Upgrade - 434: Bob to Bob to Bob

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

There's some huge news from the world of streaming, as Disney switches bosses and Apple plans its next wave of sports-streaming products. Meanwhile, Myke's busy building out his smart home while Jason has been reminded of the fragility of smart-home networking.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 434 today's show is brought to you by text expander memberful and fitbod my name is mike hurley and i am joined by jason snell hi jason snell hi mike hurley how are you i'm very good i have a hashtag snell talk question for you comes from dudak who asks who are you rooting for in very good. I have a hashtag snow talk question for you. It comes from Dudak who asks, who are you rooting for in the World Cup and who do you think will win? Oh, the World Cup. It just started.

This is soccer, American soccer. It's the biggest sporting event in the world. And the U.S. is in it, so I'm going to root for the U.S. because I'm an American. I will also be cheering on england i think because i always do that and who do i think is going to win um oh you know i i had i had a prediction and now i've forgotten what it was. It's, uh...

I'm going to say... Just to doom them, I'm going to say England. Why would you do this? To doom them. That's fun. That's part of the doom. You've got to set the expectations high so that the defeat is crushing.

That's how you've got to do it. It's going to be a rough day for you on Friday. I mean, I could go to Argentina if you like, but... You can if you prefer. Friday's going to be a bad day, you know? It's England versus the u.s well the good news i'm gonna crush you so the good news is mike the good news is i can't watch that match because fox the tv network that's carrying the world cup in the u.s has decided that they need uh they want to keep it rolling that's black friday the day after thanksgiving they need they want to keep it rolling. That's Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

They need to keep it rolling with the sports after the World Cup is over. And of course, the World Cup is over fairly early here in the U.S. because it's in Qatar. So they decided months ago, like six months ago, that what they would do is they would schedule a college football game right after England versus USA so they could keep the sports rolling. And they thought, fans of international soccer, what would they want to see more than UCLA at Cal? And so I will not see that World Cup match because I will be driving to the stadium for the college football game that

follows the World Cup match. So so stay tuned americans to watch me in a you know a few layers of clothing watch a good football team play my football team even though it's christmas take off that red shirt you know what i mean oh yeah i mean there was well we just went over the weekend to the cal stanford game the big game it was well i would say it was great the first three quarters were not so great. The fourth quarter was great, great. It's actually the most fun I've had. It was essentially the reason that I go to sporting events is we had a mostly full stadium

shouting at the top of their lungs while exciting things happened, and that hasn't happened at the California Memorial Stadium. That's fun. Kind of a long time. We had a great time, but of course, there's lots of people in red. There were people sitting next to us in red because they're the Stanford fans there. The enemy finally appears from time to time. And you can say, take off that red shirt to them all you like.

They won't. They won't do it. Because they're doing it purposefully. Yeah. And they're there. Anyway, so yeah, we'll be back at that stadium on Friday for the last game of the season. And so I'm not going to see England versus the U.S. It's just as well.

It's fine. you will get access to our wonderful RelayFM members discord. You will get longer ad-free episodes of Upgrade every single week in your podcast app of choice. It is just $5 a month or $50 a year. But we have a special promotion. From now until December the 17th, you can save 20% on an annual plan. You can find out more at GiveRelay.com You can do this as a gifting thing. We did this before.

Maybe the holidays are coming up. You don't know what... People want to buy you something. You don't know what to suggest them. Possibly some holidays on the horizon. You can say to that person in your life, go to GiveRelay.com and give me a gift for Upgrade Plus.

What we're doing this time... What I thought you were going to do. I thought you were going to go to give relay.com and give me a gift for upgrade plus what we're doing this time what i thought you were gonna do i thought you were gonna go the other way go to somebody and say i gave you the gift of a podcast but instead it's like i let's be real gift of a podcast jason let's be real no one's buying this for an unsuspecting person in their life you know what i mean like this is like a couple weeks ago where you were talking about your slippers and i made the grown-up decision to text lauren with a link to your slippers and say this would be a thing you could get me for Christmas rather than buying them myself. This is a little like that, which is, oh, here's an idea. A podcast I like has a thing that you could buy and you could give to me.

I get it. Okay. So, you know, go there. GiveRealL relay.com but the thing that we're doing this time that's different to what we've done in the past you could just do this yourself if you go to get upgrade plus.com sign up for an annual plan and use the code 2023 holidays at checkout 2023 holidays you'll get 20 off your first year of an annual subscription to Upgrade Plus. Plans will renew at the full price after this year.

We're telling you this in advance. So if you don't want that, you've got to turn off the auto-renew. But they will renew at full price otherwise. But you can get an entire year of Upgrade Plus for $40. And that includes all the previous content, bunch of members content, access to our Discord. It's all available.

Now, are the people who are Upgrade Plus subscribers now hearing this now? I mean, they can. Well, like in the episode. Does this count as an ad or does this not count as an ad? You tell me. I don't know. I feel like since you could

potentially ask a subscriber to give this as a gift, you should hear about it. Yeah, sure. Okay, see? There it is. Now, that's why you heard about it since you could potentially, as a subscriber, give this as a gift, you should hear about it. Yeah, sure. Okay, see? There it is. Now, that's why you heard about it. If you're an Upgrade Plus subscriber, you heard that. But also, if you're a subscriber and next year you would like it to be cheaper, there are ways now you could make that happen for yourself, I suppose.

I suppose. It's going to take some work. Don't ask me for the logistics to that one. I don't know how that's going to work. No. But, you know, it's not impossible. Hey, why don't you tell people about the Upgradees? It's time to vote in the ninth annual Upgradees.

Go to upgradees.vote. Voting will be open until December 12th. We've had hundreds of submissions so far. I can actually tell you. We had 288 people have filled out their nominations for the Upgradies. Good start. Which is a great start. But there's loads of time but I want you to go there now. Go to

Upgradies.vote. You don't have to fill in every category. Just fill in the ones that you care about. Let us know what your favorite tech products your books, movies, podcasts are. Upgradies.vote. And we will be putting that one out there towards the end of December. I think December 26th we have decided on is going to be.

Right. But the deadline is going to be quite a bit earlier so that we can compile. Tabulate. Yes. It will be our Boxing Day episode. Also, really noticed a lot of people getting very excited about the favorite tech screw-up category that we do every year. Because, whoa, what a bonanza. What could it be?

Right? What a bonanza of things to choose from there. Amazing. And then I had a question for you, which is, when we did the episode, did the Upgraders.vote go to the old form before it went to the new form? Nope. Nope. So just Twitter's so what you're saying is twitter's content caching is poor is not up to date correct it always goes to the current voting

right like i just changed that i did the dns propagation and stuff and it may have just taken a little bit longer but yes twitter was saying eighth but it was actually if you actually went to upgraders.vote it would take you to the form for the 9th annual Upgraders. Well, Twitter finally got with the program, I guess, but it took a while. Can you imagine that something was broken at Twitter? Can you imagine that? I can't.

I was shocked. Shocked, I say. You've got some follow-up for us. I have a little tiny bit of iPad follow-up that I wanted to throw in here. This is sort of like the continuing story of Stage Manager, which I guess it's sort of follow-out from Connected because Federico keeps talking about the continuing story of Stage Manager. I just wanted to say a couple of betas have passed in 16.2

where external display support is turned back on, and I didn't get to use the last beta, but the current beta I used for a few hours one afternoon last week plugged into my studio display. So I was running external display on my studio display. And I just wanted to do a quick report in. We'll see how it goes and we'll talk about it probably more when it ships. But I'd say it's getting better. I didn't have any crashes while I was using it. And that was, as you know from talking to Federico, that was a serious problem before,

is you would kind of be going along, and suddenly the little gear would appear, and suddenly you'd be back at the lock screen, and everything would be gone. But I haven't had any of those, or didn't during this experience, which was nice. So it's better. It still feels like it's not all the way there, right? There are still moments where I think, why is it like this? Or how can I get this thing to go to the right place? And it's just not all the way there.

