Upgrade - 435: OS 8, Not So Great

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

John Gruber joins Jason on Upgrade for the first time. Topics include eWorld, Apple's iPhone production problems in China, FIFA and Qatar and the World Cup, the reasons behind Apple's sports ambitions, BBEdit, regular expressions, Perl and Python, MarsEdit, nanotexture displays, webcams, and the state of the art in ADB-to-USB adapters. Happy Cyber Monday to all those who celebrate!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 435 today's show is brought to you by zocdoc trade coffee and expressvpn and here is your host jason snell thank you mike hurley i am jason snell and i am joined by our very special guest for this very special episode of Upgrade. It's John Gruber sitting in for Mike Hurley. John, welcome to Upgrade. I turned the tables on you. Mike Hurley. I think people are in for a rough episode of Upgrade in terms of soothing melodious tone of voice. Yeah, and the nice British accent, which makes this a multinational show, and now it's just the... Well, it's East Coast, West Coast, though. We still are like... Some variety. Some variety. A little bit of variety

among the sameness of American voices. Mike is on vacation this week and next. So I have asked some some pals to drop in and join me for upgrade. And John, I've been on the talk show a lot, but I don't think I've ever had you on upgrade. So thank you for being here. I really do appreciate it. I can tell you for certain I've never been here. So. All right. Well, it's I heard you for being here. I really do appreciate it. I can tell you for certain I've never been here. All right.

Well, I heard you on another podcast, and I was like, why have I not ever asked John to be on? So open the floodgates, I guess. Also, I don't want to be remiss here. I don't want to miss out on officially saying happy Cyber Monday to you. I can't believe that that's still a thing. My wife was just complaining yesterday that she – I mean, she does a lot of shopping online. So she is so angry this whole weekend about all of these emails because, of course, every single place you've ever bought anything from, no matter what you've done with any checkboxes about marketing permission, ever bought anything from, no matter what you've done with any checkboxes about marketing permission,

anything you've ever bought on the internet, sent you email or a text message or something over the last three days, guaranteed. And she's like, and it's every morning. They're like, happy day, happy extended Black Friday. And now they're like, she said yesterday, she was already, her inbox was just full of welcome to Cyber Monday. And she's like, it's not even Monday yet. And is that still a thing? Yeah, I mean, I get two thoughts here. One is, I've been seeing a lot of Black Friday things that started like last week and also continued through the weekend.

And I'm like, I guess Black Friday is a season and not a day now. And then Cyber Monday, I mean, I guess, are there people out there who think, well, Cyber Monday, it's just a thing we say, and I don't really understand the origin of it. I mean, obviously the origin was people started doing lots of online shopping at the beginning of the holiday shopping season back in the day, but the term is so dated, right? Because we don't really cyberspace things anymore. It was you know william gibson wrote about cyberspace and neuromancer in like 1984 and then eventually when the internet happened people were like oh wow this is like like sci-fi novels it's cyberspace but it's it's past this is like saying

you know happy aol instant messenger tuesday right it's like It's like, it's so dated. It's kind of a shame because when it was a new term or a new prefix, it did sound cool. You know, cyber sounded cool. Sure. And, you know, and then we let the AOLs of the world really burn it up into being, you know, and I guess, you know, I guess the most recent use I can think of a new one would be the cyber truck

from Tesla. Right. Which is, I believe, who knows now, the most recent use I can think of a new one would be the, the cyber truck from Tesla, which, which is, I, I believe who knows now, but the, uh, it's making me second guess everything I've ever heard about any Elon Musk

company in the last few weeks, but I just assumed it was ironic, you know, deliberately, uh, deliberately ironic. But anyway, the other thing about the roots of cyber Monday that don't,

don't add up anymore is the idea. And I think it was true, was in the very early days, people had very slow dial up at home and perhaps much faster, probably faster internet at work. And so they would save the online shopping for Monday at work, do their shopping at work on Monday, the day after Thanksgiving, because they had faster, much faster bandwidth at work than home. I don't think that's true anymore, right? I mean, everybody's sort of got, nobody's web browsing or shopping is held up by the speed of their bandwidth at home. I'm sure some are, but you're right. It was the idea that you would go into work where you had like internet or good internet, and that was where you would do it. Get ready, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has their way. This is going to be meta monday it's never going to be

meta monday you know buzzwords but you never know when the buzzwords where they'll go right like nobody has any control over it like some of them stick around some of them don't stick around they they extend beyond their meaning entirely um anyway cyber Cyber Monday is a dumb idea, but like... Happy Cyber Monday to you. Happy, sorry, to everybody who celebrates Cyber Monday, a happy Cyber Monday to you. Yeah, you're keeping me from shopping, Jason. I'm sorry.

You should have done that this morning. You're three hours ahead of me. You should have taken care of all of your Monday cyber on Monday morning, I think. We usually start the show, although that was actually a great way to start the show, with a Snell Talk question, because I always want to talk about the weather, and Mike does not want to hear me talk about the weather. And so I thought I would throw this one out there that I formulated myself, which is just, here in the United States, we had Thanksgiving last week. If you ask yourself as you're listening to the show, by the way, wow, there's not a lot of news. It's like,

it's Thanksgiving week in America. There's not a lot of news. Uh, what, what did you have on the Thanksgiving table this year? You and I also have returning college students are our youngest. I mean, both of my kids came home, but our youngest, it's his freshman year. Your kid is also his freshman year. this is a i feel like a big thanksgiving what did uh what did you do for it uh well we hardly saw jonas our son because he was out with high school pals all the time which i was expecting because i remember i'm not you know it was a long time ago for me but i remember what it was like. So we hardly saw him. We did have him all day, Thanksgiving, Thursday. What was on the table? Well, people who pay attention to my podcasts over the years

perhaps know this. My wife has a very unusual allergy. My wife is allergic to all poultry. So chicken, turkey, duck, anything like that, like duck fat fries and and something like a duck fat fry really sets it off like something that's uh cooked in the broth the broth is sort of like concentrated so there's some some molecule or something that's in birds that is what she's sensitive to and it's a very severe anaphylactic uh allergy you know like her throat swells shut and her lips get swollen. So anyway, turkey, not a big, not a big fan. And it's funny because she grew up and, you know, like on our son, it has a severe dairy allergy. So we've, you know, we're familiar with eating around allergies and

making different dishes and stuff like that. But it's funny because she grew up and, you know, eventually her family figured out that Amy is allergic, severely allergic to turkey, but they still kept making turkey because that's what you do on Thanksgiving. And it really, the other thing is her allergy is so severe, it really bothers her to have like a turkey basting in the oven in like a small, tight house, you know, and it's cold in November, so the doors are closed and windows are closed. So anyway, eventually everybody got on board with the fact we, we eat at Amy's mom's house on Thanksgiving. That's our tradition.

And at some point in the last decade or so we've switched to ham. So we, we, we roast a big ham, which works out great. Everybody loves it and nobody misses the turkey i actually personally me i vastly prefer ham to turkey so we have a we roast a big ham and all the carbs that you could possibly imagine mashed potatoes uh we we have it's very confusing we have both filling and stuffing uh we do not because we don't have a turkey to stuff the stuffing in. I know some people like to cook the stuffing in the bird. We don't have a bird.

Which you shouldn't do because the temperature is low enough in there that there could be cross-contamination with the bird. You should always do what you do, which is bake it outside. Do it outside. Bake it outside. So we have filling. We have stuffing. We pick up some stuff at a local place here in philly a great great uh sort of a grocer slash catering place but they they do take out for uh thanksgiving

you can order in advance with a couple of these side dishes they have uh what do they call it a cauliflower gratin oh yeah now uh i know i've seen people bitching about uh cauliflower mashed potatoes and stuff and i don't know what people think. This is perhaps the smash hit of the last few Thanksgivings in our family. It is sort of a creamy. You still get some chunks of cauliflower that you can spear, but they're good. Most of it is very creamy, sort of a mashed potato texture, and just all the cheese on top. That's the secret with cauliflower is if you add cheese, I mean, come on.

And then a layer of breadcrumbs on top of that. And the breadcrumbs, it's just like, we didn't do mac and cheese. Sometimes we've done mac and cheese too. But it's the reason you put like a coating. I'm not a chef, but I've picked this up. I've surmised this. The reason when you bake something like that, like a cheesy gratin dish like that,

the reason you want that layer of breadcrumbs, number one, they can get a little crispy and that's fun and tasty, but it absorbs some of the grease. And so it's not greasy at all. It's just smooth and good. What else? Brussels sprouts, which again, get a bad rap.

They do. And I just read over Thanksgiving that at some point in the 90s, scientists figured out what it was that gave Brussels sprouts a bad flavor, and they bred it out of them. That's right. That's right. The old-fashioned genetic engineering where they just bred it out, and so they're not bitter anymore.

Yeah. So the whole thing where you and I grew up and brussels sprouts were the canonical kids movie oh what's the worst thing the kid could possibly eat brussels sprouts and it's like i don't know we never i never even had them i just imagined that they were awful no but now they're they're one of my favorites they're delicious my parents are both midwesterners so uh know, our gross out for me was the green bean casserole. It was like, but, uh,

yeah, so we don't do, I, I, at one point as a kid, lobbied my parents to do a ham for Thanksgiving. Cause I was tired of the Turkey too, but my wife doesn't eat pork.

So, uh, Turkey it is. And it's fine. I, I like do a brine. I do the Alton Brown good eats. I like take a five gallon bucket from home Depot and fill it with a brine and dump the turkey in it.

And it sits there overnight. And so we did have the turkey. And then, yeah, Brussels sprouts. I'm telling you, I am a believer about Brussels sprouts. We did a couple different like we did one with like balsamic and honey. And we did another one that had like sriracha and fish sauce and soy sauce that was super savory and they were both great uh mashed potatoes uh what else my son always when he was little especially the only thing he would eat is crescent rolls at thanksgiving dinner so we do some of those like pillsbury

crescent rolls for him there's some salads and other stuff we managed to we had eight people because it was also my in-laws and my sister-in-law and her husband. So we made it work. I think we actually have practiced Thanksgiving enough now at our house that we know how to do it. Every year, I always feel like kind of a fraud when I do it. I'm like, oh man, I don't know what I'm doing.

And this year, it was like, I actually upped the difficulty level in a couple of places because like, this is boring. We know how to do this now. So it was nice. Yeah. It's one thing i learned years and years ago i forget where i picked it up but somebody said at a meal like i think it was in the context of wine pairing uh which in our family we don't really nobody's fancy pants and wants to pair wine but they're like don't overthink it and it's the silliest thing in the world for something like Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is all about big, bold flavors.

So just make sure whatever wine you get is sort of bold and flavorful and not like if it uses the word delicate in the description, don't buy that one. And anything big and bold is going to go well with it. And same thing with the side dishes where it's just like, ah, just flavor the hell out of those Brussels sprouts. That's what – I won't go on. We won't make this the Brussels sprouts episode of Upgrade. But the thing about Brussels sprouts that I think is amazing is they'll take to any kind of flavoring, right? You can go sort of Asian, like you said, I think you said, with soy sauce. Anything you think you could put on Brussels sprouts, you can do,

and you roast them, and they get crispy, and they're fun, and they're delicious. They're very good. They're very good. Well, that is turkey talk or ham talk for this episode. It's a fun holiday. I mean, I like that there's a let's make a big meal and get everybody together. It's kind of a nice tradition. I like it too because it's like I said with all the carby stuff. It's like instead of, well, which one do we want it's just a-okay we'll just make them all and i made a sweet potato pie i love sweet potato pie and i don't have it very often and i have a nice recipe that i make so i just made myself one and other people ate it too i guess but whatever we're an apple pie family all right we had an apple cake and we had a cheesecake but you know i'm team sweet potato pie all the way so it's like a pumpkin pie except better in every way goes great with barbecue too one of these years i'm going to do a barbecue

thanksgiving and nobody's going to be happy about it but me but i'm going to love it all right um we need to do some uh housekeeping some follow-out first all of all just to let people know out there uh if you love upgrade and and want to get more of it, you should be an Upgrade Plus subscriber. There's no ads. You get bonus content every week. You get access to our members' Discord at RelayFM. It's getupgradeplus.com. It's $5 a month or $50 a year. And from now until December 17th, you can save 20% on an annual plan. Find out more at give relay.com. This is give the gift of upgrade. Use the code 2023 holidays at checkout.

You get 20% off your first year of an annual subscription to upgrade plans renew at the full price after the first year in this episode, John and I talked before the show about all the tools that are made for us and the ones that are not a little bit of keyboard talk in there too, just a tiny bit. Also, I want to mention that it's time to vote in the ninth annual Upgradees. Go to upgradees.vote to send in your nominations. That'll be open until December 12th. That helps us a lot, reminding us of what happened this year and letting your voice be heard in our award show that we do at the end of the year. I also have some follow-up. First off, last week, we talked about Apple and the metaverse and speculated, I think this was last week, about what exactly an Apple headset

would look like. And we talked about what Apple would call it if they're not calling it the metaverse. I said it will probably be reality based. I feel like it's the language equivalent of skeuomorphism where Apple's going to just, if it's a reality OS, it's going to be like things from reality. They're not going to want to create a fanciful nameset for it. But anyway, lots of jokesters wrote in to say that I missed the obvious, which was that they could call it eWorld. Kids, ask your parents what eWorld was, I guess. I never used eWorld.

That is some classic 90s Apple that I missed out on. I don't even know why. I guess because the whole eWorld era was when I was at Drexel University and I had the real internet. And so I never saw the appeal and i didn't have anything like you know i wasn't doing daring fireball so i didn't have any obligation well i should still even if i don't want to use it i should still check it out so i can review it or write about it or know about it i just never tried and then it was gone and then it was gone yeah mean, the story for people who don't know, this was an online service. Like Apple did their own AOL.

