Upgrade - 57: Complex Feelings

Episode Date: October 5, 2015

This week Jason and Myke discuss OS X El Capitan, and Amazon's curious practice of removing AppleTV from stock.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 57 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts stamps.com posted on demand and go to meeting make it easy to meet with your team wherever you need to wherever you are my name is mike hurley and i am joined by the wonderful mr jason snell can you believe we've done 57 of these it's amazing it's flying by my friend it is flying by you do an episode a week and they just the numbers just keep on going and it's just uh we've done a couple of extras as well yeah that's true that's true well happy happy monday to you we record this on monday and happy whatever day it is to you

podcast listeners when you're listening to this i always had that problem because the podcasts happen in this eternal present that is any day or any time and so you can't say tonight or today if you are listening during the day kind of thing. It's hard because podcasts could be any time. They're unmoored from time and space. Exactly. That's right. But I'm glad you're listening to this podcast now.

So I want to do a little bit of follow-up from last week. If you remember, I tried my best to activate a Hawaii telephone on people and it didn't affect everyone. As we heard from many people over Twitter in both camps. So some people I did activate their Hawaii telephone and some I did not. And we heard from both from both sides. So basically, all we know is that the training isn't as perfect as you would maybe hope it would be and that it doesn't matter kind of who the person is it can still activate the new ohio telephone feature if you do not know what i'm talking about when i say ohio telephone it is to activate the personal assistant in your phone whilst the screen is off which can now happen in

the new s phones but we say ohio telephone so we don't activate people's telephones. That's right. But I had an instance for me where I was watching a TV show and it activated a couple of days ago. Somebody said, are you serious? And it lit up. But the funny thing about it, it was an American lady coming through my MacBook speakers.

So I think the training clearly needs work. So this made me think, can you turn this feature off? And yes, you can. my MacBook speakers. So I think the training clearly needs work. So this made me think, can you turn this feature off? And yes, you can. If you go to settings general on Siri, you can turn off the new feature that's in iOS 9 and the new S phones, which is what I have done

because I have my watch if I need to do the hands-free stuff. And that makes way more sense to me anyway. That makes sense to me too. And the training, I'm unclear on whether the training is just looking at particular like tones of voice or frequency ranges or if it's doing something a little more sophisticated it does have you say a few different things but i'm still not convinced that's doing anything other than trying to get you to speak with a natural uh a natural tone so it sounds like it's better than it was perhaps but

it's not locked on to your voice and no other voice will unlock uh unlock that feature that doesn't seem to be the case i think that there is more that you can do like for example if it if it maybe had you just try and say more words than just that key phrase. Because you'd think that gender and accent would be, they're basically the two biggest defining characteristics of somebody's voice. And the fact that it picked up the exact opposite to me was interesting. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know. There may be something about the way that it's listening to. Because the other thing that would solve this is if you could set something to say, set a key phrase or choose from a collection of key phrases, which is I think what Amazon does. My guess is, though, that there are costs for all of that because it's obviously listening for a certain pattern of sound with its low power mode, but it's still listening just for that certain pattern. And so it might be harder to do it. It's a tricky problem. But the difficulty is, yeah, if it's listening all the time and you're in lots of places where people are talking, that you're going to get accidental activations. Also, to follow up on my iCloud problems during the last episode and now Apple has released

another point update I don't know what these ones are actually called what are these called? point updates is like 9.1 I don't know, minor updates minor update, we'll go there 9.0.2 which had a bunch of fixes

it didn't mention anything about icloud but it has fixed my icloud backup problems so my phone is now backing up um overnight automatically now the thing is i have some friends because i've been talking to people a lot about this who are having the same problem as me and this did not fix it for them which i think further goes to my point from last week in that something is broken and it's a random set of things that can fix it for different people. Like, you know, I was saying like,

it just needs that kick to reboot it. And that did that, 9.0.2 did that for me, but it still hasn't done it for everyone. I don't know what Apple need to do here because it clearly seems like there's a fix that they can't put their finger on either um i'm hoping that 9.1 will will be enough of a big change for a lot of people that it does fix it but not being able to to back up to iCloud it's very frustrating i agree it get you lose your safety net when when you you aren doing that, when you can't rely on that.

