Upgrade - 48: The Watercooler

Episode Date: August 3, 2015

Our hosts show off their age gap by comparing how they watch television as a part of a larger discussion about the role of the Apple TV in Apple’s product line. Then Myke and Jason discuss the future of Twitter. Plus they discuss tricks of the journalism trade, Myke’s first experiences with Apple Pay, and answer some of your #askupgrade questions.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 48 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts casper because everyone deserves a great night's sleep, and Fracture, photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. How's it going? I'm very well, sir. How are you? I'm doing good. It's Monday. Well, it's Monday in listener time, but we are recording this on Friday.

Yeah, we're recording this early because I'm going on vacation next week. Because that's the it is the season all your favorite podcasts are being recorded at weird times because people go on vacation with their families. And it's all you know, it's that time of year. So that's what's going on. We're recording this on Friday, but it'll be out on Monday. And then, in fact, our following episode won't be released until a Tuesday because I'm, again, finishing up my travel. So, you know, bear with us for the next couple of weeks as we go through this travel time. Yeah, it's just one of those things. I always get really nervous recording in advance, especially when it's a topical show like this one, because you never know what's going to happen between now and Monday evening when when the show goes out yeah in fact we can you know we could ruin everything we could whatever we talk about will be eclipsed that always happens i had that with um topical makes a

difference i mean incomparable sometimes gets recorded weeks or even a couple of months in advance from time to time and and And I actually had that happen last summer where we recorded an episode and in it we talked about James Garner a little bit. And like three weeks later, he died. And I had to make some serious changes to that episode when I got to it because I had to take stuff out because it was really weird.

We were talking about him as if he was alive, but he was dead at that point. And stuff like that happens when you pre-record and you just have to deal with it. But hopefully no big tech news. For Pete's sake, it's August, a weekend in August. What big news could possibly happen over a weekend in August? Now we'll pause for everybody to laugh because of the amazingly huge thing that happened over the weekend in August. Facebook shuts down. It's over Microsoft's just giving the money back to the shareholders.

And they're closing out the door. They're 90 days from bankruptcy. Yeah. Because we're going to talk about Twitter a bit today. And we're talking about them because they're in an interesting kind of a little bit volatile state at the moment, which is why it concerns me. Right. Because they are anything. Literally anything could happen because they don't have a CEO. They might announce the CEO on Monday morning.

Who knows? So probably what I will do, Jason, and everybody who's listening to this now will know, I will put this episode out the minute I wake up on Monday. I think that's the way to do it. I was going to suggest you said Monday evening. I'm like, no, no, no, Mike. I think that's the way to do it I was going to suggest you said Monday evening I'm like no no no Mike the alarm goes off and the first thing you do is post the episode

I will wire my alarm clock so when I hit the snooze button it just posts up great that's great then when I wake up in the middle of again I don't even know where I'll be when I wake up in Bend Oregon on Monday morning it'll already be done and then the news can break and we'll say, hey, look, we beat it out the door. We, you know, what are you talking about? We already posted our show.

So it's the thing, I don't mind if I post a show and then it's out of date that afternoon. It's if like I've been holding on to one. Yeah, it's the deniability of saying, well, look, what can we do? We're not time travelers here versus you've got it in your hands and you're like, oh, no. Because Jason was on holiday. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I've debated whether I need to bring a microphone with me just in case something happens. But I might actually not bring. Well, I have to bring a laptop because I have to edit at least one podcast while I'm gone. But I'm not sure I need to record anything.

So I may not bring a microphone. That was that thing you were saying on the talk show, right? Where you were saying about what if Steve Jobs dies? Yeah, yeah. That was the, that was for a long time that just got in my head. That was the, you got to be on guard at all times because what if Steve Jobs dies? And even before he was sick, it was like, what if Steve Jobs dies in a plane crash? But it was always like, that is the prototypicalpical the archetypal big story that you can't miss when i was at mac

world and it got in my head i mean it was definitely like everything you did was what if the big story happens um yeah in the office when that happened yeah i was i was i i had just been in a long meeting and i um in the afternoon i went back desk, um, and I'm sitting at my desk on the sixth floor of 501 second street. And there was a, I think it was a tweet from somewhere saying that, that, uh, that somebody was reporting that Steve jobs had died. And then that was my, you know, that was my, uh, evening. That was, that was, uh, and my night, that was interesting too. Cause like the next day was my birthday. So I was like getting ready to wrap things up and go home and do birthday stuff. And then it was a very different evening after that. And, and as a bus

commuter, I had like all the work I could do until I got the last bus home. And then I worked on the bus. And then I thought about what I was going to write as I walked back. Oh yeah. That was a day. Did you have anything ready at Macworld? You know, we did. Yeah. And we had it coded under the name, I think it was CEO Appreciation. And the idea was,

let's work on an appreciation of Steve Jobs' tenure as CEO. Let's work on an appreciation of Steve Jobs' tenure as CEO. And in fact, we ran it somewhere, I think in print, when he stepped down as CEO in August of that year. And we ran a modified version of that when he died. So we did have something, but it didn't have anything in it about, like, Steve Jobs died XXX. It was very much like... It was all of the content.

Like, it was the meat kind of thing. Yeah, let's write about what he did at Apple. It was also about him at Apple because it was Macworld, and so we weren't writing about his life or anything like that. That would have been a traditional obituary, but also very weird. But when he stepped down as a CEO in August, so a couple, you know, a couple months before he died or a month and a half before he died, we had that story. And we're like, well, you know, this is as good a time as any, because seems like it's uh closing the the book on his

tenure as ceo so let's let's do it let's do it now but then we did run that on the web um on the day of that that that was there phil michaels and i put that one together i think because i think it kind of got to a time where any big publication would have been silly not to have something in the can yeah although you know you had that thing with bloomberg where uh um where connie at bloomberg wrote this uh obituary and they pushed it across the wire and it's like so embarrassing and um yeah so you you try to that's that's you know you try to be careful so it never went in our cms it was in a google doc with a name that said nothing about Steve Jobs or obituary. And we didn't have any details in it about a death or anything like that. It was literally like me and Phil doing a research project of let's write a story appreciating Steve Jobs for his time as Apple CEO just in case we want to do that sometime.

I don't remember anything going out from Bloomberg. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they had steve jobs obituary that ran accidentally on their across their wire by connie guillermo yeah wow yeah i'm finding links now about it that happens from time i mean so many obituaries are pre-written because again it is inevitable that that famous people will die because everybody dies. So you write those obituaries. The funny one for me is occasionally in the New York Times famously has these obituaries. I think they still do, but they certainly did back in the heyday, pre-written, ready to go. And at one point, somebody died.

And this is not that long ago. This is like in the last five years. somebody died and they and this is not that long ago this is like in the last five years somebody died and the obituary that was written about them was bylined by somebody who had been dead for several years oh my word they had pre-written the obituary years before the person died the editors dusted off the obituary that was in whatever file they have for all their obituaries they inserted the information at the top about the details of the death, but it ran as this, and it was a very nice obituary, but it was written by somebody who had pre-deceased

the subject of the obituary by several years. Because whilst it makes sense, like if I was in that situation, I would have been doing the same kind of work, it seems distasteful if you find out that it's done in advance, I think. But it makes sense. You need to do it. Writing things in advance, I mean, I've known lots of people who will write, you know, we would guess what Apple things were going to be announced

based on rumors and speculation. And sometimes you would write an article body, like chunks of it that were based on things that you were going to assume were true. And then you just leave it open. And then when the thing got announced, you would change the things to the facts. And, but you had a, like a skeleton of a story that was like, cause you, you know, you know, Apple, Apple to on Tuesday unveiled their new X at WWDC at Moscone West. You can guess what a lot of the story is going to be because it's going to be their kind of wrapper around the details

and you leave space for the details. That sort of thing happens too. Someone smart could write that and just text Expander and just like could just fire it off and just change add in a couple of keywords and your story's done every year because they are effectively a much and much the same aren't they i suppose with just some key details yeah i mean there are a lot of things in common you try to this is a way to save time and it's a yeah you know but you can also you can also get yourself in a lot of trouble if you do that which is is why you've got to be super careful. And that's why journalists have lots of code words.

Like a lot of the journalists, I don't know if we talked about it on this show before, but a lot of journalism code words, they're all misspelled things. They're things that will throw a spell check. Or even if you look at them, you'll be like, that's not a word. And that's because that way you know that it's not real. So like there's TK, capital T, capital K. That's a, you know, there's more information to come here. But instead of writing information to come, because those are all words, you put TK and people, any journalist is going to see a TK and be like, whoa, we got to fill this in before we can run this. Or, you know, like a head is a headline, a deck is a, like a line that goes below the headline and a

lead is the first paragraph. And in journalism parlance, those are spelled H-E-D-D-E-K and L-E-D-E. They're spelled intentionally misspelled. I always wondered why they were spelled that way. That's why is, is, is to my knowledge is they're, they're misspelled. So, you know, that they're not supposed to run, which is, i had my my college newspaper the year after i left so i wasn't responsible for this but they had a they had an issue that went to print that had a uh that had a an early it had a fake version of their sports section in it they they had uh it was a mock-up from earlier in the uh earlier in the day and, and they had neglected to put the final version down. And the reason nobody noticed is that they used joke headlines instead of just, you know, TK, TK, TK, which somebody would have spotted.