My biggest frustration I find, and maybe this is because I'm a weirdo in terms of how I use Windows, but like right now, I have a window in the center of my screen. This is how I work. I have a wide 27-inch display, right? I don't want a window that wide. And honestly, the 27-inch display is right in front of my face, right? So when I'm working on a document, I want it front and center. Yeah. document, I want it front and center. And one of the problems that, that, uh, on the iPad,

that stage manager has is when you have two documents on screen, it really wants them to be side by side. And so I was working on a story using stage manager on the external display on the iPad. And I wanted to bring up a web browser and have it kind of be on the side so that I could look things up on the web and then paste things in and paste links and all that stuff. And when I brought in Safari, what it did is say, oh, I know what you want. You want Safari on the left side and your document that you're working on on the right side. And that's not what I wanted. I want my document in the center. I don't want to be looking to, I know this makes me sound like a very weird person, but like, I don't want to be looking to, I know this makes me sound like a very weird person, but like, I don't, I'm not interested in writing. Writing is hard enough

without looking to the right. I just want it right in front of my eyes. I'll bring that safari window forward when I want it. And then it'll go behind, you know, overlap a little bit when I'm working here and, and stage managers doesn't want to do it you either have to make that other window really really huge so that stage manager can be moved kind of in front of it to the center or you have to add a third window like a like a proxy window a fake window an irrelevant window of some app you don't want to see so that you can have it on the right side and the Safari on the left side, and then your window will be in the center. And it's just ridiculous. Like it's, it's ridiculous. It is, it is the system. And I know that this is a, an extreme version of the, I just want to put

my windows where I want them. Like, and again, I don't need it to be like, I want to put it on this pixel or that pixel. But if I say I'd like this window in the middle it should let me put it there and it just doesn't and it's maddening so i hate that about it i and i hate that that leads to more window management because it's not letting me put my window where i want it to be because it thinks the optimal window configuration for me is side by side and it's not no it's not it's not i have a bunch of like moom shortcuts like yeah configured to put things in the middle in some way whether like just take the window at its current size and center it for me or like i have like an optimized size that i want say for safari or whatever and i put so i'm very much like you with that like

i want the main thing in the middle and there may be some stuff peeking out and i put so i'm very much like you with that like i want the main thing in the middle and there may be some stuff peeking out and i can select it if i need to for reference but the main thing i'm working on right in the middle of the screen and there's usually an optimal size for that window and i don't want it i actually usually don't even have it extend all the way to the top and all the way to the bottom but definitely it's in the middle taking up the middle third ish and moon from many tricks is great at that um some other apps lots of other apps do that that new raycast app has a bunch of window management shortcuts built into it like there are lots of utilities that'll do this yeah so anyway it's

very frustrating that that is not that the the operating system is basically like we don't think you should have a window in the center unless there are two or zero windows on like, why, why would you think that I have a great tip here, which is, uh, I was frustrated and haven't been using this as much because when I do what I have this thing about, like, how am I going to get a keyboard and a track pad hooked up to my iPad so that I can use them. And then I realized, uh, with the help of a friend who suggested this, well, my Mac is still here, right? I'm just unplugging the display from the Mac and plugging it into the iPad. But the Mac's still sitting here, right?

And so when I have the iPad all set up with external display, if I reach down to my trackpad that I use with my Mac and move it to the right off the edge of the screen, guess what it does? Pops over into the iPad using universal control, at which point I can use my Mac, still connected to my Mac, keyboard and trackpad, to drive the iPad that's driving my external display. And it totally works. So that's hilarious. I'd never even considered that. And it totally works. So that actually makes it a lot easier to plug my iPadad into the screen because i don't have to worry about the input devices they're just sitting there because they're part of universal control that was fun and then my other observation for this quick bit of follow-up

is i still love my ipad and use it as much as ever i know that there's like this vibe out there of like oh all those people who really like their ipad apple silicon happened and they're not as into their ipad anymore i'm not really one of those people. I still love my iPad. Here's where Apple Silicon made an effect though, is it is absolutely true that once they came out with the Apple Silicon MacBook Air, that product was so good that what it made me do is it removed my reluctance to travel with an iPad and a MacBook Air. That the old Intel MacBook Air, I was like, you know, it's so much worse than my desktop Mac and an extra thing to carry that I'm not going to bother. And I know that's a weird psychological thing, but it was a barrier to me.

It was like, I don't like this thing. It's way behind the times. And it's another thing to carry. So I'm just going to try to make do with my iPad and with the Apple Silicon MacBook Air. And now I have the M2. Um, that's over, right? Like the M2 is capable of doing anything. I know it's not as fast as my Mac studio, but it is capable of doing anything I want to do. And so I've just reverted to, I'm going to travel with the MacBook Air and my iPad.

But what that has done is it has removed one level of pressure off of me, which was all of my attempts, desperate attempts to get everything that I do on the iPad, everything I do to work on the iPad. Right. And I just have given up on that. Like I, I am, I've stopped trying to put the, the square peg in the round hole here. Like the iPad is going to be what it's going to be. And when I travel with the iPad and the MacBook Air, 90, you know, I am using, I'm not going to give it a percentage. I'm just going to say, I only am using the MacBook Air

when I need to do a thing that the iPad can't do, like a podcast. But I travel with it now. So that's my report about where I am with this. It does take the excitement out of the external display support a little bit, right? Because I've sort of, I'm no longer playing with the idea

that I'm going all iPad some of the time, right? It's just like, that's not happening now. But anyway, it is getting better it's still frustrating and bottom line is you mentioned moom like i think bottom line that is the way forward for uh for stage manager on the ipad is i think they need some more discrete window management controls that do things like what moom does where you can say instead of just minimize or send this to the ipad or whatever where you can say put this in the center put this on the left whether it's tiling like what windows does and like what federico i think wants or whether it's

just sort of moving windows into places we don't have to call it tiling it's okay you don't have to call it tiling if you don't want to but having that ability to fairly quickly with a shortcut or a keyboard shortcut or a gesture or something that you click down from the multitasking uh controls a way to say uh this window to the center please and when they get that i think it will be a much more usable thing but right now yeah it's better but still not great just as like a for me like a talking about this like a line to draw maybe i'm so happy with my move to the mac for work completely um i remain very happy with my decisions i still use my ipad mini every day and i love. And I use it for lots of things. Most of it is just consumption of various stuff,

which can be work, you know, like I'll check messages and all that kind of stuff. But I'm no longer sitting down and opening two Google Sheets side by side to do something. You know what I mean? Like I've just, I've given up on that kind of stuff. For me, I'm just happier to get my MacBook and do it that way.

And it works much better and these two devices now fit way better into my life when I decided to let them do the things that they are both best at yeah I'm doing more iPad stuff than you are but it's definitely true and now now especially that we're in the in the cooler months here and I'm in an unheated I mean I have a space here that I turn on in the week, but on the weekend I don't. And so if I need to do something, having the MacBook Air and having it be a computer that I feel like is up to date and current and has all the stuff that I want to do my job, if I have to do something computery, something that's going to be better with a

computer than the iPad, I can fight through it on the iPad or I could just go get the computer. Having that laptop out here in the cold, cold garage, I'll just come and get it and bring it in the house, right? So I'm much more inclined to pull that laptop in and use it in the house than I used to be because it's so much better. And that means fundamentally, necessarily, the iPad isn't... That threshold where I go, I'm not going to do this on the iPad is a lot lower than it used to be. I used to force stuff, like using Google Docs, which is terrible

on the iPad. I used to force more of that stuff, and now I reach that point, and I'm like, I'm just going to go get the MacBook Air. Yep. And that's fine. Yep. Alright, this episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at TextExpander. When you work in a small team, every moment counts.

