upgradies, which we'll discuss throughout the show as we hit each category that they are related to. As a reminder, Lifetime Achievement is given to a recipient after three wins in the same category over the history of the Upgradies. So we can get new winners coming in and out.

Because I think sometimes there are some categories where we could have maybe had seven or eight time winners at this point. Should we get on with the awards? Let's do it. So we start as we always do by looking at some apps. And our first category of the evening is going to be the best iOS app.

Overcast is the Lifetime Achievement Award winner in this category because obviously listeners of this show love podcasts and love Overcast. So, would you like to know how the Upgradians nominated for Best iOS app? Yes, please. With 4.9%

of the vote is Tweetbot. 11.8% of the vote is Apollo. And 15.7% of the vote goes to Carrot Weather. Hmm. I feel like Carrot Weather and Apollo, they are always up here. Perennial.

Yeah. Perennial choices by the Upgradians. Carrot Weather is a multiple-time runner-up in this category, one-time winner in 2017. Interesting. Mm-hmm. That's a one-time winner in 2017. Interesting. That's a good one. It's on my list. Carrot Weather is on my list as best iOS app.

I didn't used to use Carrot Weather before a few years ago. Carrot Weather, I think, added, and this may be when it won last time, it added support for weather stations via a weather station network. So I was able to get like my temperature in carrot weather, which was great. Love that.

I still use it this year. It did its update with the like interface changes, right? Within the last year. I think that may have been last year that the interface, if it wasn't last year, it was very early this year i've had a real struggle trying to remember the time span of 2021 way more than 2020 strange isn't it yeah like adina mentioned this to me at one point and it's

completely accurate like it really feels like our year began when we were vaccinated before then it was like a different year so right big hazy year carrot weather has had shall i say an absolutely incredible year it won an apple design award and an app of the year award from apple yeah and i believe it was this year that they did the modular design well they okay by the i mean brian carrot the person brian carrot mr carrot who who does carrot weather um and it was uh when i first saw it in fact i remember sending a a message to you Brian Carrot. worried but by the time it got to the end it you could make it uh you know i think this was what brian carrots vision was all along which is um basically make your own weather app and have it look the way you want and he created a whole bunch of different presets if you don't want to go into

detail but that is settled down and that is my go-to weather app now and i i like it a lot i get frustrated sometimes with the data that's displayed on the Apple Watch. But again, that is a universal thing. Complications on the Apple Watch don't get updated the way that they should. It's not Brian Carrot's fault. It's not Carrot Weather's fault. So I think that's a great choice by the Upgradians. I had a few others that I wanted to throw on the pile for consideration. One of them is NetNewsWire, which I wrote about this at Six Colors.

NetNewsWire became a daily part of my media consumption this year. NetNewsWire was released, I think, last year for iOS, and it's free. It's open source. It's a classic RSS reader going back many, many years on the Mac. And I'm using it in combination with Feedbin, which has an email gateway to be the place that I read a whole bunch of newsletters that I subscribe to this year. And then on top of that, I've added in RSS feeds because once you're in NetNewsWire, you might as well add rss feeds and it it's an app that has has absolutely changed my uh my media consumption i think and and for the better i would say um and it works the way i like it so i i want to mention net newswire as a possibility here um let's see what else uh scriptable uh which I know I mentioned last year as well. Scriptable is a JavaScript app that lets you do JavaScript on iOS, but it added support for widgets last year. And that has been a game changer for me because I was able to build my own widgets to show my own data and i think uh i think that's

really cool this is uh simon stovering in copenhagen who makes this app simon scriptable all indie developers are named naming their apps after themselves so that would make me and you jason and Mike, upgrade. Maybe. Maybe. In the context of this show, yeah, it would be. So Jason upgrade says to Mike upgrade. Yeah, maybe. Maybe.

I'm going to put broadcast in this category. I listen to live podcasts on my iPhone and Apple Watch, especially Connected, which is a fine show here at RelayFM, but also Accidental Tech Podcast. But Connected happens during the day. And so I'm frequently listening to that on my iPhone or my Apple Watch. And that's Steve Troughton Smith's app. It's also on the Mac. But I love that I can do that on my iPhone and my Apple Watch, listen to live streaming podcasts. And Carrot Weather was my fourth. So those are my other suggestions here so the conversation about carrot weather made me add carrot weather to my list there are many categories where i've come with multiple recommendations this was one where i just came with one um because i i for me i know what my favorite ios app is probably of all time carrot weather is way up there like i would say

carrot weather is without a shadow of a doubt the very best apple watch app ever made i've said that before and that isn't a category we have here because it we would run out after three years yeah we just give it to carrot weather each time and then have to close down the the award category but carrot weather is genuinely one of my favorite applications it's absolutely fantastic and has continued it's gotten it's leaps and bounds this year like it's come along like so far yeah widgets was a big thing for that app for me i think and really solidified it as as being such a fantastic application but the app that i wanted to mention, which I will always mention, is Timery. Timery by Joe Timery is maybe, for me,

not maybe, it is my favorite iOS app ever. I get such great use out of it, right? So it's personal to me. Time tracking is a big part of my life. But this application, the amount of work that is put into this and new features, it's truly astounding. Some of my favorite additions in the past year before we even possibly get to talking about the mac application that was made this year as well like things like now for setting a timer there's some auto

completing stuff so you can start maybe if i start typing in it like as soon as i press start a timer it pops up a text field. I type in like UPG and it will give me all of the things that I have tagged with upgrade and all my various projects that I've run in the past. So it's just given me auto completing of past entries. I've had things like customizable buttons to adjust a time frame. So say I've opened a timer and really actually I started this like 15 minutes ago. I can just hit a little button, turns the timer back by 15 minutes and starts from then.

The Excel widget on iPad is so good. And it's one of, I think, the smartest ways of implementing that widget class where Joe just took four medium widgets and put them in a big grid. So it's just like four of the various widget types that is made for the app is just put them in one big widget. It really is just absolutely fantastic. And it really feels like an application that's so well made for the task that it performs. And it's really just, I think, a masterclass in long-term app development. It's absolutely fantastic. Right. And I'll take your word for it because I don't track my time. Yeah, I know you don't.

And I don't use the three of the apps that you mentioned, right? But I understand their quality. But I really feel like this is a foregone conclusion for the winner this year, you know, now that we've gone through this. Put Carrot back in there? Yeah. Alright. It is done.

I feel like it's got to be right carrot weather is the winner and our runner-ups i guess we'll go i'll put timer in and do you want to pick a runner up from your list i'm going to pick um let's do broadcasts we're gonna go broadcasts from steve broadcasts steve broadcasts yes so the winners and runners up actually technically it's steve broadcast smith it's hyphenated steve broadcast pastel is that what you mean yeah oh yes steve broadcast pastel right uh so the winners and runners up in each category they are listed on the upgradies website uh i'm not going to include them in the show notes for spoilers, so I don't put the winners in. So you can

find the winners and runners up of each category on Upgradies.com. Congratulations to Brian Carrot for picking up. And the whole Carrot family. Second victory. Now on the doorstep of lifetime achievement. Best newcomer iOS app.

The Upgradians voted with 7.2 percent for affirmations eight percent for obsidian and ten percent for amplosion um i feel like the upgradients have been listening to connected because that's where i know about these apps affirmations um is not something that i have used but um i think i it's like it's just like daily positive yeah affirmations it is made by wonderful relay fm uh listener and discord community member justin justin hamilton right yep oh yeah i wrote this i wrote this up so i did use this briefly because i wrote it up as an example of a nice just it's just nice because it's telling you positive things and and it's really beneficial in the the widget so you can get a widget touching that stuff but it's also one of my favorite

screens in an ios app ever which is just a fidget screen and it's just like a bunch of controls that don't do anything it's pretty cool um and then amplosion is a amp removal extension yeah it's a safari plugin and i think that this was the year on ios where you got safari extensions and it's a big deal and i'm and you and i are both going to mention safari extensions as well and implosion is one that was its primary task is to remove basically amp which is that google like website light version that you get trapped on and it's really bad especially if you're trying to send a link to somebody because then you're sending them the amp link which isn't the real link um and so it kind of overrides that and sends you to the right page and that's produced by christian christian implosion also known as christian apollo implosion yes that's true i have uh i have three suggestions in this category okay um a new one that just just happened over the weekend actually but I'm going to throw it in here, thanks to the recommendations of the good people over at Mac Stories,

is Mela by Silvio Reeder. Yep, I love this app. This is one of the most beautiful iOS apps I've ever seen. And it's so simple. So it is fantastically designed. Look, there are a lot of recipe apps out there. I have been writing about recipe apps since the days where they were kind of like based on HyperCard. Like literally, there was an app called Manja by Upstill Software that was on the Mac back in the monochrome Mac days.

And I used it. So I've seen them all. And there are some good ones out there now. I know a lot of people like Paprika. Mela really impresses me. Partially because of its design. And then partially because of its functionality. There's a beta.

So it's not public yet. But there's a beta that does sharing. Which is super important. That's what I want. Oh my god. I was going to say. Get Adina on the test flight. This would be my app of the year.

Like my, if it did that, it is missing the one feature I wanted, which is being able to share an entire library of people. Literally on Christmas Eve, I emailed Silvio, Silvio Reader, who does Mela.

Confusing. And Silvio sent me a test flight link and I got it on Lauren's iPad, and I got it on my iPad, and we are now connected. Oh, my God. And that makes all the difference. Anyway, what I love about this app, too, is that it will let you take a picture of a recipe. It has an in-app browser, and when you navigate to a page that's got a recipe on it, it shows you in another pane what the import is going to be and it's a very good web import. My only complaint actually is that I have a few recipes

that are in text files, like in files or in notes, and I want a way for it to share that text basically with Mela and have it consume it and turn it into a recipe using its kind of intelligence that it seems to have. But it's, yeah, it's a beautifully designed app. And all of my Christmas cooking and baking was done in Mela this year. And that's not bad for an app that I literally downloaded like four days ago, five days ago, but it's great. So that one's high on my list. I'm very excited about that. Like this app is so beautiful like i love reader too like

reader is one of my very very favorite apps i should have put that in as a potential nomination but i love the way that app looks and what's so great about melee is that silvio just took what they clearly know about how to pass text right right? And just applied that to this, which I think is super good. Yes, great app. Oh man, I'm so excited about the sharing. Yeah. A couple other nominations in this newcomer iOS app category,

Tayo, which I've written about a little bit. Tayo is really interesting. It is a text editor. It's a markdown text editor. And I've been using it a bit it is not my number one uh text editor on ios but it's up and coming and the thing that impresses me about it the most is that in addition to having a whole javascript kind of like scriptability things for you to build macros with they built their own like version of shortcuts inside their

app with actions that let you build macro actions using blocks like shortcuts which is just it's wild um it's over the top but kind of brilliant and it's also like it's also a clipboard manager it's it's it's still trying to figure out what it wants to be um in some ways because it is a clipboard manager and a text editor uh and a floor wax and a dessert topping so um i i but it's just the the the boldness of building your own shortcuts interface essentially for just actions inside your app it is wild so tayo is definitely one to watch and i wanted to mention it here and then uh maybe my favorite newcomer iOS app actually talking about Safari extensions is Noir, which is the app or extension that puts all web pages in dark mode when you're in dark mode. Because nothing worse on my iPad than navigating when I'm in dark mode and it's night or early

morning to a site that is blaring at me with a white background and black text on a white background. And that's over. Like I installed Noir and that was it. It's over. And you can set it per site. So if there's a site that you don't want to override, you can do that. If you, if you, um, if it finds a dark mode on a site, it doesn't override it. But if you don't like their dark mode, you can turn that if you if you um if it finds a dark mode on a site it doesn't override it but if you don't like their dark mode you can turn on noir's dark mode and see if that makes you happier but basically you set it and forget it and i love it so noir is my other nominee noir is really good it's a really good app i saw uh amplosion and i saw your option for noir

and because i was struggling with this category. So it made me want to pick an extension because that's been a really cool thing this past year is the addition of extensions. So I'm picking Super Agent for Safari. Super Agent is very simple, but it has improved my web browsing experience immensely. It pre-fills and removes the cookie notifications

that pop up on websites. So when they want to get your cookies and they want to get your advertising preferences, Super Agent fills them out for you, mostly in the background. So you never need to see them anymore. And you can, it's not just like removing them, but like an ad blocker, it's actually filling them out. So you can say what not just like removing them or like an ad blocker it's actually filling them out

so you can say what kind of settings you want and super agent will just complete it and now like if i ever use safari view controller right i'm like what is going on with this web page um and super agent also gets rid of just like you know sometimes you get those little pop-ups like hey sign up for this newsletter like it removes some of those as well, which I really appreciate. It's a very simple application. It's free as well. And I really like it. I have it on all my devices now.

