Upgrade - 47: Trust Us, It's Doing Well

Episode Date: July 27, 2015

Jason and Myke discuss Apple’s enthusiastically vague approach to Apple Watch sales figures, Myke’s fear that content blockers could wreck people’s livelihoods, and classic iPods and iPod Classics. Plus, Jason takes a European geography quiz.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 47 today's show is brought to you by igloo and intranet you'll actually like stamps.com postage on demand and go to meeting make it easy to meet with your team wherever you need to, wherever you are. My name is Mike Hurley and I'm joined as always by your host of mine, Mr. Jason Snell. Hi Mike, we're getting dangerously close to number 50 now. Very, very close now. Very close. We're getting very close to one year of everything of Relay and then a couple of weeks later, one year of Upgrade. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah, pretty soon we will have time for reflection. Probably not now, but soon.

So this time last year, were you still at IDG? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so again, that's a couple of weeks away, isn't it? Yeah, this is July. I think,

so this time last year I was still at IDG and in fact it was probably a couple weeks from now that i got the word that uh everything was going well and that i was gonna i was gonna go at that time that's coming up that was a painful august and late august early september that was the that was the worst but um yeah so we're not quite there yet not quite at at a year. But look how far we've come. Look how far we've come. How about that?

46 episodes plus a few minutes of episode 47. And we're here. We're doing great, I think. Talking about doing great, you took the European countries quiz. I did. Somebody on Twitter said,

I think Jason should take this quiz of european countries and see if he see if he does any better than mike did with the u.s states and not only did you do better than me i think you did better than i would do taking this quiz wow uh because there are some countries on here that i don't know where they are on a map um so basically uh and and we'll put a link in the show notes to the image I tweeted, a screenshot I tweeted of doing it. Somebody tweeted this, and I just immediately responded with, okay, here it is. And I just did it right then, sitting on the couch on my iPad, I did it. And the problems that I, the ones that I missed, I actually, I got in my own head about the Baltics.

And I've been to Estonia. I know exactly where Estonia is. Latvia and Lithuania, you know, I had it right. And then I said, no, maybe it's this other way, which is the one that has got the Kaliningrad going through it, the Russian enclave and, or exclave, I guess. And I switched them and I got those wrong. So I got the two of the Baltics that I transposed. And I also transposed, and my apologies to your girlfriend, I transposed Romania. And what was the country I transposed it with?

Bulgaria. Bulgaria. Yeah. I just had them reversed. And then all of my other mistakes are because when Yugoslavia broke up, it broke up into like 90,000 different countries. Yep. So, yeah, I genuinely think 30 out of 39 is not only a great score,

it's probably a better score than I would have gotten. What European countries are the ones that baffle you? Oh, most of uh eastern europe like all of the kind of the same kind of one so i wouldn't know any of the ex-yugoslavia countries um places i got a few of them although i did i did put like i put croatia and slovenia on twice because i was like maybe this one maybe this one oh nice tactic nice tactic it didn't pay off but it was a good idea it will i think it did pay off because i think i got them right and wrong so that they counted for me but they also counted against the the total but i got to some of them

i'm like i don't even know i thought this one was croatia but this can't be croatia because then what's that and there are so so, there are so many, like, I like finding Kosovo on a map was, that was just not, I, I, you know, I did get, and I, and I totally spaced on Montenegro. I had no idea. Um, I think, yeah, those, those, I just totally, I totally blew some of those, but I did like you know i got macedonia that was a good one um i'm you know i did oh i did okay i did okay the east eastern europe is trickier it is that it is trickier over there so like i would probably get the uh like the nordic countries mixed up as well so i think you did a good job getting those two part of the advantage there is that

i have been there yeah see i've not been to a lot of europe i've actually been to more of america i think uh and i i mean and i have been to probably more of europe than you then it's possible although you know you you at least could uh spawn could spot romania on a map i hope so all right having having having been there you should probably do that but yeah it was uh yeah yeah, that was kind of fun. I was, I have to say, I was kind of proud of myself that, I mean, 30 out of 39, I wish I was kicking myself about Lithuania and Latvia, but, and then I got to Yugoslavia. It's just like, that's tough. That's a lot. I, you know, growing up learning geography, it was really simple because it was

just Yugoslavia. And now it's not like it's just two or three it's like seven different countries oh my god so that was harder but i know where greece is that's the important one so let's take this uh this conversation from the earth from the countries on the earth and propel it out into space into space uh you and steven got on the phone and spoke about space for a while and it was put into our b-sides feed which is like on the pod extras the pod phone on the pod phone it was it wasn't like an actual phone call where hello even there are we talking about space it's not quite let me get him for you he's just outside it's not shaven your friend is here to talk about space that would be an absolutely great way to start a podcast to have to call and

have it be somebody's mom answers yeah yeah sure your buddy's on the phone that's a new kind of pod the phone cast the pod phone um yeah we did we talked for about 50 minutes about space stuff we we regaled you with space stuff for so long on two podcasts in the in the last couple of weeks that we decided we would nerd out a little bit about space on our own and posted it if people want to listen to it you got to go to the b sides so that's what relay.fm slash b dash sides slash 12 yeah it'll be in the show notes this week as well yeah so you can check that out and i've had a bunch of people say they liked it which was really great and i had a bunch of people say they would love for it to be an actual podcast on relay

to which i say uh anything is possible and uh you know we couldn't contain ourselves and that's why we did it we just thought it would be fun to try and see what people thought and keep watching the skies yes there's a clock up there you can keep watching it in space i really enjoyed it i listened to it today and it was good because you know i as i said to you both when you were bending my ear off on this show and steven was doing the same on uh connected when during the Pluto stuff. I have an interest in it that I've never really explored in any way, but like most nerds, I'm just interested in space, especially this Earth 2 planet, which you spoke about a little bit.

That's the name I'll give it, because the name actually has Kevlar 422B-side or something. I don't know. Kevlar slash B-side slash 12 is the name of the planet. To quote its official name. See, this is not exciting or memorable. So I liked hearing about that too. So it was fun, and people should go listen to it and let Jason and Stephen know what you think about it.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I would say we would love to talk about space stuff more often. But there's lots, we got lots going on in our lives. So, you know, we'd love to hear what people think and if they liked it or not. And, you know, we'll go from there. But it was fun. It was fun to do. And it was fun to be able to do that with the Relay B-Side thing and just say, well, let's just talk, and we'll put it in the B-side feed,

and it'll just be, you know, that gave us some place to put it, which was nice. Yeah, that's something we should do more with. I mean, we're not, we don't really do a lot of the after dark type stuff because it's, you know, there tends not to be too much to actually go in there that is already in the shows. But doing things like little specials and stuff, we should try and do more of that. We're thinking of maybe doing a big Q&A thing

for our one-year anniversary, so that will go in there and stuff like that. So listen out for that in a couple of weeks' time because we're gearing up to our one-year anniversary now, as we mentioned at the top of the show. I just wanted to mention, know i'm very excited jason tomorrow my bank will be enabling apple pay so i can go buy as much manchego as i like from whole foods if i really want to do that excellent do that you do you want to do that you do i just bought some manchego with apple pay yesterday so so if that's the, I'm going to be out of the house tomorrow

buying all sorts of crazy cheeses from local stores. With touchless, contactless payments. Indeed. So neither of your banks had it at the official Apple Pay in the UK launch, right? Don't you have two banks? Yeah, one of the banks, Barclays,

was trying to do their own thing, and they've now since rescinded on that, and they actually lost someone high up in the company. Like, they got fired or something? Like, one of the chief executives or something? I was going to say, they're high up. Just hopefully they can wander through the building and find them, tell them to go down the stairs.

I would hate to be lost high up in a bank. That would be terrible. That'd be frightening. It would be horrible. It happened to me a few times. And HSBC, the other bank that I use, they were meant to be on launch day, but mysteriously have pushed the date twice. But they have made official press releases and such to say that tomorrow is their live date um so okay so so hsbc is going to be the one that

goes live first yeah yeah and then barclays don't have a date right because they were they were the ones who had their own thing and so they really loved their own thing and then and now they're backtracking on that well i can't wait to hear what your Apple Pay experience is like once you do start using it. That'll be interesting. Just different perspective. And also what stores have it. It seems like they've made an effort to get in a bunch of good, you know, have a bunch of good partners. I know James Thompson keeps talking about going down to his local Waitrose in Glasgow, which I've been in, and using Apple Pay,

which sounds very civilized and fun. The partners thing is a little bit weird, though, because Apple were promoting a select list of partners that they're working with, but it should actually work on any contactless terminal, which is basically every single major store in the country. So it's a bit... I'm going to do some more testing on this because I've never been able to really find a definitive answer. But my understanding is, even when it says this on Apple's website,

you know, or like, you know, any contactless, any store that uses contactless, but they're using these partners, I don't really get it. So I'm going to go and actually try that on myself in some places that are like, unofficial, you know, like, I've seen people get it. So I'm going to go and actually try that on myself in some places that are like unofficial, you know, like I've seen people use it in like bakeries and stuff. Just like if you have contactless. Yeah, you can try it and see if it works. And a lot of times it will work. And sometimes the partners are a network or a hardware provider.

