Upgrade - 466: Try to Stop Me Now, Batman

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

This week we get to the bottom of the secrets of the mysterious Puzzle Society, Goldman Sachs can't make money on credit cards, Apple might be getting into college football, and there's a lot of weird follow-up. Typical Summer of Fun stuff!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 466 today's show is brought to you by squarespace and uni pizza ovens my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley i hope you're enjoying the Summer of Fun! Summer of Fun! I have a Snell Talk question for you. This one comes from Brayden, who asks,

Jason, what is your preferred summer drink while you're at the Dongle Town Surf Club? Out there on Thunderbolt Dock? Mm-hmm. Preferred summer drink. i'd be interested in hearing what your summer drink is so get ready for that preferred summer drink i mean there's there's many different choices here i do um i make iced tea in the summer and i enjoy that uh for an alcoholic beverage i i am not a mixed drink person so i would say for an alcoholic beverage, I am not a mixed drink person. So I would say for an alcoholic beverage, these days I drink a lot of hazy IPAs, which are very sort of like summery and citrusy.

So I like those. And then my classic, I would say that for the last few years, my classic summer drink is my own. I feel like I've said this before on this podcast, but I'll say it again. My friend Simon Jerry, when I was in England uh told me about the lager top which is literally just a lager with uh lemonade on top yeah right which which in england lemonade is is is lemon lime soda in america lemonade is is uh lemon water with sugar in it i actually have a funny story for you for one of the first times i went to america and what the first time i went to america under legal drinking age i think it was and this is when i went times I went to America, well, the first time I went to America under legal drinking age, I think it was.

And this is when I went to, I went to the first Portland XOXO festival that I went to. And I was in a bar with some friends and I asked for a vodka lemonade. And the bar person was incredibly confused, which set me to be incredibly confused because i felt like i went with like the most basic drink that somebody could ask for like i purposefully did that because i was uncomfortable of what to order vodka and seven up is what you should have ordered or sprite right like i could

have asked for but what they ended up giving me was like i don't even know what it was but it was like vodka and something and simple syrup it was very confusing yeah and something yeah lemon juice and simple syrup yes i think that was what they did and it was it is because they're trying to make absolutely terrible an american lemonade yeah i love american lemonade but it's not what i mean by lemonade but it's not what i want in a vodka lemonade let me tell you mike if you take a a nice beer on a hot summer day and you put some lemonade in it it's really good very refreshing really good so that is one of my preferred summer drinks at the doggo town surf club lager lager top american style lager top uh i um this summer have just enjoyed cold

beers i am not yeah i don't drink alcohol very much um for no specific reason i just don't um i maybe have like a beer or two a week pretty much but we've there are these two beers that i've found that i found to be very refreshing this summer kind of found them in my local supermarket they're two brands one is called jubal and they basically make like beers with fruit in them like they brew them with fruit which is very refreshing and another one called Shandy Shack which is essentially what we're talking about here Shandy is the

American word for the beer lemonade combo we have Shandy's too Shandy is like one thing and Lager Top is like another thing interesting well it's because of your lemonade anyway I'm essentially making a Shandy too it's thing and lager top is like another thing. Interesting. Well, it's because of your lemonade. Anyway, I'm essentially making a shandy too. It's a good summer beer for sure. And this company just makes like a bunch of shandies,

including an IPA shandy, which I'd never had before. And I really like them. Lawrence Preferred is from a local brewery called Pitchers. And it's basically a grapefruit shandy. And it's really good. Oh, man, that sounds fantastic. It's really good. So, yeah.

I know all the beer purists are like gasp. And it's like, you know what? Beer is good in lots of ways, including with other flavors in it. It's just in the summer. It's summer of fun. We just have fun. I like an IPA. I like a lager as much as the next guy.

Well, maybe not as much as the next guy. But I also like fruity and weird beers, too. So, not a Pimm's Cup, then, is what you're saying. That's Adina's summer drink. Oh, really? She loves Pimms. Right. Well, I mean, that's the Wimbledon starting today.

Oh, well, then it's Pimms time. It's Pimms o'clock, as they used to say. That was the old ad campaign. Pimms o'clock. Yeah, it's Pimms o'clock now. This episode brought to you by Pimms. It's Pimms o'Clock. Yeah, it's Pimms O'Clock now. This episode brought to you by Pimms. It's Pimms O'Clock. I mean, it could be. My friend of the show, he's been on,

Scott McNulty, he's a Pimms Cup guy, which has always surprised me as a Philadelphian, but he's very English in that way, I guess, rebelling against his Irish background. And I would say I had, our English friends had us over for a summer party once and there were Pimms Cups

and I had one. And my review of it is you can have it. I hate it. Oh, I like it. Do you want to know another funny thing, like kind of wrapping this whole conversation around? We don't call it Pimms Cup, we call it Pimms and Lemonade. Pimms and Lemonade! That's what it's called. Pimms Cup is not

what it's called here. It's just called Pimms and Lemonade, but it's the same thing. All the fruit and lemonade that's what it's called pims cup is not what it's called here it's just interesting called pims and lemonade but it's the same thing all the fruit and all that kind of stuff yeah that's how it goes if you would like to send us in a snell talk question of course this is the summer so summary questions are not advised but recommended also oh then you can send those in by going to upgradefeedback.com and thank you for braden for that great question we have some just a whole cavalcade of weird follow-up i think today spanning the gamut of the last couple of weeks of shows i think a lot of it actually is from last week what weird show generates weird follow-up indeed we had We had many people, I think mostly Canadians, send us in a video

called the House Hippo commercial. Yes. The North American House Hippo. Obviously in relation to Jason's desire for tiny hippo. A tiny hippo. I'll tell you, I don't know if I told you this privately,

but I'll tell you it now. We posted the clip, as we always do, you can find our video clips on our various social media channels. I'll tell you about those at the end of the show. I had two people from my life, like just my sister-in-law and one of my close friends who do not listen to my podcasts, contact me to tell me what small animals they wanted. Oh, wow. See?

Breaking out. Pretty good. See? Breaking out. Pretty good. We're breaking out. It's pretty good. I had a guy I play curling with say, hey, I was in an airport scrolling through TikTok and I saw you. Good. It's working. I love it.

That's the way to do it. I love to hear about it. So this Canadian House Hippo ad, it's adorable. It's just a whole ad that reads like it's a nature documentary about a small Canadian house hippo. And at the end, and this is very late 90s, it's very 90s public service announcement. It says, of course, this isn't real, but children believe things they see on TV. And they shouldn't. Don't believe things you see on TV.

Ask questions and be critical, kids. That's what that ad is for. Yep. It was commissioned by the Concerned Children's Advertisers, which is now called the Companies Committed to Kids. And from the actual House Hippo Wikipedia page, Oh, God. it says the stated intent of this piece is to educate children about critical thinking

with regard to what they see in television advertising. And, I mean, I was struck by, you know, this is in 1999, this commercial. They're really, it's the same problems we're dealing with now, right? Oh yeah. About like fake news. And now we're moving into the AI, like deep fake generation.

It's just kind of a funny thing. And Kiwis, thank you for getting in touch with us. Yes, mostly me because you didn't want to hear from them but we did hear from them um i had i i'm back with a report the short answer so i think my theory was correct which is australians say beta uh new zealanders say beta how and we got many videos saying that the kiwis say beta. A few people said they say beta, but almost everybody said they say beta. So I believe them. But here's the thing about beta and beta is New Zealanders change. This is what I thought would be the case. New Zealanders change vowels. So I think New Zealanders are actually trying to say beta, but because they flip their vowels compared

to other English speakers, they say beta, but I think they, they mean beta, but they say beta. So a win for the beta pronunciation there. And then I want to thank specifically the listener, listener, Sam, I believe.

Yeah. Who sent in an audio clip that, that contrasts the word beta with an egg beta, which is an egg beater, in new zealand eggbeater they're different yes i i really love uh the way that you said that which is very funny to me what i would just like to addendum that what i hear and what i think is one of the key differences is they say beta beta sure they pronounce the t more and i think americans tend to swallow the t's yes yes or or really uh the way i hear it is americans say

t's like d's right where i would say water but now i've conditioned myself to say water instead when i want because i found myself jason many times again earlier on in my travels where i would say could i have a glass of water and they were like what and people couldn't understand me in a way that i just don't understand uh so now i've i've conditioned myself especially when americans say water i will tell you when people say that americans take their t's and turn them into d's i get to do the john syracuse thing where i can say no we don't but what i mean by that is i can understand why it is not you can't differentiate it but i can differentiate it there is a slight difference there but it's very close it's true it's water how would you say it

water yeah you see that's a d to me i i understand what you're saying i can't hear it any other way there is a there my. My tongue is actually up my teeth and making a T sound there, but it's very subtle, because otherwise it's water. Oh, water. Hey, look. I'm swallowing consonants all over the place, right? So, like, I'm doing it too, but I'm just saying

it's a different sound. Igbita. Igbita. Anyway. Ig. Ig. Ig. You gotta say egg it's an egg New Zealanders thank you and I'm sorry we love you no we're not sorry

no I'm sorry for what you've been doing in the last minute no I think I spent two weeks in New Zealand I think I've sussed it out I think I got it you've sorted it now you got the accent haven't spent two weeks there. You're like that person that goes on holiday and comes back with a new accent.