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Check out TextExpander today at textexpander.com slash upgrade and you can get 20% off your first year. That's textexpander.com slash upgrade to say goodbye to repetitive typing. Our thanks to TextExpander for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason, let's do some upstream because something bananas is happening at Disney and I need you to tell me what's going on.

Well, yeah, something wild. On a Sunday night, Disney announced that they had fired their CEO, Bob Chapek, who succeeded Bob Iger, who was the longtime CEO of Disney. And they replaced Bob Chapek with Bob Iger. They brought the old Bob back. We're just Bob cycling here, right? It's like from Bob to Bob to Bob. We're bobbing along. Singing a song. Get all your

bob jokes out now killer bob you know bob eiger killed uh twin peaks he canceled twin peaks when he was running abc where the killer on twin peaks was killer bob ironies so what does this mean the a lot of people in the spring were like i don't know about this bob chapek like culturally he's a he's a parks guy a A lot of the people in the movie and TV part did not like him and did not like the restructuring he was doing. And he took creative people out of positions of authority. And if there's any place that this change is being hailed, it is in the creative community because he was not their guy and Bob Iger is their guy. So Bob Iger totally understands the creative side of this in a way that Bob Chapek never did.

However, in the spring, everybody was talking about that and about how Chapek bungled the issues in Florida where they had the don't say gay law. And then he was quiet about it. And then he came out and apologized, which led to a conflagration with the governor of florida and it was this whole mess and they're like wow he's not very good at this couldn't have done it worse right like every single way that that was done he chose the wrong option in every single possibility could not he that was one of those things where he didn't just step on a rake he stepped on two rakes so it was not good and you know chapek has eiger left the job right before the pandemic and so you know disney all their parks shut down like it was tough uh chapek was given a a uh a difficult

situation and also a lot of the assumptions that eiger made in building up disney plus have been proven to be uh there's been a shift going on. Netflix had a bad quarter last quarter, and Wall Street was like, why are we spending so much money on streaming? It's time for it to make money, which I would argue was a little premature, but that's what's happened.

And so, look, a lot of headwinds, as we say, headwinds for JPEG. And yet, in the spring, the Disney and JPEG contract was going to expire in the fall. In the spring, Disney's board extended his contract for two years, which while not a huge vote of approval, because it was for two years,

could have been longer. It wasn't. It was surprising at the time though, right? Because I remember listening to downstream and you and julia were talking about like before then are they going to keep him around at all so it was a surprise that they kept him around there was a real question in the spring and summer whether they were going to renew chapek or whether this was the opportunity to walk away from him and i think at the time the question was,

well, if we fired him, who would we put in charge? And, you know, Bob Iger is out there like he's doing some investments. He's sailing on a yacht. He's just having a good time. And I think they thought, you know what? How bad could it be? We're going to re-up Chapek. We'll see how he does.

We can pull the plug at any time. And then they found out how bad it could be. Meanwhile, in the background, and there was a story, Puck News ran a story, last week, Matt Bellany wrote a piece about how he had been hearing that Iger had been bad-mouthing Disney privately. And remember, Iger picked Chapek as his successor, right? But he did not like how it was going and he was saying so. And the piece was sort of like, this is really interesting just from a perspective of, you're probably not supposed to do this. Well, it turns out, it sounds like Iger basically was so frustrated by what he was seeing at Disney that he started to say things about it because I think he wanted to either precipitate a change at Disney, maybe bring himself back.

Maybe that wasn't part of the calculation. Maybe he was positioning himself to be ready to actually come back and be willing to come back. The hiring announcement for Bob Iger said he'll do it for two years. And over those two years, he really needs to groom a successor so that he can step away after two years. Now, Bob Iger has been talking about retirement. He talked about it a long time. He kept putting it off. When he finally did it, he stayed as the chairman for a little while. And then he went away and now he's back again. So will he really retire in two years? Will they have somebody that they will be confident will be a better fit than Chapek was? Who knows? But it's a big deal. However, I will say, people who are expecting it to go back to the way it was, the territory has changed. The terrain around streaming has changed. Downstreaming has changed. And Julia and I have been talking about this on downstream every two weeks and we will do it again next week. And that'll be a heck of a show. The terrain has changed because of what happened with the Netflix results and what Wall Street's expectations are. And the terrain has changed in the fact that the linear TV rights, the cable TV rights that have been a huge infusion of money for Disney through ESPN primarily are going down and streaming is not coming up as fast. Iger's not in the place that he would have been in early 2020. It's a very different business now. And while I think he's

going to repair the relationships that Disney has with the talent in Hollywood and that Hollywood's going to feel better about it. I think Iger, if you expect Iger to go and reverse everything that JPEG is doing, let's keep in mind, one of the reasons JPEG failed is that JPEG was handed Bob Iger's strategy and the world changed and JPEG didn't react well. And it's got to be that Iger is sitting out there

watching the world change and seeing what what chapek is reacting to and saying no no no no that's not how you do this and now he's gonna put that presumably into practice but this is a real flail on on the disney boards part i assume that that like eiger has a plan i don't know if it's right right but? But like, I would assume that like he has been feeding this idea to someone, right? That like, no, I've got a plan here.

Like I can, I know what we need to do. Yeah. Or basically like this is not what they should be doing. I'll tell you what they should be doing. And finally, the Disney board last week

basically came to him and said, Bob, come back. And he's, and would you come back? Here's what we'll give you if you come back. And he was like, yeah, okay, I'll come back. I got a plan. would you come back? Here's what we'll give you if you come back. And he was like, yeah, okay, I'll come back. I got a plan. We're going to make this work. So I would, I would recommend that people not expect that this is a big reset button and big,

bad Bob Chapek is gone. And therefore Disney's not going to have problems because Disney got problems. They're going to be okay. Right? Like this is something Julia and I talked about last week. Our episode last week was literally titled, Disney's going to be okay. Which is like, oh my goodness, what happened? But the fact is, Disney did exactly what they planned on doing, which is they spent a lot of money to get subscribers. And they got subscribers. Most of these streaming services are not growing very fast at all. And yet Disney's subscription base is really growing.

It has grown a lot. That part of it has totally worked. The strategy was spend a lot of money and get subscribers. They did it. The problem now is Wall Street's like, stop spending so much money. You need to make a profit. And Disney's like, all right, well, I guess we'll raise prices everywhere and we'll lay people off and we'll tighten the belt. That aspect of what Wall Street wants is not changing. So don't expect the reset button to be hit on that front. But I do think the relationships with Hollywood will change. And I think you're going to end up with a guy who

is not only, I mean, he is one of the most effective CEOs of our era and he's got, Iger has lots of ideas. He's got a tough job ahead of him and it's going to be a lot harder than the last time he was sitting in that chair. The situation has worsened considerably. But it, so it'll be a different Disney. And I am, I have great enthusiasm for Iger coming back mostly because I think Chapek was a money guy who didn't understand the business

and its relationship with its customers. I think he was all about the parks and grinding money out of people going to parks. And I think he showed that he was bad at politics, bad at working with his employees, and bad at working with Hollywood. And while being a money guy is like part of being a CEO, if you're the CEO of Disney and you're bad at politics and bad at your own employees and bad at Hollywood, you should not be the CEO. Yeah. And Iger is good at all those things. Now, again, no guarantee of success here, but if anybody was going to succeed, it's Iger. I think the big thing

to watch with him is he needs to build, he needs to bring people back or in who he trusts and who he thinks have the talent to replace him. Because he is going to need, he's in his early 70s, he is going to need a replacement. The board would like it in two years, so we'll see. But really fascinating. I thought it was a huge surprise, mostly because they gave Chapek that vote of confidence with the extension. I thought they would let him go longer and figure this out.

