Upgrade - 439: The 2022 Upgradies

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

As the year comes to an end, it's time for the Ninth Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2022, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.

from relay fm this is the ninth annual upgradies award these award ceremonies are brought to you by our fine sponsors they are member for hover and rocket money my name is mike hurley and i will be one of your hosts for this evening and i am joined by jason snow hello jason snow hi mike hurley how is it possible that this is the ninth annual upgrade so i will say this is one of those things where like i reckon i'm a relatively smart person but i can't really truly get my head around this being the ninth when we haven't been doing the show for nine years and i know that like you count at one not zero like i get it but nevertheless it really breaks my brain that next year will be the 10th annual upgrade is but upgrade won't be 10

until 2024 you know right well it's because we yeah the first annual upgrade is was only first annual also not a thing that you are supposed to say but now retroactively maybe we could say it the first the original upgrade is was uh only a couple months after we started the podcast so now it would be the first annual though right because it was the first is annual so in retrospect it was the first annual upgrade is yes but at the time it time, it wasn't. For the people that don't know this joke, this is a thing. Oh my God, I can't believe that. People, like I was really focused on this being the first annual,

and Jason did not like that. I kept calling it the first annual. But now we've done nine of them. So who's laughing now? You know what I mean? Me. I'm laughing now. Good.

I'd like to give some thanks before we begin the Upgradies because this is a whole production every year. I'd like to thank Chris Breen for our special theme music. Chris actually composes all of the Upgrade themes, but this is a special one, so we want to give thanks to Chris for that. Thank you to David Dooley for our artwork and branding for this year's Extravaganza.

We can now extend our thanks to Jim Metzendorf for producing and editing the episode. That is a new one now that we've added this year. Thank you to all of the Upgradians for submitting their nominations. And you can find previous winners and Hall of Fame entrants at Upgradies.com. And we can thank Zach Knox for building and maintaining this website. To protect spoilers, we won't be putting any of the winners in the show notes. To protect spoilers, we won't be putting any of the winners in the show notes. They will be at Upgradies.com. But similarly, don't go there until you've listened to it all,

unless you want spoilers, right? Because it's all going to be there. Exactly. And I guess a programming note before we begin the extravaganzas this year. I don't think that that's the right words, but we're going to go with it anyway. Sure. We changed some categories this year. We've done this a few times in the past we kind of refined some categories add some categories

just as things uh change that we did best holiday gift for a couple of years but then sometimes recorded the upgrades before the holidays so it doesn't really work out you know um but we've made some more changes this year we now have a game of the year category which is for all games no longer an ios game of the year just game of the year so just all games can be included similarly we've removed the multiple podcast categories that we had and now just have a favorite podcast category so it's similar to the other media like book tv movies so you So we previously had like Newcomer and Tech Podcast and just Podcast. Now it's just Favorite Podcast is all of them.

However, the Lifetime Achievement Award winners of the Flophouse and ATP, that carries over. So they continue to be Lifetime Award winners. They are still no longer eligible for an award because they have achieved lifetime status. And I was looking over the previous winners. It is possible that we could crown some more lifetime award winners in some other categories in today's Upgradeys, depending on how things fall. Maybe we'll talk about that a little later on.

Well, that's exciting. Should we get going? Yeah, let's do it. Let's begin, as we always do, with the best iOS app for the ninth annual Upgradies. Jason, what is your nomination for best iOS app? I decided to go with Flighty. Yes. Now that I am traveling more, I don't know if I mentioned Flighty last time or not, but it's just such an impressive app.

It's not cheap, you know, because flight data is not cheap. But as a flight tracker, before, during, after, telling you what gate you're in and if your flight's been delayed and what the average flight is on that route. Is it early? Is it late? and what the average flight is on that route. Is it early? Is it late? And then this year it added live updates, including in the Dynamic Island. So having taken a few trips since then and also had some friend trips where I'm like,

because they have the ability to add trips that aren't your trips and you can monitor them. So like when I'm picking my kids up at the airport, I've been using Flighty with the live activities in the dynamic island and it's just great. And I'm just such an impressive, well-designed app. It's not for everyone and I don't use it every day, but every time I use it, I'm impressed at how good it is.

Yeah, there's been like a combo of updates that the app has received this year, which has ended up resulting in just an excellent year for the app. As you mentioned, the live activity support, but they also added the offline tracking as well, which works really well. So even when you're on the plane, it does a better job of giving you a a more accurate estimation which then works really well with the live activities so you don't even need to open the app and it's giving you like information that it can and also i think they're doing a thing where you can if a plane has wi-fi you can get some updates from the plane's wi-fi even if you don't sign up for the plane wi-fi which is very cool right because yeah because the uh a lot of airplane Wi-Fi

will support iMessage. And when you support iMessage, you're actually supporting everything that comes from Apple's push notification server. Genius. And that's where app notifications come from, obviously, which means that the live activity gets updated invisibly over the airplane Wi-Fi,

even if you're not paying, as long as you've got the iMessage stuff turned on. And it totally works. It's amazing. So I have a couple of apps, a small selection of apps that I wanted to bring for my nominations. And now I'll give my final nomination

once I've kind of spoken about these a little bit. So one of the great things about the upgrade is we say every year, this is the award ceremony where you get to come behind the curtain and actually hear the deliberation of the awards before it being given. Right. And I should mention, by the way, because I didn't give a runner up here that's not

my nomination, but I will mention Fairlight Recording Studio, which is my favorite iPad and favorite actually podcast editing app. Just got an update, just came out. It's amazing. I feel like we've nominated and probably awarded Ferrite in the past, but it's great. I feel like it's even more esoteric an app

than Flighty is, but I do love it. And so it was in my consideration list. I just decided not to go with it. Farite won best newcomer in 2015. There you go. And it's been a runner up as best iOS app two times. Right. Because of course I love it. And so I keep mentioning it, but anyway, it's at version three now and is great.

So I also wanted to give a nod to flighty for all of the reasons that you mentioned um you know one of the other features that i really enjoyed that they added with that friends flight thing you can track friends flights it doesn't then get added to your own statistics as it used to before so i like that they added that it's like a smart way to do it and i would say as well for it is an expensive app and some people will find use in it some won't but i really like that they have very flexible in-app purchase stuff where you can buy for a short period of time. There's some information that if someone's a paying user,

they can share flight information with somebody else who isn't. It is a very well-built, maintained, and designed application. I also wanted to give a nod similarly to Carrot Weather. It's just another one of these apps that just continues to get so many new features like to a level that i don't even understand how you can keep adding so many new features to a weather app and like some of them are fun but some of them are like legit really good like useful things for a weather app plus brian m Mueller just continues to add so many more features in for the customization and visual customization stuff it can be a bit overwhelming sometimes to do this stuff in

carrot weather but what I like about it is kind of like for me you do it once and you kind of set and then you can maybe tweak things a little bit over time but then I also wanted to give a nod to city mapper it's an app that I've only started using this year. It's been around forever here. It's like a mapping application. It works in only some cities around the world. It kind of needs good public transport for the app to be of any use. And their live activity support is bar none. So for example, I used it today. I was going into London. And in the live activity,ason you can stay they have like a representation of a london underground like line with all the little dots on it and your

circle is moving across and it will say like it will update like two more stops one more stop get off here like it is unbelievable the amount of information they're packing into live activities and so it just kind of means that your phone is constantly letting you know where you are on your trip um in a way that i've never seen before so i just think like the app is great all of the service is great but their live activity support is just superb now of course we have the upgradians uh the upgradians with 14.9 percent for apollo which is basically the same every single year. This category is typically always Apollo at the top. Yep, 15%

use Reddit, and they all use Apollo, is what I understand. Carrot Weather at 12.5%, and Tweetbot at 4.8%. I think we should give it to Flighty, personally. I think we should.

Because it's both an app that we brought to this. It feels like a good win, and I think a deserved win. And then Carrot Weather is a runner-up. Sure. We usually give two runners-up. So I figured we'd just go with Apollo. Because it was the Upgradians vote. Sure.

So for the best iOS app of 2022, congratulations to Flighty along with runners up Carrot Weather and Apollo. So let's talk about best newcomer iOS app. What has been interesting to you? What's the new app

that's come across your radar this year that you want to talk about? I have two that I wanted to mention. Actually, very late last year, I came across a new app called Mela. I don't know if we mentioned it last time or not, but Mela, I think it was a little too late to mention it last year, in fact.

It's a recipe app, and I have been using, I've been trying to use recipe manager apps on Apple platforms since the nineties and none of them have stuck, but Mela has stuck. I've been using Mela for a year. All of our regular recipes are in it now. Among the things I like about it, it looks good. It's got a great design. It's got a great web clipping feature. It does a good job of pulling recipes out of web pages and putting them in your catalog.

It is a delight to use. It syncs. It does iCloud sync. You can have shared sync. So I've got all our recipes. Lauren's got all our recipes. We add a new recipe. We see it that's really great too and you know using my ipad as the recipe guide for cooking something has become uh really common and i like it so uh so big fan of mella uh relatively new app and uh and uh new to me as well uh big fan mella's great it's uh made by the guy who makes reader the r the RSS Reader app. Reader, yeah. And so- Silvio Rizzi?

It's like a clever app for them to build. Yeah, Silvio, because it's a lot of text passing to do good recipe applications, because you've got to pull out the life story before you get to the recipe. Right. Exactly. Yes. The, oh boy, whole sidebar about how every time you try to Google a recipe, because obviously there's an SEO best practices and the SEO best practices is

write several thousand words about how you were feeling on the day you decided to make the dish and all the details of what towels were in the kitchen. And then eventually there's a recipe and they have to parse all of that and just say here's the recipe it's much better and then the other one i wanted to float as a nomination is it's a game so it may come up in the games too but i wanted to float it here it's zach gage uh of course not words new game from zach gage and jack schlesinger and it is like a backward crossword puzzle it's basically the shape of a crossword puzzle and you know what letters are in various points in the puzzle and then from that you have to figure out what the words are and solve it but there are no there are no clues the clues are just the letters

that go in various squares it is perfect like it's just a beautifully done game. And I will tell you that in the 365 days of... Well, that's not true because I don't remember exactly when it came out. But I'll put it this way. I've probably played Not Words at least 250 days this year. So not every day, but most days. And I am not an everyday puzzle person. I'm just not. My wife is very much an everyday puzzle person. And she has adopted this too, by the way. So it gets her seal of approval, which from Lauren, that is saying something. But I also love it. I think it's

just the perfect application of kind of the crossword concept to, and there are like harder puzzles and simple puzzles. So you get like three different puzzles a day and there are like harder puzzles and simple puzzles so you get like three different puzzles a day and there are puzzle books if you want to go back and like do extra puzzles it's just it's it's such a good app uh and and so fun and uh and has earned a spot on my home screen on my ipad this isn't one that i've played i don't know why i play all zac gauge games but this one must have just come out and i missed it it's really good it's really good and you don't know why. I play all Zach Gage games, but this one must have just come out and I missed it. It's really good. It's really good. And you don't need to know, unlike crosswords where you've got to solve the clue, this is about solving what the word is that's there. It doesn't matter what it

means. It's like what word goes there. And it's very smart. Really good game. So iOS 16 brought that feature, the object or person detection feature where you can just press your finger on somebody and drag them out of an image, right? Right. I couldn't really work out how this would be useful for me in any way until an app called Sticker Drop

came across my radar. Sticker Drop allows you to make iMessage stickers out of the things that you can drag out of images so people objects that kind of thing you drop them into the application and then they show up in your iMessage for you to make iMessage stickers out of it is a wonderful little app very well done very smart it has some great little features for how you can customize the stickers you can put fun borders around them So it kind of makes them look less weird that they're these like things

or people that are cut out. You can kind of do it from a share sheet, right? So you can bring up the share sheet and add it. But you can also just use the iOS drag and drop system to drag it out and then just drop it into StickerDrop. You open the app and just drop it in. It is a very well done application.