And, you know, the individual store isn't a partner per se, but they've turned on Apple Pay for their terminal and so it works. And they may not even know. So it's worth a try. I'm liking Apple Pay. I mean, I have limited places where it's available. And then I go to some places and I see terminals and I think, well, I could try this here. I want it to be in more places because I do find it really convenient. There was a give and take that I had with Nevin Mergan on Twitter where he was saying, well, it's very obvious that Apple Pay is better from the phone than from the Apple Watch. Because for him, you know, for him, he preferred it that way. My response was, well, I always use it with my watch instead of my phone always because i think it's easier to tap a couple of uh tap the little button which

also made him mad because you don't put tap a button you push a button which i feel like if you do it a couple of times then you're tapping on the button that's how that works but he's a designer and thinks that you only tap on a touch, I guess. So anyway, I push the little friend button a couple of times. And it's a double push, if you will. And it brings a Babel Pay on my watch. And I go, boop. And then the watch vibrates and I've paid. I think it's really convenient.

I wish it was in more places. I think this is the challenge with all this contactless stuff is that it's going to be a little while before it's everywhere. So it's hard to leave the house with only Apple Pay because depending on where you go, this place will have Apple Pay and this place won't. So you end up bringing your wallet with you anyway, but it's still fun and convenient. And all this time later, I'm still really enjoying using it. So I hope you enjoy it yeah it is without a doubt the thing that is pulling uh america kicking and screaming um into the modern age of this stuff so it's interesting but not surprising that apple was the company

to do it yeah google tried yeah well yeah and google will benefit now because these things all work with the with google pay they call it google pay now they change the name of it isn't android pay android pay maybe from google wallet um but it's it's a pay and there's samsung pay and i don't even know there's there's many pays now but uh they all do the same thing so they benefit all the other vendors this is not an apple only technology so all the all of these terminals will support those other those other things too but it really kind of took apple to push it over the edge yeah it's fun i i enjoy it i like you know like i said my whole foods by my house is the place where i use

it the most because it's right there and we're always going over there to get three things because it's the supermarket we can walk to in less than five minutes so that's when we that's when we do it but it's fun i'm you know i enjoy it feels like the future uh stewart has written in to give more advice on uh shuffling jason can you take this one before i tear my ears off yeah this is gonna be the last this is gonna be the last one because we've got lots of people even when we say things in the show we get people asking us if we know about the thing we said in the show, which means I guess they just missed what we said in the show. But I did want to mention this because I thought this was a bit of nice practical advice from Stuart for me wanting to listen to songs from an artist without adding them to my library using Apple Music. And the answer is you go to the artist, you tap on their top songs list.

If they have one, again, they don't all have them. is you go to the artist, you tap on their top songs list. If they have one, again, they don't all have them, but if they do, it's a sort of like the ones that get played or bought or whatever the most in Apple's database. If you play the first track there, at that point, it will just play that list of the top 10 songs from that artist. There may be duplicates in there. That is a risk, but it's not a bad approach if you really just want to say, hey, play me some things from this artist I've never heard of, but I'm intrigued by. so that's not a bad tip so thank you stewart um and thus ends our discussion of shuffling music in an artist in apple music this will only come up again if it is fixed if there is a development yes yeah if there is a change in which breaking just Jason happy but other than that never again

yeah thank you to everybody that suggested something. Listener Adrian wrote in about the iPods in regards to the iPod Touch. And Adrian has said, time will tell, but this seems like the perfect gift of my daughter's birthday. She's 10, loves taking photos. She wanted to be able to carry around her music

and she even recently wanted a Fitbit. The new iPod Touch has the M8 processor and he wanted to mention that he loves the show. I have a couple of cousins around the same age, both girls and was there we had a family barbecue on the weekend and they both

love their iPads. That is what they are big on for many of the same reasons like for taking photos and stuff like that. And there my uncle works for a telephone company, a mobile phone company. So there are lots of phones in the house, but they both much, much prefer their iPads. But I can see how for Adrian's daughter, maybe a little bit more specific use cases, like tracking her steps and activity,

which is really cool that at that age she wants to do that. I can see how the iPod Touch could make sense for her in this scenario. I mean, the nice thing, right, I think when we were talking last week, I don't think we can be corrected so much that we were saying we didn't understand the iPod Touch's placement placement but more like why especially the nano still exists i think the ipod touch makes makes sense in some areas and i think primarily as a game console but i do think that the ipad is still better for like 90 of tasks than the ipod touch. Right. But this is a good example of taking pictures, carrying around music and even the sort of like steps and things like that.

I wonder whether this is a common thing or whether she's a real edge case, this 10 year old girl, but it's possible. My son is 10 and just about to turn 11 and he has my original iPad mini and loves it. And that's the thing that he uses all the time. He absolutely loves it. But again, he's not carrying it around and taking pictures with it and putting it in his pocket because his pocket wouldn't fit it anyway. But it's just like for him, it's all about the games and he likes the bigger screen. And we're talking

about as he goes off to middle school, we're talking about handing down an iPhone to him just so that he's got something to contact us since he's going to be walking a longer distance to get to school and he's going to be not walked to school by us every day. So, you know, he's going to be with his friends, but we want to have a lifeline there. So we want to have him be able to call. And there's this question of, is he going to just completely embrace the iPhone or is he going to still use the iPad? And he declared sort of like unprompted to us the other day that he thinks he'll probably still use the iPad even if he gets an iPhone because of the big screen. He likes playing games on the big screen. And I think that's probably true. But, you know, the iPad is not for everybody. So the iPod Touch

gives you another angle to it. I think it really is a kid's device though yeah i think i think so there are i do hear from people every now and then who have a cheap cell phone plan yep and feel like they've got wi-fi pretty much everywhere they go the john syracuse's if you will this is the the john syracuse's of the world from a few years ago. Now he has his iPhone. But yeah, just like John, who they look at the cost. You know, data plans aren't cheap. Now, the way data plans are structured is changing. And with family plans, it can actually be not a bad deal.

And if you've got a certain number of people on a plan already, it can start to make more sense. Like you might as well just get a phone or use a hand-me-down phone. But there are people for whom that is not worth it. And that they don't need data when they're out and about. And they've got a cheap phone, maybe prepaid, that just gives them that lifeline when they're out and about. And that's enough. And for now, I think that is still an interesting kind of sliver of the market. But I do think that over time, there will be plenty of other ways to get people on data for cheap.

And, you know, we'll have to see. I think that's one reason there's no cellular iPod touches, is that I do think there's a class of people who would say, well, why should I get an iPhone? iPod Touch is that I do think there's a class of people who would say, well, why should I get an iPhone? All I want is data. And I actually thought about that, is that if I were a woman or if I was a man with a purse, I could put it that way too. If I had a big bag that I carried around all the time, I wonder whether I would really need my iPhone at all. Because if I had a cellular iPad mini, let's say, that might be enough. I mean, I don't take calls very often. It's all texts and using data. So I think it'll be interesting to see in the next five or 10 years what happens with access to data for cheap. And what do you pay for? And is there a way to get

fairly cheaply, in the US anyway, this is still still an issue to fairly cheaply get access to a lot of data when you're out and about. But right now I think that there is a class of people who are like, you know, just not, it doesn't make sense to pay that monthly fee for a smartphone plan. I actually have a question for you about plans and upgrading and stuff like that. Oh, upgrading.

Upgrading on upgrade. But let's take our first break first because we're still not out of the follow-up. So we may as well take a break in the middle of the follow-up now because I'm about to bring in a mini topic halfway through. So let's do that. This week's episode of Upgrade is brought to you by GoToMeeting from Citrix. Now, I want you to think about when you're at work and think about all of the time and money and hassle that goes into holding a meeting in your office.

So you have to book out a conference room that you want, which you might have to wait six weeks to get because the building's so busy. You need to make sure you can get everyone in the same place. So you need to sync calendars. And then when you're syncing those calendars together, if that person's off on a meeting on the other side of town, it means they can't make it, so they're going to need to travel in. And then if you do actually finally get everybody to agree to a time,

which they can make, you need to get the projector set up, you need to get IT in, right, so they can get that one dongle that you need for your MacBook, which has the crazy USB-C. Then you need to think about sorting out refreshments for everyone, right? Because some people will only come downstairs if there's going to be a cup of tea waiting for them. That is horrible. It's a hassle. Nobody wants to have to deal with it. There is a better way. That better way is Citrix's GoToMeeting. It is the smarter way to meet. GoToMeeting makes it easy to meet with your team wherever you need to, wherever you

are, because with GoToMeeting, you can meet from any computer, tablet, or smartphone without travel expenses or the hassle of travel. I remember when I was working in my old job, sometimes I would be on my way back from a meeting, like in town, and I'd have a GoToMeeting scheduled, and I could just call in from my phone. I could turn on my camera if I needed to, but I could be on the train and I could be looking at the slides that the presenter was showing from my iPhone. I used to love that. Your team can join by clicking a link. There's no signups, no speed bumps. You can turn on your webcam and with HD quality video, it's just like being in the room and you can share screens to present, review and get feedback all in

real time. With go-to meeting, everyone sees what you're seeing so you and your team can get on the same page and get going quickly. You should stop wasting time with the crazy logistics of arranging meetings. Go and sign up for GoToMeeting today. You can try it for free for 30 days and there's nothing to lose. Just visit gotomeeting.com, that's G-O-T-O-M-E-T-I-N-G.com, and click the Try It Free button, and you'll have your first meeting up and running in just minutes. Once again, gotomeeting.com for your free 30-day trial. Thank you so much to Citrix's Gotomeeting for supporting this show. I'll tell you, genuinely, Gotomeeting saved my sanity when I worked in that job at times.