Yeah, the challenge with something like Super Agent is you only notice when it isn't working, right? Because you get something like that. I wonder if I'm getting – I have not with any of these sort of like uh cookie consent blockers i haven't had as much luck with it as i've heard other people seem to have with it and i wonder if it's because i'm in california so i'm getting the california cookie consent problems whereas most of the people who complain about this problem are in europe and they're getting the european cookie consent problems very possible they're not being coded for whatever it is you're receiving. But I have had flawless luck with this application. Yeah, these are great.

I think it is the year of the Safari extension on iOS. I think that's it. My choice here is Noir, believe it or not. I just think it is a life-changing moment in terms of my use of my iPad in the evenings to have everything. Because that was always my complaint when we did dark mode, when they were like, oh, dark mode, it's finally here. And then you go to a webpage, it's like, it's not. Because all these webpages, even now, after years now of knowing how to make a dark mode version of your website, there are sites that just don't care. And it's so great to just say the websites don't care but i do care

and i have made your website into dark mode it is uh it's great so that's my my nomination i don't use noir all the time but i have it installed because i use dark mode all the time and so i don't necessarily want to force the color change of websites permanently constantly but i do have it installed and i turn it on and i will say of all of the extensions i have used i think it's the best made one like it looks really nice and still has a lot of cool features so i would be totally down with honestly i would be down with an all uh web extensions so i was i i would have leant towards mela but if you would lean towards noir as your winner from that category then maybe we should go with noir as the winner and super agent and implosion as the runners-up it would certainly be a fun sort of message to send on what this year was.

Well, let's do it. Okay. Let's call that. So congratulations to, let's check in here, Jeffrey Noir for winning this category. And we'll just put SuperAgent and Implosion as the other two. And it's the year of Safari extensions on iOS. Yep. As an asterisk, I would just say like the one password one is also excellent but one password not a new app so yeah i uh have some issues with the one

password one because of the authentication um i authenticate in one password using face id except that extension doesn't seem to have access to Face ID? No, and you have to put your... You have to type your password in, and then you can choose a refresh time. Yeah, I hate that. I get that that's something where the extensions don't have access to the biometric

authentication, but it stinks. I hope that someone at Apple will recognize that. Maybe it just wasn't the thing they needed or thought it was needed you know if you if you use the one password uh share extension and biometrically biometrically authenticate then it's unlocked and it will be unlocked for the extension but okay you can't just uh unlock with the extension without typing in that password and i hate that it's like on my ipad i don't want to type in that password.

I want it to authenticate and know it's me and just do it. My face is my one password in that case. We now move on to best Mac app. The upgradians voted thusly with 3.9% for Pixelmator Pro, 6.3% for Obsidian and 7.3% for Croft a lot of note taking happening out there in Upgradianland that's the thing right that's been one of the trends

of this year the last two years but this year especially is these personal note taking mind applications I really really like Croft I would say it is a great example of a Mac app. I don't know if I would call it my best Mac app.

I think it is. I mean, everybody says this is true. It's one of, if not the best Catalyst app. However, I would say Timery would really bump up against that. But it's a great example of what a Catalyst app can be but I know I personally have another app on the Mac that I think is really good and I like your suggestions too so would you like to tell the Upgradians what they are?

One is Swiftbar which was the replacement for Bitbar it is the utility that lets you put anything you want up in your Mac menu bar by running a script. And it can be a script, it can be a shell script, it can be an Apple script, it can be a Perl script, it can be a PHP script, it can be a Python script. It doesn't matter, a JavaScript, anything that will run in the command line and output something, that output will go in your menu bar

and you could set it how long it's a refresh. These apps have been around for a while now. I love it. I keep writing, you know, and modifying writing new ones, modifying existing ones. I have it right now. It's showing me how many live listeners we've got. It's showing me the temperature and the rainfall outside. I've got a little thing that shows me the air quality outside. I've got one that shows me what track is playing in music that a friend of mine requested that i put together uh for him or and so i found one and then i just customized it based on his desire and sent it off to him like it is a great little utility that also because it lives in the menu bar

um it is very mac very mac like it's important mac menu bar they go together okay so my next one is bartender we're staying in the menu bar staying up go together. Okay, so my next one is bartender. We're staying in the menu bar. Staying up there, Mike. Yeah. You like it up there? You like the menu bar? I like it when I have bartender on.

Hmm, yeah. So bartender updated. It's been a rough couple of years for a bartender in the sense, not of their own making, but in the sense that Apple has messed with the menu bar. They mess with the menu bar size. They put a notch up there on some of the laptops. Well, you see, I wouldn't say a rough year. I would say the notch was a gift to Bartender.

Well, that's true. But it's challenging technically the last couple of years. I feel like macOS updates and hardware updates have made the menu bar, which was maybe a little bit of an island of stability for a while, into a free-for-all. Like, what is happening? There's control center is up there now. What's going on with that?

There's a notch. There's different sized stuff. Like, there's so much up there. And every now and then, even with, like, really knowledgeable people, I listen to podcasts or people would write things and they'd be like, oh, those are this menu bar stuff. And my response is always like, use bartender, just use bartender. It is for years. It is the definitive way to organize your Mac menu bar. And I love it. I mostly use it to create an invisible menu bar space. That is my number one use of Bartender is I have the way I've got it set up. I have a few menu bar icons that are visible all the time. And then if I move my pointer over the space where they're next to it, where there isn't anything, a bunch appear.

And those are the menu bar icons that I don't need to see at a glance, but I might need to interact with at some point. And all of that is possible and a whole lot more in bartender. So I love it. It's great. And my third suggestion in this is going to be a duplicate of the next category because this is a newcomer but i'm seriously going to say i want to consider it as best mac app too uh it's an app that i first heard about uh from you and steven it's uh mime stream not the best name terrible name it's not it's not not the best name bad name i have no i don't care about saying it because the app's amazing and i'll say that when the name is so bad you can confidently say it's not the best right it's clearly far from the mime stream but this year uh what is it this year Google changed its rules about embedded browsers accessing its services.

And what that meant is that the app that I have used for years to do my email, Mailplane, basically ceased development because they saw the writing on the wall. They were not going to be able, they could fight it for a while, but in the end, their product was not going to be allowed by Google. And I love Mailplane because it was basically a Mac. It was a whole bunch of Mac stuff around the Gmail web experience. And that's because I don't use Apple Mail. I haven't used Apple Mail for a long time. I find it unreliable, slow, bad at searching, bad at getting new mail in my mailbox in a timely fashion uh bad especially when the connections are slow but actually kind of bad when the connections are good too i don't like it uh especially on the mac and so i switched to mailplane which is just loading the gmail web page and it's great except now um and it added like mac keyboard shortcuts

and mac drag and drop and clicking on a link would open the mac default um and it added like mac keyboard shortcuts and mac drag and drop and clicking on a link would open the mac default application and it was all that stuff just around the edges to sort of make this gmail web page into something that feels more like a mac thing because i'm on the mac but it's going to go away so uh within like a week or two of that sad news when i started sort of shopping around for another way to check my email, I heard about MimeStream, which is in beta. It is from somebody who used to work on the Apple Mail team, actually, and is now off on his own. And what's his name? Do we know his name?

I can find it out for you. Oh, yeah. Let me know. I mean, obviously, it's MimeStream. He named it for himself. Oh, it's Neil. Neil MimeStream. Neil MimeStream, yes.

Anyway, he made this app, and it is... Eventually, I think he wants it to be more, but out of the gate, it is a native Mac app that is a Gmail client. And what that means is everything works better because as a Gmail user, everything works better than Apple Mail does with Gmail. It understands what Gmail labels are. It understands what Gmail search is. If I do a search in MimeStream, it it does with and i can do the qualifiers and whatever

that i would do in in a gmail because it's the number one reason that gmail is great is that the search is amazing it's google uh it just it works in mindstream it's native mac interface backed by all of that gmail power i love it it i switched immediately and it is such a revelation and such a discovery still technically in beta so it's still free he will charge for it eventually sign me up sign me up for whatever you're charging neil mimestream because i love it i echo everything you said about both Bartender and MimeStream. They're two Mac apps that I love. And maybe we'll talk about MimeStream a little bit more in a minute. I wanted to say CleanShot X, which is an application that I have been on a bit of an

unnecessary or undesired press tour for over the last yes i know i've noticed this because i think it's so fantastic it's it really is a vastly better screenshot tool than the one that apple ships all right i i would i'm curious a little bit about about what makes it vastly better and i say this because i heard you talking to steven about this and the features that I think he mentioned that it did all are in the stock. Cause he stock Apple screenshot thing. He was like, Oh,

you can take a screenshot without a shadow. Yeah. You can do that in the stock Apple screenshot. You can take it with, you know, you can, you can put it on the clipboard that like, and what that says to me is that Apple stock thing is bad at discoverability, but very fully featured.

So explain to me why I, as somebody who knows all the tricks of the Apple screenshot tool, should try CleanShot X. Why I, an intellectual, should try CleanShot X. My point is you're not going to get me with a feature that already exists but i don't know about it all right so you're left with what does it do better that not what does it show you know show off better but what does it actually do better than the stock apple stuff okay so one thing it has a lot of customizability which i enjoy so you can choose what part of the screen you want the little um preview to show up on for example and you can choose how part of the screen you want the little preview to show up on, for example. And you can choose how big you want it to be and stuff like that. You can choose how long it stays around.

You can choose if and when it will disappear and what needs to happen for that. You can choose where to save stuff and all those kinds of things. So there's a little bit more customizability or easier to access customizability. The markup tools that are in the application i much prefer and are easier to use um and it i don't know it does things in a way that make more logical sense to me like if i take a screenshot i don't always i just want to take the screenshot and then make the decision about what i want to do with it i don't want to have to activate like a specific keyboard shortcut combination

to get what I want. So I take the screenshot, then I can hover over it and press copy, or I can hover over it and do what I need to do and then just press Command-C. Or you can drag the things around really easily. I don't remember if Apple's version does this. You can just drag the screenshot

and put it into a text field. I also like that you can stack multiple screenshots on top of each other and they just stack up. So you could take a bunch of screenshots of a bunch of things. And it's not like it doesn't replace each one each time. You get a new one every time. Yeah, it does video recording,

which you can also turn into GIFs really easily if you want to. It does video recording, which you can also turn into GIFs really easily if you want to. It does full screen. So if you want to take a scrolling screenshot of a web page, you can do that. It has a timer built into it if you want that. It also does stuff like you can choose to, if you take a screenshot of your desktop or something on your desktop, you can remove all the things you have on your desktop so can remove all the desk all the things you have on your desktop so they don't show up in the screenshot this is also the same for video so

if you were doing a screencast you don't actually have to clean up anything and you can also if you want to choose a screen like a background that will show up in those screenshots doesn't have to be your desktop background so basically it's it does a lot of the basics the same but then has a ton of customizability and a lot of the things that they allow you to customize are the exact things i want to customize but apple doesn't allow for the options for and also as i say like i'm i feel like i'm able to make my decisions more slowly and in my own time rather than having to decide exactly what i want if you don't hold down option right now everything is ruined yep so i only need to

remember two shortcuts one for capture an area one for capture the whole screen all right well said so that's what i like about it okay um so for me uh I would be cool with Craft. I would be cool, which was the Upgradians pick. I would be cool with Bartender. Obviously, Clean Shot X. I think, between me and you, I think

MimeStream's got a really good shot in the next category. I think it does. So, I would say, say you know i would be really good with bartender personally let's do it all right so we're gonna go with the winner for the best mac app of 2021 to be bartender with the runners up should we go with clean shot clean shot. Yeah, that works for me. Good work, Bartender. I don't know the developer's name, so we'll just go with Bartender person for the time being.

Mr. Bartender. So, best newcomer Mac app. And the upgradians voted thusly. This is really interesting to me. Craft, 9%. Now, that was interesting because Craft won Best Mac App and got a higher

percentage in Best Newcomer Mac App. There you go. MimeStream with 11.2% and Shortcuts with 16.4%. Okay, Shortcuts. Yeah. I had Shortcuts on my original shortlist.

And it's on my list. And I felt like I couldn't commit to it because I feel like next year I could maybe give it my best Mac app. But with the things that I have in my category, they are fully formed apps that do their job properly and shortcuts does that most of the time i think i think shortcuts has gotten it has gotten better and is getting better because i

think i have to realize what the ship wasn't good enough it is weird and not mac like in a lot of ways and some of it is me getting used to it and it's quirks but that's not like that's not great that's not great with the oh i have very specific behaviors i only ever do when i'm in shortcuts it's like no it shouldn't really be like that but that's sort of how it is right now um but it's getting better and everything around it is great and it has been a game changer on the mac already in terms of what I'm capable of doing. But the app is still kind of janky. So I want to, I want to praise its functionality and what it enables while also saying that as a,

as an app and we are so app focused with these categories, like I'm so happy that it's there. I wish it was better, but it's, you know, it's functional, but not great. And that's,

that's tough to give any, you know, award to. My others, other ones in this category, Swift Bar, which I've already mentioned, it came out end

of last year so basically in the period where it was sort of too late um and um and mime stream which we just talked about which um is fantastic i love having shortcuts on my mac and i love interacting with it from the menu bar i have yet to really spend a lot of time building a shortcut on my Mac. I think I want to give that a little bit more time. I also feel like I haven't really had the opportunity to fully dig into shortcuts and the possibilities for the Mac, but just having, you know, I have the menu bar and I have the five shortcuts that I use really frequently. And I really love having access to those right there as well as needing, like other than needing to just pick up an iOS device and fire it off.

