Upgrade - 404: Convert Your Nostalgia to Money

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Jason added a (working) Studio Display and a Playdate to his house last week, and Myke's a little upset. Also CNN+ died, Netflix went into crisis, and Apple kept making sports streaming deals. We also discuss the parking situation at Apple Park, accept the passing of the iPhone mini, and envision a new use for the HomePod name.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 404 today's show is brought to you by zocdoc text expander and clean my mac x my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hi jason file not found uh host not found i have a hashtag snow talk question for you comes from ryan he says jason i had a couple of questions like this and i picked one of them today people want to know this about you jason jason you are a man who watches a lot of movies tv and reads a lot of books is there something you're giving up to be able to find this time or do you like are you limiting things how do you manage no all my time is unlimited. I have unlimited time to do whatever I want.

And I never give anything up, ever. That's how you do it. And it's, you know, I'm going. Some people go 24-7. I'm going like 35-8. I'm eight days a week, 35 hours a day. That's me. I see.

Look, obviously, you just have to balance it. it like is there something i'm giving up or limiting to do those things well of course i'm giving up something else that i could be doing um you got you got to balance it i don't i mean one of the reasons um i reduced my workload on the incomparable this year after 10 years 11 years of doing it every week, is that I had run out of sort of easy subjects of things that I already knew a lot about or movies I'd seen a lot or all of that. I was running out of those and I was finding the grind of having to have essentially a TV series or movie or book or series of books every single week to be too much homework for me. And so all of my

kind of content consumption was becoming homework for the podcast. And it was a lot and the pace was a lot. And so I cut back. I'm only doing about half the episodes this year and I'm having guest hosts for the other half. So that's part of it is like, yeah, I don't have that much time in the day. I also think that you may, because I, so much of my life is kind of converted into content, I will say, you may be overestimating how much time I spend with movies and TV and reading books. I do. I mean, I read books before I go to bed and, you know, after dinner, we'll sit down and watch a movie or some TV for a couple of hours. You know, that's time with, that's family time. If it's moon night, then my son is there.

And if it's not, then we're watching other stuff and it's my wife and me. And, you know, that's part of what we do. What, I don't know. I mean, that's, that's the thing we like to do. If I had my evenings back, we would find something else to do and spend our time in that, right? Like then we would be playing board games or whatever. You just, it's a thing you have to balance out. I was thinking the other day, if I didn't do anything other than tech stuff, what would my life be like?

And I'm not, I mean mean i'm not quite sure i've always had side project stuff i'm sure that i would have like i would i would probably do more tech stuff to fill some of that but like part of my work-life balance really is the balance between the stuff that i do mostly during the day now that is upgrade and downstream and six colors and right. It's that stuff. And the stuff I do kind of in the evenings, which is reading books and watching TV or recording the incomparable, which is generally done in the evenings too. So I like to kind of have that balance. I'm fortunate that my hobbies are very similar to my job. I get to, you get to do what you love. And so part of what I love is, is the stuff that I

then ended up as doing a side projects, which kind of become part of your job. Um, it can be, it can cut the wrong way when you, when everything is a job, then you have no, have no uh no freedom which is one of the reasons why i cut back on the incomparable is i felt like it was eating up too much of my life um but i've got you know i there's also stuff that i do that is not those things and it's and i'm not publishing things to the internet and that's fine like i have a dnd game that i that I play on Monday nights occasionally that is not a podcast. It's just friends getting together. I know, on Zoom. But it's not a podcast.

I have to turn off the recording thing. Yeah, we're doing, Lauren and I are doing curling at our local curling club that just got a facility in Oakland. If you want to find me, Bay Area, find me at the Curling Club once a week-ish. We do stuff like that too. But the answer, the big answer is, yeah, I'm sure there's something I'm giving up, but these are the things that I've chosen to do.

It's like saying for any hobby, like Mike, what are you giving up to be interested in keyboards? It's like, I don't know, right? Something else that you would be doing instead but i i'm not i mean i guess if i gave if i gave it up completely then i'd spend more time what watching baseball games listening to music uh lounging in the backyard pulling weeds mowing the lawn like you know it's that's life you got to balance all those things. It's all trade-offs.

Yeah. If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, just send out a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk or use question mark SnellTalk in the RelayFM Discord. The prophecy was foretold. Jason, you have received your studio display already. That was fast. That was fast.

That turned around really fast. I was fast. That was fast. That turned around really fast. I was impressed. In fact, I got a note that my air bill had been printed before I'd even returned the display. I got that right after the podcast yesterday. Wow. Or last week. It was one of those things where it was like, oh, this is happening fast. I am not.

Okay, so we did upgrade, which meant that people heard my story. I'm not entirely convinced that people didn't hear my story and then check into it and say, this is bad PR. Let's expedite his thing. I think maybe it just happened, though. I think maybe the timing was right where it just kind of happened and this is how it turned out so the good news is i have it it doesn't have big horizontal things on it i hope that monitor that they shipped me went somewhere where somebody could look at it and go uh-oh what what is happening here is this a one-off or do we need to fix our production system that one got driven over to craig's house i think maybe it maybe it or maybe it goes down there in the discord says i

wonder who is currently posting about their display not arriving on the day i promise there's somebody in the bay area somebody in the six color slack was talking about how theirs just got pushed back a couple of weeks and somebody else replied that's because yours went to jason it's like that's probably what happened um the uh yeah no it's it's i'm pretty sure that bob mansfield still takes all the bad hardware even though he's retired they still go to bob's house gets taken over to bob's house and then people come and retrieve from there pretty sure that's what it is um craig doesn't want your hardware craig's a software guy he doesn't want your um anyway i i did hear this last week from a lot of people who work in various aspects of Apple sales and support, which is not surprising.

The general trend of that was this is not supposed to happen like this, which is good. Good to know. It sounds, though, like a lot of my guesses about what happened last week seem to have been fairly accurate. The idea, I am told by multiple people, is to make the customer satisfied as quickly and easily as possible. And in times of plenty where products are available at the drop of a hat, the idea is to do a return and a new order and the new order will be there in a couple of days and it will be a fast turnaround. And you treat it as a return and then they will pluck it off and say, this is faulty. But that's the best way to do it in order for expediency's sake, to get a new product. Because what you want to do is just get the product the consumer wanted in their hands as fast as possible. But this was a very weird situation where that wasn't the case.

Doing a new order was not going to get me a new one as fast as possible. It was going to get me a new one in 10 weeks or whatever. So the right answer was what eventually happened, which was to mark it as essentially a repair, which is how it, I think, is how it should always work. But the other, culturally, the other thing, which is return and new order culturally, that happens because it's faster and less complicated for the customer, even though it's not really how you should do it. Right. But I think Apple has just sort of normalized like the most important thing is not following our policy. It's making the customer happy. And and in most cases that's return and replace and this is one of those things where like yeah sure maybe that is the fastest way to do it but i think that this that is a process that should be hidden from the customer like yeah this thing

of you have to process a return and then we'll do a replacement like right well this this is the thing is that so this this thing that is built up around trying to make it the best thing for the customer. It gets complicated because then you're you're it's not hiding the that thing from the customer. So it turns out the right answer in this case was to do to do the thing they don't normally do in these circumstances because it's it's less expedient, which is to say this is this is broken. It's less expedient, which is to say, this is broken. We're going to put this in the essentially repair channel. And by repair, in this case, they're not going to repair my one that they sent me. They're going to get me a new replacement.

And they're going to put that one in the flow for this one is broken. And then they'll fix it and sell it. It's refurbished or they'll throw it away or whatever they do with it. Recycle it, of course, recycle. So that was the right answer. And we did get there. I think it would all have worked out a lot better had the guy on the phone not sent me to the Apple store, which was, you know, everybody I heard from was, that's a mistake. If you don't have an appointment, you really can't do that. You got to have a Genius Bar appointment.

And the guy, like, made me a Genius Bar appointment and then canceled it and said, you can just go. And it's like, no, that was not the case. So that was where the guy got messed up is punting me to the Apple store when he really should never have offered me my retail store and said, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to send you a form. You're going to send that back with this air bill PDF. You're going to print it out, put it on the box, send it back.

I'm going to have a replacement sent to you done. And that sort of didn't happen. And I did get a call from somebody at Apple about this after someone at Apple heard Upgrade. And I told them my story. I basically said, look, I already had the monitor at that point, right? By the time I talked to this guy, I had already gotten the replacement and it worked fine. But I told him the story and I said, you know, here's what happened to me. Best as I can tell, it's because of this thing. If you have any influence or can, you know, on clarifying these policies so this doesn't happen to somebody else, that would be great. So, but in the end, I've got a display. It's hovering over my desk. It's on an arm. I can push it back and lift it up and do all those things. And it's floating again. And my desk is super clean and it looks great.