I believe it. Really. Yeah, it really, really did. I actually really do endorse GoToMeeting because I think it's fantastic for this type of stuff. So my mom has an iPhone 5C, which she upgraded from a 3G from about 18 months ago, which was a happy day for everyone. Her contract is up for renewal in about 10 days' time, and she wants a bigger phone. She wants an iPhone 6, I think. She said she wants a bigger phone, but she doesn't want a phone as big as mine. So I'm thinking iPhone 6. Now, we are probably about six weeks away from the new iPhones, I think, at this point.

It would probably be a fair assessment, right? Middle of September, early September. Yep. Should I make her upgrade to an iPhone 6 now or wait? Now, there's no point getting a 6S for her because she doesn't want to spend money. And to upgrade to an iPhone 6 now in the UK, you can get it for pretty much next to free

if she signs another year on her contract because all the phone companies know that they need to be getting rid of their stock now. So they're driving the prices down. She could probably upgrade for free or she could just sell her 5C to a gazelle-like company we have here called Mizumo Mobile

and pay off the contract fee. There is a good chance, right, depending on how it works out, that she could do it to a 6S as well when they come out. She might get enough money, but I don't know. I'm just wondering. She doesn't need the most recent, so I'm not sure whether to wait to see what happens, but they could stop selling the 6 altogether. We don't know what's going to happen, and then she might have to spend the money that she doesn't want to

have to spend. So I'm in a bit of a struggle because I, you know, I've looked at to get this decision right for her. So I'm not sure what to do. Well, I think so it remains to be seen what happens with this because this is not quite an iPhone mix like we've seen before from Apple because you've got the 6 and the 6 Plus. It remains to be seen what's going to happen in terms of what's the phone that is in the U.S. It's, you know, $99 down or $100 down. It's the $99, $199, $299. So it remains to be seen, is there going to be a last year's model of the 6 down $100?

Is that going to happen with the 6 Plus as well? Are they going to have old ones of those? Or are they going to do something where, I mean, there are some reports from an analyst today saying that there's not going to be a, you know, a 4-inch iPhone with last year's stuff this fall. His track record's okay. Maybe, maybe not. And maybe it'll be next year.

Maybe it doesn't exist at all. We talked about that in previous shows. He's saying this guy is is it Timothy Akuri? He's saying there's nothing in the supply chain, which is a pretty good, if he's right, I mean, that's a pretty good indication. If he's right. And it's not unreasonable for Apple to say,

look, we are going to do that phone, but we don't need to do it in the fall when we're making all these big sales and it's our biggest quarter. Why don't we just, we don't need to launch, like with the iPod Touch, do we really need to launch all of these products simultaneously? Do that one in the summer, do this next one, you know, in the winter, um, after the holidays that that's not unreasonable,

but if they don't do that, then the question is what's that $99 product. Is that the five S for another year? Does that five S go down? Is there a six, but not a six plus maybe is there, does the six go down a hundred dollars and then the six S is above it? Is that what they do? I bring this up because I feel like that's sort of your mother's question here is, if there's going to be in a few weeks, that six is going to be $100 less or the equivalent in UK prices, right? Is that a better deal than what she's being offered now? And if that's a better deal, then maybe she should wait. But if the six just goes away and it's replaced by the 6S and now it's more expensive than what she would do right now- Exactly. This is my problem. Then, so that will, so, and that's, yeah, that's the trick.

Since she doesn't need the, you know, doesn't necessarily need the features of a 6 versus a 6S, I guess I would say if she can get a really good deal now, it's probably fine. But we don't know that piece, right? Because normally I would say that, look, in mid-September,, that iPhone 6, base iPhone 6 is going to go down $100. The question is, are they going to limit it to one size? Is that going to be, you know, the 16? Is that is that enough for her? There's lots of other questions in there, too. But oh, yeah, she only needs a 16. She doesn't put anything on her phone at all. So, I mean, if that phone exists, I have a hard time believing that all 6s are just going to vanish on September 18th or whatever

of, you know, when the new iPhones are released. It seems like we're so close now that she could probably benefit from waiting unless the deal that her carrier is willing to cut her on the 6 is really good. And if it's really good, then maybe it's worth taking it. Because obviously, like you said, they're motivated to move them out because they know that this is a tough time to sell a new iPhone to somebody because everybody knows that the new ones are coming.

But some people don't care, right? Some people don't care that the new ones are coming so maybe that's your mom's case and that if she can get a good deal now maybe that's enough like it's possible to get um an iphone 6 right now 16 gigabyte on a pretty good plan so say like 30 pounds 35 pounds a month and you just pay 100 pounds up front which is excellent it's a great deal and it's everything she needs as well see that that's that's the thing is i would say it's that that's not something that that nerds should do but that a regular you know a regular light use person like your mom uh is not one of those computer nerd people. And that's a pretty good deal. And she doesn't need to worry so much about future proofing.

Oh, well, if you wait six weeks, then you'll have a phone that will be slightly better in three years or something like that. I'm not sure that it matters or that the new features that are coming are going to be things that she cares so much about that it's worth her waiting. Then again, and see, I'm doing it now too. I'm going back and forth. Then again, it almost never hurts to wait, especially if the wait's only six weeks. So it really, to me, it's sort of like, how badly does she want something new? I mean, this is always what I say when people say, should I upgrade is, do you need to upgrade or can you wait? If you can wait, wait, because there'll always be something good,

something better coming later. But at some point you just need to buy something. And so you should buy it when you need to buy it. Yeah. My feeling right now is probably to just wait. But I don't know. I don't know.

Maybe I wait, and if it ends up costing her more, like I make her wait, and if it ends up costing her more, then I just cover the difference. I think that would be fair for everyone. So I'll probably take the gamble on waiting. Yeah, I think that might be good.

If she's willing to wait, I think it's probably worth waiting. It's just that really tough time of the year for these kinds of decisions. Because it's like we're weeks away, but yet we have literally no idea what's going to happen. Yeah, we don't. Like at this family barbecue, somebody, one of my family members asked me, what's the new iPhone going to have? And I'm like, I don't know. People expect me to know?

I don't know. I can guess, but nobody knows. But people think that I'm messing around when I say that. They expect that I know exactly what's going to happen. You must get this constantly. Yeah, people think that I know everything about what's to happen. You must get this constantly. Yeah, oh yeah. People think that I know everything about what's coming, and it's like, nope.

They don't talk to me about stuff like that. Where we are right now, we really don't have a sense for what's happening. I know. Isn't that funny? Isn't that funny that there's nothing... Well, I mean, Mark Gurman just got back from vacation. Let's see what happens tomorrow.

He's going to check in with all his sources, and we're going to get all the details the next week because he's been on vacation. He's powering up for the next round. But we've heard a lot of talk about haptic stuff, so forced touch and haptics built in I think makes sense. Better camera always makes sense. Always better camera makes always make sense always better blah blah blah yeah you know yeah faster maybe it'll have more ram like the like like the ipad

air 2 has um you know stuff like that it's the 6s right it's not it's not the 7 and so it's the talk in the TikTok metaphor maybe 50-50 chance of getting that let's just say sure so that's the if we define the tick as advancing to a whole new model with a different look and the talk as

being the incremental update within the specs and size of the old model it's the S is what I the you know it's the s is what i'm saying so it's not going to be as big a jump because the big jump happens every couple of years because the buying cycle right now is every couple of years so after we spoke last week um about ipod you went and threw an ssd into a ipod Classic or just as an iPod as it was called at the time. Yeah, it was. Well, it's the fifth generation iPod. So I refer to it as the iPod Classic.

And I had somebody say, well, actually, that's the that's the fifth generation iPod video that you're referring to there, which is I have, you know, fair point, except I think we have to refer to those as all as the iPod Classic at this point because Apple, and I pointed that person to the Wikipedia page for iPod Classic, which includes all of the classic iPod models back to the original. It's the thing we think of as the classic iPod, which in its last generation was called the iPod Classic. Anyway, it's the big one with the spinning hard drive in it. And I saw that Otherworld Computing was offering this product that was a flash drive upgrade for the fifth generation iPod and sixth generation iPod Classic. And so I said, I'd like to check that out. Can you send me one? And they sent me one and I installed it myself, which was a little scary.