Instead, they had these joke headlines like track pulls up lame and baseball team loses again and things like that. And so nobody caught it. And that's why you don't do that. Pro tip. Pro tip. Look at that. That was one of those... Unexpected topic.

Yeah. I don't even know how we got here. I don't even know. It's because we're recording this on a Friday, Mike. That's why. We're wild. We're loosening the tires on Friday over an upgrade. Shall we take a first break and then do some follow-up?

Let's do it. Why not go crazy with it? This week's episode is brought to you by lynda.com, the online learning platform that houses over 3,000 on-demand video courses that are there to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. You can get yourself a free 10-day trial by

visiting lynda.com slash upgrade. That's l-y-n-d-a dot com slash upgrade. One of my trial by visiting lynda.com slash upgrade. That's L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash upgrade. One of my favorite things about lynda.com is, and I like thinking about it, especially when doing this show, because me and Jason have recently kind of started our own businesses and we're self-employed now. You could actually go on to lynda.com and you could sign up and you would be able to learn start to finish how to run a business. Like you could have something that you're curious about. You could have a little hobby that you've wanted to start. You know, maybe you want to get into app development or maybe you want to get into design or something like that. Maybe you want to get into podcasting or audio

production. You can learn the nuts and bolts of the applications and the hardware tools that you need. And they have great experts who are there to teach you about this stuff. But then you can also learn a lot of like supplementary things that you might want to know when you're starting a business. Like you can learn about taxes. You can learn about going paperless. You can learn about marketing and body language and business negotiation skills and things like that.

You can learn all of this stuff from lynda.com. So, I mean, of course, you don't have to use it for this purpose. You can use it just to learn that piece of software you've always wanted to know. You can use it to help learn some skills that might help you get a new job that you've always wanted or even just to learn a hobby that you like. But that's the kind of thing that I like about lynda.com is you can kind of dip in and learn whatever you want. And you can learn it wherever you want.

You can learn it on whatever schedule you want as well. All of their videos are broken down into bite-sized chunks, so it's really easy to dip in and dip out of them. They have these great transcripts that you can follow along with as well. Or maybe you can search through them later to take you to a part of the video that you need. You can watch them on your web browser. You can watch them on your Android or iOS device as well. Wherever you want, whenever you want, however you want. Youra.com membership, when you sign up, which you should,

will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics just for one flat rate. Whether you are looking to become an industry expert, you're passionate about a hobby, or you want to learn something new, go ahead and visit lynda.com slash upgrade and sign up for your free 10-day trial. Go check them out. It will help support this show too. Thank you so much, lynda.com, for their support of RelayFM. Okie dokie. So Apple Pay, I have been using it.

Oh, yes. And I'm very happy. How's that been going? Yeah, I like it a lot, actually. It feels kind of magical. It makes me happy to use it. I mean, you know, as I said before, I really like contactless payments.

That is a thing that I've been using for a while. And I'm happy to be able to just do it without needing to get anything out of my pocket anymore. I prefer to do Apple Pay on the watch because it's faster. I'm with you there. Despite what Nevin Mergan says, I agree, it's faster. I'm with you there. Despite what Nevin Mergan says, I agree. It's faster.

Although you can double tap. In iOS 9, you can double tap on the home screen on the phone and bring it up, which is one of the things that lets you kind of prepare it in advance. You can do what? In iOS 9, if you double tap the home screen on your phone, it will bring up Apple Pay, like on the watch.

Really? You double tap the screen? No, no, sorry. Double tap the home button. Oh, I was going to say, what? Double push, double tap, because again, Evan is mad at me for saying that that's a tap. But you push that home button twice when it's locked, and Apple Pay will open up, like on the watch, which is nice, because that's one of the things I like about the watch, is I can sort of get it ready i i tap it a couple of times and then and then all i have

to do because i don't even need my fingerprint at that point is just kind of wave it and yeah see that's and that's the thing what i find to be the slow part that adds the time is the fingerprint scan i mean and i know it's only a couple of milliseconds or whatever but the transaction's already milliseconds in itself so it's like you know you're you're doubling the time it takes well and you get your finger on i mean it's confusing this happened um i was watching my wife do apple pay the other day she uh i was like i'm gonna let you have the glory of the apple pay here and uh and she brought her phone with her uh finger on finger resting on the home screen to unlock it on the home button to unlock it. And it unlocked and went to the home screen.

Or maybe she pressed the button. It was one of those things where Apple Pay was starting to slide up and it went away. And then she's like, well, how do I get it back? I'm like, well, you move it away and then move it back and all that. And it's one of those things that there's a lot going on involving how you use the button on the phone when you do Apple Pay. And I think Apple is working on making that a little simpler in iOS 9. But on the watch, it's just very clear. Once you've got the watch on and validated, all you do is double tap that button and it opens up. And that's really

nice. Where'd you go and what'd you buy? Oh, I have bought many things now. I have bought lunch a couple of times. Usually whenever I leave the house, which has been three days this week, Jason, it's probably a new personal record. I tend to just buy like a juice or something from the local shop. And it's like an 89 pence transaction.

And I never have cash. So I always use using my card anyway. So now I just use my watch. I've been using it on the underground um nice it is slower than even a card is because uh we have those like we call them oyster cards and it's like a uh ticketless like it's like a little nfc card we've had them for years yeah um this one uh that is like an instant thing that they go through they're using contactless cards takes a little bit longer using apple pay takes a little bit Yeah, I love them. That is like an instant thing that they go through. Using contactless cards takes a little bit longer.

Using Apple Pay takes a little bit longer still. So it's not seamless, but I like it. And I've been using my watch to go through. There is a thing which is you have to know, and I'll say it here in case anybody doesn't know, you have to use the same device on entry and exit. Right. Because it registers that unique code.

So if you use your, even if you're using the same card and you use your phone to go in and your watch to go out, you'll be charged maximum fare because it hasn't recognized that you have checked in and checked out. So that's just something to remember. But I just use my watch always. It's a little bit awkward that I have to kind of reach across my body to hit the thing but it does a pretty good job and i like it it just feels more convenient because i'm not like i mean you know it's not like a arduous task to get my credit card out my wallet my pocket but my watch is just right there like it's just right there and i just

double tap the little button and i just beat my way in. I know. That's exactly my experience. It's really nice having Apple Pay. It's really nice with the watch because it's right there. And putting, you know, tapping that button a couple of times is something I can do without looking. And it's just a natural kind of movement while I'm standing there at the register. And then I just, you know, I just hold my wrist over by the scanner, by the, by the reader. And I feel the little tap that it's good and that's it. I mean, it's, you can do it really kind of without thinking, which is, is a lot of fun. Um, I have some real time followup. Uh, this is the example I was searching for before. The New York Times' obituary of

Elizabeth Taylor, who died in 2011, was written by their theater critic, Mel Gusso, who died in 2005. Oh, wow. They had that ready for a long time. A very, very long time. And there was another one that they had that was that was a little bit less but that was the extreme example six years uh after the guy died his story ran which is kind of cool right like like i remember after roger ebert died there was one movie review he had written that was for a movie that didn't come out for a few months and so several months passed and then the at roger ebert.com said, well, here's his last review, his last published review, because they had held it until the movie was coming out. And that's kind of fun to have something that you didn't realize was still in the works, ready to go from somebody who's not with us anymore.

So that was kind of cool. But yeah, that New York Times, they're prepared. I'm just looking at our show notes. They look very morose. It's going to look very strange when people see that. Summer fun! Steve Jobs obituary. Elizabeth Taylor obituary.

Fun time Friday. Hot Friday in the summertime. Yeah, woo! We don't have a lot of follow-up this week. So what about this Apple TV stuff John Paskowski Paskowski

Paskowski I can't do it it's one of those names I read it but don't say it very much Paskowski I think Paskowski can never get used to going to BuzzFeed for this type of news I know i know well this is the you know that's my my old pal matt honan is building a very interesting uh tech bureau in uh in san

francisco for buzzfeed and john pakowski who used to be at uh at recode in the wall street journal and other places is is now at buzzfeed breaking this news and he he's the one who broke the news that the Apple TV was going to get revved at WWDC. And then he's the one who broke the news that it wasn't. And now he's broken again the news that that Apple TV that we told you was going to come and then didn't come is going to come in September. And, you know, this time for sure. It's like part of me feels like at last it's here. And part of me feels like I'll believe it when I see it and not a moment before. I don't know.

It's, uh, it's, uh, we've talked about it before. I, I, I mean, my, my questions, what I put in our show notes here is, um, what, where do we think Apple TV fits in Apple's overall strategy? Cause we, we spend a lot of time talking about Apple TV because it's one of these, you know, it's a unique Apple product. It's not part of their other kind of product families. It's this thing that's off on the side. It's been revved a few times, but it's never been kind of at the core. And yet it's the subject of a lot of conversation so do you have an apple tv no no you don't i have literally zero interest um i don't watch tv uh in the tv sense like

i watch things on netflix and like amazon prime stuff like that. But we tend to just watch things in bed, like on a laptop. Yeah. I'm really not a big TV guy. I fear that's the future of television. And I have a problem with that only because I don't like the experience of watching on a small screen. Like, everybody huddle around the small screen to watch this thing i don't i don't love that i like having a big screen somewhere that i can that i can put the video on even if it is streaming but i know a lot of people just don't i mean i i i wonder i

look at my kids and wonder if they will ever i feel like the tv screen is going to end up being like um when i was a kid we had a we had a movie projector for our home movies and a screen that we would get out and you know we'd set it up and i feel like tvs are going to be like that it's like you buy it because you want to have that that movie theater kind of experience and oh we can all watch this together but that's why it'll exist it's not not as the thing that you use to watch everything but as the thing that's for sort of special, you know, communal, oh, well, if we're all going to watch this,

we might as well put it up on the big screen. That is exactly the way that I use TV. In fact, I would say, I think the number one reason by far that my kids look at the TV screen that we've got is because they're playing games on it. Yeah, I have a TV for my Xbox and PlayStation, but it's not connected to any TV service.