Yeah, exactly. I start to call everything a car park. Everything. Like you get buildings. It's probably a car park. There's a car park in there. We spoke about the Vision Pro. And the fact that there was a potential for it to not be shipping with health features

or they may have been postponed. This is from an information report. We had two upgradians write in with some thoughts on this that I wanted to share. Ben wrote in to say, I think that it could be possible that health-related features could be held for a quote, Apple Vision Sport model,

maybe made of different materials like those used in Apple Watch straps. Based on how Mike described the weight as similar to the AirPods Max, I would imagine it might be uncomfortable to seriously exercise in as is. I don't know completely if I agree with the summary of my thoughts here. So the Apple Vision Pro is on the heavy side. I could imagine lots of forms of exercise that I could do wearing the Apple Vision Pro. Like anything on a stationary machine.

So I get stationary bikes for sure. Yoga, I could imagine being possible. I would say even with the right head strap, I could use my rowing machine like basically what i'm saying is it is on the heavy side but you could work out in these the same as i feel like i could work out in airpods max as well like i i think it's possible all all headsets are weird to work out in i think i think this could be done what do you think uh yeah i mean i'm gonna be both of these comments so i'm gonna save it for the next one but okay i i think this is one of those things

that it's very easy to say no in order to try to justify apple's reported design decision here but i don't think that i don't i don't think it's necessary to do that i think that it can be done yeah i think that you can exercise on in other headsets so i i don't think it's an issue i just don't steve says it seems like a pragmatic choice given the weight of the headset the lack of controllers and the external battery pack to not have these features until it's released it's hard to say if there are other issues limiting its use as a fitness device. Meta has worked hard to support users who are more active, but Apple's first headset may be better suited for sedentary use. Once Apple can field a lighter, cheaper, self-contained device,

I'm sure it will support some fitness activities. Again. Yeah. You couldn't, like, you're not going to be doing high-intensity training in this, right? But I don't really feel like it's but good for that for any but i feel like any of these fitness apps that i've tried you could you could use the app which pro just as easily i feel like yeah i again i feel like this is a tendency that a lot of people have to sort of try to justify the report about what apple's decided by saying well yeah i can list a bunch of a bunch of reasons why Apple just can't do this and they'll have to wait until the next time.

And I'm very skeptical about it. And what I said last week stands, which is if Apple doesn't want to do anything fitness related in here, guess what? Third-party developers will, and they will succeed. And it might not be the same as the Meta headset, and it might not be everything you want, and it might not be as good as if Apple was more committed to it, but they'll do it. And the external battery pack is not going to be the reason why it doesn't work. No. That one cable is very easy to deal with. Yeah.

The lack of controllers are not going to be the reason it doesn't work. People have worked out for a long time with cabled headphones. It's the same deal right like we all found a way to work out with our ipods we all found a way to work out with uh our apple headphones plugged into our phone like it is a very here's the thing i understand if you listen to the way you've been talking to assume that like the weight of the thing would preclude it i don't think it would i think maybe there will be things that each person might not want to do, but I could imagine multiple types of exercise

that I do now that I could quite easily do wearing the Vision Pro. Sure. Amari wrote in to say, we're moving on now from that, to say, I 100% agree with Mike on not having push notifications for news. However, I do want some news alerts.

So a while ago, I do want some news alerts. So a while ago, I switched them all to the scheduled summary feature and it's been an unmitigated success for me. I get a summary of all of the like rubbishy news that I get a couple of times a day and none of it goes to the watch. It takes 10 seconds and then I'm done and it's never distracting me.

So I thought this was a really smart thing to do and a use case of a thing that I've never understood had like why it existed, which was the scheduled summary in notifications. If you have forgotten about this, you go to settings, notifications, scheduled summary. You choose the apps that you want to be in the summary and the times of day you want it to pop up. And I think this is a great way to get a news digest of notification focused stuff. So I

just wanted to highlight that because I think Amari had a wonderful suggestion. See, it's funny because when you mentioned this last week, I remained silent, but I actually find the news notifications valuable one time of day, is when i wake up in the morning i kind of want to see if anything big happened but i don't want them the rest of the day so this is actually i i didn't even think about this feature this is the right way for me to do it is to schedule a summary for the morning and then never have to deal with them the rest of the day yeah the reason no one thought about this feature except amore is because it isn't really good for anything else.

And it's not super well implemented, at least in iOS 16. I don't know if it's been changed at all in 17, but probably not. This was part of Apple's goal to try and give you more control. Like the feature from this release that really was great is you can swipe on any notification

and choose options and basically say, don't ever show this to me again. I love that feature. But this was also a feature from that era of like, we want to give you more control over notifications, which is to say, roll up all these notifications into a summary that you'll deliver at this time. And for news headlines, I just had never thought of that. It's actually great to be like, I don't want to be bugged with news headlines, except maybe once or twice a day. Great idea. idea i'm gonna put a link in the show notes to federico's ios 15 review uh that explains notification summaries if you want a bit more information about it but yes it's the first time i've ever heard of anybody using it for something

i would like to also i ranted a couple weeks ago on uh on i think upgrade plus but I ranted a couple of weeks ago on, uh, on, I think upgrade plus, but I ranted about discoverability and in my Mac world column and got a lot of feedback from people who, again, as expected the features that we discussed in that segment and that I discussed in that article, they didn't know existed like the shuffling between faces in the lock screen, not, not to mention the, you know, uh, swiping, holding an app that's shaking with one hand while you swipe to quickly move it to another place and then drop it. People hadn't heard of that. I'll just point out that listener Mike in the member Discord right now just said, TIL did not know this was a thing to what we just talked about. So, again, discoverability of new iOS features, you know, it's a problem.

It's a challenge. I might as well, while we're doing this, I'm going to throw two features that i think people might not know about uh you can delete apps from searches so if you search for an app and long press on it you get the options to delete it so if you want to get rid of an app that's a quick way to do it and if you have folders on your home screen and you have the notification badge in the folders if you long press on the folder it will pop up and show you what apps the notifications are for. Good tips. We're a productivity podcast now.

We sure are, just for that 20 seconds. Apple News crosswords. We spoke about this last time in the details, and we were wondering where they were coming from, and we were sent an email that told us where they're coming from, and it was pointing to an Apple newsroom piece that came out during wwc which i remember seeing but i did not

read because it has like a thousand things in it but in that newsroom piece it said we'll include a daily crossword a mini crossword in partnership with the Puzzle Society. Now, the Puzzle Society on their website described themselves as, the Puzzle Society has become a major yet shadowy player in the world's puzzling spheres, simultaneously in plain sight and invisible, like

a word that is backwards and diagonal in a word search. I did a little bit more digging. For me to get the full information about the company, they wanted me to sign up for their email newsletter, which I wasn't going to do. But then I found a company called Andrews McNeil Universal. They are the pair...

Actually, Andrews McMeel Universal. McMeel, sure. McMeel. Sounds fake. They are a, quote, inclusive partner and home to a first-class roster of distinctive and powerful cartoonists artists writers illustrators game makers and storytellers they are like a conglomerate company and one of the companies they own is the puzzle society so apple has done a deal with them but then we also got some feedback from listener Adam, who says,

I am a crossword constructor, which is a fantastic job title, with puzzles published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others. So Apple News Plus crosswords are definitely on my radar. Adam says they're in partnership with Puzzle Society, which is an existing online crossword service. But Apple is also hiring in-house crossword editors including prolific puzzle maker ross trudeau and seemingly eric agard who just resigned as the usa today crossword editor and is wildly widely hailed for championing diversity in crosswords so yeah apple is pulling out the big guns they are like they're getting in the crosswords, like all of the community,

the crossword community is up in arms. Apple is leaning into the fact that they've always been a little bit puzzling. And secretive. And now they are actively puzzling. See, no other podcast is giving you this kind of analysis about crosswords. Well, I mean, there's probably a puzzle

related podcast that's all over this but among your apple podcast yes that's what i meant which i think it's a bold move that a mere minutes after admitting that there was a whole apple press release that we saw and did not read we are now claiming the mantle of being your go-to experts regarding apple and puzzles. We won immediately. Let's pat ourselves on the back. But now we are. Now we are. Look, WWDC is a very busy time for us.

It's a very busy time. We can't read all the press releases. What I'm going to say is if anybody does think, like, oh, you should have read it, just go look at this press release. It's like a million words long with loads of screenshots, and it came out on June the 7th. I was busy that day you know

what i'm saying i ain't got time to read but also it's called apple previews new features coming to apple services this fall yeah it is a bit of a snooze i was i scrolled through it but i didn't even see the the crossword society it's it's in there and I'm happy that it's in there, but it's like it's underneath Fitness Plus. I just figured it was Fitness Plus. I'm just saying, Puzzle Society owned by a shadowy conglomerate, I think the Riddler is behind this. You know, it would fit the Riddler's MO, right? Right, right.

And so I just hope that Batman cuts a deal with Apple. Can I ask, new Riddler or old Riddler? Because new Riddler is terrifying. Old Riddler is kind of fun. Well, it's the newest Riddler. The new Riddler's identity has not been revealed because they're hiding behind the Puzzle Society right now. Okay, so it's a new, new Riddler.

I think so. We don't know, probably, but we don't know. But anyway. How could we know? We're not Batman. You know? It does make me kind of sad that in this scenario, I am Robin. Right?