Yeah, I just, I showed you something last week that I built, which is that now the Mac integration is starting to hit with shortcuts. So like I can run a shortcut in launch bar and instead of just running it, I can press, I can select it and type space and then put in input and it is passed as input to the shortcut. So I built a thing that searches six colors. So if I want a search term, I want to find something in six colors. It used to be that I could either search for it, but I would end up in a web browser window. And then I need to click on the link of the one that i wanted and copy to the clipboard and i build a shortcut that takes input so it comes from launch bar

and then it throws up a little uh list of all the article headlines that match it that were came back from the server and i pick one and it copies it to the clipboard it's just it's so good and the the extra magic that's happening there is that LaunchBar, a utility that I use all the time, is now talking to the shortcut. And that puts it over the edge. So it's really great that it's there. And it's one of the big stories of this year. But I don't think it certainly can't be a winner for best newcomer Mac app because of all the problems in the app. And I'm looking at your list here,

is two apps that you've mentioned before. Yeah. MimeStream, which we've talked about, and Timery on the Mac side, which is the Catalyst version of Timery from the iOS side. Yeah, and it's super good. I think it's Catalyst. I'm pretty sure it's a Catalyst app.

I think so. And I just think that Joe has done a wonderful job with Timery. It started off as like, hey, here's the iOS app, right? Like I was on the beta, right? And it's like, basically, here's the iOS app. And then it's added a bunch of stuff to the application, like sidebar support and stuff like that, which has then found its way back into the app.

And you remember that thing I was mentioning earlier about the auto-completing when you type something in? That first in the Mac app, and then it found its way to the iOS app as well. But my very favorite thing that it has is it's up in the menu bar and it's showing me what my current timer is, but I can very easily click it.

I can start a time where I can choose from save timers or recent timers. It really feels like a great example of an application that started life as a Catalyst app and now does all this other stuff that not necessarily a standard Catalyst app. I was going to say capitalist, not a standard capitalist app would do.

But I just think that Joe's done just a wonderful job with the Timery Mac app. It's, you know i when when apple silicon came out uh it wasn't one of the apps that was like enabled that you could just run and i was disappointed about that but honestly i'm just happy that i waited now because the result of this one has been vastly superior and as i say is in going down this development path has actually made all of the apps on all of the platforms better which i just think is like really awesome i just think that that's a great thing um and then my other uh nomination is

mime stream so you should say you heard about this from uh from me and steven i heard about it first from steven on mac on a mac power users episode i use gmail and what i was looking for so for one email account that i run i didn't want it to be in my standard email app where i have a bunch of accounts so i wanted to keep it off on its own and i was looking for something to put it in and i thought oh i'll give this mime stream a try because i couldn't i couldn't switch to mime stream for all of my email for two reasons one not all of my email is Gmail. And two, I've come to really rely on Spark's email sharing system. So I can share email with our VP of sales and we can go talk about email

and stuff like that. So I couldn't leave that. It's too important to my workflow now. But what I really love about MimeStream is it's like, hey, what about all of the best features of Gmail, but in an application that's nice and looks good and is very frequently updated and has everything that you want?

Like one of my favorite things, which is very simple, but like so many other apps just don't do or can't do or whatever, is it has the support for the like auto filtering that Google does, like promotions and updates and that kind of thing. You know, you just do and it's easy. And what I also really love is I'm a very particular email person, right? I like my email set up in a certain way. And this app has every feature I've ever wanted for an email application,

but not in like an obscene way. It's just, I think it's very thought through. Like something that's really important to me is if I read an email and archive that email or reply, what I want the email app to do is just send the app back to the inbox. Do not open the next email, right? I do not want that ever. And there are way too many apps that you deal with an email and the next thing it does,

hey, here's the next email. And it marks it as unread. And then you've got the next email in front of you. I never want that. A MimeStream has a setting so you can choose when you action an email, what happens next and you can choose it. To me, that is like,

if an app doesn't have that setting, I just feel like the person doesn't use email. Like if you always, every single time want it to do one thing, I just don't think you're using email enough because that is a very particular thing that people want. Some people do their email. They just process it all at once.

But lots of people do their emails well like I do where it's like I do one at a time. Just because I've sent one email doesn't mean I now want to deal with the rest of it. So yeah, Mindstream is awesome. I love it. Yep. And that's why it's the winner yeah of best newcomer

mac app this is an easy one yes uh i really hope that uh neil mindstream is able to continue pushing this one um like support other types of email you know and and and an ios client as well which i know is on their radar right yeah runners up uh shortcuts yeah i mean it was on your list and the upgradies list and the upgrading and can we put timery in again sure awesome love you timery love you joe i should create a timer for when we talk about timery i mean it would be a lot for me that would be a lot for me. That would be a lot of time. Yeah, that would be the only timer I would ever use, though. It would just be the Timery timer.

This episode is brought to you by Memberful. Memberful is the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on the web. If we were giving an Upgradee award to really cool services that have made my life a million times better in the last year and a half memberful will be one of them i'm so happy as to what memberful has enabled for us here at upgrade and at relay fm in general like they say they want me to tell you memberful is the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on the web to

generate sustainable recurring income while diversifying your revenue stream. And Mike Hurley will tell you, yes, that is 100% true. We have had such a great experience with Memberful. We've been using them for years. We've been using them since 2015. But in the last year and a half,

two years, we've really doubled down and integrated more of their features. And they've also been putting out a lot of great new features that we're able to take advantage of and it's been an absolutely wonderful experience they're a great company to work with a value partner for us now and it's it's really given all of us here at relay fm that are really like working on the membership stuff it's given us that additional revenue stream in a time which has otherwise been weird since the beginning of 2020.

So it's just really great for that. So maybe you're already producing content. You're relying on advertising or other means of income. Memberful makes it easy to diversify that income with everything you need to run a membership program. branding, gift subscriptions, Apple Pay, free trials, private podcasts, and tons more, while leaving you with full control and ownership of everything that relates to your audience, brand, and your membership offering. You can also send paid email newsletters directly through Memberful now without needing to connect with a third-party email provider. You can publish your paid newsletter content to a Memberful-hosted members-only website website and there's no additional fee when signed up for their pro or premium plans.

And also, look, you'll be saving money compared to other popular hosted newsletter platforms. Another thing, we were using a third-party email service. We've now, we do like a monthly, Stephen writes a monthly newsletter that goes out to our members and we moved over to a memberful system and it's really great.

I just got that message. It came in MimeStream. There you go. You got it and it's really great i just got that message it came in mime stream there you go you got it it's good got sent out today it's great if you're a content creator memberful can help you monetize that passion get started for free at memberful.com upgrade with no credit card required that's memberful.com upgrade go there right now and check it out it can be be the start of something exciting. My thanks to Mirbiful for the support of this show and RelayFM. So we now move into some media-related categories. And the first one is Game of the Year. Typically, this has been non-mobile because we have an iOS Game of the Year category up next.

And the upgradians voted thusly with 4.5% going to halo infinite 8.5 percent going to forza horizon 5 and 13.8 percent going to metroid dread now i'm just gonna say this up front jason i haven't really done my homework this year i have i have not played many video games this year especially in the last half of the year. Oh, no. But this would be like me not reading a book. Yeah.

I rely on you, Mike. Been pretty bad. Now, what I will say is many of my friends basically made up a very similar list to this one. Forza Horizon 5 is a game that I have played and really enjoyed it. I would say, honestly, honestly you know maybe spoilers uh i don't know if i would have had a better game than forza maybe halo but i haven't gotten to it yet uh i don't think i would have played metroid dread i know

that lots of people love it but it's not really my type of game. So I feel pretty happy myself in saying Forza Horizon 5. But what have you been playing this year? All right. Well, guess what? I have opinions about this category because I played some games that were not iOS games. Unfortunately, they were also not Xbox games or PlayStation games. And I also believe, looking at your list, none of them released in 2021. Well, it doesn't matter because this is when I fell in love with them.

So that's all that matters. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. And here's what they are. Super Mario Brothers. That's right.

Space Invaders. Game of the year. Come on. It deserves it. I got an Oculus Quest 2 for Christmas last year and the games that I've been playing this year are Oculus Quest games and the two that I have fallen in love with are

11 Table Tennis because the world needed a super realistic virtual reality table tennis simulation It is, it's amazing It is perfect, a perfect fit for the technology. I hate this game because I suck at table tennis simulation it's it is it's amazing it is perfect a perfect fit for the i hate this game because i suck at table tennis and it's too good well you can dial the quality of the ai opponent down to nothing and then it's like you're facing a tree across the table that was the only

way i could play the game and then i just felt like a fool really i i have gotten up to i found my level where i am good enough to win sometimes but be challenged right and right it's not a very high number um but i love it it is it is one of those things where i was like oh i see yes this is a good use of vr like of the controllers and the the hardware in general like it I'm very impressed with 11 table tennis it's really good and um I'm on the beat saber train I gotta say it's a I am always okay rhythm games I don't like rhythm games that are push a button or tap a screen I don't like them because the idea with rhythm is, you know, you know, like tapping your, your, your toes, tapping your finger is not dancing, right? It's not. And,

and rhythm games are like that. They're, they're kind of like full body games. They should be. And so when they say, well, we took rock Band where you've got an instrument or whatever, and we've just made it so you tap on a screen. It's like, nah, it's a lot less interesting to me then. So Beat Saber, which makes you lunge after boxes with a lightsaber to the tune of various kind of Polish industrial music, or if you pay, Billie Eilish or imagine dragons uh is great it is it is fulfilling something something that rock band always used to fulfill for me but of course with less equipment to be carted out than rock band requires and and better it's better yeah it's the best reference game ever made like it's amazing. And this is the case. This is where I'm going to say, like what you said about 11 table tennis, that I'm terrible at it and I need to do more.

But I'm so terrible at it that I can actually make myself move and sweat and things not doing very well. And that's good enough. But then you see people who are able to do incredibly well at it and they have better rhythm than me there's just no doubt about it but uh but still you're swinging your arms you're moving around uh you're it's it's uh very effective it's a killer app i would say for this platform and it is the vr game yeah and i would i would go to so far as to say that whatever apple does with their headset they better have a rhythm game that is like, you know, I don't know what they're going to call it. Thump.

Swords. Swords. That's it. Thump swords. It better be their day one thump swords. Boom swords. Jason, here's the thing. If Apple do this, there will be a million developers trying

to make their own beat saber sure their own beat saber that's that's also true the only problem is it's owned by meta so you've got to be real careful well and you can't just sign you know sign them up to appear on the platform because meta has taken them away but um it's a great game it really is and i love both those games so uh and i didn't uh you know i thought oh vr it's fun i had fun with the psvr so i thought i'll get this thing and i i wish there was a game the other kind of game that i wish there was on um on the quest that there isn't is that i really did love the uh the psvr game with the little robots that is Tokyo Studio. Astro Bot Rescue.

And PS5 comes with an Astro Bot that's cute, but that was such a great VR game, VR platformer, and I have not been satisfied with any of that kind of stuff on the meta platform. So that's something that maybe, if Apple does it, or if there's a proper VR for some other gaming platform. But anyway, I

think those games are both great and i want to at least recognize them even though they didn't come out this year because this was the year that i i i played them and loved them and i think they're great have you played any of the beat saber levels that you uh are in like 180 or 360 degrees oh god no oh jason is so good well i can't even yeah i understand i understand i get i get i can't even do when the boxes when they when they change the the sides of the colors of the boxes i i i die like i'm so bad at it i desperately want to see you play this game now the the 360 levels like once you get good it takes practice once you get good at it

they are a whole it's like a whole different kind of game it's wild they're a lot of fun they're a lot of fun well earlier this year i um i injured my rotator cuff and it was one of those things where i was like you know it hurts it's not fun but the really sad part about it was it's a i'm like on the VR disabled list because it involves waving your arms around. And for several months, I really couldn't wave my arm around without pain. I was like, oh no, I can't play Beat Saber.

I'm on the 11 table tennis injury list now. But anyway, they're great. I think we're going to have to go. We can put Beat beat saber in as a runner-up i can't thank you i can't we can't give a game uh no it's fine uh we'll go with forza forza horizon five really oh i just assumed 11 table tennis by acclamation i apologize i apologize but yes okay well you're you're this is a racing game right mike it's race cars yeah right it's a good race car game.

Great. Very, very good racing car game set in Mexico. Forza Horizon 5 is the winner of Game of the Best Game of 2021 with Beat Saber and Metroid Dread as our runners-up. All right. So we can move into iOS Game of the Year. Yay! With 4.6% of the vote goes to Good Sudoku Plus, 5% of the vote to Mini Motorways,

and 5.5% goes to Alto's Odyssey The Lost City. Those are all Apple Arcade. All Apple Arcade. And I'll say, as it went down from there, still a lot of Apple Arcade in the top 10. Now, I will say, for me personally, now i will say for me personally this 2021 has not been a good new mobile game year i for me for me there has not been a standout new entry i don't know why this is um but i i have not come across a game this year which i felt was really like, oh, wow, this is great.

