Upgrade - 491: The 2023 Upgradies

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

From RelayFM, welcome to the 10th Annual Upgradees Awards. This evening's proceedings are brought to you by our broadcast partners, Electric, TextExpander, Factor, and Vitally, simulcast from London, England england and mill valley california i am one of your hosts mike hurley and joining me is my co-host and yours jason snell jason welcome back to the upgradies thank you mike hurley it's a delight to be back it's hard to believe it's the 10th annual upgradies it's hard to believe that just 10 years ago well nine years ago i guess this is the 10th starting the 10th year just nine years ago it's hard to believe that just 10 years ago, well, nine years ago, I guess.

This is the 10th. We're starting the 10th year. Just nine years ago. It's easy to believe 10. Just nine years ago, you tried to call it the first annual Upgradies. And I was laughed out of the podcast. And now look at us now, you know?

Look at us now. Look at us now. Who would have thought it? Look at us now. But here we are. So I will mention right now, you can always go to Upgradeys.com where you will find the winners

of all previous Upgradeys and all of the, what will be by the end of this evening, the all 10 Upgradeys. Now in many award shows, there are the pre-awards, the pre-show awards that happened before, sometimes referred to as the technical awards.

And I would like to, if you would give us a moment, I would like to honor our technical award winners for the upgradies i just it's funny i was watching a video this weekend um in which alex horn the co-host of the wonderful series taskmaster was on the great british baking show a uh a charity version of it and they were doing the technical challenge and he asked the i thought very perceptive question is anything positive when described as technical right because and i think this is true that most most of the things when it's like it's it's technically technical it's not actually positive it's it's a negative but you know what is the technical awards the technical awards are positive

because uh they're just awarding people for doing uh great technical things indeed so we have this is the first time we're doing this but i thought we have our technical award winners okay for web design of upgrade east.com zach knox for artwork jd davis music, the one and only Chris Breen. Of course. For audio editing, Jim Metzendorf. Video editing, Chip Sudduth. And for social media, Jamie Snell. Yep.

Yep. No nepotism around here. Just a well-won award. No, these are, well, I mean, they're really just a clever way of doing the credits, but we're getting to the end of the year, so thank you to everybody who makes the upgrade ease and upgrade possible every week. Should we get to our very first category? Let's do it. We're going to start with best overall iOS app. I will start off from the upgradgradians votes, as we do every year.

So we put out the call a number of weeks ago to the Upgradians to vote and make their nominations known. With 5.9% was Flighty, 7.9% was Ivory, and 9.1 was carrot weather i love the choices by the upgradians here um because i agree with all of them yep those are great apps all of them are great i struggle with this category because first off we've covered a lot of these my favorite apps before and i try to think at least a little bit in that eddie award view of sort of like what was done, what was done recently. Um, you know, ivory is basically new,

although, I mean, it was tweet bot sort of, but not really. And I think I'm gonna, I mean, I'm torn between flighty and ivory. Honestly,

I think though I like last year we gave the award to flighty. Flighty is a not cheap, but excellent, excellent travel app, flight tracking app for when you're traveling. And they added, I mean, they had a great year last year. And then this year, they added more features. They just kept piling it on. Like, I cannot believe how much more they added this year. There's a watch complication.

There's, I just, and I use it all the time. Whenever I travel, I use it. I rely on it. And every detail is immaculate. Like it is in a lot of ways, the, I don't know if it's the platonic ideal of an iPad or an iPhone app, but like pretty close, pretty close. It is an app, you know, you get those apps in some niches and you're like, you know, this is good and it's useful and it's functional, but the developers have obviously

compromised or they've done something cause it's cross platform or they just didn't have the time or they just don't get it. None of that is true with flighty. They get it all of it. So I think I'm going to say flighty what do you think i look and i agree of all of the things that you've said about flighty right that it is uh we've already we awarded it last year and it's an expensive app and it's an amp for a very particular type of need but i think the last year has excelled the application way past last time right like our last awarding like the the addition and I will add the addition of the Apple Watch app into kind of like iOS app because we don't have a watch app category I think for good reason and so I'm going

to put it all in here and really this I think is to me a no-brainer. I think the app has come along leaps and bounds this year by adding that app, by improving live activities, by improving widgets. I think it was this year that they added the Friends Flight feature as well, where you can track Friends Flights and also share with specific people that every flight, say me and you were to share with each other every flight you or i take with each other see automatically without any sharing needed like to me this is a this is a pretty clear one that i i would say that flighty is the winner

this year yeah the one feature of flighty that i used um at thanksgiving that just blew me away is you can put in friends flights and mark them as friends' flights and you get different notifications and it's at a different place than your flights. But there's also a today view. And so on Thanksgiving, on the day before Thanksgiving, I was able to track my daughter flying in from Portland, my son flying in from Eugene, my sister-in-law flying in from Fresno, all to Denver, our flight from Oakland. And actually my mother-in-law's flight the day before was in there too from Orange County. And so on the day I was able to actually see everybody's status at a glance, in addition to getting all my flight info and having the live activity and having the watch app and the complication on the watch, I was able to, at a glance, see where everybody was. And then going out on the Saturday,

same thing in reverse. I was able to see where everybody was going, what gate they were, who was leaving first, who needed to get out now, who was delayed. And I know there are lots of apps that do this, but like the detail of the work that Flighty does is also pretty impressive. So I think it needs to be a repeat winner, honestly. Yeah, it's just an app that's continuing to improve. I don't know how much better they can make it. And like also like at this point, the subscription that we mentioned, I also really like they have uh passes that you can just buy like i want it for a week or something like that or a set election of flights instead of like just

paying an annual fee i pay an annual subscription because i use it enough and yeah it's wonderful so the best overall ios app of 2023 is flighty bringing into two total wins in this category and that means one away from a lifetime achievement award so we will move on now to the best newcomer ios app last year the winner was sticker drop which might be the fastest to Sherlocking that I think we may have seen. Because now this is just really just a feature of iOS. I thought it was wonderful at the time. Unfortunately, it is a feature of iOS now.

Yes. Well, I like it. Because it was badly done. I like the sticker part. The reactions part is the part that's... Yeah. Having easy access to stickers is fine um the emojis should be in the tab backs and that's just the bottom line but yes that was last year and

this year you know sorry sticker drop not gonna win this year the upgradians voted with 8.2 percent 2% for threads, 22.1% for call sheet, and 24.2% for ivory. What are you bringing to the table, Jason? Well, I like call sheet and ivory. I am going to bring two to the table. I'm going to bring ivory. So I was always a Twitterific person. And somebody was asking me the other day about not being on Twitter anymore. And I said, you know, I don't want to

be on Twitter anymore. And the only part of Twitter that I'm really on anymore is I literally have a link to my list of sports media because the sports media people are still there and they have not gone somewhere else. It is still the best place for me to see that stuff but that's it and i see it in a in a bookmark in a in a web browser window and then i close the window and that's my interaction with twitter now but the truth is the thing that prompted me to pull back from Twitter predated the continuing problems of Twitter and its owner really was they killed the third-party clients. And that means they killed TweetBot, but they also killed Twitterific, which was my favorite app, probably my most used app of all time. And then one day, it just stopped working. It was brutal, just brutal. They just turned it off. We all knew

it was coming. It was probably the right business decision. It's a rare, actually, probably right business decision, although I would argue that they could have used it to their advantage, but they didn't want to do that. Okay, whatever. So even though I'm not a TweetBot person, when the Mastodon clients were all being built, there were a lot of them.

A bunch of them are good. A bunch of them are not good. And Ivory came out, and it is the most polished, I would argue. And it certainly fits the way that I think about using social media. So I love it. And I use it all the time. Although I would say I use it a lot less than Twitterific because I'm using social media a lot less than I used to. But I still am using Ivory.

And I will say the reason that I am more engaged on Mastodon than I am on other social media is entirely down to the fact that Ivory is excellent on the iPad and the Mac. And most of those other social medias are excellent on the iPhone. And then on the Mac and on the iPad, you kind of have to put it in a web browser and it's just not as good. So I like Ivory. I also want to throw in a word for an app I reviewed, an app I tried. Final Cut Pro for the iPad came out this year. And it's good. They did a good job. I was very impressed with it. It is Final Cut Pro.

It is really functional. If you want to cut a video on an iPad, you can do it. And it works. I was very impressed. I was less impressed with Logic, although they made some changes there. But it's fundamentally a music app, and that's of less interest to me. But the Final Cut Pro implementation on an iPad, I really liked liked so i want to give it a shout out what about you mike okay so i i maybe i'm going to say something controversial about ivory so i use ivory it is my master done app of choice i struggle to award it best newcomer because it's tweetbot i know

they've done a lot to change it i know and it's been adapted and but it started out as tweetbot and i feel like other applications that could win this award did not start brand new quote unquote with 10 years worth of code base work right it's true because for me my favorite app this year is CallSheet. And I know Casey is one of my best friends, but CallSheet is excellent. Now, if you want to check my creds, I have not awarded this

to Casey's previous apps, right? It's not like I'm just giving this to him because he's my friend. CallSheet is one of the best apps that I've used this year, easy. The design is really good. I think it is an excellent use of the way that stock design can be adapted today. He's using a lot of standard elements, but he's also sprinkling in his own touches. And talking about touches

there are so many little details like the easy one to mention that everybody mentions but it's great is that you have the ability of course by the way in case you don't know it is an application that is used for looking up information about tv shows movies actors directors that kind of thing so replacement for services like IMDb. Me and Casey had used the IMDb app for years. We used to speak about it a lot. Neither of us really liked the app. He decided he was going to fix that, and he made CallSheet.