I have never cracked an iPod open before to do something like that. And I was using a how-to article from the web and it did me pretty well until the point where I need to install their adapter and then I didn't know which way to put it. Fortunately, this was like one of the first ones that they were selling

and they've now posted their how-to video, which shows very clearly the one mistake that I made. So I basically had to take it all apart a second time and flip the thing around. I had the cable in backward. And to my surprise, it worked fine. I closed it back up, and now I've got this thing that is much lighter

because there's no spinning, big metal spinning hard drive in it. Instead, there's just a little compact flash memory adapter with a, what, SD adapter. It's a little flash memory adapter with a SD adapter. It's a little flash memory adapter with an SD card in it, with like a 128 gig SD card in it. So I went from 60 of spinning disk to 128 of not spinning and lighter and not going to crash. And the way the iPods work, you just plug it into iTunes, and it installs its own software on the device and puts your music on it. And now I have my

entire purchase music library, because like all these products, it's not compatible with Apple Music. But my entire purchase music library now is on there, it doesn't take any time to spin up, because there's nothing to spin. It doesn't, it's not to crash. That's a 10 year old iPod. So that drive was going to die at some point. It lives in my car's glove compartment attached to the car stereo. And yeah, so it was pretty cool. And so if you're somebody who has a classic iPod of the fifth or sixth generation, which like I said, is basically made in the last 10 years of the big one, and the hard drive has died, or you want more space, I think it's actually of the big one. Um, and the hard drive has died or you want more space. I think it's actually a pretty cool option. So, you know, it's funny that we were just talking

about old iPods and then, um, and then I was working on this story. So those both happened the same week. So anyway, the link to the six colors post will be in the show notes, but, um, yeah, I was, I was, uh, I was pretty impressed. It's not, you got to be comfortable cracking open an iPod, but if you are capable of doing that sort of thing, of installing, you got to work with some little things. You got to have good eyesight or good glasses. But I got it to work. It took me like half an hour once I figured out what I was doing wrong because I didn't have access to the video that they posted now yeah big iPod now

in the car nice it's weird to me that you plug it in and it installs the software itself like how does it know that it's an iPod I think so I think well it looks at the drive and says my software isn't on this drive.

Right. If you if you put in a new disk, whether it's a spinning disk or this adapter, it goes, oh, I don't know what this is. But these things are designed to connect to iTunes. Right. So you connect it to iTunes just by, you know, to USB to your Mac running iTunes. And you do a you know, you do a software restore and it puts the software on. It downloads the latest version from Apple. It puts the iPod software on, lets you sync your music, and you're up and running. That's how they're made to work, basically,

is when there's a blank drive, they just want to phone home to the Mac and to iTunes, and then they restore. That's interesting. That's very interesting to me because one of those things that maybe my fundamental level of understanding of computing is failing me. But it's like, if the drive's empty, I'm just a little bit like, how does it know? It's computer magic, kids. That's how it knows. Yeah, it's magic. There's an elf that lives inside the iPod.

Last piece of follow-up today. Oh my god. Well, I mean, you know. These are like mini-topics almost. We took a break in the middle of the follow-up. Put a topic and a sponsor in there. It was very, very, very broken up today. We spoke about Touch ID over wireless,

and listener Shep wrote in with some indication that this may be possible. Shep says, Apple have already implemented HomeKit encryption standards Shep says, transferring and confirming Touch ID information. So maybe it is possible in a wireless device. Basically, whilst me and Jason don't have any clue what that means, it sounds like that there is some kind of encryption standard being used with HomeKit to identify that you are the person that you say you are with the device that you have, right? So I assume what's happening is the HomeKit devices are authenticating via your iPhone which is unlocked by you

to do these things. So if that's the case, and if this stuff works that way, it's not too far a stretch to imagine that a Touch ID sensor could send a yes, this is the person

notification over to a device. There's an elf that lives inside and he shouts over hey hey this one's okay let this one through I like this guy he's got a friendly face I appreciated this note and I put it in the show notes because basically what Shep's saying is

look Apple's already pushing on a lot of encryption stuff for HomeKit and perhaps that means that you could even do something like Touch ID for unlocking your computer or whatever, or even kicking off an Apple Pay session if Apple Pay was baked into a version of OS X via a future Magic Trackpad that had Touch ID or something in that. Maybe that's possible, even though we were skeptical about it. Maybe it is, or maybe it's just going to be something that's going to be limited to wired trackpads on laptops. I mean, really, laptops are Apple's focus. Two-thirds, at least, of the Macs sold are laptops.

It's maybe verging up to three-quarters at this point, so this may not be an issue. even though I'm using an iMac, uh, you know, most of Apple's users are using laptops. And so putting a touch ID sensor on the laptop wouldn't require wireless anything. So maybe that's where they're going with it. If they go that, that direction. I was looking at my magic track pad today and looked at the little battery compartment, you know, little circular battery compartment and thought a touch id sensor would fit really nicely on there that was what i saw when i was using my magic pad today to edit my podcast as i do two-handed one magic trackpad

and one mouse because i am a magician you are that's right that's how it would be elsework yes one of the two. Apple Watch sales. So we're into another mini topic now. So I know that you had had some annoyance over the way that some of the Apple Watch stuff was being spoken about in the last couple of weeks. There was like a New York Times piece where somebody was basically trying to say that because

Facebook don't have an app, it means that Apple Watches aren't selling. And then there's been reports backwards and forwards about how Apple Watches have been sold. And then we had the earnings report. Now, the earnings report, which came out last week, Apple's Q3 results, didn't break down watch sales, but did give an indication that watches are selling effectively. And you wrote a great piece for Macworld talking about some of the big key learnings from the Q3 earnings. So what do you think about Apple Watch sales now past an earnings report?

Yeah, so lots to unpack here i did complain um about the this uh new york times story that was in advance of the apple watch sales and basically was saying um you know it's hard for me not to look at this and read it as that uh the editor at the new york times in charge of tech said, Apple financials are coming. We need a story that previews them. Find an angle. And the angle was, oh, developers are unsure about how they're going to develop Apple Watches. And that means that people are waiting to buy Apple Watches until the developers of their favorite apps support it, which I think is a ridiculous premise that people are not buying Apple Watch because they're not sure whether facebook will be on it i think that's just

i think that is not no i don't believe that at all people are not buying them for a reason you know if they're not buying them but i also don't buy that that is in the buying decision lack of apps seems unlikely to be a reason i mean maybe lack of a very specific thing like i need an apple watch but i needed to do this but i don't a very specific thing of like, I need an Apple Watch, but I needed to do this. But I don't think it's sort of like, why isn't there a Facebook app? And somebody pointed out, you know,

Facebook didn't do an iPad version of Facebook for years. They're very careful with what they do. And quite rightly so. I mean, I linked to Marco Arment's piece about ripping up the first version of Overcast on the watch and doing it again. And now

there's going to be WatchOS 2. I mean, there are lots of reasons why developers might want to wait and see and figure out the best uses. I think a Facebook app full stop on the Apple Watch is a terrible idea because there's too much in Facebook. And that they'd be better off, yes, a Facebook Messenger app maybe? That makes

sense. And, you know, maybe there's a very focused Facebook app that does this. But it doesn't do all these other things. But this idea that like, oh, well, it should be pretty simple. They should just drop all Facebook on an Apple Watch app. It's like, that would be terrible. That would that would be a terrible thing. So, so don't don't do that. And they haven't. So good for them. But so I think it was a kind of a ridiculous story. And I, you know, Brian Chen used to work for me, and I like him. And I am not one of those people who thinks that there are a lot of people who are very critical of a lot of the things that he writes.

And I actually think that that's overly harsh. But in this case, I think this is a story that makes this link to Apple Watch sales and app developers. And it's lazy, and it's a bad story. The bigger issue now is how many Apple Watches did Apple really sell? As far as we can tell, it looks like they are the most successful smartwatch ever. That's not a big surprise. But when it comes to details, basically what Apple says is,

trust us, it's doing well. What do you think about this it's uh well you know so tim what tim cook says is um it's not a matter of not being transparent it's a matter of not giving our competition insight on a product that we worked hard on um okay seems i mean okay okay i've been thinking about this jason uh and i have an opinion which is probably gonna be a little bit unpopular but i've been thinking about it and i'm annoyed about this i think that this is a uh real kind of big city answer like it's uh i don't i i think that they were just concerned about potential failings and that because tim basically staked his legacy on this product i think that he and

everybody else around him decided that they didn't want it to look like a failure if it was a failure um and that they would take because you can they can later start reporting it right but after they start reporting it they then can't hide it but before this before they report it for the first time they can hide it right but if it doesn't sell well and then they're like we're gonna start reporting this in other now then it looks worse than if they do it the other way around there is a middle there is a middle ground here which is the we are going to

report it on our own terms and this is what they do with things like app sales and even things like iOS device overall numbers there are numbers that aren't in the balance sheet that they do know and then what they do is they release a press release saying Apple celebrates sale of 2 million Apple

watch. And you're like, okay. Uh, and that, and that's not a lie. I, I,

when they do that, it'll be the real number, but it will be this timed release. And then everybody else is like, okay, now what? And then you wait to hear how long is it until they say, do they say it at 3 million

or 4 million or 5 million? And everybody waits. So that's the middle ground where they do things to disclose, but they do it on a time schedule that isn't quarterly and that casts the product in their own, the best light possible. And I think that is an option for them. I think it's interesting that they haven't shared the numbers and it may be that they feel like it's lower than they'd like. Although they say it exceeded their expectations, but we

don't know what their expectations are. And that's a funny game where you can also have really conservative expectations while you secretly think it's going to be three times that. And then it turns out to be one and a half times that. And you say, well, it exceeded my expectations, but didn't really, because you didn't really think it was going to be that low. That's possible. It's also possible that the production problems that they had have complicated this so much that they kind of don't want to talk about it right now.