I think it is excellent. And I'm a huge fan of it. And I think it's just one of these things where it's like a developer had a really smart idea after seeing a feature and then just made it happen. It's Aaron Stevenson is the developer's name. And the upgradians agreed with me. It was 6.6% of the vote went to sticker drop.

This is probably one of the closer categories. There's so many different suggestions this year. Nobody got even a double digit percentage of the vote went to sticker drop. This is probably one of the closer categories. There's so many different suggestions this year, and nobody got even a double-digit percentage of the overall. Up Ahead is an application that I'd not heard of, and it came in at 5.5%. This is a really cute-looking application, kind of reminds me of Animal Crossing in its design, and it's a countdown kind of app.

So things that you've got coming up in your life, you put them into upper head and it's like it's a very good looking application to display to you your thing you know your upcoming things and it's got really nice widgets just like great uh fun little design so that came in at second uh in the upgradians with 5.5 percent and then runestone at 4.9 i I thought to myself, is this a game? No, it is a text editor. No, it's a text editor for iOS. I was thinking of RuneScape.

This is Simon who did Scriptable. And he decided he would build a text editor for his app, but also for other people to use. And so he built, uh, he built runestone and worked really, really, really hard on it. And, uh, and then it put it into an app and it's also an open source framework that other people can use and are using in their iOS apps as well to have good text editors for that. But it's a, it's a very simple because it is like a text editor engine

that um was built to be in kind of other apps but it uses the standard you know apple file uh dialogue basically or file sidebar so you open it and there's sort of nothing there except a file browser and you tap on a file and it opens in the text editor and then you edit the text and it's very nice um it was fun to see that come to uh come to fruition because you know simon's been detailing his work on his uh on his new text editor for scriptable for a long time and it um and and sort of doing it publicly and this is where it ended up it's so now we're going to make our decisions and so i went over to i have a google sheet here where i keep this stuff and I was just reminded by like last year for the newcomer iOS app,

all of the winners and the runners up were all Safari extensions. Because they had the new Safari extensions on iOS. And it's just interesting looking at this that there isn't a similar thing here, right? Like there wasn't like a particular type of app that was introduced, like some kind of feature that was introduced

where a bunch of developers can make a similar kind of application right i mean i would push for sticker drop here you know both mike and the upgradians agree yeah i'm okay with that i mean if you if you confirm it because i saw this too and i'm like what is that app and i thought stick i mean honestly i message stickers really but i think it's interesting that they're using, the whole idea here is they're using that lift the content out of your photo and turn it into a sticker thing. So if you vouch for it and the Upgradians vouch for it,

I'm okay with it. I mean, you can, and as well, you can use these stickers in other applications as well. Like it's possible to do that. But like, I just like that it makes use of two features that I otherwise wouldn't really use. And because they work so well together, I do use Sticker Drop for iMessage

stickers. It's particularly fun. You have memes of friends, maybe pictures of each other that are just memes that you use, and then you can create iMessage stickers out of them again instead. Let's go. I would like to put Mela and NotWords in as our runner-up. Okay, great.

Thank you. I appreciate it. NotWords sounds fun our runner-up. Okay, great. Thank you. I appreciate it. And NotWords sounds fun, and Mela I am a big fan of too. So it's a really great app. So moving to Best Mac App. Oh, boy. I have a nice collection this time for Best Mac App. You know, this is always hard. Again, Best Mac App, where it can be anything.

I try to think of this year because I could literally just say, well, you know, BBEdit and Fantastical and, you know, I can come up with my list of the apps that I use all the time. But I wanted to highlight four. Great. The first is Audio Hijack 4. The brand new version of Audio Hijack came out this year has support for scripting and shortcuts. And it was transformative in my workflows because I can now, uh, control, uh, what audio hijack does and communicate with it and see what it's doing and

have scripts react to it. It's just changed so much of what I do now that I can press a button and audio hijack sort of like does what i expect it to do you know we'll just love it and have been you know obviously we podcasters audio hijack is what we use mac podcasters this is the tool this is it this is the thing i will say i also have audio hijack as one of mine and i do very little of the scripting but enough what i will say for me the thing that really changed with audio high tech this time is they finally added the ability for you to manually make the connections between the blocks where previously it was doing it also

true and that could be frustrating if you were trying to make the window as small as possible and so i really like that you can you can manually edit the connections between the blocks now that made a big difference to me and like just that feature on its own it would have got the nod from me let alone everything else that they added and also the old version of audio hijack was a lot more sort of stateful where you had to have it open and you had to have the windows open and now if you if you using the scripting engine or whatever you're using its menu bar items say just start this one it just does it and it runs. And the design's good.

The new design's good too. And not having to have that like, I got to leave it open and then hide the app or I got to bring it forward and all that. You don't have to worry about that stuff anymore. So they really did. It's not just the scripting. The scripting was the biggest win for me. But you're right. The fact that you can actually, you've got a complex system you can not have it do the auto

connections and you can connect all the blocks together yourself there are some new plugins for it it's a huge update uh and is great and if you're anybody who does any kind of audio on the mac because it's not just for podcasters it's any recording or routing or anything it's just a an indispensable tool so any audio on your Mac can be recorded of audio hijack. Just think about what you might want to use that for. It's awesome. And given that this was a new version, I especially wanted to mention it this year, even though I could mention it every year. I want to mention, well, okay. So Ecamm Live, let's put that in the list here. Ecamm Live. Uh, I wrote a piece about this on six colors

this year. Ecamm live is a video streaming app. And I wrote about it a while ago about how I tried to use it and felt like it was just too frustrating for me. And I gave up on it and because it was so limited. And what the beauty of Ecamm Live is it's like these big cross-platform things like OBS and Streamlabs, where it's an open-source project, and then it's been customized, and it runs on all platforms. And all the Windows streamers use it, but it's also on the Mac. And those apps are out there on the Mac, and they've actually gotten a lot better in the last year, and that's great. What I love about Ecamm Live is the Ecamm guys and they did call recorder and they've done they've done so many different little mac utilities ecamm is a mac developer and ecamm live is a completely mac mac-like

understandable as a mac user and fast because it's just made for the Mac. Uh, it, in contrast to some of those cross-platform tools, which at least on the Mac, aren't that great. They're okay, but they're not that great. It's not cheap again, but it's so good. And it's so Mac like, and I really appreciate that about it. And the best thing about it is I used it. I was frustrated how limited it was. It was a very new app, but I was frustrated at how limited it was. I went away for a year, year and a half, came back and tried it again. And everything that had bugged me about it had been fixed. And I loved that about it too, that this is an actively developed app that they really

care about. And they have all sorts of streamers who use it. And they also use them to do all their demos and to do their walkthroughs. And they built up this whole kind of structure and community around it, including in their marketing. I think it's super smart. And I love that at the center of it, it is a very good Mac app that is actively being developed and trying to address its limitations. And that was such a great thing to see this year that it evolved so much. And so now that is the app I use to stream video, period. That's it. I've thrown away Streamlabs and OBS and I just use Ecamm Live.

That's cool. I mean, similarly to you, I tried it when it came out and was like, this is interesting, but like it doesn't work the way that I want it to. But there are things that it doesn't do. You and Steven both have streaming PCs. I would argue that in 2022, we got to the point where a Mac user really doesn't need a streaming PC unless they're literally streaming PC things. Unless you're doing games.

Yeah, unless you're doing games. But if you are just using it to stream like live streams, there was a time when the smart move was to get a PC to do that dedicated because OBS ran so much better on Windows than it did on the Mac. Not only is OBS way better now, but Ecamm Live is a perfectly viable, completely viable solution. And it integrates with Stream Deck and all of those other things, too. So I went from being really disappointed in this app to coming back a year later and loving it. And my last mention, which is an app that actually won Best Newcomer last year, but it's still not even at version one.

Still not being charged for, but being continually updated. updated and I have come to rely on it on my Mac every day is MimeStream, the questionably named Gmail client that feels like what if Apple Mail was way better and super tuned for Gmail. And I was so sad when Mailplane, the web wrapper, the Mac app wrapper around Gmail's web interface went away. I was so sad about that. And now it's like it never happened because I'm all in on MimeStream and it's great. And every time I go back and I use Apple Mail, I roll my eyes a little bit because it's just not nearly as good as MimeStream. So for me, Audio Hijack 4, as I i mentioned is an easy one i also wanted to give a nod to timery timery is just like joe is just not stopping with mac features which is amazing you know because obviously he's you know i would assume biggest market is ios right it's where the app started

and i think for a lot of people makes sense to do the tracking there because of all the widgets and that kind of stuff but like like me the reason i wanted timery on my mac to do my time tracking is it's where i'm doing my work now right it's where i do my work and having the menu bar app the way that it is and just so many like little mac things like you can set a preference you start a timer and it just throws a cursor into a text box which you can start typing in and get record like suggestions for what time you want to run based on the history of timers that you've run like just throws a cursor into a text box, which you can start typing in and get record like suggestions for what time you want to run based on the history of timers that you've run, like with projects and tags on that kind of stuff put together. So like, for example, I can go to Timery, you know, use the

keyboard command to bring up a new timer and just type up for upgrade. And it will give me upgrade prep, upgrade recording, upgrade editing, and I can just choose which one of those I want. It's very easy to do all that kind of stuff. The app just continues to get better and better on all platforms, including the Mac. And so, yeah, I wanted to give a nod for Timery. That's great. The Upgradians voted at 6.7% for Safari,

which is interesting. 4.3% for Croft, and 3.5% for obsidian. You know, okay. Obsidian is a really interesting app, right? And it's very powerful.

And I appreciate that about it, but I will say that if I nominated slack or one password, I love obsidian, man. They just love people would be like, Oh my my god but it's not even a real app it's just a collection of web things that are wrapped on the mac and obsidian is that too but i guess uh everybody's okay with it because they do love it and that's fine i specifically i i'm not not nominating one, by the way, because of how it's built. Actually, there are things I really like about the new version of 1Password, and I do rely on it. But there's also a bunch of interface choices that they made that I think are not good.