But obviously the board has just lost complete faith in him. And Wall Street sort of lost faith in him. And everybody likes Iger. So they're going to let him take a crack at it. This is a wild story. I could not believe it when I saw it. I was recording a podcast last night. And it came over.

And I reread it. I clicked on the link. I made sure that it was from a Twitter account that seemed legit and not a fake Twitter account. I was like, how could this be true? But it was in the Wall Street Journal and it was on Variety and it was on the Hollywood Reporter.

I'm like, I guess this is happening. And like, I understand it, but I just, you know, it's like a baseball team re-upping its manager on a two-year contract and then three months into the season firing him. It's like, why did you, like, has the situation changed so much in the last few months? And I think the answer is the situation got a lot worse. And Bob Iger, I suspect, got more willing to come back. I think that's the key, genuinely.

willing to come back. I think that's the key, genuinely. I think it without Bob Iger wanting to do this, they would stay with JPEG because what else are they going to do? Yeah, hard to find a I think that's absolutely true. Yes, I know there are a lot of people out there, but

I'm not sure there's anybody else out there right now who could take on the mantle of Disney CEO and execute the way that the board wants them to. I don't, I think anybody else coming in. And the way Wall Street wants to. Even, yeah. And even if somebody, well, yeah, the board generally sort of wants what Wall Street wants, but yeah. Even though you could hire somebody maybe better than JPEG, but if you're bringing somebody in from the outside, they're going to have a whole period of time where they're going to have to get up to speed and they're going to

make their own mistakes and they have to learn from them. And like, I could see the thought process and we just, no, no, what we really need to do is develop a CEO, but we don't want Bob Chapek to do it because we don't like him and we want to get rid of him. And it's like, ah, here's the plan. Bring back Bob Iger. He totally gets our business and task him with also finding that person and bringing them up to speed so that they can step in this time for sure. Because, again, he did that with Bob Chapek. Although I wonder sometimes about the level of confidence he truly had in Bob Chapek versus that he was sort of told, like, no, it's got to be him. And now it's more clearly part of his job to cultivate. This is the guy.

Can you work with him, please? Right. Like one of the things that I think really sings for why they would go with Iger is clearly Disney needs to undergo some form of changes now, like some kind of strategy change again to appease everyone that needs appeasing. So Iger has the relationships of in Disney where people will trust him and work with him in a way that it seemed maybe Chapek did not have. So if the new strategy is coming from Bob Iger, people might be more willing to make it work inside of Disney, right?

I think that's also true. And that goes back to his politics and being good with the employees and being good with Hollywood, right? I mean, they may cut back severely on what they're spending on Disney Plus stuff, too. But if you've got a guy who's got the good relationships, there's going to be a higher level of trust than there was with a guy who was viewed as the money guy with a chainsaw. Even if some of the moves are the same or

similar, they're going to be received better by coming from Bob Iger than they would have been coming from Bob Chapek. And that is, right? Bob Iger's going to come in and say, look, we've got some reality here, but I get what you're going through. And I get the impression that Bob Chapek was like, Dottie, send a memo that their budget is cut. Like I really. Right.

And I know that's probably a little bit unfair, but that was the impression that I got is that one of these guys was a real corporate guy who didn't connect with those people. And then the other guy is a corporate guy, but also gets them or makes them feel like he gets them. And in a creative business, and Julie and I have talked about this a lot, it's a creative business, right? It's both those words. It's creative and a business. And if you say, Disney's not creative, it's a business. You got to run it like a business. You can't. run it like a business. Like, you can't. It is a creative business. You can't run it like it's all creative and not a business either. You have to do both.

And JPEG, a lot of the time, felt like he just didn't get that part of it, which is why we said earlier, despite all these other things that are maybe good about JPEG, like, he's the wrong person to run a business like that. I was listening to the St strategy daily update today and ben had some quotes from like audio like because i was into the podcast version from bob jpeg and i haven't really paid much attention to the guy but it was uh like yeah particularly like i know things he's done but i've not really heard him speak before and i was really struck by he was this is at the wall street journal tech conference the way he was referring to disney fans it kind of felt like he was dismissing them or like talking down on them it kind of like they and like it didn't feel right like you know it's like they

kind of make it a part of their identity like to be a disney fan and it kind of i don't know it didn't feel like the way that the disney ceo should talk about fans of disney it kind of felt a little bit like talking down to them and like they'll do whatever i want them to it was very strange it sounded strange to me and i think a lack of understanding of the disney uh audience right like i think that's what it comes down to is like, it's like somebody coming in and saying, oh, I'm in charge of Star Wars now. I don't get what those Star Wars people like, or I'm in charge of Star Trek now.

Trekkies, you know, they like stuff, whatever. And it's like, no, you kind of need to get it. You kind of need to get who your audience is and not consider them kind of weirdos that we can exploit. And I always come back to the fact that I think your least effective executives are ones who don't see your customers as people who are really engaging with your content

or your product and that that engagement matters and instead see them as bags of money walking around ready to be monetized, right? And I think Bob Chapek was a big bag of money monetizing guy. And it's not that Bob Iger doesn't like care about business

and making money, but I feel like he had a better touch on like understanding why their business is the way it is. Why are people willing to give us money? Right. Like that's the important part. people are willing to give you money because of everything that they believe in you and what you do and what you you you represent to them not just because they really love the star war right like it means something to them and like you've got to understand so they wookie heads i don't know whatever yeah just uh charge them more for that thing it's great while we're in upstream by the way okay yeah probably worth uh mentioning that Apple has announced some of the details around the Major League Soccer stuff.

Yes. You had a really good article about this in Six Colors, and I was genuinely surprised at how deep the partnership is between Apple and Major League Soccer. So I'll run through a few details. It's a lot, yeah. So Apple and Major League Soccer will be working together to produce the broadcast of every match in the season,

including cup games. There will be some that will be simulcast, so they'll be available on other services, probably like the big important games. Yeah, like ESPN or something. Yeah, exactly. Some of them will be free on Apple TV and Apple TV Plus,

but if you want all of them, you need the MLS Season Pass. This will be $15 a month or $99 a year. There is a discount for TV Plus subscribers. If you subscribe to Apple TV+, you still have to pay. It's $12.99 a month or $79 a year. And you don't have to pay if you aren't an Apple TV+. I saw some people saying, I can't believe I've got to be a subscriber and then subscribe. And it's like, you don't. You don't have to pay if you aren't an Apple TV Plus. I saw some people saying, I can't believe I got to be a subscriber and then subscribe.

And it's like, you don't. No, but it's worth it. You don't have to pay for Apple TV Plus. You can just pay $99 and get the whole season. But as we mentioned before, if you're a Major League Soccer season ticket holder, this is free for you, which I still think is incredible. Like, I think that is such a cool thing to do. Now, there was an article in The Athletic that you linked to as well in your piece, talking about how Apple are working very fast to get everything in place for the launch in February. One of the things that I found fascinating is that Major League a desire to do this from the MLS side to sort of standardize their game schedule, but that one of the things probably pushing against it was their media partners who have slots on different days that they want to fill, right? If you're ESPN, what you want is, I've got college football on this day or I've got basketball on this day.

And we're like, oh, well, we'll put the soccer on this day. And if you're MLS and you're like, but we don't play games on that day, your media partner comes to you and says, yeah, you do. And you do. How else can you do it? So what they're doing here is they're trying to set up a thing where they've got slots on, I think it's like Wednesdays and Saturdays in the evenings. And then, and then they'll have like showcase game Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon, but they're like going to set it up that way. And then everything else is sort of like the rolling through on the day where there'll be matches on Wednesday and they'll all start at

730 local time. So some of them will start Eastern, some of them will start Pacific, and they'll move across the country in between. And that is all part of their planning that they're doing with Apple. Yeah. And also product placement is part of the deal. This is a quote from you.