And they, you know, they, like he said, he said it was untrue that there was a peak of sales and then it went down, which is that one report that we got from that company that like mines people's emails and which is an insane business model. And what they said is they were higher in June that they had gone up. But that too is unclear. it could mean that the sales went up because they were unable to charge people for, for watches that hadn't shipped yet. And they very slowly started to ramp. And so what we're seeing in those sales numbers going up is not demand going up,

but it's the ramp going up at the same time. It's also disingenuous to say that, Oh, well it had a lot of initial sales and then it dropped off. I guess it's a flop because brand new product, brand new category pre-announced by six months. Of course, there's going to be a huge peak of people buying at the moment it goes on sale. And then it's going to have to settle down to an actual reasonable number. So both of the numbers are suspect. So we really don't know other than Apple saying, again, it's better than we thought. We're very excited about the holiday. I think I thought the most intriguing thing they said was by looking at the customer experience and what people are saying,

that we're really excited about the holidays. I think what he said was, we've learned a lot about the Apple Watch buying experience, and we're convinced excited about the holidays. Like I think what he said was, um, we've learned a lot about the Apple watch buying experience and we're convinced that the watch is going to be one of the top gifts of the holiday season. So what that says to me is maybe that in their research about who's buying this, they feel bullish on the fact that it's going to break through past the like super excited tech buyers to a broader audience in the holidays,

which I think is a reasonable premise, but it doesn't really get us any closer to knowing other than that the other category went up by a little less than a billion dollars. And both Luca, the CFO and Tim Cook said Apple Watch sales were way beyond that. So we've got a few metrics of like how how much greater it is but in the end i made a chart last week of this of total apple watch sales and it's like there's a it's a bar with no number and no it's a what we call a bezos chart the jeff bezos charts from amazon that there's the look the bar the bars look great but we won't tell you what they mean it's a little like that we're in this really hazy situation where apple kind of doesn't want to talk about it,

which is a little bit suspicious to me. I feel like Apple is really good at blowing its own horn. And it sort of didn't do that here. But at the same time, it is this new category. And they are undoubtedly by far the most successful smartwatch ever already. But what does that mean uh for the future and it doesn't mean anything and we it's just a whole lot of a whole lot of hazy stuff and not a lot of uh of tangible information about the watch right now yeah i think just as i've been talking about it and thinking about it i think i'm finding myself as frustrated

with this as i get with jeff bezos like and the kindle the kindle graphs that mean nothing right it's like yeah no we'll tell you no there definitely was money so they're like oh there was loads of money but uh it's more money than you think there is money like that's kind of the answer right where it's like oh the money went up but other things in that category went down so it it's even more than you think. We're just not going to tell you. Like, it's either do it or don't do it. And I just, I do feel like that just the reason for this was they were just a little bit like, we're not sure how this is going to go. So why don't we just play our cards to our chest for a while?

Yeah. And it did lead to a very funny moment for me anyway, where in order to pump up how well the watch was doing, they said, well, that other category, you know, that includes iPods and those suck. Those are falling through the floor. So, you know, don't just assume that it's just even there because I assure you some of those other categories like iPods and accessories, man, those were down, those stunk. So it's like they're throwing other stuff, you know, out into the street because they want to be like, yeah, but the watch was doing great. So yeah, they were shifty. I think that's the bottom line here is they were shifty. They're not ready to talk about it yet.

And how much of that is that they're not ready to, they don't feel proud enough of the information now? How much of that is strategic? I don't know. But it is interesting that they're being kind of shifty about it. And they don't want to disclose and they don't have to. Because, I mean, the fact is, if Apple could, they wouldn't do quarterly reports and tell you about how many phones they're selling either. But they have to because they're a public company. So it's like this is our chance to see facts about Apple's business that Apple would rather not share. Why do they have to tell us how many phones they sold and they don't have to tell us how many watches they sold?

Well, they make decisions about their main... I think it would be very difficult for a public company to have its most popular product not be broken out in their financial lines. But they have some latitude there. For a brand new product category like this, it's just like the iPods have been sort of sucked back into other now because it's just not relevant. And they did that. But it's hard.

They've got to recalculate all of their finances when they put in a new category. But they did it for the iPad, right? And they haven't done it for the watch yet. And they might. They might do a restated earnings and put a watch category on its own next year. They might do that. They might not. It is sort of an iPhone accessory.

So maybe they prefer to just keep it that way. So they have some latitude. But they do need to report about the structure of their business to their investors. And I do believe that if they had their druthers, they wouldn't. That's Apple. But they have to tell us some things, but they don't have to tell us everything.

I'm upset about something else. Oh, yes? But we can talk about that after this break okay good this week's episode is also brought to you by Igloo Igloo don't upset me they're the intranet that you're actually gonna like with Igloo you don't have to be stuck at your desk

to get your work done you don't have to look an intranet that looks like it was built by somebody who wants to hurt your eyes every day when you want to get stuff done because Igloo think about all of these things. They make their platform look fantastic and they make it work great wherever you are. You can manage your task lists from wherever you want to be. You can update and upload files from wherever you want. You can maybe be in a meeting. You can

maybe be at a client site. You can maybe send a status update to everybody while you're in the car, obviously when you're in the passenger seat. These days, everything is mobile, your work should be too, and Igloo understand that, and they give you all of this in an environment that looks great. Igloo is super configurable, you can make it look and feel the way that you want, you can completely rebrand it, you can give it the look and feel of your team with the colors and fonts that you like, and you can also customize the way that Igloo works. The group spaces function enables basically, depending on what role you have, you can access different parts of Igloo, right? So the correct teams and stuff, and you can set people up permissions and things like that, so they see what they need to see. And you as the creator or whoever creates the Igloo spaces can create all

this with a drag andand-drop widget editor. You can organize the whole platform to fit exactly how your company and individual teams within your company work. They can have different functionality switched on and switched off depending on what makes the most sense to them. You can also integrate services like Box, Google Drive, and Dropbox into their one big easy-to-secure platform. This means that people won't be spreading out their documents across all different platforms. If you integrate them with Igloo, it means people can use the apps and services they want to use, but in a way that is secure and meets the privacy policies of your company. They have 256-bit encryption, single sign-on, and active directory integrations.

This is all stuff which the security nerds out there I'm sure are going to love. With Igloo, you can also share files of your co-workers using their HTML5 document previewing engine. This is a great way for everybody to comment on documents and stay up to date with what's happening but also they have read receipts as well so you know if people are seeing the critical information that needs to be seen without having to do a round-robin email to make sure that everybody's done it. This is really good especially if you've worked in a team. Our sponsors today are great for people that work in these kind of corporate environments. Basically, stuff like this, stuff like Igloo, if you've used any other type of thing like this,

any type of intranet, maybe if you SharePoint or something like that before, this is a breath of fresh air. Just trust me on that one. If you have a team of up to 10 people, you can sign up for Igloo right now and you'll be able to get it for free for as long as you want, which is just a fantastic deal. And then if you go over 10, they have a bunch of different price plans that you can take a look at. It's time to break away from the internet you hate. Go sign up right now at igloosoftware.com upgrade. Thank you to Igloo for supporting this show and RelayFM. Okay, Jason. So this is something that I've been toying about discussing, but it's got to the point now where I want to talk about it,

which is ad blockers and Safari content blockers. And this is a little bit of follow-out in a way, isn't it? Yeah, because you and Mr. Gruber had a great discussion about this on the talk show last week. Really fantastic episode talking about the on the talk show last week, really fantastic episode talking about the business that goes into these companies and kind of web advertising how horrible it's become

and why some of that worked you gave some of the great insight of working at a company like IDG which I always love whenever you're on a talk show there are always these great discussions, I just find them so fascinating where you and John talk about this with both of your experience having worked in the web for so long.

A lot of people are upset about this for varying different reasons. And a lot of it seems to be focused towards The Verge. Because, I mean, previously it was focused on iMore, right? That was where this conversation started. Then it became a bit of a hot-button issue.

Nilay Patel wrote an article which definitely holds some merit about why the mobile web sucks. And this basically crossed the barrier between complaining about websites and ads and also complaining about the Safari as the new IE thing. So Nilay was, you know, in the post, he says about how the Verge is part of a problem and ad networks are a bit of an issue. And he talks about more, though,

about how different platforms supporting different things and phones and tablets are worse off than the desktop in this scenario. and phones and tablets are worse off than the desktop in this scenario. What this did was make a bunch of people lash out against Verge for their position on this, and there are lots of studies done and lots of statistics done, some correct, some otherwise, about how long it takes the Verge's articles to load. I saw, again, a great post linked by Nilay in retort to this. So basically, The Verge, people saying how long it takes, like it takes 30 seconds for The Verge to load.

There are 263 HTTP requests. It fetched over 9.5 megabytes of data. That was for that article that Nilay was using to complain about the mobile web, right? So saying, saying you're saying this but look how terrible your website is then in retort to this i'm basically giving the whole story here then in retort to this uh nilai tweeted a link to a forum post from one of vox media's people where they said where they said well you were not on mobile and if you were loading it on mobile it would have only been like six megabytes, which was still a ridiculously large amount.

And he admits to the fact that it is still bad. It's not as bad, but it's still bad. That seems to be the basis of their argument here, is yes, we know we suck, but we don't suck as bad as you think we suck. Yeah, and then saying that they're getting better and they've had other focuses different websites launch stuff like that they're a company and they're saying they have different priorities this is now becoming a priority so we at the moment, there's a lot of talk about this. And now there is a lot of discussion about people installing ad blockers.