And for me as well, that list there is very similar to me. It's like I've enjoyed a lot of games that have come back this year. You know, like Apple did their kind of classics thing where they brought a bunch of really great games from the past and brought them back. And that is...

Mini Motorways was an Apple Arcade, just a straight up Apple Arcade game. Original. really great games from the past and brought them back and or you know and that is mini motorways was an apple arcade just a straight up apple arcade game original yeah but it was a sequel to a you know already popular game very different game they're not they're not that similar i would say yeah but you know what i mean right like you look at it and it's like this is very clearly the same people they did this thing and that they're doing the same kind of thing uh good sudoku plus is good sudoku but now available on apple arcade altos odyssey lost city sudoku was late fairly late last year wasn't it although i don't know it was a pandemic game i i can't really tell so there have been there's been stuff right it's not like there haven't been games there have been

games this year but i there hasn't been a everyone's going wild for this ios game this year so you have a a longer list than me actually i think yeah oh look at yeah your list is the same as the upgrade my list is the same as the upgradians we are in sync on this and i don't care if there's a game out there that everybody's talking about. I just care about the games that I like. And you know what I like the best? Alto's Odyssey The Lost City, which is extra content for my favorite

iOS game of all time. So yeah, I loved it. I played it all the way through. My only real criticism is that there needs to be some sort of signifier that feels good when you clear the last thing. And that doesn't happen. It just says, oh, you don't have any more challenges left.

Like, oh, okay. But it was great. And they have new artwork and they have new music. And it's the full Alto's Odyssey game on top. Plus, this is added on. And if you already played Altas Odyssey, you can load your status and you pick up all that stuff

and you just jump right in. You have to replay the game from the start, which is nice. A lot of these plus Apple Arcade games don't do that, by the way, which I find frustrating. I would really like if I started off on the regular game

and then came to the plus game, a button that will load all of my stuff. Most of them don't need it, though. mean like i have a uh like sorry i really i'm talking about zach gage here we're like flip-flop solitaire doesn't remember all of my stats good sudoku doesn't remember any of my stats and i on the plus version so i end up having both versions on there because i already bought the games and now there's an uh the plus version. So I ended up having both versions on there. Um, cause I already bought the games and now there's an, uh, the plus version.

So anyway, uh, that's number one, many motorways. Uh, when I, I was a little lukewarm on it when initially shipped, but I think this is one of those things that also happened with mini

Metro actually that, um, the developer dinosaur polo club, fun to say, uh, they ship their game and then they, and then they tweak it. And that, that just is how they do it.

So I revisited many motorways in the last couple of months, and it's so much better than it used to be. They've really added a whole bunch of things on iOS that were just not there before. The logic works better. There's roundabouts. In fact, the turn-taking every week is a better interface now that makes it clear what your choices are between, like, do you want a highway and 20 road tokens, or do you want 40 road tokens, and you get to choose which one. It's much clearer, sort of, what you're going to get.

So I think that game is great. And Good Sudoku, which then again came out with Good Sudoku Plus, I never understood this game. I know people played it. I know people played it. I didn't get it. The whole purpose of this game is to teach it to you and to teach you how to be better at it. And it completely worked on me to the point where I have played it a bunch.

And if you give me a newspaper Sudoku page, I can solve it pretty fast. Because I'm not great, but I'm'm good i'm good at sudoku now thanks to this app so i love all three of those apps i wanted to throw in another one which is jetpack joyride plus jetpack joyride is one of my favorite ios games of all time and apple did the similar thing of asking half brick studios to bring jetpack Joyride back, give it a little bit of polish here and there where needed, make it fit all the devices. They added a few things and they brought it back as a plus game. Honestly, really, the iOS game of the year

is an Apple Arcade subscription this year. Apple is continuing the original strategy somewhat. They are working with developers and they're creating these really nice games. Or they're buying nice games for the platform. But I think this is a part of the strategy that makes a ton of sense. Yeah, we talked about it here before. But the idea that they added in those two other layers. Which is classic games that there's no financial motivation for them to be updated for the current platform.

They get folded into Apple Arcade. They provide them a financial lifeline. And then converting them off of paid so that you basically, essentially because you're an Apple Arcade subscriber, you don't have to pay for the in-app purchases. They're all unlocked. And so you, I mean, that's, right? That's what we're seeing here with all of these is Jetpack Joyride is a classic game that's been given a maintenance update because of Apple Arcade money.

Good Sudoku Plus is a pay game turned into a free game for Apple Arcade subscribers. Alta's Odyssey is they commissioned them to do extra levels. And then Mini Motorways is an original, essentially. So, like, it's covering all of these bases. And that's the dimension that Apple Arcade didn't have when it launched. I would be very cool with Alto's Odyssey. All right. Going in here.

Which I would say technically makes this a two-time best iOS game winner, which is a really weird thing to win. But they also won uh they won with alto's adventure that so three time a winner uh of an upgrade but not just wouldn't qualify them for hall of fame nor would it really make any sense to uh let's go with mini motorways and good sudoku plus as the uh as the runners-up because i like that it completely matched uh with you and the the upgradians and somebody did mention good sudoku uh plus was a runner-up last year what good sudoku was oh good sudoku was yeah because i because it came out last year. So, yep.

So now we move into favorite movie of the year. The Upgradians voted with 9% for No Time to Die, 15.9% for Shang-Chi, and 27.5% for Dune. Wow, that's a lot of Dune. Yeah, I'd like to go first because i saw less movies if that's okay sure um the two movies that i am gonna put in this category i saw this week because really they're the only new movies i've seen this year one is encanto the new uh new disney

movie really really great movie with superb music all written by lin-manuel miranda who i think has maybe found the next thing that he does like i know that he's working on other stuff and i need to watch that the movie the the about rent because i've heard that's pretty good is it tick tick boom it's called yeah i think so lin-manuel miranda writing all of the music for disney movies is a really good idea because the music in this movie like so the music in moana right moana's music awesome limo miranda played a hand in some of this the music in encanto he wrote all of the original songs they are amazing and i think it's super smart to get someone who's really talented at

writing music like to to write these kind of modern songs. Because as you say, it helps the movies be rewatchable by kids. That was always the trick with Disney in its classic era. First, they had the classic Ashman and Mencken. But then they started to bring in songwriters to do pop songwriters like elton john with the lion king and so so they're like lin-manuel miranda he loves disney and uh they work well together and uh i haven't seen in kanto yet it's on my list it's on my you gotta love it i haven't gotten to it yet it's a really cute movie and the animation's great and i'm not gonna say too much about it but what i like about

this movie compared to a lot of other disney movies is it's actually quite small in scope like oh it's not this like huge sprawling big adventure it's like a really small scope movie uh and i i really liked it a lot so my other one is spider man no way home that movie slaps it's so good oh my god no spoilers no spoilers freaking love this movie it's gonna be a mike mike at the movies probably we're gonna have to talk about yeah i think we might have to i think we might that's good i want to see it again but i don't want to go back to a movie theater again so yes i'm gonna have to wait but i i want to see it again um but yeah i i loved it um i have my i watched i watched a lot of movies this year and I, I logged my movies this year,

which hasn't happened before in letterboxd. So I actually kept, kept track of what movies I saw this year and what I thought of them. That was, that was a lot of fun. So here's my list of my favorite seven movies that I saw that were new-ish, right? I'm not going to say a lot of these were Oscar nominees, so they came from 2020, but I saw them in 2021. And here they are. Promising Young Woman with Carey Mulligan,

probably my favorite movie of the year coda on apple tv plus i liked it a lot i thought it was really good that's the uh the uh girl who is the hearing child of a deaf family um who wants to be a musician spider-man no way home a movie called never rarely sometimes always which is about two girls who have to take a bus to the city in order for one of them to get an abortion. Nomadland, which, you know, won Best Picture, but it is really good. I liked it too. I liked it too. Yay.

Now it's been mentioned on the Upgrades. Finally, they've made it. mention on the upgrade he's finally they've made it uh in and of itself which is that movie by the magician that's basically the film version of his stage show uh if you haven't seen it don't look up anything about what happens in it it's just an amazing kind of document of uh some very clever interesting stagecraft kind of things and uh and a movie called first cow which is a very quiet slow-paced movie set in the early 1800s in oregon and indeed a cow is brought to the region where the people in oregon are and it's the first cow to be brought to that area. This is pre-Gold Rush, West Coast. So not really an era that gets even shown that much. And I had been thinking about

that movie the whole year. I saw it in January. I've been thinking about it the whole year. Such a strange, but kind of wonderful movie. And so those are my faves. What do you think about Dune as the Upgradians vote? I like Dune. I didn't put it on my list here. I like Shang-Chi too and I didn't put it on my list, but I think that's a really good movie

too. I haven't seen No Time to Die. But I like Dune. First off, it's just half the movie, but I was charmed by it. I would like to watch it again at some point. I'm constantly surprised at how many people love it because I've always thought Dune to be a real acquired taste.

And when they came out with this movie, I was like, well, okay. And then people are like, oh, Dune, I love it. I'm like, really? okay. But, and then people are like, oh, Dune, I love it. I'm like, really? Really? Okay, great. Like I read like four Dune books and I, right? Like it's a good movie. I liked it. It's a, it's a vibe. I mean, maybe that's kind of one of the things I like about it is it's kind of like the sound and the, and the visuals and you just kind of like it surrounds you with sand but it's also half a movie unfortunately which I'd say I get why but I think it's unfortunate it just kind of ends

and that's just alright stay tuned for part two in three years but I did like it I do think Spider-Man would have ranked higher it was creeping up but we really didn't the voting closed just late soon for that movie um yep it matches on both of our lists yeah should we do it we could give it we could give it the upgrade i love it so do you want to pick a runner-up uh let's pick dune yep and how about incanto oh that's nice i love incanto

that's a good movie man i think you'll get a kick out of it i will look forward to it good family movie so uh congratulations to spider-man uh favorite tv show the upgradians voted of 11.4 for foundation which ranked way higher than i was expecting compared to all the other stuff that's come out this year. Loki with 14.6% and 21.7% for Ted Lasso. Wow. That's a lot of Ted Lasso.

We have the right audience for it, I think. Yeah, I think so. I think you're right. Here are my seven favorite shows of 2021. For All Mankind, season two. It's really good. The people who know, know. There's a TV critic I like, Alan Sepinwall,

who keeps writing about it. He said it was his favorite show of the year. And he's like, why, you know, people just aren't talking about it. They just don't know about it. They haven't found it. It was it too early i think yeah if it was later in the year if for all mankind had just wrapped up it would be on

more lists um so for all mankind for sure hacks on hbo max um starring gene smart and Hannah, oh, what's her name? Einbinder. That is a great show. It's funny. It's about a young woman comedy writer and a 50-something woman, legendary, maybe 60, legendary comedian from an era where it was very hard

for a woman to be in comedy. And she's now performing in Vegas. And her agent or her manager and agent convince her. I guess the manager doesn't like it. The agent convinces her to have this hot comedy talent who's kind of down on her luck because she kind of got canceled for stupid stuff she did to come write for her. And the comedian is offended and the uh the writer thinks it's beneath her um and you're seeing sort of comedy from the perspective of two women kind of like a beginning and ends of their careers

um it's brilliant and it's very funny but it's also really interesting and dramatic and uh there's just it's great if anybody hasn't seen hacks in the u.s it's on hbo max it is spectacularly good um loki i think is the i hope that when disney plus executives were looking at the output of their first year they looked at loki and they were like that one yeah that one yeah i like wandavision the best one yeah i like wandavision i like hawkeye but loki was the one that's like yeah that that we got it we we hit it that do that it was i don't want them all to be the same but like loki was one was like that we got it we nailed it um i love that show i as somebody who grew up watching doctor who it is like what if doctor who had an enormous uh disney

marvel budget because it's kind of dark doctor who in a way it's a weird weird show but i loved it and i love the soundtrack um the performances are really good loki uh is great if you haven't if you've been skeptical about the Marvel Disney shows, seek out Loki sometime when you've got Disney plus, it's really good. I loved Hulu's only murders in the building, which is Steve Martin and Martin short and Selena Gomez, or as my daughter refers to it,

the show. Oh, the show with Selena Gomez. And it was like, yeah, also Steve Martin and Martin shorter in it for the olds. It's, it's like a comedy murder mystery about podcasting i can't watch it i can't do it i'm sure it's good adina's watching it right now and she loves it i can't watch things about podcasting i can't do it i i actually think the portrayal of podcasting although unrealistic in

some ways is very realistic in other ways that's part maybe part of why i can't do it as well like i just i just can't bring myself to do it you know the episode title comes up and it's in like a little overcast kind of uh interface and it makes me laugh every time it's so good um invincible on amazon prime video uh animated series about uh superheroes and a family and it's uh not for kids, but I loved it. I think it's one of my favorite comic books and I think a great adaptation. Really, really well done. It's a Sin, which was from the BBC,

but it's on HBO Max in America by Russell T. Davis about a group of friends in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. And if I describe it that way and you think, oh, this is going to be one of those sad dramas where everybody dies. It's not, it's actually joyful and wonderful and sad all at once.