It doesn't even have an aerial. Right. And you could watch Netflix on it. But I don't. But you don't. That is the funny thing. Yeah. So we have TVs here.

Well, I think this is one of the challenges, right? TV is changing so much, and right as tv is changing so much and and the tech industry is changing so much and those things are sometimes in uh related and sometimes not but there was a great uh i'm not going to be able to find it now but there was a great chart that i saw cited a bunch of different places about i think gruber linked to it too so that would probably be the easiest way to find it um Um, and it's just how much TV viewing is done by people at various ages. And for, uh, young people, it is, uh, just falling rapidly. Yeah, here it is. It was in the, it was in the wall street journal. Um, and it's, uh, it's just like 18 to 24 TV viewing is down 32%. 25 to 34, it's down 23%. And this is why TV, you know, as we, traditional TV as we know it,

it's going to go away and become very rapidly become just for old people. And, you know, and again, I think people are going to still watch recorded entertainment. A lot of my daughters, my daughter's really into YouTube, but a lot of my daughter's friends really love Netflix

and they watch shows on Netflix. And she she watches some stuff on Netflix or on our TV. But the concept of traditional TV is just completely lost on them. And that makes me go back to thinking, you know, we'll still watch entertainment. But but this traditional thought of TV, you know, maybe old people will watch it that way, but nobody else is going to. It seems so weird to me that Apple is approaching this with a device like it. Surely this whatever it is they end up doing if they try and do something in TV should be on all services because Apple made this bed like they gave us personal devices, right? iPads, iPhones. So people watched their own content, the content that they like on the device that they find most personal. I think that's the way

it is now. I think that's why I watch things that way. I think it's why your kids watch things that way. Like, because I've never been a big TV guy. Like I'm, I'm not a young person. I'm a young person, but I'm not like a teenager. So I don't compare myself in that kind of way, but I've just never been a big TV person. So like, I just tend to watch things on the screen that I like the most or what's most convenient as opposed to like sitting down to watch a show. But I think it's like these sort of,

these standalone devices don't make a lot of sense to me. Like for any purpose. I mean, gaming seems like a thing, but the games are not going to be incredibly powered, so I think people are still just going to want to prefer to play them on their iPhone or their iPad. I don't really understand, looking at it right now, I don't really understand Apple TV as a platform. I've never been interested in it.

So I think what they're trying to do here is, and maybe this is one of the reasons why this is such an odd product, is in the end, if we accept that a big TV set is really not about what we think of as traditional television anymore, really not about what we think of as traditional television anymore, but it's about getting content that you like onto a bigger screen. If that's what it's about is TV is a big screen. That's what it is. It's a device so large you can't hold it in your hands, but it's bigger. So it's better for watching movies and, you know, with a large group of people, watching a sporting event, stuff like that. It's better. That's what it's better for is not anything about the programming on it, but because it's literally it is a big screen and our iPads and our iPhones and our laptops aren't so big.

definition of what television is or what a television set is then what is apple tv for and yeah you know apple tv is for um it's for airplay it you know it's for throwing content from your device like my tivo has uh support for the the youtube slinging feature so i will i will um well not not chromecast it's the um so my TiVo has a YouTube app on it. And, you know, the YouTube app has this ability to basically fling the URL of a YouTube video and then it plays it instead of on your phone. You can like share it and play it somewhere else. And that, I actually think that's a really great feature. And I use that all the time.

Like I'll have a movie trailer and it'll be on my iPhone and I'll want to show it to my family. You know, oh, here's this new Marvel movie that the trailer just dropped or the new Star Wars behind the scenes footage from Comic-Con and all that. And, you know, they're sitting around in the living room and there's a baseball game on or whatever and I'll go boop boop and I'll tap on my phone and the YouTube video will just come up on the TV

because TiVo will just launch the YouTube app and start playing it. It's like, that's cool. That's good. That's a good use for a TV is to throw stuff up there from the internet because you want to see it on the big screen and hear it with big speakers or, or, or whatever. Um, okay. So that's one thing. And so you've got to build a lot of services into it and Apple's got their own airplay stuff. So they want to do that for their devices. So it's a really great way for you to put things on a big

screen from your little devices. I think that, I think that's a big part of it. And you can do it that way. You don't actually even need to use the Apple TV interface if you don't want to, although we do rent movies on Apple TV. So that's something that we do and watch Netflix. I'm mostly using the TiVo for that now, but you can do that on there. So it's a portal for your devices.

It's a portal for services. You talk about games, like not everybody's gonna buy a game console. Game consoles are kind of a pain You talk about games, like not everybody's going to buy a game console. Game consoles are kind of a pain. They're a pain to set up. And then you have a lot of them and, you know, they still have like discs that you have to buy a lot of times for the big

games and it's, you know, $50 discs and all of that. So I, I think that there's a potential market for, for playing games that are like a little more console. Like, I think that's a harder sell,

but if you like use your iPhone as the controller, um, maybe I'm not, I'm not entirely convinced on that but well you know no because the thing is is like the iphone is a terrible controller like for a tv experience if you're button mashing yes i'm thinking like if you use the just basically the positional stuff, the iPhone. Yeah, exactly. And you and use that for playing like I could totally play Mario Kart with my iPhone as the controller. Right. Because that maybe you will be. And maybe I will be.

Because that could be something as simple as I'm, you know, it's the steering wheel and that's entirely motion. wheel and I that's entirely motion and then like the left half of the screen is breaking and the right half of the screen is uh launching uh whatever my my weapon is or something like that I mean there you could I could see that maybe I think it's a harder sell but I could see that and then a lot of people are talking about home kit that one of the advantages of something like having uh having uh an apple tv in your in on your home network is that it can talk to all of your devices and kind of like channel them to the internet and have them interconnect. Although they often can do that on their own and don't, you know, a lot of these devices don't need a hub for that. So, but I could see that maybe

there's an argument there. I was thinking about Siri and devices like the Amazon Echo, which it's a music player and it's a voice recognition thing. So you can tell it things and it's tied in with your home network. And I thought Apple TV, that might be an interesting thing for Apple TV. It'll also play Apple music, presumably. So it's something where you could hook it into speakers and maybe even have it be listening to your commands. So you could say, basically, it's Siri in your house instead of in your car or in your pocket. It's Siri for your living room. Or you could you could open your phone and say, hey, play this music on the big speakers. And it would know that the big speakers are attached to an Apple TV that's attached to the you know, there are there are lots of things. I think the challenge is what's the single focused, super clear principle about why you have an Apple TV.

And, you know, that's hard. I guess maybe you'd say it's essentially AirPlay. It's being able to take stuff from your apps and put it up on a big screen. It doesn't feel like enough. Like it really feels like content should be the thing. But for Peksauski's report, that's not coming. Yeah, not yet, not yet. Which is weird.

Well, I think this is one of the reasons why you've seen, with Chromecast and with the Fire TV Stick and things like that, this move toward a little tiny thing that just sort of, like, hides attached to your TV and makes a dumb TV smart. And Apple TV isn't quite that, but I feel like that's one of the reasons those approaches exist is because you could argue that that's all you really need is you just need a thing to stick on your TV that lets your iPhone put things on the screen. Like know that the TV exists. And I think that, I mean, I think at its base base that is what the apple tv is for i think i i think and because apple is doing its own thing

instead of using some other standard that everybody else uses right it's like only apple's things can do airplay to video and it's like so so if you want to attach uh if you want to throw video from your apple devices up onto a screen, the way you do that is you buy an Apple TV. And that, so I think in the end, that is probably the number one thing it's good for, but it also lets you navigate online content and, and play it on your TV without having to use your phone or your iPad to do that. I mean, it also, I mean, it also serves that purpose,

which is nice because I would rather not like, I would rather use the Apple remote or some other physical remote than like the remote app on my iPhone. And I know some people don't feel that way, but I would much rather like use a remote to navigate. And I would rather rent a movie on Apple TV than rent a movie on my iPhone

and then try to airplay it to my Apple TV. But other people just don't care. I don't know. Yeah. It's weird. It's a weird product. This is why it's weird. This is why it's,

um, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's, it's weird stuff. It'll be interesting to see how it goes. This is,

this is one of those cases where things are moving fast. TV is changing fast. fast tv is changing fast the technology is changing fast and it's tough uh in some ways i think every product in this category is just a complete mess and a work in progress because um how else could it how could it be any different the whole tv world is a complete mess right now we'll see in a couple of months maybe yeah yeah maybe so i i would love it if if i had a uh an apple device in my house that would be like sort of like the amazon echo though and tied into apple music yeah and plugged into a speaker somewhere i actually think i would really love to be able to say you know play this album or play you know whatever and and whether it was

doing that from my phone or whether it didn't need any other device to be in proximity because it was its own device and on the internet. I think there's a lot of features here, but, you know, how does it all go together? How does it all fit together in a way where the product makes sense? And I'm not sure whether this new Apple TV, should it appear, We'll do that or not. Yeah, we'll see. I don't know. You don't care. I'm not sold. You just don't care.