Sure. You are obviously Batman and I'm Robin. And there's kind of nothing I can do about that. Cheer up, chum. That makes me sad. Our 2023 member special is now available to all RelayFM members. This includes those of you who subscribe to upgrade plus you will find this in the crossover feed that we have available to all relay fm members if you sign in uh to your account your memberful account you'll see the feeds there

it's very easy to subscribe i will put a link in the show notes that you can just click on and you sign in and it will take you to your member exclusive podcasts this is the third installment of our rpg crossover where the two of us are joined by cgp gray and our game master tony cindylar of the total party kill podcast this is my favorite of the three of these that we've done, I think Tony did a really, really amazing job creating a very fun game mechanic that I'm very excited includes our first ever combat. That is the only spoiler that I will give for

this special. Yeah, I would say I love this one's really good and in fact I've started to think about these three Tales from the Floating Vagabond adventures that we've done the last three years as like three, I don't know, like three movie series or three episodes of a TV show where each one of them is like the one where this happens. Like the first one, we go to the bureaucracy planet. And the second one, we go to the food company where there's been a there's a mascot

and there's been a disaster and then in this one um we get it we get a new job that i take seriously and you two don't no because it doesn't really feel like it's necessary to take seriously but it fits right within your wheelhouse i completely embraced it yeah Yeah. Tony was targeting you, I think. I think so. Yeah, I suspect so. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Ooni Pizza Ovens, the world's number one pizza oven company. They make surprisingly small ovens powered by your choice of either wood, charcoal, or gas to let you make restaurant-quality pizza in your own backyard. Ooni pizza ovens are incredibly easy to use and super portable. They'll fit into any outside space. Their ovens can reach temperatures of up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit or 500 degrees Celsius, which enables you to cook restaurant-quality pizza in as little as 60 seconds. You need the

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which I think is a really awesome addition for them. They have Tunsday that you can check out yourself. But Jason, it is a kind of a holiday season over in the US. I feel like an Ooni is probably pretty great for that. Already made. So I made pizza in the Ooni last week, Thursday, Thursday, Wednesday, I don't know, just a few days ago. Got it out, set it up again up. Again, easy to find a place for it. It's got little legs. If you're worried about that heat, it's got these legs.

I measured the temperature underneath the 700 degree oven and it was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit under there. It was nothing. Don't be afraid. You can put this on basically anything and it will be fine. Um, I put it on wood, I put it on plastic, it's put on concrete. It's all,

it's all good because all the heat is in the oven. And, uh, yeah, you get the little, um, it, it melts the cheese on top and you get the little kind of like a Bernie bits on the crust and the bottom of it is like a pizza stone. So you preheat it. That's my tip for you is, especially if you're like me and you struggle a little bit to get the dough thin enough, be sure to properly preheat it so that the pizza stone is really hot. Because then when you slide the pizza in, the flames on the top are melting everything and crisping everything up. But that pizza stone is radiating out the heat on the bottom, which is what bakes the crust and makes it crispy. So that's my tip to you. But it is, and I can make more than one pizza on it, which I love because it cooks so fast. I can have a

little assembly line and have multiple pizzas. Whereas at home or inside in the oven, I have to do like, it sits in there for 10 or 15 minutes and then I pull it out and then I have to put another one in and then the first one gets cold. So that's no good. So anyway, yeah, I love it. Listeners of this show can get 10% off their purchase of an Ooni pizza oven. Just go to Ooni.com, O-O-N-I.com and use the code UPGRADE2023 at checkout. They also have a range of great accessories and peels to cutters, to oven tables to thermometers, if you want to make sure you've got the good preheating going on. Laser thermometers, Mike.

Laser thermometers. The future. Ooni.com, O-O-N-I.com. Use the code UPGRADE2023 for 10% off to bring restaurant-quality pizza to your own backyard. Our thanks to Ooni Pizza Ovens for their support of this show and RelayFM. It's room roundup time. Giddy up.

Giddy up, partner. We've got, we're back. We're back on the rumor roundup train. It's been quiet on the Western Front over the last couple of weeks, but not anymore. The sheriff's back in town. Sheriff Mark Gurman,

he's been in the corral this week. He's been rounding up all those rumors. He's got multiple jobs, the sheriff. He's also in the corral. Well. He's been rounding up all those rumors. He's got multiple jobs, the sheriff. He's also in the corral. Well, the rumors, I guess, are like criminals, and so he's bringing them in. Yep. He's rounding them all up. He's rounding the criminals up, and he's putting them in newsletter jail, and he's

now sending that out. AirPods. So, Apple's working on a bunch of things for AirPods, including developing a feature to test hearing by playing a series of tones and sounds. A quote from Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter is, The idea is to help users screen for hearing issues, not unlike how the Apple Watch ECG app checks for heart problems. Apple is exploring how they could better position the airpods product line as a replacement

for conventional hearing aids as well so they currently have a selection of features that they've been introducing over the last few years for people who would like hearing assistance things like conversation boost and live listen as soon features they've done here but apple does not have health regulatory approvals to claim that they are actually hearing aids with these features right and and in the u.s that just changed where you can sell things that make hearing aid claims over the counter so this is and this is one of the ideas here that apple seems to be staffing up and um leaning into that now that they have a little more latitude to um consider airpods basically as hearing, at least in some modes.

Quote from Mark, there's also engineering work being done on adding sensors to AirPods so they can determine body temperature via the wearer's ear canal. This type of data is considered more accurate than wrist temperature, which is collected on the Apple Watch Series 8 and Ultra models while users sleep. Yeah, just more accurate for when you're wearing them. I mean, you're probably not going to wear them while you're sleeping and all that. But if you're wearing them, they can track your temperature and it's going to be much more accurate, right? Because that's actually a way that they take people's temperature is in their ears.

It's a pretty accurate reading. So it just makes sense because you've got a product that's already in there and that would be super good because that feels like would be a feature where it could tell you if it's found something wrong or you could proactively check right and like you just have it now like you don't need an ear thermometer because you've just got airpods so you can just use those and i think that would be an excellent feature i think so that i'd be super excited about uh as always with these things these features could take time to materialize in shipping products you know it could be like they don't he doesn't know when it's coming because it's complicated especially when if they're going to go for regulatory approval on either of these things yeah but in the meantime apple is preparing to switch the airpods product line over to usbc

starting with the like along with the iphone this year beginning with the airpods pro the way he phrases this is really weird to me because all it means is that you do a new case yes right yeah that's it that's what's happening yeah that's how i understood it is what i expect and there is precedent for this, right? So when they did, was it wireless charging? When they revised the AirPods of wireless charging, you could just buy the case? It was wireless charging support, right?

And it was literally just the case changed, yeah. Which I will be super excited about, because we're still in the throes of house decoration. One of the things I want to do is work out a good couch cable setup, which, by the way, if anybody has product recommendations for good ways to get USB-C cables in and around your couch

without just cables all over the place, I want to know those. Send them in, upgradefeedback.com. I am upgradefeedback.com. I am surprised that there aren't more products that are designed to like clip on or go over like the edge of a exactly of a couch so that you've got them like nearby because yeah i ended up having i have a usb adapter uh that is basically under the couch and then the USB-C snakes upward and is behind a cushion so that you can get it,

but it's dumb. There's just cables everywhere. That's not, I want like a little, I'm not buying furniture with USB installed, right? Like I'm not going to do that, but I would like the USB to be somewhere really accessible without getting in my way. And I know that's that's tricky

but like i am surprised that everything i find is a big block that you plug in the wall and then run cables and wireless charging is not the solution here because i'm not just charging products that well like for example nintendo switch right there's nothing good about the beauty of having usbc and and what your point that you're making here about airpods is if you end up with a usbc cable or two at your couch you can charge anything there right charge your ipad charge your laptop charge your airpods charge your phone anything so last night me and edina were talking about this and i was like i am going to find a solution to this because right now we just have like cables just like under the sofa and it's just ugly and yeah it's not really great to get to grab them and stuff and they're like trailing all over the place and i was saying oh

you know when the iphone goes to usbc then we won't even need the lightning cable anymore which will make it easier and she said oh but what about airpods and i was like aha here we go we're gonna we're gonna get airpods pro the new cases and we'll be we'll be nice and happy yeah so but if anybody has recommendations for how to do like good couch cable management please send those in to us upgradefeedback.com right i would love to know if there's a a thing that you can like hang over the back of the couch that is also an adapter like i've got a i've got a desk power strip that literally under desk power strip that i got with my desk and it's a power strip that literally under desk power strip that I got with my desk. And it's a power strip that's got like little clamps on it. So you can clamp it under your desk. And I thought,

you know, I am surprised given all of the iPhone accessories out there that somebody hasn't come up with like a super clever, clever solution for this. That is not well hide this brick on the floor and then get a long cable and stuff it behind the cushion. Really rather not. Mark is also reporting that Apple have, quote,

explored the idea of a finger-worn device that would work as a controller for the Apple Vision Pro, but rejected it. And Mark has heard that they are still not planning any hand controllers of their own, nor are they planning to support third-party controllers specifically for VR-focused experiences. They are all in on hand tracking. And the question is just how good is their hand tracking, right? I mean, it doesn't necessarily mean... What he's not saying is that they built something you could stick on your finger

and it aided in the precision, and then they decided it was no good. I'm not sure that's the case here. It precision and then they decided it was no good i'm not sure that's the case here it may be that they decided it was no good it may be they decided that they didn't really want to go down that route it's also possible that they looked at the hand tracking software they already had and said this is good enough uh and whether that's good enough for games or anything else i guess we'll find out i guess we'll find out but it's interesting that this report suggests that apple was exploring this idea and then was like, nah, we don't want it or need it to pop something on your finger. I don't know.

The jury is out. I am remaining hopeful. I'm making sure to stay hopeful about just there being new and interesting gaming experiences. gaming experiences you know i have found the current crop of vr gaming to be very focused around a very specific type of game which realistically is just shooting games where you do do not really move or like you move in weird ways because of like you don't want to right get sick and so what i'm hoping is that if apple is saying like no controllers, they may encourage people to think a little bit more weirdly and out of the box and create some interesting experiences. Like I could imagine a lot of like puzzle games

that could come out of just hand tracking, you know, like moving things around. We'll see. Or maybe, you know, like with really good eye tracking, what kind of gaming experiences does that create? So I'm going to hold faith in not Apple, but developers that they will be able to, when pressed under certain constraints,

come up with some new type of experiences. As Joe in the chat has said, puzzle games from the Puzzle Society. Puzzle Society, they're there. Ha ha, try to stop me now, Batman. And finally from Mark Gurman, Apple is working on, quote, multiple next generation monitors.

