Upgrade - 46: The S Could Stand for Snell

Episode Date: July 20, 2015

Myke and Jason party like it’s 2005 and spend a lot of time talking about the iPod, including what the new iPod touch might mean for the future of the iPhone product line, and the mystery of the continued existence of the iPod nano and iPod shuffle. Plus they address some follow-up about tea, space, and American geography.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 46 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts text expander from smile type more with less effort. Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by the wonderful Mr. Jason Snell. Oh, that's very nice of you to say. Hi, Mike. You are pretty wonderful yourself. Welcome to the Mutual Admiration Society, I suppose.

How are you? I am very well, sir. How are you? Good, good. Very good. Had a weekend, actual weekend, which I very rarely have. That was very nice. My wife and I are here. The kids are coming back in a couple of days, but they're with their grandparents.

And I didn't have an incomparable episode this weekend. So, you know, that's hours of editing that I often do on Saturday mornings gone. I did have a podcast this weekend, but it was early on Saturday morning and then nothing else the rest of the weekend. And it was great. It was like, this must be what we, this is why people like weekends. So it was a good rest. It was a good break. Did you have a lot of weekends when you were at IDG? Or you were still doing all the incomparable stuff?

That's exactly it. all the side project stuff. I mean, Saturday morning is podcast morning for me. You know, generally, I will make, you know, breakfast when the kids are here, especially I'll make breakfast and all that and we'll do that.

And then I'll go out and, you know, I'll spend three or four hours working on the Incomparable. And there's often a podcast recording session in there. Yeah, that was true at IDG as well. Plus, you know, stuff comes up where I've got ongoing stories or things for IDG, you know. Yeah. I mean, it's not that different than it was where the weekend is interspersed. I've just got work stuff interspersed with life stuff, and that's

just how it is. And that's fine. But this weekend was nice in the sense that i uh i sort of said no i'm not gonna i'm not gonna do that this weekend this is our our last chance to get a couple of days with kind of we had we had nothing else on the calendar usually there's take a kid somewhere and do this or take the kids this way and and it was nothing and and it was one of those moments of like hey let's celebrate having nothing on the calendar by not putting anything on the calendar so we didn't it's not bad not bad yeah my weekends tend to be a balance of life and business but it tends to work out pretty well actually i mean we still did stuff like um we went for some walks and uh we we did a bunch of house stuff so like painted we painted a of stuff, like touched up a bunch of paint in the

house and painted some furniture and bought some, bought my son a new desk and we did stuff, but it wasn't, you know, we, we, it wasn't the usual stuff. And that was good. I, I, I plugged in, I rewired my TV with these new HDMI cables because I got frustrated by how our TV was set up. It was really confusing and I couldn't tell what was plugged into where, and I bought all these color. They were longer. They need to be longer and not broken because some of them were kind of questionable,

and I threw them away. And they need to be colored so that I now know, like, my TiVo is hooked up with the red cable. Did you go with the gold-plated option? No, I got a reasonably priced mono price set of cables but they're they have colors so that's that makes me happy so yeah yeah red red for the tivo shall we move into your very favorite of all verticals uh well it is the container in which all verticals reside, which is follow up slash out.

And let's do that now. So Angus wrote in about our discussion last week in Ask Upgrade about Touch ID in apps. And this is what Angus had to say. There's another reason that you may have not mentioned about why Touch ID exists in applications because we were questioning as to whether you need it if you lock your phone. Apps that use Touch ID also have access to the Safari keychain.

This means that apps that require a username and password to access a web component such as the Backblaze app and also sections of the Apple Store and Amazon apps can retrieve these details by using Touch ID instead of having to ask every time they're launched, assuming the login details are obviously saved in the keychain. Yeah, that's a good tip, Angus. I've noticed this with, I mean, this is why you lock your phone too,

because Safari won't let you have access to Safari keychain unless you've got a lock on it. And I was just, it can be really convenient. I was on this iPad 2 that I'm using, iPad Air 2 that I'm using for iOS 9. I realized I didn't have Safari stuff synced. And once I did that and my password started just showing up everywhere, it's very convenient. Even if you use one password, having stuff saved in the Safari keychain can be incredibly convenient because it just auto fills it and you don't even need to look it up. And I do that for some stuff. And so yeah, you would want that

to be locked away, obviously. So that's another good reason. I am happy to have more reasons to use Touch ID. I wish Touch ID was everywhere because it's so much easier to just verify it with my thumbprint than to have to deal with typing a password in somewhere. I'd love it to be everywhere. I wish it was on my Mac. I was thinking about that the other day. I was typing something in and thinking, this Mac's never going to have it

because it would be a new Mac hardware, but I would love to have that. Or somebody was speculating, I remember reading somewhere, somebody was speculating of a new magic trackpad that maybe was force touch but that maybe it would also have a uh a touch id sensor somewhere in it um that would be that would be cool although i don't know whether securely whether you can do something like touch id with a non with a wireless device or not because there might be some man in the middle or some other kind of security problems there.

But yeah, it would be nice to do something like Touch ID on the Mac just to not have to type in that password because my voice is my passport. Verify me. That's from sneakers, Mike. Indeed. I know that very well. Good.

Will has provided another way in which you can shuffle artists. And this also will provide a little bit of clarification that I don't think I was completely clear on. So if you remember in previous episodes, we've spoken about the fact that you can't very easily play artists. You can just shuffle all songs in an artist. If they have more than two albums in Apple Music, if you have more than two albums with a specific artist, the option to shuffle all songs in an artist. If they have more than two albums in Apple Music, if you have more than two albums specific artists, the option to shuffle all songs goes away. But we'll discover that if you go to the artist view, so you've got the list of all artists, and you tap on the thumbnail of the artwork, it just starts playing all songs and then you can shuffle them. This is

exactly what I was looking for. However, I now know that it's not what Jason was looking for at all. And I think me, along with many other people, have missed this. So I'm going to try and sum this up for you, Jason. Okay. Because I'm worried that we've not been able to get this locked down. What I am looking for is I, for example, have Kings of Leon. I have added all of Kings of Leon's albums into my Apple Music collection. So they are there.

So now I can go in, press the album artwork on the artist view, and it will start playing them all. But what you're looking for is a way to search for Kings of Leon and then shuffle play all of their albums without adding them to your collection first. Right. That was what I was looking for, is how do I go to an artist that I'm interested in hearing from? And not all artists have a playlist that says intro to this artist, right? How,

so how do I listen to songs of theirs? And one of my thoughts is just, why don't I just shuffle through their albums? Just, you know, just shuffle all their songs. Now there there's, there's problems with them that, because there's a lot of junk duplicates, special editions, things like that.

But that was just my thought was when I go to any artist, I should be able to say, you know, play me some stuff from this artist. And you can't do that unless you add them. I mean, you can play stuff, but it doesn't seem like you can play like show me a sample or just show me a random collection of this artist. Instead, you need to either add them to your library or if you're lucky, there's a playlist and then that solves it because then there's a, you know, intro to artist name, like intro to Kings of Leon is probably a playlist. And I could go there and play that not knowing them. And those playlists are really designed for me because you know them well. And so it wouldn't be, I see those playlists on artists I know and i'm

like no i i could make my own playlist thank you but for me as somebody who doesn't know an artist that would be really useful um but sometimes they're not there and then i end up in this situation where i i don't think you can go into like their list of songs and just shuffle that but what you could do is i was just looking this up you could search for the artist name and then the search results click on the heading of songs and you can play it that way but the problem with that is it plays absolutely everything including all of the album songs all of the singles from those albums all live it, it's everything, right? That's the problem. But it is possible to select somebody like that and just play everything.