And I saw Marco was tweeting about this and wrote in a link post that he is installing an ad blocker. And I'm seeing many other people that I follow on Twitter do this and people saying that they're looking forward to the Safari content blocker thing so they can finally fix people saying that they're looking forward to the safari content blocker thing so they can finally fix the issues that they're seeing on mobile so what i want to talk about is how i feel about this situation relay your feels mike i'm going to it makes this makes me very uncomfortable because i feel bad for the people that work at these sites. Because where we are now is basically a lot of people crying foul against these websites and saying that, you know, it's time for this to die.

I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing. to die. I'm seeing a lot of this kind of thing. And the advertising on the web needs to be burned down to the ground and restarted and that kind of thing. And I understand this. And I mean, I get as frustrated as many people do about web ads. They do suck in a lot of ways. But I'm just there's just something that I'm not comfortable in that people saying that it needs to change completely, because for things to change, I don't like the idea of the collateral damage of this being the livelihoods of people that have no say in how the advertising is served, because fundamentally, that's what it is. And, you know, because basically, by saying you want this to go away and to die, it's going to kill off a bunch of websites, a bunch of websites that are reputable, or it's going to

cut the profits of a bunch of websites, which ultimately means people will lose their jobs. And the thing is, it's like, it's not there for, it's not even the companies, like the website company, I don't even think it's like the Virgin, iMore, it's not there for, this is just the market that they're in. And I admit that my current form of employment is the reason that it's swaying my opinion this way because we work on advertising here i think the feeling about podcast advertising is very different um i mean people get annoyed at it because it's advertising in and of itself and people some people just hate advertising but i don't think it's hated as much as web advertising because it's less intrusive you can skip it if you want to and we try and do our best to pick advertisers. It's one

of the reasons that now at RelayFM, we do all of our own advertising because we can choose who we want, right? So there are ad networks, but we don't use them. So that's how I feel about this. And there is just this feeling to me, which makes me uncomfortable, the idea that this means people's livelihoods go away. And that makes me feel uncomfortable. So that's how I feel, Jason. I get it. A couple of things that I wanted to mention based on what you were saying there. One is I get the feeling that you feel bad for people who are going to be affected by this and i share that i mean i was i lived this right i lived this everybody who worked at macworld and i think still but i can't speak to that because i you know i'm not on the

inside anymore um everybody who worked at macworld and idg in general, you know, the Macworld staff really, they hated the increasingly crappy ads and pre-roll videos and intercept ads and pop over ads and all of these things that kept getting added. And so you feel bad for them. And yet, you know, at the same time, the ad blocker thing, you're losing all those ad impressions. And those are ultimately the way their salaries get paid. So you can feel bad for them. At the same time, there are lots of

professions and industries that change because technology changes and because people's habits change. And, you know, this is like, you know, I feel bad for the steel workers. I feel bad for the people who used, for the milkmen, but we don't have milkmen anymore. You can feel bad for them, but also say, you know, I feel bad for the milkman, but I bought a refrigerator and my life is better because I brought a refrigerator. And you can feel bad for them without saying, I'm going to hope that everybody foregoes this inevitable progress, this inevitable change, because otherwise it'll hurt people we like and we'll feel bad. I think you can't fight it and you can still feel bad about it, but that's not enough. I also think that one of the parts of the story here is that this is an example of the web. It's the other traditional older kind of businesses that funded a lot of this stuff went away because the web finally kind of ate their lunch and took all their ad revenue away.

And the world of advertising on the web, it's been this vicious cycle where people stop paying attention to the ads, so they add more junk. And then people stop paying attention to the ads, so they add more junk and there's more junk. And then people stop wanting to read the sites because there's too much junk or people download an ad blocker. And so I think there's an inevitability here too of this, the current world of web ads falling apart for all but the biggest publishers um because the you know the prices go down and the junk goes up and people are uh and the technology gets more savvy to block that stuff and it's it i think um it may or it may not be something that we can say you know i wouldn't choose this i feel like it's just going to happen that that the way that the that advertising on the web works right now is um is just broken and um and i'm not sure how it gets fixed or if it gets fixed

the shame of it is i don't agree with you there i have to i have okay go ahead in the idea of that we don't choose this people are choosing like people ad blockers are not an organic thing right it's not a thing that happens to your computer like people are now making the choice that they want these websites to make this money what i'm saying is the websites the websites are complicit because the websites are filling their pages with junk and making them hard to load and if you load a web page on mobile sometimes you've got like multiple things overlaying the content that you have to try and tap and then you tap them. And it takes you away from that page

to the thing that's being advertised instead. And you get really frustrated and you go back. All that is happening. I also do hate this stuff. That's what you can't control. That's what you can't control is that that's where the web, the world of web advertising is pushing.

How do we make money off of people on mobile? There are way more people on mobile than on desktops, but we can't make money there. How do we do that? And they keep pushing and pushing and degrading the experience on desktop and on mobile, which I think does drive people to get frustrated and drives the development of content blockers and ad blockers. And that's part of what's going on here. So I do think that that I do think that's part of it. And, you know, the web brought this on itself because of the way that it's, it's been built all along, you know, and the fact that the reaction to this stuff is let's put more junk on the pages that this is sort of, we, we've reached this point that it's very difficult. The, there's a huge

competition. I mean, I always cite Ben Thompson here from Stratechery and his, his writing about the smiling curve and publishing, where you either go for volume or you go for a very small but dedicated audience. And all the publishers that are caught in the middle, they've got lower and lower ad rates. They keep trying to add more ways to make money to scrape by. And it feels like something that just can't be solved, that it will just keep going down until a point where you can't have a business anymore unless you're on one end of the curve or the other. And that's the scary part is the people we like who make good content, who are in the middle, who are not writing for BuzzFeed, right?

But they're also not daring Fireball. What happens if the way that the web works is not sustainable, whether or not there are content blockers? Because I would actually say the content blockers are a reaction to this race, but this is happening anyway because everybody wants to pour more junk onto pages because the CPMs keep going down, which is the ad rates basically, cost per thousand to display an ad. Those just keep going down. So it's tough.

I'm not sure where this goes other than that I do think there will be a crack up at some point. And you already, when you talk to people, and I've seen it, people we know are talking about what do you do to do a membership

or something like that, that support. Maybe it's not a Patreon. Maybe it is, maybe it's some other kind of membership, but those things, people are floating those things around. And one of the reasons is because, um, you know, what's going to happen with advertising is advertising enough on its own. And yeah, podcast advertising is a little bit different. I feel it's sort of a shame back in the day, like the early days of computer magazines, the ads were great. Like people were excited to look at the ads because it brought them information. And the web,

I think has trained a whole generation to just despise everything advertising because the web ads are generally so bad. And I think podcast advertising is a lot better. But some people don't even want that because like I said, I think that I think some people are just allergic to advertising in general, but I think that's one of the things that the pod... They haven't figured out how to screw up podcast advertising and make them awful yet. And some of that is just because technically it's very hard to do that because podcasts are... The way they're delivered and processed is so different from the web that it's a lot

harder to mess it up, which is I'm sure there's some startup out there right now that's trying to ruin podcast advertising too and make it awful. Oh, there are many. I hear from them. I'm sure you do. But there's, you know, their powers are less than they are on the web. On the web, their powers are great. Those people to ruin everybody's experience with more advertising. I think a lot of this comes from my general nature of why can't we all be nice to each other like oh i agree you know that that's my general nature is like why do we you know why do we have to hurt people you know like that kind of feeling and i always get a little bit upset about this kind of stuff but this is this was always the case with with macworld where serenity would be like, you know, Serenity often got the brunt of this cause she was sort of manning the letters account at,

at Macworld. And she would say, um, you know, she would get these people who are just brutally angry about the stuff that, that was going on on the site. And,

and, you know, she would agree with that too. That's the, that's the challenge here is the people who are doing the content often agree, but at the same time, this is the stuff that pays the bills. And then unless their business finds another way forward, um, that's the challenge here is the people who are doing the content often agree, but at the same time, this is the stuff that pays the bills and then unless their business finds

another way forward. Um, it's, it's just, yeah, it's a, it's a difficult situation. I have never run an ad blocker for the same reason,

which is, I feel like, um, then I'm, I feel like I want to support the sites that I like and I want to support their, um, their,

their sponsors because I want them to have a business that works. At the same time, I do think that you could argue that a lot of these businesses have really abused that connection that we've got with the people who make the content in order to do lots of things, not just annoy you, but track you in order to in order to keep the lights on and again yay keep the lights on but at some point do you do you have to say um this is unacceptable and if you say this is unacceptable do you stop patronizing the site versus running an ad blocker which is what i've always said is like look if you don't like it maybe you should just not look at their site not look at it with an ad blocker but that's a hard argument to make it's just you know it's just funny to me that it's like at the start of the show, we were talking about what happened at MagWorld

and like how sad it was. But it's like if we keep going down this road, there's going to be many more days like that. Yes. Oh, undoubtedly. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me really uncomfortable because I like the websites.