And it frustrates me enough that I wasn't going to nominate it, regardless of how they built it. Yeah, I'm kind of like that. I'm neutral on the new 1Password. I like some of it, but I also don't like some of it. Like I used to be able to get to my credit cards really easily. And now it's like I've got to go find my credit cards because it doesn't want to show them to me. And I don't understand why. They think I use 1Password in a way that I don't.

They think I need access in the sidebar to a bunch of things that I don't and not the things that I do. And it's really frustrating. And so this year, I'm definitely not going to propose it. But I just want to point out Obsidian. It's a funny one. It's a funny one to have. It's very funny. But I get why people like it and the power of it.

I've tried it. It doesn't work for the way I work. But every time I hear somebody like Federico talk about how he's using it, I'm amazed by it. And I think that's so cool. But that's where it ends for me. So runners up. Bonus thought of runners up. I would say we should probably go with...

I mean, I don't really want to give Safari the best Mac. I just don't want... No. So I would say maybe should we go with a pick Timery? Because I love it. And Ecamm for you? Because we haven't spoken about that one before. Yeah, let's do it.

And then Ecamm Live. And then we'll put Audio Hijack as the winner. And you know what that does? Oh, is it in the Hall of Fame? It creates our third lifetime award-winning individual group. So now Audio Hijack has now won the Best Mac App three times. It won in 2022. It won in 2018.

And it won in 2016. So it has won three times overall. And that's the rule. You win three times, become a Lifetime Award winner. You're no longer eligible for the future. And this stops the idea of just like some categories which has been the same apps all the time. So we want to mix things up.

So congratulations to Rogan Meeber and Audio Hijack. Not only have you picked up a win this year, you are now a Lifetime Award winner, making the third Lifetime Award winner. This is the first non-podcast Lifetime Award winner, making the third Lifetime Award winner. This is the first non-podcast Lifetime Award winner. Finally, those podcasters will stop talking about Audio Hijack. I know. Or will we?

Oh, will we? No one could know. So that's really cool. I'm happy about that. And so should we move on to best newcomer Mac app? The entire reason that we have Upgradians do the voting? This is why we created it because it can be complicated. So I would tell you, even though I have been using my Mac more this year than I have in years, I don't have an app to nominate in the best newcomer Mac app.

There hasn't been anything that has really made a significant impact on me that has received a release in the last year like there are lots of apps that have been updated and that kind of stuff and you know i've taken great use of them and i've loved them but i haven't had any brand new applications to me uh that i felt will would be would be a nomination for me. Well, in a shocking turn of events, I am going to nominate MimeStream, our previous winner in this newcomer category, because it's still at version 0.40.1 and hasn't come out yet.

Okay, so this is interesting. I saw you do this and it's also spoilers four percent of the upgradians voted for mime stream making it third now i love mime stream but it's also not a newcomer the newcomer category i agree i agree i just i i laugh about it because it seems new because it's still version zero and it's also just feels very much like it's in active development which it is but i mean like really really proper active development of like there's an update every week kind of active development yeah and he and he hasn't shipped it um i also nominate audio hijack 4 in this category because it's yeah i see that new version but i'm not sure if i mean if that really counts and it

just got the the the hall of fame so it's hard the other app i thought of and i have not used it a lot but i've read a lot of uh writing about it and i've used it a little bit i've been trying to use it more is this app raycast yeah which is like a 2020s take on the quick launchers that we all got like 20 years ago. So like Alfred and my personal favorite, LaunchBar. And Raycast, it's basically one of

those. I think what's different about it is that it's new. And I is that it's new. And I like that it's new. This is a category that felt like it was basically set, right? Yeah. I can't believe there's a new one of these applications.

Right. I mean, it started with Quicksilver, and then you got Alfred and LaunchBar, and it was a real thing in what? The 2000s, right? Yeah, and then Spotlight, right? And then Spotlight picked up a lot of the features of it. It's true in the default OS, although not, you know, again, it's an Apple feature, so it's for the masses and simplified and all of that. So Raycast existing, I think, is kind of cool. I have moments where I really like the fact

that somebody is trying very hard to build a new version of these with the sensibilities of the modern era, right? They don't have to support existing users. They don't have to have an evolving code base that's been around for 20 years. Raycast can be built for just a brand new world and a new set of you know whatever

is current on the mac today integration with shortcuts and all those things not to say that the other apps don't have that but they have to you know right they're building brick by brick over over 20 years and raycast comes in it's like we got a new take on it i like that about it what i don't like about it a little bit is that it feels like they're reinventing the wheel. And there's something about their, their writing and their company where they, you know, they talk about, oh, we got an investment and we're building this and we've got this thing that we're doing where I feel like it's very congratulatory for literally reinventing apps that have already existed for 20 years. Like it doesn't feel new. It feels like a new take on an old thing. And yet the way it's marketed is sort of like, oh, it'll blow your

mind. Look at what it does. I'm like, so I'm torn a little bit, but what I do like about it is it feels like a real Mac app. It is designed for Mac productivity. There are not a lot of those apps out there. And I do, this is a category that is near and dear to my heart. I love these quick launchers. I think that they can be incredibly powerful. So I, um, I want to support it, but I also had that moment where I think, and yet at the end of the day, it really is just playing a song that we all know from 20 years ago. Yeah, it's an interesting app. I know a lot of people that have come to really like it. And, you know, it's also doing some interesting stuff. Like it has window management tools built into it

because like, why not? And I like that someone's putting all this stuff into the mac i'm intrigued about the company and what they're up to you know they take an investment they have a team's plan but it's like really hard to give them money like like that you know the amount that they give away for free before they start charging is really interesting so i'm i wonder where this app's gonna go it's it's been kind of in the corner of my eye for a while um i might you know i've been i've been trying to use it like trying it out i use alfred and i'm a very happy alfred customer but i am really intrigued by all the integrations that raycast have like there's like a bunch of extensions this is kind of like obsidian really where people can write extensions for the app and that's the part that i like about it, right? When I say that it's modern, that's the kind of thing where it's like, okay, we're going

to build this thing. And then we're going to do the very modern thing of, we're going to have all these different extensions to, you know, web services and things in the system. And we're going to build those things out and they're extensible. And it's not like the other apps don't do it. But again, the other apps do it in a way that is more of the 15, 20 years ago take because that's when they evolved. And this thing is like a fresh take on it. And that part I find very, yeah, very interesting.

It's just, you know, again, tempered with the fact that it doesn't feel like there's a lot of new ground being broken here. I mean, if you want an example of its newness, the top featured extension right now is to interact with GPT-3. So you can do that inside of Raycast in case, I don't know, you need to interact with GPT-3. So you can do that inside of Raycast in case, I don't know, you need to do it immediately. Don't do that. So the upgradians are 4% with Mimestream because they believe like you do, that it's a new app.

It's new to you. 5.8% for Diffusion B which I thought was really interesting. But like, you know, and was of the now in a way that I kind of like. For sure. And 9.8% for Arc Browser from the browser company. Which is fascinating because there's quite a big

margin to the second app, and it's not publicly available. It is a closed beta that you can get an invite to it. You can just put your name down. You get put on a list. This is an app that I am personally really interested in. I see people that use Arc. They post

things that Arc does. I've seen people build these homepages that are like a collection of six live tiles of other pages. And it's like, just do really interesting stuff. And people write their own code injections that just get added in really simply. I think this is going to be a big deal arc,

but it's got to come out first. I agree. So I'm kind of stuck here with what is the winner in this category and what are the runners-up. There's an overlap, but, I mean, I don't know about giving an app best newcomer twice, but, like, we make the rules, so maybe it's kind of funny to do that.

I don't know. Oh, yeah. You know, I think so. I think we should do it. I knew you were funny to do that. I don't know. Oh, yeah. You know, I think so. I think we should do it. I knew you were going to. All right, so MimeStream does an almost impossible. Two years in a row is the best newcomer. Ship 1.0, Neil.

We could end up in a weird situation where next year MimeStream becomes a lifetime winner in the best newcomer category, which would be very weird. That would be amazing. And let's go with Raycast. And I want to put Diffusion B in as a runner-up. Just because it's like it tells a time in history

as we look back. You know, when we're doing the 18th annual upgrades, it'd be like, oh yeah, that was the year everybody thought that AI art was the thing that we were all going to do with our time. This episode is brought to you by Memberful. Memberful is a wonderful service that we use here at RelayFM to power our membership program, and it's something that you might want to check out if you're looking for the very easiest

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That is memberful.com slash upgrade. Go there and check it out. See what it could do for your business. Now, thanks to Memberful for their support of this show and relay fm so we'll move on to our next category we're kind of moving into more entertainment apps now we've got the uh the entertainment awards i should say we've got the app awards taken care of so move to entertainment and we start with game of the year. Okay. I would like to start here and just give an emphatic recommendation for Marvel Snap. This game is so goddamn good. All right, please explain it to me like somebody who doesn't know what Marvel Snap is.

Yes. Marvel Snap is a card game, right? Like a collectible card game where you play against each other. You know, like a Magic the Gathering, like Hearthstone, you know, like Pokemon, that kind of idea. But it's using the Marvel property, right?

So it is a very simplified version of a game like this. You have a small deck, and each game, like each actual game is timed to last about three to four minutes there are six rounds and each of those rounds has a ticking clock on it so it can only last for so long and the cards are very simple you have a cost of the card and how much damage the card can do and then there are some some cards have additional powers to them that

they can maybe change an outcome or change the power of other cards, that kind of stuff. But don't worry about that too much if you're just trying to learn what the app is. And effectively, you're just playing against people in these very short games. You're looking at the cards that you have in your hand and in your deck and picking the ones

that you think are going to give you the best strategy for winning the game. Because you are playing against real people, mostly there are but you're they try and match you up with real people as much as possible it kind of you know when i win i feel this sometimes can feel this real sense of accomplishment if i pull off a strategy i've got strategy going into a game and i win the game oh it feels so good and you're also collecting up the cards as well and so you have like a collection of cards and they all have great art and you can update the visuals of them you can kind of like upgrade the cards it is a very very good so you hear me say all of this i tell you it's free and you're like oh here we go right

you can play this game as much as you want as often as you want without paying them a cent the only thing that you that so there are a couple of things you can pay for you can pay as you want, as often as you want, without paying them a cent. The only thing that you... So there are a couple of things you can pay for. You can pay for currency in the game if you want to upgrade your cards faster, but all that upgrading the cards does is just change their visuals. It doesn't change

the cards, how they play, and you can't buy more powerful cards, really. There are some asterisks to that they might sometimes have a special event where you can buy one card but it's not like you can go in and be like give me a pack of cards and maybe in those six i might get one that's good no you know what you're buying if you're going to do that they also have their battle passes where you can play to earn everything pretty much in the battle pass which is like an event season

but you can also pay them a bit of money to jump forward a few levels but all it does is just gives you some unlockables but again those unlockables by and large won't necessarily change the way that you play the game it is so good the tutorial is so good if you've never played a game like this before like i had never played a card game like this before their tutorial is so good at explaining how to play this kind of game and you come out of it and you feel great and you just get like slowly they slowly divulge the pieces of the game to you and then eventually you'll let out into the world and you don't really know at what point that begins which is also very interesting like it's hard to tell

where the tutorial ends and you're actually playing the game with real people begins it is a truly fantastic ios game it's also on the mac because they they they did they checked the checkbox so you can play the ios game on the mac i adore marvel snap like i only really checked this out because i love marvel right so it was like an ip that i like but it is taking the games industry by a storm this year just because of how good it is like it is so well made it's a wonderful game uh my nomination i've already talked about which is not words by zach gage which which is the rare game. You know me, Mike. I'm very skeptical about any added burden on my time. I'm like, what is this going to cost me?