However, I just did a search for Alabama Shakes, which is a band that I quite like. But the problem is, as you go further down, there is stuff that is not Alabama Shakes in here. So actually that won't work. Hmm. This is a conundrum. Right, because it's finding everything that matches.

Yeah, I saw that too, where I searched for Genesis for a forthcoming episode of a different podcast because I was listening to some Genesis in advance of doing that podcast. And I could play from that songs list, but that songs list also contained all the songs with the word Genesis in it. So it wasn't an artist shuffle at that point, but I could go into that artist. I just don't, you know, this is, I mean,

what I'm really saying is maybe what I'm asking for is a programmatic playlist if you don't have a really good intro playlist give me a you know most popular songs by this artist playlist or something because some artists do have that so again i'll use alabama shakes as an example they have a uh it just says top songs and just has like seven songs but it's not a playlist it's just the most popular songs by that artist right so that's i want more of that because for me i hear about a band i know nothing about them i've only heard one song by them in some other playlist i go oh they're interesting what do i do and right now it seems like what i really need to do if they don't have a playlist that's been curated for them is sort of just pick an album at random and start playing it. But what if I want to add like three albums and shuffle them? I can do it, but it's more work. So I just

feel like that's a discovery thing that I have that I desire that I would like to see. But, you know, it's early yet. Oh, and a listener, Rich, also suggested, and I think this actually does work, is use Siri and tell Siri to play music from a band and it will find 20 songs by that artist and play them. So it turns out that there are many, many ways to pronounce the name of the tea that we were talking about during the New Mexico Tea Company. Yes. So many people wrote in, many people wrote in, many people were angry. And there are two different ways to pronounce the

tea, which is spelt R-O-O-I-B-O-S. There is an English way and a Dutch way. So I'm going to do my best here. The English way is Rooibos and the Dutch way is Roeribos. But many people call it Roer red bush because that's what that means yeah yeah red bush tea so there you go i'll put a link in the show notes

uh to the wikipedia page which has the audio clips which i attempted to uh pronounce in my own way and it's actually wiktionary rather than Wikipedia. And it's still pronounced hibiscus. Hibiscus. No, hibiscus. Hi, biscus. Hi, biscus. No.

Yeah, well, hibiscus is so close. Hibiscus, I think you know more, especially if you're near Hawaii, because it's a very common thing in Hawaii, and I've been to Hawaii many times. You've never been to Hawaii, right? I've never been to Hawaii. It's high on my list of places to go, though. You should go sometime. That's the kind of thing that, given how far away it is for you, that's the kind of thing where if you are going to the west coast of North America, planning it into something like that

before or after or during a trip to the west coast of North America is one way to fit it in. Because it is just, for people who don't live in California, essentially, it is out in the middle of nowhere because it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But it's great.

I love it. It's my favorite place in the world. Yeah, it's high on the list. Yeah, get there someday. Volcanoes, you know. My favorite. Lava. I love it.

You should say, I love some lava. I love some lava? Okay. It's just fun. It's more fun in an English accent. Anyway. Oh. Are you a lava lover a lava lover yep okay

uh we got a lot of feedback about the space stuff we talked about i i uh pelted you with space facts uh which i i have to say um i have been doing to people around me since i was in first grade i remember very distinctly that i got some book about the planets in first grade and actually like would read facts from the book to my classmates in first grade. And it is a wonder that they didn't just punch me in the face and throw me down in the dirt. So I've been doing it since then. So you got to hear it from me. And then later in the week, you got to hear it from Stephen on Connected because you have the pleasure to host podcasts with two people who are space fans.

So you got it twice. I really enjoyed it, though, because I, you know, like all nerds, space is interesting to me. I've just never spent a lot of time learning about it, you know? Yeah, so we were hopefully able to kind of boil it down and make it understandable and interesting. We got some really nice feedback from people about it, which was great. I did make a mistake, which I heard about several times because that's what happens with podcasts is you make the mistake once. And then as people listen to it over the course of the week, they all tell you that you're wrong. Yay. New Horizons, when it left the Earth, was the fastest launch of an object going that we've sent out into the solar system.

But it is not the fastest moving object because both of the Voyager probes, at the very least, there may actually may be some others too, but certainly the Voyagers are going faster. They went around Jupiter and Saturn. And when you go around a big planet like that, it usually is increasing your speed and pushing you on to the next one. They have a sort of gravity assist thing that happens, and it's complicated. So I'm not going to talk about it too much because then I'll have to correct that next week. But the idea is the Voyagers are going faster. So New Horizons is never going to catch up. The Voyager 2, I think, will be the furthest out object that we've made for the foreseeable future. So we got a nice bit of feedback from Andy, listener Andy, who enjoyed our accidental astronomy and asked if there were any beginner level astronomy podcasts

to recommend. Back in the early days of podcasting, I actually listened to these podcasts like 2008, 2009, somewhere in there that are by a guy named Richard Pogge, who is an astronomy professor at Ohio State University. And we'll put the link to his page in the show notes. It's an old school. It's got a tilde in the directory name. It is old school web, but it's got links to... He recorded himself with several of his introductory astronomy classes. There are three that I listened to that are all still up from 2008, 2007, 2009. And I think they're in the iTunes podcast directory, but he's also got

the direct links on his site. So we'll put that in the show notes. And then he's Pogge, P-O-G-G-E. He actually has a more recent course in iTunes U that you can also listen to. I think he's a really good teacher, which is not always the case with professors at major universities. They're there because they're good at research and getting grants and things like that. And the teaching is often secondary. But Pogge, I thought, was just a really – first, I love that in 2007 he basically – he bought himself an MP3 recorder and a clip-on microphone and just thought, wouldn't it be cool if I could record my lectures? And then he also made them available to the students so that if they missed a lecture, they could listen back. Or if they were there, they could still listen back, which I always thought was really cool. And there were good courses.

So I recommend those if you really want to dive in. They are intended as essentially introductory courses. One of them is about the solar system. It just goes through every part of the solar system. It's good stuff. In terms of like modern podcasts, Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk podcast is widely loved. So I'll throw that out there. I really enjoyed the NPR Science Friday podcast, which they, I don't know if they still do this or not.

One of the things I liked about it is they split all the segments up into individual items. So they would do a show for a couple of hours. But instead of dropping like one podcast, they would drop all the segments. And I always liked that because I could listen to the segments that interested me and skip the ones that didn't. Sounds kind of like chapter markers. Yeah, a little bit, except instead they're just episodes, are the chapters. Each segment is its own episode, and they drop a bunch of episodes every Friday.

And, of course, you and Stephen the the best space podcast to never exist which is space and cider not space insider that's a website it's space and cider because people drink cider while talking about space uh and you can't get that anywhere because it is made up so it really sounded like he said that i know i know but he didn't i i actually just bought space insider.com just all right just in case just just in case just in case you never know you never know so a couple weeks ago uh we were talking about my knowledge of the u.s states i can't even remember how this came up and i said i would take a quiz and a couple of days after, I did, but we forgot to talk about it last week. Right.

There's so much last week. Yeah. Have you seen the results of my US state quiz? I sent it to you. And I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a PDF of my quiz results. No. Oh, here it is. Here it is.