I don't think it's for me. But, you know, maybe there's, as we always hope with Apple, there is a thing in there or a story in there that I don't yet see. And there may be a need for me for it. So let's say you get a little older and you buy a house and you think, oh, I want to watch a movie. And you think, well, I could watch it on my iPad or my laptop screen or something. But wouldn't it be nice if I had a bigger screen to watch it on? I mean, that's where you get the scenario, right?

Is that you need something to attach that TV to your Apple devices. And that's the apple tv that's why it's there i mean there are times where we do watch movies on the big tv downstairs but it's just rare that we do that to be honest because a lot of the stuff that we're watching we're just like binge watching shows on netflix it doesn't really seem necessary to watch it on the tv um because you know it's just it's just throw away content a lot of times i have a nice big tv and a comfortable couch and it's i i prefer to you know when lauren and i watch a show in the evening after the kids have gone to bed or as they're going to bed we're

we're uh you know we're in our living room and yeah, we could totally watch a Netflix show, um, sitting next to each other on the couch, looking down at an iPad, you know, but instead we watch it on a big, a big screen that we've got. I mean, it's not huge, but it's like, it's like a, you know, 50 inch or something, uh, flat screen. And that's, that's nicer. And I can like move around and, you know, tilt. I I can move around and tilt. I don't have to tilt my head in one very specific direction in order to see the video playing on that screen through the little iPad speakers or something like that. I mean, it's nicer. But that's a far cry from saying, well, the only place you can get anything is on that TV.

Those days are ending. So it's really more about thinking of the TV, I really believe as just another screen. It's just a really big screen with maybe some big speakers attached to it. And that's it. Otherwise, it's just like your phone or your iPad. It's just another screen. I think at this point, though, it is completely safe to say that Apple will never make a television set because I think today that makes literally zero sense. I agree. I don't know why you would do it. I don't know. Yeah. I don't, I don't know why you would because yeah. Why? You don't need to, you can put everything you need in that box. Why do they want to be in that, in that business where they're selling, you know, even if there

were good margins in it, it's like, I just don't, yeah, I don't see that. I've never understood that. Even Gene Munster has given up on that one. Poor Gene. He's doing okay. Should take a second break? Yep. Let's do it. This week's episode is also brought to you by Casper. Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses that you can get for a fraction of the price of what you'll find in store. The mattress industry has for a long time been this really weird thing

that you have to go to a store and you want to buy a new mattress. And I had to do this recently. And you lay down on a bed. And it's like, this is just so weird. Why would you want to do this? It's just a very strange way of doing things. You lay down and it's like, oh, well, now I'm in the middle of a showroom and I have my shoes on. And it's just very peculiar. So Casper is here to revolutionize

the way that you think about buying mattresses by cutting the cost of dealing with resellers, showrooms, and they pass those savings directly to you, the consumer. And also their product is really interesting and really cool. A Casper mattress provides resilience and long-lasting supportive comfort. They have developed their own type of mattress, a hybrid, which combines premium latex foam with memory foam. And these two technologies come together for what Casper says will give you better nights and brighter days. It provides you with just the right sink and just the right bounce. Usually mattresses can cost well over $1,500, but Casper mattresses cost between $500 for a twin size, $750 for a full size, $850 for a queen,

and $950 for a king. And all Casper mattresses are made in America. Now, Mr. Jason Snow, I believe that you have a Casper mattress. Me being here in the island of the United Kingdom means that I unfortunately cannot get a Casper mattress, but I know that you do indeed have one. I sleep on one every night. And in fact, my in-laws were here a couple of weeks ago and my father-in-law was like, oh, can I check out that mattress that you've been talking about?

Because apparently my wife has been talking about the Casper mattress. And so he came and sat down on it because they're looking for a new mattress and and I was trying to explain to him the difference that it's the it's the memory foam underneath with the latex on top the latex foam so that it's sort of a comfortable top part but it's still got a lot of support and the feature that I mentioned before which is the the no trampolining that the cat can be sitting on one side of the bed and you sit down on the other side of the bed and it doesn't like eject the cat into the air the person on one side of the bed and you sit down on the other side of the bed and it doesn't like eject the cat into the air. The person on one side of the bed can be drinking tea

and somebody else can be sitting on the other side, can drop down on the other side and the tea isn't spilled, which let me tell you on our old mattress, the tea got spilled. So I think they may, I said to him, we've got a code for you

if you want to buy a Casper and you can save a little bit of money. That code is, if you go to casper.com slash upgrade you'll get 50 towards any mattress purchase you just go to casper.com slash upgrade use the code upgrade at checkout and terms and conditions apply on that i will mention that casper offer a free delivery and returns of in a 100 day period it is completely risk-free when you buy a casper mattress this means you get the time to try it out for yourself at home with all of your own bedding on your own bed for 100 days to make sure that it's right for you it's completely risk-free they ship to you in a fancy box and opening them is an experience all of its own thank you so much

to casper for supporting this show and RelayFM. I really wish I could get a Casper mattress. I must say. If we had known we were going to be talking about Apple TV today, we could have gotten Joe Steele on the line. He has lots of opinions about Apple TV. Oh, I'm sure that we will have the ability to talk to him at another point about this.

That would actually be fun. Let's put that on the to-do list. Let's put that on the to-do list as one of our rare upgrade guests to talk about apple tv with joe steel because we're now going to enter that news cycle the rumor news cycle of apple tv right because yeah i've heard success is not it's not interesting right this is you know it's not it's not exciting i i think we are entering the period where if we're not careful every episode of upgrade is literally just going to be more talk about the three rumors that are going to happen between now and the middle of September. So we'll try to measure that out a little bit and only talk about things when there's

something new to say. Indeed. Hence why we're going to talk about something a little bit different now, which is Twitter. Twitter. So Twitter right now as a company is in a state of flux. They just announced their Q2 earnings their earnings were good their revenue was higher than expectation but their big problem right now

and one of the reasons why they're in a bit of turmoil is they are not attracting users fast enough and I read a quote from, I think it might have been from Dorsey or from their COO. I think his name is Noto. I could be completely wrong. I want to make sure I get that right now

before we continue. Yeah, Anthony Noto. And they were talking about user growth and saying like that their advertising is doing well, but they actually might end up an inventory problem because they're going to have too much demand for advertising and they have eyeballs to show it to. So that is like an issue for them. But more, you know, what they actually need is people using the service. And they're trying many different things and have tried many different things that have made many

guarantees, but that's not happening. They're not attracting users. And one of the other big things that's happening at Twitter right now is Twitter has no CEO. Costello stepped down amidst many concerns that the company wasn't going anywhere. And now Jack Dorsey is at the helm in an interim position, but Twitter has yet to announce its new CEO. From the reports that you see right now, it's because they haven't actually decided on a new CEO. So this is kind of where they are now. And I kind of wanted to talk about this a bit, but also perform some thought exercises, Jason, with you about Twitter as a company and as a service, because that's one of the interesting things I've heard people mention this before, and I

definitely think about it this way, that there is Twitter as a company, Twitter Incorporated or whatever they are, and Twitter as in the service that I see through TweetBot. And I see those as two very, very different things. So what do you think Twitter needs to do right now for Twitter, the company? What should they be focusing on? Well, I will put in the show notes, Chris Sacka wrote this thing that got spread around a lot about what he thought Twitter should do. And I thought there was a lot of really perceptive stuff in there. You start by saying, forgive the business school jargon here. I didn't go to business school, although my wife did. And I've worked for many CEOs over the years. So the question you should always ask yourself, I think, is what do we do better than anyone else in the

world? Or some degree of that. What do I do that's different? What do I do that's better? Because you want to focus on that. Focus on your strengths. Focus on what you're good at. And what Chris Saka pointed out, and I think is really good, is Twitter is really good at real time and breaking news and hot topics

and being the water cooler. As we all discovered when we first logged onto Twitter back in the day, it is the water cooler. It is a place where you can talk about what's going on and it can connect people can connect communities and it can connect everybody, a community in terms of colleagues or, or friends,

but also community in terms of interest in a topic. And Saka pointed out, and I think it was brilliant that if you were following and Ben Thompson has written about this too on Stratechery, like Ben's example was the NBA playoffs. He was writing during the NBA playoffs. And he said, if you were following, and I think it was also the trade deadline or something. It was something sports related, NBA related, where there was all this stuff happening on Twitter.