And do a puzzle every day. It's like, oh, you know, do I really want to commit to doing a puzzle every day? Well, I don't. And we've talked about my game playing. A couple weeks ago, we talked about in in reference to the play date and it's like i'm really bad at playing games because i just always end up prioritizing something else that i'm doing instead of playing games and so although i want to play games i just don't and yet not words got me to play uh almost every day and that is uh and it's and it's a great game so that's my it didn't set the world on fire it

didn't change the world but for me it was uh it was incredibly successful at what it did the upgradians voted i think predictably which i understand in that they picked three of the very best video games released this year on traditional consoles uh horizon forbidden west at four percent god of war god of war ragnarok at 6.3 percent and elden ring at 8.4 percent most game of the years in all outlets this year will be either elden ring or ragnarok and yeah i think one one piece of context that i meant to say with marvel snap this year i've played more video games than I have in years. I'll talk about why a little bit later on in the episode, but I'm playing tons of games this year.

And I've played some truly fantastic games this year. That is how good Marvel Snap is. I love it more than all of the traditional games that I've played this year. I will say I have yet to play God of War Ragnarok because I haven't been able to get my PlayStation set up at my new house. I have tried Elden Ring and it's just not for me. Right. So I would like to propose Marvel Snappers Game of the Year,

Not Words and Elden Ring as our runners up. Yep. Sounds good. All right. So we're going to move into favorite movie. I would like you to start this one off for us. All right, I had four that I rated very highly on my diary on Letterboxd because that was the repository of my brain of what did I watch this year. It's nice to have a repository for that stuff. And so I was able to quickly go through. These are the four that i wanted to highlight in the marvel movie category wakanda forever i think was the best marvel movie a good movie

not as good as black panther but um a very good movie that does some really interesting um things make some interesting choices um i wanted to mention the pix Pixar movie turning red about a girl in Toronto in the nineties, two thousands who, uh, who turns into a giant super Panda. Uh, it is super stealth, a Marvel movie, uh, not based on any Marvel intellectual property mind. You just, you don't realize it and then at some point you're like, this is kind of a superhero story, isn't it? It totally is. It's great. I love that movie. And then on the, in the serious theater, serious movie fronts, I wanted to point out two. The

Oscar nominated, but I watched it this year, so it counts as far as I'm concerned. And Oscar winning, Power of the oh the dog movie the dog movie that we talked about you know what it's really good it's powerful benedict cumberbatch directed by james campion it it's a really good movie i saw the dog movie it's a really good movie and um on apple tv plus of all places denzel washington in the tragedy of mcbeth interesting a oh that movie um a black and white um directed by one of the coen brothers it is in a shakespeare adaptation

i watched it because it was an oscar nominee and i was interested in watching those and i was completely blown away by it not just the performances but the the filmmaking choices and the way it looked it was the single best experience i had watching a movie this year uh and so the tragedy of macbeth on apple tv plus i would say was my favorite movie of the year wow yeah right i'm surprised too uh oh, I went with Turning Red. I love that movie. I just love that movie. It's so good. Oh my God.

I did not expect that the movie was going to make me cry. And it did. Big time. And so this one's a little skewed. The Batman. So two things on this. I did really love this movie. I had a great time.

But I know that part of it was the experience. Watched this in Memphis with Steven. It was the first time I'd seen a movie with friends in a very long time. Ah, yes. So my experience of that movie was heightened by that. Well, let me tell you about my Batman experience, because Lauren and I started to watch it, and about 30 minutes in, both of us were kind of tired and it was all dark and slow. And I was like,

this isn't working for either of us. And I turned it off. I was like, that's it for the Batman. Nice try. I was kind of watching it reluctantly anyway. I think the Batman needed to be seen in the cinema. Well, hold on. I then watched the rest of the Batman

like five days later by myself. And I thought it was really good it's a it's a great movie it's a really good movie i was in the wrong frame of mind and i think it starts a little bit slow yep um and i didn't really get what vibe that that that matt reeves was going for and i i think i brought in some of my prejudices about some of the previous Batman movies and the things I liked and didn't like about them. And I'm not a fan of the, Oh, it's dark and gritty and everything's miserable.

And it's Batman. Cause like Batman can also be fun. Batman doesn't have to be like that. And yet I was like, Oh, here's another movie that's dark and slow and, and miserable. And Batman is in it and then i can't i the switch flipped when i had that moment where i thought to myself oh this is they're literally doing a almost like 70s dirty gross, grungy,

detective crime movie. Or something like Zodiac, right? Like that kind of, almost like a period piece, even though it's not. And once I realized like, oh, I see what you're doing here. You really are doing,

not doing a Batman movie in many ways. You're doing a detective movie with Batman, which is great because he's supposed to be a detective. And that's when it flipped over for me. And I'm like, okay, actually, I kind of enjoy this movie now that I understand what it is. But it took me a second try to get there. But I did get there. I think that there's a reason that so far at least it seems to be uh surviving the dc reworking that james gunn is doing right now it seems like this is one of the things they're

not going to get rid of it does seem it does seem that way the upgradings voted at 7.7 percent for wakanda forever 16.8 percent for top gun maverick, and 22.2% for Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's a very popular movie that's going to do really well, I think, during awards season as well, Everything Everywhere All at Once. I'm going to expose myself as a monster and say, I thought it was fine. Okay.

I haven't seen it yet. I didn't dislike it, and I think it probably suffers from having everybody rave about it before I saw it. This is why I haven't seen it yet. Because of that. But I thought it was fine. I thought it was a perfectly fine movie.

I didn't think it was earth-shattering. There's also a possibility here that I am so deep down in the genre that things that are maybe surprising to other people are not surprising to me. And so I don't find it as novel. But yeah, I thought it was a good movie. I don't really understand. It didn't match up with the raves that I saw from other people about it, but I get why people love it. I know so many people love it. We did the incomparable episode about it. I just opted out. I had people who loved it talk about it

because I didn't want to hear me talk about it. I wanted to hear the people who loved it talk about why they thought it was great. But it didn't do that for me. So let's take a look at what we've got here, right? We've got a couple of overlaps. So we've got Turning Red, me and you both voted for.

Wakanda Forever, you and the Upgradians voted for. You love Tragedy of Macbeth. Yeah. I'm okay with Turning Red winning this category because that was absolutely one of my favorites. I would want Tragedy of Macbeth to be a runner-up because it was my favorite movie of the year.

And we'll also do Everything Ever All at Once. Sure. So, I love that. Because I don't think Turning Red's gonna get the nod many places. I'm happy that we get to do that. Because that was a very big surprise to me just how much i love that movie me too me too i mean it was a pixar i i thought it would be good i i i my expectations were sort of zero i was just like i don't even know a lot about this movie and that was why it surprised

me too because it was just like oh it kind of came out of nowhere it felt like at the time i hope that that disney pull pixar back together again and do what they need to do with pixar yeah because the movie the movies are still great but they're just not giving them the the market yeah i mean running them all on disney plus and yeah there's a lot of things going on there that they need to they need to fix let's talk about our favorite tv show of the oh boy so many choices so many tv it's a great year for television great year for television what have you got you want me to go yeah okay i i i'm gonna give you five okay of a list that will probably i when i think about this a little bit more, will end up being a top 10 list that I'll post somewhere. But here are my five.

You know, I watch a lot of TV. This is my thing. I think this is my top five. Severance on Apple TV+. Just, you know, chef's kiss. Yep. I think I just, I was kind of kind of skeptical i was like i don't know it's like a workplace like black comedy or uh and then and then i watched it i'm like this is

this is the best i had very specific places that i thought it was going to go to of like people have relationships in both sides and then those relationships collide like romantic ones and none of like you know just like it's like that was what i thought the show was going to be people have relationships in both sides and then those relationships collide like romantic ones and none of like you know just like it's like that was what i thought the show was gonna be nah wasn't that you know so like again like you i was very surprised with with where it went uh yeah exactly it it uh it surprised me in all good ways and or the star wars show and i will say if you are a person who is skeptical of uh like star wars shows and uh and sci-fi shows and oh well when you say that it's the best show what you mean is that it's the you know best of a with an asterisk the best of this best franchise show

risk the best of this best franchise show exactly or you're you're grading it uh up a little bit because it was like oh no and or is legitimately one of the very best tv shows of the year tv shows of the year not good for star wars not good for genre just good just good you could watch it not caring about star wars and it is good it is it's legitimately that good and that was also a surprise because i went into that show thinking okay like it's a guy from that from the rogue one movie who is a sort of secondary character and somehow that you know somehow he's got a show and what will that be about and it's a prequel to a prequel and i don't understand what it's all about and it was um it just legitimately great legitimately all the way i haven't seen it yet but i want to the reason i didn't start it when it started because i was very much i already

know the fate of this guy like what stories are they really going to tell to excite me yeah but i know like everyone is just praising this show like you wouldn't believe it's probably next up for us i would argue i already know the fate of this guy any show that's got somebody at their center right like and better call saul is like this too right but it's like you know the fate of that guy but it's not the point um it's how it's it's in fact and or better call saul have some things in common including the fact that they're both about sort of like who is this guy and how does he get where we know he's going to be uh from that other thing okay right. Right? Yep. That makes sense. I, speaking of, we know what's going to happen to this guy,

Star Trek, Strange New Worlds, which is making a lot of top 10 lists too, which warms my heart. It's, it's just a breath of fresh air. It is, it is a franchise that said,

we know what people actually want from Star Trek, which is they want Star Trek. They want, every week they go to a different planet and have an adventure and have a collection of really interesting characters along the way and kind of a happy spirit of adventure and exploration, which is not in the zeitgeist

of what modern TV, streaming TV is like, which is why the previous and the other Star Trek streaming shows are all sort of like modern press tree prestige dramas and season long story arcs and all those things. And for strange new worlds, they're like, nope, bright uniforms go to a different planet every week.

USS enterprise. We're going to, and it's literally a prequel to the original Star Trek on the enterprise with the previous captain who we know his fate, but a a some great performances especially anson mount as captain pike 10 episodes super fun uh can't recommend it enough just a delight to watch it and then i have two more uh the bear which is on Hulu in the US, probably Disney Plus everywhere else. I don't know.