Not only will teams be equipped with iPads, referees will wear Apple Watches, and the VAR video review system will be based on Apple devices an apple tv logo will also appear on the sleeve of every team's jersey yeah i had somebody commented uh that i thought was very clever which is like one of the values in this is product placement that like this is not just apple paying for uh for the TV rights. It's also Apple, you know,

Apple is essentially a sponsor of the league. They're going to be on every, the sleeve of every team in the league. So there's lots of other stuff going on here that is not just the rights deal that's going on with them. And yeah, the VAR was a funny one. Like it sounds like that's a that's a challenge to get the var stuff the video review it's like the replay instant replay for americans

um up to uh up to code with uh with what they want to do um but they're gonna try right because they want it to be like all apple everywhere yeah i wonder if this might set a bad precedent for apple of like how much control they would get from a sports partner they're gonna get this everywhere which brings us to our last item in downstream which is a really quick one which is the athletic also did a very good piece about nfl sunday ticket is your show this is upstream sorry upstream we're going upstream we're paddling upstream right now yeah go tell me what's happening with sunday ticket i feel like i don't have to i can just tell people to listen to it on downstream next week if they really want okay um nfl sunday ticket

apple is negotiating with uh with the nfl about this this is the out of game out of market uh live game streaming uh direct tv currently has this has this, uh, this is taking time that, uh, the NFL thought that there would be a deal. And the reports are basically Apple and the NFL are both used to being, getting the upper hand. And so they're kind of clashing on the deal. It sounds like basically the Apple is frustrated because of the limitations that limitations that the NFL has placed on this deal. It doesn't cover international because they already have a product for that called NFL Plus. It only covers out-of-market local. So if you bought this package and you live in San Francisco, you can't watch the game on Fox that's on Fox on Channel 2 in the Bay Area market because that's blacked out because you need to watch it on Channel 2 to protect the local TV channel.

And if you can't get it via some other means, you can't watch it. And that is Apple doesn't like that, but they have presumably other contracts with Fox and CBS. There's also this feeling like NFL keeps putting games on other time slots. They are playing in Europe. They've got the Thursday night and the Monday night, and they've added some Saturdays late in the year, and there's all sorts of other things. There's three games on Thanksgiving. So there's a feeling that the NFL has devalued Sunday ticket a lot by putting all these restrictions on it, and that that frustrates Apple.

And that Apple wants also the freedom to invent stuff. And the way that Apple works is sort of like, we set what the rules are, and then we do whatever we want within the rules. And the NFL is like, no, we set the rules, and that's all you can do. And that there's a fundamental like cultural issue between them where the NFL only wants this.

And that's why the Sunday ticket has never been the best fit for Apple. It's just what's available for them because it's a repackaging of existing content under other contracts. And so it's tough to make that your own. And I think Apple is chafing at that. But they're still talking.

I think the thing to remember above all else is the only reason that the NFL has not rolled this into NFL Plus, their existing package, and just sold it themselves and eliminated the middleman, There's a deep pocketed tech company out there who will overpay for it because they want to build either a subscriber base or an addressable market. Because DirecTV overpaid for Sunday Ticket for years. They overpaid and they knew they overpaid. But they overpaid because they knew to get Sunday Ticket, you had to call up DirecTV and have them install a satellite dish on your roof. And at that point, you're probably going to cancel your cable and use DirecTV as your TV provider. And so it was a way to acquire new subscribers for them. And so they overpaid for Sunday Ticket and Sunday Ticket never really made back that money, but they knew they were getting people to put satellite dishes on their roof. Well, now it's 2022, we're talking

about 2023 for this. What they're trying to do is find somebody who will overpay so that they will do what Apple and Amazon have been trying to do, which is force people who are not yet streaming to start streaming. And Amazon's had great success with Thursday Night Football doing this. And Apple will presumably try to do more of this with MLS than they tried with Major League Baseball, is sports is a way to get people who are resistant to signing up for streaming or plugging something into their TV or learning how their TV works in order to find that app that's already on their TV to get them over the hump. And if Apple or Amazon is willing to overpay, the NFL would rather do that, right? Why eliminate the middleman to

make less money when the middleman will pay me more? And it doesn't matter to the NFL if it doesn't make sense to their business because they're playing a different game. The NFL just cashes the checks. So that's what's going on. And it's still out there. There's a feeling that by the time the Super Bowl rolls around in February, this deal has to be done. And while Apple is in first position in this negotiation, done. And while Apple is in first position in this negotiation, they say that there are definitely Amazon and Google with YouTube are both circling as well as potential suitors for this. YouTube? Huh. I mean, I understand they have YouTube TV, but I didn't think, I did not know they were in the running for this or were ever interested, but why not, I guess, right?

I think technically it would be, I don't know if it would even be YouTube TV. It would probably just be YouTube and it would be a package that you would buy and watch. Or I doubt they would force you to pay for the YouTube TV product to do it, but who knows? Again, this is all speculation at this point from informed sources but anyway it's a good piece in the athletic by daniel caplan and uh you know when apple when apple or someone else makes a deal we'll let you know here on upstream a segment on the upgrade program this episode of upgrade is brought to you by a good friends at member for the easiest way to sell memberships to your audience used by the biggest creators on the web. You can generate sustainable recurring

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So I had a bunch of smart home follow-up stuff like from the last episode. I wanted to talk about a few little bots. Awesome follow-up from the Upgradians. So good. I've got a bunch on Twitter, some in email, some in Discord. Really great.

One of the big things that I mentioned was about using Aqara products. So A-Q-A-R-A. There were products that I was interested in, but their hub was showing up as an alarm system in the summary fields in HomeKit. So you know HomeKit now has those little pills at the top, right? So it shows you at a glance how many lights are on. It will also show you some information about sensors, security stuff.

And I'm using a security system from a company called Abode that are very, like, hooked into HomeKit. And even if my alarm was set, it was showing that, like, on the summary section, that it was disarmed because the Aqara hub wasn't set. And it didn't make any sense to me to have the Akara hub be a security system. I didn't need it for that. So a bunch of people wrote into me about ways that you could in by checking and unchecking a bunch of settings, get it to not show. It's been unreliable for me where sometimes it wasn't showing as a part of the the security

system and sometimes it was it was very strange but what i'm actually going to do is take a suggestion from lex who wrote in to say that what they're doing because they they have an alarm system and they have the akara stuff is to with automations link them together so if my alarm system sets to arm set the akara hub to arm and then it will just visually show the weight of the one but actually makes no change to the system because i'm not using any of akara's alarm stuff this is probably the route that i'm going to go down just becauseqara's stuff is really good and really cheap compared to other people like they have tons of sensor stuff and I think I want to continue using some of their products and some of their products are really ingenious they're not things I think I want

to use but like they have these two products they have one which is it's a device that you can attach to curtains on a curtain rail to open the curtains. It's like, it's this little like robot basically that just pulls the curtains open. And similarly, if you have regular blinds that you pull with like a chain or a cord, they have this thing that you can put over the top of it and it will make your regular blind smart blinds. They're very ingenious stuff at Aqara. So I want to continue using some of their

things like they have these leak sensors that these are the ones that i was interested in so much cheaper than the other stuff that i found that was home kit enabled the same for like temperature sensors and stuff like i'm talking the difference between like 19 pounds and 60 pounds with competitors and i don't really want to pay that much plus i got someone recommended that i get one of their cameras they have the akara g2h camera which also acts as a hub it was still being inconsistent as to wherever it shows up as an alarm but i did get one of these and now i'm kind of i actually really like having cameras in home kit like just in the home app and so their cameras are also really good

and fairly priced. And so I think I'm kind of, I'm in on the car and I'm just going to make it work with my security system. And I might end up with like, because you know how this stuff is. Abode, which is the company

that I like their alarm system and all that kind of stuff. They have cameras, but the Abode cameras do not work in HomeKit. So I can use Abode cameras and they'd be in the Abode app. And then I could have a car cameras and they'd be in the Home app.