And it's not the nano textured one, which I, since I don't have a window behind me, I actually prefer because everything's a little bit crisper and it's great. So Rami, you have the nano texture one as the review unit, right? Yeah, yeah. So now that you've had both of them in your space

you're happier with the with the glossy absolutely because it's just a little bit crisper because the nanotexture that that is a textured display and so everything looks a little this is the trade-off everything looks it looks like it's behind something it looks a little less sharp because there's a texture in front of it. It's almost diluted. Like you're losing the blackest blacks. Everything gets a little grayed up because of that texture reflecting. Because what it's doing is it's taking whatever light it is getting and it is diffusely reflecting it, which is how it is an anti-glare display. But the downside of that is everything is sort of all that light is diffusely reflected and it kind of reduces the contrast a little bit.

If you're somebody who is like you talking about, you talked to Gray about this on Cortex, like he is a big nanotexture boy. And like, I get it for people who are sensitive to reflections and like, it's amazing that that is available for people. But my window is to my left. There is no scenario where I'm going to turn my desk with my back to the window. I don't want that. I like to look out the window. And so I'm in a position where I don't need an anti-glare display. And I'm happy to not have one because I do think that there's a little bit of a trade-off there, plus the money. and I'm happy to not have one because I do think that there's a little bit of a trade-off there, plus the money.

I'm assuming there aren't really any, that you have no new... Oh, you should get the VESA, right? It's on the VESA now. Yeah. This has the main difference. Yeah, it's just... And I assume that all went well. Yeah, it's literally the same VESA arm that I got when I bought my previous desk that I've just kept on moving. And so I had a Dell display on it i had the

original 5k imac on it i had the imac pro on it and now i've got this display on it but it's much lighter than those imacs so it's it that's kind of funny it's it's a lot easier to kind of move around yeah um but it's the same arm i thought about getting a new arm they're probably nice newer cooler mounting arms but it works fine. So, yeah. Why change it up? Back to normal. I mean, with the Mac Studio under the desk now, it actually is, it feels very much like my old setup. The difference being there are fewer cables passing over on the monitor arm because now I don't, all the other stuff that used to be plugged into the back of the iMac is now under the desk plugged into the back of the Mac Studio.

So it's actually a little less cluttered than it used to be. A couple of weeks ago, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned we were talking about the Twitter user whose name has escaped me right now. I think the name was Chaos, I think, who took apart a magic keyboard with Touch ID and was able to extract the Touch ID power button from it so they could make their own little Touch ID buttons that sit on their desk. And I vowed to do this myself. All the parts have arrived.

And so I'm going to do this on stream and Jason's going to join me. So it's going to be on June 6th. I'll remind everyone about this next week too. Sorry, it's going to be May. I have a real problem right now, Jasonason where may is being erased from my mind yeah i keep doing this i did this to you i've been doing it with lots of things i keep saying june 6th when i mean may 6th for me right now april was rolling right into june i'm just ready for w i love it let's do it

let's just skip right over may sorry may you're out You're out of here. It's going to be May for one day. May 6th at 9.30 a.m. Pacific, 12.30 Eastern, half past five, best time at BST. That's what that means. That's British summertime. So yeah, I'll remind everyone about this next week, but me and Jason are going to be hanging out for a bit and I'm going to be trying to extract a circuit board and a fingerprint sensor from a keyboard. So that should be fun. This episode is brought to you by our friends at CleanMyMac X. The Mac is a crucial tool for work, education, and life. I'm sure that's something that we can all agree on here listening to upgrade clean my mac x from mac poor can keep it in your mac in tip-top shape it is the ideal decluttering app so what exactly does it do

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I hate you. Oh, hi. Do you know this? Do you know that I hate you right now? This is cyberbullying. You are cyberbullying me. Wait, wait, what? Directly. I think you are the one. You are actively cyberbullying me by streaming your Playdate.

Oh, yeah. I watched you stream your Playdate and watched you not be able to play the games, and I was just getting more and more mad at you, Jason, because you don't deserve it, all right? I deserve the Playdate. You don't deserve the Playdate. not be able to play the games and i was just getting more and more mad at you jason because you don't deserve it all right i deserve to play date you don't deserve to play learning how to play you're not a real gamer i learned how to play on the stream i had a breakthrough on the surfing game while we were that was really fun that was the one i was talking about that was that was

hilarious to me you were just like why just like spinning the crank like wild before realizing it controls your direction well it says crank it up it says crank it up it does it does that was on the way too so i'm hoping i'm hoping i'll have mine by the end of this week and so we can talk about it uh in a little bit more detail next week but i wanted to know like what are your um your kind of first impressions of the playdate? I love the hardware. I wish it had a backlight because it is very hard to use. I feel like this is the perfect game thing to play outside because it really needs to be well lit.

I know why it doesn't have a backlight, but I wish it had a backlight because it is hard to see unless you're in very good lighting conditions. I don't know if you remember this, Jason, but this was always the thing with the original game boys right the original game boys didn't have lights on them so you could buy these lights that you would attach them i hope somebody makes this for play date it's like the original kindle where the early kindles i had a little clip on book light for the kindles which seemed so stupid but you know at least it made it i could read at night so So yeah, hardware feels great. The attention to detail in the software by Panic is great.

Love the setup details, love the sideloading. You can sideload it on your computer, but you can also drag the file into the web interface on Playdate's website and it will get synced to you. So very Kindle-like experience is what I would say. It's like, you know, you can do it either way. You can be in their system or you can not be in their system and it doesn't matter. There are some games out there of varying quality.

Honestly, if I have a criticism of Playdate at this point, it is that the first two games of the season one um i appreciate that one of them is an arcade game and one of them is more like an rpg game and an extended game i think that that is a very good bit of of uh curating the game experience i think it's a very smart. I will say that finding the surfing game kind of impenetrable is, um, was kind of reduced my enthusiasm, right? Because that's one of the two games that are there and in the long run.

And I know like it just shipped and there are going to be more games coming in. In fact, I get the distinct impression that in this last few days, as these products have started to ship, the people who had been working on Playdate games are like, oh, geez, I need to get it out there. I found one game.

In fact, I played it on the stream. There was a Tetris game that didn't sideload and was very weird. And then when I lost at the end, it had a very, very, did you see that very bad frame rate problem? Suddenly it reduced to sort of like one frame every five seconds as it animated the end of the game.

And I left a note for the developer of that game, and he pushed an update that said, oh, yes, I changed the ending because it turns out that the frame rate was really bad on the actual hardware because he was just using. So all these developers are not even using, or many of them are not even using hardware. They're just using the development environment. them are not even using hardware they're they're just using the the development environment so you know big picture i would say what let me down about the play date is that there weren't enough games to choose from on day one and i don't know what the answer is there i think i think while it's great that panic is talking about doing a catalog app that people can like put their games

in so that there can be a place to find Playdate games. You can sideload them, whatever, but they need, if not a store, at least like a directory. They called it a store. They called it a store. It sounds like it will be both. Like you could be in their store

or you can just be in as a directory linking to your own place where people buy it. Which is kind of like the Microsoft store. That's how like the Microsoft store works. And I know it's early days. So when this is shipping to, in a couple of months, it'll be shipping to a larger group of people. I was one of the first people to get one.

So it's early yet. But that is my real complaint, is that I feel like out of the box, it should have a better selection. I wonder, I actually wonder, this is talking our discussion of like the binge drop versus the weekly release i kind of wonder given that they have what 20 games it's like a 10 week season i wonder if maybe they should have put four games on week one instead of two yeah just to have more selection it just that's the part of it that i think that they've gotten wrong and if there's a must-have game out there on the internet now or in the next couple of months where people

are like well yeah but just go get this game for eight dollars and it's amazing and then and then it's worth it that'll solve this problem too just right now there's kind of nothing although i was happy to get the um there's a space invaders game that is basically unplayable you can play it but you can't win it. And there's Tetris, which, like I said, was sort of broken, but was sort of playable. And honestly, having that little yellow play date where I can just play Tetris, that kind of hit the spot. That kind of made me feel happy. So I just want a little more variety of the games on it. But it's a beautiful piece of hardware, and I love the idea of this cute little...

It's so small. Cute little thing. I think by the time they reach critical mass of shipping, which right now they are not, for good reason. They're still kind of testing out their shipping. I wouldn't be surprised if I'm one of the first international people to receive one.