And I think it's a masterwork. I think it's worth your time. It's five episodes, I think. So well done. And last, I'll throw in What We Do in the Shadows, which had a third season, I think, on FX and on Hulu. And that is just a funny show. Funny, dumb show about vampires.

And I love it no spoilers i'll just say watched we watched uh what we do in the shadow season three this week didn't like the ending yeah i don't know what i don't know what they're doing there i think so i think the walls fell off a little bit i think two things might have happened i think one and maybe not sure if they had a season four when they read when they wrote it i also think they had maybe five writers had different ways they wanted to end the season and over the span of like three episodes they did all of them they did them all and i'm not sure that that was the right way to go i mostly watch that for the jokes and the characters and not for the plot but yeah at the end there's sort of a lot of plot that happens

you're like you just and honestly my my whole reaction is like you're just gonna undo this all next year if you come back you're gonna literally undo everything and that's what makes it even more weird to me because it's like if they do another one they have five things to undo and like but love that show though like the whole thing for me seasons one and two are better than season three season three also still really good yeah uh my uh favorite shows of the year ted lasso it was an easy one for me to be in there oh i've got a i've got a real-time correction by the way because this is what i do i always joke about how i just conflate all british television to the bbc it's a sentence from channel four or as i like to think of it bb 4. But it's not.

It's Channel 4. It's a commercial broadcaster in the UK. It's a great show, though. Okay, please resume Ted Lasso. Ted Lasso, easy pick for me. The Morning Show, great second season. Way better than season one. If you watched season one, didn't like how it ended, watch season two.

It's way better in every way. I guess I'll have to do that because I watched season one and I thought it was okay, but I didn't like how it ended and I have not been motivated to watch it, even though I've been planning on it. So this will be a spur to put it more on the watch list and we'll get back to it. If I can give two more recommendations for it. One, I think they learned what the show is and they made it that. Good. And there is an episode of this season, which is maybe the best episode of TV I've seen this year.

this season which is maybe the best episode of tv i've seen this year the rest of the season isn't as good as this which is why it's not my favorite show of the year but it's one of my favorite shows of the year for all mankind it's just superb i think it's probably apple's best show not my favorite but their best right i could just think it is every episode's excellent. Loki is my favorite Disney and Marvel project that they've done. But I think my personal favorite television show this year is Dexter New Blood. So if you're a fan of Dexter, you have to be a fan of Dexter to watch the show. If you don't, there's no point. But it is the only television show this year where I have been, like all of these other shows, I'm like, it's ted lasso day or oh great it's for mankind day but with dexter i'm

like i cannot wait for monday huh because i mean it's a thriller right so it has that to it there is a cliffhanger at the end of every episode of the show right so like you are motivated to want more of it but it's just like a really smart way that they have brought the character back for i believe it's just going to be this one season as a way to put a better bow on the series than what everybody hated how it ended yeah and this is they've done a bunch of really smart stuff and they have a ton of new characters and they've integrated some of the old previous stories into it really well and old characters into it really well.

It is excellent. If you watched Dexter and liked it, if you watched Dexter and hated how Dexter ended, do yourself a favor and watch Dexter New Blood. That's my recommendation. I'm not going to try and petition it as the winner. It would be my personal runner-up. Let's do here's my suggestion winner for all mankind runners up ted lasso and loki i'm good with that i'm good with that so for all mankind we'll win kind of integrating all through

all of our lists and the upgradians lists yeah and then ted lasso and loki like here's the thing ted lasso season two was still really great it was never going to be no like ted lasso one and i don't know how it could be because it's impossible that it was that first season was act one where everybody gets to know each other and everything and like you can't yeah really season two is okay, now we need to tell the rest of the story here. But also season one, the surprise of what the show is. It's true. It was lockdown. It was magic.

It was a shot of happiness. It was so many things that can't be replicated. But I do think Ted Lasso season two is very good. Oh, it's excellent. It's just not ever. Nothing is ever going to be season one of ted lasso honestly like it's it's kind of perfect in that way and i think for all mankind for all mankind season two was better than for all mankind season one in my opinion and so that's why

i agree push for that because i agree they improved that show even though it already started on an excellent footing. The problem with Ted Lasso is there was no improving on it. The first season was perfect. You can't improve on that. But they lived up to it about as good as possible. Favorite book category. Yay, it's my category.

With 7% for Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey. 7% for The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, and 17.6% to Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I've read two of those. Okay. I'm going to tell you seven things that I really enjoyed in books this year.

I'm just doing a lot of sevens. This is kind of organic. I didn't choose a bunch of sevens, but that's how it ended up so i guess i a lot of sevens for the eighth upgradies a lot a lot of thinking of holding seven things i love in my in my mind so this i looked on on goodreads because i do log the books i read um it's not i i only started doing that with movies this year but i have been doing that with um with books for a while now so you can check out my goodreads i guess if you want to see all the books that i read this year with their uh check out my goodreads smash the bell button smash the follow me on goodreads button um, and I read,

I think I read basically a novel a week this year. I think, not at that pace, because vacations you read more and other times I read less, but I think I'm going to finish the year at about 52 books. That is obscene to me, in my brain, right? Like, look, I didn't read any books this year.

I know somebody who read 150, so, you know, but not me. So these are the seven that I wanted to mention. Okay. Piranesi is by the writer of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Neural, which was like a thousand page book

that came out a decade ago. This is a short book. It was my favorite book of the year. I love it. It is weird, but delightful. And it gets more, it starts out real weird and then gets less weird as it goes in a good way where you start to kind of understand what you're seeing. But I think it's beautiful.

It is about a person who lives in a giant building full of statues, classical statues, and the sea is coming in and there are birds. And they think that it's the entire world, but it's not. So it's amazing. It's so world, but it's not. So it's amazing. It's so strange, but I loved it. Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse is a sort of Mesoamerican fantasy novel about like a... I mean, there's the Black Sun cult that's trying to overthrow the people who are the rulers. And there's a kid who's supposedly the chosen one and they do terrible things to him. But he's brought to the city by a pirate and there's a whole human sacrifice that's going

to happen. And it's great. I loved it. That's first book in a trilogy. I can't wait for the second book to come out. I thought it was great. Becky Chambers wrote a book called The Galaxy and the Ground Within, which if I describe it to you, it will sound like the most boring book ever because the plot is basically there's a traffic delay. And so a bunch of aliens of different kinds are stuck on a planet for a while. That's the book. It's great. It's amazing. What do they do while they're stuck on a planet? I

don't know. They interact. They talk with each other. It's great. I loved it. The Hidden Palace by my friend Helene Wecker is the sequel to her book, The Golem and the Genie. Both of those books are great if you have not read them. They're set in New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when there were lots of immigrants pouring into New York City, including in this world. Part of the Jewish diaspora is a golem, a magical creature, and part of the Syrian diaspora is a genie.

And they meet, and then there are two books about that. I read an older book this year, but it took up a lot of time. It was Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. I gave it five stars, so I have to mention it. It's like a thousand page book. It's like five books in one. I felt like I accomplished something by reading it and I truly loved it. Just don't read it. Nobody should read it. Um, um, that's my warning to you because almost nobody will like it, but I loved it. Um, uh, none. I just, it's one of those things where I have to weigh people off. They're like, Oh, that sounds intriguing. It's like, no, no, no,

no, no. You don't understand how weird and complicated this book is. Uh, but if you do take up the challenge, you may be rewarded or you may bail within the first like 40 pages of this book, but I loved it. Michael Lewis's nonfiction book, The Premonition of Pandemic Story, just really well done. Loved it. Not fiction, but nonfiction. It was good. And then I discovered a series that I read the entire series this year, the divine cities trilogy, um, by Robert Jackson Bennett, three books.

Uh, it's a, uh, kind of urban ish fantasy series. And, um, I read them all. I devoured them all.

And I love that when I read a book and it's the first book in a series and I can't put it down because it means there's two more books that I can't put down. And all three of them are great. In fact, arguably the series gets better as it goes along, but the first one alone is City of Stairs is worth reading. So those are my seven reading picks for this year. What did you read this year, Mike? I think I read something, but I don't remember what it was.

It wasn't anything I enjoyed. Fair. Okay, so how do we do this you have to pick the upgrading award winner same as you do every year okay piranesi is the winner that was my favorite book of the year i am going to put the galaxy and the ground within as a runner-up and we'll put let's put Leviathan Falls, which I also really enjoyed and was an Upgradian pick as a runner-up. Great. That's the last book in the Expanse series. It was a good ending to a very good nine-book series. So The Galaxy and the Ground of Inn and Leviathan Falls

are the runners-up in this category. Okay. The Expanse is a TV show, right? Yes. Okay. I didn't know is a TV show, right? Yes. Okay. I didn't know it was a book series. Or was it? Yeah, it's always, yeah, it's based on that series. And the series is

finishing with book six, but there's also book seven, eight, nine. I don't know what they're doing about that, but this is book nine. So this is the end of that story. this episode of upgrade is brought to you by zocdoc when you need a doctor you need a doctor now you don't want one in a few days or in a few weeks definitely not in a few months if you need to see an md asap you need zocdoc just download the free zocdoc app the easiest way to find a great doctor and instantly

book an appointment with zocdoc you can search for local doctors who take your insurance, read verified patient reviews, and book an appointment in person or video chat, so you never have to wait on hold with a receptionist again. I know that this fits my personal preferences so much. When I want to see a doctor, I want to see a doctor. I don't want to have to wait. Because sometimes, who knows, right? You never know. It's difficult, especially these times, right? You're just a bit, I'm always a bit on edge of medical stuff. I want to be seen when I want to be seen. Things can change. You might not have the symptoms anymore. You just want to get that treatment. I also really love the ability to be able to speak to somebody over video chat because I don't always want to have to go

somewhere, especially if it's something where I'm just like, hey, what do you think about this? So having those options is so, so good. Whether you need a primary care physician, dentist, dermatologist, psychiatrist, eye doctor, or other specialists, ZocDoc has you covered. Go to ZocDoc.com slash UpgradeFM and download the ZocDoc app to sign up for free. Every month, millions of people use ZocDoc. ZocDoc makes healthcare easy, and now is the time to prioritize your health. Go to ZocDoc.com slash UpgradeFM. You download the ZocDoc app to sign up for free

and book a top-rated doctor. Many are available as soon as today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash Upgradec.com upgrade fm thanks to sock doc for their support of this show and relay fm all right we're now going to move into some hardware uh and technology focused categories first is favorite apple product the upgradians voted with 12.2% for the iPad mini, 12.7% for the MacBook Pro 16-inch, and 27.6% for the MacBook Pro 14-inch. Got that MacBook Pro splitting the vote there. We would have been able to get another one in this category

if I were to put them together. But to me, they are incredibly different products. So I thought I would put them in there separately and that's how it ended up being uh jason what is your favorite apple product of the year well i hate to diverge from the upgradians here but in my mind the apple product of the year is the 24 inch m1 imac when i saw this in your list I was like oh that's interesting I wouldn't have thought that that was where you were going to go with this but I actually kind of love that you did yeah I just I think the iMac I love iMacs I think they're important

I know that laptops get more consideration. I know that the MacBook Pro is a very important product because they made, you know, some amazing, good redesign decisions in terms of bringing back some ports, in terms of that screen, which is amazing, and of course, and being the place where they've unveiled their pro level processors for Apple Silicon. Absolutely. All those things are true. That said, I think the iMac getting a complete redesign for the first time in almost a decade and bringing in color and bringing that M1 power to the desktop and some of the interesting design decisions in terms of the magnet and the ethernet on the cable and all of those sort of things i just and the fact that again you can buy an orange or blue or whatever iMac uh this is

favorite apple product is it is it as powerful as the MacBook Pro of course not it doesn't have as good a screen as the MacBook Pro of course it doesn't and yet it is my favorite i love that they updated the iMac i love that they did it the way they did it i think they did a great job i think it's a beautiful product and um and so that's that's my choice that's that's my that's my number one i mean i love the machine i bought one some i love it so much i bought one and i use it every day it's what i use to record and edit my shows on uh like you i think it was the perfect machine for what it is made for and then some right like it is the perfect machine for what it's made for oh and also by the way it's really powerful because it has an m1 chip in it um and they made it in colors and i have a yellow one it's like so good

i really do love that machine uh i went with... I echo you here, right? I echo you. But for me personally, I put in the 14-inch MacBook Pro. It's just an incredible computer. It's incredibly powerful. Looks fantastic. Screen is amazing. They reverted a bunch of weird decisions. They got rid of the touch bar.

They kept Touch ID. They brought some ports back, brought back MagSafe. Yeah, just a great machine all around. It looks great. I love the look of it. Just in general, the hardware design of it is great.