But one of the great features in CallSheet is you want to look up a TV show, but you want a specific piece of information about it. You can turn on a spoiler warning basically which will hide all the like how many episodes there are the titles of episodes so you could like go in and just check something about the first episode or whatever without spoiling it for yourself which is fantastic uh because i know i have spoiled myself and stuff like this all the time because you're like watching season what do you mean he's only in one episode exactly what do you yeah what do you mean he's only in season one yeah right yeah koshi is superb i would mention the um the age feature is is brilliant too where you're you're looking up not only like

who is that person but like how old were they when they made this movie he knows you are thinking that and so the app will say that they were 24 when this movie was made. It's like, oh, wow. They look younger or older or whatever, right? Yeah. You can very easily pin items if you want to. So you can kind of use the app as a simple, like, this is what I want to watch kind of application. If that's the kind of thing you're looking for and you don't use another app to do that, something like SoFa or SQL. And I just think it's really great like this is one of my favorite apps of the year um and i think that it does a really good job of

doing what it should do and lives up to the the premise and the promise that casey set out to which is like create something simple to get the information that you're looking for. Well, I was thinking I was just going to push this through on Ivory, but I think you're right that although Ivory is an impressive app, it's basically a runner-up in multiple categories probably. But I hear your words about CallSheet being completely new. And even though we know, Casey, it's a really good app.

I have recommended it to friends who have come back to me later without prompting and said, oh my God, that app is so great, which I think says something about that app. So sure, let's do it. Worthy winner of the best newcomer iOS app this year is CallSheet.

See, I feel like there was a better case for ivory and best overall, to be honest, than in best new. Yeah, you should have warned me that this was coming, but it's too late now. That's not how these awards go, you know what I mean? Nope, that's not how they go. They're very linear. That's how they go.

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3 headphones today for scheduling a meeting. Our thanks to Electric for their support of this show and RelayFM. Okay, so our next award is for the best overall Mac app. Last year, Audio Hijack picked up the win and a Lifetime Achievement Award. The Upgradians voted with 4.1% for Bartender, The Upgradians voted with 4.1% for Bartender, 5.1% for Obsidian, and 5.3% for MimeStream. Yeah, this is a tough one. So MimeStream came out as a 1.0 this year, but it had been in beta last year and in fact won our Newcomer Award last year, which made us have that whole question of like, is it a newcomer if it's not out yet? But it really was out well the funny thing jason uh it won the newcomer award in 2021 and 2022 oh it was it was two years in a row so technically it could win newcomer for a third time oh i'm excited

about that and be in the newcomer hall of fame now for being a newcomer three years in a row because it just come out and then it was in beta and now it's a 1.0 i'm excited about the possibility for that however i will pull myself up and say that that feels unfair to ivory for what i said about ivory to then give the same app three times in a row yeah it is so so um mindstream is great it is a great mac app, one of the things that I love about it, and I know we've talked about this the last few years in the newcomer category is I used, so it's a Gmail client. I used Mailplane for a long time, which was literally a web view of Gmail, but with Mac stuff injected into it. So like you could do drag and drop of attachments and like the keyboard shortcuts made it be like a Mac app. So it was like this really amazing kind of, what if we took Gmail and put enough Mac stuff around it that it felt like you weren't using a browser window anymore? Quite close, but not quite. And you get the advantages of all the speed and the features of Gmail. MimeStream, written by Neil MimeStream, as we do on this podcast.

Neil MimeStream used to be Neil Mail, Neil Apple Mail. He worked on Apple Mail. Neil Javeri, I think is his actual name. So he left and started a company and they said, we're going to build a Gmail client that is like a really good Mac client. And eventually they're probably going to do an iOS version, but a really good Mac client that's a Mac app. And people like me who are predisposed to dislike Apple Mail because I've used it and I don't like it, it throws off all of the stuff that I don't like about Apple Mail and actually just is good. And it's good.

It is a good Mac app. It's good. It is a good Mac app. There are so few core, not utilities or anything, but a core Mac app that does basic base level functionality and replaces the system app in a way that is dramatically better. And MimeStream does that. Now, it's not for everybody because it is at least at present just a Gmail client. But as somebody coming from Apple Mail and MailPlane, But as somebody coming from Apple Mail and Mailplane, we gave it two newcomer awards. It's a great, legitimately great Mac app. So I think it has to be in the consideration here, even though it's been much awarded, because it is so very good. Again, in an era where there are not a lot of great Mac apps anymore, right?

And the ones that are there, a lot of them mac apps anymore right and the ones that are there a lot of them are utilities right because that's a thing that is a space where you can modify the mac experience that's a space that fits um so i think it deserves serious consideration the other apps that i think we should consider here are bartender five speaking of great mac utilities which lets you simplify and modify your menu bar on your mac and it's a it's a venerable utility implied by the version five but big new features this year lots of more functionality and intelligence about it plus working around apple sort of trying to make it much harder to keep the bartender. Some theming settings which are nice too, some visual stuff and I think once again what Bartender

did this year is found really elegant ways to work around new problems that were introduced by macOS changing because this is one of those apps that is constantly playing reverse whack-a-mole. Yeah, it's the mole isn't it is it the mole

yes apple keeps trying to try to whack it yes all that like it's it's apple's doing things and it has to sneak around the hammer you know like apple doesn't even know it's playing whack-a-mole but they just know it's just a hammer that's hammering other stuff, and there's a mole living under there being like, watch out, hammer. That's an interesting idea in whack-a-mole. Is the native state of mack-a-mole the natural state of whack-a-mole that there's just a hammer that randomly appears and the moles evolve to avoid it? And it's not trying to actually whack the moles? The whacking of a mole is just an accident? Yep.

Interesting idea philosophically the other thing i wanted to mention that is not purely a mac technology or even a mac app and yet i'm going to mention it in this category because reasons is open ai whisper which is the amazing transcription engine that open ai built it has been implemented in a bunch of different ways. Apple just released a version of it. There's a guy on GitHub who did a version in C++. There have been multiple Mac apps wrapped around it, including Mac Whisper, but there are several. And it has been transformative for me on the Mac desktop this year. I just took the C++ version and put a shortcut around it, honestly.

But there are also apps that do it. And as a technology, it's amazing. Now, as an app, it's not, right? It's inside other apps. But I want to mention it because as a technology running on Mac hardware with that Apple Silicon power, it's staggering how good it is.

All right, so here's where I'm falling with this. MimeStream, I love MimeStream. But the fact that it only supports Gmail means that I can't actually use it for the majority of my email. And so I am hesitant personally to give it the best

Mac app. Like, I love it as winning the newcomer app as it has done twice, obviously. We love that. But I feel like it still has a way to go for it to be considered, in my mind, like the best app that it could possibly be. I'm okay giving this to Bartender 5. I mean, its newness is part of it, but also it is a traditional Mac utility that is great at its job well what else so here's what i was going to say bartender one in 2021 okay i would my vote would go to bartender however i just wanted to say i have not used whisper but i benefit from whisper because people i know use it

it's also like for me interesting in a way to award something like whisper because it's what 2023 has been right is these machine learning tools yeah so like if you felt strongly enough about it that you would consider it a winner i would be happy to award it that it would be a little outside the box because what i would be doing is saying open a i whisper is the winner because it feeds into some great mac apps and other applications that you can build yourself using a script or shortcuts or whatever or the command line and it takes full advantage of apple hardware and the fact that apple has now jumped on board and built their own implementation that's accelerated for Apple's frameworks, I do think it's kind of great.

And, you know, it is the upgradees. We do wacky stuff, and our bartender won a couple years ago. So, yeah, let's do it. Let's give OpenAI Whisper an upgradee. Why not? So the winner of the 2023 upgradee for best mac app is whisper open ai whisper that's wild and everybody and everybody who has an app that's based on whisper you can you can now say that you

can't say that you want an upgrade but you can say you use upgrade winning technology upgrade winning technology and we'll give bartender and my stream the runner-up nods yeah sounds good best newcomer mac app now uh last year mime stream and the year before and the year before we don't we don't talk about that you know love it i love it i love the chaos on it that's great we're not bound by rules no there are no rules for the upgrades there are literally no rules we make them up as we go along and they're flexible and then discard them as necessary that's the best way to do awards that's how to do it there are no rules for the upgradings there are literally no rules we make them up as we go along and they're flexible and then discard them as necessary that's the best way to do awards

that's how to do it the upgradings voted bartender 5 at 4.4% mime stream at 13.8% and ivory at 23.3% do you mind if I go first at this category? please do to me this is where ivory picks up

the nod from me like i think that this is the perfect place to put it um because it is a new app right like for as much as we spoke about it earlier like it came from somewhere else but it's a new app. And I would particularly highlight it here because I feel like at the time Ivory on the Mac came out, the desperation was real for a good Mac Mastodon client. And I think Ivory has done the job for that, where I feel like on the iPhone, for that where i feel like on the iphone the competition is much more varied and there are more really good competitors at least at the time when ivory was around right like there were a bunch of apps that were popping up and they were they were doing a good job but i feel like on the mac version uh ivory was was really needed and welcomed at the time that it arrived i agree with you i think i

think our challenge here is that we've got an app that is sort of derived from a previous app we've got an app that is not a newcomer just the new version 5 is new and uh and and then mindstream is the app that is is new in a way but also has won this category the last two years. So there's a lot of retreading going on in the newcomer Mac app category, which I think I feel like is kind of fitting. But there's a lot of good Mac stuff. It's just there's some iteration going on here. I fully endorse Ivory winning an upgrade somewhere. And I do use it on the Mac.

And I agree. Getting Mac apps for modern social media. fully endorse ivory winning an upgrade somewhere and i do use it on the mac and i agree getting mac apps for modern social media like i know everybody's really excited that there's this new feature in sonoma where you can uh i mean you've been able to do this in third-party apps for a while but like safari will just let you said say you know save threads out as an app but it's really just a safari window and you can say blue sky out which is nice i'm like i'm happy i can do that but it's not ideal no it's not it's not a it's not a replacement for the mac app so yeah let's give it to ivory because i want to thank tap bots for actually caring enough to make a mac app yeah um they didn't have to and i'm glad they did and it's a good mac app

even though it is familiar to people who've used tweetbot it's not the same and i'm so glad that it exists on the mac and i have it open on my mac right now yep so the winner of the 2023 upgrade for best newcomer mac app is ivory with mime stream and bots into five as runners up mentioned earlier, there is a full list of all the winners and runners-up in every category over at Upgradies.com. We have a new category for this year, which we're calling Best Feature, and each year Jason and I will decide which Apple platform feature do we want to highlight for this category. And this year we chose Widgets. In a year where widgets found their

way to the Mac, became interactive, and became a pivotal focus of WatchOS, we wanted to award widgets. So developers who have made good widgets, we wanted to note them. The upgradians voted in this category with 5.2% for Widget Smith, 5.8% for Fantastical, and 15.7% for Carrot Weather. Huh. Well, my nomination in this category is Flighty. Interesting. I enjoy Flighty's widgets and I use them and I find them valuable. They could be more dynamic. They're doing a lot of work in the dynamic island and in live activities and on the Apple Watch in the complications.