And there ended up being like players making jokes on Twitter because there was a signing deadline for new players. But this is also true like in live sporting events and things too. And like the teams and the fans were all kind of interacting and the players were making jokes. And it was this amazing little kind of window into what was happening right then with the NBA signing deadline. And if you were following the right people through a list or just following in your timeline, you had this amazing experience. But if you're somebody who is like not a Twitter user, doesn't know anything about Twitter, hasn't curated a list about this particular interest, you just didn't see it because you have to have put in the work so that at that moment, you can see those tweets. And Saka's point and Ben Thompson's point that I think is dead on

is Twitter needs to be better about exposing the very best stuff about a hot topic as it's happening to users. And those users don't necessarily need to be logged into Twitter even. And if they are logged into Twitter, they can set favorites and all that, but they shouldn't need to curate lists or scan a hashtag that's got a billion posts, just a fire hose of junk coming at it. They need to do a better job of finding, probably algorithmically, finding the best tweets from the best people on a hot subject and exposing them to people so that people who are like watching a game, like any sporting event that's going on, could tune in and see this conversation and jump into it. Or an awards show, you know, the Academy Awards or some breaking news event that happens, show, you know, the Academy Awards, or some breaking news event

that happens, Ferguson, you know, all the stuff that happened in Ferguson, right? That's an example of that. Or presidential candidates or whatever, right? Twitter can be really good at stuff that's happening right now. And it's just really hard because it's like, the bottom line is, because that's what Twitter could do. My question is, what is Twitter doing? It looks like they've made some changes to, in some areas, like their abuse stuff seems to be way better than it was. Although there's more work to do there.

It seems like they made some headway there. But on their product, there are so many missing pieces. Like, I use the Twitter Mac app, mostly because it's got some features that they don't allow third party apps to do. So they're only in the Twitter Mac app, but it's bad. It's bad. The Twitter iOS app isn't great. The Twitter Mac app is atrocious. So it's like they took their ball and went home in terms of letting third parties do new features or support new features that they're not in the API, so they can't support them. And they limited their number of users and all of that.

And then they stopped development on the apps. So, um, but if you look at their service, it's similar. It's like, what have they done? What have they done to upgrade the service? What have they done to make it easier for people to discover stuff? It's still the same old Twitter in so many ways as it's been. And it's a shame because I get huge value out of Twitter. But that's what I keep coming back to is Twitter. What Twitter is best at is exposing interesting conversations and communities happening in real time about things that are going on.

And it's way too hard to tune into those. And searching a hashtag is not the answer. They need to take a lot of their metadata, a lot of things that they can understand about the content of individual tweets and who the people are who are tweeting them and what their background is. Some of that may be human curated, like on this topic, these are good people and some of it could be algorithmic. They just they need to do more of that. I think that's the number one thing, because then if you if you realize everybody is on Twitter because this thing is happening and Twitter is the place you go for that, that is going to open up user growth to Twitter where people are like, oh, man, that was really great. I need to do more stuff on Twitter.

your favorites and all of those things. And that I think is a, is a way to move forward. But right now it's just like, you know, the, the, the new, if you've tried to make a new user and Twitter and, and, and go through that process, it's awful. They do like auto file, follow things, but nobody's following you. And unless you can find friends, then you're like looking at a bunch of brand accounts and you could tweet something, but you're just tweeting it out into oblivion and nobody will ever see it. And that's a terrible experience. No wonder people abandoned their Twitter accounts. It's got to be better. Have you heard of Project Lightning? I read that.

Well, I read that Verge story. Yeah. So Project Lightning is a new initiative that Twitter is working on. And it is actually to address some of the things that you've spoken about. So basically, Project Lightning is a new initiative by Twitter to collect tweets and related media around certain events and stories. So part of it is going to be human curated, which I don't even know how they're going to do that, but they'll find a way. And part of it will obviously be algorithmically curated. And the human curation stuff will be around big events.

So, for example, the Verge, Casey Newton at the Verge, did a Q&A with Twitter's head of product, Kevin Wheel. And he gave the example of the VMAs, right, the Video Music Awards. And said, basically, imagine an event-based follow. This is something that they're considering. Yes. So being able to follow what's happening at the VMAs

just while they're happening. So it will break out of the rules of the current timeline to show you content that you're interested in, not from people you follow necessarily, but it allows you to be connected to what is happening right now in a

certain place. This is a very, I mean, it makes so much sense to be able to do that. Yeah. Follow an event, follow a concept, follow a brand and not like their account. But like, if I want to follow the San Francisco Giants conversation, that's not the same as saying, follow SF Giants. If I want to follow the V giants. If I want to follow the VMAs, I want to follow the VMAs, not the MTV VMA account. Right. And Twitter. So it's good that they're talking about this. They need to do this, right? They need to, they need to finally do something resembling anything because yes, I think it's very clear that these are things that they could do. They've got all this great data and all these great conversations.

And yet they're mired in this concept of which I mean, the original power of Twitter is this asymmetric. You follow me. I don't have to follow you, but you can still talk to me. That's all good. But I feel like they've done nothing to change that in or add to it in like its entire existence. And it's this this absolutely has to happen. You should be able to follow abstract things and like an awards show or a team or a candidate

or a cause and see the conversations going on. Well, it definitely seems like they are on this path, right? That they are on this path, right? That they are making this change. And Ben Thompson, again, wrote another great piece about stuff like this, but also about Jack Dorsey. Because currently, Dorsey is the interim CEO. And the word on the street is that he wants the position. But Twitter, the company, the board, is hesitant for him because of the fact that he is the CEO of Square as well. And they want him to be all in on Twitter, which I can totally understand. The CEO of two companies seems a little excessive.

But apparently he wants the job again. And he did some good Q&A stuff around the earnings call. And one of the things that he's talking about is potentially changing. So this is a quote from the call. You will see us to continue to question our reverse chronological timeline and all of the work it takes to build one by

finding and following accounts through experiences like While You Were Away and Project Lightning which launches this fall our goal is to show more meaningful tweets and conversations faster whether that's logged in or out of Twitter Dulcy and then Ben Thompson adds a bit of commentary to this

Dulcy noted later that the traditional reverse chronological timeline Twitter. Dulcey, and then Ben Thompson adds a bit of commentary to this from his article. Dulcey noted later that the traditional reverse chronological timeline would still be available, but he again made clear that the strictly chronological timeline wasn't gospel. And then goes on to say it's doubtful that anyone else would say so, so brazenly. Right. I mean, I don't think they're going to throw away what makes Twitter, Twitter, but they need to do other things, right? Like it's not enough. For some of us, it may be enough, but it's not enough for Twitter to grow and find other people and allow other people who are not us to get something out of Twitter. I think. And I think that that is, I think it's very wise. I think that they need to be thinking

of the fact that, like you said, when you start a twitter account you you're basically the like a a person with a megaphone in a town square because you're just shouting into oblivion well no you're you're an invisible person right i mean nobody follows you you follow everybody and and and that leads to this passive sort of experience where now you're seeing links on Twitter from brands or influencers or whatever. Right. And that's fine. But then when you have something to say, how does how does anyone know? How does anyone find you unless you tell your friends, hey, I'm on Twitter? on Twitter. How do you, you know, you can start posting things with hashtags and hope that the people who, you know, other than spam bots, though, how do they find you, they search for a hashtag, and they see you and all that. And maybe you don't want to be part of the conversation. But I think it is a problem with with Twitter that you can't, you can't as easily find other people, you know, building that social graph, or whatever you want to call it. And, you know, and yet all you're

getting out of it is this sort of like brand stream, which is not that interesting either. So, you know, creating these aggregate streams is a good idea. And, you know, this is one of those cases where they collide with Facebook a little bit. But I think the difference is Facebook is, you know, it's your family tree and your map of social connections from high school and college and your business world, maybe. And Twitter is about, like, stuff that's happening right now.

And that gives Twitter some advantages over Facebook because Facebook's really not about that. What do you think about Jack Dorsey? I think he says a lot of the right things. I think he cares about twitter which is important and you'd think you'd think that that would be a ridiculous statement to make but when you look at the some of the people who have worked at twitter and are on the board of twitter who don't use twitter um and ben thompson mentioned this is like twitter has twitter has a board problem which is it's like former CEOs

who don't like each other and a board that doesn't use Twitter. Yep. And you know what? You don't have to be a fan of X to be the CEO of the company that produces X. But it sure helps. It sure helps to have a vision

about what your product should be based on your knowledge of and love of the service, based on knowing the power of what you have. And it baffles me. As somebody who is very enthusiastic about Twitter and what Twitter could be and has been a fan of Twitter all along, it does infuriate me that they have this board of directors that just doesn't care. They're there because they've got money. they're there because they invested in it you know they're there because they're buddies with somebody who put them on the board but uh these are these do not seem to be people who actually get what twitter's about and is it any wonder that twitter has been adrift for the last few years and i mean i i try and i try to be understanding and not harsh

about so many of these things in the early early years, Twitter really struggled with scale, the fail whale and all of that. But lately, they just seem completely adrift. And it's not that they don't have talented people there working on the product. And yet we see so little in terms of innovation in the product. And it's just sort of like drifting there. And I got to think that part of that comes from the fact that there are a lot of people in influential places at Twitter who just don't get Twitter. And that's a problem. That's a problem. So I will say that about about Dorsey is that he, he seems to know and love and understand the power of Twitter. And you know, you need people like that, because I am, I still think it's an incredibly powerful service with a lot of potential.

The amount of content that they've got behind the scenes, the things they know about what people are talking about, this is why their deals with broadcasters and other media companies are also kind of brilliant. It's like they know what people are talking about. And the more of that that they can get, the more data they've got. And not in a creepy way of like,

we're going to target you because you're talking about x but in an aggregate way like this is what the world cares about right now that's that could be really powerful so they've got a lot going for them they've got a lot of assets but you know they gotta they gotta do something with it and that's the frustration is that they is that i feel like so much of so much of the product has just been kind of sitting there. So, you know, that's what I think about Dorsey, is he cares and that's a good start. And, you know, if somebody, you can point at somebody else and say, well, this person really has a great idea about Twitter, then that would be great.