Okay. I hadn't looked at that. I wanted to be surprised. So I got 16 correct. Wow. Here it is. Okay. I hadn't looked at that. I wanted to be surprised. So I got 16 correct. Wow, that's 32%, Mike. That's not a passing grade. What do you think about that? 16 correct. Do you think that that is a bad score? Like, person from england probably not um i'm looking at your results here this is uh you okay you got you got alaska and hawaii easy they were the easy ones so that gives you 14 continental united states um what states have you been to in the united states california

and you got that one right yep oregon you got that one right portland i always say i always say the places yeah i've been to nevada yeah you got that one right uh i've been to michigan and you didn't get that one nope uh and um maybe that's it. Oh, and Georgia. Tennessee. Georgia and Tennessee. And Georgia. And you didn't get Georgia and you did get Tennessee. Yep. So I think that there are some pretty bad results on here.

But overall, I'm proud that I was able to get any to be honest because it's difficult i i've never we never studied this like why would we have you know um you got you got idaho yep you thought you thought montana was wisconsin wow i don't even know why that's funny wisconsin's not okay so if are you looking at the map yep okay are you looking at number six Montana okay go to the right that's North and South Dakota go to the right yep that's Minnesota

go to the right that's Wisconsin okay 34 well at least it was at the top though it was at the top you got right you got the what the top. You got the X right, but not the Y. So here's the other thing

about this. I had to type in the results. I had to bring up a list on Wikipedia of the states, because I don't know the 50 states. So that is another thing. I didn't even know all the states. I probably could have only done about 20. How did you get you got wyoming right that is a good guess yeah a lot of them because those are the square states those are

really hard to get the square complete guesses basically if it wasn't super obvious right like texas for example you said utah was indiana wow who knows And Utah, you labeled, what is it? Arizona, you labeled as Utah. Okay. I can see that. I can see that. You named Colorado as Illinois. Okay. Illinois is in the Midwest, which is not in the middle of the country. That is where Chicago is. You put Chicago in Denver, basically. That's okay. you got New Mexico right, you got Texas right Texas is a good one, that's a good anchor on the lower section of the map so there are some where it's like I have

a vague idea of where this state sits in the country you put Missouri and Kansas they're next to each other that's not terrible you put Oklahoma and Ohio or you put Ohio and Oklahoma Missouri and Kansas, they're next to each other. That's not terrible. You put Ohio and Oklahoma, that's not as good.

You put Louisiana in South Dakota. Okay, that's a bad one. You missed that one by a lot. Louisiana's New Orleans, that's steamy and on the gulf I really struggled with the northeastern states well they're so they're so little yeah because I know a bunch that are up there I just didn't know which one was which you know that also you label Delaware as Minnesota again it's funny how like this is hilarious to you and i have no idea why oh my god well they're not it's funny because for for me i would think that somebody from the united states would would get

i mean look north and south dakota you know you get the north and south so you can figure out which is which there but you've got to know that they're kind of in the middle there and if you mix them up with minnesota or if you mixed uh kansas up with ne with Nebraska or something like that, or Missouri with Iowa and Arkansas, I could kind of understand that, or Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, I could kind of understand that. What's fascinating to me is that you've got states that are like, because you don't have any context of how the states, like what their character is.

So like for me, Louisiana is where New Orleans is. It is a hot, steamy region. It has to be South and it has to be, and you probably would know that it like got hit by Hurricane Katrina. It's on the Gulf Coast and that would be able to place it. And you placed it in the Northern Plains near Canada. So that's an example where you don't have that context

to say, what do I know about this state? And be able to, you know, other than a few California and Florida and things like that. Yeah. See, there was some at the end where I was like, I have some states left and I have some boxes left. So that might've been one of those. You know, it's like, I'm looking down the list. I'm like, I've got three empty boxes. I don't know what needs to go here. I had to go down through the state list, check all the names that I had, and then just throw some names in and hope that I got some of them right. Yeah. That may explain why you labeled Pennsylvania as New York and New York as Vancouver. I can't help you, my friend.

That's amazing. It's amazing. Well, you know, I'm sure if you gave me the 20 most populous cities in the UK and had me label them, I would probably get five. Yeah, but I don't even know if I would get them right. Oh, okay. Fair enough. Because the thing is, like, we're not really, there isn't a focus on it like there is in the US. You guys have this focus on yourselves, which is very different to how the rest of the world looks at their own country, I think. Well, it's a bit... I mean, this is a little bit like...

I keep saying this to people who try to compare the US to a country in Europe. It's like, this is a continent. So this would be like somebody from Europe learning where the other countries in Europe are on a map of Europe. Yeah, I would probably have a better job of labeling Europe than places in the UK. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense.

That makes sense. It is a lot of states. And again, I don't mean to offend people because I have relatives in many of these states by saying this. But unless you have a personal connection or a cultural connection or something like that to a state, it's easy to not understand what a state is. Because, you know, like I know people in Indiana, so I know where Indiana is. But if you don't know exactly where it is and you don't have any kind of cultural context of I know somebody or there is a, you know, like New Orleans gives you Louisiana, if you know that context fairly easily. But if you don't, then, you know, if you don't know that Maine is just kind of all the way up at the top there, which you labeled as Iowa. Oh, my.

That's just hilarious. Anyway, then that's why you wouldn't even know. And, yeah, schoolchildren in the U.S. get drilled in this, too. So that's part of anyway um then then that's why you wouldn't even know and and yeah school children in the u.s get drilled in this too so that's part of it too but there's also that context thing of just knowing yeah oh well new orleans is hot so it must be at the bottom some i think some of the ones that i got right or close to right was by that kind of that kind of thinking but i don't know enough about all of the states to know exactly where they sit i i know about new Orleans. I didn't specifically know it was hot there.

It wouldn't have helped me. It's hot and steamy like Florida. Alright, well, you fail. This week's episode is brought to you by lynda.com They probably have a course on learning the states.

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be helping support this show. Thank you so much, lynda.com, for the continued support of Upgrade and RelayFM. So, Jason Snell, there was some new Apple products this week. Yes. Oh, great! Yeah, new mind-blowing Apple products. uh there was mind bending i

think is a better mind uh mind touching mind approaching mind shuffling so the mind yes nano mind touch uh ipod touch new ipod touch This is the thing that John Syracuse would be dancing in the streets about probably if he, you know, didn't go and get an iPhone. Um, the, uh, he didn't need a, if he danced and if he went in the street. Okay. Really? John Syracuse wouldn't have done any of those things. Anyway, a new iPod touch with an A8 processor.

So this is one of those things where it's not... It is up... It's up to spec with the current models, which are 2014, right? So it's the 2015 iPod Touch has the 2014 era, but still current for now, processor of the iPhone 6.

Although probably clocked down somewhat. But still, it's an AA powered 4 inch so it's the iPhone 5 series screen still as it was before and it's it's first update in what 3 years or something like that so I mean that's good news

yeah wow the enthusiasm this reminds me on clockwise the other week uh somebody said uh somebody said who will speak for the i the i the ipod and i was like not me it's like it's kind of it's kind of fading away but but this is still valuable in in certain contexts as a product because not everybody wants or needs or can afford a monthly phone bill with data on it. Because the data really is where they get you. And so I know people who have dumb phones and iPod Touches. I just feel like with the iPad and the iPad Mini, it's less exciting than it was.