They're kind of all around it. Their widgets are okay. They're sort of countdown and then current time and location. It's not their strength, but I do like them and I wanted to give them a shout out. The other ones that are in this category, I feel like you are ready to anticipate because I can see what you are going to say because I can see into the future. So why don't you just go ahead because I'm in line with your picks here anyway. I like Flighty's widgets, but their live activity work and complication work is superior to their widgets. It's superior. Because that's just more helpful for the type of app that it is. My nods are for the Home app widget, which is just awesome.

And I use it every day. And I'm so happy they did it because we spoke about it on the show just before it happened. The Control Center version, where it's trying to guess what you want is no good. And if you have used the widget and you're like, well, that just does the same. If you long press on the widget, you can turn off a toggle, which allows you to switch from a recommended system to just choosing your own scenes and items that you would like

to just be in Apple's home widget. And then I want to give a nod to WidgetSmith because look, WidgetSmith is the king of widgets anyway. And David Smith does such a good job. I feel like this is one where I don't need to make the disclaimer that David's my friend because everyone on the planet uses WidgetSmith. But what I think David did a really great job of this year

as he is want to do is to take something new and do something with it that nobody else is doing. And some of the stuff that he's done with interactive widgets are incredible like the man built rebuilt cover flow inside of a widget so you can scroll through yeah your album just because he could but my favorite thing that he did is quite simple but can be quite powerful depending on how you use it is the ability to kind of stack widgets on top of each other within one widget so something that that I loved about Widget Smith

and something I'd used for a long time was the countdown widget. So if I had a big event going on in my life or a vacation, I would set up a countdown and you could add an image. So I would put an image of the place that I was going to or something. But you always had to pick the right image so the text worked correctly.

Now you don't need to worry about it. Pick whatever image you want. And then when you tap it, the widget slides up and shows you the countdown to your event. Just little things like that. WidgetSmith continues to be incredible, and the interactivity has only taken it a step further this year. So for my money, the best widgets go to WidgetSmith. See, we swear we did not create this category

just to give an award to WidgetSmith. We really didn't. But it's not a surprise that an app entirely devoted to widgets is doing the best at widgets and so i agree with you let's give it to widget smith so i just wanted to make a couple of other statements about this because i would want to put home and fly tears the runners up and my reasoning for this so we've got got CarrotWeather and Fantasticals voted for by the Upgradians. This is very interesting to me. So Fantastical and CarrotWeather have great widgets.

I don't feel that these are versions of applications that have done a great job of interactivity, which in my mind is the kind of thing we're focusing on this time. Yeah, Flighty doesn't really have great interactivity either, though, in their widget. Okay. The... on this time yeah flighty doesn't really have great interactivity either though in their widget okay um the yeah i'm trying to think of of great interactive widgets and there are some out there there are not as many that at least that i've used well i would say though that like carrot

just has really good widget like if we're gonna say like who's got the best widgets out of all of these ones let's say carrot is the runner up there because Carrot's widgets are very good. They're always very good but not necessarily very good interactivity wise. But super good. So the best widgets

best feature widgets goes to Widgetsmith with Home and Carrot Weather as our runners up. This episode is brought to you by TextExpander. When you work in a small team, every moment counts. You don't want to waste time finding video conferencing details to send to a new client. You don't want to track down the same FAQs from a company website. These are the kinds of things you want directly at your fingertips

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goatee time, everybody. My favorite category. Favorite category. Last year was Marvel Snap. Snap. Yeah. I have a word about Marvel Snap because I just took your word for it last year you made a great case for marvel snap and how much you liked it and how fun it was and i just want to i just

want to say now kind of moving retroactively the game i played the most this year by far was marvel snap right so thanks you endorsed the 2022 upgrade for marvel snap i endorse the upgrade is about marvel snap i love it it's great um and i'll throw out there also not quite an app but posmo launched which is at gauges web based puzzle page basically with lots of familiar zach gage games and other games and they they are now owned. They got bought by Hearst. So they're integrating it with the Hearst newspapers, like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle.

And that's also really great, even though it's not. It's just a game, right? This is a platform independent. It's just a bunch of puzzles, and they're great. So I want to mention those. But now I hand the floor over to the host of the Upgradians Game of the Year, Mike Hurley. All right, I'm going to start with the Upgradians votes. 7% for Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Baldur's Gate 3, 8.9%. And a whopping 30.5% was The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. And let me tell you, the Upgradians, they are gamers with

taste, Jason Snell. Because they pick correctly. I'm sure. Let me say, these three games here, interchangeable as Game of the Year, depending on where you're coming from, honestly. Like, I've played all of them. I could see it. For me, I would put Spider-Man 2 above

Baldur's Gate 3. I think Baldur's Gate is an incredible achievement. And I would say 60% of the game is incredible. And I feel like 30% of the game starts to get a bit weird and slow. And I have yet to finish it because I feel like it keeps pushing me away from wanting to play.

Spider-Man 2, unbelievable. In a year without Tears of the Kingdom, this is an easy game of the year for me i loved it like there was a point playing this game where i was like is this my favorite game of the year and it's just difficult for it to hold um the level that it was at i think for an entire game experience, where Legend of Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom, had a almost insurmountable task, which was, how do you best maybe the best game ever made? And it did it. And it did it by adding in incredible new mechanics, by expanding the world significantly, and layering on top of it a beautiful story.

And for me, the only mark that I had against Breath of the Wild was that there was not a coherent good story told in the game and they crushed it with Tears of the Kingdom. This is my new favorite game of all time and is therefore the 2023 winner for game of the year sounds great it's so good man i know and you didn't play breath of the wild or did you no no i'm i'm not a person who played my son is it feeds me all of these things but i'm just not like when i was sick last week i played the first level of the original um spider-man game yeah that was fun but even even

then it was fun but there's just so much like button mashing and it just is not my my brain doesn't work like that yeah so and i and i was on easy on on easiest. I would say though, as an opener, that's hard. Like it's quite a hard opener. I think in the first game, they did not balance the opening well, where the opening to Spider-Man 2 is the best opening of any video game I've ever played. It is unbirthly.

Genuinely, it looks and feels like you're playing a movie. Like it's, I've never seen anything like it. And basically, you know, one of the big things for them is this game was just developed for the playstation 5 like it was not developed for the playstation 4 and so they were able to really take advantage of what the playstation 5 is capable of and it showed i love hearing about these i mean the truth the truth is i think the truth is that my entertainment choices are books and movies and tv shows yeah and i try to think of like when would i play games and the other thing is i do other than reading books which i tend to do sort of like as i'm going to bed the movies and tv shows i do with lauren And video game, like I can never find the time to go off by myself.

I just, I never can. To be like, I'm just going to go play a video game. You do something else. Especially since I already do that sometimes with podcasts. Like there's enough of that already. So I just never find the time. And when it's like this amount of time to play some of these games, it's just like it never happens for me. So I'm not, I always am an aspirational gamer i bought so many games and i i almost never play

them yeah so that's just that's just my life understood all right so for the next category is favorite movie hey speaking of movies last movies. Last year was Turning Red, which is coming to the cinemas next year and I'm going to go see it. It is in January, I think. Yeah. I want to go see it. Yeah, great movie.

Really great movie. For this year, the Upgradians voted 14.7% for Barbie, 18% for Oppenheimer, and 18.7% for the Dark Horse, Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse. I loved that. Yeah.

Good job, Upgradians. And when I look at your choices here, they're the same. It's the Upgradians. You're right in line. Yeah. My three nominations are these three exact movies, and they are coming from very different places. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they are coming from very different places so like yeah yeah they are so oppenheimer's the best movie i saw this year uh spider verse 2 was just amazing i loved it and barbie was the

most fun i had in the cinema this year um like if i was to rank them, I probably would go Oppenheimer, Barbie, Spider-Verse. Like that would be my ranking. What is your favorite movie of the year? Oppenheimer was my favorite movie of the year. It's pretty good. Hands down. I love Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse. I really did.

I didn't mind that it has a cliffhanger at the end because I knew going in that they were doing two movies and it felt very clear that they were going to lead it has a cliffhanger at the end because I knew going in that they were doing two movies and it felt very clear that they were going to lead up to a cliffhanger and I was fine with that and the fact that they you talk about topping breath of the wild how do you follow breath of the wild well how do you follow the first spider-verse movie which was a beautiful thing unto itself that just, it stands alone and is beautiful. And one, I would argue one of the great animated films of all time. How do you follow that? And the answer is they followed it with something that's pretty great and doesn't

match up. I don't know because the story isn't done yet, but it certainly didn't make me feel like they let me down. In fact fact it felt like they were trying to shift into another gear and be more ambitious which is what you should do after you make a movie that's ambitious and successful like the first one so i really admire it i think it's really great um but i thought oppenheimer was the best movie i saw this year i, and I've read a lot about that era. Um, I read the making of the atomic bomb a couple of years ago. Um, I actually read the Oppenheimer biography after I saw it. Um, and I re I was like, Oh, that's why there are all these scenes with Robert Downey jr. In there. Uh, I, I didn't, I didn't think they were that interesting in the

book actually, but in the movie, Christopherolan's doing his thing where he is telling a story about a particularly important and cataclysmic event in human history and a person who is right at the center of it and in his style of breaking up the time frame and having you know having it kind of whirl around the different parts of this guy's life, you end up with a story that is, you can see the story that Christopher Nolan is wanting to tell with the chopped up pieces placed in a particular order. I think it was really brilliantly done and saw it in 70 millimeter. Me too. Me too. And looks great. Really effective, beautiful beautiful serious um moving uh yeah i just i

walked out of the theater thinking yeah that's uh why we why we make movies right there so i think i think that's the winner and then the other two are our runners up yeah i would like to just on oppenheimer like also just add in just how incredible of a job killian murphy did like just crushed it yeah because that is a hard job the amount that he is on yeah he's a very particular character too oppenheimer there he is trying to be a very very specific kind of character oppenheimer and he does a good job yeah he is in so much of that movie you know like and it's a long movie and he's it's a big movie yeah and that is a tough job to do like i watched a really good like cast interview thing and everyone was saying that you know like

matt damon robert downey jr was just like giving him props of like that is any like an a herculean task to know all those words and be in all those scenes. He did a fantastic job. I've been a big fan of his, especially as a fan of Peaky Blinders, and I'm happy that he has gotten his Hollywood breakout movie, where he's kind of been

a supporting player in a lot of Nolan movies, and this time he was a star. Favorite TV show? Last year we awarded Severance. This year the Upgradians voted of 8.4% for The Last of Us, 11.4% for Loki, and 12.2% for Silo.