And I actually think I'm okay with that divide. There's some like getting cameras certified to work in the Home app seems to be a particularly difficult prospect, which is why it is impossible to find a wireless video doorbell that works in HomeKit. It does not exist. You cannot find one. It drives me mad. At least I cannot find one here in the UK. Some products exist in other markets. So I might end up with a slight split there about what my cameras are looking at, but I actually kind of like just, if I'm in the home app,

just having a quick view into maybe an inside and outside camera, as well as having the camera system that's tied into my alarm system as well. So we'll see. But basically the Aqara stuff, i'm going to continue going down that road just because some of their products are interesting and i can set up some automations to kind of set and unset them correctly um i also got a bunch of recommendations for home kit youtubers to follow there was one person whose videos i started watching and found really enjoyable uh it's a guy called shane whatley and he did actually had just published a video it's

like 35 minutes long of going through his entire home and showing all the stuff that he set up and i like it i like it a lot uh he he does a lot of stuff that's not necessarily digging into home assistant and home and i don't want to do that i just i want to keep things as simple as possible while still using just the regular apps like i'm not i don't want to keep things as simple as possible while still using just the regular apps like i'm not i don't want to go down the home assistant homebridge route and i know people will tell me why it's so great but it's not a thing that i want to do like every time i watch people talk about this it's about five minutes before they show me a github page i'm like you see now you've gone too far i'm not interested right yeah that's like me me with soldering right yes and it's completely understand

it's just a certain level at which i'm ready to check out and that's it like i want to be able to do everything in apps right as soon as i have to go into a config file um you've lost me i'm not this is this is adding in a level of weirdness that can occur that i don't want but i'm very much enjoying setting all this stuff up uh and i'm again like looking at some of these products and seeing how like matter future could be helpful to me so uh but yeah I'm still trying my best to keep things as HomeKit as possible. But yeah, we'll see. Yeah, the wireless camera stuff and wireless doorbell stuff of HomeKit,

still far off. But doorbells are one of the things that's coming to matter, I think, next. So at some point it will get fixed for me. Well, like I said, a while ago, I have these Arlo cameras and they integrate with HomeKit, even though they're not HomeKit secure video or anything like that. And at least they do show up. And theoretically, I can, I do, they don't work. They're not as responsive as I would like them to be in general. So like,

if I tap on a camera in HomeKit, there's a bit of a wait before they spin up. And that's because they aren't streaming video all the time. They're based on sort of either your demand or motion sensing for them to spin up and start recording. So they're not perfect, but I've got a few of them and they're okay. And it's kind of nice to see them in HomeKit. I mean, theoretically, my house is so small. Like so many of these smart doorbell, smart camera things are oh smart doorbell that's so cute i mean just tap on the door literally tap on the door and you can hear it everywhere in the house there's no the door like kids the trick-or-treaters trick-or-treaters this year were confused because there was no doorbell i was like guys

this house is real small we don't need a doorbell And so we don't have one. I have two reasons I would like a video doorbell. One is we have a front garden with kind of like a little pathway. And so if somebody was to knock, say, we wouldn't hear them. And they have an external gate, and that's where I want to put a video doorbell. The other thing is for when I'm not home, right? Like somebody rings the doorbell of a package when I'm not home, and I can give them some kind of direction as to where to put the package or not. That's what I want it for.

I'm never not home. So I've got no use for this. The other, my only thing, it's only 20 bucks, but the only other thing is I don't really want another hub, and this car stuff looks really interesting but it is like and then you got to get the zigbee hub for 25 bucks and plug it in somewhere well what what i do like about them is that they build hubs into other products like their cameras are hubs are hubs okay and i think that that's kind of fascinating it's very like a very smart way to do it like that look you need a hub but we're finding ways to put our hubs into other things

you might want and so for me you know you know what you just mentioned about the arlo cameras i'm kind of like building this this i think like a two-tier system of security camera in my mind for the home right that like the abode system is for like the important cameras right like it's you know i have it set up to the siren thing it's got the like the backup the battery backup it's got the professional monitoring that whole deal right so like that is the urgent stuff but i would like maybe a couple of cameras maybe pointing outside or whatever that I basically use as just snapshots in the home app. Like I'm not looking for necessarily the live video from them

but that I could open the home app and get like, oh, there's these three cameras and just like, what was it like 10 minutes ago? You know what I mean? Like that kind of idea rather than like the urgent part. So like I'm kind of, that's how I'm starting to like map it out

of my brain just i'm having so much fun with smart home stuff right now i'm like i'm glad i'm like in it to win it over it's great it's good well you got a home please keep sending me all of your suggestions i want all of them the oh today i haven't set them up yet but the the hue christmas lights arrived today wow yeah i'm excited to look at this. I have not taken that plunge yet about the Christmas lights. I ought to consult with Lauren and see what she wants to do with that. I'll let you know. I think I'm going to unbox them today.

I'll text you and I'll let you know if they're good or not. Maybe I'll send you some pictures. Okay. Cool. You had a story for me. You told me you said Michael got a story for you. Yeah, we got to create a little home segment here because you had your home follow-up and I had my story.

Just a little story. I really want to tell this story mostly because I feel like we say it a lot and a lot of the podcasts that are like ours say it a lot where we bring up something like the Lutron Caseta stuff and mention, oh, it's rock solid. It's rock solid. I've done that. And I know Marco has done that on

ATP. And we say it. And I just want to say, when we say it, we mean it. And I want to give you an example of what happened in my life that makes me think about this, which is I had a networking failure a week ago yesterday. I woke up on Sunday morning in no internet. And, you know, I come out to the garage and it's cold and I'm, I'm, I'm just awake and I'm like, what is going on? And it doesn't seem like the lights are on, on my router or my, uh, or my fiber router, my wifi router or my fiber router, which are right next to each other. I'm like, what's going on here? And I figure out eventually that what happened is at 3 a.m., my cyber power uninterruptible power supply, which previously appeared in episode 269 of Upgrade as beep beep from far away the UPS that beeps forever when the power goes out to tell you that the power is out which you probably already figured out its battery

officially died I don't know what causes that I don't know I mean I know battery degradation but at some point the UPS internal monitors were like, oh, this battery's gone. And so it did what you would think it would do logically, which is cut off power immediately to all the outlets on the thing that is there to keep things running. I know it beeps. It could just start beeping. But no, instead, it just cut the power off to those outlets. That seems like the thing. I don't understand.

Look, there is a philosophy in a lot of power strips that are surge protectors that when the surge protection is gone, they turn off because that's the way you can't ignore it. They say, no, no, you can't use this anymore. It's a surge protector and it's not offering protection. So you can't use it anymore. But this thing, I don't understand it because yeah you you would think that if it was having a problem with the battery it should beep and say battery problem not goodbye power so you still had power to the house oh yeah power didn't go out but the ups died so it decided yes it's if I'm going down, you're coming with me.

Yeah. That's what it's feeling. Yeah. Yeah. So what this meant was, essentially, my Wi-Fi router, the Eero, routes all the traffic inside my home network. It does all of the network address translation stuff for my server and my other things that are accessible from outside. It's doing all of that. The Eero does that.

And that's because the Eero has some features that the fiber router from AT&T does not have. I tried. I tried a lot. I couldn't get it to work where I wanted to use the same URL to access my home server from inside my network and outside my network. It didn't work. Frustrating. I learned a lot about hairpin NAT. from inside my network and outside my network. It didn't work. Frustrating.

I learned a lot about hairpin NAT. Anyway, AT&T's fiber, yeah, again, a thing that you should just nope out of, Mike, if you hear about it. Hairpin NAT, don't, no, don't do it. So I'm using the Eero instead for all of that. And it's been fine. But just keep in mind, what this means is that for four or five hours,

the Eero that routes everything and is the DHCP server and is everything from my homeland is down and my fiber connection is down. I finally figure it out. I pull out another power strip. I plug it in. I pull the UPS out. I plug the stuff in. The lights come back on. The network comes back on.