I go to websites that I like. That's where I go. Yeah, I know. And I don't want them to go away. And the other problem is if every website you like in the Mac space said, we can't make it with advertising, but we're going to do a membership thing and we're asking you for $50 a year. That's great. Except how many people are going, how many, even if you're really deep into this and you really love this,

how many of those can you have? How much are you going to pay? Are you going to pay $500 a year to 10 websites in order to support them? I think there's a limit to that too. And that's my fear in all of this is that the fact is the web has created this broad canvas for anybody to reach an audience. And so a lot of people have, and that we're about to enter a phase where it turns out that we have too many people doing this. Not that they aren't good at their job and not that people don't want to read them, but that there's no way we can get a big enough audience to either make money on ads or generate enough support direct from readers slash listeners in order for them all to keep doing what they're doing as their livelihood.

And that's scary because that is, I mean, in journalism, since I've been doing journalism, it's been very clear that it is a troubled industry, right? And we always joke about like, this is like sending somebody to journalism school is a little bit like telling somebody to enter a valuable career being a steel worker, right? It's like, well, wait, that is not an industry you necessarily want to go into because it's kind of fading away. And that would be a bad bit of career advice. But sometimes this is one of those cases where I start to think about that even more and think, you know, it's possible and things could change dramatically. And a lot of people are going to make it through, but it is possible that in this population of people we like, who write stuff we like, or do podcasts

that we like, that in five years, half of them are not doing it anymore because they can't make it work. And that's scary, but that may be financially, economically, that may happen. And sometimes when I see my colleagues in the computer journalism industry, the tech journalism industry, going to work in PR or going to work behind the scenes for a company, you know, those are examples of that. We don't read things by Chris Breen anymore because he's working at Apple. Well, we may read things by him, but we wouldn't know it because his name isn't on it. You know, we don't know my friend John Seth, who's the executive editor at Macworld for many years. You know, he's working at Apple now. And so we don't, you know, he's not working on this stuff day to day.

And, you know, the list goes on. Somebody like Brad Mullen, who wrote about mobile for ages at a whole bunch of different sites, is doing PR now. to like Brad Mullen, who wrote about mobile for ages at a whole bunch of different sites, is doing PR now. That always happened. But I do wonder if there is a reckoning coming where we're going to do this. And I don't think ad blockers are not going to be... I don't think we're going to look back and say, oh, content blockers killed the web and everybody lost their jobs. It's just part of this much bigger issue, I think. But I think you're right to be concerned about it because it's a big deal. And it's going to get worse before it gets better, I think. It just makes me sad. Right. I mean, I'm certainly trying to find a way to to make it without being in the position that Mackerel is in where they've got, you know, pre-roll ads and lots of tiles everywhere and things that slide in over your page and stuff like that. I would that Six Colors has like a text ad and a post a week and a little tiny deck ad and that's it.

It's it's like incredibly lightweight because i that as a reaction to all of that um but you know i'm also not at the point now where i think if i can't make more money at six colors i'm gonna have to go you know start applying for jobs at tech companies i'm not at that point so it's easy for me to do that but what if i was at that point what are my options then that's scary yep i want to get a job jason yeah i hear you yeah i'm gonna get too sad how about we uh whilst advertising is still good in this game how about we stop it is one and then do some last upgrade yeah you know podcast advertising is uh is really nice and one of the one of the things is you can have a it's a little more personal and hopefully it's different every time.

So this Ask Upgrade is about our friends at Stamps.com who are back. We've told you about Stamps.com before. The idea here is if you're a small or medium-sized business, you probably do a lot of shipping and mailing. And the old way of doing stuff, the old way of businesses, shipping and mailing is with a postal meter. But there's been a revolution in this stuff, just like there has been in so many different bits of technology. You can get the mailing and shipping done without leaving your desk using stamps.com. It never closes, unlike the post

office. You don't have to wait in a line, unlike the post office. You can actually buy and print your postage from your computer and your printer, and then you just hand it to your friendly letter carrier when they come by or drop it in a mailbox, and that's it. So businesses pay $15.99 a month. That's it. There's no long-term requirement. There's no multi-year commitment. That's something that postage meters generally require. They also don't mark up your postage. In fact, you can get discounts with stamps.com. So if you would like to try this out for your business, here's what you should do. Use the promo code upgrade for this special offer. You get a no risk trial and there's $110 bonus offer that includes a digital scale. So you can get exact postage. It's a USB, a little nice USB scale that you get,

and up to $55 of free postage. So don't wait. Go now, stamps.com. Click on the microphone on stamps.com at the top of the homepage and type in upgrade the show you're listening to right now at stamps.com and enter upgrade for the special deals. But I've used stamps.com quite a bit and it is so great. I've talked about it before. I work in my garage. I don't get out as much as I used to. When I do get out of the house though,

you know what I don't want to do? I don't want to go to the post office and stamps.com means I don't have to go there. I can go somewhere nicer. I can go next door from the post office to Whole Foods and buy manchego or peanut butter. And thank you stamps.com for allowing me to just swerve past the post office and move on to someplace happier. Stamps.com. Stamps.com.

Thank you stamps.com. Listener Alan wrote in. Listener Alan has an iMac with a Fusion Drive in it. And he finds that it grinds, pauses, or simply feels like he's running on a stupid old slow spinning disk from 2003. So, let's say that Alan could upgrade to a new iMac. And he has $4,000 to spend on the new 5K iMac. So he's running an older iMac version, where I think the Fusion Drive was just introduced in the previous model,

and he's running that one. So let's say in this scenario that Alan has come across this money. He's still stuck with the decision of either a 1TB SSD or a 3TB Fusion Drive. What does he do? What does he do? I am a believer in SSD. So I know it's not as much storage space,

but I feel like for your boot drive, I think the best. Fusion Drive, I've heard mixed things. Some people like it, some people hate it. I would go all SSD. And if you need storage, if you need like lots of external storage, I would say get a NAS, you know, network attached storage device or, or getting a big external drive of some kind and off, you know, offload your projects to that when you're done. So I've got a little, I've got a Mac mini server with the Drobo

attached to it, actually about four feet away from me, and an SSD on my iMac. So I just use the SSD on my iMac and I store all my files on the big drive when I'm done. And I think that's the best combination. And you have to look and see whether that fits in your budget, but personally, I want my storage that's on my Mac to be SSD at this point. It's just, that is the number one thing. Whenever I use a computer that still has the spinning disk in it, even if it's a Fusion drive, it is painful compared to the pure SSD. So that's my recommendation is, I think people should buy SSDs for their internal storage. And then if they really need a lot of external storage to get a network attached drive and just put it on their network and they can do it that way or get an external drive you can attach when you need it or leave it attached all the time. But know that that's the slower storage that just is just for kind of offloading when you're not using it.

Yeah, I have a 512 SSD in my Mac Pro. that is just for kind of offloading when you're not using it. Does that work for you, Mike? Yeah, I have a 512 SSD in my Mac Pro and it isn't a problem, but I'm finding myself every now and then going in and needing to delete stuff, you know? So I've been thinking about getting a Drobo for a while and it's on my long-term shopping list, you know? Maybe around tax season.

Get rid of some of that money. And so I think I'm going to do that. Just to store stuff long-term, like audio files can get quite big depending on what you're working with. Oh, yeah. And at the moment, I'm like deleting old project files and I probably don't need them for that long, but it would just be nice, I think, to have something where I could just store stuff long-term. The great thing is, like, we have... Stephen has a bunch of storage space and we have some storage space with Mac Mini Colo

and we have everything just automatically download there for storage so it's not like a pressing issue. Like, all our shows are archived, you know, on our stuff that we have elsewhere. Yeah. But I wouldn't mind having something here. It's just not pressing, so I haven't gotten around to it yet. But in all honesty, for the machine that I work on, 512 gigabytes is fine, really.

I'm not putting movies on this. I'm not putting music on this. It's just work files, and it does a good enough job. But I agree with you i i did once have to go from ssd back to a spinning hard drive and it's one of the most horrible things that i've ever done and i had to work on that mac mini for years um and i now i just you couldn't you could not make me do it yeah i have the 512 gigabyte SSD in my iMac and it is plenty of space

given that I am not storing all the stuff that when I'm done with a project I move it. The nice thing about having all that external storage space is that I listen to you talk about, I don't need my logic projects, I can just get rid of them. It's like, well, a lot of the relay stuff

is so timely. It's most valuable now. And I mean, yeah, people might go back and listen to some episodes from the past, but it's mostly about the present. Whereas incomparable stuff, I occasionally will go back and I'll do a best of, or I'll do a special edit of something and all of that. So I now keep all of those. I'm actually keeping all of my logic files right now, but those are the ones that they're, they're the ones that are more timeless that I want to save it because I've actually had it come up where somebody said, you know, what about this thing? Or, or, you know, it's a best of the year thing. And, and, uh, somebody is talking over somebody

else, but I can like isolate their track. And, um, and I do that because I've got this, you know, big, uh, raid with a giant amount of hard drive space. And it's great. And yet my Mac with the 512 SSD is super fast. And it's a great combination. If you can make it work in your budget to have external storage, that's the way to go. Yep, I agree completely.

Right, Andrew asked, with Apple Music that is added to your library, can you burn it to a CD to get around DRM and have a permanent copy? I don't know the answer to this, but I'm just going to say no. You can't do that. That's my feeling.

I don't even feel like I need to check. Yeah, it seems unlikely, doesn't it? I don't actually know. This was the old way you got around DRM, right? Was you went to a playlist and then burned it as a CD. Do you remember that era, Mike? Do you remember that? Oh, 100%, Jason.