I wished it was a little lighter. I wished it was a little thinner, but not so much that it would change my opinion about this machine. And I also love the iPad Mini. I think the new iPad Mini is the best iPad for content consumption that Apple has ever made. I think that it is perfectly sized.

It looks fantastic. It's got all of the right features that you would want out of an iPad for watching video, reading stuff, light communication, that kind of stuff. So these two machines, the MacBook Pro and the iPad mini, they've been really great for me this year. Yep. What are we going to do?

So, I mean, so obviously I and the Upgradians voted the same. That's true. But I also really love yours. You can have it. I mean, I can be outvoted here, unless you're willing to flip over to my side here. But it's a great choice. I mean, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is a great choice.

It is a milestone in the comeback of the Mac after kind of five years in the doldrums. I would really love to give it to the M1 iMac, but honestly, I feel like it would be doing a disservice to the MacBook Pro, which I think actually really deserves to win this. Alright, so let's make it the winner, and

let's make the 24-inch iMac and the iPad Mini the runners-up. Yeah, I love that. Because I agree with you about the iPad Mini, it's great. That, man, when I looked at this list, someone mentioned to me that i forgot to put the apple remote on this list which sure i did forget to put that on this list i've got it covered in

another category yet to come but i don't think it was going to win this list no like it's fantastic right uh but just in general when i was putting this like whole selection together it has been a super good year for Apple products. In a year that had, I think, a very good iPhone, that it didn't even rank in that top three, makes sense. Didn't even mention them. Didn't mention them, didn't need to,

because everything else has been so excellent as well. It's made it even harder for the general good products to even come near to them. So, a great year. Now, looking to do the best non-Apple product of the year. The Upgradians voted with 3.1% for the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3, which I was super happy to see. I agree, great product,

but I was not expecting it to see in this list. The Google Pixel 6 Pro at 3.5%, and the Nintendo Switch OLED at 9.7%. I didn't put in, I mean, I guess I could put the Oculus Quest 2, but it really did come out last year, and I got it last year at the end of the year, and I've enjoyed it, but I'm not going to put it on the list. The product I'm going to put on this list in terms of hardware,

this is the year that I switched from Kindle to Kobo. I bought a Kobo Libra. They came out with the Kobo Libra 2. I'm using that now. It is, for my money, the best balance of features in an e-reader and price in an e-reader. And Amazon's high-end Kindle, which is the only one that's got physical page turn buttons. The ergonomics are good. The screen is great. It's waterproof. And Kobo is not Amazon, which I kind of like not using that product from Amazon and using an alternative. So Kobo Libre 2 is my nominee in this category. Mine is the Nintendo Switch OLED.

It's really nice. I wasn't going to buy one. I bought one for Adina and then bought one for myself because it is so much better than the original Switch. It makes you want to play games more in handheld. It looks so good. It really does look so good. Okay, well, I mean, you and the Upgradians agree, good okay well i mean you and the upgradings agree

and i usually defer to you and the upgradings in this category um uh so let's make that the nintendo switch oled the winner um i would like my kobo yeah to be a runner-up and then what what do you think what you can pick a runner-up what you didn't you and i only mentioned one product each so what else could we throw in there i mean i do think that the google pixel 6 pro was it seemed to be a pretty good device that a lot of people were really happy about it's like if we were going to go back to the upgradians i would be happy to go with that uh okay so congratulations nintendo uh now we mentioned earlier about categories that maybe people wouldn't want to win awards in and this is the first of those this is

for the worst gadget or most disappointing technology of the year upgradians voted thusly the apple watch series 7 with 3.4 i was really surprised about this i mean i was someone who said like i really wanted a new design for the apple watch and was disappointed by that but this apple watch is a very good apple watch like last year's apple watch i could understand in this category but this year's apple watch i don't know so much i think the screen changes are really good um 8.3 percent is meta slash facebook so here's the thing with this people put all kinds of facebook things in every year i just group them all together. It's because I don't really know how to...

Some people just say Facebook, everything Facebook does. Some people didn't like the name change. I'm not really sure why people are disappointed. Surely you know Facebook, right? You know what they're going to be. Who's disappointed? Anyway, 8.3% for for meta and facebook and 8.8 for nfts let your hate flow through you yeah i gotta say up gradients next year i want a little

bit more from you in this category okay i want to i want to get some some i don't know i feel like there could be more uh originality in this yeah i got some originality for you mike i'm excited for it i saw this in there and i like i know it is going to be a story my nominee for worst gadget is the breville jewel sous vide machine the wire cutter choice although i will point out since retracted uh for best sous vide machine i have a sous vide from um anova anova that's what i have too and it's good but it's an early model and it's kind of on its last legs it's making weird noises i'm sure it's gonna fail pretty soon so i've been looking at replacing it um but i've

also that was i took it in a classic jason move and i know we've talked about this before i took a flyer on it um and was like and then you use it for a while and then you're like well now i have opinions about this product category when the first time you buy something you're like it's the thing where you end up having to buy two because you buy one and you kind of cheap out and you get it and then you have opinions and you're like the thing where you end up having to buy two because you buy one and you kind of cheap out and you get it. And then you have opinions and you're like, oh, now I like this. I have to buy the expensive one. So I'm in the market for a new sous vide cooker.

I found them. Not only do I cook with them, I thaw stuff with them. It's great. And I'm a big believer. have an immersion uh cooker um you don't need to buy fancy materials you can use like a ziploc bag or uh or uh buy some silicone zip top bags and that are reusable and you don't have to like have a one of those vacuum sealers if you don't want to but it is great for cooking stuff it cooks meat perfectly and it thaws stuff it's great so i look at the wire cutter choices and they're like well there is the anova model and there are a couple of them. There's a small one and a big one and all that. And then there's Breville. I'm like, Breville, I love Breville stuff. I have a Breville T-Robot. Our kettle, our electric kettle is also a Breville. I love their stuff. It's really good. They make really good stuff. And when my T-Robot broke, they took it in and they either fixed it or just sent me a new one.

But their service is great. So I thought, all right, I'm going to take a flyer on this, the Breville Jewel. Here's the thing about the Breville Jewel. And I think that it is painting a picture about all the ways that technology is bad today. It has no controls. It has no controls!

If you would like to turn it on, if you would like to set the temperature, you know what you gotta do? got to use an app. You got to pair to it with Bluetooth. You got to use their app. So yeah, you're in the kitchen. You got, you just put the chicken in a bag and you're putting it in the thing and you need to set the temperature to sous vide this thing and you get the chickeny hands and you're like,

set the temperature to sous vide this thing and you get the chickeny hands and you're like, oh, okay, well now I need to wash my hands and dry them off and then unlock my iPhone and then adjust it. And then, you know, in order to put in the right temperature and then set it and all that, you know what the Innova that I have has on it, it's got a wheel. It's got a wheel you spin to set the temperature, right? And a button you press to say go. That's it. And a little screen that tells you what the temperature is and what the target temperature is. And I could extend this to cars that over-touch screen. There are lots of other devices that do this.

People, controlling it via app is a nice bonus. But if the only way you can control a product is through an app you failed your hardware is a failure you can't i know we all have smartphones so you can abandon all attempts to put any controls anywhere except in a smartphone app i know you can do it you shouldn't don't do it because breville a company that i really like made a very well-reviewed sous vide cooker that is ergonomically got a lot going for it in terms of its size and the way it attaches and it looks nice all of these things are fine and then they decided what we won't do is put any buttons on it it's like it's like that ipod shuffle basically yeah no controls who needs

physical controls hey breville well one of the reason i the reason i took a flyer on it is i thought well at least i could do it it has alexa integration and i have an echo in my kitchen so if what i can say is hey lady set the sous vide cooker to 145 degrees but of course it uses a skill and this falls into that whole problem that that alexa skills have where uh if you get beyond what amazon provides it gets really weird really fast so you have to phrase it a certain way and i realized that while i might eventually re internalize this very specific way of phrasing it yeah i i talked to lauren about it and she's like i'm not ever gonna say that because it would be like hey uh alexa tell breville to blah blah blah like i don't tell

breville jewel yeah to set the temperature to it's like you're writing code in with your voice you're doing ifttt but audibly yeah and and so again if it was if it was hey lady set the sous vide to 120 degrees and turn it on it would be maybe arguably usable i would say still not but closer but even that is a disaster because of the way Amazon handles skills, because some skills are good, most of them are jokes. So in the end, this went back to Amazon, where I bought it, and I got my money back because as nice as that hardware was, they abandoned all user interface for their crappy app. Also, the app, crappy. The pairing experience of the Breville app, crappy. So a company that has taken pride

in making good hardware ends up making a product with a terrible experience because they don't care about the software, even though the software is the entire experience. So that's my story. My worst gadget experience of the entire year was the stupid Breville Jewel, which is bad and nobody should buy one until they put a button and a dial on it so you can change the temperature by touching it. Imagine. Yeah, so like I have an Anova

and something happened and it was struggling to pair with the app. Like after getting a new phone, I don't know why, but I just stopped caring about it and just used the controls. My Anova sous vide is not the, it's, it's old enough that it doesn't do wifi.

It only does Bluetooth, but I connected it and I put it in and I connected it via Bluetooth. And at some point it stopped working and that was fine. Cause I didn't care because I never used the Bluetooth. I don't care. I get that if it's on wifi, if you're like leaving it unattended and you need to check on it or you want to time it up,

like there are reasons I don't do any of that. I'm going for Apple care plus as my most, my biggest disappointment in tech, not personal disappointment in technology this year i have a really really scratched up iphone and i was like well this iphone's got a bunch of cracks in it or whatever they look like cracks to me i took it to the apple store and they wouldn't replace it um they told me that they don't make replacements they all need to make replacements. They only make replacements for cracks and these technically are scratches, which isn't the same thing. And that's the end of that. And they weren't going

to replace my screen, even though I have AppleCare Plus and I would happily pay the little fee that you have to pay for a screen replacement. I was told by the genius in the Apple store that they would not do my replacement for me. They told me that it was just cosmetic. AppleCare doesn't cover cosmetic damage, even though I have found a thing which kind of says that it does. But nevertheless, they told me

I should have read the terms and conditions and told me that if I now broke the screen, they would know that because they told me I should have read the terms and conditions and told me that if I now broke the screen they would know that because they told me not to so I have had a really really scratched up screen for a few months I am planning to deal with this somehow some way I don't know how but I just couldn't believe it the amount of money that I have paid for AppleCare over the years I've never done any kind of replacement. And this is my first one. And I was just really frustrated by the whole experience. And so for me, it's just such a disappointment.

Like to the point that I don't think I'm going to get AppleCare on my iPhones anymore because I feel like I'm better just saving the money. And if I break my iPhone, buy a new iPhone. Or just get it repaired. Or just pay for it to be fixed repaired for the cost of what it would be for Apica. It was a very, very frustrating, very, very

disappointing experience for me. Yeah. I don't know how to award this one. What are you thinking we should do here for what is the worst or most disappointing technology of the year? Well, I like mine because it is a gadget. What are you thinking we should do here for what is the worst or most disappointing technology? Well, I like mine because it is a gadget.

Yeah. And it is the worst. We can go with the Breville Jewel as the worst gadget. Take that, Breville. Breville. And Wirecutter, I guess. Well, yeah. It's funny.

The guy is very nice, but there's a guy who writes for Wirecutter who is the co-byline on that and also wrote the iPad cases story that basically says it's fine to put your iPad in a big thick case and use a kickstand. And I basically said on Twitter, no, that's terrible. And his response was very polite. He's a very nice fellow. But then I find that his byline's on this story too. And I'm like, I don't even know what to tell you. You you're very nice guy but also also a monster no i don't know i think you have found the one human on the planet that has the exact opposite taste it's my nemesis yeah yeah it's my nemesis i guess to be fair the the way the wire cutter pick reads for the breville is um the reason it's not our number one pick is because it requires an app but they like the app i but they do like the app they say the app

is nice it's not nice the um maybe by the standards of terrible apps it's that you use when you're testing products it's not that bad yeah i mean i can imagine wire cutter editors see the worst apps right i would imagine so but But I just, I can't. My hope is that Breville doesn't look at that and say, oh, look, they picked us. My hope is that Breville looks at that and says, wow, we would have been the Wirecutter pick if we put temperature control on the top of our sous vide cooker

like every other sous vide cooker. But we'll see. So, yes, let's make that the worst gadget. And then I'm fine with AppleCare Plus being a runner-up. And let's make NFTs a runner-up. Let's do that. Why not? Why not? not let's celebrate in a way the nft 2021 in a nutshell and we go back to good with the most life-changing hardware of the year the upgradians voted with 4.5 for the m1 ipad pro which i was just surprised about i think i i wasn't expecting to see in there. My expectation is a bunch of people bought an iPad Pro,

didn't have one before. And once you get your first iPad Pro, yeah, it will change you because it's a super great product. 6.2% for the Apple Watch. Clearly not the same people who found it the most disappointing technology of the year. And 7.6% for the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Which I get that.