And it's a funnier story even than that because AOL sort of sprung out of Apple Link, which was a previous Apple online service that was mostly for people connected to Apple. But then those people went and they made AOL. And then when Apple decided, well, we are going to do our own online service for the people in the Apple sphere, they decided to actually essentially work with AOL and use AOL's infrastructure to build their own separate online service called eWorld. It went about as well as you might expect, especially since you've never heard of it, probably. I only know about it because I worked at Mac user at the time and we were, we had to be there, you know, right. It was like Apple starting an online service. How could we not be there? And so we had to be there and it was cute, but it was empty. I mean, it was empty. It was like a better art directed AOL with nobody in it.

It did look adorable. Yeah. And, and it used the metaphor of like a map art directed aol with nobody in it it did look adorable yeah um and and it used the metaphor of like a map you know sort of like the map you get when when you enter a theme park right exactly it was like a you know slightly 3d or whatever you call that sort of fake 3d uh tilted into the horizon and then the map would have the areas where you'd want to go. And supposedly that was the mental model they wanted you to have. I think it was sort of coincident with the General Magic PDA, which took the desktop metaphor to extreme you know the the full cartoon you're in an office and the desk is drawn in 3d skeuomorphism right that it's an actual desk and it was the actual an actual telephone that you clicked on to to make a communications thing that was sort of like e-world where it was

a map and you'd you'd go places yeah and like i said it was it was just kind of empty and it was i i would say a very 90s apple sort of thing which is they spent a lot of money on a thing that didn't wasn't necessary and didn't work i do still have an e-world mug it's slightly faded but i do still have it it's one of my prized possessions um not because i love e-world but because i love that e-world is such a weird footnote so sure. Let's bring it back with our headset. It's not a bad name. It is short. It sounds good.

eWorld, you know, like the sounds go together world. I don't think they're going to use it. The e prefix seems to have moved along, right? Right. EMAC. We were just talking about the EMAC when you were on the talk show right yeah right the emac which was we can't afford to make an uh g3 imac anymore we've

moved on to the g4 but everybody in education was like we're not buying your expensive g4 imac and they're like what do we do what do we do what do we do and the answer was we're gonna make a g4 imac we're gonna call it the emac we're going to make a G4i Mac. We're going to call it the eMac. We're going to only sell it to education, except maybe not just. And they only did one of those. But it showed the power. I think it was in the context of, like, why is there a 999 M1 MacBook Air still for sale? Or why is there that low-end iPad still for sale, even though there's a new low-end iPad? And the answer was because their education customers said they wouldn't buy the new one because it's more expensive and that's that was why the emac existed same reason a whole one-off product just for

education because they wouldn't pay more wild they probably that was probably like a g4 imac prototype when they weren't sure they were going to go to the flat screen from the crt i mean i it's hard to believe that they just they made the whole thing out of whole cloth just for education. It was probably like, what if we do this for the next iMac? And then they're like, no, no, no, no, no. And they're like, well, education. We'll put it in there. That's, when I did 20 Macs for 2020, one of the things, and you were on a bunch of those episodes, one of the things that struck me while I was working on it is how, this is a real aside, but like, how has history erased all of the dumb things that Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple?

Like, they did a lot of dumb stuff, too. We don't remember any of those failures. People are like, oh, Apple's doing things that don't work quite right. That wouldn't have happened when Steve Jobs was around. It's like early Steve Jobs era, they tried a lot of stuff that didn't work quite right. That wouldn't have happened when Steve jobs was around. It's like early Steve jobs era. They, they tried a lot of stuff that didn't go anywhere. And I think that was good for them to do that because they were trying to

figure out what worked and what didn't. And, and the EMAC was a, was kind of a product of necessity and wasn't really part of their product grid, but they did it because they had to, and they tried to X serve and that didn't work. And you know,

they, they, not everything was a hit dalmatian imax oh wow well i've told you that story before right that we did a we did a fake dalmatian imac like three months before on the cover of mac world and they called us in a panic because they thought we knew something we had no idea why they were so angry and then they announced the dalmatian imax and they're like oh because it seemed like such a preposterous idea that it would be a perfect gag we had a cowboy lassoing it it was a joke so it's cow spots but same deal right yeah close enough one a more serious bit of a follow-up

is about something mike and i have been talking about and i know you've been talking about it with ben on uh not stratechery that is ben ben talks about it on stratechery ben's got a like a media empire now where he's got like a china podcast that he's not on on dithering you guys have talked about this i know you've talked about it on the talk show too apple and china and the latest production issues there's a new bloomberg story i already had this in our show document and then there was a new story this morning from a flat save of a name we remember from The Verge, but he's at Bloomberg on their tech staff. And it's a production shortfall of close to 6 million iPhone Pro units this quarter is expected. This is about the shutdowns for the COVID policy and then the people who were locked in the factory who decided they didn't want to

be there anymore. Apparently, there's a Reuters story that came out late last week that says that they hired a bunch of people and said that they would give them bonuses and then they didn't give them bonuses. And so then they wanted to resign and that apparently like 20,000 new hires are reported to have left and been given like severance basically to get out. um and and been given like severance basically to get out and uh so generally it's unclear there are some people are like this isn't going to be that big a deal but i think the bloomberg report uh where it's estimated that this could be about six million iphone pro units that they won't be able to make and you know that means that's six million that will almost certainly be entirely uh demand that will be unfulfilled right Because Apple doesn't generally spend all of its time making iPhones that nobody's going to buy. And this is in their biggest quarter of the year. So it's a big hit to their most important product. I don't know what to estimate the average selling price of an iPhone Pro at.

If you do make it nice and easy and just say it's $1,000, then you get a nice even $6 billion in revenue. Even by Apple standards, it is significant. I don't know what to say about this story because I accept that it is as big a story as it can get as relates to the internal politics of China countrywide, right? Because this is not an Apple story. Apple is downwind of it, and Apple is obviously now deeply and significantly affected by it. But there are protests as we speak in China that are unprecedented. I mean, there are certainly younger people who don't remember the 80s, the late 80s in the Tiananmen Square massacre. It has been a long – decades since there has been public uprising and protests in China. It's just part of the lesson of Tiananmen Square as well.

If you're going to protest, look out. to protest look out um and it combined with the i think just totally ill-advised zero covid policy that g wants to pursue and and this culture of never admitting that you're wrong and never no never telling the boss what what he doesn't want to hear, this sort of thing was inevitable, right? Where locking people into dormitories, I mean, effectively, it's a dormitory as like a prison, really. And people can only take so much, right? People are people in human nature, eventually, however patient you are, and however used to the, I would say, draconian rules and lifestyle of working there, being locked in a dormitory for weeks at a time, it's going to boil over. And now we're starting to see it. a true case, especially in authoritarian systems where you have so much power as the government that you have a certain level of power over everybody. And that goes for a while, but it

only goes so far. And then at some point, it's like that story about that you become bankrupt very gradually and then all at once. Lots of crypto examples of that recently. And maybe Elon Musk, who knows? But I was thinking about that here and about the protests in Iran some people comfortable enough that everybody is not going to overthrow you. And if you fail at that, and you can put it off for a while, but I do feel like at some point it does boil over. And I don't know if anything going on in China or in Iran is at that point. I did see that they burned down the Ayatollah Khomeini's house. Like, that's not great for the government of Iran. But again, authoritarian systems have a level of control, but I do think at some point, part of the reason that they survive is that there's not enough of that anger in enough of the people. And then when they reach as a boiling point, then things can happen real fast.

So, and it's always the young people, you know, it, because, you know, you and I are, you know,

heartily into middle age. And it's like, you forget that how young people have less patience and they don't have the, uh, settled in like the parts of their brain haven't atrophied. well, this is just the way it is. Right. Well, and we've got more things to lose, right? We've got houses and jobs and things like that. And when you have more to lose, stability ends up being a priority instead of maybe change.

Right. But it's no question it deserves to be talked about in our racket here in the Apple ecosphere because Apple is inextricably tied to China. I mean, there's – And this is not the near miss that losing all Mac assembly for a month was, which was brutal, right? But it was the Mac and they could ride it out. But this is the brand new iPhone Pro, their most important product, and it's going to get hit square in their most profitable traditionally quarter of the year. And it means that there are people who want to buy an iPhone Pro for Christmas who are not going to be able to get it or just in December.

But I mean, I imagine that there must be a gift element to it because, or maybe there's a by the end of the year kind of element to it as well. But like this hits them, this is as hard in terms of the product and the timing a hit as Apple, I think, could take. Yeah, I do too. And I wonder about that. Because you think if it's just a business tool, and in COVID, for example, when there was the supply chain locked up for obvious reasons, but there was also this tidal wave of demand for laptops because all of a sudden people are working at home and need their main computer to be a laptop. And if their laptop was old and the whole factor of kids doing

all their schooling at home and all the families where maybe there's two kids, but they share a laptop for school, but you can't share a laptop when all day. So all of a sudden everybody needed to buy laptops and you couldn't buy the laptops because they were all sold out. But then once they became available, even if it was the next quarter, then you buy them, right? You buy them, you know, I forget there's a term for that where, where you're going to sell the device anyway. It's like deferred demand or something like that is the idea. I really wonder about the holiday demand, right? And it's always been a bit of a mystery to me why the iPhone, not a total mystery because

you can think of the factors, but what's the mix of why is the holiday quarter so abnormal just like it was for the iPod back in the day. Now, with the iPod, you knew it was for the holidays. It was people getting them as a gift. With the iPhone, because they're new in the holiday quarter too, you get both the enthusiasts who want to get the latest and greatest iPhone right when it's new and the holiday mix. But I think the iPhone is so big that the enthusiast angle, I think, is smaller than the holiday angle. So I wonder if you can't get one for Christmas,

does it actually get purchased? I don't know, like in January or February. I do think that there is something here that is the genius of Apple that I've complained about before, like how hard it is. You know this because your kid's a gamer. Like to get a game console, it's like, you know, it's ridiculous. Like you can't just roll into the PlayStation store and say, I would like to buy a PS5. And they say, well, we don't have any right now, but we'll put you in line and you'll

get it in November. You just can't. They're like, it's for sale. Now it's not. It's for sale. Now it's not. It's a Target. Now it's not. It's a Walmart. Now it's not. And Apple will take your money. I mean, I really admire them for this. And I know that there's part of the, maybe Sony's benefit is that everybody's hunting for it or whatever. I don't agree with that, but okay, whatever. I've always admired the that, but okay, whatever. I've always admired the fact that even if Apple doesn't have it, or it's going to take Apple a while to get it, they will take your order, give you a date,

and say it will be here on this date. And it will be. Generally, it will be there on that date or before. Yeah. And so in a situation like this, that is an advantage of Apple. It's like, well, we can't get you an iPhone now, but we can get you an iPhone in early January or whatever. People still have the option of saying, well, that sucks. I'm not going to order this iPhone if I'm not going to get it until January.

But some percentage of the people will be like, that's good enough. That's fine. And they'll say, OK. But I do agree with you that there's going to be a certain amount where it's like, oh, well, I was going to get a new iPhone and give it as a gift or give it to myself for the holidays and it's not really available so now i'm just not going to bother i'll buy something else and that's a a lost sale or it's a like deferred sale for maybe until the next product cycle maybe they don't get that person back for a year yeah uh i will say i don't know i don't know what you know i haven't been tracking it so i don't know if it's changed or not but if you go to apple.com and click iPhone on their main iPhone page, they list the regular iPhone 14 at the top and the 14 Pro below. I don't know if they've changed that.

I don't know. Get the one you can get. Get the one that you can get. It's nice. It's right here. It'll save you a little money, and we have them. Yeah. Well, we'll keep an eye on i'm sure that you and ben and ben's various endeavors and here at upgrade will keep watching i i again from an apple business perspective i think is the most fascinating like the fact that

they had to put out that news release essentially saying this is going to be a problem like legally they need to say this is not it was after their earnings and all and it just happened so quickly thereafter and they didn't give you know any actual official guidance because they haven't done that because of this right because in during covid they're like there's lots of things that could affect this that are unexpected and then they had to put out that statement there's like well something unexpected happened, which is we're not going to be able to make enough iPhones. And it's going to be a really interesting release in late January, right?

When they're going to explain exactly how bad this was. Yeah. So I just clicked through. I tried to buy a iPhone 14 Pro Max, 512 gigabytes, deep purple. And it is order today delivers December 28. So literally after Christmas. and it is order today delivers december 28th so literally and after after christmas and still before you go back to work at the first of the year maybe yeah it's not great right but it's all you know it's only cyber monday it is it is we're just at the beginning

again happy cyber monday to everybody out there yeah as you celebrate in your own way to me it's inevitable and to me i think what when the tim cook era is in the rear view mirror when he steps steps aside and and somebody else takes over as ceo apple's relationship with china is going to be such a huge part of the the tim cook story, I think it might've even been on dithering where you guys were talking about this, but okay, this is bad for Apple because they're gonna take this hit and they're gonna lose $6 billion in sales-ish, let's say. But it really feels to me like on another level,

this is great for Apple in the sense that Apple can point to 2022. They can point to what happened in Shanghai with the Macs and they can point to the iPhone Pro here. And they can say, this is why we need to diversify. And it gives them a story. Again, maybe their reason to diversify is a bigger issue about China, right? But it gives them a story to tell and to tell to China, which is, no, no, we love you, but you saw what happened in 2022.

We just need to spread this thing out geographically a little bit in case something like this happens again. It gives them like a fig leaf to hide behind a little bit with China, whether China buys it or not, who knows. But it gives them a little bit of not only a push, but I feel like a way to not say, well, we don't really believe in China like we used to. We got to get out of there. And instead just say, oh, it's important to diversify, which it is, right? But now they have good examples of exactly why.