The interesting one here is one of these could include an integrated processor and software stack that could make a display double as a monitor for a mac and he and as a standalone display um like a tv kind of thing and a smart home display with a low power mode i don't know about this his story is basically like a larger external display that you can i could sort of see it because it's the it it actually is the answer to the question,

why do we have a studio display that has iOS inside it, but it's not visible in any way? And couldn't you use it to run tvOS? Couldn't you use it to be a TV on its own? It's got speakers, it's a screen, it's got software on it. Why is it only working when it's attached to another device? And this is sort of the answer to that is, what if they made one that was a little bit bigger that you could use as your standalone display, but it could also take other inputs and also have a smart home low power mode? Yeah.

But where's this display going in someone's house that it can actually serve as all of these things at once? It made me start to think about like IMAX, where they say that sometimes you put a, you're in a limited screen environment. I don't think this is for like a living room TV, but like could it be for other environments where there's really limited space and you can have it pull double duty? I don't know. It is an interesting idea of like where this actually fits and is it a product that actually has a mainstream

use case but they keep telling me that they sell a lot of imax that are just meant to be you know that people just plot them down in the middle of their of their home and everybody uses them and i guess that could be for something like this i don't know it's weird but i feel like they these like use cases and the product doesn't match up right because this is obviously going to be more expensive than the current studio display because it sounds this is obviously going to be more expensive than the current studio display because it sounds like it's going to be quite advanced so let's let's imagine this is a two thousand dollar display right let's just i'm just throwing that money out there i just feel like a an expensive display doesn't necessarily match with this idea of like i have just one room

right right like those things this sounds to me like it's an expensive display so it's probably going to be bought by somebody who has at least a room where they keep their work computer like their office right where they have their computer and then if it's in the office it's not so helpful to be a smart smart home display because it's in the office yeah some people do live in very small spaces and uh and they could use this and i'm sure there are people out there who watch movies and tv shows on the same screen that they use you know to do their computer stuff but i would imagine most people don't they use a a device to do that they use an ipad or an iphone or whatever or a laptop

and so yeah i wonder about that i am going to dispute you on this is going to be powerful and therefore expensive i think that the studio display could do this right now i think it could i think i think they made a decision to have it run ios invisibly in the background in order to run the uh run the camera and run um center stage but like i don't know it's it's a an a-series processor running an os i think it's not a real leap to say that if it was a slightly more modern a-series processor and they built it to run tv os standalone from scratch which they didn't do with the studio display i'm not sure that that's a particularly more expensive product now maybe the display is better and that makes it more expensive but i don't think this is a lot of extra power i think this is just designing it

with that stuff visible versus invisible like on the studio display i mean i i still think a 1600 display meets the same argument that I was making earlier. My point is, is there a market where you're sitting right in front of the screen doing computing work and it's also your TV? Right? And if there are markets for that, then great. But is that a market? Or is this an incredibly large display for a computer monitor that Apple thinks is sort of like it will work as a small tv or it'll work as a computer monitor you decide but you're right there are lots of scenarios where

you might be better off just buying a tv right because tvs are cheaper than that i don't i don't know it's an interesting idea um and they they have the market research but it does seem like a one-size-fits-all TV that is also a computer monitor. I mean, I feel like I know of a better display, which already includes an integrated processor and software that could double as a standalone display and smart home display of a low power mode. It's called the iPad.

If this feels like it's better for an iPad if they're going to put it in a product that's not like HomePod with screen. Look, this is such a nebulous rumor. We're really just like talking around a thing that we have no idea, but it's interesting to talk about. It could legitimately

just be a Mac display that they've decided, why are we hiding the fact that we're running our operating system on it? Let people use it for a PlayStation. Let people use it as an Apple TV if they want when the Mac is not connected. And maybe they look at the use cases and think, we got people connecting via laptops. They disconnect their laptop. The screen's just sitting there doing nothing. Somebody else in the home can use it for something else yeah maybe this is a minor feature where it's sort of like well if we're going to make a smart display for that works with max why not why not also make it be visibly smart it's an extra feature like because like i'm saying the studio display as it currently exists basically

is this except they decided to hide it all. So maybe they just decided, let's not hide it. Let's put an HDMI port back there and make it an Apple TV and not hide it anymore. I don't know. So moving on, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Goldman Sachs is trying to break out of their deal with Apple on the Apple card. Apparently, this is so weird to me, Goldman Sachs is in talks with American Express to try and convince them to take on the Apple card. Apparently, this is so weird to me, Goldman Sachs is in talks with American Express to try and convince them to take on the business.

Quote, Apple would have to agree to a transfer. The tech company is aware of the talks, which have been ongoing for months. It was reported in January

that Goldman Sachs has apparently lost over a billion dollars on the Apple card. But in October, Goldman Sachs and Apple extended their relationship until 2029 yep so my very cursory knowledge of this market suggests that goldman sachs probably doesn't want to be in the consumer credit card market anymore the consumer they have they really tried to expand into kind of like this consumer banking area

and they've lost a lot of money. They were really aggressive in it. And I think that there's some thought that, talk about, there's nothing more esoteric than what investors in banks think. Like, it's like double financial. It's investors in banks. And that's the point where i generally pass out um

but you know they may they may have tried to expand and they're like oh no let's go back to our core business and let's unload all this stuff i am fascinated about the fact that they're losing money on the apple card i guess that that is because they're you know they they took on sort of apple's aggressive terms and so they're not able to make the money on it than they wanted to it is it's head-scratching to me that report so some of the stuff that i read today about because i was doing a little bit of research and like trying to understand this loss that was reported and it was very nebulous because it was like a loss reported in part of a bigger loss that they had and some people were trying to pull it apart and work out that this is what it was. And there was some talk about the billion and,

you know, it was hard for me to try and work out exactly how it was confirmed. But, uh, I read an article on nine to five Mac, um, by Michael Potok, and they were talking about some of the potential ways in which Goldman may have lost lost money here and it could have been the cash back it could have been um the fact that they weren't charging uh lots of fees which usually credit card companies would charge which is something apple didn't want um and also like they were much more aggressive in accepting people people and the and therefore there would be more bad debt there they were really excited about about working with apple because there's like apple halo and and i think that there's this question about like well maybe apple's really only good at making money for apple um i do think this is very interesting in the context of well why isn't the apple card somewhere

else it's like uh i mean maybe it's business because nobody wants this business nobody wants to play by apple's rules and it makes again makes me wonder about apple like setting up its own financial company of it right like i don't know when apple becomes like a bank or not if as long as they've got partners maybe they don't need to become a bank but apparently they're hiring for it like this is something we spoke about a number of months ago that like they are hiring and looking more at becoming a financial service and taking on more of this stuff themselves in some form or other lots of regulation to deal with there um i don't know i mean the apple card is is a pretty good product i think the question is yeah did apple apple obviously was like we want to set the terms we want this to be very

different and they got somebody to say yes and uh that's great but maybe in the end that is a it was a bad idea so as well as the apple card the relationship with goldman sachs is also powering apple card savings and apple pay later so they're like really intertwined now. The Amex thing is interesting to me. It's obviously a very different business, American Express. They have the American Express card and that's going to be complicated. Well, I cannot

envision Apple just declaring that the Apple card is an Amex card. If this deal is going on, I assume that the deal would maybe involve that as an option, but that I just can't, I can't envision the Apple card going to Amex and being turned into an American Express card. But similarly, I can't imagine Amex taking it and not making it an Amex.

Like, why would they not do that? Like, they don't have to take this from Goldman Sachs. This is like, you know what I mean? Like American Express are going to have their own needs and desires here so it that might be one of the reasons this doesn't work maybe amex say yeah but it's going to be an amex and apple say no and it's like well back to goldman yeah i think uh the scenario i would say there again knowing nothing about this so i'm just spitballing would be amex taking on that business viewing it as an opportunity to get some of these apple card holders to be amex customers um amex card customers over time

even if they're supporting the existing mastercard customers because the amex is just not accepted in the same places that visa and mastercard are no there there i've seen some instances of mx cards that have like um another card as a fallback yeah and so like maybe mx would do that that like it would be mx by default but you have this fallback maybe if it didn't work and maybe they would work of apple to find some kind of interesting way to make that work via Apple Pay. I don't know. But it would be really strange to me if Amex were like, yeah, we'll take this, but we're going to use MasterCard and pay MasterCard to do this. Remember the context here, Mike. The context here is companies who want to do

business with Apple and are willing to do things that they would not normally do because they want to be in business with Apple. I'm not saying that it's smart i'm saying that that seems to happen but it's weird though right if like goldman's like we're losing so much money on this will you take this from us like i can't even imagine what the pitch is to mx like do you want this we're losing a billion dollars and we lost a billion dollars this 2020 did you like this it's very strange to me i would love to know more about like what is going on there very strange and i'm now fascinated to see what the the next few years are for the apple card because it seems like maybe it's not the business people want it to be goldman sachs is learning one of those important lessons some days you just can't get rid of a bomb. It's a very Batman episode today.

It is. I'm just sliding the Batman stuff in there. And the Financial Times is reporting that Apple has had to reduce their production forecasts for the Apple Vision Pro due to manufacturing complexities. These issues are stemming from the micro OLED displays that are found inside the two displays found inside the feature Vision Pro inside the Feature Vision Pro.