Great. We have the internet in the house now hooray except and this is when we talk about lutron caseta and other things that have like and probably a car is like this too have their own hub with their own radio backhaul and then it attaches to your local network but like they can talk amongst themselves and they can talk using the, the, the base and then the base talks to the rest of the network, but you, they can, they can work without the network being there.

This is the kind of stuff we're talking about because that outage on a Sunday morning rippled through my house and it's smart home stuff for the whole week, the whole week. It wasn't like, Oh, now nothing works and I need to reboot everything. Everything worked for a while. I suspect that there was a networking thing going on where there were like DHCP leases that were, it was gliding on the old ones from the Eero and then they timed

out and the Eero didn't interact with them right. I don't know. I'm not a network manager, nor should I have to be. So my automation stopped working at network manager nor should i have to be so my automation stopped working at some point which leads me to believe that my apple tv got confused and or my devices that were trying to look to the home kit hub couldn't um and when i looked at home at one point when i looked at home it was like uh you know the it was not there or there were two of them it got real weird. Right. And, and so my automation stopped working.

So like the lights didn't come on in my backyard. I'm like, what is going on here? The outside light smart outlet, which is on wifi stopped working at some point until I unplugged it. I think that was on Sunday, unplugged it and replugged it. And then it worked fine, but then the automation stopped working. And so then it didn't go on. And I thought, do I need unplugged it and replugged it. And then it worked fine. But then the automation stopped working. And so then it didn't go on. And I thought, do I need to unplug it and replug it? But no, no, they were working now.

It was just that the automation stopped. And I have a dehumidifier in our bedroom. And I think it turned on and then never turned off. And I had to go turn it off. It was like- What were these automations set by? HomeKit? HomeKit automations, yeah.

It's to turn the lights on at a certain time after sunset and then turn it off at 1130 and turns the front light on and then leaves it on to a certain time and turns it off. And it turns the dehumidifier on during the day and then turns it off. It's a whole set of timers, essentially. Those stopped working. The outside smart outlets stopped working. essentially those those stopped working the outside smart outlet stopped working my weather station data logger which is literally just an ethernet thing it's plugged in to the ethernet the the data logger is attached to the little console that talks to my weather station they have their own little radio connection that they share yeah and then the data logger is the

thing that's like it trails out of the console and it's an ethernet plug and you plug it in. It stopped working. And then, and I thought it had died and I ordered a replacement and then it started working and then it stopped working and then it started working and it was sporadic. And that was very mysterious because as far as I could tell, I could still sort of see it, but it wasn't talking to my Mac mini in the closet in my son's bedroom. Uh, that is my server. So that was very mysterious home bridge at one point during the week, not on Sunday morning, mind you at some point during the week home bridge got very confused. So I had to, and I had to be restarted. I had already restarted my Mac mini at this point I believe a couple of times but I had to then re-restart homebridge inside of it because all

the homebridge devices stopped being visible or you know seen by home kit at one point I tried to turn on my lights when the lights weren't working on the outside and I thought that it was the the um that they need to be unplugged and replugged a little light switch for the smart light for the lights outside i uh it was because i was pressing up and down on the little um phillips hue remote that i have on the wall by the outside door that i used to turn those lights on and off using home kit uh Turns out the Hue switches had stopped working. Again, this is later in the week. The Hue switches stopped working. So then I have to go and find,

I have to play the game of where exactly did I tuck my Hue hub? Is it in Julian's bedroom or is it in, it turns out it's actually in the center of my living room uh you know thing that the tv is on it's back behind there with a hub and a bunch of other stuff so i had to go in there and pull it out and find the power plug and unplug it and replug it and then guess what oh the stuff came back um and this was this rolling chaos throughout the week so what have we learned here

one is as much of a work as it is, if part of your network goes down, if your router goes down, I guess what you need to do is literally go to everything that's got a plug that's a home thing on your network, and you need to unplug it all and replug it in after you get the router back up. Because apparently, they're all just ticking time bombs until you get to that point. Um, this is, I just want to restate, this is why, uh, relying on wifi and products that just use your, your LANs IP network is bad because they're bad and they are unreliable because the network protocols are, were meant to be administered by people working at universities who have technical staffs to do this sort of thing, not in your home where you're the technical staff. And why stuff like the Lutron thing where it's got its own radios and network really does work. It's why I feel like the thread aspect of matter is really interesting

because the idea that maybe we don't need to trust the Wi-Fi and there are other ways for us to talk to one another is the right way forward. Like try to not have it be on your home IP network and your home Wi-Fi if you can avoid it because it's not, it's reliable until it isn't. And then it doesn't work anywhere. And then, and then another next, next point, even when something works pretty well for a while, then it fails. And it's super frustrating because you end up in the situation where you're like, well, wait a second, it's worked for a year. Why did it stop working?

And it's very hard to debug why it is not working now. out that like, this is also why you should never ever subject anyone in your home to smart home anything unless you have signed up to be the red alert IT manager who is going to troubleshoot it immediately when it breaks, which also means as a corollary, do not do this to your, your family who does not live with you because you are on the hook to figure out their home network at a distance or go there and fix it. Because I, at least I'm in this house and can do the troubleshoot. I didn't like doing the troubleshooting all week, Sunday morning, and then the rest of the week, but at least I was here to do it. And my final bullet point here is, bottom line is, this stuff's still not good enough. It's just not there yet.

It's fun to play with, but it's way too brittle. And I appreciate the fact that I think the Matter Standard is actually meant to deal with a bunch of these issues, but it's been a while. It's been a few years since I had a cascade of failures like I had this week. And I love my smart home stuff and it really has improved aspects of our house. But I'll also point out that when the lights didn't go on in the backyard or I couldn't control them from the switch that I have inside, the lights in my living room were never a problem because they're Lutron Caseta lights. They have a physical switch on the

wall that controls them. And there is a remote control that we have in the living room to control them that uses radio, its own radio frequency to talk to its own devices. And so it all still worked as the rest of the stuff broke. So that's my story, Mike. That's my story. Don't have hubs. Don't have networks, I guess, is the lesson to take from this. have hubs, don't have networks, I guess, is the lesson to take from this. This episode is brought to you by FitBud. Between balancing your work life, family life, and everything going on in your life, it can be hard to make fitness a priority. And what you need is a program that's going to work with you, not against you,

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That is 25% of your membership at FitBud dot me slash upgrade. Thanks to FitBud for their support of this show and RelayFM. It is time for some hashtag ask upgrade questions to finish out today's episode. The first comes from Jambo who asks if Apple does launch a

consumer VR product, do you have any thoughts on what they would call their VR world, since Metaverse is unlikely to be used as a name? So this question got me thinking, Jason, just in general, that there are so many branding opportunities for Apple when it comes to this VR headset, right? So you've got the headset itself, what is that going to be called? What is the operating system going to be called? What is their kind of like home area? You know, like when you put it on and you see things like what is that going to be called? Like, you know, the

area that you're in where maybe you can create apps like, you know, Oculus give you like this little home that you're in and you can see stuff and or maybe there's an office environment and then if they do have any kind of virtual worlds or collaboration apps there's names for them there do you have any thoughts on these like i don't think we could try and name them but there's a lot to do right there is a lot to do i mean it sounds at least based on mark german's reports that it's going to probably be Reality Pro or Reality One for the headset, that the operating system is at least called Reality OS. And if they're going to put Reality in the name of the product, they'll probably put it in the OS, too. The home area is a good question, right?

Is that just home? Apple Home? Reality Home? Real Reality? Reality Pro? Reality Pro Max? I don't know. Ultra Home?