Right. Because I was very early in the system, like you. Yeah, you're a couple before me. Yeah. And so, you know, I know that they're like, they're kind of taking baby steps in their shipping, which I think is the right thing to do, just because it seems like they're going to be

really going to scale soon. My expectation is by the time that people start receiving them at scale, there will be way more games available. Like, I'll put a link in the show notes that Zach put out of a, like, there's a wiki. You know, someone's keeping a track there will be way more games available um like yeah i'll put a look in the show notes that zach uh put out of like there's a wiki you know someone's keeping a track of some of the community games that are available and i watched a really good interview on the spawn on me podcast of cable

sasa um it was kelly was uh interviewing him and they were talking about this uh exact idea of the season thing and cable's like i'm really hoping that people are willing to stick with it right that like the general consensus is sticking with it but he said however we do have some tools available to us that if it seems that people don't seem to like it, that we can take advantage of. My expectation there is they can maybe increase, release more games, or just let someone say, hey, just give me them all now. And we'll see how that goes. This actually reminds me a lot.

I know I just mentioned it, but a lot of the conversation that we've had and that I know that I've talked about on a bunch of other podcasts about streaming releases, binge drop versus weekly drop. And we talked here about, very specifically about Apple, like doing the, we're going to give you two or three episodes up front and then it's going to be weekly. and then it's going to be weekly. And I was thinking about this with Playdate. And by the way, Zach in the Discord says it's 24 games, so it's a 12-week season. Yeah, it was originally going to be 12 weeks with one game a week,

and then they increased it to two games a week for 12 weeks. So this is my take as a very early Playdate person, is that I think they needed to do it. I agree with the idea of not dropping 24 games on the console to begin with, right? Like, you're going to miss games. You're going to have such an embarrassment of games that there's going to be a game that you would spend time with

that you're not going to spend time with. And I think it's bad. I don't think you should do that. That said, I think starting with those two was a mistake. I really do. I think that they need to come out stronger out of the gate so people are really enthusiastic about it. But this is the problem, I think, with the Playdate

because I have heard from some of the reviewers because the reviewers, they got two games a day for 12 days i've seen lots of people say that uh the surfing game is one of their favorites i read a review that said the surfing game was impenetrable which i nodded about so right but like this this i think this is always going to be the problem that's the argument for more games right because you have more chances to get something that really clicks i think one of the things that is good about this compared to when it was initially announced is this idea of sideloading like they didn't talk about this for a really long time right i think they actually weren't so clear about it until like a week ago like launch day the idea of like hey you can just

go and get these games from wherever you want to get them and you upload them on our web tool and it gets pushed to your play date which reminds me of the kindle it is it is i know you can do it by plugging it into but i like that idea it's like very kindling the difference is if you want to play it right now the best thing to do is sideload it because it when you put it on the there's no like force sync it sort of just happens eventually and not in the moment so that that that is i found myself sideloading things because i wanted them now also Also, there were some things that I could sideload that I couldn't get into Panic's tool, which I thought was kind of funny

that they had put the developer had, I think Panic's tool validates like the little text file that goes with it that says, what game is this? And who's it from? And sideloading does not care. So- Well, that's the way to do it, right?

Yeah. Like that's the kind of the benefit. Yeah. Yeah. So I i think this is really interesting i would be disappointed if they got rid of this idea because it's the whole idea it's the name oh i agree right i agree i i love the season idea and i actually think it's i would like it to be sustainable i would like to be able to sign up for a new season of Playdate and have a season premiere and have those roll out. Like, I think it's actually a really great idea,

especially for these games that are on this little handheld that are little fun games, having that excitement. I love that idea. I just, I guess what I'm really saying is I would advocate for the modified weekly schedule that a lot of streamers are doing now, where you start with a bunch and then roll them out.

Maybe four is a better start than two. Or maybe it's two and then two the next day and then it's weekly or something like that. I feel like there's maybe something to tweak there to go out a little bit stronger. I expect them to tweak it because there was definitely in the reviews a lot of question about the games, the quality of the games, if they worked or not. But I think it was hidden a little bit in the reviewers' minds because they just got two more tomorrow. And for you, you've got two games that you didn't really like and now you waiting you know you may be at what like five days before you would get another two and so i think i wouldn't be surprised if again by the time they're shipping wave two or whatever like batch two maybe it is four games that you get especially because the whole idea of the play date was originally it was date synced for everyone

right so like you would get when your play date arrived all of the games released up to that date it wasn't when you got it and then moving on so when mine arrived say mine arrives monday you've got four and i have four but they couldn't do this because they couldn't get them out in the way that they wanted right because because that's like that that is and i think imagine that for a moment imagine that it's a year from now or eight months from now and there are thousands of play dates out there and season two starts that's i think that's why they're gonna do season two because i'll actually get to live out what they wanted right and everybody experiences those games get to live out what they wanted right and everybody experiences those games together that is perfect like i get why you wouldn't want to do this now because like i said i'm not saying drop

24 games on the system when it ships i i'm not saying that but um yeah it all and it's early days i think that's the bottom line is it's early days and if you get one of these three months from now or six months from now then you're gonna have lots of content out there that is going to be available and that that's my feeling now is that being this early on even though they've had you know a couple of years to work on this it still feels like on the on the actual game side it's just it's just light and it may just be that the curtain is only now coming up and this will be very different in a few weeks. And I hope so because the hardware is great. And I love the idea of this model too. It's fun. And it's fun that it's people we know. Obviously, the gaming business, there's lots of big corporations that have all sorts of ways of structuring game rollouts and

stuff like that. But this is like the indie game experiment that's going on, indie game handheld. And I like that. I think it's interesting because we get to debate the models and they are seeing their plans meet reality right now. And that's fascinating too, right? Because they've had two, three, four years to think about what this would be like. And now reality will hit

and they'll realize some of their assumptions were wrong and they're going to have to adjust.'s fascinating what i love about the last thing on this we're going to be talking about playdate for weeks right because like i'm going to want to talk about it more when i get mine you know just i mean but we've been talking about it for years on this show right like we've been so excited about it but it's been so fascinating to me like as i am watching more games media just to hear how people refer to panic like they are the company from goose game and firewatch yeah right it's just interesting and i don't criticize that by the way like if you are a video game outlet that's the content talk

about transmit what's the point right like it doesn't it's know that they're the company from the truck of the FTP client, but that's not what it is to everyone else. This is clearly what Panic want. Panic want to be seen as both, and they should be, because they are in that world. They are both a Mac developer and a game developer.

I actually really wonder what their future is. I think possibly they will be a games company. I think that they are on course to be a games company. And I am really intrigued to see what that ends up at. Because

there is a lot of money that they can make from this market because games are so big. Right. And at a certain point, they may have to make some decisions. And I could really imagine them scaling back a lot of their Mac stuff to focus on game stuff because it's in the DNA of the company anyway. It's potentially an iPhone Mac thing where you tap into a very small portion of the games market but it's so huge compared to the mac software market what is that thing that steve jobs said

like that tiny percentage of the phone market and how big it would make like you know when they when they announced the iphone when they launched the iphone and they were talking about just getting a slither of the smartphone market how big it would be for them like that well i use transmit so so uh hey look they're there i think they're always going to employ mac developers at panic but yes it would be very interesting if panic was the uh games indie game darling that also makes an ftp client and a development tool on the side. Jason, I think they are that now. I think that's what they are now. Maybe so. Love it.

We'll see. I can't wait for mine. I really want it to hurry up. I'm so excited. We're talking about binging. Yep. It is impossible for us not to do some upstream this week

because the news has been. Mike, we did two episodes of downstream last week two it's an every other week podcast i am so happy that you did you you pulled the cord and did the emergency first ever at the inaugural emergency episode of downstream because like always you know and i'm sure i know this is why you do this show like and i get it like just listening to julia talk through her thought processes it's just like oh my god she's like the smartest person on the planet she is she's just so freaking smart so i really implore people listen uh to downstream episode 16 because honestly nothing that i add here is really gonna be that

much value uh you can already hear jason have a more intelligent conversation about this but cnn is cnn plus is dead it's dead dead. A lot of jokes going on. And Netflix had a bad quarter. Yeah, that's basically it. CNN Plus, I can do the TLDR here. CNN Plus is dead. A lot of takes out there about how it was a flop and people didn't like it. Truth is, it had nothing to do with its launch.