It's like we lost $6 billion in sales because we didn't diversify iPhone production. Hard to argue. Yeah. All right. because we didn't diversify iPhone production. Hard to argue. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a break here and do a sponsor read from Mike Hurley. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Watching Netflix without using ExpressVPN

is a little like buying tickets to your favorite artist but only being allowed to watch the opening act. Maybe you didn't know this, but some streaming services have different content libraries for every country. So there are tons of shows available in other countries. With VPN, you can access those other libraries. It basically tweaks where Netflix or other services think that you are right now. This means, for example, that you could watch the US office from Canadian Netflix. Maybe you want to watch Lord of the Rings. the US office from Canadian Netflix.

Maybe you want to watch Lord of the Rings. Well, just use ExpressVPN to let Netflix think you're in Turkey. With just one click by opening the app and choosing the country that I want Netflix to think that I'm in, and refreshing. It's as simple as that. There are so many reasons, though, to choose ExpressVPN. It has blazing fast speeds. You can stream in HD with zero buffering. It's compatible with all your devices, phones, laptops, media consoles, smart TVs, and more. Plus, they have servers in 94

different countries, so you can gain access to tons of content, and it works with loads of other streaming services like BBC iPlayer, YouTube, and many more. I've used it a bunch of times to watch Formula One, so if I've been traveling, I pay for a service to let me watch it, but I can't watch it when I'm outside of the UK. But I can use ExpressVPN to let the watch it but I can't watch it when I'm outside of the UK but I can use ExpressVPN to let the service think that I'm back at home again so I'm able to watch up and keep going with my races, very important to me you can stop paying full price for streaming services

and only get access to a fraction of their content and get your money's worth at expressvpn.com slash upgrade don't forget to use the link at expressvpn.com slash upgrade to get an extra three months free of express vpn our thanks to express vpn for their support of this show and relay fm i thought we would do some sports talk because when i'm on the talk show we talk about sports

and people get mad at us like i didn't i didn't tune in to hear, we talk about sports and people get mad at us. Like, I didn't tune in to hear you guys talk about sports. By the way, congratulations on the great season that your Philadelphia Eagles are having. Oh, wait a second. You live in Philadelphia, but the Dallas Cowboys are doing pretty well too, actually. Doesn't that whole division make the playoffs if the season ended today? It's going okay. I believe so.

I do. Pretty good. There's another division in that conference that everybody's under 500. Yeah. But I did have that moment where I was watching the Eagles last night

and I was like, oh, I'm talking to John tomorrow. Oh, right. John's in Philly, but he's not. Do you get any, do you have like, as a division rival

to the Eagles, like, do you get mad at the Eagles or are they more like, you guys are okay? I'm from Philly. You guys are okay, but the Cowboys are my guy or do you hate them? No, I don't hate anybody. The Yankees have the Red Sox, which is genuine. There's no question about it that that's their arch rival. The Dallas Cowboys don't really have an arch rival because they're the arch rival of

all of their division. Of everyone? Yeah, but they're sort of above it all. I thought the Giants were their big rival, but I guess it depends on the era, right? Yeah, it depends who's good, right? It depends who's the best team in the NFC East. So is it the Packers or the Giants? But the

Washington fans, their most hated team is Dallas, too. Right. Well, in the 90s, as a 49er fan, that 49ers-Dallas matchup, there was rivalry there, but it was a rivalry of they were the two best teams. Right. That was very special. Right.

And that's a thing you just don't see anymore in the NFL, where there's two truly—I mean, the Eagles are 9-1, so maybe they truly are great, but there's, you know, the, the, the goal of the NFL to the, to the chagrin of many fans has been, uh, for decades has been, what do they call it? Uh, parody where they want everybody to be almost 500 and, and anybody can win every week. Whereas in the nineties, when you're talking about with that 49er Cal, but they were like two all-star teams. And it was so obvious that barring catastrophic injuries to any of the stars

that they would play in the NFC Championship and whoever won would then go to the Super Bowl and coast to victory by 30 points over the Buffalo Bills. Or the Chargers. That was the 49ers in the 90s. That was the one time the 49ers got through the Cowboys and they got to place the Chargers. And the Chargers were like, we've never been to the Super Bowl before

and it didn't go well for them. This is not NFL talk, though. I actually want to talk to you about the World Cup briefly. But I did have that moment watching the Eagles where I thought, well, Lex Friedman is very excited now, but John doesn't care. Well, I'll just say this. I did not that moment watching the Eagles where I thought, well, Lex Friedman is very excited now, but John doesn't care. Well, I'll just say this. I did not watch that game yesterday.

I was watching a scripted television with my wife, but I used it as an opportunity to do live activities on my phone just to keep track of the score. And it wound up the Eagles. It was a Sunday night game, the Eagles Packers. And it was actually an outstanding use of live activity because it was a super high scoring game. So every time I looked at my phone, it was a a new score so you use the news app for that uh no you know what i use is an app called uh sports alerts oh it is it is a very unimaginably named app but it is it's excellent and it's not the prettiest app to look at but i i can i I actually hadn't heard of it until recently because of this live activities thing. But they've got all sports live scores,

and you can tap into a game to get the box score if you just want to look at what actually happened. They've got everything you'd want for all sports. And for any game, you just tap into the game and then there's a menu at the top that just says start live activity for that game. And as soon as, you know, then boom, you've got a live activity for that game score.

And it's any sport. That's pretty cool. There are some sports you can now do it in the Apple News app. You can like say this is a game I'm following or a team I'm following and then it'll kick off a live activity. I'm looking forward because we're baseball fans, I'm really looking forward to the live

activity view for baseball. I assume that MLB, since they always seem to jump on Apple's new tech, will jump on live activities for the new season, and that'll be great. I used live activities recently for travel. I used flighty on a trip that we took over a weekend, a few weeks ago to Denver and I loved it. And then it was tracking my kids on the way in. So we were able to see like, okay, their plane took off and here's when it's going to be a little late. And it was, it's pretty great. Live activities, I think the challenge is just

that they released most of the API so late that it's just going to take a while for people to get up to speed. Anyway, World Cup. World Cup. Why not? So Mike and I talked about World Cup really briefly in Snell Talk, and I got some feedback that was like, how can you not mention how bad Qatar is? And I was like, well, I think anybody who's paying attention to the World Cup knows exactly how bad Qatar is. But just to say it, FIFA and Qatar are almost comically bad.

Qatar is an authoritarian state. FIFA is a corrupt... This is post everybody getting resigned and charged with crimes for corruption in giving the world cup to qatar but they're still corrupt so um you did some posts on daring fireball about this that made me laugh it's the things are going great meme but for the for the world cup a bunch of european soccer clubs were going to wear armbands that were anti-discrimination and fifa basically said anybody who wears those armbands

is going to get a yellow card so the uh the the different teams basically said okay we're not going to do it because FIFA is making us not do it and I think for people who aren't sports fans and I'm not the world's biggest soccer fan but I know the basic rules but if you're not a sports fan at all yellow maybe sounds mild but that's actually a severe penalty. And so the blaming the teams for backing, I don't blame the actual teams for backing out. I blame FIFA for instituting the penalty. But to say, oh, they, you know, why not just take a yellow card and wear the armband? But it's like a devastating penalty to have your captain start the game with a yellow card. You get one more yellow and then you're out of the game and you miss the next game.

And you're playing a man down for the rest of the game right which is not right not it's a huge disadvantage so so the uh so that happened and i think the netherlands had something sewn into their shirts and they were like you gotta you gotta rip that out you can't have that so it's going great um last week the new york times did a nice feature article that it's a great overview i'll put it in the show notes. A great overview of all of the graft and then the kind of horrifying conditions in which the stadiums were all built. Also, remember, World Cup usually happens in the summertime. They had to move it to the winter because it's so hot in Qatar.

And I've definitely seen some soccer commentators saying that they think the quality of the play at the World Cup is actually poor. and I've definitely seen some soccer commentators saying that they think the quality of the play at the World Cup is actually poor. Not that the players aren't great players, but because the teams have not necessarily been able to play together as much before the tournament as they would have in a summer World Cup season where the club seasons would end

and then they would get more time to practice together. And so, and I am also not a soccer expert and it's been fun to watch these matches because it is this kind of international all-star soccer tournament and it's fun to watch. But, uh, I, I definitely took note that some people thought that this is probably by moving it to the winter, not only are you stopping everybody's leagues for weeks, but, uh, also that the teams aren't as cohesive. There's long been this similar complaint. I don't think it's like the Olympic, the International Olympic Committee must love FIFA because it makes the International Olympic Committee look like

they're on the straight and narrow and that there's nothing to, about the way, you know, Oh, us corrupt. Look at FIFA. But there's always been complaints about being the host city for the Olympics, winter or summer that you, you end up having to build out all of this massive infrastructure that is only useful if you're hosting the Olympics, right? It's like, so who needs an, you know, Olympic size swimming pool with seating for thousands the rest of time, right?

Because you're not going to get the Olympics again. So there's all, you know, and you end up building stadiums and parking and temporary housing in the Olympic Village and you build all this stuff up and, you know, it's two weeks of Olympics and then it's gone. What do you do with it?

Qatar has taken this to an just a an absurd extreme because they didn't have any soccer they didn't have any stadiums that were capable of hosting a single world cup match i think they had a stadium that could be upgraded but they needed like seven more right And so they just built them all for scratch, from scratch, for this. And what are they going to do with them afterwards? Yeah. You know, it's their money,

so the money isn't really the waste. But, you know, you talk about environmental impact and stuff like that. I mean, it's just crazy. They built these massive, modern, you know, they look very nice. They don't look temporary. They all look permanent for a country that doesn't have any need for 100,000 seat stadiums. And in addition to all of the stuff on LGBT rights that are just awful in Qatar and being absurd, like where people are just fans coming into the matches if you've got

something rainbow colored on your shirt doesn't even matter what it says there's all sorts of documentation of guards telling people you can't come in with that shirt just because I mean I wouldn't be surprised honestly you came in with an Apple logo a classic Apple logo shirt they tell you to get out

also some some Iran related things right same thing where they're like you've got something in support of the women, some Iran related things, right? Same thing where they're like, you've got something in support of the women protesting in Iran and they're like, you gotta take it off. You gotta replace it. Yeah. You gotta take it off. But then the, the other, the whole other unrelated aspect of human rights that it's just absolutely shameful is the way they built these stadiums. I mean, and reading about, this is one of those things where I know I I've written recently, I know a lot of people have video fatigue because so much of the internet is broadcast in video.

And it's like, oh, you know, how do I fix my sync when it's stuck? And it's all these YouTube videos. Like, just give me an article. I want to read, show me some pictures and let me figure this out. I know people have video fatigue, but I watched some journalism about the conditions that the migrant workers who built these stadiums lived in, and you really have to see it. It needs to be seen to understand how horrible the conditions were. I mean, just the worst filth that you could imagine. One room, and you do everything from sleep, eat, cook, and go to the bathroom in it. You know, it's just crazy how bad the conditions are. I know there's people out there who are saying, you know, well, what about Apple's factories?

And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, this is a large issue in general. But it sounds like this was a particularly bad situation where people are coming from other countries. Their passports were often being held by their employers so they couldn't leave. They're essentially trapped there. They were being paid in one of the richest countries in the world, paid almost nothing. Often they had to pay thousands of dollars that they didn't have. So they were indentured essentially in order to come and work and work it off and send money home. And some of that changed due to criticism. But I think the stories that I've read about it and the videos I've watched about it suggest that while Qatar has sort of reformed some of those practices, those reforms are not necessarily as universal

as they should be. And the reform doesn't actually take them to a great place. It's just less bad than it was. I wanted to mention soccer journalist Grant Wall, who is a great American soccer journalist. Yes, there is one. He has a sub stack that I subscribe to. He was stopped twice. Once, he was literally in like a media area and he took a picture of a logo, a poster on the wall, and a security guard came up to him and said, you can't take pictures here. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm a journalist and this is a public media place. And they're like, you can't take pictures here. Delete it off your phone. And Grant Wall's response to his credit was, no, I'm not going to do that. And eventually it kind

of deescalated. But then he also wore a shirt with some rainbow colors on it to a match and got detained. And another journalist vouched for him and they got detained. And it was one of those things where eventually they said, oh, it's okay. We apologize. And they let them go. But I think what he learned is that's the default security in Qatar. And even though the Qatar government has made promises to FIFA about freedom for the people who are visiting the country in terms of things like wearing a rainbow on their shirt and they've they've agreed to that that that either they agreed to it but wink wink nudge nudge or they agreed to it but the security

people on the ground are so used to cracking down on this stuff that they just do it and then they're like oh right world cup right we let we let you go for two weeks and then then we'll crack down again so it's not great i also want to mention gianni infantino by the way just because i i think i mean it's terrible but i think it's also hilarious how corrupt fifa is and the moment he gave a bizarre press conference last week the head of fifa where he said that you can't criticize guitar if your country ever committed a crime in the past which is what a move that is um and also he declared that that he felt the pain of every marginalized group and he took it upon himself but he was fine with it so it was okay like what just. So if you ever wondered sort of like,

who's running FIFA? This is the guy who replaced the guy, Sepp Blatter, who basically got kicked out because of the corruption involving Qatar, but they just replaced him with another guy.

It's like he knew he was going to get criticized and went into the bookstore and went up to the counter and was like, where are your books on whataboutism? I'm working on something.

I'm working on a speech. And he just picked up a couple of books on whataboutism and was like, yes, yes, this is the way. But what about the British Empire and the slave trade? What about slavery in America? You can't talk about, okay. And the least of the issues, I mean, again, the human rights issues are preeminent. And the fact that it's even hosted in Qatar at all without their infrastructure is absurd. And it's just bribery. I mean, this isn't even like allegations. People have been caught. So it's the least of the issues. But this story with the beer is so fascinating.