People say, well, you can get it for a kid. And it's true. You can get it for a kid and they can put it in their pocket or something. But like, you know, you could also get, and it's cheaper than getting an iPad mini even, but it's just, it's the, it's niche keeps getting smaller and smaller, I feel like. But it is good that it exists, I think, to have something out there that you can buy. $199 gets you an iOS device that is basically an iPhone, somewhere between an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 6. I really struggle to understand the placement of this device.

And I know that the idea is it's basically the lowest end to be able to play games on right that's effectively what it is i think it it is kind of like the cheapest way to play iphone games right so you can buy them for kids and stuff i think that's probably the prime market yeah but my son has has been using hand-me-down ipads of mine for a couple of years and it's and and that's way better but they are more expensive but they're way better choices so i think there's a lot of people that go that way and i think it's a better way because my feeling about this is bigger screens are better for games and every game device every uh other handheld gaming device is bigger than an ipod touch um it physically or

in screen size. They're just like bigger devices. And I think that they work better for games. But I think it's the idea of there's no iOS devices in a family. Jimmy would like an iPhone. So you buy him an iPod Touch for his birthday. I think that's where this device sits because I genuinely cannot think of another

place where it really really makes sense yeah because it's like okay it has a really large hard drive to replace the ipod classic but i just i don't see it i just i really don't get it it's a very very peculiar device and i find it even stranger with some of the things they've given it and some of the things they haven't. Like no Apple Pay on this is weird to me. And I know it requires the addition of a Touch ID sensor, which I'm sure is an expensive part. But Apple Pay feels like such a core part of Apple now. Like it feels like such a big thing for their future having a device that that is new um that could support it but doesn't it seems like a very strange mission to me i yeah i i think it's about making it cheap i think it's that simple it's like they didn't

they didn't want to put in the you know know, whatever it is, the secure enclave, that secure element thing. And not just, and we're not talking about Apple Pay even necessarily because of connectivity issues, you need a device that's always on the internet to do Apple Pay as the, you know, near field stuff. But you can do the Apple Pay

for online. You don't need it. It doesn't need to be connected to the internet. It doesn't, does it? Well, it's NFC. It's not in the iPad either. So they've decided to say Apple Pay for online is fine. And

for not is not. Well, because it doesn't make sense to put an NFC chip in the iPad because you couldn't pay in a store with that thing. You could theoretically with an ipod touch i suppose that's true but i think the point is they'd have to put in nfc hardware and they'd have to put in touch id hardware and the idea here is to create something that's cheap yeah i mean that's definitely the reason it's definitely the reason it's because the expense an unlocked S currently is like $500.

And this is $199 to start. And I didn't actually look up the price, but it's a lot. The gap is huge. And you can't just say, well, it's, you know, if you throw in the $130 or whatever, that's the premium they charge when you take an iPad and make it a cellular device. I mean, they would never do that here because at that point it is an iPhone, basically, that can't make calls, but who cares? So part of this is an artificial distinction to separate the iPhone from the iPod Touch. But part of it is, you know, they are charging so much less for it. And that's partially because they're throwing lots of features out.

And I think Apple Pay is an expensive feature. I mean, it requires some custom hardware, more than one piece of custom hardware to make it work. And I think, you know, Apple does not want this thing to be that close to an iPhone and doesn't want it to be that functional compared to an iPhone. That's just not what this thing is for. So I think that's, I do think, and I wrote about this at Six Colors, I do think, or, well, no, I didn't.

I wrote about this at Macworld. That's a site that I occasionally write for. You may have heard of it. I wonder if, though, this, if you can have a four-inch iPhone 5-sized iPod Touch with an AA processor in it, it makes me wonder if we will see a four-inch iPhone this fall, which I've been talking about since the last iPhone release, that I wasn't convinced that the iPhone 5S was the end of the line, and I'm still not. And this gives me a little more hope,

the fact that Apple is still creating products with that screen size, and these products have an A8 processor in them. It makes me think perhaps we will see an iPhone, I don't know what,

6C or something like that, that is essentially this, or 5S something else, 5Q, I don't even know what it would be, but that it was the smaller phone size, but with an AA processor in it. And hopefully that one would have Touch ID. Well, it would have Touch ID. Hopefully it would also have Apple Pay at that point. And then you'd have three sizes of phones. Of course, the iPhone 6 would then rev to be even more awesome with like an a9 and it would be essentially a generation behind but at least like the ipad mini but at least it would exist so i am going to take that as a positive from this even if uh even if you're not super enthusiastic about the ipod touch i feel like maybe it augurs for, you know, a new-ish phone in the old school iPhone 5 size.

Which some people would like. Not you, because you like the gigantic phone. But some people, I've heard, you know, would really love a more modern phone in that size. I want to talk about that very quickly. Sadior in the chat room has pointed out that the iPad Air 2 does have an NFC chip in it, but it's not used. Alright, fair enough. I wonder if it must just kind of come connected with but yeah, it's off. They don't want you tapping your

iPad Air at the store. Because the idea being that people have thought that potentially this is for merchant terminals right i've heard that speculation that at some point they might be able to turn that on and have some sort of you know use it as a you know use your apple pay phone to pay to an out to an ipad air to apple pay driven terminal and do it that way. But that's just a rumor. Well, I feel like they're not going to do that for as long as they have a good relationship with Square.

Well, unless Square is the first app that, unless Square gets access to the NFC before anything else. I mean, that could be part of this, right? They, Square have built a Apple Pay reader, right? Right. Which they put on stage at WWDC. So I feel like that

is a thing that they're clearly working with Apple on, and it's, you know, so maybe Apple have the chip in there just in case, but right now they're happy to work with partners on it. Sure. Hey, who knows? Right, so let's talk about this small phone. So what are you expecting here?

Like the body of maybe the C, like the colors, and with all of the hardware of the 6? I don't know. If I had to make a guess, okay, we're in Fantasyland now because I have no little birdies telling me things. because I have no little birdies telling me things. But if I'm in Fantasyland, what I would say, my bet would be, most likely, would be something that looks more or less like the iPhone 5S, but has an A8 processor in it and does Apple Pay.

That would basically be it. That it would look more or less like the 5S, that they wouldn't really change it to look... It's possible they would try to redesign it to make it look more like the 6, but I think that they could also just save their time and fit it inside. This new iPod Touch is the exact same exterior as the old one. The dimensions are the same. The weight is the same. So they didn't bother redesigning the outside. They just redesigned the insides. So let's go with that. Let's say that's what they're going to do. They're going to take the 5S, which is, you know, it's a nice looking thing. They're selling that now. That's

your $99 with contract phone. And they put an A8 and Apple Pay support in there. It's already got Touch ID. Maybe they upgrade the cameras a little bit, but, but more to the level of last year's iPhones, not the forthcoming new iPhones and keep it at the nine as the $99. And at that point you've got an A9 iPhone 6 6 plus for 299 and as the starting price an a9 iphone 6s for um 199 and then you've got this thing iphone 5z 5q or iphone 6c or something for 99 and so it's it's a new product that's kind of an old product um but it also it means that people who want the smaller phone can still get it and just you know it's there it's not going to be as awesome as the the bigger phones are but it will stick around and that gives apple that allows apple to keep

that lower priced phone in the line while having it support like you were saying having support apple pay for example um and kind of clear out some of the uh products that don't so in your imagination in this snell product lineup there is is no cheap phone with a big screen. In my imagination, yeah. Yeah, that's it. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are, or their successors are 99 and 199, and they're gone,