If you permit me to go first, because you have more options here. I do. I want to throw Succession in. Succession ended just a truly superb season. Really, really, really stuck the landing. The Last of Us was just a real feat. I think they did an incredible job retelling that story in a new medium. And I think that Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal were just superb.

Uh, I watched all of the bear this year. So season one and two, that is a television show. It really is. Season two was great. Season two is, I mean,

season one was great. And I think I might've mentioned it last year, but season two is just spectacular too. Talk about your followups. Yeah. Managing to, to uh to do it that the bear season two does it yeah so does loki loki season two i watched episode one and i did not like it but i i will power on at some point and watch the rest of it i was really turned off by episode one the last episodes especially are superb like i am not a marvel doomer um but this show kind of reminded me of how good they can be with story um and also slow horses oh yeah wow wow slow horses uh we've spoken about this a couple of times it It is a very interesting show based in the UK.

It's based on some books. Gary Oldman in the lead, just doing a really weird and wonderful performance of just a disgusting MI5 agent. Yeah. And Slow Horses, there is a group of mi5 agents who for whatever reason have been deemed unfit and so they get sent to a place called slough house where they go to work uh on unglamorous tasks and yeah junk junk work because they can't be fired for whatever reason they won't

they won't quit and so they're basically uh shelved at slough house under gary oldman's leadership and you might think how is that a show and the answer is well the that's the premise right is that is that there's some things that end up going to the slow horses for various reasons and also you get the very strong sense that jackson lamb gary oldman's character is not all that he appears to be. And so they're more useful than you think, but they are also the rejects. So it's like doing a movie about a superhero team of rejects or something.

It's that kind of idea. It's like, these are spies. They're bad spies, but they are spies. And they're not necessarily even bad, but they did stupid stuff and they've got stupid things in their lives that have made them get warehoused.

And rather, and they also have low self-esteem because, I mean, either they're dreaming on working their way back to MI5 or they can't think of what else they would do in life. So they're just going to sit

and stare out a window at Slough House. It's a great show. Great show. What I would say, like, I've seen the whole season. No spoilers, just going to sit and stare out a window at at slough house it's a great show great show what i would say like i've seen the whole season no spoilers but i just wanted to throw that out there because sometimes we get special access to things and this is one of those yes thank you apple tv team um what i like about slow horses is it is a spy thriller that is dealing with ultimately small things where yes spy thrillers are usually like huge and they're like we're dealing with the fate of the world or like

there's a super villain who's trying to blow up space and this is like there are things that need to be dealt with but maybe they only impact a small group of people or maybe it's just one town or half of a city or whatever and these things have to be dealt with though and the slow horses do it so that's what i like about exactly it's everything those shows have but on a small scale that's super good so they're my picks it's an apple tv we we talked at the time about they hired like somebody from the bbc to head their european tv development this is a british show in fact i saw it in a list of 10 i was like why is it not in this 10 best list and then the next list was 10 best um international it was an american list and it was in there and i'm like oh yeah it is a british show right but it's an apple tv show

it's brilliant and it's a show that they shoot oddly in such a way that at the end of each season they show you a trailer of the entire next season which i love the way they shoot oddly in such a way that at the end of each season they show you a trailer of the entire next season, which I love. The way they shoot it is these are six episode seasons. They're very short, but they shoot 12 episodes in a block. So they shoot two seasons at once. So at the end of season one, they know what season two is going to be. They show you a trailer for it.

So they've shot season three and four. We've seen season three, or you and I at least have seen all of it. And then there's a trailer for season four based on the books by Mick Herronren it's following the books my understanding is pretty closely cool um i've only read the first one of the books books are good too all right i thought this was a great year for tv honestly great year i got i've got a long list i don't know what to pick here um star trek strange new worlds season two was amazing and it is everything i like as a lifelong star trek fan i cannot believe we got a show as good as Star Trek Strange New Worlds.

It is accessible. It's friendly. It's the captain crew of the Starship Enterprise going around having adventures. It is fundamentally Star Trek. And Anson Mount is Captain Pike. And he is super charismatic. And it is an awesome show. super charismatic and it is an awesome show and this year they did they did a crossover with the animated show lower decks where animated characters came into the real world oh that was hilarious and

amazing they did a a musical episode that is really good and they also had like their season season finale is is another kind of action like aliens-esque kind of thing just every episode is a different genre it really well done so big fan strange new worlds love it um i mentioned you mentioned slow horses great foundation season two was really good um i know people were really mixed on foundation season one um because it's slow and it starts really slow and you have to download a lot of information and i think it's intentionally a little slower than it needs to be that is not a problem with season two they got the notes they clearly got the notes season two is much faster paced. And what I love about Foundation is it looks like the inside of my, in my internal, like, mind's eye when I read these ridiculous

widescreen space opera novels that are full of ideas and do wild stuff. And you would think, well, that's never going to be able to be put on a screen, right? It's just, it can't, who would do that? And who would pay for it?

And the answer is David Goyer and Apple and its foundation. It is, and also it's like, I've heard people say it's Star Wars-esque in the sense that it's about an empire, but it's not. It only in the broadest senses like Star Wars. It is really, it's intelligent. It is weird. It does very, it's intelligent. It is weird. It does very, makes some very strange decisions. It's kind of, you got to pay attention to it, but it is, it looks amazing.

I think there is maybe not a better looking show on TV than Foundation. Love it. Season two, loved it. Every episode of it. Great. So much fun. The Bear. Yep. You said it um pick your favorite

episode there's that christmas episode where everybody in the family is and it brings up back all the intensity and all the emotional i thought the episode uh where they send the baker to amsterdam oh was the best episode of TV I saw all year. I liked it even better than that Christmas episode. It is a great character who's like a minor character and he goes off on his own for an episode and it is heartfelt and moving and brilliant and has a great cameo at the end of it

and is just amazing. And the one with his, or actually the cousin is the one with the cameo at the end of it. And that's a great episode too.'s like the bear uh just i you're thinking what i don't want to watch a show about a bear well it's not about that it's about uh a family and uh and people who run a restaurant in chicago so it's totally not about a bear although there is a bear in it but it's not about that um i highly like listen to me listen to mike watch the bear if you haven't like just do it the bear

is is very popular which is great it maybe suffers a little bit of the patriot problem of like the name is not the title right like what do i want to watch the bear i don't like bears it's not about bears people uh it's so good for also it's it's short it's a it's i would say it's a drama but each episode is like 30 minutes long. So you might be thinking like, is it a comedy? Is it a dramedy? It can be funny, but it is a drama. And it's short.

And I kind of love that it's short, except when it needs to be long, it's long because it's streaming. But mostly it's short. And the pace is, as a result, very fast. And it's great. It's a great show. For All Mankind is back for season four. as a result, very fast and it's great. It's a great show. Um, for all mankind, uh, is back for season four.

Yep. It is, it delivers. I have seen the first eight. I'm halfway through. I haven't seen the last two. I'm halfway through. It's great.

I love that show. Yeah, super good. I was a little nervous on one episode where I felt like they were focusing on a story that I kind of didn't care about but then it opened up a little bit yeah because they're bringing it all together into one uh big ball of disaster because that's what that show does yes and they as always they open up the show with disaster like it after the last season like me and indiana have this joke now that anytime

anyone goes to do anything i'm sure that they're gonna die like they're gonna die goes to pick up the mail blow up yeah and like a satellite lands on your head you know what i mean that's gonna happen yeah yeah because there's always and and so yeah in episode one they're like yep here's your giant space disaster um uh agree on the last of us what an achievement that is that is a prestige tv show based on a video game. It's done incredibly well. And I would also say, you could think after something like The Walking Dead, where people are like,

okay, we did the zombie thing. We don't need to do that again. But if you do it like The Last of Us, you can do it again. And the brilliant thing is, it's using the zombie apocalypse for what it's supposed to be, which is it's about characters. Because in the end, it's always the the zombie apocalypse for what it's supposed to be which is it's about characters because in the end it's always about the characters and it does it uh supremely well they're not even in every episode no no which is and it's like i mean this is why

i like genre tv in general is that it's about the characters but you can have these wild these wild ideas that are not based in the real world, they're there to either reflect our fears, reflect our lives, or put characters in situations where they have to process things that are common about being human, even if they're not. Like a character processing the fact

that there are zombies chasing them. Like we may not live that life in our real life, but the way it's told, it's about something fundamental to being a human being. It's beautiful. Also has a contender for best episode of a show this year, which was the Bill Frank episode. Yes. For sure. For sure.

That would be my number two, I think, after the Baker going to Amsterdam. Or is it Copenhagen? Maybe it's Copenhagen. It goes to Copenhagen. It's Copenhagen. Sorry, I said Amsterdam earlier. That was the Ted Lasso episode about Amsterdam, which was great.

Yes, Ted Lasso's Amsterdam. Also a good episode. Also on a boat. I like season three of Ted Lasso, by the way. I didn't even put it in the list here, but I liked it. It was not as good

as some of the previous, but I liked it. It did a really good job of wrapping up a show which seemed complicated and difficult to wrap up in a good way. I felt like they were forced

to wrap it up in a way that they're like, because Jason Sudeikis didn't want to be there anymore um okay reservation dogs again you may or may not like the title um it's done now they've done all the episodes they're not going to make anymore okay it is about a bunch of indigenous kids in oklahoma on a reservation. And they start out as kind of like they're trying to play with being thieves or being a gang. But it's not really about that. It's not about crime.