Oh, man. Yeah. Budweiser, for decades, I think, has been the exclusive beer sponsor of the World Cup. I believe it's the case. I think that it's such that for the last many World Cups, if you go to a match and you want to have a beer in the stands- That'd be a Budweiser product. Yeah. Yeah. It's Bud or Bud Light or something from their brewery. Yeah, maybe Shock Top or something now. They've diversified a little, but it's all going to be Bud products.

That's it, period. Right. And when they said, hey, we're going to host it in Qatar, and they're like, well, wait, we have a beer sponsorship and fans from all over the world

expect to enjoy a beer while they watch. And Qatar was like, ah, we'll make an exception. Ordinarily, that would not be a place where you can consume alcohol in qatar but we'll make an exception and they're like okay good that's you know it's the same thing that they said they were going to do with you know people wearing uh armbands in support of uh lgbt rights uh you know and they're like, totally Darth Vader'd it. Yeah, that's right.

At the last minute, they just said no. And we should say, Qatar is not a dry country. I mean, it is actually technically a dry country, but you know what I mean. It's not a no-alcohol country.

They let you have it in restaurants and high-end bars. There's a very limited amount of public restaurants and things that are licensed and it's very expensive where you can. It's not completely banned in the country. but stadiums are not on that list.

Right. So a couple of absurdities of this is that Qatar came and said, okay, that thing we said about selling beer at the matches, yeah, never mind. That's not true. And that was two days before the World cup started and so budweiser they tweeted a picture of it it looks like the raiders of the lost ark warehouse at the end it's just this massive warehouse full of budweiser beer that they'd already shipped over there for the world cup matches and they're like we've already got all this beer so budweiser is trying to make the best of it they said whichever country wins the world we'll just give all this beer. We'll ship it to that country and give it away to fans or something. But the other part that is just so absurd, it's just so ridiculous and corrupt and just the worst of everything,

is that you actually can consume alcohol as a fan at these World Cup matches matches it's just that you have to be in one of the luxury boxes and they start that the seats for those uh the those boxes start at twenty two thousand dollars for like one seat one match so if you've got twenty two thousand dollars for your seat let's say you want to go with a pal or maybe your partner so you want two so if you've got you know 44 45 000 for seats then you can you can get some alcohol at the match it's it's not good it's yeah yeah anyway it's a shame because the world cup is such a great competition it is it's fun it's a even for non like really into soccer people like it's the best players in the world playing for their country. They have something,

they really care about it. It is because it's not the usual clubs. It's everybody, you know, at the highest level, uh, all together. And it happens pretty quick where they're the pool play.

And then there's the knockout matches. So they go from 16 down to a champion happens in a few weeks. It's a little it's like a little mini olympics it's why by the way it's why the best players in the world are not allowed to play in the olympics is because fifa is like we that's that's too world cuppy for us so they they limit it to like young people to play in the olympics but um so it's a great event even for somebody who's not super soccer crazy it is a great event and as much as i i am watching matches but my enthusiasm for it is it has been drained out of it because like look i watch the super bowl and i know how corrupt the nfl is but this is next level i know like i don't like rob manfred but i watch major league baseball and i watch the

world series right like he's the commissioner of baseball. He's kind of awful. Like, it's big business and there's a lot of awfulness happening in big business sports. And you try to focus on the sport. This is so bad that it's actually kind of hard to focus on the sport. And we didn't even mention, you mentioned the stadiums. One of them is built with like shipping containers. Lauren was asking me like, what are they going to do with these stadiums after? And I said, well, I suspect that this is part of a long-term plan where Qatar is going to start paying for exhibition matches in various sports or for like a rugby tournament or whatever. Like they're going to, they're going to roll out the money sort of like that live golf tour. They're going to have money and they're going to say,

we want clubs and friendlies and other sports that we'll put on in our, our stadiums and we'll pay you a lot of money to do it. And some people will do it. And that will probably be their game plan. And then they'll probably deconstruct. I know that one that's temporary, they will deconstruct. But as the rest of them, that's my guess about what their game plan is. Or

they'll just let them sit there. I mean, that's what happened in Brazil, right? As they built that stadium out by the Amazon. And they're like, it's a very small city. We don't need a stadium this big. And it's like, well, what you gonna do? World Cup. Let the kids play youth soccer inside

and be excited. Yeah, it's gonna be great. I mean, the Echoes alone will be, just get 10 people in there and let the Echoes bounce around. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Trade Coffee. If you're getting your coffee at the grocery store and drinking that same stuff every day, trust me, it's time to try something even better with Trade Coffee. And it is so easy to get fresh roasts delivered to your doorstep

from local roasters around the country with Trade. You'll wonder why you hadn't done it sooner. Trade Coffee is a coffee subscription service. This makes it so simple for you to discover something new and make your best cup of coffee at home every day the way you like it. Trade partners with the nation's top-rated independent roasters to send you coffee that you're going to love fresh to your home and on your preferred schedule. Whether you already know what you like or you're new to their specialty coffees and you want some help, Trade makes it easy and convenient to discover new stuff. Specialty coffee is very awesome and special to me. But don't be put off by that.

It's not like a big fancy word. This is just people who are making something to the best it can be so you can enjoy something fantastic every day. And what I love about trade is they help take down the barriers that you may feel and like, oh, well, I don't know what I want. They will help you work out what you love. Then they're going to keep sending you more stuff that is just as good as that last cup, if not even better. I think they're a fantastic service. If you enjoy coffee, trust me, you want to check this one out. Trade Coffee is also perfect for loved ones as a gift. They make it easy with their

digital gifting options for last minute shoppers or their coffee and equipment bundles to help you put something under the tree. Treat yourself or the coffee lover in your life with Trade Coffee. Right now, Trade is offering listeners of this show a total of $30 off a subscription and access to limited time holiday specials at drinktrade.com upgrade that's d-r-i-n-k-t-r-a-d-e.com upgrade for $30 off a subscription and access to limited time holiday specials at drinktrade.com upgrade our thanks to trade coffee for their support of this show and relay fm another sports item that i wanted to mention is, uh, more specifically about Apple and it's, it, Apple seems,

and Eddie Q is sort of leading the charge here. I think very ambitious about sports and sports streaming. Um, and Julia Alexander and I talk about this a lot on our downstream podcast that we do every other Tuesday. Uh, people should check that out. But,

um, Apple in particular, like, I think they're very motivated in reaching sports audiences because it's a way to reach audiences who maybe have not ever launched the Apple TV app or have not experimented with their TV to find, can they open the Apple TV app or do they need to buy a box that has the Apple TV app on it, whether it's an Apple TV or some other box. And one way you

drive people, and Amazon has found this with Thursday Night Football on Prime Video, is you drive people by putting sports on there that they have to watch on the TV app. And so they did their contract with the MLS for 10 years for American soccer. They had that Major League Baseball deal, which I read, I haven't read anything about that. I read that they had an opt-out every year, but I assume it's going to continue. I wonder whether it will change forms or not.

And of course, they're rumored to talk about, to be talking with the NFL about the NFL Sunday ticket package, which is the only NFL package remaining available, even though it's not quite as good as the others in a lot of ways because it's just a rebroadcast of other games with a bunch of limitations which may be why the deals are are holding it up um and i think it's fascinating however it has led to what i would

say is one of the most hilarious rumors of the week, which is a rumor that Apple's going to buy Manchester United. Because, sure, why not? I don't know how this rumor started. I don't know who thinks it makes sense. It makes zero sense to me because strategically, why would Apple want to buy one team? And for those who don't know, Manchester United is sort of like the Dallas Cowboys and the

Yankees rolled into one. If you were going to buy one, I presume perhaps the most expensive, if every sports franchise in the world went on sale and you got bids for all of them, might be the most valuable professional sports franchise in any sport anywhere in the world. Apple could afford it, obviously. Apple's business is bigger than sports. But if their goal strategically is to get streaming rights to various sports, it makes no sense to own one team in any sport, right? It wouldn't make sense for them to buy the San Francisco Giants. Like, oh, they're our local team uh or i guess oakland would probably be a better you got a better deal on that one right but what what sense would it make for the company that is supposedly a neutral

uh broadcaster of these games to own one of the teams i mean you could pull it off as a conglomerate, but Apple's not really a conglomerate, right? And it's not part of the strategy, right? No. And the direction they're going with sports is not about like, well, maybe we should just buy some sports teams. It's about this streaming strategy. And yeah, it's a little bit like saying well maybe apple could buy disney it's like well maybe but does apple want to have theme parks does apple want to have broadcast tv network does it like there's this is but this is just that this is like apple's gonna buy disneyland level of like

what why would that ever i mean i i think what's funny about it is Apple is now playing in this game. And so these sorts of rumors are happening. I get it. But, you know, really, the action is happening on this other side. And since you and I are both sports fans, what do you think about Apple's ambitions in terms of streaming? Are there aspects of it that interest you? Do you think that this is a smart strategy for them? I think it's such a mystery where sports goes, because I don't think anybody has cracked the nut yet on sports streaming. Famously, this season, Amazon Prime has the rights to Thursday night football in the NFL. And just by, honestly, mostly bad luck. I mean, they didn't schedule the best games on Thursday night football. It was known to be sort of the B package or C package, right? Like Sunday night football and Monday night football are the bigger primetime slots. But this season, by rotten luck, the Thursday night games have been awful.

Just teams that were expected to be good, but they've had injuries or just surprisingly bad. And they hired Al Michaels, who's my favorite play-by-play announcer. They hired him away from NBC. And it seems like he sort of got squeezed out of NBC because they wanted Mike Tirico, who's younger. It was his time to take over the NBC because they wanted Mike Tirico who's younger to, it was his time to take over the mic, but here's this guy who's 71 or 72 years old near the end of his career is by far the, you know,

has been broadcasting since he was super young. So 50 years of, of national memories of Al Michaels calling games and he's stuck calling these awful games. And he's kind of talking about how awful the games are which is really neat but i don't it it seems to me though that nobody's really cracked the nut of getting people to watch like like my dad is i mean my dad is 80 84 close to 85 uh he's he they might as well tell him that you've got to go up to the space station orbit to watch Thursday night football.

I mean, I could talk him through it. I really could, but he does. He has no interest. I taught, I talked to my mom. My mom is 82 and I talked to her 83 and,

uh, sorry, mom. And I talked, I talked her through it because I had set up like a Roku attached to her TV a while ago. I am getting her an Apple TV. Nobody tell her I'm getting her an Apple TV. I'm going to install that. But I had set up like a Roku attached to her TV a while ago. I am getting her an Apple TV. Nobody tell her I'm getting her an Apple TV.

I'm going to install that. But I had to write, I literally had to write up a document and print it about what buttons to push to get to prime video. But she was motivated and I know she's done it. She doesn't necessarily do it every week. Cause like you said, the games are not necessarily great,

but if there's nothing else on and she, she mostly watches sports, I did get her to get there. And the numbers for the Prime Video Thursday Night Football are pretty good for streaming and for Thursday Night Football. But I think you're right. That doesn't necessarily mean that they've cracked it because your dad is a perfect example.

It's like, well, they aren't good teams and it might as well be in space. And so I just don't care. And it's just, it's, it's gone from his mind then. Yeah. So I think that that is an interesting problem to solve.

And I don't think Apple is really close to it. Um, and I don't know what the answer is. So that's really my interest. And I think it's more for the general, you know, like the upgrade audience who's not into us talking the sports aspect of sports. I think it's a very interesting, not just user interface issue once you're into Apple TV or the Apple TV app that's built into your TV set or any of the other ways you might be able to watch these.

But it truly the broader sense of the user experience of, well, wait, what hardware do I even need? How do I do this? Whereas everybody knows how landline traditional cable TV works, you have to pay, you're going to overpay because you've almost certainly got a local monopoly to deal with. It's going to be expensive, but then once you have it, you just punch numbers into a remote control. And the game is on channel 804. And you type 804 and hit enter. And then the game is on. And that's it.

And if you have a DVR type thing, you can hit pause and pause temporarily and whatever. But people get that, right's that's you there's a number and you you enter the number and now now you're watching the game and i i just that to me is the more interesting part as they go to higher profile stuff so like okay they had friday night baseball every week last summer and i watched a couple i know you did too because i know we all wanted to watch the first game or two and just sort of get a flavor for how they're going to do it um I I just think people are confused by it I really do in terms of people like the sort of people who have no idea who who you and I are what upgrade is yeah well and you saw it um happen like when Aaron Judge was

on the record pace and the Yankees had a friday night game that might have been the record breaker and everybody's like freaking out in new york and it is new york that happens there uh why is this not on the yes network and all that and the problem with that friday night baseball package is it was something where unlike uh the mls thing where everything's going to be on the apple platform this was just like random games essentially are picked and put only on Apple TV for this baseball deal. And it's not great because you're just used to watching it on your local cable.

And suddenly it's like, nope, not this game. This game is an Apple game. And people got mad about it. I do think that the ultimate strategy is as simple as the more we make things that you you gotta see and they're only on our platform the more motivated people are to get on our platform and once they're there right once they've they've got it then we can market to them but we got to get them over the hump how do we get people who don't know what streaming is every time i visit

my mom she says what is streaming? And I explain it to her. And I put it on that piece of paper that's got the remote codes on it. It also says, what is streaming at the top? And it's like this. You can read this. I explain to you what streaming is. It's a little article just for you.