It had nothing to do with its number of subscribers. Warner Media was basically spun out by at&t and merged with discovery communications and that finally that approved and closed like last week or two weeks ago and discovery now it's warner brothers discovery is the new company and the people like in charge of warner brothers discovery all the people who were in charge at CNN and Warner Media left. Like they're out. They're out. And the new team does not want an additional streaming service devoted to news.

Not part of their strategy. They're really talking about merging, I think, everything in basically under HBO Max. And so rather than go through the motions for a while and shut it down or merge it in, they just decided to shut it down now and then figure out what they're going to do. So this was much more about the new team coming in and saying, we don't want this. This is not a direction we want to pursue. Then it is about there's literally no, what I said to Julia is there's no realistic subscriber number in the first three weeks of CNN Plus that would have changed their minds. It literally could not have happened because that's not what this is about.

But what an obscene waste of money, right? It depends on what they do with it, right? I mean, they can still do things, but there was an inconsequential amount of money wasted the marketing was completely wasted they they signed talent it's possible they will repurpose that talent and it won't be wasted they it's we don't know what the other part of this is but they may do some streaming shows on cnn's app or their website and put things in hbo max and And they're not going to get the marketing budget back. And there are going to be people who lose their jobs. And they're going to pay severance. And all of those things are going to happen. That's absolutely true. In the aggregate,

it remains to be seen how much of this they choose to salvage and how much of this they choose to dump. But the new people coming in have no ego to bruise about the bad decisions made by the previous regime, right? It's very easy for them to say, nope, and just wipe it out. And that's what's going on here. So, yeah, this is – sure, that old group decided to launch this thing anyway. I have a theory, which is that Jeff Zucker, who is the head of CNN, basically said, look, I know David Zaslav, who's the CEO of the new combined company. He'll, he'll let me do this. We got a plan. It'll be fine. But of course, Jeff Zucker got fired. And so he wasn't even there. And the other people who were there all basically lost their jobs.

And the new people came coming in, were not impressed. So I, that's my theory is CNN plus, um, was launched. And Julia said as much as like it was sort of a well if we launch it then they can't kill it and they killed it it didn't matter they killed it anyway like aha what will you do now that we've launched it before you literally like a week before you took over we launched it and they're like yeah we're still gonna kill it sorry that's it's like we called your bluff or we called your bluff that called our bluff and now it's dead yeah uh the bigger news to me honestly though and i think in general uh it's funny that like this could happen and they could still be bigger news in streaming media is that netflix lost 200 000

subscribers uh in the q1 um after estimating they would gain 2.5 million yeah and but i think the bigger part of it is saying that in the next quarter they're going to lose another 2 million paying subscribers what do we know from apple results by the way apple results later this week we'll be talking about charts and numbers next week mike's favorite episode oh boy i can't wait oh yeah so it's always about like wall street cares about where you're going not where you've been because where you've been is already priced into the stock it's where you're going. They want to do. So Netflix losing a little bit. It is a milestone, but at the same time, if they hadn't turned off their service

in Russia, they wouldn't have lost. They would have still gained, but they say they're going to lose 2 million next quarter. And there are lots of reasons for it. Julia goes into some of them on downstream. I think it is a milestone because as I said on downstream, one of my favorite quotes ever is John Madden, the football coach, saying that winning is a great deodorant. And I know I've used that quote here about Apple and the App Store, but it's also true of Netflix,

which is it's very hard to do cultural change when you're winning. Even if parts of what you're doing aren't working, even if parts of what you're doing are showing signs of weakness, it's very hard to make cultural change when you're winning because you're winning. Who cares about this part?

We're making money. We're growing. It doesn't matter. And then you're not winning. And all of a sudden, like what happened with this is that during the, it wasn't even a press release, like during the commentary,

after announcing that they had lost subscribers, the CEO of Netflix said, Oh yeah, we'll'll do we're going to do an ad tier sounded so desperate and it it you know but what and it was desperate but what he's really doing is trying to send a message to investors to wall street saying no no no we've got plans like this we're going to do this but but they've been so adamantly like no no we are a premium service that we don't have that. And immediately, oh, yeah, we're going to do an ad tier two. So, but that was a sacred cow that is gone now. And I think that is what I think we have to watch at Netflix now is they are now, they're in a great position. They've spent the last decade being first in streaming.

great position they've spent the last decade being first in streaming and it means they are now a giant of entertainment up there with disney and hbo and all the rest great yeah but now they're in they've gone from being like the land rush to being at cruising speed where they are just in the trenches i'm mixing all the metaphors here but right they're fighting it out now the the big expansion period is over and now they just have to run themselves like an entertainment company. And it means they have to think about ads. It means they have to think about their development program where they drop everything. They don't market it very well. They drop it and then they move on. They do a lot of quantity, but the quality is really not there. They don't have a lot of banner like high profile stuff that

really brings people in like how disney has been able to do it with star wars and marvel i think hbo is a better um comparison there because like disney have it in the pocket already right they've got they've got the people you want to hear about like they've got star wars they've got marvel hbo have to create new ip right they're in the same boat as netflix well yeah but they've got dc they've got some intellectual property there right theoretically i feel like hbo max has been creating a bunch of shows right that are like these are brand new things you've not heard about before and you want to watch them but the the big picture here is that yeah is that netflix uh has really become the perception of netflix is that they're just a fire hose of content and that even when there's

something big that's coming to netflix that people want to see that they don't know about it and then if you pay not are not paying attention the one or two weeks they're promoting it you don't even know that it happened. Like, it's really easy to, like, love a show and then miss that it came back because of the way Netflix has approached this. And what we're going to see is Netflix is going to change that, too. As easily as Netflix said, oh, no, we're going to do a cheaper ad tier. And they're not going to put ads on your Netflix. But they are going to offer Netflix for cheaper if you watch ads. That's what they're going to do.

Like, literally everybody but Apple so far is doing. So they're going to do that. But they are going to change. They're going to experiment quick with the trigger of canceling a show after two seasons if it's promising because they might realize that they actually need to cultivate that and build that catalog where things have a satisfying ending instead of just being cut off because it doesn't matter it's all just water in the fire hose right like we will see netflix questioning now all of its sort of sacred cows that have made Netflix Netflix, which is good because if you compare Netflix to the policies of all of its competitors, so many of them are outliers and they're really not outliers for good reasons. They're outliers because Netflix went first, made some decisions and has not had any need to revisit them. So it's going to be fascinating to watch the changes at Netflix now that they're literally just playing in the big leagues, which is great, but they're playing in the big leagues with HBO Max and Disney and then down the line, you know, Paramount Plus and Apple TV Plus and stuff like that.

They are in it now and it's a struggle for them. So it's going to be a challenge for them. and it's a struggle for them. So it's going to be a challenge for them. Rumors continue that Apple have actually already made a deal for NFL Sunday Ticket. This is from Matthew Bologna at Puck News. Quote,

My sources say it's Apple's to lose at this point. One source told me this weekend that the deal is actually done and is being kept quiet at Apple's request. Right. So for people who don't know, NFL Sunday Ticket is how you watch all the NFL games that are out of your local market. So your local TV stations are showing a couple of games. But in the NFL, there are like, whatever, 14 games on a Sunday, something like that, that are nationally, they're not nationally televised. They're only on local stations.

So if you're a fan of an out-of-market team, or if you just want to watch like the best teams and not your local teams, I used to be a Sunday Ticket subscriber. It's great. And it's been a DirecTV exclusive. So basically people would get satellite dishes on their roofs just for this product. It was a great driver of satellite TV into people's homes, which is why they spent so much money on it. Now, Apple is going to do something different with it, although I think it's similar, and I'll get to that in a minute. But I totally believe that Apple's already made this deal, and it's just quiet, because I think that's what happened with Major League Baseball, it's the same thing. And they just waited until they had an event to announce it. I totally believe they're doing this. I think it's going to be a big deal because more people will have access to this product than currently do because they don't have satellite TV, but they have the internet. I have some questions about like bars and things that do Sunday Ticket. I wonder if that will be

belonging to Apple or whether maybe the NFL will a an alternate kind of package that's for public exhibition stuff because there's a question of like how can you put on 10 can your internet in your bar handle 10 different hd streams of different apple things on all of your tvs right like i i i wonder about that but that's like a minor thing that there's probably a technical solution for, um, or a contractual solution for, but, um, but no, it's, it's another example, like with baseball of Apple getting into sports and having, I think, I think they'll charge for this. I think this won't just be an Apple TV plus thing. I think there'll probably be a premium, you know, Apple TV pro max, uh, something to get this. But I think that Apple's motivations are broader,