It's not a Reservoir Dogs kind of thing. There's no blood. It is about kids coming of age on the Indian Reservation trying to figure out who they are and dealing with trauma because one of the kids in the group has died and the rest of them are, we don't see it at first, but there is a hole in

that group and it really affects them and what, how they're going to live their lives. It is funny. This is another show that's really short. You could classify it as a comedy, but it's not just that. It's very emotional. It's funny, but also very emotional. It's beautiful. It's really one of the best shows I've seen in the last 10 years. Highly recommended.

All episodes available now. Hilarious. I'll also say for people who are on the fence about it, the show that I find that it's most like tonally is actually Letterkenny, which is weird because Letterkenny is just almost like a sketch comedy show, and I dearly love Letterkenny. But imagine Letterkenny, but with way more heart. That's Reservation Dogs.

Cannot recommend it enough. Okay. Amazing. I want to shout out Mrs. Davis, which is a bizarre one season show that was on peacock from damon lindelof and oh i forget her name the co-producer uh who came from a totally different genre and they made this and they made the show together and it is about a it's about an ai that has become sentient that's trying to find the holy grail and there's a nun who used to be a magician okay every episode is bananas and it has a beginning and it has an end jones is that

who you're looking for uh that may be it director and executive producer or tara hernandez writer executive producer it's tara hernandez. Yeah, she did it with... Lindelof. With Damon Lindelof. They did it together. And she comes from a... I think she was a writer on Big Bang Theory. Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon.

All of this information came from Upgradee award-winning call sheet. It's good. Thank you. Anyway, I recommend it. The first episode will tell you whether you want to watch this show or not because it's bananas. It really is. You'll watch it and you'll be like, I don't like this vibe. Or you'll be like, I kind of like this vibe. If you like the vibe, watch all of them because it just gets weirder as it goes in a delight i found delightful way so mrs davis it's a gem they're only going to make the one season it's basically a mini series watch it it's great it's hilarious uh and then finally the peripheral a gem that doesn't have an ending and got canceled by amazon after it got renewed it

then got canceled based on it's the best adaptation of a william gibson novel i've ever seen uh prestige beautiful uh high budget scienceget science fiction, too high-budget to survive, apparently, but really great drama. VR, two-time frame, parallel universe, sort of, but not quite. And I love the premise of the book, and I love the premise of the show, and they really did some great stuff with it,

and I'll miss it because it was really great. That's my list. Okay. So now what do we do, Mike? Now what do we do do let's look for where we overlap and then maybe use that as a starting point so we overlap last of us and last of us yeah uh if i'm looking at these i would like i have to think about how i felt watching these three shows for us for example and i feel like slow horses would be a runner-up yeah and then it would be out of the bear and last of us i would say i had a lot of emotions at the bear because

i watched all of it right so i feel like that's my caveat there is i watched one and season one and season two i don't know if sure would maybe make me of light even more um i would maybe lean towards the bear yeah um let's do the bear okay and i would like to put nobody cares but i would like to put reservation dogs on the runners up yep and the last of us and slow horses you can catch us next time yeah we'll be back here next year there'll be another season but this because the reason i wanted to go with the bear is i think that it is quite an incredible thing to elicit so many emotions that was such a simple premise which is a guy opens a restaurant yeah yeah also like reservation dogs that is a show that um is dealing with a trauma that happens

before the episode begins and everything in it is at least in part based on the fact that somebody very close to many of the characters in the movie has died before the show starts and everybody or a lot of those people are broken in a very particular way and they have to deal with it and that's actually very similar between those two shows those are both great shows um they're both hulu shows too i think so i don't know where you find them everywhere else but i think they're both on Hulu. Disney Plus for me. Disney Plus in a lot of the world. Disney Plus for you soon, too.

Well, it is. Actually, I can watch them on Disney Plus now. I can do that now. Sure. All right, The Bear, let's do it. You know, yes, chef. The Bear. Yes, chef. This episode is brought to you by Factor. This bustling holiday season, you might be looking for nutritious, flavorful meals

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Why did you take them? And this is what she said to me. She said this to me yesterday, unbidden, not intending for it to be in a podcast read, but here we are. Here it is. She said, I cannot believe how good those are. They are microwave lunches. They are so good. I don't know how they make microwave reheated chicken taste good, but they do. And she said, if we ever need, she says to me, if we ever need to get meals for my mom because she's having issues with cooking for herself let's get these and not those other ones unnamed that we tried that were terrible so that i actually i laughed when she said it because she's right because i i have again i didn't get as many of them this time because

she took them away from me because she demanded she's like whoa give me the factor but that is an endorsement that i just have to pass on that you may be thinking to yourself, you know, sticking a little thing in the microwave and heating it up. You can do it in the oven too, but you know, microwaves really fast. You get that two or three minutes and you're done. Just take it from Lauren. She cannot believe that they're this good as something you stick in the microwave for three minutes because you, you know, all the connotations of like, you know, it's not quite right. And it came came but it's like the meat isn't very good and all that it's like it's just not the case with factor i don't know what they're doing over there probably using good

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Head to factormeals.com slash upgrade50 and use the code upgrade50 to get 50% off your first box. That's code upgrade50, that's upgrade50 and use the code upgrade50 to get 50% off your first box. That's code upgrade50. That's upgrade50 at factormeals.com slash upgrade50 for 50% off your first box. Our thanks to Factor for their support of this show and RelayFM. It's time for the favorite book category. Oh, it's my favorite category. Your favorite category.

Although it could be argued so is TV, but you said that and i love the tv one too anyway yeah but that one we have opinions about you we both have opinions about you i have no opinions about games you have no opinions about books yeah almost um but we we both watch tv so we can share those opinions indeed elder race was the winner last year uh gradians voted this is a complicated count up, this one. This is always one of the harder ones to count. Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson at 2.6% of the vote. System Collapse by Martha Wells with 3.9% of the vote. That's going to be a TV show. That's going to be an Apple TV show.

Oh, okay. That's Murderbot Chronicles, and they just announced that's going to go in. Oh, I saw that with one of the saw that with the uh one of the scars guards odds one of the scars guards yeah yeah that's weird casting but i don't care it's like i was reading i read system collapse really liked it and i thought this should be a show and it is a show it's going to be an apple apple is getting in on the like you want your high quality sci-fi uh they seem to be really doubling down i it. I love it. Yeah. And All Souls Lost by Dan Morin at 27.3% of the vote. Pretty good.

On the Verge's list of the best books of the year. Really? This week. Posted today, yeah. Oh, fantastic. Congratulations, Dan. That's so good. And you might be saying, why is a novel, an urban fantasy, in fact, on the Verge's list of the best books of the year?

But here's the thing. You know and I know that Dan has covered Apple for a long time now. And you might be thinking, well, All Souls Lost, this seems to be a book about like a detective in Boston involving magic. And it's like an urban fantasy. How could it be related to Apple? And I'm not going to spoil it, but let let me tell you it is super related to apple in a delightful way and if you have not read all souls lost yet available as an e-book there's a print on demand paperback that you can buy as well if you prefer that um you it there is there an apple

angle to this book oh boy is there oh boy is there but it's like no spoilers for it so this is from barbara oh did dan write that part okay dan wrote that part it's a no spoilers for it so this is from barbara christmas oh did dan write that part okay dan wrote that part it's a conspiracy of dance okay this is not it's not said in this part of the thing but maybe barbara's put there's a little tag at the end of the of the write-up that is thank you oh yeah dan see if it deputy i missed that so dan says it about dan uh about dan's book uh different dan it took me almost a month to get to All Souls Lost in my reading queue after it was released and then I promptly

tore through it in just a few days. It's an incredibly fun supernatural detective story with a touch of big tech thrown in. The pace is fast, the prose is entertaining

and the characters are rich. Yep. There you go. What more do you want? Okay, so my picks in this category. Can I just give a nod right now? I read something this category can I just give a nod

right now I read something this year which is not I'm trying to read in one year this is not a book and it's not from this year but I just wanted to say because I read it I read the whole run of Ultimate Spider-Man it's fantastic

Mike that is my favorite comic of this this century i guess it's just truly superb like you think you know how a spider-man story can be and they just twist on its head constantly so the original premise was what if we could start from the from the beginning and do use modern storytelling to tell the story of Spider-Man in a familiar way, but like it was a TV adaptation or a movie adaptation. It was like, let's do a comic where we start from zero. And they did this with a bunch of different characters, but in the end, the one that was successful,

the most successful in this premise by far, is Ultimate Spider-Man. And it's like Peter Parker, he's young, he learns. And it uses the learns, and it uses the canon, but it also breaks the canon in a lot of ways because he's making Brian Michael Bendis, the writer, who wrote all of it, and

there are two different artists on it, so it's really cohesive in a way that long-running comics aren't usually. And he makes creative decisions because obviously he has thought about Spider-Man for 40 years and about like how would you tell this story differently in a modern context and so like to give one example like mary jane is involved fairly early and and learns about his identity and that matters yes and has impact reminded me of buffy

a little bit because Buffy is basically retelling a Spider-Man story. And now Spider-Man is sort of doing, Ultimate Spider-Man does the same thing to Spider-Man that Buffy sort of tried to do it, where it's still like, let's make this more grounded and about the characters and their family connections.