The Bear, a show about a famous chef who sort of returns to his family restaurant, kind of in disgrace, sort of, after the death of his brother who ran the restaurant. brother who ran the restaurant and it is for a show that is literally about people in a restaurant and maybe people who've worked in restaurants will understand why this is but it is one of the most intense tv shows i have ever seen and is so good um at being about characters and being about you know but also being about action and like it it's yeah it was a breath of fresh air and a shock and it's so good it's it's just i don't know what to say about the bear um watch it you will be glad you did and then finally i'm going to say the latest season for all mankind Mankind at number five on my list. Apple TV Plus show, very good. Had a new season.

It's all about going to Mars. That show builds the tension like no other show on TV in some ways. And although it is sort of increasingly outlandish in a lot of ways, I could not stop watching episode to episode. in a lot of ways like i could not stop watching episode to episode but really just a what are what a roller coaster ride of sort of near future sci-fi ish action um just that that show is a great show and i love it that's my five uh my list goes she hulk at number four i really loved she hulk it gave me exactly what i wanted from a marvel show it's a good show good breaking some ground being being um funny and a little meta and i wanted i wanted to see her as a lawyer and we got that like it was the one thing i wanted from the show is i wanted i wanted jennifer walters right like i wanted to see her do law, and we got that.

And it was hilarious. Superhero law. I mean, it is She-Hulk Attorney at Law, right? The joke and also the subject matter is in the title there, and that was very good. You mentioned it earlier, but Better Call Saul finished this year just sublime. Such a good TV

show. That is a show that builds drama almost unlike anything else. I will agree with you that for All Mankind, which is my second favorite show of this year, I could not believe what they pulled off in this season.

I don't understand. It was like every episode, even the first, the opening episode is one of the most nerve-wracking opening episodes of any tv show i've ever seen like they took things to such a level it felt like that there couldn't have been the rest of a season it's like how are you going to continue from this point yeah superb and again like the season ends and it's just like we know there's another one coming i think i assume i don't recall if they've they've done it but i mean i couldn't remember if apple like officially

announced that like hey we're doing it again but i'm sure they have uh but it's again we're in this situation with the show where it's like i don't understand how you will continue making the show based upon everything that you've done but handled just wonderfully such a fantastic show but it's just easy the best television show this year was severance like i just think it's not even up for any argument like it was the best tv show i agree no it's it's i had the um alan stephan wall the tv critic for rolling stone tweeted out a uh a message that was you can't do ties you can't do also rands name the best show you saw this year what just one and i thought that was a really

interesting challenge because it's a lot easy making these lists and it made me sit there and think for a while about specifically about severance and andor and it's severance it is and a lot of my pals are like oh andor is the best show and it's like nah i gotta go with severance it is i i think it is the best the best i think maybe a lot of people including me forget that severance came out in 2022 because it was early maybe so it was early so like it feels like it was a 2021 show but no it came out in 2022 and it was sublime uh the best the upgradings went 5.2% for House of the Dragon, 22.7% for Andor, and 26.1% for Severance.

We're all in sync here. So I think Severance is the winner, Andor, and For All Mankind has runs up. All right. Yeah, that sounds good. Favorite book category, which unbelievably I have a nominee for. Oh boy.

After Steve. Boo! I liked it and I read it. Boo! You can boo me. I read the book. I read a book this year that came out this year.

And so I'm nominated. Is it also the worst book you read this year? No. Okay. Because I've read more than one book and I wouldn't say, the other book that I read, I liked. I wouldn't have called it the worst book you read this year? No. Because I've read more than one book. And I wouldn't say... The other book that I read, I liked.

I wouldn't have called it the worst, but I just didn't like as much as After Steve. Technically, that's the worst book you read because you only read two. All right. I have a problem with that book. It has lots of interesting things in it. There is an Upgrade Plus episode where we talk about it.

I don't remember offhand which one it was, but an upgrade plus episode where we talk about it i don't remember offhand which one it was but there is an episode uh where we talk about it i'll see if i can find it okay yeah not not for me not for me um i read 50 books this year and you know it happens that's why i'm not playing games. My three favorite books of the year, The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik, which is the third book in her Scholomance series. We just are, I guess, about to do an incomparable episode about that whole series. Great three book series now done.

This was the last one. And you know, some series start with a bang and then they kind of fade out as they go. And this didn't do that. It did the reverse. Uh, it built up, uh, everything that you've learned in the first two books and then, uh, starts to interrogate some parts of the premise of the books while it brings it to a, a, a really rousing climax. Uh, the golden long enclaves is, um, well, the whole series, it's a, it's kind of Harry Potter-esque only in the sense that it is about a magical school that people go to for high school, except that most of them don't survive it. Most of them die.

And they're locked inside for four years. And then some of them come out at the end, but mostly they don't. And we follow some students who are in that school. And it's brutal and really interesting. And it's just great. Great story. Fairy tale by an author, a young up-and-coming author you may not have heard of, named Stephen King. It's great.

It would be funny if it was like, yeah, no, not that one. That would be hilarious. No, no, it's that one. It's great. It would be funny if it was like, yeah, no, not that one. That would be hilarious. No, no, it's that one.

It's that one. It's Stephen King at, I would say there are some different Stephen Kings, right? There's the horror writer, Stephen King, and there's this kind of like mythic fantasy writer, Stephen King.

And this is that, this is that mythic fantasy writer. My favorite Stephen King book is probably 11, 22, 63, which is the book about a guy who goes back in time to try to stop the kennedy assassination except it's way more complicated than that and it's and that book is great because it's emotional and lyrical it's sad it's it's kind of about what history means and how history affects us and how you you can't change your own personal history and what it means to learn and grow as a person.

I mean, it's, it gets into lots of different areas and fairytale kind of reminded me of that. That said fairytale is a book about, uh, ultimately about a magical portal to another world and a kid who goes through it.

But even in that, the book takes its time to before the portal even is found to get you to know who this kid is and and what the rules of the world are and who's the old man who is basically guarding the portal um i i loved it and i couldn't put it down so if uh you know if you don't i think there are a lot of people who don't read Stephen King. I think there are also a lot of people who read Stephen King selectively. But this is, I think, one of his very best. And it's the kind of Stephen King that I really like, which is a little more dark towery, a little more in that epic fantasy kind of category and not the horror spooky stuff.

I will say like on that, it is wild to me that stephen king is continuing to put out books that people like like i just kind of i kind of can't believe that because just because of how many he's done now you know what i mean that's just like i don't think there are many people that have had the kind of career that he has had he's been writing like a novel or two a year since the 70s And he's still doing stuff that people like. You know like he. Yeah. That's just wild to me.

Like this doesn't. Like musicians don't have this kind of success. Right. And in general. Right. Very rarely. Authors don't. Movie makers.

You know don't. Like he has. An almost unparalleled. Levels of success Stephen King. It's really. Really interesting. And the third book. It's actually a novella. It's. So it's. of short that I adored this year is Elder Race which is by the

British author Adrian Tchaikovsky and it is a delightful story that is simultaneously well okay inter interleaved chapter by chapter a science fiction story and an epic fantasy story that are happening at the exact same time it just matters which character is narrating i love the premise of that it is because there is a wizard harry who needs to solve a problem that a princess brings to him. And there is also a very old and depressed space traveler who one of the locals on the planet that he's been observing because he's an anthropologist. It comes with a warning that possibly some rogue leftover technology has gone awry it's the same story it's great and it's short and adrian tchaikovsky is a brilliant writer but this is just a little novella and it's i loved it to death um and so so yeah i'm gonna say and i'm gonna say that was my favorite although the golden enclaves was also great and Fairytale was also great.

But Elder Race is the one I keep telling to people. I love the idea of that book. That sounds fascinating. Yeah, it's really good. It's so good. At 4.5%, the Upgradians voted for The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson. Okay. 5.2% for After Steve by Trip Mickle.

What can I say? By the way, it's episode 427 of Upgrade. If you subscribe to Upgrade Plus, there is a very long After Show where me and Jason have a fight about this book. And at 14.6%, The Nova Incident by Dan Morin. Don't know that guy. Dan, he's just doing his job.

He's out there with his street team. Uh-huh. They're marketing that for the latest book. It's a really good book and a really good series. You should read them all. The Galactic Cold War by Dan Morin. All right, what are we going to do here? Well, this one is typically for you to stack, right?

Yeah. So I want to know what you're feeling. I mean, obviously, I would like after steve is a runner-up but it's if you can handle that you know oh man uh okay let's say elder race is the winner okay um let's make the golden enclaves a runner-up and we need one more runner-up is that right it's a nova incident dan moran is a three-time runner-up in the Upgradies now. And I've got to say, I love that you cannot do it, right? You cannot.

Can't do it. You just can't do it. If there was a real empty hole there where there was nothing, but I can't do it. No. Can't do it. No. We're going to move into the brand new category now. Favorite podcast.

Yeah, I mean, new, and yet it's really just a combination of several categories but it's a new category now it's like but it is as you say it's a smush it's a smushing together of all the podcast categories and so for this i'm going to recommend a show uh that was new for me this year even though it's been going on for a long time but it's an example of the type of show that I love the most. It's the type of show that I make. It is the Kinda Funny Gamescast. So Kinda Funny is a podcast network. They are audio and video.

I tend to watch their shows as video rather than audio. I just think the presentation is nice and I like to do that. They have a bunch of different shows. They do games, they do games news, they do pop culture stuff, movies, TV shows. But one of their shows is the Gamescast, which is just focused on video games, what they're playing, reviews, that kind of stuff. But while it has this topic, it is just as much about the relationships between the hosts than it is about the show itself. And where it takes it even further is like,

there are like between eight to 12 kind of funny hosts and they kind of rotate onto the show depending on who's going to be there. And there are just like,'s it's like us right like there are relationships between everybody there are feuds occurring between the hosts that sometimes it was spoke about on this show but now it's coming into this one you know like it is as much about their relationships as it is about the type of topic right and you get both and that's what i love i love that about Kind of Funny in general.

And the Gamescast is maybe my favorite because they also have a show called the Kind of Funny Podcast, which is just like four of them get together and they just talk about whatever. And I love that show, but it doesn't have a structure. It doesn't have a guiding light where the Gamescast does. So if there's nothing funny happening, they'll just talk about the video games they came to talk about. So like, I think it's like a perfect example of the type of show that I like to make and enjoy too. I also wanted to mention the Always Sunny podcast as like, you know, over the last few years,

I keep finding these shows that are about a TV show made by the people who made the TV show. It's like that next level up from the, like a lot of the stuff that you do on the Incomparable, right? Like where it's like, we like this show, we're're going to talk about it then all of a sudden it became uh financially viable for hosts of the shows to do it uh the fascinating thing about the always sunny podcast is the show is still running like it and the host and it's not just and the hosts

of the show forever yeah the hosts of the show weren't just on the show, they make the show, right? So it's really unique in that. It's like they are the creators, showrunners, and stars of a currently running television show. And they're on, like for example,

now they are referencing and talking about the fact that they are in the writer's room for the next season. I love the Always Sunny podcast. Again, it's a show that i watched the video of rather than listen to the audio for i actually switched over like they started doing a video show and then at a certain point there were a lot of visual gags just how it happens this is why we don't do video by the way because you just can't help but get into video and so i'm you know i decided to start

watching it and i just love it it is fantastic and it's hilarious it is as you know i just i actually prefer the always sunny podcast to always sunny in philadelphia and it is a show i enjoy but like i just really find those three guys fascinating and they're they have a producer on the show who's a producer uh on mythic producer and co-creator on mythic quest megan gantz yeah uh and she is like was originally like off camera but now is part of the show too and so it makes up the four of them and they're just as a group just excellent so i wanted to mention that one too. They're my two podcasts that I'm bringing to the table. Okay, that's good. All right.