I totally get that. I'll say for every reason that I spoke about earlier, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is my pick here. Like in a year where I have come back to the Mac in a quite significant way, this machine is just pushing it further and further

where I love using this computer so much. I want it to be my main computer all the time because it's so great to use. You know, i always come back to your incredible line from your review it's a mac book it's a mac pro in my backpack and i just think it's incredible i love the power of this thing so let me tell you what i bought this year mike i i got a um i bought a new receiver for my home theater I cut the cord

and replaced cable with fiber and replaced my TV service with an over the top streaming service I pulled the Logitech infrared remote thing out of my living room with an over-the-top streaming service. I made all sorts of, I pulled the Logitech infrared remote thing out of my living room. I overhauled my entire TV viewing experience in my living room this year.

All because of the Apple TV remote. All because of the Apple TV remote. Because I got that Apple TV remote and it has that power button on it. And it has this whole thing about like, I'm going to turn on your TV and the TV is going to turn on the right inputs and it's all going to work.

And you know what? It almost did, but I had to replace some hardware and make some changes. But now we're at the end of the year and has my life changed? It has because we no longer have five remotes. We have a remote to control all our TV entertainment.

And it's the Apple TV remote because Apple TV now has our television on it. We don't have TiVo anymore. And I've got a receiver that does all of the ARC and CEC stuff so that when I press the button, it turns on the Apple TV. It turns on the television. It turns on the Apple TV, it turns on the television, it turns on the receiver. Everything just works. When I press the button to turn it off, everything turns off. It is amazing.

And I required some changes and I need to spend some money. But I just want to point out, it all was prompted by that new Apple TV remote that is not the Siri remote. And I don't know what's more life-changing than that. I love that remote. It's so good. I would be very happy to give it the win. MacBook Pro already won one.

That's why I think it. I love what it says about our choice for most life-changing hardware being the new Apple TV remote too. Also, it's like, yeah, take that old Apple TV remote. Well, it's super good. I think I said this somewhere recently. My favorite thing about this remote

is I never have to think about the remote anymore. I spent a lot of time thinking about my remote control, right? Like when I had the old Apple TV remote, like where is it? How am I holding it? Am I touching the right place on this thing? Like all that kind of stuff. And with this Apple TV remote. Where is it? How am I holding it? Am I touching the right place on this thing?

All that kind of stuff. And with this Apple TV remote, I just get to use it like a remote and it's great. And so it works really good for me. I'm very, very, very happy with it as a product. When it comes to a second runner-up, I don't really have

one. To me, Apple Watch and iPad Pro, I don't know about those and i don't like the the to me like apple watch and ipad pro i don't know about those ones i mean i get that people are feeling it but it doesn't i'm gonna make a suggestion which is um the imac because i know you did a lot of stuff in your life because of that imac i will say that but i actually want to make a i want to rescind something here and to say i can't believe i kind of did this. The Apple Watch has made one of the biggest changes to my life in the last 12 months, which is around health and fitness. Let's do that

then, because I constantly am changing my behavior based on the Apple Watch and integrating it into my life. And as I mentioned earlier, being able to go for a run on, I often am running on Wednesdays when Connected is on. And I am literally just running with Apple Watch and AirPods listening to the live stream via broadcast over cellular. And I have those moments of like, I cannot believe this is actually working. And it does. I would like to lodge a side complaint, though. Yes. it does it's i would like to lodge let's do that side complaint though yes which is about the way that apple handles when you move across time zones when it comes to the activity app ah i lost your

your your ring day no things that's the problem it doesn't doesn't move it so i lost a really long move day streak because i was only awake like only awake for a few hours because of a flight that came in right and it was really frustrating to me and i think that they should do a better job of recalculating it um you know like one of the things i loved pedometer plus plus by underscore david smith recalculated right based upon the actual time zone of where i was and apple didn't doesn't do that and i find that really really frustrating you know like i'm flying from the west coast of america to home i just don't have enough time in the day to to actually get the rings closed anymore and if they did the recalculation i would

have done it because it was already like i had put the next day in the uk and i'm still moving around inside of the airport and i just found that stuff really frustrating i mean and as beaks is saying in the chat i will also just tack this one on the fact that apple doesn't allow any kind of rest days is bananas like still that they don't incorporate any kind of rest days into streaks is really really weird up until this point that this that's still the case it actually honestly feels unhealthy for them to right insist that you must be exercising every single day um i find it actually doesn't feel like the right thing to do i i agree actually that is um i'll i'll say that not just skipping but target like if it is in fact a lot of the guidelines are talk about exercising three or four times a week.

So if you exercise three or four times a week, you should be given credit as exercising that week. But a lot of Apple's approach is basically like, got to crush it every day. Oh, it's like, oh, you've got COVID? Doesn't matter. Keep working out. Crush it every day. Like, what do you want from me? You're taking a flight.

You have a sick day. You me taking a flight you're you have a sick day you're taking a flight whatever like no crush it doesn't matter run up and down on the plane come on what's wrong with you yeah that's right this episode of upgrade is brought to you by squarespace the all-in-one platform to build your online presence and run your business from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace has you covered. They combine cutting-edge design with world-class engineering to make it easier than ever to establish your home online

and make your ideas a reality. With Squarespace, you get everything you need to make a wonderful website. They give you... Your starting point is one of their professionally designed templates. You choose what you want. You drag and drop the tools.

You can customize the look, the feel, the settings, the products you have on sale, and more with just a few clicks. They really do have everything you want to create that beautiful, modern website. All of their sites are optimized for mobile, so that's going to look fantastic no matter what device is being used to visit your content.

You get free unlimited hosting, top-of-the-line security, dependable resources, 24-7 customer support. They have SEO and email marketing tools, domain name registration, and there's nothing to patch, nothing to install, nothing to upgrade. It's all built right in. With Squarespace, you can announce an upcoming event that you're working on. Maybe you've got something you're doing digitally and you want to get some new customers to come and see it. Promote your business. You can publish your next blog post. You can even take your big idea,

turn it into that website. This is something I like, especially as we're moving into a new year. You know, maybe you've got that project that you want to kickstart in January. One of the great ways to do that is to sit and build the website for it. I always find that to be like a really important first step. And for me, that is always by going to Squarespace. So go to squarespace.com upgrade and you can sign up for a free trial today with no credit card required. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code upgrade

and you'll save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That is squarespace.com upgrade. And when you decide to sign up, use the offer code upgrade and you will get 10% of your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the continued support of upgrade and relay fm all right so our

favorite tech story of the year the upgradians they're just never going to quit it 9.2 for the macbook pro just in general then another 9.2 for the m1 pro and m1 max chips wow and then 10.8 percent for app store regulation i would like to nominate a story this is my favorite tech story of the year is it it's sort of a tech story close enough anyway because i think it says something also about the value of objects and nfts and things that. Yeah. It is a sort of an art collective called Mischief. And they bought an Andy Warhol print from 1954 called Fairies. And then what they did is they built a machine to make, it's a sketch. They built a machine to sketch on paper with identical strokes as the Warhol.

And then they made, and they like weathered the paper. And they said basically their goal was to make it so you couldn't tell a difference between the real one, which they owned, and the fakes. and mixed in the real one, destroyed, they say, all evidence that would indicate which one was the real one, and then sold them all for $250 each. So if they bought it for about $20,000, they then sold them for perhaps $250,000. So they made an enormous profit. But what I also love about this is just the idea that they've

essentially created, by eliminating the originality of it and making a bunch of identical copies the originality of it and making a bunch of identical copies and mixing in the real one a whole bunch of people for 250 could buy a one in a thousand chance that there is is the original but no one will ever know so it's almost like they own the original or part of the original but nobody ever knows and i just i this was my favorite text story of the year because it so interacts with the idea of what originals are and what their value of art is and everything that's come up with the whole NFT story this year. The idea that they transformed this art by buying it, copying it, and then losing it essentially so that you can't tell the difference between the real and the quote-unquote fakes they're all fakes even the real one but they're also all real even the fake ones so anyway that's that's uh that's my favorite text right here

i hadn't heard of this uh until i saw it in notes. I think it's very clever. I know they do loads of wild stuff, and this is just one of those wild things. Yep. I've gone in two directions. I've gone with, like, what you're doing. Basically, there are two ways you can go with this. You can either choose a specific story or an overall story, and I leave it blank and just let people choose what they want.

My favorite article that I read this year was by Lauren Good at Wired. Lauren wrote just an incredible, heartbreaking, fascinating article about memories in photos that really helped crystallize something that I was feeling a lot and just did it in a better way than I ever could have and why this technology, whilst it can be great, can also be very upsetting. And why I have hoped that Apple would do more, and they've done a little bit more,

but nowhere near enough in allowing for people to control the things that they are being constantly reminded about on their devices. It's just an incredible thing that Lauren wrote. And just like a real amazing thing to have written and to share something so painful with us in a way that really helps highlight the issue. So it's just a great article.

And then some of my favorite trends of the year in stories. One is Apple Silicon, like the Upgradians. Just the way that that has continued to be such a fascinating story and is only continuing to get more interesting and allow for even more speculation it's just been great it's been a great time uh this past year to talk about this stuff on this show and others like you know it is one of the rare things where uh we have wild dreams they are exceeded and then we get to have even more wild dreams and see if they'll be exceeded. It's like, it's great.

This kind of stuff doesn't happen very much. And then the other is app store regulation, just in general. It's another thing that we've spoken about a ton. I like talking about it. I do not feel as satisfied from this as I do about Apple Silicon and the way that that's been going over

the last year. I think that I hope there's going to be more results from this stuff, but currently it seems like the courts aren't going to be the way that it's done. Right. So what do you think? I don't know. I'm kind of tempted to split the difference

and go with the Upgradian pick of the App Store regulation. Apple Silicon was the story of the year last year, with the upgradian pick of the app store regulation apple silicon was the story of the year last year by the way yeah um the story continues obviously yeah um but i i think maybe going with that because we talked about that a lot on upgrade i think that's a pretty good uh general topic and then maybe our our links are the runners up yeah i like that that makes a lot of sense because that's, I think it's difficult because we both brought a thing that we both personally thought

was really interesting. Picking one of those is really hard, but you can look at the content of the show. We like talking about App Store regulation stuff. It's an interesting thing to talk about. For sure. Favorite tech screw-up of the year? The Upgradians voted at 6.6%

for App Store regulation. At 8% for Apple's CSAM announcement. The child's sexual abuse material announcement. And 30.5% for Meta slash Facebook. This walking screw-up.

I guess that's the name, maybe? The naming is what they mean there? Well, yes and no. Again, I lumped these together because it didn't really make sense to me. Otherwise, some people it was a naming and some people just write Facebook, which Facebook again, upgradians, please feel free to vote whoever you want. But if Mike Hurley can help steer you be more expressive about what you're like, there are so many people that just write the word Facebook and it's like look I understand you don't like Facebook

I get it right but give me more than that you know because if everybody just said the meta Facebook rebranding fine I don't know I don't think that was a screw up at all I actually think it was quite a smart move I'm not really sure what the screw up is maybe people don't like the name I don't know but I think it makes sense anyway

it's not worth getting into now it's obvious what the the winner of this year is right jason i think by a claim from you and me the rollout of apple's child safety features and the c-sam in particular but really the whole thing because it also encompasses the fact that they rolled out a bunch of stuff that was sort of interrelated, and it caused certain features to get attached to other features in ways that just made the whole thing explode. And then Apple had to do its damage control, where there was an announcement,

and then there was a leaked mention, and then there was another announcement, and then there was another. So many repeated damage control cycles had to happen and then they pulled the features back and said based on feedback we're going to uh release these at a later time and some of them have been released since recently others remain unreleased and perhaps perhaps will never be released in the form that they were announced in so this was a a bunch of stuff that made you know people upset uh that called into question

some of apple's choices apple as we as we talked about on the show apple very much uh released it like we are so awesome technically we have done an amazing thing and everybody said what are you doing this is terrible so badly badly uh communicated and some questionable questionable technology decisions and it all kind of fell apart so uh what a what a amazing tech screw up it was from apple this year yeah this. Yeah, this was a big one. Honestly, on the level that they usually don't do. This was just like, every part of it was bad. Like the way, as you say,

the way it was announced was terrible. The way that they had to retract it, everything was terrible. The way that it was like, oh no, we were just seeing what people thought about it. Like some of the wording you'd see in certain press outlets is like no this is you've you messed up big time and it's and it was again as we talk about on the show if they were just more open it wouldn't have

happened this way yeah if they engaged with people more rather than just as you say i think you said at the time coming down from the mountain with the stone tablets of like this is completed we're getting ready to ship this yeah and we've reinvented it everybody else has got a different take on this but we have reinvented it and now it's going to be great and everybody said oh we have all these problems with how you reinvented it that maybe we could have had that conversation out in public when you were talking about it but instead you came down from the mountain and yeah yeah, this is this is and there's some conversation in the in the members discord about is this a PR problem or a tech problem? I think it is absolutely both.