I did that all the time. Yeah, you'd want to get your friend the new album that you were listening to that you'd bought on iTunes. So you'd burn them a CD on a CDRW so they could give it back to you. And then there would be no DRM for them. You wouldn't need to authorize their computer and they'd be good to go.

Yeah, so my guess is no. But I don't know. Yeah, I did some quick searching. I haven't burned a CD in so long, but yeah. I haven't got a computer that could. I have an external drive that I use. I do have one of those, and I can't remember why I bought it, but I bought it relatively...

Oh, I remember, I remember. I had to make a CD for a funeral, and it was like, yeah, it was like, well, we needed the music and there was no other way to get it. And the funeral home would only take a CD. So I had to spend 80 pounds to get a CD drive to make one CD. Man, future. So, yeah, that's the reason I have one. And it's but I always forget that I have it because I never need it for anything who uses cds today man crazy crazy town yeah john would like to know and

i would love to know this and now that john has pointed it out jason i really have an answer i hoped that you would why do os 10 keyboard shortcuts highlight their menu bar in blue, like the specific item where they live in the menu bar, when it's pressed? So for example, if you are in TweetBot and you press Ctrl N, it will open the box for the new tweet, which is also under the Tweet menu in the TweetBot menu bar. So it highlights it in blue, the word Tweet in the menu bar, as if to show you, hey, it came from here. Why does that happen?

Well, I mean, the answer is, it is, the idea is, if you know a keyboard shortcut, but you don't know where its corresponding menu item is, it's telling you. That's really the answer. The idea is to tie the keyboard

to the menu bar, which sometimes is useful if you're like, well, I know what the shortcut is for, to make text bold, but I don't know what it is to make it an underline or a strikethrough. If you press the text bold, you'll see that it's in the style menu or whatever. And you'll say, oh, well, that must be where it is. And then you can go up and you can, you can look for it. But that, that is, that is the reason why it does that is it's it's trying to make the connection that the keys that you type are are actually menu commands and then the counterpart is that the

command shows you the key you can type in the menu so that that's it's a convention from the beginning of the mac and so it remains. And sometimes it can be useful, but it's also there just to tie those two things together. Okay. I mean, it kind of makes sense. That's going to grow on. That kind of makes sense. But there is a part of me that feels like that is a remnant from a bygone era. bongolin era also i'd say what it does is it um it's indicating to you that um it's indicating you to you that that your key was heard right because you might not always see in the interface

something changes like if i if i've got i'm sitting at a cursor and I choose Command B to start typing in bold text, there's no bold text yet. So how does it know? Did my key get read? Did it hear me? And by flashing in the menu bar, you've got a visual indicator that your keyboard shortcut was heard. So that's the other reason. Funny thing is I don't see the menu bar very often anymore because I run a lot of my apps in full screen yeah you know same on you hey you didn't you write a piece about full screen like and why it's good or is that dan no no no no it's funny i wrote a thing about how i think uh split view

makes full screen more um more useful yeah Yeah, that's, that's what I was going for. I'm kind of twisting your words there a bit. And Macworld did too. Cause my piece was very much like, Hey, split view has got a lot of problems that Apple needs to fix. Cause the metaphor is kind of broken. And the headline is like, why split view will make things great. I haven't read that piece yet. that's why i thought you said it oh the headline is much more positive than the actual article is by the way i only noticed like yesterday that your article is called more color and that's fantastic your series is called more color your column that was suzy oaks's idea and it's great

because it not only references six colors but i couldn't stop laughing on the analyst call because they're always asking Tim Cook for more color about this or more color about that in the results. And Tim Cook at one point actually said, you know, in terms of more color on this other thing, it just made me laugh. So that's a really great name for the call. Yeah, it is. Yeah, Susie, great suggestion by Susie. And finally, a question from will going back to something we're talking about a little bit earlier uh will asks with us carriers dropping the subsidy model should apple rethink iphone price points to offset sticker shock this fall to my so my

supplementary question to you jason is i didn't notice this happening is this happening it's starting to happen really what's happening is that carriers are changing from the subsidy model to what they're calling financing. I think essentially the difference is that with financing, you pay the extra money for two years, you pay the $199 or whatever the price is with financing. And after two years, your bill goes down instead of what has been happening, which is completely insane. And I do think drives phone sales, which is your subsidy is baked into your bill. And if you use an iPhone for four years instead of two, your bill doesn't go down. So you really are motivated to upgrade as soon as you're out of your subsidy, because you're

essentially paying your subsidy, whether you use it or not. So you might as well use it and pay the $199 or whatever and get a new phone because your bill's not going to go down. With this approach, your bill goes down. So you pay an extra whatever, $20 a month until two years is over and then your bill goes down. Yeah. Which is great. So I think it's interesting. I think it's unlikely at this point that Apple will rethink its price points because it is by far the most important product in Apple's product line and it's doing really well and growing.

And I'm not sure Apple feels like it needs to uh it needs to change the prices but it is true if we got to the point where people were i i think what it's going to take is i think it's going to the more we abandon subsidies the more um uh people are going to see the full price. And that is going to lengthen the upgrade cycle. It's going to make people reluctant to pay for that phone every two years. Even if they will pay less money overall, which is probably accurate, seeing that number is the problem. Having to pay $600 for your phone, even though in the end, over the course of two years, your bill is less because you're not paying the subsidy.

It's still just buying psychology. It is harder to say, yay, I'm going to go pay $550 for the new iPhone. Also, it takes it off of the calendar. Then it's just, when do I want to buy a new iPhone? And it's no longer your phone company saying, look, you're basically paying for it anyway. You might as well get it. It's $199. Now it's more, hey99. And so, yeah, well, I think when there's a feeling that sales are going to start lagging because of the price, because people are now seeing the full price, that would be when it would happen. But I think everybody involved in this transaction, actually, well, even the consumers, even though it doesn't make sense financially, it makes sense emotionally for consumers. I think everybody benefits by having

it say $199. So I think the change will be the finance model, like I said, and the idea that after you've got your phone for two years, your bill just goes down until you get a new phone, and then your bill goes back up for the two-year period that you're paying it off. That may remain. I think it's there for a reason. And although it's not necessarily the best deal, the best deal would be to just buy your phone. And the more they make it easy for you to just walk in, I would rather do that. I would just rather walk in and pay the full price and walk out and have my bill be less because I know in the end, that's a better deal. But I think most people don't react that way. And that's why it is the way it is.

And I think that'll probably continue. But if it does tail off, if we do start seeing a whole lot more people just paying full price for the phone, and if it has an impact on the upgrade cycle, that's when I think you might start seeing Apple feel some pressure to make the sticker price less. So we have actually had this model in the UK for a year or two, but I didn't fully understand it from the way that the question was asked. And it's led to a couple of different things. So the way that it's pitched here is maybe slightly different.

The idea being that you pay one amount of money, but it pays for two different things. You pay for your contract and you pay for your phone, your handset. And once you finish paying for your handset, you can upgrade to another one. So you can do a free upgrade or if you want to keep on the contract period

or extend the contract, or you can pay again for another one, and then we put it back into your contract again. So you take out another handset payment, right? And you're keeping the bill. And one of the things this is doing is it's benefiting customers in one way, which also benefits the phone companies. So people may take two, three-year, four-year agreements.

So they're keeping their price plan low, but they can still upgrade sooner because they pay their handsets off over a year. Does that make sense? Yeah. So people are still changing their phones every year, but they're locked into longer-term contracts, which benefits the company, but also keeps people's price plans cheaper because the longer you take it out, the cheaper it is. So there is this weird thing where it's like a kind of a benefit for both sides. Like if you're happy enough with the price and the service that you get from your phone company, you end up being able to upgrade on a more frequent time period. Right. I think we'll see more of that. I think the U.S. market,

this is what's happening now, is they're realizing they need to try some different approaches here. That's the advantage, too, of having a lot of competition in wireless is that wireless companies are willing to make you a deal and give you a better deal

if you'll stay with them. And that's good. That's one of those cases where the consumer has an advantage is they're afraid that you're going to switch to the other guys. And that motivates them to make a better deal.

Yep. All right. So I think that brings us to the end of this week. I think so. If you want to find our show notes for today's episode, head on over to relay.fm

upgrade 47. That's where you also find a link to Stephen and Jason's little space conversation which I think you should go and listen to if you haven't already. Thanks again to our sponsors this week, Stamps.com, Igloo, and GoToMeeting. If you want to support this show,

go support our sponsors. It's a great way. Go check them out. Go sign up for their trials, that kind of thing. And if you want to support this show go support our sponsors it's a great way go check them out go sign up for their trials that kind of thing and if you like them buy their products that help support this show we do sell stickers uh for all of our shows and we have relay fm t-shirts and that's another way you can help us if you really want to it's at relay.fm store and we're always trying to think of new different ways for you to help us out if you want to do that and we're going to have more to talk about in the future I'm sure if you want to find us online I am at

imike on twitter Jason is at jsnll and he writes over at sixcolors.com go and check out Jason's site and click all of his ads as well why don't you do that if my sadness has reached you today and thank you so much for

listening thank you jason for joining me as always and we'll be back next time to an end so goodbye mrs now goodbye everybody