or while supplies last or something. Or maybe they stick around. Last year's models are also 99. You can get last year's model. But I think it would be one reasonable way to do it would be to say, you know, we've got, you know, medium, large, and extra large. 99, you know, 199, and 299. And then extra for more storage on top of the base the 16 base so would that potentially be in this lineup then we have the 5c which will probably just still stick around as like as the

free as the free phone free probably yeah they gotta have what they gotta have a free phone so that probably they're not going to keep the 4 or 4s yeah that makes sense, I think, is the phone that goes into that slot. Then they have a 5C+, which is the mythical Jason Snell phone. Yeah, it's the 5S with an A8. Yeah. And Apple Pay. And Apple Pay. And then they have the two larger phones

in their revs, in their revisions, basically. Yeah, the 2015 versions. Yeah, that's what I would, in this scenario, that's what I would say. Yeah. And this feels like sort of the direction Apple's going with all its products, which is you've got like your flagships that you update every year, and then you've got these other ones that kind of trail a year behind. And then you've got some stuff that you keep around because you need something that's got higher margins that you can cut the price on for various reasons. Not saying they will do it that way, but that would be one

way to do it. That would be, you know, instead of saying we give you last year's iPhone 6 for cheap, we say, you know, we can give you this year's 4-inch phone for cheap, which I think is a better proposition to say this is the new 4-inch iPhone, even if, yeah, it's using last year's technology, but it's the new 4-inch iPhonehone instead of saying this is last year's six which they could do but but i i feel like there's a market and and for the smaller phone and so why not just it's not enough of a priority like last year was the first time apple did two different like two different entirely new iphones with the six and the 6 Plus. So, of course, they weren't going to also update the 5 at that point. It was too much, too much. But this year, would they push an update? Just like the iPad Mini 3 will probably go to iPad Mini 4 and get last year's iPad Air 2 specs, right,

and just stay a year behind. And this would be the equivalent of that. Okay. What about the way it looks, this device? Oh, my mythical imaginary? Yeah. It's too bad that 5S is taken, or the S could stand for Snell. But it's already...

We call it the 5S now. The 5SS. The 5SS. Like I said, I think looking at the ipod touch and knowing like how much work do you want to put into this thing look we want to have it out there and we want to have it be cheap but we want more recent technology into it do you really restyle it um you could but do you or do you just say look the five looks great let's just keep the five look around it won't look like the six and six plus

if they do that so they could totally you know they could restyle it to have the kind of curvy edges and stuff and call it a six something or they could leave it blocky but have it be modern and even call it a five something um i think one of the key problems that apple definitely looked to solve with the introduction of the 5c is how do you take an old device and make it look new so it looks like you have a new phone when you buy it and not an old phone right and i think if they kept it just in like 5s same body silver black gold i think that they would struggle to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised to see iPod Touch metallic colors. That could be.

That could be. With so many of these products, it really is just like how much do they want to prioritize it? Because I don't think this is, when I'm describing this product, this isn't their high priority product, right? The next 6 Plus and 6 are their high priority products. This is a, yes, we also revved that too.

So that's the question is, do they have enough, do they want it to look like the other phones? Or do they want it to not look like the other phones because what they really want to sell are the big phones? I don't know. It would be more consistent to have it look like the 6 family. You say that about selling the big phones. When they introduced... What was the C introduced alongside? What phone was it that they introduced the C alongside?

The 5S. Right. Because in the UK and in other places, all of the marketing, like the billboard marketing, was for the C range. All of it. It was very interesting that they did that, but that was the choice that they decided to go down. So I wouldn't be surprised to see that again if they went down that route. It's possible.

Yeah, I don't know. We could theorize about it all day. Somebody at Apple may be listening to this and just laughing and laughing. But yeah, I think we've talked about this before. This is one of those things that is fascinating about talking about what Apple's strategy is, is there's so many different paths they could go down. And they have inside Apple, they have more statistics, right? Nobody knows more about who's buying phones and how many they're buying and in what configurations where, let alone market research than people inside Apple. So they know way more than we do about who, you know, what the markets are. And they may have looked at the data and said, you know what, I know people are, there are noisy people out there who say, I want to, I'm not going to upgrade from the 5S because I don't want the big phone. But when we do all of our looks at sales and research, those people are a fraction of the market and we are just not going to bother.

That may be the case. I would like to believe that it's not the case, but it's possible because they know more than we do because they see their internal sales data. But even with that, they have so many different choices. There's so many different ways they could go with their product line. So it's kind of fascinating to break it down in that way. Do you spend the time to make a four inch phone that looks kind of like the iPhone six line and do it that way? Do you leave it in the old shape of the 5s? Do you use it as a, you know, as the shiny colors thing, like six shiny colors, like, um, like the iPod touch. I, lots of choices, lots of choices. My, my gut feeling is since the five S is still in the

product line, that it would be more a space gray, uh, silver gold thing. And, you know, maybe it looks like the six, maybe it looks like the five and that they'll keep that c model as their colorful low-end model but who knows if i'm going to take a bet on this provided it exists and i'm still not convinced that they'll make this um personally i i don't know what i think about that uh i would put a bet on it looking like the five but having metallic colors all right that would be my bet but i'm still not even convinced it will exist i i don't i mean my confidence in this product exists is is greater because the ipod touch is out there but it's not like it's not a 90 or anything it's it's i it's, I think it's a, maybe better than a coin flip.

I think I'm, I think it's more likely than not because I think they need to do something other than just clear the five down to the free phone and say, forget it. You can't buy, you know, we we've abandoned that size. They've,

they've never said they've abandoned that size. And in fact, they still sell phones in that size. I, I would, like I said, I would like to believe that they are not going to abandon that size and that we will see something a year behind um but i don't think it's a sure thing

because like i said there there could be market research that makes it clear that inside apple there is no point in doing that phone yeah because it basically could be yeah i'm sure there are quite a lot of people that would love a phone this size. But are there enough to continue making it? That's the thing, right? It's like, yeah, there probably will be a lot of people, but it costs a lot of money to make something like this. Is the cost going to outweigh the amount of people that will buy it? I mean, that's a question about the Apple Touch, but they've clearly made that decision

there, but they might not want to make that decision for the phone because the phones are probably more expensive to make. And what are the margins on that phone versus last year's iphone 6 at 16 you know gigabytes what what what are the margin differences there would you be better off just marketing a iphone 6 along with the new you know iphone 6s um or or would you like to differentiate so that the 99 phone isn't the bigger screen and that get people to feel like they're choosing their phone size when they're choosing their price? And there probably you could have a whole day of arguments with people at Apple about what the right thing to do is there with lots of different data from the channel. And we don't have access to a lot of that. So we have to sort of speculate about it. But,

you know, those are the kinds of decisions that go into it. Is there an audience here? What does it do to our other products? Does it, does it take, if our margins are less on this than on the, on the new, you know, 6S, are we going to have a certain percentage of those people are just going to opt for the cheaper phone? That hurts us. If Apple believes that they're going to lose a certain number of people who aren't going to buy a six-sized phone regardless, but then there's a whole chunk who would buy a smaller phone if it's there, but otherwise will just buy the bigger phone. And the bigger phone has the bigger margins, and they do the math. They may say, look, we're killing ourselves if we offer a smaller model that has those margins. So it's super complicated. And that's why my confidence

that they'll do it is more like, you know, 55%, which is up from before last week. But the fact that there is now an iPod Touch in that size with last year's processor gives me some hope that they are... I mean, look, they've built that product now, right? They've built a 4-inch device, iOS device with an A8 processor.