But, you know, I don't know enough about who else is out there. But, you know, I don't know. It's so frustrating to talk about twitter because there's so much good about twitter and there's so much bad about twitter um as a user but as a business that's that you know it's the same story i think which is so much potential so much power um and you know what are they doing with it i like the jobs-esque story with Dorsey. Sure, sure. He comes back having learned some lessons about and gotten some perspective. Well, this would be like his third time coming back.

Yeah, yeah. But like, you know, he got ousted, well, then he ousted Ev when he came back again. But like this guy, I mean, he created it. Like it was his original idea, although the technology that he created was something very different. It was like a dispatch system. And they ended up turning it into Twitter.

For that history, actually, Kevin Rose did an incredible interview with Jack Dorsey a few years ago. I'll find it and put it in the show notes where he talks about like where his original idea was and how it ended up moving along. But I think that he's very, very interesting, and as a character, I quite like him. He does some peculiar things,

but it continues to be quite interesting, and he seems very smart. I really love this one quote from him on this earnings call. He says, our goal is to show more meaningful tweets and conversations. If we meet these expectations, Twitter will become the first thing

people check every morning to start the day. I mean, that's an obvious thing because it's what I do. It's what you do. It's what basically everybody listening to the show does. But we understand Twitter and have a different feeling about Twitter because we, as listeners of this show,

we get out of Twitter what Twitter wants the world to get from Twitter, which is such a weird thing because we are very against a lot of the things that the company does because the company is trying to wrestle back what they let go. It was a wild west, right and and anybody could do anything um and now we none of us well a lot of people do but i think a lot a lot a lot of people listening to the show do not use the official apps um they use third-party apps and i think that that is a normal thing which is you know when i ask you like what do you think twitter should do as a company?

It's very different to what would you like to see them do. I mean, for me, I would like them to give a bit more control back to the third parties, but with conditions. The conditions are you need to show our advertising.

And it's not necessarily what I want, but it's what I would take that trade off, you know? Yeah, that was a huge miscalculation. That was a huge miscalculation on their part. Like Twitter is not going to make it or break it as a company based on forcing people into the official client and onto the web.

And again, I would feel more sympathy for them if they hadn't completely abandoned. They killed all the Mac as a Mac user who uses Twitter. They killed all the Mac clients and they didn't keep up their end of the bargain by having their client be good. It's not good. It's buggy and it's just, it's not good. And, but it's got features that they've withheld from everybody else. It's like, first thing I would do if I ran the zoo at Twitter would be to set, to go back to third party, uh, app developers and say, look, like you just said, uh, we're, you, you are going to get access to everything that we've got. got, but you have to

display it in these ways because we don't want to be in the business. We know there are different kinds of users. We don't want to be in the business of having to create the world-class window into our platform on every single platform that's out there. It's too much work for us. It's not a priority for us. Or I would say why we need to make every Twitter app world-class on all the platforms, one or the other. But right now it's neither because, you know, their, their apps are kind of embarrassing and, and they've closed off the third parties. So, so that would be, you know, absolutely at the top of the list. I would also embrace their existence as a way of link collecting and sharing. And personally, I would say you either should buy Nuzzle or you should do Nuzzle.

I don't know how they haven't bought them. I just don't understand. Twitter feeds are an amazing way of mining news links, just making a newspaper out of the conversation of the moment. And it's all in the data. And, you know, Nuzzle is using that data to build its product. And it's a really good product for, you know, nerds who know about Nuzzle. But that could be for everybody. I mean, that's another way where twitter you could

surface what people are reading and the conversations about what they're reading and do all sorts of kind of amazing things but again where is it where is it it's not there oh twitter yeah it's a it's a world i know there was a time when i really complained about uh i i always thought one area for them was, was for groups because Twitter, um, now they have group DMS, but they're like, you know, instant messages. I always felt like Twitter would be really great if you could make posts that, um, were constrained to a certain number of people. Like I could say, I want to send this tweet, but I only want to send it to people who follow

me or only people I follow or, or only send it to. Yeah. Like, like the Google plus circles only send it to, yeah, like, like the Google plus circles only send it to my colleagues in the technology industry. You know, the tech, tech journalists, I only want them to see this, not everybody, just them. And they, they missed that chance. And, and maybe that was a bad fit for them. They, they made the decision not to go down there. And I think about it now and I think, well, it's too late. That's what Slack is for. and I think about it now and I think well it's too late that's what slack is for and uh slack is not quite a perfect analog but it is it is a place and we have like a relay slack and I have an incomparable slack I mean there's lots of different different slacks that people

are in and the fact is there are conversations I don't have on twitter that I might have had on twitter before but it's easier for me to have them in Slack because they're really conversations for a very, that I want to have with a smaller group of people. And, and I don't need to have those in public because although I could have them in public, it's easier and more targeted for me to have them in Slack where there's a smaller group of people. It's going to, there's going to be less noise. There's going to be less kind of stuff that I have to go through that's not helpful. And I can go more directly to a smaller group of people who are the people I really want to talk about about a particular issue. And so that's sort of gone from the Twitter agenda for me now is, is that sort of thing. And on one level, that's a shame, because that's, you know, that's dark

social, that's the that's private social, that and one of the things I get out of Twitter is interaction, interacting with people who I don't follow follow but they can always talk to me and so those people are great the people i know from twitter i meet them at events and i'm like hey from the internet from twitter i recognize you from your avatar or whatever right i love that and the shame of of twitter kind of like uh saying we don't want to give you control over that is that is that you know some of that goes to the the dark social stuff some stuff that that might have been a little less limited before but you know in the end i feel like slack is actually really good at being what it's being and and that was not really down the middle of what

twitter wanted to be and so maybe it's all for the best that those have sort of split off um i think the real-time water cooler stuff is a much better fit for for twitter's strengths right now and their volume of content i think it's going to be one to watch i mean i think in my mind i want dorsey in because i'm interested in him but i think there's this nagging part of my brain in the back that's like maybe he'll be the one to give us the control back that we want because you know he was there in first instance, but it's a different company now. And I would be very surprised if they ever give anything back to the third parties.

It really does just feel like a matter of time until the API access is shut down. Yeah, it's a shame because, like I said, I feel like their product is... First off, the nerds who are using the third-party clients are not going to restrain their growth to have those in existence there um but again i think there's a contract among uh or between twitter and its users which is if you're gonna if you're if you're the only game in town your game needs to be good and it's just not i mean

that that is the bottom line is there may be, I don't actually know, there may be some very nice people working on the Twitter app for Mac, and they may be just as frustrated about it as everybody who uses it. But it's just not that, trust me, I use it every day. It's just not that good. And I would use Twitterific on my Mac if I could, but the only version of Twitterific that runs on the mac is really old and not very useful and that's because of all of the the developer limitations um yeah and i don't like before everybody pours in yes i do have tweetbot and i i don't like it and i use twitter even though it's not very good um but the point stands this is an issue for tweetbot too they're going to run out of users too

and they don't have access to the API or they have stuff that is not in the API either so they can't access it. So, I don't know. I think you're right. I think realistically Twitter's not going to open it up, but I would. I think it's good for Twitter's service to have as many different

views into it as possible as long as they're following the rules for whatever Twitter is doing to make money. Yeah. It doesn't make sense to me why they just give us the ads. Plus you get innovation that way. And maybe that leads to Twitter hiring people or buying technology that improves the service. That was always the saddest. Yeah. That's always the saddest story about Twitter is the Twitter, you know, so many of the key features of Twitter were built by the community. And, you know, and at some point they said, well, we're done with you. We don't need you anymore. And the problem with that is if they had immediately turned the corner and done amazing stuff themselves, that would have been like, oh, okay, I see why they needed to do that.

But instead they took their ball and they didn't go home. They just took their ball and they like deflated the ball and sat there on the deflated ball. I'm going to just run that one into the ground. And that is the shame of Twitter is that they thanked the community for everything that it had done to contribute to their success. They picked up all these features and said, yeah, this is great. We're going to, this is awesome, but now we need to go our own way and do this ourselves. And they proceeded to do nothing. That's the problem I have with Twitter turning its back on the third parties come on it is this company that's foundations are so weird like it's the logo like came from the idea of somebody else right yeah fundamental idea of the bluebird the at reply you know the dm yeah hashtag tweeting hashtags hold it none of it none of it is was created by

twitter the company yeah and then they took it which is fine because everyone was building on their own service but then they shut it off to the rest of the world again which you know is so it's just so strange so very very strange and again if they if they if that was a moment for them to say we got it from here, that's fine, except they didn't do anything. No. It was just a power play to shut everybody else out because they were afraid.

I mean, again, they got to build a business. I'm not saying they don't need to build a business. I'm saying perhaps you could have built your business with the people who had helped make your business interesting and worth investing in instead of saying, you're out, we're going to do it ourselves now. But if you're going to, you got to put up or shut up at some point. And that's the problem is that they, you know, they haven't. I look at Twitter and I think if I could have gone forward five years in time to today from 2010 and seen Twitter

of today, I would be so disappointed. Like that's it. That's all they've done in five years. And maybe there's a lot of work happening behind the scenes and I just don't understand. But as a user, it's like, you know, it's just very disappointing. So I don't know. I hope, I hope they turn the corner. I think they've still got amazing power. And I love that we're having these conversations and they're talking about Project Lightning. And I feel like, I feel like there is I feel like there are good things ahead for Twitter because we've gotten to this point. It's just a shame that it had to get to this. But I just hope that in another five years' time, we look back at this time and being like, oh, man, I'm glad they went through that.