which I guess brings me to my theory, Mike. I told you I had a theory that I wanted to get out. Yeah, I want to hear your theory. All right. So I know a lot of people talking about the baseball thing and this NFL thing too, and saying like, well, Apple's going to pay more, even though they're

giving away the baseball games for now. The goal is just to get people to try Apple TV Plus and drive people to subscribe eventually, because they're going to want to do it. And then they'll get their money. And that's what it's for. Get people into Apple's service ecosystem. My theory, and I think the Sunday ticket thing goes along with this, is that they're actually doing something that is kind of like what DirecTV did, which is what you want to do is increase your addressable market. So in the case of the sports stuff, I think it's another way for them to drive adoption of devices that can play Apple TV Plus content, which means devices with a TV app. Not Apple TV boxes necessarily, but devices that have the TV app. And I was thinking about this because of my friend Greg, Greg Noss, who I've known since

college. He's a Dodger fan. I don't hold that against him. But, well, I do a little bit, but it's okay. He holds me being a Giants fan against me. It's fair. Rivals. bit, but it's okay. He holds me being a Giants fan against me. It's fair. Rivals. So he was complaining because the Dodgers were on Friday Night Baseball week before last. And he said,

and I said, it's free. You don't have to pay Apple. He was complaining about having to pay Apple, which is a common complaint, right? It's like, I already pay for the thing and to get the Dodgers and now this game isn't on and Apple's supposed to want my money for it. What is that about? But what I realized is, okay, well, it's free. And his response was, well, yeah, but I have to watch it on a computer. And I said, do you not have a device that will put Apple TV app on your television set? And he said, no, I don't. None of my TVs support it.

And I don't have a streaming box that supports it. So I would have to watch it on a computer. And I thought, well, this is one of the reasons Apple is doing this. Apple is doing this in part, at least, this is my theory, because what it really wants to do is not just get people to sign up for Apple TV Plus or sample Apple TV Plus, but what they also want to do is motivate people to buy equipment. And it could be a new TV, sure, but it could also be a $20 Roku stick, right?

These things aren't that expensive, actually. It means you have to go down to the store. You can probably get one at a convenience store. You certainly can get one at Target or Walmart. I got one for my mom. A $20 Roku box or stick or whatever, or an Amazon one if you want to do that, buying a relatively cheap thing that you attach to your TV or setting up your TV's smart features that you haven't set up,

whatever it is. And if Greg did that, if Greg spent $20, bought a Roku stick, attached it to his TV so he could watch the Dodgers on Friday night. He's now part of the potential addressable audience for Apple TV. Not all those people are going to buy Apple TV, but I think it actually benefits Apple to have people have TV sets with smart features in them that include the TV app. And it also kind of benefits everybody, right? It also benefits anybody else who, who might not have been addressable before, but it certainly gets Apple. Now, how do you get people? Cause it's only really recent TVs and boxes that support the TV app. Cause Apple made that deal a couple years ago, right? Two, three years ago. Well, this is a great way to motivate people that an

NFL Sunday ticket will be a great way to motivate people to do that. And then, you know, if you buy a $20 Roku stick for baseball, maybe you stick around, maybe you don't. But so that's part of my theory about one of the calculations they're making here is to actually, how do we get people in a position where they could even consider watching Apple TV Plus? And here you go. You don't have to pay for the baseball game.

You just have to make sure that you've got an app that supports it. I think that's interesting. It is funny, right? Like, because it definitely severs that idea of like hardware software talking together. Like that's what we do at Apple. Like they do have to let go

of some of the hardware part for the service part, right? Like we just have to try and make the best the hardware part for the service part, right? Like, we just have to try and make the best apps we can on the hardware that we have available to us. I did see, like, on a similar point, Charlie Chapman, I saw a tweet the other day saying, I guess by acquiring those MLB games rights, Apple kind of bought a bunch of native local news coverage across the whole country explaining exactly what Apple TV is and how to use it yeah right everybody's favorite baseball team will explain at some point or or newspaper or sports website or whatever they're all going to have to explain week by week

to fans of new teams every friday here's how you get apple tv set up. And again, that goes hand in hand, right? Because it may be if you don't have this and you want to watch it on your TV, go buy a Roku stick. And you're like, well, okay, that's not an Apple TV box, so why would Apple do that? And the answer is, if they can get in front of them

with a TV app, anyway, it's good for Apple. This episode is brought to you by TextExpander. Get your team communicating faster so they can focus on what's most important. With TextExpander, your team's knowledge is at everybody's fingertips. You can get your whole team on the same page

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year. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. This is one of the weirder things I've seen you put in our document. It says, Jason wants to talk about Apple Park logistics. All right. Yeah, I do because it's one of those things, you know it, when you listen to a podcast and you want to talk back to it and you can't because you're just a listener. So I have my own podcast. That's right.

The talk show episode 343, it's a really great episode. It's Paul Kaposis from Rogue Amoeba. They talk about baseball and audio hijack near and dear to my heart. Both of them. It's great. the WWDC keynote that Apple says will be happening in person with developers and students at Apple Park, right? In person where they'll watch the videos on a big screen. And my understanding is it's outside. I imagine it's going to be in the ring somewhere, whether it's the rainbow stage or a modified. The only reason it might not be the Rainbow stage is maybe they need to modify it in order to have more people there, but they've already got a big stage set up,

so it seems like the best place. What was interesting, so they were speculating about it, and I just wanted to go over this as somebody who's been to a bunch of events at the Steve Jobs Theater now. I really do believe, as I said on a past upgrade, this is going to be a relatively small number of people brought in to the inside of the park, to that stage or something like it for kind of a PR and photo opportunity. We're starting to get the community together. We handpick some developers and we have a bunch of student developers we want to show off. Apple loves that, to have that kind of opportunity, I will say as a sidebar, and this is a journalist problem, but I'm dreading being invited to come to the event to interview the fans or

students or whatever who are there because it's really important to cover the actual content of the keynote. And I'm only one person. I can't cover the content of the keynote and cover people watching the keynote, right? Like if I had to choose, I would choose the content of the keynote. So I'm troubled by that a little bit. I'm actually kind of afraid of that. I'm hoping that they won't make me make that decision.

Make you, but sure. Well, you know, it's very hard to turn down a request by Apple to go to Apple Park and all of that. And yet it might make my coverage worse. And so anyway, so what I want to talk about, though, is the logistics of it, because Gruber and Kafasas were talking about this a little bit. And I don't know about John's experience going to events at the Steve Jobs Theater and how he gets there. And I don't know if he rents a car or if he just takes an Uber or something to the Steve Jobs Theater. He is right in what he talked about,

about access to Apple Park versus Infinite Loop. Infinite Loop, you could just go there. Like even now, but certainly even back in the day when it was the HQ of Apple, you could just get off the freeway, get off 280, you make a right turn at the end of the off-ramp, make a left turn at the light, and then a left into infinite loop. And you're on the loop, and you can park in the parking lot where the employees park, and the company store was in, I don't know if it's still there, maybe it's still there. It's in Infinite Loop 1.

You're literally in the building that Apple people are in, but there's a little store at the beginning of it. Like, it's just right there. It was designed as an office park when Apple was not what Apple is now. So Apple Park was designed as a fortress. And so as a result, there is a visitor's center there with an Apple store. It is across, and you've been there, right? Yeah. It's across Tantau Avenue.

It's the Tantau Visitor's Center. So it's a two-lane street. It's across the street from Apple Park. But it's not really across the street from Apple Park. It's across the street from the fence and the embankment and the trees. And then in the distance, you can see the ring, right? It's not close. You just get like a, you know it's

out there. Yeah, I can sort of see it through the trees, and it was definitely built to keep all the fans who came to Infinite Loop at arm's length from Apple Park. That's the whole purpose of the Disney Center. One of the things I find so interesting is you can go up on the roof, right, and you can look at it, right? And the thing that I find so interesting about that,

as you said, it's not super close. It's like kind of across the street. You can't, at least with the last time I went there, with the wide-angle lens, you can't get a photo of the whole ring. This is how big Apple Park is. Like, it's so large. You zoom all the way out, and you still can't you have to

panorama if you want to get an image of the entire like the the building yep so um it is uh it's big the steve jobs theater which i have been to you know what you're doing is you walk across the street there's a essentially like a pass through a check-in desk building there that you, for an event at the Steve Jobs Theater or a briefing or whatever, you check in and then they pass you through to the other side. It's very weird. It's a mirrored building. So like both sides are exactly the same. It's very strange. So you pass through to the inner universe of Apple Park and then you go up. If you're going to Steve Jobs Theater, you go up the hill to the left, to the south, and Steve Jobs Theater is there. Steve Jobs Theater is at a remove from the actual proper Apple Park. It's kind of off on the edge. So you're not actually close to the ring when you're at the Steve Jobs Theater. So I think they could do it.