And I would guess that those probably could be... that could be work saved by designing them both together. Like, let's bring the A8s to these two four-inch models, but they'll hold off on the iPhone until the iPhones come out. But I don't know enough about that. It may just be that those are two separate projects and there's nothing to be gained. But the fact is that device exists. It's got an A8 processor in it. It's very close to being this

iPhone that I've described. And the question is, do they want it to be that too, or do they not? I don't know. This episode of Upgrade is also brought to you by Fracture. Fracture is a really interesting company that have a really interesting product

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I know that Jason loves his. I've seen them proudly displayed on the wall. Confirmed, yes. I'm looking at the upgrade. The upgrade one's on the top, Mike. It's all the way up at the top there. Good. Those are nice, but I've also got a beautiful black and white print that's in a square. And I've got one that's a that's a painting, basically. And you've got that same one. And that's a larger one. And it's, it's rectangular and in, in, in landscape mode, it is not a landscape, but it is, it is in the landscape orientation, a nice rectangular piece of art.

And that always struck me that some of my kids' art that I like that's on a piece of construction paper or something like that, that fracture might actually be a really great way of preserving some of that. Rather than framing it or anything like that, you take a picture of it or a scan of it and send it to Fracture and have them print it on the back of the glass and then you hang it up. I'm planning on doing that with some of my kids' stuff. It is difficult for us to explain just how great these look.

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Thank you so much to Fracture for supporting this show. So we should talk about, really quickly, we don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but one thing that also happened last week, we mentioned the big news, right? The other big news, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle releases. They do still exist, and they got updated. The iPod Nano still looks like iOS 6. John Gruber said that his birdies tell him that there's just nobody left to do anything with that software to update it. And the iPod Shuffle still exists.

And I've heard from some people who still use them. Even when I run, I run with my phone. And if I didn't run with my phone, I've got an Apple Watch, so I would use that as my iPod shuffle. But I understand that this is all about, there's still a market for it and the margins on those are great. And so why not keep selling them? The one thing that baffles me though about it is, and this goes back to, we're willing to keep selling this product, but we're not willing to do anything to make it that much better. Like, we'll just change the anodized colors, but we're not going to do any software work for it because it's not important enough. It's too important to kill, not important enough to improve.

enough to improve. And the example I want to give here is, as far as we can tell, the iPod Nano and the iPod Shuffle that were just released don't support Apple Music. So if you add a song to your library and you want to put it on the Shuffle, you can't because it's a DRM'd Apple Music file. And they didn't update the software on the iPod Shuffle or Nano to play that stuff, apparently. I haven't tested this. I don't have these products. Now, on one level, I understand it because they seem to have nobody home developing those products anymore, really. And it probably would require some, you know, maybe serious software changes to support that kind of DRM stuff or changes in iTunes that when it's, you know, copying to those devices, it does something

that makes them playable, wraps them in a different kind of DRM that they understand, or takes the DRM off, which maybe they can't do because of the licensing agreements for Apple Music. Okay, I get that. However, on the other hand, it does seem bizarre to me because these are products made by a company that has a music service that their music products don't support. And, you know, so I understand the technical reasons why, but at the same time, part of me says, why do these products exist if you're not going to

support them for something like your brand new music service? Because I was thinking it would actually be kind of great if you're an iPod shuffle kind of person to take an Apple Music playlist and sync it to your iPod shuffle kind of person to take an Apple Music playlist and sync it to your iPod shuffle and go for a run. I think that would be a lot of fun, but you can't do it. Even if, like, I mean, it's possible to do, right, in theory, in the idea that I imagine that if I left my iPhone in airplane mode for a period of time, at some point, it's going to say to me, you need to connect this device to the internet to continue listening to your music. Yeah, to the Apple Music tracks. It's going to say that.

We haven't tested that, but I would imagine after a month or a couple of months that there's probably some leeway there because sometimes you're just not on the internet, you're traveling internationally or something like that. you wouldn't want to lose your music but at some point it's going to say look you need to phone home i need to know that this isn't you know that you didn't cancel download the every piece of music ever and then cancel while while this was in airplane mode we need to see you know we need to verify your subscription i i get that but there's got to be a period of time, right? And, you know, for something like an iPod Shuffle,

is there going to be a great heist of Apple Music by preloading an iPod Shuffle and then never, ever connecting it to a computer ever again? I guess it's theoretically possible, but it seems sort of silly. And even there, they would have to update the software. But, you know, to say, you know, in order to listen to Apple Music, you need to keep, keep you know you need to plug your ipod shuffle into your mac every just after like 30 days it says if you want to continue listening to this you need to

authenticate me like it just gives you that audio message i think they could do this but it's clear that there is nobody working on this because like this product image on apple.com slash iPod at the Nano is embarrassing because they have five of them. Four of them are facing you from the back so you see just the colors. But then the other one has a current album, Tame Impala's new album, and the UI is shiny, right?

It looks bad. It's the iOS 6 UI. And it's not running iOS 6. This is not an iOS device. It's running something that has been made to look like iOS. And whoever skinned it is working on more important products now. So my thinking is to keep the iPod Touch margin low, they have to update the anodization method for all three of these products,

and it spreads the cost. Because if you wanted to update the colors of this device, you can't separate it from the Nano and the Shuffle you wanted to update the colors of this device, you would also, you can't separate it from the Nano and the Shuffle because they have their own colors. You have to update all of the colors at once because it spreads the cost amongst the three items, the, like, the anodization, like,

and the materials that they use for it. So they had to do this to keep the margins making sense. So they have to update the Nano and the Shuffle, even though Apple doesn't care about them, like in that way. Like they don't care about them in the same way they care about the Touch, because the Touch got new features and you can put Apple Music on it and stuff like that, right? It got stuff and it continues to get iOS updates. But the Nano and the Shuffle don't run iOS. There's nobody working on those teams, it seems like

but they had to update the colors so if you're going to update the colors you've got to make new marketing materials out of it so they just did that and they're trying their best to hide it that's my opinion on this good conspiracy theory I like it I don't know if it has any basis in reality but it's a good one good job

they can't keep the old anodization stuff it doesn't make sense to just do them for those two devices which if you imagine the iPod Touch isn't selling Because I feel like you have to, you know, they can't keep the old anodization stuff. It doesn't make sense to just do them for those two devices, which if you imagine the iPod Touch isn't selling a lot, no way are the Nano and the Shuffle selling a lot. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they did. I think it's the, this is, these products are in the minimal, the minimum, minimum required to keep it alive category right now. I wonder if it's just like a pride thing they want the iPod to live on.

I think that they look at the sales and figure that it's, you know, given the margins on the products and given the sales, you might as well keep selling them. Like they're in the iPod classic phase sales, you might as well keep selling them. They're in the iPod classic phase now where they're just going to fade away. But there's still a business there.

Because at some point, really, if you're Apple, you're going to say, look, you've got an iPhone. Who is using the Nano and the Shuffle? And I know that there are probably kids. And there are certain kinds of scenarios where you would want to use a nano or a shuffle i i and the prices are good but at some point it's still not a good enough business for apple to be in but right now it's in it's just good enough for them to keep them alive but to do as little effort as make as little effort as possible yeah Yeah, it's like we're just going to keep this until the point where we can get rid of it, which is exactly

what they did with the iPod Classic, so maybe we're a year or two away, maybe a little bit longer before the Nano. I think the Nano would go first in my opinion, and the Shuffle would stick around because it's probably easier to continue just keeping the Shuffle around because it doesn't look weird, right?