So I struggle with this because I have very limited time to listen to podcasts. And so there are very few podcasts that I listen to every episode of, but I do dip in here and there to various other podcasts. And there are ones that I've found

that I've enjoyed and I want to recognize at least a little bit. One of them is the Playdate podcast from Panic. Yeah. Because I think it's a well-produced, you know, produced with care show, you know, a little company with little game device that they are selling and they want to do. So it's marketing, I guess, but it's also sort of just good storytelling about how the product came to be. And this year it's been also about how the software came to be and telling the stories of the people who've written the games.

Their first episode, which was in April, the story of Playdate, it's 100 minutes. It's one of the best podcast episodes I've ever heard. Yeah. It's just sublime and incredible and so well done. ever heard yeah it's just sublime and incredible so well done yeah it's it's the the story of how the product came to be and then the stories of the people who are making the games and like it's just a very well-produced podcast about an interesting subject um so i wanted to shout out playdate podcast uh there is a podcast called origin story which i really like and i've listened to a few episodes of um this is origin story by ian dunt the uh british politics writer

and dorian linsky uh and the idea there is they talk about about the real stories behind what they say is the most misunderstood and abused ideas in politics. So they take a phrase or a word and they unravel it and say sort of like, where did this come from? And why do we use this term? And I think it's very smart because they're trying to go beyond the sort of like any of the phrases, I'm not gonna even mention the phrases that they cover because any phrase that they cover has a hot button meaning and you're like, oh, I know what that is.

And the whole point of origin story is that they unravel it and say, well, where did this come from? I think this was a newcomer for you last year, I think, because I've heard about this before and I think it'll only come from you. It's possible or I mentioned it, I think it came a newcomer for you last year, I think, because I've heard about this before and I think it'll only come from you. It's possible, or I mentioned it. I think it came out this year, though.

But anyway, it wasn't nominated as a newcomer last year. So I'm going to just throw it in. Smart idea for a podcast. And a podcast actually, let's do a bunch of episodes of this year. I think it's a great thing that they're doing it. And again, it's kind of a revamp of a show that's been on the air for a bazillion years um but somebody had the intelligence to be like let's do a podcast for our fans who want to know about like behind the scenes and that's because this show got a new producer this year there was a lot of drama but it's the venerable long-running

american game show jeopardy which i do watch every episode of and love that's a family tradition they have a podcast called inside jeopardy that is hosted by one of the producers and interviews the producers and the players and talks about the gameplay and the strategies when they change the rules or they do special episodes uh in a tumultuous year for the show where they have like they had a host and and then they they that guy and a producer and that guy left and they brought in multiple hosts and then they ended up with two hosts and they like and a lot going on um the podcast has been really fun and interesting every week to talk about sort of like what happened this week on the show and

that give me that good behind the scenes stuff where they're talking about like the decisions they make and the choices they make about making the show work um again like you said about the always sunny podcast there's something to getting that give me the people who make the show talking about how they make the show it's good stuff and i love that the um the executive producer of that show who's um michael davis who's been doing game shows forever like who wants to be a millionaire and like endlessly is also a gigantic soccer fan and um his desire to view jeopardy through a sports lens delights me because he's like these are players these are athletes these are sporting events we need a

post-game show we need post-game interviews. We need to talk about it. We need to hype up the events. I like it. I think it's a good way of approaching a TV game show is to say, this is basically sports for smart people. For a show that's been going for so long and has had such a set format for so long, it's probably time to do something different with it.

But still keep the show that is core of the same. Keep it fresh. And when I say sports for smart people, i i like sports and i i would like to i'm not saying people like sports are dumb i think that i think that lots of smart people like sports but you know what i mean it's like these are people whose whose qualification is that they stand on a stage and answer very obscure trivia questions right and like and michael davis's point is to say, that's a sport, right? Let's treat it like a sport. Uh, even though, you know, yes, it's not, but treat it like it is. And I think that's kind of a brilliant insight. And that's something that I get more of by listening to inside jeopardy and

understanding what their rationale is. And then in our own little world, I do listen to connected, um, connected, got slid to the top of my priority queue this year um it is my number one podcast i uh that in the flop house i guess you're right so the flop house is number one you guys are number two but it's my number one uh tech podcast that i i try to tune in for every week i greatly appreciate that thank you very much it's funny you guys have a great rapport and you talk about issues but it's it's it's also funny i mean and there are other podcasts that do that the rebound does a good job of that too i like having that change of pace right that's a that's just a little bit less serious and a little bit more about the

the personalities of the hosts kind of knocking off each other it's great yeah which this is like exactly what kind of funny games kind of says to me right because it's a similar thing it's like i want to hear about video games but I also want to hear these guys make fun of each other and play pranks on each other and stuff like that. The upgradians voted... So I'll say something about this

when we're done. 6.4% Cortex, 7.6% Upgrade. We've finally made some waves this year. 13.9% is Connected. So here's the thing. I didn't expect this to happen, but it makes sense.

Once again, we established that Upgradian's favorite podcast is connected. Yep, this keeps happening. They don't want us to get too confident. They don't want us to get too cocky. No, I just assume they're like, oh, I'm listening to the show. Obviously, I really love the show.

Yeah, I think that's the truth of it, but it just makes me laugh every single time we gotta give them something to aim for I did not expect this to be so relay dominated I did not expect this to be all shows that I'm on

would end up being what happened to this category yeah I will say that it is I actually had an emotional reaction when i was totaling these up and it felt you know i felt pretty humbled by it so i i appreciate that people enjoyed the shows that i'm on so much uh i will also use this as a reminder to say that there are a ton of great shows here on relay fm go to relay.fm slash shows and find a show that i'm not on and check that one out too if you haven't already right there are a ton of great shows here on Relay.fm. Go to relay.fm slash shows and find a show that I'm not on

and check that one out too if you haven't already. There are a ton of really great programs. But I will also say thank you for listening to my shows and please keep listening to my shows as well. We may need to change the form for next year to disqualify shows we're on. Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

I mean, we'll keep playing around with it but like all right we wanted to simplify it and obviously listeners of our shows will like the shows that we make right that would be my assumption and that's at least the shows that you make i mean none of my shows are on this list well upgrade is i mean yeah okay but the other two are not they're you they love well and but then again cortex is great and connected is great so i get it uh i would like to put the kind of funny games cast in as a runner-up i'm not going to push for okay great um and then i will abstain from deciding the winner uh playdate podcast is the other runner-up okay and uh connected is the winner thank you very much so

what this does is because we're gonna look at the we're including the tech podcasts here so that now makes connected a two-time winner of an upgrade i thought about making upgrade the runner up because i thought it would be funny Upgrade was the runner up last year and the year before there is something funny about our own podcast never quite winning awards just never doing enough to get it over the line but that's what I would say

for this year I like that we're simplifying the categories I do wonder if we'll see how we feel about this for next year because if this just ends up happening every year uh i mean eventually all of my all of our shows will just get lifetime achievements and just fall off the line that's a lot it's like but like you know it's like if we didn't do it atp would be here every single time right and so yeah we're gonna

have to work that out uh but I will say for this time thank you very much it felt category it felt pretty good to me I will say felt pretty good to me this episode is brought to you by hover have you ever thought about starting your own business maybe you want to create a brand share your wealth of knowledge with the world and use the years of experience that you have in your chosen subject area to create something for yourself and share with others? Hover wants you to help you take that first step in getting your ideas off the ground. If you've had something you've always dreamt of building, or maybe you have a business that you want to take online, the first step is finding a domain name that works for it. Hover makes this incredibly simple with a clear and straightforward user experience,

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Like, for example, with Upgrade Plus, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash join to sign up, or you just go to get upgrade plus.com and where do you think i've registered get upgrade plus.com obviously at hover in additions to the classics like a.com you can also get.shop.tech.art i was overjoyed recently to find out.lol exists didn't know that was a thing i don't know what i'm going to do with that yet but i'm going to do something and of over 400 more domain extensions choose from, you'll be able to find the perfect domain name for your business. One that is memorable, relevant, and boosts your brand. You can buy a domain, set up custom email boxes, and point it to your website in just a few clicks. If you're ever into any trouble,

help is just a phone call or chat away. It is secure, simple, and reliable. Hover is trusted and a popular choice amongst millions of people launching any kind of brand or business. If you're ready to get your idea off the ground and find that perfect domain name, go to hover.com slash upgrade and you'll get 10% of your first purchase. That's hover.com slash upgrade to get 10% of your first Hover purchase. A thanks to Hover for the support of this show and RelayFM. hover purchase a thanks to hover for the support of this show and relay fm what is your favorite apple product of 2022 well that's a big question isn't it a lot of good apple products this year uh m2 macbook air this year

airpods pro 2 this year love them both a lot bought them both right but there's another apple product that i bought this year that i that i love that i bought and it blew our minds when it was announced yep because a new mac in a new category that we haven't seen before what is this thing that? That's the Mac Studio. And Mac Studio is my favorite Apple product of the year. I bought the base model basically, but I love that they, remember this is the product they rolled out. It's the fastest Mac ever. I believe the high end M2 Ultra

or M1 Ultra Mac Studio, like this little thing. It's the fastest Mac ever. And it kind of came out of nowhere. So I feel like we may never see it's like again, Mike. We may never see it's like again, but this year we saw it. I don't really have a lot of thoughts

about the Mac Studio other than the fact that I think it's an interesting product. I just added it wasn't one for me and it's also a weird product in its own way, but that kind of makes it kind of adorable. But no matter what, it was easy for me. The M2 MacBook Air

is actually my favorite Mac of all time. Huh. It is a perfect laptop. It's pretty good. I'll give you that. I have zero problems with it. I have never found a better, I've never experienced a better combination

of portability and power. And it is so powerful, and it is so thin, and it is so light. It is just an absolutely wonderful computer it is it's my favorite mac that i've ever owned like it just makes me happy and it's just like yeah another reason why it's like i'm just all in on the mac now like and that that laptop is just absolutely perfect i can put it in my backpack every day, take it to and from the studio so I can have it at home if I ever need it.

And I barely know it's in my bag, right? Like it is outstanding. I get that there are more powerful laptops. I get that. I get that there are laptops with better screens and more ports. Like get, totally get it. There are more powerful and feature-rich Mac laptops available.