Doing an event with how many people inside the ring, they could totally do it because what they would do is they would set up the same thing where you would go from the visitor center and you'd pass through showing that you're approved. And then you would be sent off to the right instead, presumably. And they don't let you run free. There's no free roaming at Apple Park. The doors are all locked. Well, when you're going to the seed jobs theater it's a uh it's several hundred yards uphill to get to the theater and

i will just tell you not 10 yards goes by that there isn't an apple employee there being very friendly and welcoming you and telling you where to go but like you're not alone at the... Now, I've been there for a briefing. This way, sir. I've been there for a briefing and that hasn't been the case. And it's been a little eerie because I'm like, I could just take off and run and where would I go? But then that wouldn't be that great.

But my point is they do crowd control. They're not going to let you go off the path. So they would have a path that would take you to whatever point they're ushering people through to get to inside the ring, to a theater that was inside the ring, assuming that that's where it's going to be. Shouldn't be a problem. So there's questions about that. I don't think it'll be a problem. But here's the piece of info that I wanted to dump that I think that they didn't really get to in the talk show that I want to mention, which is there is an underground parking lot beneath the visitor center.

It is enormous. It's at least two levels. I think it might be more levels than that. And they're very, very large levels. So in terms of getting people to drive to Apple Park for the people who are not like Ubering there to drive to Apple Park and park at the visitor center on a day where there's a special event, so they're not going to let any employees park there. It's just going to be invited guests. Trust me, they can get a lot of people to park and walk across the street and go to the event. It's not a problem that that parking lot is built for that. There, there are an enormous number of parking spaces under there. I don't think it's a problem. Um, even if it was more people than could fit in the Steve Jobs theater, I don't think it would be a problem. It's certainly not a problem.

Like I parked down there. One time I had to go down an extra level and like it was kind of creepy and there's nobody down there. So what I'm saying is it's not a big deal to get people in Apple Park. Now, I am sure this is not part of apple's original plan right their whole plan was steve jobs theater the whole plan was you park in the underground lot go across the street go in the doors go to the left steve jobs theater big we built this beautiful state of the art incredible facility absolutely come and watch our presentations but covid and so they're going to do an open air thing. And like, great.

I think it's great improvisation. But I just wanted to say, I don't think that this is one of those things where you can say, well, I don't really think they're going to have, I mean, I don't think they're going to have 5,000 people in there. But I think that they can make the logistics work just fine. People are talking about a bus. Like, where would the bus come from? Because this is not like, it's not like the developers and guests. work just fine. People are talking about a bus. Where would the bus come from? Because it's not like the developers and guests. Maybe some of the special guests would be translated

over there. Maybe the students. I could imagine them picking up the students from somewhere in San Francisco. Sure, if they're being put up somewhere. But so many of these things are going to be just like people show, look, it's the suburbs. They're just going to show up. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a group break again at a hotel like they used to do at wwc could be i mean shuttle buses can happen but i guess what i'm just saying is if you invited literally just people from

the bay area and told them to drive there it would be fine it's the suburbs apple built a lot of parking they built parking at under the visitor Center specifically for public events at places like the Steve Jobs Theater. So there's a lot of parking down there. I'm sure it's mostly used by Apple employees during the rest of the time. But when I go there for special events, there's a person there that makes sure you're not an Apple employee before you're allowed in. They're like, if you're an Apple employee, you got to turn around. And I'm like, I am not an Apple employee. They're like, all right, sir, move along. So anyway, I think that's what they'll do. I don't know if they'll invite the media or not. I'm still thinking that

it's possible that they will invite the media either to cover the special event or even potentially to have the media go if they pass a test and are vaccinated, maybe even in the Steve Jobs Theater, but if not that, then out in the outside to do that. There may be a media contingent there. It's unclear. But anyway, parking is not going to be a problem. And Apple is capable of doing an outdoor event at that campus, even though that wasn't the plan. Should we go down to the room and round up? Let's put on our spurs.

Marshall Ming-Chi Kuo, name suggested by Tony and the RelayFM members' Discord. Yeehaw. Marshall Kuo is reporting at the front-facing camera. No, that doesn't work? It's a little too close to Roger Kuo. It's Ming-Chi Kuo.

No, I call him Sheriff Gurman. Yeah, okay, all right. Right? It's fine it's just marshall's also a name so it sounds like his name is marshall but i'm not saying that okay sheriff could be somebody's name all right the marshal what is the marshal reporting the marshal is reporting that the front-facing camera of all iphone 14 models would be upgraded to get autofocus capability. One of those things that every time I see a headline like this, because there was one of these a little while ago, it was for something else, but it's like, wait, it doesn't have it? No, it doesn't have it.

The front-facing camera does not have autofocus capability. There will also be a wider aperture on the iPhone 14 front-facing camera to allow more light into the lens. Not only could this lead to better portrait mode, it will also give overall image quality gains for the front-facing cameras, which are always great. And I guess I saw somebody say this on Twitter, would just continue to show just how bad the rest of Apple's front-facing cameras on their Macs are

when the iPhones just get better and better and better exactly the first iphone 14 molds have leaked on chinese social media network weibo these always come out kind of around this time and then not too long after youtubers get their hands on uh production like dummies you know so like these are are just built from the specs. If these are genuine, which they might as well be because all they're really confirming is the sizes, which we've known about for years

that Apple will be moving to this, which is two regular-sized phones, two max-sized phones. So there will be the iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 Max and then the iPhone 14 Pro and the iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 Max and then the iPhone 14 Pro and the iPhone 14 Pro Max. So, yeah. Yeah, that's the way it's going to be. I am, look, I mean, I'm an iPhone mini user,

apparently one of the few, the happy with the mini. Clearly, it didn't sell well. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see what the uptake is on the bigger iPhone 14 Max. It's going to sell so much. The idea of this sort of base model but big, how that's going to do. It'll be interesting how Apple views it. I think Apple must figure that people like a big phone, but they don't necessarily like the big price of the pro max that that is a limiting factor where people like oh that's too much i'm just gonna get the regular phone and uh and it makes sense it makes sense they it's funny too because they did with the 10r

um they did a big cheap phone at one point and then they kind of stopped and i wonder if that was the experiment to see how people reacted to it and now they've put it into the the regular line makes sense i think the problem is big cheap right yeah like the 10r was downgraded and i don't think that that helped that device um this will be big more expensive but still cheaper than Pro. Yeah. So I think we'll be overall, I think this is a better lineup because I don't think people should be punished because they want to have a big screen. I agree. They have to spend $1,000 for it.

I agree. And, you know, look, I'm sorry to Jason and every other iPhone mini user. I've said this before. You can't complain. You should have just bought more of them. I guess I should have bought more than one. You should have bought, every iPhone mini user. I've said this before. You can't complain. You should have just bought more of them. I guess I should have bought more than one. You should have bought... Every iPhone mini user should have bought four. Well, there's a thing we always

say when a local business closes where it's like, wow, I guess that one time we went there wasn't enough for them to stay in business. That's how I feel about the iPhone 14 mini. It's like, wow. I've never heard that before. It's really good. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh, we went to that restaurant twice. Well, I guess the two times we went to that restaurant in the last six years was not enough to keep it in business uh that's how i

feel about the iphone 14 mini right it's like oh well i guess the one iphone 14 mini that i bought was not enough to keep it in circulation oh well look you know the listener i'm not talking about your favorite thing here but it's always funny to me when i see like such and such websites closed down or such and such magazines closed down and everyone's like oh man this used to mean so much to me and it's like yeah but that's the key part right like it used to like i get that you nostalgically will miss this magazine now that it's not going to be published anymore sorry mac quad mac quad is still published though right in a digital sense yes yeah but i think in the uk there's still a physical mac uh no i don't think it's physical in the uk either no maybe got rid of it anyway but the point is this is like these

things if if you kept if you were able to translate your nostalgia to money it would still be around the problem is everybody stopped buying it like otherwise it would stick it's funny that you mentioned this because i wrote about this last week and we'll put a link in the show notes i wrote a piece about the home pod and the studio display and what they had in common that was uh at least partially based on the fact that marco armand was talking about how um he loves his home pods and they don't make them anymore and how there was a news story about how home pods are now going for more than their list price on ebay because the people who love them really, really, really, really love them.