And also like rethinking what the wacky 60s Spider-Man villains would manifest as in a modern context. And he has a story arc and he grows and he ages and he and and has you know bad things that happen to him and it has a it really has a beginning middle and believe it or not kind of an end yeah that there's there's multiple endings in a way and the first ending is is good but it happens weirdly and in a way that wasn't controlled by the what the writers were really going for it was like it was in a large arc like one of those like multi-comic events

and i have finished that but i'm now on the second part of it where they pick it back up again um and then i'm going to continue reading into miles morales and onwards from there because this is this is where miles morales is introduced and and this aspect of the story is similar to what's in that first spider verse movie yep um it's really good you've seen it's really it's very good it's one of the best um my two favorite novels that i read this year are mountain in the sea by ray nailer this is scott mcnulty read this before me and he said it's the uh it's the best octopus related novel i've read this year which is funny because i also read and scott did too surprisingly bright creatures which is also a novel about an octopus and it's also great it's

actually a great book but mountain in the sea push it pushes all my buttons. It is sort of cyberpunk-y and sort of apocalyptic and is about octopuses that may be sentient. And there's like an android and a disgraced scientist and like a corporation. scientist and that like a corporation and there's like a in another part of the story there's like a guy who gets taken hostage and put on a robotic uh fishing vessel where he's basically it's like human traffic trafficking is happening you know like how is this all connected um and are those octopuses really um as intelligent as people and what does that mean are they aliens but also like us um and it's all it's just all in there it's a great book i loved it it is exactly my jam um and then different my murder a book by katie williams uh it reminded me of uh the echo wife by sarah gailey which i read a few years ago which i really loved um my murder's premise is that it is the protagonist is somebody who was murdered and then resurrected using technology that's kind of off screen it's mentioned i like how

it's a sci-fi setting that they try not to make not too much of the sci-fi it's not really obsessed with like how it works um it's more about again about the characters and and all of that but it is also kind of a murder mystery i think the elevator pitch for this book was what if the person who was murdered has to solve her own murder. And it has a lot to say about women and how they fit in society and relationships and social media and fame and video games and all sorts of other stuff. What's interesting about it is it's super a sci-fi

novel but sold as a mainstream novel okay and uh it like so they don't want people to be scared away by the sci-fi elements in it as a sci-fi often as a sci-fi reader i read those books and i'm like oh i see you're slumming it right like you're not really committed to the bit here you you don't want to be writing a sci-fi novel and you're kind of ashamed of it. That's not true with My Murder. My Murder is expertly done as a sci-fi novel, but in a way that's very accessible to other people. I'm not going to spoil it, but like, whoa, there are turns and twists and red herrings and surprises. And it is about like social media and VRr in in some ways too it's fascinating uh it's it's just uh it's a wild book so my murder by katie williams also one of my

favorites of the year those are the two five five stars on my goodreads this year they're they're both great tell me the winners and runner-up i would move uh mountain in the sea is the winner that was the best book i read this year with My Murder and All Souls Lost as the runners-up. All right. Mountain in the Sea is the winner. All Souls Lost and My Murder. So it's the octopus book that wins. My Murder.

The octopus book. Congratulations. It is exactly. It's not for everybody, and I know people who read it and were like, eh, whatever. I couldn't get enough of it. It's William the most, it's William Gibson-esque in some ways. Reminded me of The Wind-Up Girl

by Paolo Bacigalupi a little bit. It's just, it's, I mean, in the end, it is also a first context story. I mean, spoilers for Mountain and the Sea, it's not really much of a spoiler, which is, are the octopuses intelligent? Well, it'd be a really disappointing book if they weren't, right? And I just, and it's weird. And like like i said why is there an android in this book you know honestly the reason why is because it's actually about dealing with sentience and and the

question of like what does it mean to be an intelligent sentient creature and is this android sentient is this octopus sentient are human beings octopus sentient? Are human beings sentient? Like, what does it all mean? Like, how do we define you as being alive and real versus something that we can other and say, oh, they're not real. And Mountain in the Sea is about that, but it's also fun and wild and weird. We move to favorite podcast. Last year's winner was Connected on RelayFM. Oh. The Upgradians voted thusly with 7.2% for Cortex,

9.5% for Upgrade, and 14.8% for Connected. I would like to thank our listeners for enjoying my programs. It feels good and it's humbling when I go through these and these are the answers. So I just want to tell everybody that I appreciate that very much. Thank you. They didn't nominate any of my other podcasts. They're in there, Jason, but they weren't up in the top three. No, they weren't at the top three.

What else do you have for favorite podcast, personally? The Town. From The Ringer and Puck, hosted by Matt Bellany. This show is unbelievably good. It's three times a week, about 30 minutes an episode. Matt Bellany writes at the Puck, sorry, writes at Puck. He is like their... Puck News.

He's their like... He writes about entertainment mostly, right? Yeah, it's like Hollywood. Yeah, he used to work at The Hollywood Reporter. The Town is a reference to Hollywood being The Town. It's known in the industry as The Town, right? And he was a Hollywood Reporter. He was a lawyer beforehand.

If you enjoy anything about entertainment, if you enjoy the upstream segments, if you enjoy downstream, I think if you just enjoy this show, you would enjoy the town because it is mostly looking at the way that these large entertainment companies work. And his Rolodex is huge he has anyone on the show that he wants to basically it was what it feels like like when netflix dropped their uh data dump he had the netflix ceo to surround us on the show to talk about it he has regular guests including lucas shaw from bloomberg he's the monday guy i love them two together um yep there's segments on the show you know we love a segment in the show they have it they have a segment called the call sheet at the end where where bellini makes predictions like

falls so into so many of the things that i like to do on my podcasts too he makes predictions about box office over and unders um but the thing that surprises me the most about this show is there is clearly like good production going on in the types of content they produce and the people they get to come on and talk about it like i don't think i have heard a show that was ostensibly an interview show that is as good as this one, where Bellini brings on every week people I've never heard of before. And every single episode is fascinating because of the way he is able to talk to people. And he is one of these people that's clearly respected enough in Hollywood

that he can kind of ask whatever question he wants and people will answer it or they won't but it won't stop them from going on the show uh really good content you're in the strikes um yeah just all around fantastic it's like three times a week 30 minutes an episode i cannot recommend it enough it's the my favorite show this this that i found this year um and it's maybe the only podcast i've ever listened to where uh edina listens to it too and me and her have a conversation about every episode about what we thought right because it's that it's just that good like it really is it's very good the the when bob eiger came back they did uh uh matt and and luca shaw who who I'd say are the two definitive

journalists covering this era of Hollywood, I would say. And the streaming machinations and all those things. And you're saying, what about Julia? Well, Julia's not a journalist. She's an analyst who also has a column in a podcast. But she's an analyst. She's got clients and stuff like that. These guys, this is what they do. And they do that together on Mondays.

Right, where Julia is tethered. She's doing a lot of things she has her fingers in a lot of client work i mean it's not her primary job her primary job is being the director of of of strategy for for uh parrot analytics right um these guys this is what they do um matt bellanito's puck used to be at the hollywood reporter and lucas shaw is at bloomberg and covers hollywood for bloomberg and then you get them together those episodes especially just like they are the smartest people in the room and so you get them to talk and that episode about after bob eiger came back is so good because you can hear how giddy they are about it and also how they're these are experts who are processing

in real time a cataclysmic event in their industry like yeah it's a good it's a great podcast i think it's gonna win but let me tell you about two podcasts that i also liked this year that i found i don't find a lot of new podcasts but i did find two one of them obvious i but i gotta mention it's strike force five which was the five late night talk show hosts doing a podcast when the strike was happening yeah um it happened so late that like they only released like five episodes and then they ordered all their merch and then the strike got settled they're like okay well please buy our merch uh and also please listen to our four episodes that we recorded that haven't come out yet but there's some gems in that uh in that

episode or in that series in that very small series there are some gems like it was one of those shows she'd listen to and just be laughing just like her head i couldn't do it because at least the beginning the audio production was just so bad i couldn't handle it i couldn't handle it it's not it doesn't sound great it is very clearly a recording of a zoom conversation between famous people, which just didn't make sense to me. Cause I saw pictures and they were using really nice microphones. It's like, did nobody tell them how to press record on it?

I just couldn't, I couldn't deal with it. I, I, I'm, I'm very weird like that. I just can't handle bad audio. I get it. I get it.

I get it. I think there's one episode. I'm not sure if it's episode five. Um, yeah, it is. That's the one where there are, uh,

that's hilarious just to listen to because that's where Jimmy Fallon tries to do a quiz where he's asked questions of the wives of all of the people on the panel. Uh, cause it's Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, um stephen colbert and jimmy kimmel and jimmy kimmel yeah all together because they got nothing to do because of the strike um episode five let's just say it reminded me of many podcasts i've been on yeah because uh jimmy's uh jimmy fallon's prep is

questionable he has not honed his questions right and throughout he is asking the whole premise is undermined and of course you've got four other sharp-witted comedian talk show hosts there to pick apart the premise as it's going on it's amazing it's very hilarious and episode nine is david letterman they all talk to do and they ask all the questions they have always wanted to ask david letterman i love i love the premise of it too that like these guys should all be bitter rivals you know like in previous years like let me tell you i was gonna say let's just say that that that if this was a scenario 20 years ago david letterman and jay leno would not have a podcast it would have been a boxing match it wouldn't have been a podcast right definitely definitely not so that's that

was a fun podcast it came and it went um and episode five is hilarious and the david letterman letterman one is worth a listen to uh and the other podcast proving that i am a middle-aged dad i'm gonna just do it i i'm gonna wear it i'm gonna wear it with with with uh it comes for you eventually the middle-aged dad comes for you eventually you can't dodge it for too long and therefore i recommend a podcast called the rest is history in which two historians two british historians tom holland and dominic sandbrook talk about stuff that happened in the past. And as somebody, what I love about it is you can pick and choose the stuff that interests you. And I realized like,

there's some history that I learned and then all the rest of it, I did not learn and don't know anything about. So like they did a history of like the history of Ukraine. I'm like, you know, I don't know anything about the history of Ukraine. Let's have a listen to that and learned all sorts of you know i don't know anything about the history of ukraine let's have a listen to that and learned all sorts of things that i didn't know about that that are the fundamental

background of what's happening there i got into them because they did a series of episodes about the american revolution and they're british so amazing because they are outside of the official story told in american classrooms about the revolution. And it was fascinating because they puncture a lot of illusions that, you know, myths, myth-making that Americans like to tell about the reasons for the revolution. And I found it incredibly fascinating. And that made me want to listen to, they did a bunch of episodes about the American Civil War that were really great. The rise of, the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin, and those were really good.