Yeah, it's hard not to look at the reign of Dick Costolo and just think that was a waste of time and totally the wrong guy. And, you know, he made great contributions, like just putting an ad at the top of the app. Wow. Good job. Way to go. Like, where's the vision and the leadership there? Obviously, it wasn't there. Maybe that's the third act. Maybe that this is the third act. Maybe.

Should we get on some Ask Upgrade? I think it's a great time for that. Perfect. This week's episode and Ask Upgrade is brought to you as well by our friends over at Fracture, a great company who make a great product. Fracture is here to help rescue your images from the dark corners of a timeline or hidden away inside an album on a hard drive and let you display them in your home, in your office, wherever you want with great,

beautiful colors. And you want to have them in front of you all the time. This is what Fracture is here to help you do. And they do it in a really interesting way. Super simple. You just go to FractureMe.com, you upload a picture, you choose the size that you want, and then Fracture will print this photo directly onto a piece of glass for you. And it produces stunning results with colors that look really, really great. They pop. This isn't like just putting a picture in a frame. This is something totally different. It is a completely new way to display your favorite images. And once you receive your fantastic glass photo print from Fracture, which will be shipped to you from their great team in Florida who hand check all of them, you'll want to mount it or display it to the world.

And it's really easy to do that because if you get one of their little square sizes, you can choose to have a little stand sent to you so you can just put it on your desk, which is really nice. Or maybe if you use one of their rectangle sizes or if you use a bigger size one of the bigger square sizes they will put everything that you need right in the box they apply a lovely backing mount like a foam backing mount so nothing gets damaged and then they put a screw in the box as well so you can put it in the wall it's as simple as that no frame needed because it is the frame itself right that piece of glass it's a edge to edge is this image on this beautiful piece of glass for you. And it really, really looks very, very special. I have a few fractures of my own here.

I know Jason has some. You've heard him speak about his podcast artwork. I have podcast artwork. I have pictures as well. I bought them as gifts. It's a really great order process. They package it super tightly so nothing gets damaged. They all come out fantastic and it really does give new life to some of these images that are otherwise just hidden away. So you can get fracture prints in five different rectangle sizes that go all the way up to 21 by 28 inch and they are three square sizes as well. They are great gifts for family and friends. It's a perfect type of thing to buy for people for birthdays or for anniversaries or just to say thanks for something.

And they start at just $15, so you're not going to break the bank. You can also help support this show if you use the code UPGRADE at checkout. It's going to get you 10% off, and it will also help us out, which is fantastic. So go to fractureme.com and get started. Thank you so much to Fracture for their support of this show. Yay! So Carl has written in, and Carl wants to know, is there a way to edit a logged workout activity in the activities app on the Apple Watch?

Carl forgot to end one, and now he's messing up his times. I've had this exact problem. I forgot that too. I just did that the other day. I forgot to end one, and I had a really great day, it turns out, because I had a bike ride that went on for like five hours but didn't go anywhere I don't think there is a way to do it in the same way that I can't find a way to like for example I went swimming yesterday and there isn't really a way to enter I was swimming for 15 minutes and right right I'm not I'm not uh I'm not Craig Hockenberry I don't wear my Apple Watch when I swim uh because I'm scared even though I know it'll be okay I'm not Craig Hockenberry. I don't wear my Apple Watch when I swim because I'm scared, even though I know it would be

okay. I'm still scared of it doing that. So I don't do that. But no, I don't think there is a way to edit them unless you've come across anything that I've not found. I haven't. I haven't seen that either. You're just going to...

Sorry, Carl. Carl, you're just going to have to accept, you know, and show off to the world that that day you did 17 hours of exercise. Rajiv would like to know, do you think Apple will eventually add more types of workout to the workout app on the watch, such as swimming? So I wanted to group these two together because I thought they went quite nicely. I think that additional workouts will come with additional sensors. that additional workouts will come with additional sensors. I think that Apple have probably included most of the workouts that they can,

that they can get accurate data for with the sensors that they have. So maybe as the sensors are tweaked, the software behind them is tweaked or more sensors are added, they'll be able to more efficiently understand different types of workouts. I would like some more intelligence, though, that they could add to their software to say, you know, basically figuring that you're doing a workout. Like you get some of that with the motion coprocessor in the iPhone where it'll log your activity even though you didn't say I'm starting an activity now. I think the watch might potentially be able to do that, too, especially if it's talking to the phone and it's looking at your heart rate and it's looking at your, uh, it would be nice if the watch could kick into gear and say, Oh, you're doing a workout and

you didn't start a workout. I'm going to, I'm going to go into workout mode now. Cause I can tell your heart rate is elevated and we're moving fast. And you know, this is what's happening now. Um, and, and also have a little more like, um, like I have to say I'm starting a run or I'm starting a walk, but if i run with walking and then running and then walking and then running it's like weird that i guess that's a run but it's one of those things i think it could be more intelligent it's early yet i feel like there's a lot more that they could do swimming is a is a tricky one because i think they don't want to encourage people to swim with their apple watch despite craig hockenberry um but i would

like to be able to tell it that I went swimming and it just does the calculation. Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. I'd like to be able to program. I wrote something about this the other day. I'd like to be able to program a workout that's more complex too,

to say, like I said, like, you know, run five minutes, walk two minutes, run five minutes and then have it tell me. I think in the end, that'll just be a watchOS 2 app that'll do that. I mean, there are some watch apps that'll do that now, but you have to have your phone with you,

and I would love to be able to just do that on the watch and say, I'm going to go for a run. I'm just going to wear my watch. It's going to tell me when to run and when to walk. And that'll come. It's early days. This is the first version. So I think it's going to get a lot better as time goes on.

They're just, it's going to get i think it's going to get a lot better as time goes on they're just it's early yet indeed long life in that product yet uh chris would like to know uh now that windows 10 is out should chris upgrade his boot camp setup so i've seen people uh i think i saw james thompson saying James Thompson saying that he put Windows 10 on his boot camp partition and basically it wasn't recognized in his graphics card. So I think my understanding of this is Apple has to do some stuff for boot camp. Yeah, I have a boot camp partition ready to go. I was really looking forward to upgrading to Windows 10 and upgrading whatever Apple is going to provide and all that. And then I installed El Capitan and

found lots of problems with the beta to the point where I have to record podcasts using Yosemite. So I had to wipe my boot camp partition and instead install Yosemite on it. So I have some refuge to go in when I'm recording podcasts because there are some audio bugs in the betas of El Capitan. And so, alas, I will be waiting until later to see Windows 10. But I'm looking forward to it because I never really understood previous versions of Windows between, you know, here and XP. I just was baffled by some of the UIi choices they made so it sounds like that's a lot better in windows 10 so that's what i'm going to do is my boot camp but yeah that those updates should be coming yeah yeah and uh i'm interested i mean i've toyed i looked up how much does a surface

cost it's way more expensive than what i want to toy around with but i'm interested to try out windows 10 but it's just not easy to do it. And I'm not that keen on doing bootcamp, to be honest. Yeah, I bought it because there was a point where I was trying, I think I've given up on trying this, but I was trying to figure out how to stream Total Party Kill on Twitch.

And that's very hard to do from a Mac if you are trying to integrate, you know, your microphone audio and the audio of people in the game and the video all mixed together and then streamed out to Twitch. There are some programs on the Mac that theoretically do it, but I've had very little luck getting those to run. And there's apparently a very easy way to do that in Windows. So I gave some thought to doing that. It's just rebooting into Windows when we play Total Party Kill game and do all the streaming in there. And I think I've just come down to the idea that we'll use Google Hangouts on air.

And then I make a video that shows because the the hangouts don't show our maps that we play on but i just capture the my screen locally of uh of the map and then after the show is over i edit those together and so you can see us and you can see the map and i just post that to youtube later so um i'm not sure whether i've i i may have just given up on doing Twitch streaming, but that was the impetus for that was being able to boot into Boot Camp and use that approach to get the streaming working. And I just sort of never got it working and got really frustrated by Windows. And I'll go back. I'll go back once El Capitan is stable enough for me to wipe the Yosemite. I'll go back and install it.

El Capitan is stable enough for me to wipe the Yosemite, I'll go back and install it. Richard has asked, why don't we consider moving to something like Adobe Creative Cloud instead of sticking with Logic? For me, I mean, I'm not really sure why Richard asked this. Maybe we complain about Logic all the time. No, I followed up with Richard and basically he was thinking about what he wanted toard and he basically he was he was um thinking about what he wanted to get and he was he was wondering why we use logic and not uh the adobe creative cloud stuff okay for audition basically for me i have spent some time learning

logic and i'm still learning new things um in logic i'm learning new tools like for example i think i've finally gotten compressors working in my brain uh so i'm i'm starting to roll us out in places funny thing is you know this is one of the things people say to you you need to use compressors you need to use compressors and then you start using them and nobody mentions it yeah like you know anyway um so i don't i struggle with some of this stuff it doesn't a lot of it doesn't like gel in my brain like for example why why am i turning a dial oh yeah well the compressor the the new and that's the new one the new compressor plug-in in logic is terrible because it's skeuomorphic i don't know what is happening i mean it's powerful but it's all these dials that you're turning i use a different compressor

these days that i bought a different voice compressor and it's just got a slider it's great once i get a handle on this one maybe i'll ask you to point that one point that one out to me but anyway all this is to say say, audio editing and audio engineering is nowhere near my level of expertise in what I think that I'm good or not good at. And I kind of fumble my way through a lot of it and just produce a show that is listenable, effectively. And sound good.