You got to get those people. And the digital natives, the younger people, it's not a problem, right? But there is, especially for sports, there is a large older audience. And again, people listening to Upgrade, you're not in this audience, but maybe you know people in this audience. And I'm not even saying retirees. I'm saying there's a lot of people, even in their 40s and 50s, I would say, who just don't care enough to do streaming. Or maybe they know how to do Netflixflix and nothing else and amazon and apple

are like we got to reach these people and we got to get them to know we exist it's i had an old boss who was a sales guy who used to say the first key uh to being to selling a product is you have to be considered to be bought you have to be considered you have to be in the ballpark and they're trying to do that here right which is just like please know we exist and then learn how to get us and then we can talk about you watching ted lasso right or renting a movie but we gotta we gotta get over the hump of like does your tv have apps on it well you know you say that but i you know whenever you and i talk we inevitably go back to to classic Apple talk. But that was the root of Apple's problem in that the nadir at the low point of the max market share was that they weren't even being considered. comes back to Apple 1996, 97 through 2000. And I remember there were surveys. I remember reading about it repeatedly in MDJ,

Matt Detheridge's newsletter, great newsletter. But it was amongst people who were polled, regular consumers who considered buying a Mac and were like, did you even really think about buying a Mac instead of a Windows PC? Apple's market share was astonishing. I don't know. It was like, I pulled this out of my butt, but let's say it was 40%. I don't know, 50%, maybe even higher. But amongst people who didn't even consider it, it was most people never even considered it. They just were like, I don't know. I've heard of Apple. I've heard of the Mac, but I don't know.

I have no idea why I would want one, Never even considered it. All I've heard is it's not what I'm used to, so therefore I don't think about it. That is absolutely key to anything. You've got to be considered. I do think there is, as a user interface thing for TV, the numbered things, numbered channels is so dumb, and it will look antiquated. It's already starting to look antiquated, right? That you've got to remember, at least for me, that our Fox channel is 805 and our ABC is 806. I have a couple of those memorized, but now that I'm older, I can't memorize channels like I used to when I was a kid. And they've renumbered them so many times.

But it is, conceptually, it's one level deep of hierarchy, and anybody can understand it. Everything's a channel, every channel has a number, and that's all you need to know. And you probably have a guide button on your remote control where you can see what's on right now. So if you don't know, you just look at the guide and look for one that says NFL football. Oh, here it is. And just up, up, up, click it. Or World Cup soccer. Oh, down, down, down, down.

There it is. It's on Fox Sports 1. But it's one level deep of hierarchy. And it's exactly the same whether it's Fox or ABC or NBC or ESPN or whatever it is. Fox or ABC or NBC or ESPN or whatever it is, everybody's got a number and all the numbers are equal in terms of how easy it is to get to them. Whereas with streaming, it's like, and Apple has tried to solve this. Their attempt to solve it is their TV app, which partners have to participate in. And of course, Netflix is the most conspicuous non-participant in the tv app but even there it's like still like an editorial decision on apple's part what gets put at the top

you know like hey what to watch or maybe it's an algorithm i don't know but it's weird i don't think so either but there's like if you're if you you can get to it through the TV app, it is still somewhat of a game to play. How do I get to this thing? I know that I can get to it somehow. And even if it means that I have to download a new app from the App Store, maybe I have to download the World Cup app, or do I need to download the Fox Sports app for my Apple TV? I don't know what to do, but there's some way to get to it, but I don't know what it is. And it's like, it's already, you've already lost compared to just type 8 6 0 enter on your remote control. And now you're on Fox Sports 1. I do wonder sometimes if they're going, if more apps or services or pieces of hardware are going to try and emulate linear TV

on? Like if I was, okay. If I, if I was working on cable box software and they're like, well, we've got our next gen cable box and it does apps and it also shows you channels. I would be in there saying, here's what we need to do. We need to show the apps as channels, right? Like we need to show the apps as channels, right? Like we need to pull out like, and there's an app called Channels that does this, that you can hook up to a streaming service or to a tuner or to a cable card using hardware. So it runs on the Mac. It runs on a bunch of different servers. And then you can also put it on your Apple TV.

And that's what it does is it's got like a guide view and you can make virtual channels that are coming from streaming. And there are also these fast channels, which are the like free ad supported TV that are, that are, they have linear streams. And a lot of the services now have added linear streams. So like, like flipping around to channels is a thing that's sort of coming back now. We'd like, we did the, everything's on demand and now they're like, oh oh but sometimes you just want to tune into a channel and see what's on and i wonder whether it's the cable boxes or whether it's going to be other uh other boxes that do this but like i wonder if there's a way it's yes i know it's a little bit like selling people the cell phone with the big numbers on it yeah it's like

it's super simple uh but there is something to it that's going on and maybe the ultimate extension of that is that it's like you you can always launch the netflix app but we also put a channel of the crown on and and it just shows it shows episodes of the crown how's it doing that well it's not actually doing it linearly it's it but if you click on the crown channel it will play an episode of the crown and then just keep playing and you're watching netflix but you're sort of tuned into a channel and it and for some people maybe that's maybe that's the way to do it now i know that you know in in a few decades that won't be relevant but like if you're if you're apple or amazon or anybody else you're like i i can't not crack the audience of people

who are not comfortable navigating a bunch of different apps on the streaming box and those people exist they're not listening to this show but they exist and the other weird thing about it and it's very interesting technology-wise, is almost everything else streaming-wise is nonlinear. You can watch it whenever you want. That's the whole point and the whole appeal, right? And there are, you know, maybe if you have a bunch of colleagues and everybody watches Game of Thrones on Sunday night, you kind of do want to watch Sunday night because all of your colleagues are going to be talking about it the next morning. But you don't have to start it exactly at 9 o'clock. You can watch it a little later. You can pause. You can do whatever. Sports are different because people want to watch them

live for the most part. But you also might want to tune in halfway. And what do you want to do? You want to jump to the live part. You want to catch up, whatever. But the other aspect, and again, it is a serious disadvantage for all streaming. If you're watching live sports and there's two games going on on two different services, how do you switch between them? Whereas on cable TV, it's trivial. This has been a solved problem since before it even got computerized. Back when it was really like an analog thing, you'd either have like a dedicated button on the remote to go back to the last channel or sometimes it's like you hit 00 or something like that. But there's something you can do to just quick zip between two different channels.

And they're both live and they switch instantly. There's no wait, no startup time, no spinner like, oh, let me catch up on this streaming thing. Streaming makes that impossible. If there's two football games going on on two different services at the same time, there's no way to skip between two. So I have been—this is going to be a piece at some point. I had somebody—Federico Vatici pointed out on Connected last week that, oh, Jason, everything he says, he turns into a story somewhere. It's like, yeah, man, I got to write 40 Macworld columns a year. It's hard to write that. Any little

glimmer of a column idea, I write it down. I'm like, I'm going to do that at some point somewhere. But I've been thinking about this in context of tvOS and the Apple TV. It's true on other streaming boxes, but I use the Apple TV every day. And that's how I watch all TV now because I cut the cord and then I have Fubo TV,

which is like YouTube TV and all these. It's a virtual cable bundle, basically, in an app. But Fubo, which has its origins as a sports app, has something called MultiView. And you can put two, three, four channels up at once, which is great when like college football is on, for example, because you can bring in all those different things from all those different channels and have two up or four up and zoom in and then zoom back and then,

you know, move over and listen to the audio for one and then listen to the audio for the other. It's great. I love it. Um, and I was thinking about how, when Apple does the MLS, uh, stuff, they're going to have multiple games going on at once. And, uh, with Sunday ticket, the it's all about multiple games at once that Apple has to be working on this interface at a higher level in TVOS, something like what Fubo does with multi-view and i think youtube does it now too but like because it's great i love it i used to have picture in picture in my tv my tube tv back in the day and when i upgraded like all those features went away because you needed multiple digital tuners and the cable box didn't do it and and that was the end of that

story for a while i love it and i and i to think, okay, Apple's got to do this because of MLS and probably because of Sunday ticket, if they do that deal. And what you brought up is the other part of it, which is you need to be able to put, so, so Fubo will let you put four up in one window, which if you've got a 4k TV is four, 10 80 P image. It's amazing. Um, but, uh, image it's amazing um but uh it's only in fubo right and apple has this picture in picture feature that just doesn't work it just doesn't work where you can put like one app in picture in picture and then go to another app and only some apps support it and they don't interact very well and and the picture in picture is rudimentary it very it's like a sad version of the ipad or the mac feature and this is where they gotta up their game is not only do i need to be able to do four up for mls in

the tv app but what i really ought to be able to do uh we ran into this the other day where there was a game we were watching on fubo and there was a game we were watching it was in the espn app it's like you can't do that and that that's bad. But what's worse is exactly what you just said, which is you also can't easily switch between them. Every time you do, you've got to like, there's a double tap and swipe and thing, or you have to press home and go back. There's no like press the button to go back to the other thing. And I feel like this is all rolled into one feature that they need to have, which is you need to be able to watch multiple video streams from different apps. And you need to be able to switch between different video streams without dealing

with app Chrome once you've got it set up. And I know they can't control it on other platforms, but on tvOS, they can control it. And that would be a winning feature if you could flip back and forth between the game you're streaming on this app and the show you're streaming on this app. And none of that nicety that is just built into every cable box exists on these streaming platforms. And it really does come back to one of my recurring themes talking about this stuff

is that at first, the computerization of TV was nothing but for our benefit, the users, right? The original TiVo and whatever its competitor was, whose name I always forget. Replay TV?

Replay TV, which had the magical 30-second button. Yeah, it was the Betamax of DVRs, for good and bad. But that was all possible because if you wanted to be a TV channel, if you were, let's just say ESPN, and you want to be in a cable package, what do you give to the cable providers? You give them a stream of video that is analog, and you're just sending

them this stream, and that's it. You have no more control. That's it. It's out of your hands. You don't get anything back. It was not two-way. You just send Comcast or whoever your cable provider is a signal. Comcast sends it to the house. And once it's in your house, we were free to do whatever we wanted to with it, which included hook it up to a computer, which would suck in these video signals and could record them and pause them and do all these things. And there was nothing they had to opt into. There was nothing they could do to prevent it. And so if you wanted to famously record your favorite shows on commercial TV and then skip all the commercials when you actually watch, there was nothing they could do about it. And now it's the complete opposite where everybody it's everything's a computer signal everything goes two ways you have to be signed in for everything they've always for you know how

many did you set up a new tv 4k the new thing yeah i ranted about this i think maybe last week or the week before where i literally i spent half an hour logging into every single item because apple doesn't do a migration of your of your logins or have a keychain on the device or anything like that. Over and over and over again, you're going to whatever the name of the app.com slash activate and enter this code and anyway and blah, blah, blah. And they can make their commercials unskippable because they're digital signals

and it's playing in their app with their software so they can make it so you can fast forward through the regular content, but you cannot skip the ads, et cetera, et cetera. And they can make it so that they don't participate in a unified central layer like the TV app so that you could skip between a college game on the Fox Sports app or whatever that other service you were using and a game that's on the ESPN app and just, you know, one button skip, you know, flip back and forth between the two games.

You can't do it. All right. We have more to talk about, but I want to take a break and read an ad because Mike's not here. And that means the job falls to me for this, this ad on the show. It is ZocDoc sponsoring the show this week. ZocDoc makes it easy to find quality doctors in your network and in your neighborhood. Plus, with real verified patient reviews, you can find the right doctor for you. ZocDoc is a free app. It shows you doctors who

are patient reviewed, take your insurance, and are available when you need them. It's matching you with doctors. You can find every specialist under the sun, whether you're trying to straighten teeth, fix an achy back, get that mole checked out, anything else ZocDoc has you covered. The mobile app is as easy as ordering a ride to a restaurant or getting delivery to your house with other apps that I'm not going to name in this ad. Search, find, and book doctors with a few taps. You can find and review local doctors, read verified patient reviews from real people who made real appointments with those doctors. So when you walk in that doctor's office, you are all set to see someone in your network who gets you. So find the doctor that is right for you and book an appointment in person or remotely that works for your schedule. Every month, millions of people use ZocDoc. It's their

go-to whenever they need to find and book a quality doctor. Go to ZocDoc.com slash UpgradeFM and download the ZocDoc app for free. Start your search with a top-rated doctor today, many available within 24 hours. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com slash UpgradeFM. That URL one more time, ZocDoc.com slash UpgradeFM. Thank you to ZocDoc for supporting Upgrade and all of RelayFM. John, I was on MacBreak Weekly last week, and I don't even know how it happened, but Andy Anotko and I basically grabbed the wheel

and turned us into a ditch, and we talked about BBEdit for a long long time and yet i'm not done talking about it because i wanted to talk about it with you too i think it was mostly in the context of having respect for how rich siegel and bare bones have kept that product evolving for 30 years and relevant for 30 years like the initial version was written in what like pascal and was written for you know system six and now it is built in xcode and uses c and it uses the latest apis from apple and it has just kind of kept evolving over 30 years and i know you worked there for a little while um but i just wanted to do like a little bb edit check-in like I use it every day to write almost everything I do um how do you use it

well let me just say this when I worked there from like 2000 to 2002 yeah and a long time ago moved to Massachusetts for it but I got there and uh you know it was very welcomed uh you know and we had like a uh it was actual office at the time, but there was a tradition every Friday, the whole company went out to lunch. And the first week I was there, we went out to lunch and Rich said something about Andy being there was going to join us. And I'm like, wait, who? Wait, no, no.

And it was like literally my first week working there, we had lunch and Andy and Atko was there. And I was like, oh my God, I've always wanted to meet you. So the first time Andy and I met in person was like my first, the end of my first week at the job. And I was like, this is the most exciting place to work I've ever been. And here we are 30 years later, still talking about it. How do I use it every day? Boy, it's, it is, I, it's almost the only other app I could compare to. It's like the Finder where it's, it's, I don't even think about it. Yeah. Right.