And the history of Ukraine was fascinating and timely. And they're funny, and they have guests. And if you are a middle-aged dad and you want to listen to things about history and learn stuff, the rest is history. It is really a lot lot of fun and it was a great find for me this year all right so can we go with the town as the winner yep yeah and then let's make the rest is history and strike force 5 the runners-up although i will say i i i shout out to cortex a podcast with mike hurley and cgp gray on it uh i don't listen to every episode of it because i have limited podcast time there's only like 15 of them a year you know what i mean but i listen to most

of them and they are really long uh and they are very and they're very good they're just that that every time i listen to that show i am impressed with all the stuff that you guys uh go through your themes episode your state of the Apps episode, especially your Post Vision Pro episode. That's my favorite thing I made this year. A lot of good stuff. I would say, considering you've just complimented me and so did all of the listeners,

I would say that I think this might be Cortex's best year, content-wise. I've been very happy with it. And that has come from increased effort from the two of us. We've worked on trying to make the show better, and I think we made the show better. And so I hope that that will continue. Favorite Apple product of the year now.

Last year was the M2 MacBook Air. product of the year now. Last year was the M2 MacBook Air. The Upgradians voted for, with 13.7% to the absolute shock surprise for me, the 15-inch MacBook Air. I was not expecting it.

It's a crowd pleaser. I didn't really get a sense that it was a popular product at large and I did would not have guessed that it would be a very popular product amongst our audience based on the type of feedback that we get

and 15 inch MacBook Air 13.7% 16.8% the iPhone 15 Pro and 27.1% is the iPhone 15 Pro Max. For me, it's either the 15 Pro Max or the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Oh, interesting.

It was my first Apple Watch Ultra. In what I would say is kind of a quiet year, I was going to say the iPhone 15 Pro, which I like. Pro Max has the cool new camera. And I think it gets my endorsement. I think that that's the best product Apple shipped this year, if you consider what's new. Yep. yep um the you know the m3 max macbook pro is also would be on my list i would say because the max is so impressive as a chip

but nothing else changed about it um so i i would i would consider that maybe a runner-up yeah it's a good one uh so let's go with the winner is the iPhone 15 Pro Max with the M3 Max MacBook Pro. I'd also like to put the 15-inch MacBook Air in there just because it was so surprising to me. Okay, let's do it. I just thought that that was... I don't know if I should be surprised about that,

but I was. Yeah, I love it. Favorite non-Apple product last year was the Steam Deck. Ah, yes, I'll let you have that one. The Upgradians voted for 3.4% for the Anker 3-in-1 Cube, which is a very good charging solution. Cubes are the best, says Federico. 4.2% for ChatGPT.

I was surprised to see it in this part, it was and at 5.3 percent is the steam deck oled it's back baby it's back baby here it is again i am gonna throw a vote in for the steam deck oled because i i got one i i sold my steam deck um and with the money that i got from a product that i returned that i'm going to talk about later on in the show, I bought a Steam Deck OLED, and it is incredible how good that screen is, and the overall package is nicer. It's got a faster Wi-Fi chip,

which is great for downloading the really large games that are on Steam. It's got a little bit better battery life, but not that much. It's noticeable that it's a little lighter, but also not that much. It's noticeable that it's a little lighter, but also not that much. It's noticeable, but the screen really makes a huge difference. But for me, I think my absolute favorite thing this year was the Sonos ERA 100. I spoke about this on the show that, you know, I've gotten into Sonos in my home and the ERA 100 is such a huge upgrade over the Sonos One um it is now a stereo speaker it has line in it has bluetooth it sounds fantastic so it's become an even better option

for people that are looking to get into sonos so i really recommend it wow i i really struggled with this one i don't think i have a product that i would i would consider a favorite um just sort of like in general from everything i don't know if there's anything i i keep racking my brain and i i i don't think i've got anything i actually thought about putting in here a kitchenaid mixer okay because i love my kitchenaid mixer and uh it's not an apple product so sure you know make bread, make some cookies, whatever. Use your mixer. But really, I have no vote here.

I would probably go with a Steam Deck OLED because I like doing that again. Yeah. That's why I would like to do Steam Deck OLED as the winner. Okay. All right. Let's make Sonos a runner-up. Mm-hmm. And Cube?

Yeah. The Cube is great. Let's do it is great the anchor cube is a great product so the winner of the favorite non-apple product is the steam deck oled with the runners-up as the sonos era 100 and the anchor three in one cube like i love it that that seems like because okay so the background here with the upgrade is that i used to do do the Eddie Awards every year at Macworld and before that at Macuser. And you're in the room and you're doing debates. And then in the end, it comes out and it's like all very like, oh, yes, here's the winner and here are the runners up. And it's very serious. And most of the time we took it extremely seriously.

But, you know, there are those moments where you're like, can we just pick two and move on? And I liked it on this podcast. And this has been the case for now 10 of these um sometimes you get to this point and you're like anchor cube let's do that okay that looks good great and we just move on and it it's stamped into history now as a runner-up great it's a great little product the anchor cube And this is another example of why we have the Upgradian vote, because sometimes we don't have a good option. And so it's great to have the Upgradians in here too

to help us balance out the awards. I like it. And this episode is brought to you by Vitally. Customer success teams today are facing a problem. How do they connect customer data back to their work? Vitally changes that. It's a new kind of customer success platform, an all-in-one collaborative workspace that combines your customer data with all the capabilities you expect from today's project management and work platforms.

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employees and you're willing to explore changing customer success platforms if you already have one in place schedule your call today by visiting vitally.io upgrade and you'll get that free pair of airpods pro that's vitally.io upgrade for a free pair of airpods pro when you schedule a qualified meeting thanks to vitally for their support of this show and all of relay fm now with the worst gadget or most disappointing technology last year was the ipad pro with m2 chip now remember i i was taken aback by this but remember this is because the ipad pro we were thinking that there would be like major changes to the ipad pro and they didn't do anything and they so it was disappointing didn't even do the

bare minimum which was give the 11 inch to the battle screen indeed yep gradients voted with 5.1 percent for chat gpt which is so funny to me that the up i will tell you upgradians you're an incredible bunch where like five percent of you will say chat gpt was your favorite product five percent of you will say it was most disappointing i love it yep nine percent is x and 13.3 percent is the Humane AI Pin. Yeah. Now, I would just like to state here the PlayStation Portal was my most disappointing technology of the year. So this was a device that PlayStation made

to allow you to remote play to your PlayStation. So you're playing from your PlayStation but over Wi-Fi. And for me, the connection was terrible. It was so bad. I was at home trying to play this thing with a playstation sitting in front of me but i wanted to play it handheld so the tv wasn't occupied that was my use case for this thing and it was so bad like the screen was incredible for what it was for like a 250 dollar device the controller was great because it was a playstation controller cut in half of the screen in the middle but they skimped out on the wi-fi chip and it would not it just could not handle it

i did not enjoy it it was really bad for me other people have had other uh experiences i've heard of really good experiences with it but for me was not so and i wasn't willing to make any changes to the way that my house was wired just to get a better response here. So PlayStation Portal returned, Steam Deck OLED acquired. But yeah, it was a disappointment for me. I was looking forward to it as a disappointment. So I have two nominees here.

One is, as the Upgradian said, the Humane AI pin. And again, I don't want to like, I kind of don't want to kick them when they're down but I feel like their presentation was so over the top and also incompetent that they are they've all it's their marketing has always struck me as being like incredibly arrogant like we're great and we know it and we're going to change the world and I like on one level it's like marketing so I get it but on another level I read it as like, are you though? Are

you? And then you see this thing, which still hasn't shipped. Right. But like they've announced it and they're taking orders for it. And there's just not that much there. And it definitely feels like a product that was originally going to be like, oh, you project it on your hand. And then they're like, oh, chatbots, let's do that instead. And they made some changes. And I don't know. It seems like a really dumb gadget that is... I talked for a while about how I think the idea of having AI agents that help know about your life better than you can recall and connect the dots is going to be a big thing. And it's going to be potentially a game changer but i don't understand how this hardware would be that no it's um it'll be in all sorts of other

things and not a pin you wear so i want to nominate that the one thing i'm going to say about this is all we have had is a presentation video so like i think it is hard to say like we could say it was the worst presentation video but like and also was anybody really disappointed by this like i don't know were you expecting something better i i'm saying worst gadget yeah i'm saying worst gadget that this is a gadget and i don't quite think anyone needs it and their key features are not features they invented because they're literally just chatbots from someone else yeah and they even the integration right like it we i think we all assumed that it would be more than it is because it's like

literally hey it's a chatbot but you can attach it and like does it talk to my phone well no we can't do that so it's got its own phone number and you just we ruined the world by creating phones so here's another phone about yeah well yeah i mean and the presentation and the whole thing around it is part of it and and i'm going to nominate it in that category too but i just want to i want to nominate it here because as a gadget yeah i my i was trying to keep an open mind but like the presentation i just don't know what they're even i mean it really felt to me like they got investment and they got to do a product and this is their best swing at it.

But I'm not sure even they believe that this is a thing. I think that they may be... You get to a certain point and your choice is, well, we can keep running this out and then have it crash and burn or we can give the money back to the investors. And their decision is, well, no, let's run it out and watch it crash and burn.

And maybe, shot in the dark, it'll be successful. But it probably won't, but let's give it a shot. And that's how the Humane AI pin feels to me. Like, they're just burning the money of their investors at this point. But I do have another disappointing tech that I want to throw out there, which is Matter. Remember Matter? Yeah. This is supposed to be the year where Matter unified all our stuff and our smart home stuff finally came into focus.