I think our shows sound good, but there's stuff that sounds better. But hey-ho. I try and do what I can with it. But all of this is to say, I don't want to spend many many many hours again trying to learn another piece of software it's not that's not cost effective for me um well it's not logic doesn't most of what i want it's not also i mean like I had Logic for a year before I actually started to use it. I was using GarageBand for everything.

And at least, because I knew, because oftentimes when I was editing The Incomparable, especially, it's like Saturday morning and my family is sitting around waiting for me to be done so that we can go do something. And under those time pressures, the last thing I want to do is spend, take something that's going to take me two hours and have it take eight hours because I'm going to learn a new tool. And so it didn't happen for a long time. Now, when it did happen, Logic is so much better than GarageBand that it saved me time. The amount of time I invested in learning it, that was paid back in a matter of weeks because I'm able to edit so much faster. But you talk about something like Logic and Audition, they're different. And even if one of them is slightly better than the other, they're different.

And so there's a huge investment to get probably minimal gain, unless there are very specific things that one tool does that another doesn't do that you could use a lot. that another doesn't do that you could use a lot. And the method that I've got of editing logic uses some very specific concepts, essentially specific to logic that work for me. And so I would have to come up with a new way and not have any idea of whether in the end, audition would be a net benefit or not. So that's a lot harder.

I have tried audition and I could not wrap my head around it. Logic, although it also was a bit baffling at first, was, I think, more understandable for me because I had spent time in Final Cut and the interfaces are similar. And so I was able to kind of intuit from that a little bit in ways that I can't from audition. I know people who swear by audition. Chris Breen, now an Apple employee, so he would probably never say this publicly, but at the time when he was working for Macworld, he swore by audition. He loved it, but he comes from a musical background and I think it worked with the way that he, the way that he approached sound from his background as a musician. And it's got some

features. It's got some noise removal tools that are really great that just don't and and some waveform editing stuff that just doesn't exist in logic and i don't know why it's not in logic um and so i you know i have to had to buy sound soap because logic doesn't have a noise removal tool of the level that i need and audition my understanding does the other problem and this is something that Richard and I talked about, is you can buy Logic for $200 and eventually there'll be an OS update that breaks Logic, but probably not for a long time. You buy it, you own it. If you want to use Audition, it's $20 a month for as long as you want to use it. So even in even in a year, you're spending more on audition than you are on logic. That said, if you're somebody with a creative cloud membership,

and you or your employer is spending whatever it is $40 a month for all the all the creative cloud apps, well, then you've got audition as part of that. And so you, you know, you can try that out now instead of spending $200 on logic. But for me, I look at that and think, you know, this is $250 a year and this one's $200 all in and you own it. And maybe in, maybe in two or three years, you'll buy another copy of it, but you'll be ahead of the game. So it's, it's cheaper and you own it and you're not getting charged monthly for it. And I like that about logic too. I do pay for Photoshop and Lightroom, but that's $10 a month. If Audition, if Logic was only available for $20 a month,

I would do it. I rely on it that much. So, you know, in the end, you can try Creative Cloud apps. So you might want to try out Audition if you want to. And if the idea of spending $20 a month for it doesn't bother you. Like I said said people swear

by it but uh i'm with you mike i'm self-taught and i've gotten really good at logic so it would be very hard to switch now and uh see i think see much benefit nick would like to know uh if we use cases on our ipads if so what do we If not, why not? I use a smart cover because to me, like for me in my mind, iPads come with smart covers, like they are intertwined. It's like part of the product. It's just such a smart design. You just protect the screen, you close it and it locks the thing, you open it and it unlocks the thing like that just feels like a part of the product in and of itself to me and it has done for like since that was the ipad 2 they introduced them so i always buy smart covers i don't have any other type of case or bag or anything else on my ipad uh same here same here i have the smart cover my

wife has the smart case, which she likes. She doesn't like, she likes having something around the back as well. So, um, she can set that down and she's not going to feel the, like the metal on whatever she's setting it down on. It's going to be, it's going to be completely wrapped in it. That ever so slight crunching sound. Yeah, it does. It can be a little disconcerting, right? Although you can always put it screen down at that point, but, but I'm with you. I really like the smart cover. I like being able to take it off when I want to. And then it makes everything lighter. And then I can just snap it back on. And then we're good to go. And that works for me for my iPad. case and so is julian actually on his ipad mini and uh i like them you know i know it's just like it's the apple case so how boring is that but it's the best case though it is i like it yeah

and they're pretty reliable they're actually even because since my son has one and he is a 10 year old boy and is just a just a cloud of dirt and sticky you know goo from yogurt and and ice cream oh my god oh my god um you can wash those things even like the leather case put some like put a little soap on the inside on the felt on the inside and just like wash it in in water and then leave it out somewhere to dry i've done that several times it actually cleans up really well it's kind kind of amazing. So even with a filth monster like my son, it's still a resilient case. Poor Julian. And last question.

He doesn't listen to the show. Let's hope so. Have Kindles and e-readers reached an ideal point or are there new features and improvements that could still be made? What a great question because i mean yeah i'm not i'm not massively interested in these things as you are and i would say that yes they are done that's it um i uh i think there are new features and improvements that can absolutely be made i think the E-ink screens can get a lot better.

They can be even more contrast and higher resolution so that they are completely indistinguishable from paper. They are still distinguishable from paper now. They're way better than they used to be, but they could be better. The need to refresh and blink the screen in order to wipe up the e-paper. There's a lot more I think e-paper can do. I believe in these products. I think until you get to the point where you've got tablets that are not just light, but can solve the glare problem, and Apple's gotten better at glare, but still, you know, reading, if you want to see Kindles, go to a pool at a resort and you

will see Kindles because those are people who are reading outside in the sun and they are using a Kindle. You'll see some iPads. Those people will probably be under umbrellas because glare is still a problem. I love dedicated reading devices like this. They're much less distracting. I never want to flip over to Twitter or even if I do want to flip over to Twitter, I can't because it's just a Kindle. It doesn't do that. And I like that about it. So I think there's more that can be done. But

I don't know necessarily that there's a huge leap to be made on those devices anymore. I think it's just going to be some screen iteration. And Amazon could write way better software. Their typography could get better. They promised that and they haven't delivered it yet. The Amazon software is still pretty lousy. So somebody, Amazon or others, could make it a more pleasant reading experience. And I feel like they could integrate web stuff better. I mean, I'd love to see more apps on it that can do things like Instapaper or

integrate things like Instapaper, where it's much easier for me to send a story I like from the web to my Kindle. I mean, you can do some of that, but I feel like that could be much better integrated into the software where, you know, you could save things for later and they all just kind of pile up intelligently in the e-reader. So there's stuff. There's stuff. But it's not going to be a wild innovation fest in the e-reader world.

But I still love my Kindle and I read it every day. I only ever use a Kindle when I go on beach holidays and I don't use those very often. Yeah, but it's good. It's really good at the beach. Well, it's perfect for it because I can't read anything on my iPhone. No, you can't. It's glare. That's one of these things that I think that Apple and its partners are going to have to work really hard on,

which is better ways of fighting glare on these devices that we use outside every day. Because they need to be brighter in and and more readable outside they they still have a that's still an issue that's still one of the features that is uh problematic on on phones and tablets i think because you could you could get a lot of the way there but the phone would last like an hour right right or it would look weird i mean some of it is like they could code it and make it really great for outside use and then you'd go inside and you'd be like oh this looks awful yeah there's more there's more to be done there i think materials wise um as and components wise perhaps

to to make things more readable outside but that's the that's the nice thing about the the kiddo that's why i always thought that that uh that uh weird android phone with the e-ink screen on the back was such a cool idea yeah just because like you could you know you've got this like super high contrast thing that you can see when you're out and about and then uh you know it's not it's not great resolution it's black and white but it you know you can see stuff on it when you're out i don't know there. There's more. There's always more. Except for this show, Mike. There's no more of this show. Except for this last little part

where I would like to thank our sponsors, Fracture, Casper, and Linda for supporting us this week. Don't forget you can always send in your follow-up questions, concerns, and many more things via Twitter and use the hashtag AskUpgrade to do that. It's a great way we can collect all that stuff in. It makes it very easy for me and Jason. If you want to find us

both on Twitter, we've been talking about it today. It's very easy to do that. I am at I Mike, I am YK E and Jason is at J Snell, J S N E double L and Jason writes over at six colors.com. And of course we mentioned them as well as the great shows on RelayFM you can find more great shows at TheIncomparable.com as well where you can get your pop culture, sci-fi and many other fixes met over at The Incomparable

all the great shows in all the great places thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade and we'll be back next time until then, say goodbye Mr. snell i hope everybody has a good week and we'll see you next week