I think that whoever decided to conflate all of these features and maybe they were conflated by engineering or somebody on the technical side. And so it was just rolled out to PR and they had to do it this way. just rolled out to PR and they had to do it this way. But nobody at any point said, this is too many things that are not entirely interrelated and they're all going to be connected by the public when we announce it in ways that might, somebody could have said, no, no, no, let's roll these out separately.

And they just said, no, we're going to make a big blast here about safety and protection. And it hurt them by doing that. And then it's also a technical thing because that choice of how they did the CSAM detection on on device which you can listen to our episode about it we talked about it in detail they did something for what they thought were the right reasons but were not perceived that way by the public and it's one of those things where they were reinventing the wheel they were creating

something new that they thought was superior and it might be superior once you dig in it might not be and i was to say there's the argument that i think still remains is also for that they chose a path which was like the least resistance for them because then if they put it on the phones they didn't have to do the scanning at scale in their data centers exactly right they can use they can use your power on your device to do it and at the same time potentially changing the security of your device depending on who you talk to right and it's like i don't know if this is the right yeah and i think they as we said at the time i think the for me my best guess is they from a very technical perspective we're thinking what we're doing is we're stopping you at the door on your way out to iCloud and doing a scan then. And by doing this, we're protecting your privacy

because we're not scanning you out in the cloud, nor are we scanning you on your device. We're scanning you at the doorway on the way out. Unfortunately, that is a really nuanced idea that I think if you aren't spending all your time thinking of how Apple software is architected, you end up boiling it down to the essentials, which is, oh, my device is looking at all my pictures, which it's not quite, but sort of. And again, this is why it was a screw up. Yep. So easy one for us uh the biggest tech screw up of the year was apple c sam announcement and we'll put uh meta and facebook in and also app store regulation as uh to run us up in that category congratulations everyone yeah great so our final three categories of the night are our podcast related categories and the favorite

tech podcast award has a lifetime achievement award winner which is the accidental tech podcast which won three years in a row i believe and picked up its lifetime achievement award the upgradians voted for the following a 5.6 percent with dithering, 18.8% with upgrade. We'll come back to that in a minute. And 29.5% for connected. So those last two on RelayFM there. I just want to say, again, obviously 100% of upgradians would vote for upgrade,

but most of them just feel like they can't. I feel like I just need to say that every time because it's obviously the way it goes. Right, Jason? Obviously. Every single time we find that upgrading in second favorite podcast is upgrade stop that that's not no that's not how we are number one and then they just vote for us because they feel like they can't i don't know i i have

one that i want to i i usually don't have um most years I do not have a show for this. But one I just wanted to say is Mac Power Users. I, as I mentioned earlier, I have been really getting into the Mac more this year. So the show has become even more useful to me. Like because Mac Power Users focuses on a bunch of stuff, right? Like I really love the episode they just did last week about the studio setups.

And those are the episodes I would always listen to like without fail but i would pick and choose some because they did a lot of obviously mac focused shows and i just wasn't really so mac focused i have become much more mac focused so i'm listening to the show more and more and more than i ever have uh in years and steven and david they're really good together they are a very good pair they do a great job their interviews are really good they get some wild guests

they said someone from Pixar on the show it was like fascinating stuff yeah they do a really great job of Mac Power users and I just wanted to recognize that I agree I like that show a lot I think that they had to figure out

what they were doing when the host change happened when Stephen a lot. I think that they had to figure out what they were doing when the host change happened and when Stephen came in. I think that they have successfully kept the show going, and that's not a given. That was a hard job that the two of them had to do. A long-running show with the two hosts, and then one of the hosts leaves. That is not a given that that show can continue to exist.

Usually that would kill a podcast, and the two of them are only getting to new heights together it's just just super great testament um my favorite tech podcast is probably connected that's very sweet you say thank you um which is why apparently i then conspire to possess it because you got to kill the things you love. I like app stories. I like under the radar. I like automators, which I think we maybe gave an award to. We did.

And I want to do one more shout out to The Rebound, which is Lex Friedman and John Moltz and Dan Morin. It is like, imagine if you will, a kind of alternate universe version of Connected. I know that's hard to do, but The Rebound is kind of like that. Imagine an alternate universe of Connected. Not that one is The Rebound.

Not that one. It's the other one. It's The Rebound. And James Thompson is on there sometimes and Guy English is on there sometimes. And it is a there sometimes and it is a but it is like the rebound is like connected in that it's a tech podcast with three guys and it's kind of about the jokes uh it's very funny funny podcast so i want to recommend that i'd be okay giving this to mpu with upgrade and connected as the runners up always a bridesmaid

never a bride i'm totally up with that let's do it let's do it power users is the our favorite technology podcast of the year because look it is very rare when me and jason both bring something to this category where they match so i think it's good to honor that. Yeah, it's a good one. Connected did win this multiple years ago. Otherwise, it's basically a runner-up every single year. But, you know, I don't really like giving awards to myself. So I want to win them. I don't want to be the one that gives the podcast award to myself. Yeah, one of these days we should just give Upgrade the winner.

I think if he – well, should I say this? No, you shouldn't say it. But everybody knows what you're about to say. We don't actually say it, and I agree if you... Should I say this? No, you shouldn't say it, but everybody knows what you're about to say. We don't actually say it, and I agree with you. And then we move on to our favorite non-tech podcast, the Lifetime Achievement Award winner being The Flophouse. The Flophouse. I think, if I remember rightly, The Flophouse and ATP,

they both, in the first three years, won each year. And so we created the Lifetime Achievement Award for them primarily. Because otherwise, they would probably win most years. So we wanted to change that up. And the Upgradians voted thusly. 2.9% for Dubai Friday, 5.9% for Cortex, and 5.7% for Reconcilable Differences. This is always a really interesting category to me

because it's one of the closest. Because everybody listens to lots of different podcasts. And that's so there's a lot and a lot of votes for this. Reconcilable Differences won last year. It did. That's about right. a lot a lot of votes for this reconcilable differences won last year just as it did as a

note that's that's that's about right it's a non it's a great podcast i like it a lot nominations i brought to the table this time for all mankind official podcast from apple uh the foundation official podcast from apple wow look at you good job with that fanboy um yeah sure the i i well i could i could counter that and say uh the foundation official podcast in which the creator of the show sometimes needed to explain what was happening in his show anyway um the a perennial for me is the pause cast with uh joe posnanski and michael schur where they draft things and talk about sports. Now on its fifth home, I think, but still releasing podcasts.

And I'll throw in Rectifs and Cortex. Those are both shows that I don't listen to every episode, but I do listen to a lot. I appreciate that. Sorry, Cortex, one of the only shows that appears in both of the categories. Nobody ever knows where to vote for it it which personally I see is a great victory of my own that nobody's really

sure what kind of podcast is this and my answer is yes I will say for for Rectus it is just a truly fantastic show and i'm halfway through uh the most recent episode and oh the refrigerator yeah i've got that at the top of my queue i haven't listened yet i'm already feeling like this is going to be another classic i'm like a third of the way through the episode um i i wanted to make my nomination for Talking Sopranos. I think last year I spoke about,

I think last year I spoke about the West Wing Weekly as one of my favorite shows because I've just finished watching the West Wing. Talking Sopranos is like this. It is two of, well, actually more than, if anything, two of the, Steve Schripper, who played Bobby, and Michael Imperioli,

who played Chrissy, Christopher. They started the show in March of 2020, so it was a pandemic project for them, because they had a touring show where they would do stories about the Sopranos. And they, this week

completed every episode and it's fantastic like the shows that are like this, the ones that are produced by people involved with it they have stories that you otherwise wouldn't hear and they have access to

absolutely everybody and they interviewed everyone to do with this show you know it's it is uh strange in places it's a little bit like they have a really interesting and i think really very funny dynamic between the two of them and but some people might not like that and it's a little uh off color in some places too which i would totally understand if people wouldn't like but also i don't know it's kind of expected i think about a show about the sopranos i don't know um but i i've really enjoyed this show um and because the sopranos is one of my favorite shows ever and getting to hear about the stories that

went, you know, and the people and the mindset of what went into creating this show, I just think is really great. I haven't started listening to Parks and Recollection yet, but that's going to be one that I think will fill this hole when I'm done with talking Sopranos.

So yeah, that would be one of my recommendations this year. I'm not going to push for it to win. I'm very happy with it being a runner-up. Okay. But what do you want to do for this category this year? So just for... I need to consult the official Bible of the Upgradies, Upgradies.com.

Last year, it was Rectifs. Has Rectifs won twice or just once? Rectifs has won once. I do want to note, I've made an error in my list here by saying Cortex got 5.9% and Reconcilable Differences got 5.7%. I think it was 6.7%. I know it was more than Cortex, though,

so I misspoke there it did i don't i cannot tell you the exact thing i think i just mistyped it must have been 6.7 all right i'm going to say since since rec diffs was number one by the upgradians uh let's let's give it let's give it the award again yeah it's a good podcast it's a very good show uh that people should be listening to here and relay of home if they of her excellent show notes as well excellent show notes excellent show notes um would you like to give another runner-up yeah let's do we'll do your talking sopranos runner-up and let's make um let's make uh cortex the other runner-up. Thank you. Look at that.

It's like Upgrade. It didn't win, but it's an honor just to be nominated. Merlin Mann is a strong winner of this category. This is Merlin's fifth win, I believe, in this category. Or fourth? Fourth win? That was great. That was a very award show.

This is Merlin's fifth win in this category. A fourth? A fourth win? That was great. That was a very award show. This is Merlin's fifth win in this category. Merlin Man. He's nominated tonight for two categories. I think this is also I believe Merlin is a five-time, maybe six-time overall winner in the Upgradies, though.

Brackdiff's one favorite podcast newcomer in 2015. No, it makes him five. And then Dubai Friday has picked up two awards and Reconcilable Differences has now picked up two awards. The heavily awarded Mellow Man.

So we get to our final award of the evening for favorite podcast newcomer of the year. 3.1% for Football is Life on The Incomparable. Ooh. 4.8% for Football is Life on The Incomparable. Ooh. 4.8% for Conduit here on RelayFM.

And a massive 28.5% of the vote, one of the highest percentages of the evening, goes for Downstream here on RelayFM. Am I on that one? Is that mine? You're on that one. That's one of your ones. That also makes a lot of sense and

is my personal pick as well, Downstream. I really wanted this show to exist because it's obviously a topic that we both care about greatly. Julia is the perfect person to host this show along with you. And so I really love Downstream.

It's just what I want. It's a lot of information, and it's told in a really great way with a lot of great context that two of you provide about an area that I do find fascinating, which is how do these big companies navigate this landscape? So I think Downstream is a very worthy winner of this award. Well, if you and the Upgradians agree, then i'm happy to accept this award on julia's behalf and also um it is something we would like to have you on at some point i would love to be on um to talk about what the uk lay of the land is we're going to try to do that with the uk and australia and maybe find some other guests to explain what streaming uh looks like in their countries because i could different everywhere. I could just tell you right now, Sky ate it all up. Thanks for coming, everyone.

I'm going to leave now. Nice. But I have lots of opinions on that. So yeah, I would love to be on the show. So yes, congratulations to Downstream for the Favorite Podcast Newcomer Award and Conduit and Football is Life in the runners-up.

Great. Look at that. So that was the 2021 upgradees awards how about that congratulations everybody congratulations to all of our winners all of our nominees all of our runner-ups uh thank you to every upgradee and for listening this is obviously our very last episode of the year 2021 uh i'm really excited to kick off another year of the show unless apple like announces an event for january 4th and we have to come back and do a draft but probably not probably not probably not i'm gonna hope not anyway uh i would say 2021 been a weird old year

but for this show been a great year i've really i've really enjoyed everything that we've done this year i think it's been one of our strongest if not our strongest year of the show i i you know i think i'll take a moment to reflect now i i love the interviews that we've had all of the drafts and stuff and event coverage we've done summer of fun was great this year um so you know obviously we we're continuing to really enjoy producing uh bonus content and upgrade plus and thank you again to every upgradian that supports the show that way. But the biggest thanks we can give to this time of year is for everybody that listens to the show

and loves the show and continues to share it with people. And yeah, I love doing this. And I'm very thankful that I get to do this show with Jason every week. So thank you to everybody for listening. Jason, thank you for working with me on this project. It's a great honor. Thank you, Mike.

It's been a while now, and yet here we are. We're still doing it. I love it. It's a huge part of my week every week. Great way to start my week too. And likewise, I think we're making good episodes and having good conversations. And I really enjoy talking to you every week. And I am interested in the fact that this is the year where I broke the seal

and we did an episode that I was mostly not on. That was a milestone for me. And even then, I couldn't resist being on a little bit. We have to have you on a little bit. Just a little, little tiny bit. If you'd like to find some information about the award winners, go to Upgradees.com. You'll find all of the links there to all of the content

and all of the shows and everything that we've spoken about. And thank you to Zach Knox for the great work that Zach does on that project. Thank you all for listening. We'll be back next year. Until then, thank you for this wonderful evening. Say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell. you