It's, it's, I, I have, I guess the difference is I have more complaints about the Finder and I don't know, I don't know who to file them with, but I don't really even think about it. It's just there. It is like the ground that I mentally walk on every day. I don't write most of my posts at Daring Fireball in it. I use MarsEdit for that. But for all of my long articles, certainly my reviews, anything that you would think,

hey, this is a pretty, you know, gruber wrote something long you know today uh 100 certainty went through bbm uh at some point it was probably written entirely in it so i do long form writing in it in markdown uh my programming which i don't publish as much anymore and i keep thinking you know at some point i'll actually get around to it but i used to uh are everybody's the internet's mutual friend dr drang often you know just on his excellent blog you know we'll just he'll come up with some custom solution to something and then after he's made the custom solution he writes it up and makes you know explains how he did it uh i have all sorts of little custom things like that you actually know about some of them which i haven't shared with with the world uh i've talked about it it's not secret but i have like a markdown lint i call it markdown lint which is just a more like a pre-flight checker remember pre-flight for like quark express where you could

before you sent a quark express file back when I was doing print work, there were these great tools where you'd take your Quark document and just drag and drop it onto a utility. And it would go through and look at all the fonts you referenced and all the images in the document. And are they all high enough resolution? And it would give you a list of warnings like, oh, you've scaled this image up if you have a higher resolute you know blah blah blah that's what it does for markdown for me is before i publish an article it goes through and looks for markdown typos you know which where i forgot like an asterisk or forgot a closing brace or didn't define a link or something like that. And as the creator of Markdown,

it was something that was in my mind from day one. Like I published it. I was like, this is great. And then I started, as soon as I started using Markdown myself, I started making Markdown mistakes. And I thought I should write a tool that catches these mistakes.

And something like 18 years later, I actually broke down and wrote it. But I made that in BBEdit. And is it Perl? It's Perl. Perl is my... I'm not a great programmer. That's just why I've made a career out of writing. I have a degree in computer science, and it was like I'm just good enough a programmer to recognize how bad of a programmer I am in the grand scheme of things, you know, which is so very, you know, before I even graduated,

I was like, you know, I cannot be a professional computer, or I could be, but I'm never going to go anywhere, you know. Or I could be, but I'm never going to go anywhere. But Perl is the language that fits my idiosyncratic brain the best. And I get it. I'm never, even in the early days, like when Perl was on the upswing in popularity, I latched onto it very early. I was never one of those Perl users who was telling other people, you should use Perl, because I was like, oh, no, this is not for most people. If you think Perl is weird because

the syntax looks weird, you're right. It is weird. But what Perl has that no other language, with the possible exception of Ruby, is treating regular expressions as a first-class citizen of the language. And that's what most of my programming is, is manipulating text. And I, for whatever reason, again, I don't tell other people. I believe in Jamie Zawinski's famous axiom of when you're faced with a problem and you think, I know, I'll use regular expressions. Now you have two problems, right? I believe that that's true. Unless you have a weird, weird mind like mine, which regular expressions, I just, it's like, I realize how weird the syntax is. I realize how most people obviously aren't ever really going to take to it other than

at a basic level. And I just love them and take to it other than at a basic level. And I just love them and I take to them naturally. And Perl makes that possible at a fundamental level of the language and almost everything I want to do to make little tools for myself in my own work that I can and do right in Perl, and I do that in BBEdit. I taught myself Python last year, and it's more modern than Perl pearl you know it's a great language you have to compile regular expressions which is not as great as just throwing them out there you have to compile them and then run them which i don't love uh because i use that a lot uh because i love i you and i are both uh big regular expressions

fans and i wrote a bunch of articles at macworld basically trying to get people to try it out because although they look impenetrable you can figure out the syntax and once you do there they will save you what I always say about regular expressions is they will save you more time than it will take for you to learn them I guarantee it but you do have to take the time up front to learn them did you did you write the regular expressions chapter in the BB Edit manual, or did you only... I always ascribe that to you, but did you only work on it or edit it or something? I can humbly take significant credit for it. It's a good intro to regular expressions. It's very good. Well, so long story short on that is before I got to bare bones, BB edit, BB edit, they call it grep. They've, you know, it's just a, it's the same thing. Grep is really just a Unix tool that uses regular expressions. But what BB edit has called grep and what most people call regular expressions, same thing. six point something they bb edit used a very rudimentary regular expression engine

with which didn't support uh only really the basics but that it wasn't because bb it was behind the state of the art that was the state of the art and uh again it comes back to pearl pearl the programming language actually you it was a guy named Henry Spencer who wrote an open, it was so long ago, it was before they called it open source, but like wrote a public domain. Actually, Henry Spencer wrote, I think, three regular expression libraries, but they all implemented very similar basic syntax, right? Just sort of the plus, the star, the dot, you know, but enough, 90, you know, 95% of what anybody does with them today are still in that basic syntax. But that's all BBEdit supported,

and the manual already described that very well. When I was there, I think it would have happened eventually anyway, but one of the things I really pushed for was for BBEdit to adopt the PCRE engine, Perl-compatible regular expressions. It actually has nothing to do with Perl other than it's an open source library that implements the regular expression syntax that Perl itself implements in its language. And BBEdit switched to that in the six-point-something era. And my reward for getting the feature accepted and put into BBEdit was I got to write the chapter to document it at all.

So it's sort of, but of course, once I dug into it, I enjoyed it. But it is sort of proto-Daring Fireball, right? sort of proto daring fireball right it's you know and it's and people say that i see it comes up all the time where people say boy i didn't regular expressions never made sense to me till i read the the chapter in bb at its user manual and it's like it and then somebody says you know gruber wrote that and i didn't write the whole thing there was the basics were already there so like the what does the dot do what does the plus do i didn't rewrite i have to rewrite that and it bb has always had to me at just a user manual that it could it's hard to imagine how it could be better because it documents everything everything is documented with clarity and concision.

So it was a challenge, but yes, effectively I wrote like the last 80% of the BD edit regular expression chapter. Right, it is. By the way, I am told in our chat room that Python has added a direct sort of, you match using the regular expressions dealie. I don't know. I don't know Python that well,

but you do, you do an re dot match and you can actually get in a pattern. You don't have to compile them. And I, I, that's not how I learned, but I learned by Googling things and probably was doing it wrong, but that's good. So it's a little easier. I'll, I'll, I'll keep that in mind the next time I write a Python script. But, um, I I'll say the thing about regular expressions is that they struggle to be explained to people. And that's why I wrote so many articles about it at Macworld back in the day. And a lot of them related to BBEdit because that was a really easy way in TextWrangler to get access to those regular expressions. The definitive book on this is Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E.F. Friedel. It is a great book, but is so dense and intense. And in a context of using a command line

that especially for Mac users, I would say, like, I can't, I mean, I do recommend it. It's a great book, but it is so, there's so much. And the nice thing about the BB Edit chapter is it feels very much like somebody who read that book and then was like, okay, how do I explain this to somebody who is not the audience for Jeffrey Friedel's book? And so it's a good place to start. I would have to look at copyright dates. I forget I'm a huge fan of Friedel's book and have read both editions cover to cover just to refresh my memory of it. I don't remember if his first edition was already out. It might've been.

And if so, I definitely owe him significant thanks. And even if it was after, I still owe him thanks because it's a wonderful resource. I would say it's sort of like the BB Edit chapter is like strunken white. It is like a pamphlet. And Jeffrey Friedel's book is like the dictionary.

It is like, it's the OED, it's the it's the oed you know and it's everything you know and therefore it is in you know 400 page book as opposed to h literally just a chapter but um but yeah you know it's i i don't know what i would do without bb i don't know what my i don't know what i would do without it because i don't have to think when I'm doing it and I know how to customize it and add a little, oh, here's my BBEdit. John Gruber's copy of BBEdit has all these functions in the script menu and the text filters menu that your copy of BBEdit doesn't have and probably shouldn't have. But that I can, hey, I've been doing this same thing over and over again. I should automate it. I know how to automate it in BBEdit, like the back of my hand.

And it's so easy. And, you know, and, and I, it's, there's, I, I, honestly, I've been using it for 30 years because I started using BBEdit before it was even a commercial app. bb edit before it was even a commercial app it was two version two point something where i saw it in the drexel dorms when it was still i i've you know just like a there only was the free version um i've been using as soon as i saw it i was like i've got to get that got it from you know my local bbs or probably usenet or something have been using it non-stop ever since i don't think i've ever lost anything in bb edit ever even back when crashes you know because it had like automated backup features where you'd i honestly maybe at the most i've lost like a sentence or a line or two of text you know but this you know going back to the era when your Mac might just seize up because you browsed a web page that made Internet Explorer freeze up the whole system.

And, you know, there's it's not that the app crashed. It's not that something crashed. The whole thing would just lock up and there's literally nothing you do but restart the Mac. And when was the last time I saved my document? Oh, God. You know, it's terrifying how much data collectively we all lost back in that era. I never lost anything in BBEdit because BBEdit had, when it needed it, automated backups. And quite frankly, and I'm almost always running a beta version for 30 years because I got to know

Rich. I've been running beta versions or pre-beta most of the time. Right. And it still doesn't crash. It is a more reliable, less crashy program in beta than most apps are in release. But even if it's something terrible happens in BBA that does crash or something like that, you start it back up and everything you had open is open again, including your unsaved changes. And it's like, you know, the peace of mind that that gives me, it's the same peace of mind. Like, I feel like something I type into a BBA window is as stable as ink on paper.

I also have it doing all of those autosaves in the background. So I also know it's like Time Machine, but not Time Machine. If I delete something or have a version that I want to go back to, and that rarely happens, I try to not lose things like that. But there's a paper trail of all the changes I've made to my documents as I'm working on them. And I can go back and pull an earlier version and pull out the thing that I deleted that I want back. And that's happened a few times too. So it's not even just protection from crashes. And the software that I ran, by the way, that always crashed my Mac was OS 8.

That was it. OS 8. That was a bad time. That was a dark time. OS 8, not so great. But BBEdit's not, never let me down. Wasn't that the slogan? System 8, not so great. But BBEdit's not. Never let me down. Wasn't that the slogan? System 8, not so great. I think among users. I remember where I was. I remember my cubicle at the time. And I remember that it was a good day when I only had to force reboot my Mac three times in the day. Because it usually was more than that. They would just stop and you'd be like, okay, and press the reboot button. It was not good. That was a tough time. That was a dark time.

That was why they were working on OS X or working on finding another operating system because it was kind of all falling apart there. And BB-Edit just integrates in my work in so many little ways. Yeah. The ads that I serve on Daring Fireball, I sell myself the little sidebar ads.

And once a week, I have to switch them over from last week's sponsor to this week's sponsor. And it's just a simple little homegrown system I've made myself. I just edit a text file that's on my server. I use Transmit from the great folks at Panic, but I can just double click the file and transmit and it knows to open in BB edit and it opens the remote file over the internet and BB edit. I put the new sponsor's image name and their slogan and their URL and I hit save and boom. Now I have, uh, this week's ad is up on daring fireball once a week, every week I do that. And you know, I don't even think about it. It's like, Oh, it's like, I have a reminder go off. It's Mondayay it's time to switch the sponsor over uh i do it in bb edit without even thinking so

why why don't you open that directly in bb edit via sftp uh i could shift oh i i don't know i uh i guess because and i know that the bb bb edits's built-in SFTP thing has gotten more robust over the years. It has. it was a very common, a frequently requested, a whole list of features along the lines of add to the SFTP support built into BBEdit. And our standard answer was something along the line, it was like something we had like a shared text snippet to answer, was that's a great idea, but there are numerous great dedicated file transfer apps for the Mac that all integrate with BBEdit using the ODB Editor Suite. And we'd rather spend our time on BBEdit-specific text editing features, and you should let – and we had a list, like Interarchy and Transmit and Fetch and these apps. And they all integrate with BBEdit and they're all great. And you should check those out because all of those implement the feature.

That feature you asked for, all of these three great apps already have it. And we'll file it away for future consideration. The answer was a lot shorter than the one I'm coming up here with. No, I still edit a lot of text files directly out of Transmit, which I use now. I used Interarchy for a long time. I used Fetch for a long time. And I've been using Transmit now for a long time. I do that all the time too.

But every now and then I'm like, you know. What I notice is I press save and then sometimes Transmit's like, okay, now I need to establish a connection and I'm going to make it. And then it's like, now I've saved it. And when I open that file directly in BBA, then I just press save and it's saved. And I don't, I don't think about it, but it's just, it's funny. There's like pathways that you follow. I mean, you get used to them and you're like, well, I'm comfortable looking at that directory and transmit and then picking the file I want to edit. And so I do it that way instead of this other way where you could probably look in your recents and just find the file and choose it and it would open it over the server. Yeah, I could. I guess it's because I do other

file transfer stuff too, right? So including the uploading of the images for the ads. There you go. Yeah, that's the reason. That's a good reason for it. I cannot get into it here because we have limited time, but the quote-unquote CMS for my podcast is still a bunch of text files, not a proper CMS. So that's a tab that's always open in Transmit, too. There's a couple of other server-related things. So having one Transmit window with four tabs to four different folders where I do edit files and they're all open all the time, I mean, in Transmit window with like four tabs to four different folders where I do edit files and they're all open all the time. I mean, in Transmit. And Transmit can just sit there in the background and takes up, you know, minimal memory, doesn't do anything.

And then it's only there when I need it. I guess that's why. I'm going to whistle past that particular graveyard. I have about a million questions about that, but I'm going to just go right past it because we do have limited time. We mentioned MarsEdit. I wanted to throw that out there. Our friend Daniel Jalkut is working on a new version. There's a public beta. Big feature in MarsEdit 5 is finally, finally, syntax highlighting for Markdown, which is great because I do use MarsEdit. I use MarsEdit as a conduit for my big pieces from BBEdit.

I have a script that I run that parses the document and then puts it in MarsEdit ready to be posted to the blog. And then I will write some shorter pieces in MarsEdit directly. And it always kills me because I write in Markdown that it hasn't done syntax coloring because that's very helpful and would encourage me to write more short pieces in MarsEdit.