The Times is claiming that Apple is unhappy with the output and quality from their manufacturing partners and have now subsequently cut estimates to 400,000 units produced in 2024. It was previously reported that Apple was forecasting a million units in the first year. However, I have heard some conjecture that maybe it was misunderstood as a million displays, which would be half a million units. But nevertheless, there has been a change in Apple's forecasting based on the quality. The Financial Times is also claiming

that Apple has further pushed back their plans for a more affordable Apple Vision headset. They were exploring mini LED displays instead of micro OLED displays for a cheaper device, but they were unhappy with the results of the mini LED displays when used that close to the eyes.

It's cutting edge stuff. It's hard. They're going to sell every one that they can make, but they're not going to be able to make very many. It seems that way. It's going to be every one that they can make, but they're not going to be able to make very many. It seems that way. It's going to be hard to get them. It is. I'm not looking forward to that. It's going to be hard to get them. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace,

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for the support of this show and all of RelayFM. For the summer of fun, I wanted to bring back Upstream. Oh. It's been a while. I remember Upstream.

It has been a while. We can still do Upstream here. Yes. We just haven't, but I remember upstream. It has been a while. We can still do upstream here. Yes. We just haven't, but we still can. Yeah, we can. But I'm always looking for a reason. And today, when I opened my RSS reader, I had like six stories, five or six stories,

all related to Apple TV+. And so I thought, for the summer of fun, let's do upstream. One of these was a link from you we're going to talk about pac-12 football again let's do it so what's going on uh i don't know i'm sorry my kids we're pac-12 family i i uh you know went to cal cal lifelong my dad was a cal season ticket holder he went to cal my kids go to oregon or went to oregon i guess i got to say now. My daughter is an alumna now.

Congratulations. You got the Ducks and the Bears, Pac-12. And they are the only college football conference that does not currently have a long-term contract. They're in discussion. Their contract runs through the end of or through next summer. So about a year left on it. But they've been negotiating for a year. And there's this real question of like, are they going to be able to match some of the other conferences in terms of

the money? And the presidents keep saying that they're very confident that they're going to be able to beat the big 12 in terms of the money that they're going to be able to pay. And then there's some question about that. And this is all going on. They got a new commissioner. He was brought in to negotiate the media rights. That's why he's here. And so what's going to happen? And nothing has happened yet. They might expand. The reason this is relevant to the upgrade audience, and I'm not just bringing in your, you know, let me talk about how the Cal Bears are going to do this year. Go Cal. Disappointing as always. Is the answer or how the Oregon Ducks are going to do

way more successful and my kids are spoiled. Anyway, this is the only American football contract that's out there. It literally is the only, the NFL has signed all its deals several years out with all of its partners. All the other college conferences have signed all their deals. This is it.

So while it is the Pac-12, it is a smaller of the major conferences. It's not one of the two big ones. It's one of the three smaller ones. They are still a good source of viewers and a good source of content during college football season. And again, I'll just remind our non-American viewers, American football is by far the most successful sport in America. It is by far. most successful sport in America. It is by far. By far, far.

Like the highest rated television series for the last 15 years have been NFL games. Literally, it's always number one. So it's not the national pastime then? Like the national pastime is baseball, right? But that's not the most successful sport? People would argue that football

is now the national pastime, I guess. But whatever. It is certainly the biggest entertainment property and sports entertainment property in America. And so the fact that the Pac-12 is still sitting out there is interesting because if you were a streamer who is trying to dip your toe in the water of more live sports events and you wanted to try it with American football. Now Amazon's got an NFL deal, but that's about it. Uh, there's a little like NBC as part of their deal with the NFL has a peacock thing where they're going to show some episodes or some games on peacock. But according to a, uh,

a guy who covers this for a living, uh, John Wilner from the San Jose Mercury news, as well as information from John Konzano, who has a sub stack that I subscribe to is very good. Apple, Wilner says, is the favorite for the bulk of the Pac-12 college football inventory beginning in the fall of next year. um wilner's projection is that espn will probably take sort of like scoop up the cream of the crop especially for saturday nights and maybe other weeknights you know like a thursday night game um those will be like marquee matchups on espn but that's only about 22 regular season games he estimates um there are 50 something other conference games that currently air on Fox or on the Pac-12 network, which is the conference's

own TV network. The idea here from Wilner is that Apple will probably just buy those. And they may even pick up the Pac-12 network, which produces these games, and use it as part of its sports production facility that would be owned by apple but that's a little unclear did you say it was fox is that wholly owned by fox no the 50 something games currently some of them are on the on fox a handful and then the rest of them are on the pac-12 network which pac-12 owns which pac-12 owns and pac-12 owns the production company so in the way that major league baseball is producing friday night baseball for apple okay but that I believe Apple and MLS are producing or MLS is producing for Apple. I'm not sure exactly how that works.

The MLS games. Pac-12 produces its own content and that's probably part of the deal. Anyway, Wilner thinks that Apple is going to take those other games that ESPN doesn't take. And that it's possible that there will be another small package. And he says, maybe Fox will buy some games. The advantage the Pac-12 has is on the West Coast, which means that it can put games later on on Saturday night where the East Coast can't play anymore. And so it just extends the day and there's limited inventory of West Coast football games. So maybe Fox or NBC or Peacock on NBC or Amazon, but he thinks Apple's the favorite. I've

heard other reports that Apple and Amazon were both talking to Pac-12 about this. So it's just, as an Apple story, this is the idea that this may be Apple's best chance in the next few years to experiment with American football, which is our most popular sport. And I think it can't hurt that these are all institutions, the Pac-12, they're Western institutions. It's all along the West Coast and the Western US, which culturally is actually not a bad fit for Apple. The idea that you've got universities, one of them just down the road in Palo Alto, also in Berkeley, and then Seattle, alto also in berkeley and then seattle uh you know and salt lake city and eugene and and and tucson and like uh and i'm not going to list all the pac-12 cities there are a lot uh and then they may expand to san diego and even dallas it's possible so um just something to watch that

will probably happen this month in july these and and so we may get another um apple sports announcement essentially this would start next fall not this coming fall but fall of 2024 And so we may get another Apple sports announcement, essentially. This would start next fall, not this coming fall, but fall of 2024. If Wilner is right, and Wilner and Canzano have suggested that there's a Pac-12 media day happening in a few weeks where they get all the coaches and players and stuff and they do their big promotion for the year. And they said the last thing they want is for the TV rights to be undecided by the time they get there. want is for the TV rights to be undecided by the time they get there. And I think I may have mentioned this here earlier, but the reason this has taken way longer than most of these conference TV negotiations have taken is apparently because they're talking to non-traditional partners, namely Apple and Amazon. And those companies don't know how sports

rights negotiations work. And even now, even though they've got some sports rights, the impression is like when you're talking to Fox and ESPN, they've been doing this for ages. They know how it is. You talk to Apple and they're like not even quite talking the same language, which we heard about the NFL Sunday ticket negotiations, right? That there was this real head scratcher of a conversation going on there. And then I guess Google figured it out or just wrote a big check. So, well, we'll see. But this would be another thing in the pile of all the different live sports that Apple is trying if Apple ends up picking up 40 or 50 college football games. So the thing that I could imagine of that same language thing is just cultural norms of Apple like, well, well we're gonna take this and show it all over

the world and they're like no you're not and they're like yeah we are you know what so i'm wondering from this is they may be the favorite but can they actually get the deal there's not much of a college football market no but can they get the deal they want there isn't a large mls market either but they still do that. The advantage that they have here is that this is small enough and it doesn't really have much of an international deal that they can basically, yeah, I think they would just take it and do it, even though outside of the US there isn't much of a market for this. But they can offer it and see what happens, right?

It's an interesting idea. So I don't know how to read this because like i said i am a lifelong fan of a team in this conference so but i'm just saying from a larger issue it's very interesting that apple is at least reportedly the favorite to close this deal because it would throw um some college football on the pile along with mLS and MLB. Apple have posted the first episode of their new, I'm going to say hit show Silo on Twitter. I would call it a hit just because

I've been seeing people talk about this show who are not in my tech circles. I've yet to see it, but I've got it on my queue. I want to watch it because people are saying it's really good. And so they just took the first episode and just posted it on Twitter so people want to watch it because people are saying it's really good and so they just took the

first episode and just posted it on twitter so people can just watch it for free like john gruber out of god good art core but let's put in the show notes but like it's interesting because you can do this already in the tv app like you could just go to the tv app and you can watch the first episode of like all of their shows like for free but this is just interesting because they've done it on twitter at what is i think a pretty contentious time to do anything new with twitter right um and it's only like over the last week just gotten even weirder with the with the rate limiting and stuff like that now like as somebody who doesn't use twitter now i can't read any tweets because i'm not logged in anywhere it's just sent me a link to a tweet and i'm like i can't do anything with this because like i can't be bothered to log in again and it's interesting because like i think there

are two pretty decent arguments on this of like one it's weird to extend any kind of new relationship with twitter right now from a political reason like political standpoint in all of the ways that you could take the word political but people are still there so yeah that's that's the thing right like people's we might not be a lot of our audience may have moved on to new places but like most people who were on twitter in the first place are still there so would you do so like it is a i honestly i feel like i have good opinions usually on each, like, I feel like, sorry, I have strong opinions that I can make on things, right? Like I could feel definite about stuff. I don't know what the right decision is to make on this one, if you're Apple, to be honest. It's marketing and there are a lot of people still using it and they've got an existing marketing relationship, so they're doing it.

so they're doing it. I'm a little surprised. So like they, CBS, Viacom put up, or I guess Paramount Plus technically, put up on the entire first season of Star Trek Strange New Worlds before ahead of the season two premiere for a limited time.

But they basically like posted the whole thing and said, you can just watch, you can binge this and then sign up for Paramount Plus for season two. I'm a little surprised that this was a Twitter decision here, but again, they do have an existing Twitter relationship. They must find some value in it.