And then collaboration apps. What I keep thinking, though, is that a lot of this branding is, whenever possible, is going to be inherited from the iPhone because they want to keep the linkage with the rest of their platform. So collaboration, I think they're going to call collaboration, and SharePlay is going to be called SharePlay and all of that. But you're right, there is some opportunity. What do you call the metaverse if it's not the metaverse? You've got to call it the, again, reality first, reality pro, Apple reality, reality. I don't know. That's, it's a good question. There's a lot of branding that goes on here. I am a little concerned given some of Apple's recent product names about the branding of this stuff, but I think they're

going to try to keep it simple. And I don't know if skeuomorphism applies to language, but I feel like that's probably what they're going to want to do is home, or you're in the living room, or you're at the front door or something like that. That would be my guess, is that they're going to try to apply real world concepts to this, rather than saying, oh, we're in the metaverse now. You're in a science fiction landscape that's floating around you i just that i think apple is going to go as far in the direction of reality as possible in terms of its naming a metaphor could be wrong but that's just that's my my intuition i've got to say about metaverse like i've just started watching the most recent season of mythic quest and like oh it's the writing's great still like they they've got people that know gaming so good have you started it too i've seen the first two yeah yeah that's where i am great

great like legitimately great so good great and like iron is just so metaverse and web 3 and it's really funny it's very very funny yeah yep good stuff sava asks does anyone know what happened to all of the rumors of airpods getting support for lossless audio it seemed like it was a whole bunch of speculation just disappeared well apple when they announced airpods pro 2 they said that it it enables complete like a much higher ability to do bandwidth from devices and they never explained what they were doing with that or if they were doing anything with it so i consider to believe or i continue to believe that there is functionality in the airpods pro 2 that will support either higher bitrate or lossless audio

and that they haven't enabled it yet in software. And why are they waiting? Maybe the software doesn't work. Maybe it is something that we're waiting for also rolling out like AirPods Max 2 that also supports it. And then they can say, and now both of these things support this new amazing thing we've got.

I don't know that detail. It's also possible, yes, technically, that this is a feature that they put in there, but it actually turns out they can't use it. It doesn't work reliably, and so they're not going to talk about it. Except they did talk about the increased bandwidth. So that's weird. So I feel like it's hanging out there and it probably does exist but it doesn't it's not being used right now it's a little bit like the uh the old u1 chip when it was announced which is like this is a thing that uh you use for airdrop i guess and it was like very clear if you know about ultra wideband what it was going to ultimately be used for but they weren't ready yet

it's a little like that okay just one of those things where like that additional bandwidth does not allow for support for lossless audio, but people heard it has additional bandwidth because of rumor and thought that meant lossless audio. Yeah. But what are they, here's the problem with that theory. And I think it could be right, but why did they talk about the additional bandwidth and then not explain in any way what it might be used for? They never said. Yeah, you're right. You're completely right. It's just like, hey, we do this. It might not be lossless, right? It also might be enhanced in some way where it's a higher quality thing that's coming out of the lossless. They're encoding the lossless audio on the fly to

a much higher bit rate. So it's a much higher quality stream, but not truly lossless. That could be. Or it could be that they've got Apple lossless streaming working in the background could be that they've got you know apple lossless streaming working in the background but they're not ready to enable it yet could be could be andrew asks do you think apple will make usbc wired earpods yes yeah i do kind of got to right. There has to be some kind of wired. Even if you don't sell a lot of them, people do still want that, I guess.

So why not make it? I think they will. I mean, maybe, I don't know the dynamics of the manufacturer of those things, but they made the lightning earpods. I don't know why they wouldn't make the USB-C earpods just to have them around as a real base thing for people who don't want to buy wireless headphones but want to attach headphones to their iPhone. Like, yes, I do.

I saw my mom this morning and she turned to me and said, I think I want some of those AirPods. And I was like, oh, okay, mother. Fine. All right. We can help you out with that like i have a i'm not sure if she's gonna like it no see we're gonna start out so don't tell i'm gonna buy her a new iphone this year that i'm buying her i'm gonna get her an iphone 13 she had my a 10r right right and and she's she's struggling at the moment with the earpiece she can't it's it's kind of failing on her a bit. But just in general, I think it's time for an upgrade for her.

I'm going to get her a 13 because that's good for her. She doesn't need a 14, so we're going to get her an iPhone 13. And you're going to probably buy it during the Apple. I've got a shopping period thing right now. I think you get like a $50 gift card or whatever, a £50 gift card if you do it during the Black Friday time. So it feels like a good time to do it. But I have some old original AirPods

and I'm going to try these because I don't know if she's going to like it. Right. Don't buy her something if you can get her to try it. She doesn't use any kind of earphones right now at all. It's something she wants to do when she's on the bus to work and she wants to know what's listening to music the bus to work and she doesn't she wants

to know what's listening to music which is just interesting it's like just an interesting thing it's like this has never been a thing you've expressed before so i was like all right i'm gonna give you my old airpods and you can you can start with those and let me know if you like them and then we can get some regular ones but it was just like a funny thing that happened to me today david asks one thing i haven't heard discussed much about the lock screen changes in iOS 16 is the removal of the volume slider along with the playback controls do you miss it or have you even noticed

I like it as an indicator of volume level and a quick way to control volume on screen if I'm not holding my phone I hadn't noticed because I used the button to adjust the volume never noticed I'm a button boy I didn't noticed cause I use the button to adjust the volume. Never noticed.

I'm a button boy. Uh, I didn't even know that until I, this is the reason I included this question is I didn't know that they had removed the volume slider. So one thing I will say with the lock screen, I've found myself multiple times, not something happened before, accidentally skipping forward what I'm listening to. Like maybe i'm like touching something that i didn't mean to or like whatever but that's been happening to me but you know in general i like that now playing more i found it to be much more reliable with like suggestions for restarting podcasts and stuff it was not very reliable with that before um but while we're talking about volume buttons i'm a big fan of the volume control on airpods pro 2 i love having a volume control just there on the airpods like i agree way better

than pressing like reaching into my pocket and pressing the buttons or whatever like i really like it you gotta like get the gesture down like it takes a little bit of practice to kind of get it right but once you get it right very good well i have those moments where i'm listening and i want to adjust the volume and i think oh boy i'm gonna need to go get my phone or pull my phone out of my pocket or whatever and then i realize oh wait a second and then you do that little thing and it's yeah it's really nice as is fun from zach and discord the volume indicator comes back on the lock screen if you're air playing something. Huh. That just makes it weird, right?

Like if you sometimes have it, why did you get rid of it? That's funny. Yeah. That's very funny. Yeah, what I would say is it probably should be there. Even though we are not using it, I think that it's nice to have it there and I think you can afford the space on that one.

I think so too. I think so too. I think so too. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show, just use the hashtag AskUpgrade or use question mark AskUpgrade in the RelayFM members Discord. Thank you so much to everybody that supports the show

with an Upgrade Plus membership. We appreciate you very much and we'd also like to thank Fitbod, Memberful, and TextExpander for their support of this episode if you'd like to find Jason online you can go to sixcolors.com he is at jsnl on twitter

do you want to talk about twitter and Upgrade Plus? I want to talk about it on Upgrade Plus again I think we have to do that it's just too much fun to not talk about it right now it's absolutely wild over there I am I am YKE and I-M-Y-K-E. And I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks now.

I'm going on vacation. Jason's lined up a couple of very exciting guests for the show. So you can look out for those over the next couple of weeks. And don't forget to go to upgradies.vote to cast your nominations

for the Upgradies, the ninth annual Upgradies Awards. We'll be back next week. Until then. Nope. Well, he'll be back next week. Until then. Nope. Well, he'll be back next week. Until then. Have a good vacation, Mike.

Say goodbye. Bye. Bye, everybody.