And so it was great to see Daniel actually adding Markdown support in an app that I, I had that moment where I went, I didn't use it for a while and I came back to it and I thought, wait a second. It is, it's an odd story. I mean, number one, I love and adore Mars

Edit and don't know what I would do without it. I guess what I would do without it is rewrite it in BB Edit, but it wouldn't be as That's what I had to do on iOS. On iOS, because there's no BB Edit, I have a text editor that I use called OneWriter and I have shortcuts that all run out

of OneWriter that do everything that I do in MarsEdit, including send XML to my server, to WordPress in my case. And it used to be movable type. And then it opens it in the web interface so I can press post. And I had to do that because I didn't have BBEdit or MarsEdit on iOS. But on the Mac, I just used B Edit, Mars Edit, and it's good. People call it front matter. So in other words, if you're using some sort of CMS type system where the input is a bunch of markdown text files, you have front matter at the top where you can put like title, colon, and then that's the title,

tags, colon, and a list of tags. Probably a date, right? If you want to be able to adjust the publication date of the thing. And then it's some kind of marker. And then underneath the marker is the actual markdown text of the article or post or whatever it is. So I could do something like that in BBEdit and just make some write some kind of script to parse the front matter but that is backwards to me you're right that feels like doing email in the 90s when sending email at the command line terminal was effectively the same thing right it was just a big text file and a subject colon space that's where the subject was and the the email program that you used on the unix terminal would just parse the file to know that at the top, subject colon space, that's the subject of the email. Whereas using MarsEdit is like using – it's a lot.

I mean it's – going back to – I know when it was created. Brent Simmons actually created MarsEdit before we were selling it to Jacket. Inside NetNewsWire, I believe. Right. Brent Simmons actually created MarsEdit before we're selling it to Jacket. Inside NetNewsWire, I believe. Right, right. But the basic pitch was make posting to your blog like sending a mail message with Apple Mail. Yeah.

And that's the pitch. And it's like, yeah, that sounds awesome, right? So that you have these dedicated fields that you can tab between. I love MarsEdit. But it is bizarre that I'm literally the person who invented Markdown 20 years ago. I use it every day. I have written, I believe, honestly, I believe over 20,000 posts to Daring Fireball using MarsEdit in Markdown. Possibly, it might be up to 30,000 at this point. It's close.

But tens of thousands of posts that have gone through MarsEdit using the markup language that I invented, and I'm very close personal friends with Daniel Jalget, the guy who makes the app. And yet, MarsEdit it didn't get marked down syntax styling until officially not yet. Not yet. But it's close, very close, late, maybe by the end of 2022. I honestly think that anybody out there who's nodding their heads is like, yeah, it's about time. Don't blame Jalket, blame me, because I honestly feel

like it's my fault that I should have applied my skills of persuasion to get... One of the advantages of becoming friends with the developers of the tools you use is that you get priority access to the feature request line, or at least get to bend their ear. And I have certainly mentioned it to Daniel numerous times over the years, both in iMessage, probably going back to AIM, right? AOL Instant Messenger, iChat, right? Happy Cyber Monday to everybody, by the way.

Certainly in person, over various meals and conferences and beers over the years. I have mentioned it to him, but I don't believe, looking back at how long it's taken, I don't believe I've applied sufficient pressure. And, you know, it's not like MarsEdit didn't have syntax styling. It's had HTML syntax styling for 20 years. It just didn't have Markdown. But then, so the funny thing is me, the guy who made Markdown have written tens of thousands of posts with no Markdown syntax support at all in the app I used to do it. That's my point. I am always worried about breaking the seal on a discussion with an

app developer about the text editing engine. Cause I feel like that's one of those sore spots where they're probably, you know, they probably are not building their own text editing engine, right? They are on some text editing engine that they have put to, that they have, have added, or they are supporting, and it has issues that are very complicated and then go way beyond the scope of my little problem. This came up, BBEdit, in fact, just recently changed its text editing mechanism. And the end result was, it was actually a feature request I made a while ago. And it was one of those moments where Rich Siegel said, this is because of the text editing engine we're doing. I'm like, I'm backing away.

I'm like, okay, I'm gone. I'm like, never mind. Never mind. I don't need ligatures in code fonts. It's fine. And they just updated their thing. And I don't even want to know how hairy it was in the, in the background there that they had to do this. I believe it was forced. This is actually one of the reasons why BBA survives is they really are great at being disciplined and prioritizing when they make

changes to their app. And, um, they don't rush to support every new feature it's very much like well let's see whether we need to support it and is there a is there when you're a small company like them is there a reason for us to put the effort in here and if there is we'll do it but if there isn't we won't do it yet and i think when ventura went into beta bb edit got sluggish on ventura and they knew it and they didn't like it. And I think that was, I don't know, I think I know this for sure, but I think that was the motivator where they're like, all right, we have to do this. And I reported, I said, do you know it's sluggish? And they're like, yeah, there's a text editing thing happening here that makes it sluggish. Even with short

files, you know, you type it and you can sort of see that the letters are struggling to keep up with your typing. And I think that was the thing where they're like, all right, now we have to do this because by the time Venturi ships, we need to make this change, whatever it was in the background. And the net result was that, yeah, you can, coding fonts now have ligature support and BB edit. I don't know what the story is with Daniel Jalkut. And maybe he's just like, oh, those guys with their markdown, whatever. But I was always afraid to mention it. I did mention it occasionally, but I was afraid to push it

because I was worried that it was like going to unravel his app, right? Like there was some reason, a really good reason that he didn't want to touch that because it was going to break everything. And like, that's not a good enough reason to, like, don't add the support if it's going to kill your app, Daniel.

Just ignore us. But he did add it now. So that's great. Yeah. Well, and I, you know, again, I think I could have tightened the screws and maybe gotten it out. Maybe, maybe gotten them to do it. But, but I would, I, but my other consideration is I know that the way I use MarsEdit, the guy who writes Daring Fireball is an unusual situation. Most people, even if you're a regular user and you have a blog, you don't post as many entries as I do because it's my job. And there aren't that many people who have a job like me. I happen to be talking to one right now, but there aren't many of us. And so I don't want to tell him what's important for his app to keep

most of the users happy because I know it's not. And there are things like supporting new APIs for WordPress and stuff like that that are more important than maybe Markdown syntax coloring. And the other thing is I maybe have my own self to blame because when I created Markdown 20 years ago, or almost 20 years ago at this point, part of the point is that it was supposed to look good and readable in plain text with no syntax styling at all. So of all of the various language, like I think HTML without syntax coloring is if you're actually writing prose and you're putting the P tags and A tags and span tags and stuff like that, you really want syntax coloring to tell what's a tag apart from what's content. Whereas the whole point of Markdown's design is that it's supposed to look good as a completely uncolored, plain,

black text on a white background string. It's just, oh, the asterisks are around the word. That's emphasis, right? That's the whole point of it, that it's supposed to look good without syntax coloring. So I kind of have to blame myself that, you know, and again, and that's why I was happy, if not completely satisfied, but happy to keep using MarsEdit for literally close to two decades without Markdown, explicit Markdown styling support, because it was fine without it. But now that it has it, I'm super happy. And he did a really good job because one of the things I really like, IA Writer does this, there's a couple of other apps where it's not just coloring the words, it actually applies the semantic style. So if you in Markdown make something italics, the text is now in an italic font in MarsEdit.

If you make it bold, now it's bold in between the double asterisks. It's actual bold text. And I find that to be so super pleasing. And Markdown is not supposed to be WYSIWYG because you're supposed to see the punctuation markers, but it is this nice hybrid ground between WYSIWYG and seeing the punctuate, not trying to hide the markdown in a preview. I find it to be the perfect middle ground, and MarsEdit right out of the bat with version five has a very, very nice implementation. Yeah, that's one of the things I really enjoy about the iOS editors that I'm using is they, they do, they actually do the thing where if you put it at a level one, right, it makes it bigger and bolder.

And it's really, that's really nice. And it's still all the text you see is the markdown. It's just styling your markdown um because you know my my big complaint about some text editors is that they will let you write a markdown but as soon as you like complete a link they hide the link yeah and they make it a hyperlink and it's like i i my business is hyperlinks right like and i i sometimes need to check them and link and make sure they're right or edit them and for me i need to see a bridge too far yeah right yeah don't hide it and one level deep is too deep for me i need to see it yeah for sure before we go i had one quick thing that i wanted to do rather than do some ask upgrade

i'm going to do a an ask john gruber because i don't think i know the answer here and i just i would i would like it for us to sort of uh it on the record here about your setup, basically, the tools you use to do your job every day. I assume that you're – are you sitting – is your podcasting area also the place where you work all day? No. Or is it different? No, I'm fortunate enough in our new home that I have a little podcast cave in the basement where I literally only do podcasts. All right. So where you are now is not – so let's talk about... I'm more interested in where

you write every day in your office. What is your setup there? What do you have? Monitor, computer, keyboard, any other accessories? I'm curious what you've got. So my one and only main Mac work computer. I have a dedicated old power book down here. It's part of the, having a dedicated podcast station is it set it, forget it. Right. It's not a power book though, right? It's not that old. No, no, it's not that old, but it is, it is due to be, it's a 2015 MacBook pro.

Um, and it's, it's aging out. Um, but my, it's not But my podcast setup is not interesting. My writing, my main work machine is a 14-inch MacBook Pro, completely maxed out. It is the 64 gigs of RAM and whatever the fastest chip is. Because maybe I didn't buy the most storage. I forget how much. Maybe I did, though.

Is four terabytes the most? I forget. But I knew what I like to do is get a maxed out MacBook Pro and use it for years until it's too old. Because once it gets past the, is it a lemon or not, right? And it's not. And I've been fortunate over the years that I can't remember gets past the, is it a lemon or not, right? And it's not. And I've been fortunate over the years that I can't remember ever buying a Mac that was a lemon. But then I don't have to do anything.

And I hate setting up a new Mac. It's so much easier with Dropbox and iCloud and stuff these days. And so much stuff is synced to the cloud. But still, I don't want to install anything. I'd rather get a maxed out macbook pro that's overkill from my technical needs certainly on the gpu um but then i can i'll use this macbook pro for years so i got it last year when the 14 inch was new uh i bought the 14 instead of the 16 because i do travel sometimes and i when I do travel, smaller is better.

I have it hooked up to... This is something I need to write. Spoiler for the upgrade listeners. You can listen to me talk about it. I bought the studio display with nanotexture glass or whatever they call it, and the fancy adjustable stand. So that's, I guess, maxed out as well. That's my display. Now I have windows that face the South in my office. And so South facing windows in North America, it's lovely because on a nice sunny day, my office gets

beautiful natural light. But there are two times of the year. We just got past the one. They're six months apart for obvious reasons. That's how the sun works. But it's like October and April, I believe. There are times of the day that just happen to be my prime working hours, like noon to 2 p.m. Or 1 to 3 p.m., where the sunlight literally streams in through the window up above where my blinds go. I've got windows up high that don't have

blinds to cover them. And they literally hit right where my desk is, just full-on sunshine on a sunny day. And so what I was doing for years was, well, I didn't have this office set up the way it was for a couple of years when we moved in here. But what I did before I had the studio display was I would just, for a couple of weeks in October and April, I would take my MacBook Pro and go up to the kitchen and work up there for a couple hours. And I'm lucky enough that I have space on a kitchen island where I can work because it was literally unusable. The sunlight, it wasn't just like, ah, it's a little hard to read. I mean, it was full-on turned my display at full brightness into just a mirror. The studio display with nanotexture

is so unbelievably good at that that I literally don't know when the direct sunlight is hitting it. So the first time, I didn't have it in time for April because I was still using the review unit from Apple. And the one they sent me back in March was the glossy default Surface. And then they were backordered for a while. I don't think mine showed up till June, even though I ordered pretty early. It didn't show up till like June. Yeah,ered for a while. I don't think mine showed up till June, even though I ordered pretty early. It didn't show up till like June. Yeah, it took a while.

And so it took until October for me to hit the time of the year when I had my direct... There were other times on sunny days where I'm like, oh my God, this is so much better. There's just so much less reflectivity. I don't see myself reflected in my display. But when that direct sunlight time of October hit, I had to hold my

hand in front of the display, like an inch in front of it, to see that my hand is bathed in direct sunlight. And then I move it away, and I could still read the screen and not even... And it's like, okay, I can sort of see it. That's how good the nanotexture is. It turned completely unusable direct sunlight. I would have to take my Mac and work somewhere else to get anything done to I can't even tell the direct sunlight is hitting it. That's how good it is. I also love the stand, even though for me, because I'm not moving it around and I'm not, you know, it's like I've set it and forget it. it around and I'm not, you know, it's like I've set it and forget it. I sort of what I should just get out a ruler and make like a note telling me this is the exact height that I like so that if

I ever do need to move it, but I've got it set up just right. And it's, it is, you know, you pay it. It's, I think it's 400 bucks for the stand, which is a lot of extra money, but it is a really nice stand. So I've got the studio display, that. I've got my keyboard. I'm trying to give up trying other keyboards. I've got my Apple extended keyboard too. And I gave it up for a couple of years when I was getting my office renovated. And there were like two years where I was working full-time on a MacBook Pro, just using the MacBook Pro's screen because of renovations for my office and some visual issues with my retinal detachments a couple years ago, where I couldn't focus at an arm's length distance. I needed to be a little closer

to the screen. So I wasn't using any external keyboard. And now that I'm back and I have a desk setup, it's like I'm done shopping around for keyboards. Who am I kidding? I'm never going to find one I like as much as the Apple Extended Keyboard 2. So I'm on my second Apple Extended Keyboard 2 from, so what, 30 years ago, I won my, I've told this story before. I had a Mac LC in college at Drexel and the LC came with the ADB keyboard Apple ever made. I forget the name of it, but they were the squishiest, weirdest. It was sort of a smaller footprint keyboard. You could, anybody who looks up that Mac LC and like one of those classic Mac sites, they'll

show the keyboard. I hated it. And I knew that the kids who had the SE30 had the good one. And so I had a friend and we were the two best players in John Madden football. And we had a championship where I put up $100 and he put up his Apple extended keyboard too. And I won the game. And so that's where I won my first Apple extended. And you think, oh, wait, 100 bucks. But they sold, they were like $160 retail or more. I forget what they cost, but they are $200.