And yet, I think if you looked at the M2 MacBook Air and what it can do, you know, and you could say like, oh, well, 20 years ago, boy, it would blow people's minds. Two years ago, it would blow people's minds, right? Yeah. Three years ago, it it would blow people's minds. Two years ago, it would blow people's minds, right? Yeah. Three years ago, it would completely blow people's minds of users of any Mac laptop. And it's the not quite low end because they kept the M1 around and put this in at a higher price, which is one of the unfortunate things about it is that it can't hold down $999 at this point. Will eventually probably, but not yet.

But what it's capable of doing, and we've struggled with this in the computer world for a very long time now, which is as Moore's Law advances and we get these more powerful computers. Yeah, we add more features that take advantage of the power and to do different things. And, you know, there's now machine learning processing. There's all this stuff going on. But the truth is, a long time ago, we left the era where computers were not powerful enough for 95, 98% of the people who use computers. We did that actually kind of a long time ago. But even if you'd argue, yes, but there were these edge cases,

like we've definitely left it now. I would argue that unless you are an incredibly high-end Mac user, which a lot of our listeners are, but I would say even among those people who self-identify as high-end Mac users, you know, like if you get a 14 or a 16-inch macbook pro i think you're probably doing it for the ports and the screen and not the power because almost nobody needs more power than the m2 macbook air that's amazing to me there are nice things about those macbook pros and when they get their m2s they're going to be really fast and i get it. But like the M2 is so powerful

and has no fan. And, you know, and again, yes, are there edge cases? Of course there are. But they are so edgy now. So yeah, it's a great laptop. I bought one.

I love it. It has changed my travel math as well in that I went for a long time just trying to avoid bringing my macbook air with me yep and now i bring my macbook air with me because it's so light and so completely capable that it magsafe like come on come on yeah the mag magsafe's really nice and and just having it to do all the mac things and be so capable it's just as capable as my desktop right i could i could not have my mac studio and just have my macbook air plugged into this display and a bunch of things i do would be slower it's it's absolutely true but uh not

really any slower than like the imac pro i was using before. So it would be fine. The Upgradians voted at 16.9% for AirPods Pro 2, 17.5% for Apple Watch Ultra, and 18.6% for the MacBook Air M2. AirPods Pro 2, super good. I love them. So I would propose that we give macbook air m2 though the win and have the runners-up be the mac studio and the airpods pro 2 i not only do i agree with you i'd already written it down in my google sheet because i knew that was

where we were going to go with this right it just felt like obvious to me that's because uh we are on top of this that's because this is the ninth upgrade he's and it's episode 439 we're on it what's your favorite non-apple product this year i struggle with this because i always think like i i don't feel like i accumulate lots and lots of products throughout the year i really don't feel like i do that and this that's what ends up being in this category a lot is like other stuff that i have accumulated that's not not directly for my job although i will say uh as a runner-up i'm gonna say the keyboard you made for me oh okay so that's the keychron well it's a keychron q1 but it's also with a with the kiwi switches that you you you lubed with a little paintbrush and it's got the i've got the um uh the the key caps are from

um drop but they're um the severance ones they're they're the severance ones uh that's one of my favorite non-apple products of the year but i'm gonna say the play date oh that's a good one that's fun i love that i love that it exists finally yeah and i love the design of it and i wish i played it more and although i think it's a knock against it that i haven't played it as much as i would like i think it's a uh a case for it that i want to play it more uh i have become a sonos customer oh boy it's a whole world there i love it i'm just using it for audio i bought a bunch of things and yeah it's fantastic like it was something i wanted for our new home. I wanted to just have more music in the home more easily. I kind of don't like the way that you play music on HomePods. I find it really awkward to control with the phone.

Sonos does such a good job with their app. Like I just kind of can't believe how good their app is. I also don't even understand how they're able to do all the things that they can do. Like I've signed in to Sonos with my Apple Music. Nadina has signed in with her Spotify and we can both get to all of our music in the Sonos app.

Like it really is bananas how well it works. I love how easily, like you can, you know, one of the things about Sonos, right? They will kind of invented the idea of the same song being played right they will kind of invented the idea of uh the the same song being played in multiple places right like multiple devices that was kind of their thing

from a very long time ago and they really know how to make that work well like when you adjust volume in the app you you know you can move it up and down but then you automatically get the controls to adjust every single volume level of all of the sono speakers that you have um so i have uh sono's move which is the movable one uh i have sono's one which is that kind of regular one and i have five and i got that because i can plug my record player into it and i can play records on my sonos system it's just like so good absolutely love it do not know why they had john carlo vespasito as the like their voice like voice assistant is a great voice but it's like villain he's a villain but love it you know i

say like you know please stop the music and you know and and gus fring tells me yeah he's gonna stop the music it's like great uh i saw him by, he's going to stop the music. It's like, great. I saw him, by the way. He was on my plane when we were coming back from LA. But my favorite non-Apple product of the year is the Valve Steam Deck. This thing, unbelievable. It has changed my life. Spoilers for later on.

It lets me play so many more video games and lets me play just like the best video games possible in the palm of my hand like this thing is just it is so good it defies logic like when i heard about this thing and they showed up there's no way this thing is going to be comfortable or work well and turns out it is comfortable to use and works well like uh they know how to make things for video games over at valve they did an unbelievably good job the steam deck is absolutely fantastic the upgradians voted at 2.8 percent with the lg c2 oled tv just like fascinating to me that that was in there. Is that John Syracuse's TV? I don't think so. No, he has a Sony.

Interesting. He went with a Sony. I have the LG C1 OLED and love it. So I agree. So last year. I know, right? Panic Playdate at 9% and the Steam Deck at 13.6%. All right.

What do you think i would be very happy giving this to the play date i mean we could we could give it to the steam deck you you and and the upgradians definitely picked it i don't know i would be happy either way around well i mean hmm like what i'll say the steam deck is a better product like yeah and it is better at what it Well, I mean, hmm. Like, Playdate is... The Steam Deck is a better product. And it is better at what it should do. Let's give it to the Steam Deck and we'll have the Playdate as a runner-up. And if you want to pick a Sonos thing

and put it in there as a runner-up, that's great too. I will pick the Sonos Move. Okay. So we now move into the worst gadget or most disappointing technology of the year. I would like to just throw mine out

there real quick, which is just the 11-inch iPad Pro. Like the iPad Pro line in general, disappointing. But that one specifically, just bad. There are things it should have got, but it didn't get. Like the mini LED screen.

It's just like a bad lineup in general from the iPad Pro this year, but that 11-inch M2 iPad Pro, just bad. What's the name of that iPad kickstand case, Dealey? What did we decide that was? It's a smart keyboard folio? Magic keyboard folio magic keyboard folio the oh the one that comes with the the 10th gen ipad yeah magic keyboard the magic magic keyboard

folio magic keyboard folio for ipad that's it because it's folio because it's it it it doesn't have the cantilever thing it just has a kickstand part on the back. Is that one of yours? Yes. Okay. That's why I'm mentioning it. I found Apple's choices with the iPad this year to be perplexing. And while I understand that this probably was a cost thing,

because I feel like everything at the low end of the iPad line is a cost thing. I thought that the fact that they introduced an iPad that is roughly the same size as a bunch of other iPads, but uses a completely different accessory and that it's an accessory that has a kickstand, which I am officially on the record as disliking with a detachable keyboard.

I was, that was disappointing to me. That product is disappointing to me. It really adds a lot of thickness and weight. It adds a lot of price. And I think the Magic Keyboard is better. I understand that maybe it's just too expensive to put on a low-end iPad because it is very, very expensive. But that whole thing disappointed me.

And I think I have to say, the other nominee I'm going to make is center stage cameras, not just the one in the studio display. Because while I've been a fan of center stage, the criticism of the center stage camera in the studio display has made me realize that all center stage cameras look like that because they're all using that wide the ultra wide lens and then panning and scanning within it and the image quality is not great even though the auto auto uh pan and scan is

um and in terms of disappointing uh not only was it put in the studio display and obviously just disappointed a lot of people but uh with continuity camera on uh on ios 16 and mac os ventura you can put your iphone with that amazing camera or even last year's iphone or the year before his iphone with their amazing cameras on the top of your screen. But then when you turn on center stage, what you don't, you don't get the really,

really good camera panning and scanning. You get the wide angle camera. That's not very good panning and scanning. And it ends up as that same lousy image quality is on the, on the display. So then you have to like, turn it to the regular camera at which point it's not cropped right it's a whole mess and i think that i think apple is too enamored

with center stage as a concept and um and the execution isn't good enough like i would say the idea of center stage is good but the hardware that they are having to use to power this feature is not good. They keep recycling the same 12 megapixel wide angle camera. And I think that in a casual setting on an iPad, it's okay. I think at your desk in a meeting, in the right lighting, it can be okay, but in any other lighting, it's not okay. And there's no fallback on the studio display. And I would say the problem with continuity camera, which is a great feature is if you decide not to use center stage, you are left with a really bad crop and Apple gives you no tools to crop it better, even though it's a very

high quality camera, that's got plenty of resolution to give, Apple gives you no. So on one level, I feel like the center stage stuff also exacerbates Apple's bigger issue it's got with forward-facing cameras. There's just not enough going on there. It's just not quite right.

So the Upgradians voted thusly. 6.8% Twitter. We'll get to that later on. 7.1% the iPad Pro 2022. So the whole line. I combined the line. And at 8.25%, the MetaQuest Pro. This one is curious to me. I'd like why people have put this one in there.

I think it was meant to be a game-changing thing and all the reviews were like, it's not. It's a little bit better than the existing one in Cost of Fortune. But like were people expecting? Like do people want it? Like, you know what I mean? Sometimes I do feel like there

is a a tendency amongst the voting upgradians to be upset with anything meta does like i i get it i i think though that the quest pro really was considered a disappointment because yeah no i thought that it would be more impressive than than it actually ended up like addy robinson at the verge had a wonderful review just like scathing but i would want to say i'm just surprised that it was the most like yeah to this audience the ipad pro should be more of a disappointment i feel like but hey i'm surprised every year uh i would like to back the center stage cameras as the most disappointing thing you know honestly mike i think that saying the ipad pro of cameras as the most disappointing thing you know honestly mike i think that saying the ipad pro of 2022 as the most disappointing is a good choice you said it the upgradians said

it was at seven percent and i think that it viewed as a whole the the fact that we got a generation of ipad pro that is essentially just a place like a carbon copy and we went 18 months with no changes other than the chip when it's very clear there should have been something and they just weren't ready for it and so for ipad pro users you you're basically treading water for another 18 months before they do something new with that product that is largely unchanged other than the chip and you know i mean yeah largely unchanged design since 2018 it's evolved a little bit and it evolved almost not at all this year so i'm comfortable with that being the winner quote unquote uh and put center stage as a runner-up actually put the meta quest pro

as a runner-up too give sure why not what they want yep sure most life-changing hardware uh i'll say for me for all the reasons i mentioned earlier is the steam deck like i've been a i wanted to play more video games this year this enabled that to happen for me because it's so easy to download basically any game that i want to play because they're basically all on steam and because of the you know it's effectively a nintendo switch for pc games so i can just pick it up and put it down i just wake it and I'm back in the game again. It is unbelievably user-friendly in a way that I wasn't expecting because it is still ultimately PC gaming.