Yep. And it's the reason I pay for iCloud storage. So, you know, in a roundabout way, I pay to back up my phone. I guess this is why people don't upgrade right away, right? Is that you spend a couple of weeks and Apple obviously spends a couple of weeks shaking all the little bugs out and they're inevitably, you know, so when I write reviews of stuff like this, people are like, I can't believe you didn't mention this thing. And the answer is, well, you know, what happens, most of these things are things that don't happen every time. They happen to one person out of a thousand or one person out of 10,000. The problem is that, you know, if you're only testing with a small group, relatively small group of people, you may never find some of these quirks. And then you roll it out to tens of thousands, and then you notice. Confidence has definitely been shook in the average consumer about upgrading,

even though Apple's statistics are fantastic, right? I just know that from people that I've spoken to, they get a bit nervous about upgrading their devices now yeah i think i think ios 7 really made a lot of ios users wary because that was a pretty traumatic update and changed the you know changed the os interface itself and uh i i think that that has led to ios users being a little more reluctant to to dive in. And was it 8 that bricked people's phones? Or was it 7?

I don't know. It was one of them that had, there was like a bad, there was some bad code in the update. Oh, yeah. Well, that was in 8. In 8, there was the one that it, there was an 8 update that killed the cellular modem. Yeah, there you go.

That was it. That's what I wanted to go about. Good times. So it's like, you know, you keep doing these things and people are like oh you know and i feel for apple because i mean the seven the ios 7 one um where they maybe could have predicted it they didn't necessarily know that people wouldn't like it right but it's the issue of if people aren't tuned into your marketing message they wake up the next day and they basically have a different phone because it looks nothing like the one from the day before. But the motivation of the vendors is interesting because in a lot of these cases, they don't want you to not upgrade. They want you to upgrade and they don't care.

They know that some people are going to be fearing change and be reluctant to change, but they're highly motivated to get everybody on the latest and greatest. And so, you know, they're not trying to make life easy for people who are holding back from updating. They're not interested in that. The challenge is when you do something really traumatic like with the ios 7 interface changes that that's pretty that yeah that was pretty shocking and i think there was a lot of trust lost there because their phone changed overnight and i know i heard it from some of my relatives like you know there's a new update is this going to change my phone again completely nope just that one time but um but still it they remember it's one of those things though that i don't know how you solve that problem. If it's what you want to do,

I don't know if there's any other way to do it. Yeah. There are people smarter than me to look at these issues. Let's do a bit of follow-up. We haven't spoken about this yet, and I know that a few people wanted us to. Yeah, it's all part of the conspiracy.

They have a running large conspiracy regarding peace and ad blockers and marco um and there's been some really interesting discussion on atp 136 and on the talk show 132 about this um obviously marco was on both of those uh and i know that jason you wanted to to kind of talk about the uh the fact that we're friends right yeah i i this is uh i mean i i don't really want to spend a lot of time talking about ad blockers um and about um the the i think it's a complicated issue i think i i think i may have said this previously you will you will end up just all feeling bad and not solving anything yeah i'm gearing up for something like i'm still chewing through my feelings and i think i think that me and gray are going to talk about this at some point um just because i think he's going to have a different kind of view on this kind of

stuff because he will come from somewhere else i would be interested to hear what he has to say. I think after we did the show last week, we talked about this a little. So the people who are in the live chat listening to the live stream heard it. But I did talk about ad blocking and more generally about how problematic web ads are on the talk show in July. So that's episode 126 of the talk show. Gruber and I talked about that for quite a bit. And I think, you know, I recounted some of the things that I witnessed working for a publishing

company that was struggling with how you make money on the web. And my feelings about ad blocking in general are, they're difficult, they're problematic, because I think that uh on one level it is wrong to take the content that's being offered but uh not uh the the things that ride along with them on one level i think that's wrong on another level though i feel like the abuse of that that connection and that trust has gone totally out of control and sort of taken... The publishers don't have any ground to stand on anymore about this because of how badly they've abused that. If you could imagine getting a newspaper, your daily newspaper suddenly... I mean, think back 10 years. Your daily newspaper suddenly comes with a fake front page that's all fake stories about an advertiser. And when you open it up, there's like a thing that pops up and plays a sound

until you close that page. And then somewhere else in there, they've inserted eight different cologne samples, and those are stinking up the newspaper you know and and some of those were attempted in print and generally it was very expensive and it turned out that the readers like hated it i've got to say i saw uh andy bayo uh tweet today about the front page of the la times and it looks like a web page i put a link in the show Times and it looks like a web page. I put a link in the show notes and in the chat room. It's kind of fun to see. So the trend toward junk, I mean, it happens. So I feel like it's a complicated issue. And like I said, I think in the end, everybody just feels bad because you want to find a way to support this. This is one of the things that was, I think, almost inevitable when the entire model for the web settled down to everything is free or almost everything is free on the web.