I don't know. They were insane. And that's $1991. So it was a fair bet, but I won it. And I always loved that I won it. But then eventually I broke the E key. One of these days I'm going to find somebody who knows how to solder.

I don't, but maybe they can fix, you know, solder on a new switch for my E key. But I literally, I must have broken the E key by typing because it's the most frequently typed letter in the English language. But I'm on my second one. I have a couple other spares hidden down here in my basement. But my second one is still going strong. And I use – people always want to know when you use an old ADB keyboard. There's a – the old classic Griffin iMates still technically work. That's the adapter to go from ADB to USB.

go from ADB to USB. But years ago, five, six, seven, eight years ago, at some point there was a major version of macOS that updated. I think it was called macOS. It might have been in the OS X when it was called OS X. But anyway, what happened is it somewhat broke. The caps lock key no longer worked. It's somewhat broke. Like the caps lock key no longer worked.

Like the, you know, and on the, as you well know, the actual caps lock key locks. You type it and it goes down and stays down like an old keyboard, like an old typewriter. But there was no more caps lock support. I forget what else. But anyway, there's a great little company. I think he's a one-man show. It's Tinkerboy.

Tinkerboy, and his domain name is Tinkerboy.xyz. And he sells all sorts of little things. I think he 3D prints them somehow or something like that. Yeah, and there's a little Raspberry Pi or Arduino or some little tiny, teeny, tiny computer. It's a tiny little computer, which is why the USB end of the thing is a little bigger. He sells it.

It's a $40 adapter. The one that he sells, I'm looking at the website, is still the big old USB-A adapter. I wrote to him, and he was very kind. He sent me a prototype of one that goes to USB-C, so I don't need a USB-A to C adapter anymore. I should actually send him some feedback on it. It's very nice, but it is bulletproof. I shouldn't say bulletproof.

I would say once every six weeks or so, it seems like I need to unplug it and replug it back into the back, which is fine. It uses QMK, which is actually my Q1 Keychron keyboard that I've got also uses that. It shows up as like a fancy USB keyboard where you can run the software and map the keys to whatever you want.

Yeah, it shows up as a totally modern fancy pants USB keyboard, even though it's not. Yeah, love it. I love it. What else would you want to know? That's about it. That's about it. That's about it. What's your pointing device? Oh, pointing device. That's a good question. So I keep a Magic Trackpad on the right side of my

keyboard, and I barely use it. But I happen to own it, so why not? And I have room for it. And I really only use it for spaces. I swear to God, I have a magic keyboard that I just use for... For swiping purposes. Yeah. Because every once in a while, I want to set up a secondary... I don't use spaces very much, but every once in a while, I want a dedicated space for more or less a poor man's stage manager or old man's stage... the same purpose as stage manager of setting up three windows from three different apps that go together for a dedicated task. I'll put it over on a space to the right. And I like to swipe over there with four fingers,

but, uh, my pointing device is a, uh, Bluetooth mouse. It is, it is, uh, uh a a think pad usb mouse that i got for i think it was ten dollars it might have been twenty dollars but uh about a year or two ago josh centers who is the editor i believe he's the editor at tidbits he left he's working at oh well he was expander now i think oh okay he was i didn't know that years and years yeah well i didn't know that uh but josh centers uh tweeted uh like just as a joke like hey you know i forget who it was somebody had like overstock of these think pad it's just a black two-button mouse with a of course the the scroll wheel is red because it's think pad it has a think pad logo on it i'll send you the link. You can put it in the show notes.

That'd be great. It was either $10 or $20. And I got it because I thought, I don't know, sometimes I'll blow $10 on anything. But it's a really nice Bluetooth mouse. I like, I'm old and I'm used to it. I like the old 20-year-old style scroll wheels where it's just a rubber old-fashioned wheel. There's

nothing fancy to it, no touch. It's just got two buttons and a wheel. But I love the tracking speed. I do use a third-party driver for it called SteerMouse. I forget the other. SteerMouse. I forget the SteerMouse is our rival, but it lets me set the tracking speed more finely than Apple's built-in support for third-party mice do. And then I also have a utility called Scroll Reverser. I'm not on that computer right now, so I might be getting the name wrong. But what Scroll Reverser lets you do is set the scrolling direction for a mouse to go one way and when you use the trackpad to go the other way. Do you understand what I mean? Sure. Right. So you can set the natural scrolling or whatever different on the different devices.

Right. And even though I say I don't use my Magic trackpad very often at my desk, obviously when I've detached my MacBook Pro from my desk and I'm on its own, I'm using the trackpad all the time. And so I want, the way my brain works is if I'm on a trackpad, whether it's built in or the magic trackpad that's separate, I want the modern natural style scrolling. But when I use the wheel, I want reverse scrolling because it is ergonomically so much easier to go down when you roll a wheel than to go up. And it's just burned into my memory and it it i know for other people it must seem like the weirdest thing in the world that i scroll naturally with a trackpad but uh unnaturally

with a scroll wheel but that's the way my brain works without thinking about it and it's so much easier to to drag my finger towards me that's's my setup. That's fascinating. You mentioned camera. You're using the studio display camera. Do you have a good webcam up there? So down here in my podcast station, I've got a fancy pants Sony SLR, or not SLR, the modern mirrorless thing. Right.

Oh, fancy. Well, there's some talk. Let's just say there's some talk of dithering having video at some point so i've got a really nice camera here thanks to uh the dithering corporation um but at my desk i either i don't do much video i really don't and and for a while there i was doing hits on cnbc every couple months and you know that might happen again and it's you know that's real tv whenever Whenever I am on CNBC, holy shit, do I get email from long-lost friends. My accountant emailed me the one day. He's like,

holy shit, Gruber, I just saw you on CNBC. What the hell's going on? People notice when you're on TV. So you want to look good. So for the most part, I just use the built-in one, even though I'm famously unhappy with the quality. But I also have the Opal camera. Oh, I've got that too. Yeah. So Opal, it's a weird thing where I don't know what they're doing because the hardware is... I've got it. But I think if you're just a regular listener, you still have to get in line. I don't think they're selling them yet. But you give them your email and they'll put you in a queue and some people have them already. It's a better, you know, it's weird. It's like 300 bucks.

They say it's SLR quality. It's not, but it is definitely better than the built-in studio display camera. And it comes with a nice little thing that you can put on top of the studio display. But I don't keep it up there all the time. I only put it on when I'm actually going to be on a call. I put it on. Oh, I'm doing Macro Break Weekly every Tuesday now. So that's video.

It's my first thing. So I don't always keep it up there, but I usually keep it close. I'm using that mostly. I wouldn't say it's SLR quality either. I would say it's kind of iPhone quality quality and the problem is there's continuity camera now right so the continuity camera has kind of stolen its thunder a little bit um so i you know i i i have a hard time recommending somebody spend this much money on something that while it looks good is not appreciably better than using

either continuity camera or something like reincubate camo and your iphone other than that it's just it's dedicated and you can leave it up there and not worry about it but other than that i don't i don't know if it makes any sense i i will say that just like camo um opal has software that lets you tweak what it looks like and that's the thing that i hate about continuity cameras it's a great feature but apple has decided that you shouldn't have controls for your video camera and like i want to zoom it in a little bit and like forget it it just won't do it for that you need to use camo or something like the opal right because the the iphone camera i mean until they renamed it the what do they call it now uh main camera right main camera up until this year they called the

main camera the wide camera as opposed to ultra wide but it is wide i i like the new name main because that makes more sense to me and i always think wide means the widest, which means ultra wide. And I got confused, but it is wide. And so from that distance, it is natural to want to crop in a little bit. And that would be one of my requests. I know that listeners of this show are way more likely than typical people, consumers out there to have a spare iPhone. I mean, which is, yeah, let's face it. That's an exorbitant thing to just, and I've got, you know, a shelf full of spare iPhones. Have you played around with continuity camera? It works great. It really is fantastic. The issue for me is I haven't found a good mount for the studio yet. I'm sure people are 3D printing them, but the one from Belkin is only, at least as far as I'm aware, the only one they came out with so far is the one for MacBooks.

Yeah, I have a prototype that they didn't tell me not to talk about. I have a prototype of one that they're working on that is for the studio display. And it's very much like the one that's on that Opal. is for the studio display and it's it's very much like the one that's on that opal it's a uh uh you know it's it's for all large displays so we work on the pro display xdr2 and it's a mag safe that that then you perch it up there and uh and so presumably they'll come out with this pretty soon and it will solve all of the other cases that are that are bigger um although i had a problem with the continuity camera on my laptop it if you don't tilt it quite right, it'll just pull your screen down. Oh, I think it's terrible. I don't know what the solution is, but an iPhone is simply too heavy.

And I'll give them credit where the... I should write this up too. This is another one that's been in the hopper for... But their instructions are very clear about it you you open up the box and they show you that you're supposed to have your macbook at a at a 90 degree angle where the screen is you know perfectly perpendicular to the keyboard because that keeps it balanced and they show they show a macbook with the screen tilted back and they put like the the red circle with a line through it, as Syracuse calls it, a buster. Buster, yeah. And they show you that. But the problem is a MacBook, I mean, I don't know about you, but when I use a MacBook as

a laptop, the screen is not perpendicular to the keyboard. No, no. And if it were, the camera would be pointing right at my sternum. Yeah. So to have it pointed at my face requires tilting it back and then as soon as you tilt it back it tips the whole macbook over because the iphone's too heavy and it falls out of the thing and it's i think they're also doing that that's the problem with that desk view feature too is the same thing it needs to be in a kind of an unnatural position

way back on your desk and at 90 degrees in order and it's just you know it's a fun feature but nobody's ergonomics work for that yeah that's the one so i don't know what to say about the macbook but the uh to me if you're on a macbook in laptop mode you're you're already talking about an unflattering angle anyway because of the whole angle issue so who cares if you're using the built-in camera to me is good enough if you have to use it. But I do get it though, if you're the sort of person whose work means you're on lots and lots of video meetings, you really do want to look good, but you have to be, you know, the nature of your work is you travel all the time or you just use a MacBook. Maybe you'd buy some kind of stand to put your whole MacBook on so that you can keep it

at a right angle, but have it elevated so that the camera actually points at your face. I mean, there's reasons to use it with a MacBook. But to me, it's the standalone desktop display where continuity camera would be ideal. But I don't have a mount yet for it. I probably would dump the Opal for it as soon as it comes out. But we'll see. Because like you said, I get control over the software with the opal yeah that that that does make a difference although you could also use camo but then you've got to deal with like connecting the camo app and the beauty beautiful

thing about continuity camera is there's no app it just detects it if you do and all i should say i have any 2018 introduced iphone or later supports continuity. So you've got to have, it's not just an iPhone from 2016. You've got to have a XR or later, essentially. But if you do have something like that laying around, it is a good option. And if you do use a laptop, I would say maybe save that money that you would use on something

like the Opal or something like that. And instead, you know, maybe consider like a little mini tripod and a glyph or something and put it behind your laptop because it'll be a better angle it'll be a little higher up uh and look look better there too but i don't know it continues to frustrate to me that as expensive a display as the studio display that the built-in camera is not higher quality it it it still doesn't sit right with me low these many months later well and and you know i i mean continuity camera for me was really instructive in that way where if you if you put an iphone up there

and use continuity camera and then turn on center stage it uses the ultra wide and then it's pan and scan software and i'm telling you when it's in that mode it doesn't look any better right like it's exactly the same camera at that point that the good one is when you use that main camera and then it looks so much better but at that point it's more limited especially with apple software where you can't crop it or anything um and that's what i sort of feel like the answer should have been is that they should have maybe it was just way too expensive but like you put a good camera in there and then you up up your software game a little bit to allow people to like because you could still like auto crop not quite center stage

but like auto crop a little bit and have it work with the good camera. And that's not what they did. They just, they already have the software written obviously to do center stage with that camera. And they're like, we'll just put that software in the monitor because it's running iOS and we'll put that camera in the monitor and we're done. And even with continuity camera, you can see what a compromise it is yeah so anyway long story short my macbook pro is from 2022 my studio studio display is from 2022 and my keyboard is from 1990 solid with it with a fancy new my favorite part is that the revolution of little teeny tiny electronics that like small batch electronics people can make that has meant that the the Griffin iMate from 19, you know, whatever, 98, 1997, when all,

when the iMac came out and suddenly everybody needed an ADB to USB adapter and all those drivers don't work anymore or mostly don't work, that we've got a new solution that's a very 2020s solution to get you to use that old keyboard putting an entire tiny computer in the usb plug yeah which is awesome and it works it just works all right john thank you so much for being on upgrade i really appreciate it for filling in for mike oh this was a lot of fun the hell with mike yeah that's right well you know i i got some backups now if he decides to just never come back i got some backup co-hosts that i can go to yeah more more vacations for mike i say i i agree

he that guy looks tired he needs to take some time off next week i'm going um i'm continuing my streak of of uh john's with john syracusa so i gotta mike leaves and the johns come bring in the johns oh man that's a listen it's gonna be great it's gonna be great and this was great too USA. So I got a Mike leaves and the Johns come bring in the Johns. Oh man. That's a listen. It's going to be great. It's going to be great. And this was great too.

Uh, everybody out there. Thank you for listening to upgrade. You can find me at Jason L on Twitter, uh, sometimes. And John is Gruber on Twitter, daring fireball.net.

Of course, six colors.com for me, relay. FM slash upgrade for the podcast. And, we appreciate you listening we'll be back next week with another guest host

but until then John Gruber thank you for being here say goodbye adios goodbye everybody