I don't know. It's a marketing decision. The truth is marketing decisions are not made through any lens, but does this get us to our marketing goals? And I think the idea here is they're trying to get people to see Silo and be into it and then want to pick up Apple TV Plus, and this is a place that they can do that. And I think that in the end, a lot of the arguments about, do you want to be supporting this product and this company ends up being, well, there's a lot of people there.

And, and those people don't seem to care. Maybe they're not paying attention. Maybe they're awful people. Chances are they're not awful people. They're just, that's what the conversation is. Not everybody cares about the things everybody else cares about exactly uh and so um i i will admit that i rolled my eyes at a lot of the so-called controversy about this because most of the posts i saw about this were how dare apple you know with twitter i'm like whatever it's marketing they're gonna do it

because there's a reach there if there weren't't people on Twitter, they wouldn't do it. They're not trying to prop up Twitter. They're trying to get people to watch their TV show. And a lot of people have not quit Twitter in a huff like so many people in our community have. That's just the truth of it. And the moment that it's not worth it for Apple to promote things on Twitter, they'll stop. Believe me. It is strange, though, because there are other places to put it, right?

Yeah. And Twitter is rapidly becoming a worse place to be. You mentioned it. In the last week, we've gotten this thing where Twitter is, are they paying their bills to Google Cloud? Are they paying their bills to anywhere else? Who knows? But suddenly, they closed off the whole site unless you can log in, and they rate limited

everybody. And it is rapidly decaying to the point where I almost wonder if Apple would make that same decision today that they made last week. But it is that. Yeah. And YouTube. Yeah. I don't know why not YouTube and why Twitter. And I don't know.

It's weird. It's a weird thing. But it's marketing. Their ways are mysterious. Maybe they had. Also, it's possible that they had a deal with Twitter where they got the ability to do this and it was part of their deal. So they're like, well, we might as well use like use the coupon for this.

It's entirely, we don't always know what the nature of these things. It may not be. We can spend money to put a show somewhere. Will we put it on Twitter or YouTube? They cost about the same. I mean, maybe they don't cost the same, or maybe literally you have a coupon for a free thing as part of your relationship with twitter and you're like well let's just see it let's try it see see how it goes i don't know i am surprised like i just went to look at the apple tv youtube channel they didn't do it also on apple tv like on the youtube channel sorry

which i just feel like i mean you're just afraid to upload it you know why didn't you just do that too but i didn't but like this this this just feels to me of like someone in marketing was just like oh let's try this right because that's realistically all they're doing it's also not the 10th time they've done it like it's probably like maybe even the first time they've done it like they're trying it marketing marketing is all about let's give it a shot and see what happens and get the results back and again i tell you tell you, if the results back are bad, they won't do it again. And it doesn't matter. And it won't matter about the politics of it unless it totally blew up in their faces like, how dare you, which I don't think it actually will. I don't think that there's anything to that. What will happen is that if people have abandoned Twitter because it sucks

or they've been rate limited or whatever the reasons are and their marketing doesn't work there, they'll stop. That's it. Very bottom line oriented, most marketing people. The Ted Lasso finale hit a series high in viewership for the show, delivering a billion total minutes of viewing

across the entire show itself, according to Nielsen during the kind of finale premiere time. The episode, the very show itself, according to Nielsen, during the kind of finale premiere time. The episode, the very final episode, hit 529 million minutes watched in a week with the rest of those billion minutes spread across the show itself. So it like, lots of people watched it and it also drew people to watch the entire show.

So it was a big high for Ted Lasso for his minutes watched. I just wanted to say, I feel like I saw so many articles bemoaning the final season of the show. I feel like people were taking pleasure in sharing them around. It almost felt like at one point. And to me, it all felt off the mark. I really enjoyed the final season of Ted Lasso.

I loved the show overall. I loved the path it took and i was very satisfied with the ending my read on people not enjoying the final season a lot of it was people wanted the show to be different than what the show was rather than like just enjoying it for what it was like people were like hey this show's sad now i wanted a happy show it's like but you can't choose like it's not up to you right just enjoy the show for what it is and i think it told an incredibly good story that would not have been effective if it was just three seasons of episode of season one in my opinion i would also argue

that that season one is also not as happy as people remember it and the show was always uh what it was and it just wasn't what people this is my very briefly i'll give you my tangent about battlestar galactica which is i think one of the reasons people hated battlestar galactica's ending so much is because they had decided what they had what the show was and ignored the stuff that they didn't want to pay attention to that was in the show and then it turns out they got to the ending and the stuff that they had ignored that a certain kind of science fiction TV series viewer had ignored because they didn't want to engage with that kind of the content was the point of the ending. And therefore there was an enormous disconnect and people felt really betrayed by it.

Whereas I had thought about that content all along as being super important to the show, given its origins and given the previous version and its origins. And so when they got to the end, I was like, yeah, of course, sure. But other people were like, I am so betrayed. And I think Ted Lasso is a little like that, where I think people, it's like pandemic. It was a comfort view. They're like, oh, yes. And it's like, oh, yeah.

Also, he had a horrible panic attack and is getting a divorce and is super sad in season one. But people didn't really remember that part. I thought season three was weaker than the first two seasons because there were some plotting problems and there was a bunch of stuff that happened sort of in the middle of the season. Like a lot of streaming shows that was kind of a mess because they were kind of trying to get to their ending. The ending was great. I agree with you. I agree with you. I also think I noticed at least a couple of places where there were TV critics and TV writers who were doing the obligatory Ted Lasso write-ups because it got traffic who never liked the show. And were really enjoying the fact that they were able to rip on it, which I don't really understand why you get somebody who doesn't like the show to write about the show.

I agree. The only people who are reading it are people who are watching it. And are there that many hate watchers out there? Seemed very weird and not a good way to live, but so be it. Anyway, if you didn't like it, that's fine. A lot of reasons not to, there was a lot of discourse about it. Fact is lots of people watched it. Were they satisfied? I don't know. Right. But they watched it. It was a huge hit. And I'm sure again, that if they want to to make more apple will back many trucks of money up to whoever's door is necessary to make more ted lasso after the writer's strike is over i'm convinced they're going to i still i still remain convinced uh i think me and you were talking about

this when we went to baseball don't make a show of course was it the richmond way or whatever the richmond way or afc richmond yeah and that'll be with uh with most of the cast just not jason sudeikis because the whole point of season three, spoilers for Ted Lasso, I guess, but like Jason Sudeikis, his kids live in America and he doesn't want to be making a show in England. And so the whole point of season three was saying it's not season of Ted Lasso and he's coaching some other sport or whatever. Like we spoke about this. I mean, come on, Apple. Just put he's an MLS coach now. You've got it. You can make it happen, right?

You don't even need to do the deals. It's just in there. Ted Lasso is literally an MLS coach. Yes. A fictional character is going to be a coach in the real MLS now. It's true. It's going to happen. Ted Lasso, the MLS coach. He's literally an MLS coach. Yes. A fictional character is going to be a coach in the real MLS now. It's true. It's going to happen. Just do it.

Because they had that kind of power. Oh, I didn't mean that, but yeah, do that. Make Jason Sudeikis the coach of an MLS team. No, no, Ted Lasso. Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso is the coach of an MLS team. Yeah. Sure. Why not?

The Morning Show returns in September with a 10-episode season. It's shifting to a Wednesday release, like most of Apple's content has. The first two episodes drop on September 13th. Jon Hamm is in this one, which was the perfect payoff to his whole commercial thing of like,

Apple, please cast me, and they did. They put him in the Morning Show, which is I think whether the world agrees apple considers the morning show it's like premiere thing right like this is their like jewel whether you know because it's like started star studded and yeah it's got the prestige feel whether people feel like it's got the prestige quality or not i really like the morning show um a lot actually i really liked the last season um before this season even begins it has been renewed for season four which is a surprise to me i just

thought this would be the last one uh but it's going to keep going for another season after this one okay i still haven't watched season two i know you liked it i really liked it i really didn't like how season one ended but really it's just we have to season two is better than season one that that is for sure we're watching the bear right now so when that's over we'll see what's next highly recommend the bear by the way and just oh yeah i haven't seen the bear yet but i want to i know how good it is just from everyone talking about it and right now we're watching abba elementary which which is fantastic. It's good. Like it is the return of the 30 minute sitcom, right? Like I can't believe that someone has made this show that like now,

and it works and it's great. And it's just like a surprise to me that like, is it Peacock? Where is Abba Elementary? We have it on Disney. Is it Hulu? Yeah, it's Hulu because it's an abc

because we have it on disney plus and uh yeah the reason i say is it peacock because it just feels like the nbc 30 minute comedy like it is a surprise to me that's something that could exist again but it's fantastically done we are slowly going through that having finished superstore which was our last traditional i love superstore which also great. That's a really good one. And so we've got Abbott Elementary. The Bear, I will tell you this about The Bear. The Bear is not a sitcom. The Bear is very intense. However, the beauty thing about The Bear is that

they're also half-hour episodes for the most part. So if you're looking to get something to fit into your life, because sometimes with an hour-long show, it's like, do I have an hour right now? The Bear, it's mostly half-hours. But super intense see abbott's fitting in perfectly for like a show while we're eating dinner or whatever sometimes and i feel like the bear's not gonna do that like no i feel like the bear do not eat dinner while watching the bear yeah i i feel like uh any show where there's like food is part of the