And it's all about traffic and ads to make money and not about people paying for stories. Like it used to be you didn't get news unless you paid for it. And now we all get it for free from a lot of different sources. So there's that issue. But that's actually not what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to talk about, at least briefly, is that I had that moment listening to Marco talk about making the decision to pull Peace because he wasn't comfortable and he decided he didn't want to be in the ad blocking industry. I don't know, Mike, you and I were privy to, we saw a beta of peace and we saw conversations about peace a little bit in, in the, uh, in,

in our relay FM Slack channel. And I just had a couple of moments where I felt like I asked myself, did I fail Marco by not trying to steer him away from this idea that he decided was a bad idea? Because I felt like we were all sort of supportive of Marco. It's like, hey, Marco, I can't believe you're doing this thing, but, you know, good for you. And we tried to be sort of friendly and supportive. And I just had that moment of thinking, you know, should we have been more skeptical? of thinking, uh, you know, should we have, should we have been more skeptical? Should we have been, uh, you know, warned him? Like, do you really want to get into this or not? I don't, I don't know. I just, I feel a little

bit of guilt that I, I, I, I could have seen this coming and failed to say anything. I didn't see it coming. It's not like I saw it coming and, and, and decided I was going to let him go through this. But I do have that moment of pause of like, could I have thought about this a little bit more and sort of jumped out and said, no, wave my arms. No, Marco, stop. No, think about this some more. And I didn't do that. See, I feel bad about it too now um and it kind of frustrates me looking back at it because i have i mean we've spoken about it on this show um in the past like i have very complex feelings

towards ad blocking um and and i don't really know where I fall on it. So I should have been able to transplant that feeling onto the idea to say, Marco, this could be trouble. But for some reason, it never crossed my mind. I was using it, trying it out. I was like, this is really cool, was my thinking. Right? And just like, wow, look how fast the pages load. I was purely focused on the technical. And this is exactly what Marco was saying. And I think it might be difficult for people to hear that and believe it. Right? Like he was talking about this on ATP, but I was like nodding along because I was like, yeah, I saw it too. And it never,

I didn't connect the dots between the two things because it just felt like this is a technical achievement he has created a thing that really works well um and and i really think it's because i don't have skin in this exact game i think that was why i didn't think about it. Because there's nothing to block on Relay. There's nothing there. I mean, some desktop ad blockers do actually

block our This Episode Was Sponsored By box. Because every now and then I get an email from someone saying, you should put sponsors on the page. I'm like, hey, you should turn off your ad blocker. And I checked that it was one of the first things i checked when i installed pieces to our to our sponsor blocks load on the on the show pages and they did and i was like great that works and so i didn't ever really think about

the you are entering into a war of ideals here um and and it's interesting to look at it now and be like well yeah of course he was and it's funny how we all kind of came to that thinking afterwards rather than before. It's a story that's been told many times, which is the, you know, I think most probably most notably in the Manhattan Project. But it's the story of scientists. But it goes for all technology, which is there's the enthusiasm about learning something new and creating something new. And then there is the thought about the application of it. And those are always in conflict, or often in conflict anyway, where you've got the, as the line from one of my favorite TV shows said, I mean, I only build the bomb. I don't drop it. Right. Like it doesn't, I'm

completely disconnected from the effects of the thing that I've built. I'm just focused on the building. And that I think history is full of examples of people enthusiastic about building new things without necessarily thinking through all the horrible uses that would come to them. about building new things without necessarily thinking through all the horrible uses that would come to them. And so, you know, I think that we were guilty in some ways of not shifting our frame of reference from this person we know who we're in this sort of private conversation with having worked on something new and trying it out and saying, yeah, it really does work. And I noticed this about it and not taking that step back and saying, um, what, what's going to happen when this all goes down and what, where does it lead? And thinking about it, not, and I'm not saying that making an ad blocker is immoral, but I'm saying that it is controversial enough that when you, when you pull

back from the idea of this is a cool thing that you built, you then start to have that realization of what's going to happen. I think we could have seen it coming. And that's all I wanted to bring up. There's no answer here other than I feel bad that Marco had to go through it. I totally understand how it happened, which is that he realized that, first off, he's a smart businessman. I have to say that. He saw an opportunity here. As a programmer, he thought, oh, content blockers on OS 9 are going to be a big thing.