The Nano looks weird now, but the shuffle is kind of just like this little thing that you just put music on. I can't imagine it requires a lot of development to keep alive. Yeah. And then it's like you need something when you're at the gym? Well, the shuffle is perfect for you. Sure. Unless you have an Apple Watch. Unless you have an Apple at the gym, well, the Shuffle is perfect for you. Sure.

Unless you have an Apple Watch. Unless you have an Apple Watch. See, that's the other thing, right? When you move further down the line. It's like, well, just get an... I know the prices aren't the same, but that's what the Apple Watch is for. It's exactly for this.

We created a whole version to be made when you work out. That's the product you want, madam. That's just the way that I can imagine them going in the future. Should we do some Ask Upgrade wrap- up? I think that's a good idea. This episode of Upgrade and Ask Upgrade is brought to you by Text Expander from Smile. If you ever need to type the same sentences, phrases, or even words on a regular basis, you need Text Expander. Trust me on this one. It saves you time and effort by expanding short abbreviations into frequently used text and even pictures if you want. TextExpander 5 is out now. It has a new Yosemite look and feel.

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but no, TextExpander does it all for me. You can sync your snippets among multiple devices. You can store them in iCloud Drive or Dropbox. That means that they can be with you on your Mac, on your iPad, on your iPhone. They have TextExpander for iOS as well. They have a keyboard of TextExpander for iOS, and also a bunch of third-party apps like OmniOutliner, Day One, Fantastical, and so many more allow you to have text expander snippets as well inside those applications, so they're always there. I love text expander. I think you're going to love it too. Text Expander 5 is out now. It costs $44.95. Upgrades are available for $19.95 for existing users, and it's free to those who purchased on or after January 1, 2015. So that's awesome there. You can find out more about TextExpander 5 by visiting

smilesoftware.com slash upgrade. Please note that TextExpander 5 requires Yosemite and TextExpander for iOS is available on the App Store for iPhone and ipad thank you so much to smile for their support of this show hey so john asked uh what is the average time you spend producing and editing a podcast cutting out the ums and the rs splicing in secret messages and so on well secret messages take a lot of time uh well, for me, it varies. I do a weekly TV podcast with Tim Goodman, who's the chief critic at The Hollywood Reporter, and we talk for about an hour. I, it takes me maybe five minutes because all I really do is cut the beginning and end of the conversation and get, like, last week his son had to leave in the middle of it. So he had to, like, go downstairs and unlock the door and say goodbye and give him his stuff and whatever. There was, like, a little bit in the middle where I had to trim that part out.

And that was it. That was all I did. It was a two person conversation. I can write down like this one, I can write down when, when there are issues and we can trim those out and it's super fast. I don't edit the ums and the ahs out because I think that's how people talk unless there's a very long delay somewhere. I just don't think it's worth it to do. I think you could edit forever. And I don't think you would be appreciably improving the, um, see I ummed right there, the, the product by doing that. Uh, I will say that for something like the incomparable, I would spend more like three or four hours on it. Something like total party kill, which runs about an hour. I probably spend an hour and a half or two hours. And that's

because those are podcasts with lots of people. And often there are some sound issues and I need to play through the entire episode and make some changes as I run based on noises that people are making or things I need to cut out with incomparable. I do a lot more kind of editorial influence in terms of saying, this is a digression, I'm going to take this out. And so that one is a much more intense podcast, but even there, I'm not cutting out ums and ahs more than like a long pause. I won't do it. And occasionally, yes, splicing in a secret message. So my answer is it really varies depending on what the show is and what the content is and what I'm trying to do with it. And if it's got a lot of people and it's very complicated,

it takes longer. And shorter ones, if I just recorded it, I know everything that's in it, I know it sounds fine, and I know there's one thing I need to clip out, it's a five or ten minute process. What about you? I imagine most of the shows you do are more like that category, the quick edit category.

Not really anymore. No? Because you're editing the panel shows now, aren't you? So how long does this show take to edit? This show probably takes about 20 minutes now. Yeah. Because what I do is, right next to me I have a notepad, and I write down some of the collisions that we have.

So I try and take some of those out when we talk over each other and stuff like that. And I pull some of those out, and I do that for all the shows now um so that has increased my edit time over what it used to be which was just cutting the end cutting the start putting it out there and letting it go um so that is one thing i think analog is uh we do a heavier edit on that so like we cut some stuff right to make the show a bit tighter that's the casey list edit yeah but the thing is about that is it takes me again about 20 minutes because casey does the listen through and he makes notes of me the show that takes me the longest to edit

is cortex right now um because we do a full listen through uh i cut out i do cut out things like ums and ahs in there to polish it up and we cut out things that are digressions, like pretty similar to you with the incomparable, actually. So with me and Gray, we do that, and we actually both edit. So I do the first edit, I give it to Gray, and he does the second pass-through. Wow. Yep.

So that's how that show is edited, so it's a much longer process. And in those cases, what I have found is a good rule of thumb. If you're doing a full listen through and you're cutting the stuff that is irrelevant, you're cutting the ums and the ahs and things like that, I find it takes about twice as long as the show is to do, I've found. Because you're going back and you're cutting something, going back and listening. I'd say that for Incomparable too. Anything where you've got a big panel like that, because you're really,

it's a two to one ratio. You're listening through it and then there's stuff that you have to go back and change. And that all kind of adds up to about, yeah, because your average, I always tell people it's about three hours to do the Incomparable. And the shows are all about 90 minutes-ish. Sometimes they're not, but they're in that ballpark usually. And so the three, three and a half hours is, is not unreasonable for that. I think that's, I think that's right. Panel shows are harder because you do have, um, much more over-talking like we, you and I over talk a little bit cause we've got some latency here on this, on this show, but it's still just two voices. Even if you kept that in, it would be understandable cause there are really only two people it could be. But when you've got five people, seven people, you have to take out the interruptions. There are more interruptions, and you have to take them out, or you'd never understand half of what was being said. So James asked, Jason, I'm going to leave this one for you, I think.

James wants to buy a new MacBook Pro. Should he wait until USB-C comes to the Pro before buying? This is the classic when should I buy question with Apple stuff. And what I would say is, you say you want to buy a new MacBook Pro. Do you need to buy a new MacBook Pro? Because the longer you can wait, the more new stuff there will be. That's the bottom line. It's always been that way.

It will always be that way. So hold out until you need to buy one. But if you need to buy one, you should go ahead and buy one because you need it. And so it's time. There will probably be USB-C in the Pro, but that probably won't be

until the next revision of the Pro line, which probably won't be for another year. So are you going to wait until next spring, maybe to get a new MacBook Pro, but that probably won't be until the next revision of the Pro line, which probably won't be for another year. So are you going to wait until next spring, maybe, to get a new MacBook Pro with USB-C? If you can, then you will get that. Of course, if you buy next year's, you'll be missing some feature that's in the year after that, and that will go on forever. So at some point, you just got to say, all right, I want this one. Like, I don't have USB-C on my Retina iMac. So at some point you just got to say, all right, I want this one. Like I don't have USB-C on my Retina iMac. I'm okay with it because I needed a Retina iMac.