show where it's not a cooking competition i'm never gonna watch it while i'm eating like i feel like no learned that before that bear is sort of a cooking competition but in the worst way okay i love it i love it it is it is in the middle of season two right now it is legitimately one of the best shows on tv right now yeah and i know that i know it to be the case just because of the way people talk about it so like i'm gonna get to it at some point yeah silo on the list now too yeah apple has also renewed their sci-fi show invasion for season two don't know anything about invasion hey remember that there was an there's like aliens of the invader or something i didn't watch it either and they canceled their drama show uh high desert they don't cancel things but they canceled this one yeah that's ben

stiller who is also doing severance uh was the executive producer of that but uh they canceled that unlike all the other streamers when apple cancels something they don't just yank it off the air it'll live in the apple catalog because apple's catalog is really small and they want more stuff in it i still find the yanking things off services to be weird that is a very weird thing to me it's real weird we've talked about it on uh on our podcast downstream julian alexander and i host which the pilot episode of that was uh was a summer of fun episode last year and uh we do talk about it is weird there are tax purposes for some of it which is really gross and then also the idea is if it's not making money for you, maybe you can sell it to someone that the short version of this is there was a period there where everybody was getting, trying to gear up to fight Netflix and everybody decided

all those studios decided we're going to own our own streaming service and put all of our content on it. We're going to take our ball and go home. We're going to bring it all inside friends. Netflix is really successful, but you know what Warner brothers owns it. We're going to take it in and put it on HBO max. Um, that was the trend for a while then netflix had a bad quarter everybody freaked out about how much money they were spending on streaming and what ended up happening is people like say you know that that show that's not doing like insecure is an hbo show and it and it was on and people watched it and now it's just sitting there on max and nobody's watching it uh netflix netflix will give us money to put it on netflix watched it. And now it's just sitting there on max and nobody's watching it.

Uh, Netflix, Netflix will give us money to put it on Netflix where it will find a bigger audience and make more money for us and for Netflix. And so they sold it to Netflix. Like that is starting to happen. And that's, what's going on with some of these things getting pulled off streaming services is they're going to get sold somewhere else for more for incremental money basically the idea of like well we everybody who'd watched it on our service has watched it now so we're going to go put it on netflix or we'll put it on tubi or something like that like we'll put it somewhere where it can uh where it can generate more money for us than on our own service and that's a very

different model i understand why people feel whiplashed by it because like just literally a year and a half ago uh we were in the land of like everything's going to its own service and disney's going to have a service and paramount's got a service and warner media's got a service and that's what we're going to do and um then it all blew up and now uh that's not going to be the case anymore it just feels like as a customer like the rug's been poured out from under me like i was yes sold on the idea that i would sign up to all of these services so i could have all of the television and movies and they would all be there and it's like fine all right i'll sign up for this one i'll sign up for that one

and now it's like oh it's all going to move around again vicom um or paramount global i guess is what they are now um they were the whole idea was we're going to invest in star trek because we're going to we own star trek so we're going to be the home of Star Trek. And they literally pulled an animated Star Trek show off, completely off Paramount Plus, and are going to sell it with 20 unaired episodes somewhere else. So you're a Star Trek fan? You get all your Star Trek on Paramount Plus? Not so fast. It's akin a little bit to a Marvel show suddenly going on Netflix where it's like they did that back in the past, right?

And they pulled it all off and put it on Disney Plus. Imagine if they're like, you know, on second thought, maybe we should just put Daredevil back on Netflix. Like weird, just weird. I feel like Disney would maybe be the company least likely to do this. Least likely to do it. I agree. I think Disney's crown jewels are its franchise stuff. That's why the Star Trek thing is so shocking. would maybe be the company most least likely to least likely to do it i agree i i think disney's crown jewels are its franchise stuff that's why the star trek thing is so shocking it's a kid's

show i mean it's not it's actually a very good show star trek prodigy it's it's a very good show but it's for all ages it's like like doctor who it's a family show right it's appropriate for kids but i think parents would like it too um paramount plus not really great with kids kids content they've got some because everybody's got some but like there's probably a better fit somewhere else like disney would disney buy a star trek show i don't know but it would probably be a good fit maybe netflix we'll see but it's just so weird this idea that you would take some of your crown jewels your intellectual property this is a franchise we own and And say, eh, I don't know.

It's weird. Weird times. Disney did remove shows, but the idea of selling them, it doesn't sit with me. Imagine if Disney was like, yeah, Obi-Wan, we're just going to make it disappear. Like, what? Or we're going to put it on, Obi-Wan's going to be on Max. No. Like, you wouldn't do that.

Yeah. Weird. If you enjoyed this segment go check out downstream on relay fm uh it's a wonderful show it's one of my favorites and thank you more of this stuff every two weeks every two weeks if you would like to get more upgrade if you want more upgrade why wouldn't you want more upgrade subscribe to upgrade plus go to get upgrade plus.com you will hear more bonus content every single week today jason said that he wants to talk about celebrating a holiday that's all i've got in the notes i'm very excited to find out what that means you'll get no ads no ads for

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Let's do some Ask Upgrade questions. All right. So first question comes from Randall, who asks, if you had to remove one category of Apple device, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Apple Watch from your life forever, which would you choose? Oh. Hmm.

Forever. Forever. Apple Watch. I'm sorry. I like my Apple Watch, but it's the least like i can't imagine living without mac and ipad and unlike most people iphone would come third in that list but still like how do you not live your life without a phone so apple watch apple watch like it's on the edge for me at best of time right like like i i don't have any other device where i'm like i wished apple made something else so i didn't have to use this right i don't feel

that about the mac i don't feel about the ipad or the iphone like i said like i want apple to put all of this stuff in the thing that doesn't have a screen on it so then i can also wear a regular watch i don't wear two watches i don't want to wear two watches. So I want the features they give. I don't want the device as much where like the Mac, iPad, iPhone, I don't want any of the other competing products. I don't want Apple to significantly change

the product in any way. And it's also just like what will make the least impact on my life from both work and enjoyment. It's Apple Watch. Although I do love it, but not as much as I love the others. Exactly. It's like choosing

your least favorite child kind of thing. Carrie asks, or Sari asks, how would you do? C-E-R-I. Sari. I'm not going to say. That could have set off phones all over the place. Do we know what Apple's eyesight feature on the Vision Pro, so this is where you see someone's eyes on the outside,

will show for somebody that normally wears glasses? What do you think it might be if you don't know? Presumably, since the initial scan is done without the headset on, one could be wearing glasses? I think they have you take the glasses off when you do your scan and it will not show you glasses because that would be weird because you're wearing the headset sort of where your glasses would be so it won't show them and it would break the uh illusion right it would they're trying to create an illusion and so no glasses off for the scan and you'll do the scan and then you'll have just eyes in there the headset are your glasses and

you won't look weird because the headset is going to provide the frame that looks like your glasses i mean would you look weird if you took you know if you have prescription like ski goggles and you took the your glasses off and put on the goggles well no because you're still wearing something i am gonna say jason you will look weird you're the goggles? Well, no, because you're still wearing something that's framing your eyes. I am going to say, Jason, you will look weird. You're just not going to look weird in that way. You're going to look weird. It won't be the glasses. It won't be the glasses.

The glasses won't make you look weird. The headset will make you look weird. Exactly. Differently weird, but weird. Okay, that's fair. Tom asks, how do you think environments will work in Vision OS? Will there be an environments app store where

developers could create and share their own? This is the fully immersed things, the mountains and that kind of stuff. Or will this be restricted to Apple adding through OS updates or even special environments such as things like the AFC Richmond locker room or Lumen Industries office?

Yeah. I mean, my guess is that this is going to be Apple provided and they'll there'll be a collection of them and that maybe one day third parties will be able to contribute but not out of the gate and the idea is that apple will have these nicely curated kind of environments keep in mind environments are like the desktop picture of vision pro right like you're going to be by default you're going to be in augmented reality but if you want to run multiple apps in a an environment you turn the dial on the on the digital crown and you can enter an environment that you can choose from what apple

is providing but they're they're not there they're not the primary and i think you'll still be able to use like your apps the idea here is you kind of close off from And I think you'll still be able to use your apps. The idea here is you kind of close off from the world, but you can still have all your windows floating around and all of that. And then separately, apps can take over the entire interface and do whatever they want. But that's in their own app space, not in the space that's shared with lots of different apps. So I think that's going to be how it works for now at least i am sure i heard somebody say this i thought i might have seen it in an interview with some with someone at apple but maybe i didn't maybe it was just somebody was conjecture making conjecture but i agree with it basically these will be like watch faces apple will make them no one else can make them and they'll update them when they want to probably at least in the short

term yes the environments thing feels very technically complicated like my understanding is it's like a mixture between real imagery and 3d generated stuff which i could see was the case because like in the image that i was in like mount hood there was like this rock kind of not too far in the distance and i could see that that was cgi like i could just see it looked like a texture to me the video some of some of it looked real some of it looked cgi i asked if it was real or cgi or both they did not have an answer for me and also i think they have the ability to do not only like dynamic sounds and stuff in the environment so you you got birds chirping and stuff like that. It was raining in mine, and it definitely wasn't real rain.