Every game that I've wanted to play has run really well on it. Tons of games. Basically every game now is optimized to run on it because it's such a success as a hardware. And now, as of this recording, you can just buy one. That was a thing for a while that they were struggling with demand. But now you can just place an order and one will ship in like a week in most countries where they have it available.

So I think this is an absolute home run and it's really made a massive impact on my life in enabling me to be able to more easily play the games that I want to play. It's cool. No doubt about it. Great idea for a product. I put the MacBook Air M2 in this category for all the reasons I said before. I travel with it now. It doesn't feel like it's compromised.

said before i travel with it now it doesn't feel like it's compromised um one of the reasons i stopped wanting to travel with my macbook air is that i was unhappy with the fact that you know with the the the state of affairs of the intel macbooks and i had my imac pro at home and so the i was using the intel macbook air less and less and it was kind of i had to update the software every time and the m2 macbook air really kind of reinvigorated my love of a laptop and being able to pull that laptop out and do work on it without having it feel inferior and bad, where I just decided I was going to do it all on the iPad. So it really did, like literally changed how I use devices

by having that available to me. The Upgradians voted at 3.4% for the Steam Deck, 4.4% for AirPods Pro 2, 5.6% for the Apple Watch Ultra, and 8.7% for the Apple Watch. Now, this is a complicated thing for me. That's why there's four here. We usually just bring in the top three.

I was a bit conflicted about how to score the Apple watch because it was like apple watch apple watch series a apple watch apple and i combined those together but the apple watch ultra i did not combine with the apple watch because it felt like a different product still like it felt like of the people who consider the apple watch ultra to be life-changing maybe wouldn't have with the regular apple watch like it's like a different category of people. But I wanted to put all four of them in here to kind of, you know, there's like, yeah. So I don't know. I would be very happy with the M2 MacBook Air taking this category,

making it I think an unprecedented two-time winner in the same upgrades, which is really weird as as a thing to occur. Well, the other choice here is the Steam Deck, which would also be a two-time winner. Yeah, the reason I would lean MacBook Air is because I agree with you, right? Like, where you have not been able to have this experience, but I have had an experience like with the MacBook Air

where it has also changed the way that I work. All right, let's do it then. That's wild. Same one. So we'll go M2 MacBook Air is the winner in this category. And I would like to pick the Apple Watch Ultra like specifically

because I just think it's interesting. And then maybe the Steam Deck. And the Steam Deck, yeah. So, okay. So most life-changing hardware award goes to the m2 macbook air which also won favorite apple product this year i love that this episode is brought to you by rocket money say goodbye to last year's outdated disorganized methods of managing your money and say hello to Rocket Money, the better way to hack your finances in 2023. Rocket Money, formerly known as Truebill, is a personal finance app that finds and cancels

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for their support of this show and RelayFM. So we are in our final categories of this year's upgradies. We're going to talk about the favorite tech story of this year. I want to do mine real quick because it's not going to be the winner. But there are some obvious things and they are negative things by and large. I want to talk about something that made me really happy this year and I was very excited to dig into as Upgradians will know.

It's the launch of Matter. Ah, yes. I loved learning about it. I'm happy about the potential future that it's going to mean for the smart home. I loved reading a lot of the reporting about it over on The Verge especially and like being able to see all the new products that were coming

out. I've really enjoyed it and I'm continuing to enjoy learning more about like what our Matter future is going to be. And that felt like a positive story of something that i'm excited about rather than all of the other things yeah no it's nice to be positive i'm going to be positive about a negative story actually yes go for it for mine so one of my favorite things that i discovered this year is that I discovered that a dry financial column on Bloomberg could make me laugh so hard that I cried. Okay. And it happened this year more than once. And so I just want to applaud. I mean, it started with Twitter and we're going to get to Twitter,

but the stuff that really made me laugh was the ftx stuff the ftx meltdown as covered in just i think the funniest like informative serious and all from somebody who understands cryptocurrency and wrote a big story about it the day-to-day fallout of the ftx disaster as covered by matt Matt Levine of Bloomberg, in his excellent Daily-ish column, Money Stuff, he's a very funny guy, a very funny writer, but also super knowledgeable. And, you know, you got to laugh, right? Like, the story, the FTX story is so disastrous. You got to laugh, right? Like the story, the FTX story is such, so disastrous. It's just complicated and also just horrible to have an expert who can walk you through what's going on and all the way make you laugh. It's, it's a little miracle. So Matt Levine, a very

good writer started covering sort of like everything Elon Musk was doing this year, but I think he achieved his greatest work covering what was going on at ftx it just i i can't even describe how how good a job he did or how much he made me laugh like i was having eaten lunch reading his column and just tears going down my face because it was so funny just what what a trick from Matt Levine. I will say one thing. I'm very happy to see that Bloomberg have a specific RSS feed for Matt Levine's column.

Happy to see that. Yeah. What I will say about like the FTX thing is like not a thing that we've spoken about. It is technology, but it's kind of outside of what we would normally talk about on the show, right?

But like what a just banana story like absolutely wild what on earth is going on and continuing to evolve right like we're recording this show a little in advance but like so who knows what's gonna have happened by the time that this goes out right but like just a truly wild story in technology uh which may be like the beginning of the end for this type of cryptocurrency or at least for the exchanges we're not sure the upgradians voted at 5.4 percent for crypto crashing. That included everything FTX related and that kind of stuff. I just kind of lumped it in together. Sure.

Similarly at 7.3% for AI art and chat bots, but at a staggering 41.4% Elon Musk buys Twitter. Yeah. Now what I will say is let's come back to that in our next category and yep uh we why don't we i want to give uh ai art and chatbots a runner-up okay i want to give matter launching a runner-up because all right fun and we're gonna put ftx We're going to put FTX. That's great. FTX with a hat tip to Matt Levine. Matt Levine. Because sometimes it's that favorite story, right?

When we talk about a specific story. His coverage put it over the top for me. But the whole crypto crashing thing is quite a story this year. And then the way Matt handled it, it's just amazing. We go into our final category favorite tech screw up surprise i'm just gonna start with the upgradients 2.4 meta layoffs take that facebook that's again i i don't know if i have some weird bias like i'm not a fan of meta i'm not a fan of mark z. I'm not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook particularly. They're kind of whatever

to me now. It's just a weird thing to see 2.4% of people that their favorite text grew up this year was that Meta had to lay off people. Everyone's laid off people. Anyway, 6% is the crashing of crypto. But I said staggering. How about this one?

79.1% of upgradians voted for Elon Musk buys Twitter as their favorite tech screw up. So I would say that this is like, depending on where you are in the timeline, it's either your favorite or just the biggest, right? So like, how could you not?

This is obviously mine too. I have enormous, yeah, mine mine too i have enormous yeah mine too i have enormous value over the years that i've gotten out of twitter and so seeing what's happened this year would i call this a favorite i mean i don't think i would but like it's the biggest i'll say a couple of things about it because we've mostly like limited our twitter conversation to upgrade plus but i'll say a couple of things about it because we've mostly limited our Twitter conversation to Upgrade Plus, but I'll just say a couple of things about it. One is, in terms of screw up, I have a hard time seeing a scenario where Elon Musk doesn't end up losing tens of billions of dollars on this. even if he gets it stabilized,

even if it becomes something else, I just have a hard time imagining that this isn't not only enormous opportunity cost, he has other things he should be worried about. Although I imagine the people who work at SpaceX and Tesla are maybe even a little relieved that he's not around. He's focused on Twitter. But he's going to lose tens of billions of dollars. And I think that that,

and potentially destroy a major social media site. That's a screw up um and then the other thought i had was just if you had handed me a story summarizing what has happened with twitter a year ago i would have assumed that it was an onion story yeah because it's too outlandish it's too ridiculous so many of the details are like no surely he didn't do that when when this was all going on people are like oh you know what he's gonna do and i'd be like no i mean it's not gonna be that bad oh it's worse than i thought okay uh and so yes it is a um i think it's monetarily a screw up and you know personal brand wise

a screw up and just whatever Twitter ends up being at the end of all of this a screw up and none of this was necessary but here we are it's like a screw up in every possible you name it right you name

it and it's you name it right you know I did not expect that this year I would leave Twitter. There wasn't something that I assumed would happen. It's something that I thought about for a long time, but nothing ever drove me to do it. But this is just like, yeah, I don't want to be a part of this anymore. I don't enjoy it anymore. And it's not going in places that i want it to go i when when this news happened i was like oh interesting like i think

twitter would would fare well as a private company and i still do believe that but i think it also needs somebody who actually knows what they're doing and i don't think he's the person that does. And is just being a buffoon, really, in every sense of the word. And even me saying that, it's like, that's not a harsh enough word, but I just don't know of a word to encapsulate his being right now. But he's just absolutely destroying this thing.

And even if it is still around, it isn't what it was and that's already happened so without a shadow of a doubt elon musk buys twitter is the biggest tech screw-up of this year might be one of the biggest if not the biggest in upgradies history history. So let me run these back quickly and we can see, right? Last year, Apple's CSAM announcement, which they're not even doing that anymore. So that's why. Quibi in 2020.

Oh, Quibi. Oh, the memories. The Samsung Galaxy Fold in 2019. Because it was breaking. A little sticky. Yeah. In 2018, Facebook's privacy scandals so i'm assuming that this was cambridge analytica then 2017 the homepod leak which i don't remember i don't know

what that was i don't but there you go uh 2016 samsung note 7 exploding. 2015, Aaron Rodgers throws a surface. Oh, that was good. The HomePod leak was that they were recording audio and passing it around. Oh, yeah, that was pretty bad. Yeah, that was pretty bad. And this one is wild because I can't believe that we were recording the show when this happened.

In 2014, the Amazon Fire Phone. That feels like longer ago than our show and yeah i'm willing to say elon musk buying twitter is the worst one of all of those yeah it's pretty bad now but aaron rogers threw that tablet that one time that's happened all the quarterbacks throw those surface tablets now all of them it's amazing tom brady is like forget it like it's it's a product placement. Good job, Microsoft. Apple might be in that with the soccer, right?

Oh, yeah, sure. And they are in the Apple. Actually, iPads are in baseball dugouts now. So, yeah. So our runners-up are MetaLayoffs and CryptoCrashing.

But the winner is Elon Musk buying Twitter as the biggest tech screw-up of the year. And the final upgrade-y in the 2022 upgrade is the 9th annual. Thank you so much for listening to this

very special episode. If you would like longer ad-free versions of every episode of Upgrade, including this one, go to getupgradeplus.com and you can sign up. If you want to find us online, you can go to sixcolors.com for Jason's work. I have yet to decide where to go for me.

What about... Oh, it's coming up to the new year. Go to cortexmerch.com. Buy yourself a theme system journal. That's another thing that I do. Thank you to our fine sponsors for this episode. Rocket Money, Hover, and Memberful. And we'd like to thank you for listening and to all upgradians a very happy new year to you all indeed until next year

jason snell whoa say goodbye goodbye upgradians and thank you