And instead, it kind of didn't happen. Like Matter's around and some things support it, but other things don't support it. And it didn't really happen. And it's unclear, is this just the growing pains of a thing that's going to ultimately be the thing that we all use next year or the year after or is it a flop and i don't know and that is disappointing i pay attention to a couple of home kit youtubers still and i i feel like it is still in that camp of this will make a bigger difference in a year or two from now because sure what it seems like is so many new products come out now with matter and so it's going it will be something

we get the effect of in years from now especially as right they continue to add in new things into the spec they did more this year they're doing more next year. I think vacuums are coming next year. It is a case of device makers need to opt into it, but more and more of them are. I do feel like there are more companies that there are more products available

to you now than there were before because whether you're on iOS or Android because there are some companies that are now like hey this will work for you now because of matter but i think it's one of those things where like your mileage may vary for quite a while as to whether it will make any impact on your life and i think we were all i mean disappointing is what i'm hitting home here which is i think we felt like when the first shots of matter were fired yeah and it was late but it was last year after already being kind of like later than we thought it would be

yep and it finally came came out because remember this was like chip or something it was it had another not a real name and then they and they uh and then their their matter and then this year i just felt like all the matter stories were well this doesn't support it and this this thing has a limited thing with matter and this thing is not quite right and I I totally get that that we're playing the long game here with matter but I would say this year I thought matter would make more of a difference and it hasn't and maybe that was an unrealistic expectation but I certainly felt the disappointment all right I feel like we'll put playstation portal and i would say matter as runner up and go with the humane ai pin because okay because the upgradians voted pretty

overwhelmingly for it and it was also in yours and i do agree my only asterisk on it is is it is a product that i don't even think is available. It's not been in any review, but I don't think it's going to surprise anyone. I think it will probably just be worse than we even think that it will be. We've decided. That's all that matters. That's all that matters.

Most life-changing hardware last year was picked up by the M2 MacBook Air. Best Mac ever in my opinion. Love that thing. The Upgraders voted with 4.8% for the iPhone

15 Pro Max at 6.3% for the AirPods Pro 2 and I combined the votes for Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra to come in at 14.9 there was like wow apple watch apple watch ac apple watch a apple watch 9 apple watch ultra i just combined them all because that felt like the sanest thing to do and that came in at 14.9 and i will say that the battery life specifically of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has made huge changes to my life this year.

Like, I'm way happier in using the Apple Watch every day than I was before because it has completely removed the annoyance of charging that device from my life. I'd say my nominee here, and it doesn't need to win it, but I'll just say i have embraced the stream deck lifestyle having that set of buttons that's programmable um that can fire off various macros um i was initially you know skeptical and then i bought the mini and then i upgraded to the full size and this year i bought another full size um that i can use when i travel and then because i'm doing the studio b thing it lives in studio b so i have the same stream deck set up in two places so that i can use my familiar things in either location and uh that has been great so i love it and it literally as a bit of life-changing hardware um i have to i have to say the stream deck with the Were the AirPods Pro 2 this year or last year

when they actually came out? No, no. They were last year, right? They only did the USB-C case this year. Yeah. I think we should do Apple Watch Ultra 2. Okay. And that acknowledges all the Apple Watch votes

that the Upgradians did. Yep. And then let's do the Stream Deck and the Pro Max as the runners-up. Love it. 115 Pro Max and Stream Deck as runner-up.

Apple Watch Ultra 2 as the winner. Final two categories now. Yeah. Favorite tech story. Last year, the fall of FTX was the winning category. Good times.

Good times. This year, the Upgradians voted with AI progress at 8.7%, OpenAI fires Sam Altman at 17.9% and Apple Vision Pro at 23.2%. Where are you sitting with this one? I think the wisdom of the upgradians, the Vision Pro may be the favorite tech story of next year, but this year, look, years and years and years,

Apple's doing a headset, Apple's doing a headset. What's it going to look like? What's it going to be like? We got it this year and it was not what we expected, which was even more exciting. And then all that has reverberated the rest of the year. That was the first half of the year. Right. And it has reverberated where we've got the different developer things and they release betas and there's talk about like, what's the future of it and when's it going to come out, which sounds like early next year, which is exciting. Um,

like earlier than, than some people thought early next year meant come out, which sounds like early next year, which is exciting, like earlier than some people thought early next year meant, which is great. So for me, yeah, the story this year is the announcement of the Vision Pro, for sure. Because as well,

it was also really good and really fun and like the content was good. Yeah, and we got to try it. The stories were good. It's an interesting take. It is them trying to do something different. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they're trying to do something different with it really interesting and a new platform from apple like just fundamentally a new platform from apple is a big story too so that was

definitely my favorite so we will go with the apple vision pro as the winner and we'll put OpenAI and AI as the runners-up. Thanks, Upgradians. And we now go to the final category, which is the favorite tech screw-up. Yep. Last year was Elon Musk buys Twitter. The Upgradians voted as the humane AI pin at 6.3 percent open ai fires sam altman

it's 23.6 percent and again a combination of anything related to elon musk twitter and x with 36.9 percent of the vote well i like the idea of the humane ai pin specifically the introduction because i do think that was a tech screw up. We've already given them another award here. So I'm going to not press them for this. But that opening, that marketing video was bad and they made a lot of mistakes and it's kind of baffling and amazing. but for my money it was almost my favorite tech story of the year but it's definitely my favorite tech screw-up of the year is the whole open ai leadership debacle the we're a non-profit board we don't like sam we're gonna fire sam oh i regrets uh investors in open ai saying what are you doing sam altman being like i'm gonna start my own company or maybe i'll just bring everybody with me to microsoft and having them be like no no no no come back come back come back uh we'll import a new independent board so that we can do this all again in a couple of years

maybe or not i don't know microsoft will be there but not on the board just as an observer so they get a heads up if something bananas like this happens again great weird what a weird story uh and in the end never mind never never mind yep yeah for me like i kind of agree with you like as a singular story this was also my favorite tech story of the year but the vision pro weaved its way throughout the year which made it like overall a better story to tell. And also if this wasn't also a screw up, I would have, right?

Like, because this is a screw up, I knew I could award it here. This was a fascinating thing that happened. The initial thing itself was, was incredibly interesting and weird, like firing him. And then the twists and turns that occurred over like a

7 to 10 day period was just like incredible and I don't I cannot remember in my

history of being involved in this industry and paying attention to this industry of a company bungling something

so badly that like a board performed their role so poorly they were all got rid of they and like the company the company has taken a reputational hit which was pretty big and we could look back a year from now and be like oh yeah that was where it changed i don't know what has changed but that could be what we look at and be like oh yeah that was a inflection point or something yeah the meaning meaning of open ai has changed and it might be might be positive might be a negative but it's definitely a a change in how we view that company and sam altman and everybody

else well he's come a long way from being the looped guy with the pop collars on stage with steve jobs right long long well i can never forget that but it's that it's that guy sam altman because i wonder apparently the thing that i wonder that could have a lasting thing is like what do enterprise companies think about open ai now and or would they now be more willing to just work directly with microsoft and use their the open ai technology and but have a what they might consider to be a more reliable understandable company in its in its stead i don't know i don't know so if they had if they had fired sam altman and then just gone on um it might not have been a screw up although they would have really been a screw up if they had fired him and then everybody had

just left the company and gone to microsoft i think that actually would have been been a screw up if they had fired him and then everybody had just left the company and gone to Microsoft. I think that actually would have been a bigger screw up. Yeah, that would have been, that would have been, so there's, there's like, they could have been in play for favorite tech story,

but the way it worked and it could still be favorite tech story, but just, it was all, why did this happen? I just think, yeah, it's a good, it's a good tech screw up.

There are lots to choose from in the tech industry this year. So I think openAI is our winner. And the Humane AI pin introduction and Elon slash Twitter slash X are our runners-up in this category. It is actually quite a spectacular achievement from OpenAI that they were able to topple Elon in our minds, at least. Yeah. I mean, that is also just an ongoing screw-up that happened starting last year so it just has continued and i'd say it's just rolling thunder with with twitter and x right like it is not they have not yet had their purely cataclysmic event

instead it's more like it just keeps being that thing that keeps happening and that's okay there's next year's upgrade ease we got next year's upgrade ease for whatever happens in 2014 with elon also for me at this point i i don't care yeah right i hear you like i don't care what happens to x at this point like if you're still using it i don't i don't know man i just don't honestly honestly if uh if my sports writers there like just go there if if x if x got shut down it would be great because all those sports writers people would have to go to threads and then i could just read them on threads but as it is i can't assemble that list it's happening though right like i know like it's happening yeah i'm starting to follow base roll writers on threads or blue sky i i'm starting to put it

together it's just not all there yet so that may happen in 24 that might they might finally drain out of there because i know that like threads is putting money into nba like they're trying to like convince the nba writers to come over and that's like a thing that they're doing sponsoring some nba stuff and so like they might do that with more sports you never know i know they're doing it with f1 a little bit too because uh charlotte claire one of the ferrari drivers he has like a deal with meta he's been like let's say in their ads for a while and they've been getting him to post i'm building i'm building my follow list and at some point i'll do actual proper lists on those other services they're just not anywhere close to what's still in my old sports list. So again, give me a reason to delete that bookmark in 2024.

That would be great. Thank you so much if you participated in the Upgradees this year. We really appreciate you giving your nominations to us. If you would like to send in your feedback, follow-up, or questions for future episodes, you can always go to upgradefeedback.com. You can find Jason at sixcolors.com, theincomparable.com and here on RelayFM, where you'll find me too on RelayFM.

You can check out my work at cortexbrand.com. I was talking about the other social networks. You can find us on Mastodon. Jason is at jsnow on zeppelin.flights and I am at imike on mike.social. You can find the show as upgrade at relayfm.social you can watch video clips of the show there and on tiktok instagram and youtube where we are at upgrade relay uh i'm on threads i'm at i mike i am yke jason has previously said

he isn't but i've been seeing him on threads this week and he is at j snow j s n e double l thank you to our snow zone snow zone on blue sky snow zone on blue are you really using blue sky uh not not much but a little bit there's stuff there but but mostly it's it's it's threads and really mostly it's mastodon but also a little bit of threads on blue i just wanted to i blue sky lets you register as a domain so i'm snell.zone over there and i just find that hilarious every time i see it i mean you could do that if you're a blue ski person if you really wanted to but you shouldn't don't do that well i'm using zeppelin.flights for that so that's that's what i got thank you to our members and supporters of upgrade plus you can get longer ad-free versions of the show including this one

by going to getupgradeplus.com thank you to those that do that thank you to our sponsors of this episode vitally factor text expander and electric we'll be back next time with the upgrade dot com. Thank you to those that do that. Thank you to our sponsors of this episode, Vitaly Factor, TextExpander, and Electric. We'll be back next time with the Upgrade Holiday Special. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Have a good week, everybody, but

don't miss that Christmas Day episode. It's something. Bye, Mike Mike see you later