As again, I could see, this looks like rain, but it looks like video game rain. Right. So you could have probably over time, it's rain, it's sunny, the clouds move in the sky, the reflections change on the lake. That kind of thing is part of it so it's it has to be like whole experience it has to be like uh uh 3d generated graphics like it just has to be like there kind of isn't a way to do this i think in a way because you know like the panorama didn't look as good as the environment right when we did our demo like there's like a panoramic image that we looked at and just didn't look as good i was thinking you know mount hood itself could be uh basically

photographic all the way in the background but like all the stuff that's in the in the that's being impacted by the effects and you're right i think that this is the idea is you don't want look if it was a desktop picture or even like one of those dynamic desktop pictures that updates every 10 minutes or something it's not going to feel like a real space you're going to be inside a photograph right that's not what they want and so they want to add a very subtle amount of dynamism to it right so it's subtle right because it doesn't want to you don't want to be distracted but it wants it to be kind of soothingly an environment that has some background noise and and change changes a little bit and like but super subtle and that's a lot of engineering work going on there so to talk about a little bit

more what you are about like you can still create an immersive environment as a developer that lets the space model right so you can have a full space but you can only have your app but you can have multiple windows within it but if you want to create a space. But you can only have your app, but you can have multiple windows in it. But if you want to create a fully immersive experience, you're able to do this. Like if you were a developer and wanted to create your own mountain environment, you can, but users can only be using

windows of your application inside of that immersive space. So it's like in the sizzle reel that Disney made, where you were watching Disney Plus sitting inside of some some i think it was a tie fighter no a x-wing or whatever or like a land cruise speed cruiser i'm just destroying this everybody loves star trek land speeder um yep toyota land cruiser watching disney plus that's right uh sure that would have been a full space if they make something like that so you you can watch Disney Plus inside of an environment that they create, but you can't then also check your tweets.

Right. James writes in and says, as a software developer who listens to tech podcasts, I wonder how you would rate your software development skills. And if you've had instances where you've increased your software skills and found it has helped your journalism

to know more about how the sausage is made. Are there other non-journalistic skills like maybe coaching a children's sports team that have helped you in covering technology in large companies you know um what i always say about my software skills is i know just enough to be dangerous yep uh i wrote a lot of apple scripts i write a lot of python now it has helped me in like i and i did i learned how to do php because i built the templates for six colors when we moved to wordpress and i have to update that stuff when i'm doing them all the membership stuff on six colors and the incomparable that involved i had web designers work on the pages but i had to do a lot of the implementation i had some help but i had to do a lot of it and understand it and I have to maintain it.

Writing a Python scripts, similarly writing automations is fun and actually informs my writing because I like to write about user automation and encourage people to try it. Beyond that, I mean, I wrote a one thing that I distributed to a bunch of people I know that's like an automator slash Apple script thing that's kind

of like an app that you have to install and it has a readme file. And certainly that was interesting in taking the mental shift from a tool that's only for me to a tool that's meant for other people, which is a big leap, as I'm sure software developers know. But the truth is, I talked to a lot of software developers and I get their read on things and I get what they care about. And that's how I cover that. And, um, if I was a software developer, the danger would be that I would care only about the stuff that mattered to me for my app and maybe not the bigger picture. Um, but the good news is I'm not a software developer and nor am I going to be. So the answer is I let, I try to listen and talk to people who understand this stuff and gauge their reaction. And that's sort of how I do it. I've always viewed myself as writing from the perspective of the user of the software. So I'm less concerned. I'm more concerned about what happens with developers in terms of how it will impact the user in terms of what software gets delivered.

And that can mean developers are having a really hard time with this. But the point there is sort of like, so don't get your hopes up, essentially. I'm trying to view it from the user's perspective because I am one. And also that's who my audience is, at least as I view it.

Is there people who care about Apple hardware and software and software that runs in Apple's platforms and what that's who my audience is, at least as I view it. Is there people who care about Apple hardware and software and software that runs in Apple's platforms and what that means? And I'm trying to find that by understanding how, to a certain extent, how the software development process works and what the developers care about. But I don't think, if I was one,

I would have a very different view. And it's not the view that I have or that I've kind of cultivated. So I tried learning Swift a couple of years ago and just failed. It's just not a thing for me that I either have the skills for or that I care enough about to develop those skills realistically. I had an idea for an app. I wanted to see how hard it would be to make it and also just like learn something new

and also potentially give myself another kind of like feather in my cap to be able to talk about on shows and understand things a little bit more. Realistically, I came to like a bunch of different conclusions of which I will detail for you now. I have always been a very passionate user of technology, right? That's kind of the whole reason that I cared enough to start a podcast about technology in the first place. And for me, realistically, I feel like just talking somewhat intelligently about the user facing features, how I feel about them, and listening to and consuming content in that way is more helpful for my job than learning how to

program um and when it comes to kind of like my other skills that i think make me or i've been able to make me good at what i do working in a very large company for many years helped my perspective about how large companies are run where i feel like some people are way too like they think of apple was like way too good when realistically it is a very large company run by lots of people which is why we see things that you might not agree with like oh why did they put that tv show on twitter like what we were talking about earlier was like well because the marketing team decided to try it right like when me and you have either worked in or with marketing people who make that decision because ultimately that's their job and they don't care about cultural

wars right right you know yeah yeah that's yeah that's it i also think one of the things that helps me is i'm i consider myself to be pretty good at business like it's just a thing that i'm interested in and do and i think that helps me talk about very large companies doing business. I also want to like, I feel like I came to a conclusion at WWDC about who I am that I wanted to share because James references journalism. I am not and do not consider myself to be a journalist.

Like, I don't think I ever really have, but I came to that decision. Like it dawned on me while sitting in the keynote like environment area while i was sitting around media and could see journalists all over the place and around me and the way that they were reacting to or not the keynote and it's just like i'm not a journalist i have settled on i'm a technology entertainer that is what i do like i make entertainment i don't try and believe i don't believe that what we for me i don't believe that what i am bringing to this show is a journalism sensibility i don't think i'm bringing it to this show or any other show that i do i believe these podcasts are entertainment first like that's what they are from my perspective

that's what i set out to do and so i consider myself just an entertainer with a focus on technology like that's who i am so i care and i get excited and i don't try and like be like hmm these are my serious opinions on this technology so that's i mean i think that i think that for podcasts that's true of all of us to a degree um the original concept of upgrade and i think it still holds is that this is also a place where you help me get out the stuff that i've been thinking about and doing as a journalist who covers this space. So you're the in the primary role you have. It's not the only role by any means is also to be sort of a facilitator of of the conversation and bring out what I'm thinking about a lot of stuff. And honestly,

that is what I, that is the role that I have in downstream is Julia is brilliant. And there was a week we've been talking about CNN, her ages. She wrote a piece in puck puck news about CNN's business model quandary that people aren't talking about. Cause they're talking about like these high level kind of like rumors and things. And she's like, the problem is's business model quandary that people aren't talking about because they're talking about like these high-level kind of like rumors and things and she's like the problem is the

business model and then there was a report in bloomberg that basically said oh yeah that julia's story went around or maybe maybe it wasn't puck but it was julia's story went around in the c-suite at cnn and i just had that moment of like and she said to me on the last episode that like, yeah, she's had multiple high level executives say, I love downstream. Like, wow. But like, again, my job there is to be a passionate consumer and user of the tech. I am the observer of some things, especially like the sports stuff. Cause it interests me, but like, she's the expert I'm, I'm trying to be a facilitator to get her expertise out. And that is sort of the role.

Again, it's complicated, but that is like a key role that you play. In the show, I think it's changed a bit over time. It has. As my confidence grew, I now consider- Yes, you contribute much more. We have a conversation now rather than I used to just ask you questions. So Jason, how about this? How do you feel about this? And you absolutely do. But you're right right you're coming look being look i am a

passionate user of apple products right i'm not writing this from a pc i'm like a apple but i gotta write about it like these people part of part of what i try to do is to understand it right like i try to understand it i am writing for an audience that includes me yeah um mostly because i don't want that job of of and i've been very fortunate to not have to do the job of covering something i don't care about because that's what the job is which believe me when you go into journalism that's always the most likely scenario. And that's not been a path that I've followed. But you're right. It is aspects of what we do are more or less

journalism versus entertainment. And you're right. There are those moments, I think, at those events where you can sort of see the people who are sort of viewing it. Because I still view everything through that journalistic lens, right?

I still do that. And I would say even- There's no way you wouldn't because you did it for so long, right? But I feel like you still get excited. And I still view everything through that journalistic lens, right? I still do that. And I would say even- There's no way you wouldn't because you did it for so long, right? But I feel like you still get excited. And I still do it. Like, I don't feel like you're jaded in any way. Yeah, but I don't clap. But I don't clap.

I clap. And I whoop and I holler. I only clap at things that are laughably a thing that I've- Like when they did Stage Manager, i clapped because i've been complaining it's more like a almost like an ironic clap of like oh yes my feature yay uh but i i don't do that and that's that's like everybody makes their own choices but yeah i know i think this has been good thank you to to the mysterious james for his question i do that we'll say like one last thing on that it's like i don't know if it was always this way but like i really appreciated apple's designation as media rather than press

like i feel like everyone is always always calls it press i hear about press press press press press but they call it media i don't know if it's always been that way and people are just used to calling it press but media makes more sense to me than than press does because i don't consider myself as part of the press because there's no newspaper around here. There's no printing press in this podcast studio. If you would like to send us your feedback, follow-up,

and questions for our various segments, go to upgradefeedback.com. Thank you so much to everybody that does every single week. I really appreciate it. You can check out Jason's journalistic endeavors at sixcolors.com.

You can hear his podcasts at theincumbrable.com and here on RelayFM that includes the podcast we've mentioned multiple times because you should listen to it that is called Downstream here on RelayFM. You can listen to my shows here on RelayFM too. You can check out my other work over at cortexbrand.com. We're on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeayFM too. You can check out my other work over at cortexbrand.com We're on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnell on zeppelin.flights Maybe you're new to Mastodon. You can go follow Jason. You can find me

as at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E on myke.social. You can find the show as at upgrade on relayfm.social where you will see video clips posted but you should go and watch them on the video clip platforms, TikTok and Instagram. We are at Upgrade Relay on both.

Or, you know, Final Mastermind, as I said. Thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus. Go to getupgradeplus.com to learn more. And thank you to our sponsors, Uni and Squarespace for their support of this episode. But most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye,

Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.