And it made me think about like a couple of things. One of which is like, sometimes there's a specific group that has very specific needs and a product fills their needs and it makes them very happy. And I feel like the reason I mentioned the studio display is I think that's the reason for the disconnect

between people who say, why don't you just buy a 32 inch curved Dell 4k display and be happy? And we know the answer, which is because there are some very specific attributes of the studio display that don't really exist elsewhere other than on that ultra fine that nobody seems to love. And that these are the reasons why that display is is backordered as it is and why people are excited about it within a very specific niche. The HomePod is like that too. Like we think of the HomePod, the original HomePod, as a failure because it was a market failure, right?

But market failure doesn't mean that it wasn't filling a niche that was perfect for a certain subgroup of people. I am one of those people. I adore my two HomePods and stereo pair. And Marco talking about it, like he said, I did the research. There's nothing out there that matches what the HomePod does. And it's true. Now, one of the reasons there isn't anything out there is because the niche is probably not big enough.

And it wasn't big enough for Apple. And that's why Apple did it. It also doesn't make it untrue that the HomePod was overpriced and overengineered. If you're thinking of it from a market perspective of we want a product that's going to sell really well. But that doesn't change that for the people it fits, it is a great product and a tragedy that not enough other people bought it for them to keep making it. I mentioned in my article, my dad's favorite snack chip when I was a kid got discontinued and it was really sad, but like, you know, he couldn't buy enough bags. It really, it had to be a hit or they weren't going to make it anymore. And they stopped making it. And that's

just how it is. And it stinks, but that's how it is. Well, I could put the iPhone mini in that category too. Like it stinks because I love it, but I also get it that as much as I love it, obviously they're not enough of me to meet Apple standards for an iPhone. And those standards are real high, right? Because they sell a lot of iPhones and they're looking at that mini thinking, surely we could do something else that would sell better. And I'm sure that the iPhone 14 Max will sell better. Speaking of the HomePod, Sheriff Mark Gurman is reporting that Apple is still working

on a combined HomePod and Apple TV device. This was in Mark's newsletter Power On. This would also include a camera for FaceTime calls. Mark Gurman believes, Sheriff Gurman believes there is no specific replacement to the original home pod in the

works at apple but expects more home pod mini devices this hybrid uh home pod apple tv product is expected to be the centerpiece of the home strategy for apple into the future and the expectation is it is a device that is still connected to a TV. So there have been conversations before about a HomePod with a screen. And maybe that will still come. But this is the, like, This is the soundbar. The expectation, soundbar. This is the Apple soundbar

where they're going to do spatial audio, right? And even if it's one device, right, it's going to be a soundbar, but they're going to say, well, yes, but our spatial audio processing makes it sound like a... And you'll probably be able to add like homepod minis maybe to add to the the the surround or something like that

and it's but it's but it's based on apple tv so you hook it in um it's going to have a camera in it that does center stage because if you have the idea of like you're sitting in front of your tv and it's zooming into you to do a FaceTime call with somebody. I wrote about this four years ago. It does fit as a product. It's interesting that they're going to try it. As time has gone on since we first spoke about that, more pieces are falling into place, right? Like center stage. They're actually building camera technology that would work. Right. And your HomePods that are connected to your apple tv right that's a proof of concept essentially for the idea of doing the external speakers along with an apple tv device and then you throw in center stage and it all starts to kind of accumulate it also

accumulates to the idea of a uh a home pod that you put in your kitchen that does center stage and they may they may yet do that too but it sounds like you know mark german thinks the sheriff thinks that this is coming i also the more homepod mini devices i think is interesting i in my in my piece last week about the homepod i think i threw in there that like it seems like with the homepod mini they've got something that is a better fit and that what they're probably going to start doing now is iterating up from there right like instead of make that a bit better right they make it better make it sound better maybe make a version that's more expensive,

but what they're not going to do is leap back to the big home pod because they're like that burned them. Now they're going to try to like start from this new base at the mini. And then maybe, maybe there will be another home pod in the future, but what it will probably be is a little bit bigger, little bit more capable home pod mini, not actually the old home pod.

Home pod is the name of this product. Is this product? Yeah, it might be. It might be. Because you know what made me think of it? It was the way you emphasized the word home. HomePod. HomePod.

And the centerpiece of the home strategy, right? That would be. And it'll be all the other things that an Apple TV already is. It'll be your home kit hub. the things that an apple tv already is it'll be your home uh home kit hub uh wonder if they'll put a you know maybe they're they will do a more proper kind of home kit integration into the tvos update that's coming in june right matter is going to be a thing eventually and apple have already spoken even in presentations about you know so like it's it's all going to start coming together it's just taking time yeah uh german is also reporting that apple is of course working on m3 chips right now

this is funny to me yeah the first m3 mac could be unveiled towards the end of next year next year no kidding people are laughing about this but it's like he's reporting it because he has somebody saying, yes, we are working on the M3. And so he's going to say that. Obviously, any of us could say it, but he's got somebody who is specifically working, basically who is working on the M3 saying, yes, we are working on the M3. And it gives us a little bit of an idea that the M series is going to be on an annual timeline, that they're not going to do it 18 months or two years. That's the thing that I find interesting about this is it shows that the foot is still on the accelerator because that was the question that we've had over the last couple of weeks, right?

It's like, okay, so the M2 is coming now. Like it's going to start happening any day now, right? Like by previous rumors, it could happen imminently. Which is actually an 18-month gap from the M1 to the M2. So him saying it may be end of next year, I guess that's another 18-month gap. So maybe that's the pacing is an 18-month gap between these things. And that's what we kind of wanted to get an idea of. Mark also does confirm that he does still believe an iMac Pro is in the works, but it will not be anytime soon.

I think that's one of those things where he has an idea of what products are imminent and that's not imminent um i still think that that product is probably coming based on m2 pro and um my guess would be yeah that would maybe be like early next year kind of thing i think it'll happen i just don't think you know they they didn't make it a priority for generation one. It'll probably be late in generation two. This episode is brought to you by ZocDoc. Nobody knows what you're looking for in a doctor better than you. And no one's better at giving you the tools to find the perfect doctor than ZocDoc. The people who created ZocDoc found the major pain points in healthcare and made booking a great doctor surprisingly pain

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To talk from my own experience of the liberating feeling of virtual doctor appointments, like being able to book an appointment and have it only take the time out of my day, which is the actual appointment, not like going to the surgery, waiting in the waiting room, like being able to actually just be like, all right, it's going to be at this time and we'll call you or be at this time and log on to the system and you can just keep doing what you're doing into the doctor connects, like whatever way it's done.

That kind of stuff is just, I find that fantastic. And I think also the big benefit is you don't have to wait for months. Like one of the most frustrating things to me, you call the doctor surgeon like, yeah, we'll appoint for you in six weeks. Like I don't need it in six weeks.

I need tomorrow. And that's what is so great about this. So go to ZocDoc.com slash UpgradeFM and download the ZocDoc app for free. Then start your search for a top rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com slash UpgradeFM. One last time, ZocDoc.com. Our thanks to ZocDoc for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions to finish out today's episode of Upgrade. The first comes from Jean who asks, There are at least four modifier keys you can use to create keyboard shortcuts.

Five if you use the hyper key. The hyper key is when you bind, is it all four of them to one key? A lot of people do that with caps lock and stuff. So the possible combinations for shortcuts that you choose yourself could be infinite. Do you have a personal system for creating keyboard shortcuts that make them easier to remember?

I bought a stream deck. That is perfectly valid as a thing, or like for me like i've used macro pads where it's just like i don't need to remember the the shortcut itself just what it does similarly i use a wacom tablet and the wacom tablet has eight buttons on the side that i programmed to do different things in logic so i know what these buttons do i don't necessarily remember what key um like combinations they're assigned to yeah there are a few things where i've tried to bind it to a normal kind of keyboard shortcut like for you know inserting a markdown link or something like that that i try to assign to every app and do it that way and that's like command k or command ship k or there's just different versions of that. But so many of them, it is hard to remember.

That's why I got a Stream Deck, is because I wanted to have a visual representation of it. It's actually why I would love for Apple down the road, or also, I'll say this, it's an opportunity for keyboard manufacturers too, to have something like a Stream Deck, but it's the F keys. So what you mean is like a bar that you could touch? Kind of, but it's the f keys so so what you mean is like it's like a bar that you could touch kind of but it would be physical keys and then you could and then you

would actually use software to control what they showed and what they did but but sort of like a bar that you could touch because the f keys that's the problem i have with the f keys is f keys are inscrutable it's just like oh f6 well now and then apple has taken over the f keys and turned them all into like hard system hardware shortcuts so then you're like oh do i keep those or do i have to press the the function i like that they put the the icons on them right like to to show you what they do well yeah they've repurposed stuff for that but that's that's the thing. So basically in the end, this is why I bought a Stream Deck to begin with is not because of all the whizzy automation stuff.