I needed a new computer and I got it and it's great. So in the end, it's a personal decision. I think your MacBook Pro, you know, maybe with, well, let's see. I don't know. I mean, Thunderbolt, the new Thunderbolt and the new USB are going to be big changes. And if you can wait, I would wait because we are going through a port transition here. And if you can afford to wait a year, I think that's probably good. But again, if you need it, you need it. But I would wait if you could.

But I would always say that. I'd say, like, when you start getting that itch to buy a new computer don't just buy a new computer wait wait try to go as far as you can before you just can't stand it anymore and you have to do it and then buy it i think that's that's what i that's what i try to do this is a completely off topic, but something that I meant to mention earlier in the show about Apple Music. Yeah. This week, Dr. Dre's The Pharmacy Show has been put in its entirety on Dre's Connect page. Oh, see, that's cool.

That's cool. That's an interesting test of listen again mode instead of just a playlist. I would love that because I miss some of these shows and I hear about them later and I can't listen to them. I can only see the tracks and listen to the tracks that were played. And as we've said before, that's kind of not the point of most of these shows. The point is to hear the person who's built this hour or two of entertainment for you and not having access to that seems kind of crazy yep so because i missed i missed elton john's rocket hour and i'd like to hear it but now all i can do is see the playlist

there you go yeah so we have more questions this comes from from Olivier. Olivier is looking for a checklist app where they can reuse the same list template over and over again. Any suggestions? I was going to say, let's talk to CGP Grey about this, but you talk to him regularly. I do.

So I know from talking to Grey that it is possible to have project templates in OmniFocus. So you can then invoke a template when you need it, and it will just throw up the project and all of the associated items with that project. However, if you need something just more simple, what I use for this is Clear. Because with Clear, I create a list and I put all the things that I need in that list. And then when I come to check them off, I check them off, but I don't delete the tasks tasks because once you check all the the tasks off

in in clear within a list you can pull up to like just to clear that list but don't do that and then the next time that i need it i just swipe all of the tasks again to reactivate them and it's there ready to go i do this for packing stuff like that nice so there you go and then will will is very angry at us okay um about our El Capitan installs. This is probably more me than you. He has three exclamation points in his comment. After saying, have you never heard of partitions? Yes.

Yes, Will, I have heard of partitions. I have an SSD in my MacBook Pro, so I don't have a ton of space on it. So I don't want to put aside a really big portion of my MacBook Pro. But also, I want to live with it and use it every day. And you only live once, so... Yeah, I'm with you there. I have, you know, my iMac has an SSD. I do think to really use and talk about

and write about an OS X version, you got to live with it. So you have to live with it. And I don't have the space on my SSD to partition. partition plus at this point i would have to like wipe everything and then repartition um and i don't want to do that so yeah so that's even worse yeah i just i don't want to do that so i have i have el capitan on the external drive and what i'm going to do is uh at some point here i'm just going to install it and the question is just do i. And the question is just, do I install it on the iMac or do I install it on my MacBook Air?

And one of them will become El Capitan, but really it should be the iMac. I mentioned this last week with the MacBook Air as my emergency fallback machine for things that don't work in El Capitan because I need to use it every day in order to write about it. And the only way booting,

because that's the other thing about partitions is booting into another partition to use the new OS. I never stay there for very long because then I got to go back and get work done. And so I'm not really using the new OS at that point, am I? I'm just kind of poking around in it. And then I go back to using the computer and I'm using the old operating system then. So yes, if you want to be safe, you can have two partitions. If you want to set that up, can have two partitions if you want to set that up. We have heard of them and neither of us is really interested in or willing to do it or thinks that it would be enough of a benefit.

So and to further Mr. Hurley's point, YOLO. Exactly. And then finally, Upgradian Steve has written in. Steve is an aspiring writer. He's starting to write some stuff online and he wants to try and learn Markdown. But his son was suggesting to Steve that he is wasting his time. His son just said, why don't you just write it in Word and paste it into WordPress and call it good. So Steve wants to know, do we use Markdown? Do we think it's a good skill to have? And what do you use to try and learn it?

That's a good question. Do you use Markdown? You don't write a whole lot of things. No, but I do write in Markdown. Whenever I write a blog post, so for example, I write stuff for the Relay blog here and there when we have new shows or announcements to make. I write those in Markdown and I write, we have a new sponsor system that we're working on and all of the scripts there are written in Markdown. So I write those in Markdown.

Yeah. And also our CMS takes Markdown. So I write the show notes and stuff in some instances in Markdown as well. So I'm very used to it. And also when I'm making notes for myself, I write markdown uh some of my show notes stuff i wrote so yes i do even though i am not a a writer or a blogger

or anything like that i i still use markdown when i write things down and i i write in markdown what i would say is it depends on what you're writing and why you're writing it. You don't need to, I use Markdown because, um, I like that I can use it in any text editor and I've internalized the rules, but, but, um, I, and I've talked to, I have colleagues who want to write in Microsoft word. I have colleagues who want to write in HTML. They just do the HTML code. My feeling is I don't really like reading HTML. It's not that I can't do it. It's just that I don't really like reading it. And Markdown is a little less obtrusive to the eye than HTML code is. And also I would always make typos in my HTML code. I'd forget to close a tag. I'd forget to have a, you know, quote mark at the end of the HREF in the hyperlink,

end of the href in the hyperlink, things like that. And the way I view Markdown is it is easier for me to do it right, less likely that I'm going to make a mistake. And then I generate using the Markdown script, it generates HTML and that HTML is valid. It's already, you know, there are no typos in the code because the Markdown script did it based on my thing. And I use BBEdit for most of what I write. I've got a preview window that is a Markdown preview window with my site template in it. And so that's great too. But it doesn't need to be for everyone. I use it because of the reasons I've said, because it seems easy to use. It stays readable.

And then it generates HTML easily in lots of different places. There are plenty of other ways to write, depending on what you're writing and where you're writing them and why you're writing them. So it may or may not, for Steve, it may or may not be for him. If you do want to learn it, you should go to the Daring Fireball and look at the at the spec document that that gruber has if you really want to uh to immerse yourself in markdown i would recommend david sparks's markdown um book it's a book right it's an ibook yeah yeah um that he is screencasts and uh a book as well yeah and he has a he has a co-author eddie smith co- wrote that with him, but it's an iBook book, um, that you can get it. Um, you can see about it at maxsparky.com slash markdown.

And it's in our show notes. And it is in our show notes, which you can find at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 46, or in your podcast app of choice. So I'd check that out. If you really want to dive in and learn it. David Sparks' stuff is great and that's a good book. But it's not for everybody and it doesn't have to be. And your son may be wrong or your son may be right based on what he knows about what you need to do. And I think that's the difference. I think your son probably would tell you that it was dumb regardless, but it may, you know, it may be worth learning if, uh, if you're writing a lot on the web and you don't like messing around with HTML or messing around with, with, uh, with, uh, style tools. I never

like typing, you know, little, you know, style working style text and stuff. I'd rather not do that either. I'd rather work in, uh, in plain BBEdit. I also use ByWord on the Mac. Right, which is what Steve is using. Yep. And I also use Drafts. Oh, yeah. Yeah, those are great. There are a bunch of great markdown editors on iOS, especially. Yep. So I use them both. Right. So that's it for this week. I want to thank again our sponsors for helping us out today. Lender.com, Fracture, and Smile with TextExpander. If you want to find our show notes, Jason mentioned those a moment ago. They're at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 46.

If you want to find us online, Jason writes his fantastic stuff over at sixcolors.com. And he's at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter. And I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.