It really was because I like the idea of mapping some of the things that I do that were previously, is it shift command alt S or is it shift control alt or is it control or option, but my keyboard says alt or is it control option command?

Like which three is it? i would and do the wrong one and be like uh and undo that now i'm gonna do this new one and and uh now i have several things on a on my stream deck that it's just it's that function and so like i just i just press the button that has the label that says it does this and that's better. Like I, so I don't have a strategy because I find it very hard to remember other since other than some very specific things, very hard to remember these,

you know, a mnemonic for how, not only what letter is it or number or F key, but which modifiers I'm pressing. It's just, it's too much. So I, most of mine that I use for like quick navigation stuff on the Mac,

I use a combination of command and option and then some key. So like for Fantastical, it's command option C and it brings down Fantastical from the menu bar. And then I have the same with P for p calc now ideally if i hadn't been using fantastical for so long that would be f and then like right right but fantastical is just that way and also a friend of the show david sparks has been on a personal crusade to get me to use moom for window management and i have been recently

and i use command option and then a bunch of letters to do some window management stuff and i actually really like it i'm getting more into that now and i'll put i'll put a link in the show notes he made a video after trying to convince me and then the video that he made finally convinced me uh aaron wrote in and says if apple were to make a fitness only wrist device as discussed on episode 403 would you still feel the need to wear it through the day to capture steps stand breaks etc so this is something i was looking for more right like i've spoken as a bunch that i wish that i would just make a band right not a watch and yes i would wear it the whole day because that's kind of the whole point yeah my thing is i want to be able to get all of the fitness tracking without having to wear apple's watch so i could still feel free to

wear other watches but still get all of the exercise and fitness tracking and all of the sensors so yeah i would just wear it on my other wrist like a bracelet like that's that's the idea yeah but yep one day I wished. Dom asked, do you think Apple will return to making routers at some point with more routers? Routers? Routers. Routers at some point.

Routers? Routers. At some point with more services being focused on cloud and internet connectivity these days. Oh. I think they're firmly out of this business. I don don't i don't think they need to come back to it this isn't like the other stuff i think this isn't like monitors i mean i would i would love for them

to do it but at this point they would be competing with some products that are basically using the apple playbook and i don't they would need a very strong story to tell, and it would have to be about security and privacy. It would have to be about overriding all of your, basically building their own VPN into it or something like that, like private browsing, that they're building into their devices instead, right? So I think it's probably unlikely. So I think it's probably unlikely. It's not an area where I'm sure that they can make a difference, but I'm not sure they can make enough of a difference given that you've got Eero and Orbi and stuff like that. The products that exist in this market are all just genuinely good,

and there's a lot of them, right? Like this isn't, I don't think that, and it's also, I feel like this is the kind of product where it's kind of, it stays out of your way, and Apple don't really make stay outout-of-the-way products anymore. Yeah. They make the stuff that you're interacting with. They don't want the infrastructure. They want the infrastructure,

and then they can do stuff like the HomeKit secure router if they really want to, right? They can keep making that stuff more. This gets to the question of should apple make light bulbs right for smart home like that that that's that's what this falls into for me these days where do you draw the answer is no like the answer is no like i you know like um i use ero at the studio and i have an orbi at home and i have great results with these products like i i have no,

this isn't like some of the other stuff. I'm not like, oh, please let me get AirPort back again. Like I just don't feel that way at all. If Eero or Orbi didn't, if those didn't exist and so everything was still just old style routers, I would say that there was more of a space for Apple to come in and say,

look, look, we've done this. But that's what those products did is take an Apple-like approach to it. So the ability, so if you're Apple and you're looking at where you pick your spots something like that's like it's kind of already covered and and while i could see them again making it a cornerstone of their strategy if they they would need to make it more they really would need to lead into the privacy thing and say these are all apple secured and all the traffic that goes through them goes to our network and

your provider doesn't look at it. And like, they would have to make it this like super security product. And I don't think they want to do that. I don't think the customer experience would be very good on that. Like, it just doesn't seem like this is an area where Apple is going to be able to add enough to make it worth doing. And it's like, if they didn't have the ability for say like HomePods or iPads to be HomeHubs, I could imagine it, but they already have that. So they don't, you know. Yeah, exactly.

They don't need it. Finally today, Ryan writes in and asks, special audio with head tracking. Is this a case of Apple trying to make fetch happen? It's not something that I particularly enjoy and I have definitely heard other people complain about it. And I'm wondering why Apple is trying so hard to market it as a big feature. Why is Apple pushing the spatial audio and head tracking feature to this level?

It is not subtle. No. spatial audio, the subtleties of spatial audio, which remember, if you're doing it in a pair of headphones, what it's doing is it's taking multi-channel and processing it into stereo dynamically based on your head position. So you can have things positioned behind you and you turn a little bit and they turn along with your head, but it's subtle. And the head tracking where your audio is coming out of the device that's right in front of you is not subtle. And that's my answer. Apple likes this feature because you can tell it's happening and be impressed by the, whoa, I can't believe it's like that. And I think that's the truth because I think

that it's not subtle and that there are subtle benefits that people might get out of spatial audio in other environments that are not i mean i can see how some people might like it but i don't i think that it's um it's also it just demos well it's like the equivalent of having the tvs at the best buy in uh in in show you know showroom mode where they're super bright and saturated and you'd never want to watch a TV like that in your home, but they have them like that on the show floor because they're trying to sell you on them

and they want to stand out. It's a little like that, I think. So for me, one of the things that actually annoys me the most out of this feature it's not so much that it does the head tracking thing which i know bugs people right of like your iphones to the left and so it always that's where it always sounds like the audio is coming from like i know why it annoys people what annoys me about is if you turn your head for long enough it just re-centers right because it doesn't it doesn't actually know where your iPhone is.

I know. But that annoys me. It annoys me. It's like, commit to this. If you're going to do it, commit to it. Don't, like, then all of a sudden break it. Like, you know, like, that frustrates me. I like spatial audio in general.

Jury's out for me a little bit with the head tracking part. I leave it on, but I don't know how I feel about it. But I think in general, the spatial audio technology is excellent but i think one of the other problems of head tracking is a thing that i've observed many people do which is the first time that they're on a plane and they think that they haven't connected their headphones and they freak out yeah right like adina had this she's like she thought she was playing her movie out loud i was like no no no like i was like no, it's just the AirPods are just, you know, they're doing their thing.

But yeah, spatial audio is cool. I think you're right. The reason I do the head tracking is so they can actually demonstrate spatial audio to people that otherwise maybe can't pick it up otherwise. And this won't be a problem with the VR headset, right? They'll just, it'll be, they'll actually know where your head is.

That's why they're building all this technology. It's just another part of it it is this is like you know it's more augmented reality but for audio and they this is all again we're talking about that home pod thing right it's like i think over the last few years you can see that they are building all these individual technologies and they're coming towards like they're all moving towards each other and this is another one this This is a thing that Apple does that as secretive as they are so often it happens that they release a product and you look back and realize that they put

all of these pieces together over several years in public and then put them in a product. If you'd like to send in a question for us to answer on the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord, which you can get access to

if you sign up for Upgrade Plus. Go to GetUpgradePlus.com and you can sign up. $5 a month, $50 a year. We talk about Elon Musk on Twitter today. And if you want to hear our thoughts about that,

you can go get it. It's the only place we're going to talk about it for now. So if you want it, about that, you can go get it. It's the only place we're going to talk about it for now. If you want it, go to getupgradeplus.com and you can get those opinions. Thank you so much to ZocDoc, TextExpander,

and CleanMyMacX for their support of this show. If you want to find Jason online, you can go to Twitter. He is at jsnell. For now. Don't do that you can go to sixcolors.com jason will have a bunch of great content and coverage of apple's q2 charts q2 right it's q2 yep yep q2 results are you going to be live streaming yeah we'll do a live stream sometime in the afternoon after the event is over because there's nothing more exciting than watching two

guys uh on a video show you charts oh then there's something even more exciting maybe is listening to two guys talk to you about those charts next week happening next week uh i'm i'm like i am yke yeah i think that's it for this week's episode of Upgrade. Say goodbye, Mike Hurley. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.