Let's do something there. And he did something there, and he built it. And he did that because of his interest in learning about this technology, in supporting new Apple technologies, in learning about this technology, in supporting new Apple technologies. And because he assumed, I think more than, and he talked about this on ATP and I think the talk show, he assumed there'd be 20 of them, right? And there weren't. There were surprisingly only a handful of them at launch. And that was the stuff that was driving him was I could build this. I could make a deal with ghostery, I could I could learn what the different formats are. And I could implement this new thing from Apple. And, and that was what was driving it. And it was and it was only afterward that he realized, oh, I'm going to get all the people in the media business angry at

me. And I've I'm looking now at a future where I'm going to have to maintain this thing. And now I'm part of the ad block industry, which is kind of a gross industry. Um, and he didn't want to be a part of it. So ultimately I feel bad that he, he went through it and that he didn't stop earlier and say, Oh, this is not a good idea. I shouldn't release this. Um, and, and like I said, I, I feel at least a little residual guilt that, uh, that I didn't at least have enough perspective to say, are you sure you want to do this? And I'm not saying that, you know, like I said, I, I didn't know this was going to happen and say, well, we'll see.

Let's watch what Marco does now. It was like, I didn't think of it and I wish I had. Yeah, definitely. All right. Let's take a break and get into, we have, we have a real selection of topics today. Lots, definitely. All right. Let's take a break and get into we have we have a real selection of topics today. Lots, lots of little things. Oh, yeah.

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and help support this show. Once again, that is lynda.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to lynda.com for their continued support of Upgrade and RelayFM. So, OS-10 El Capitan came out in between the two shows that we've recorded. I'm running El Capitan on my Mac Pro right now. It has not fixed the issues I was having on my Mac Pro, which is for anybody that hasn't followed the chain. I have an issue with my Mac Pro wherein

it sometimes just freezes. All of the UI locks up. I can still have podcast conversations. Skype still works. And in some apps, audio recording still works. It's a whole big thing, which is so much to say this is why i will be buying a uh a new iMac as soon as they are revved which i'm hoping should be soon-ish i hope so i priced one out today oh well that's a that's never a good sign i'm gonna be buying a monster jason i'm looking at currently uh as it stands the four gigahertz quad-core i7, 16 gigabytes of RAM, 1 terabyte of flash storage.

Are you anticipating getting an updated 5K? Yeah, I'm getting the 5K. All right. Boy, that day is coming soon, I'm sure, where my precious 5K iMac here will be last year's model. I mean, technically it is last year's model, but it hasn't been eclipsed yet. But, well, yeah, I mean, they've re-bundled some stuff and all that. But my precious, my precious. Yeah, I'm going to be going the whole way because I'll be able to sell my Mac Pro for about two-thirds of the cost.

Dare I say hashtag Jason was right? Well, no, you see. Come on, give this to me. Give this to me. me no because people say this right because they said oh you should get an iMac you should get an iMac at the time but at that time uh i i only have the space for one monitor in the office where i work and i needed to have something that could also have uh games consoles plugged into so that was why i had to go with a machine that was one of the primary reasons.

But now I have a whole different setup. I have a lovely TV here that my PS4 and Xbox and Wii are plugged into. And so now I'm going to go for the iMac because I want that big Retina display as well as all the power now. All right. I'll allow it. Yeah, I'm sorry. You'll get a Jason was right in soon enough.

Maybe before the end of this episode you're just copying me yeah that's it i just i just want i just want that jason snell uh experience experience yeah the full snail zone experience thank you so so el capitan what you're saying is uh your solution updating to el capitan isn't going to do it. So instead, you're just going to buy a whole new computer. Yes. I'm sorry. I had hoped that maybe just whatever that problem is, that it would be solved in El Capitan. This isn't a thing to be sorry about.

I'm going to be getting a nicer computer. Sure. There was a part of me that was hoping that this wouldn't fix the problem. Well, then congratulations. I'm glad your bug did not get fixed in El Capitan. Whatever it is, whatever strange OS bug it is that it does that. That's just such a

weird thing. So El Capitan came out. That's what we're saying. El Capitan is out. I'm hoping you will have more to say about El Capitan than I do. i don't have a ton to say i like the split screen and i like the overall enhancements to mission control because i really do work in my mac in mission control well i mean i think that's one of the unheralded

improvements is that i i really like what they did to mission control the fact that all of the uh all of your windows now appear when you activate mission control um instead of stacking all the windows from an app together which was kind of annoying if you work heavily in some specific apps and i really like that they've got the geography thing going on where i it's much easier to find windows in mission control because they don't go too far away they sort of stay roughly where they were um so you know like it was over on the left somewhere and you look and you can find it um i i think they did a good job with with all of that and you can drag more things up into the

mission control bar now i like that you can set you can send that full screen by just dragging it up there yeah you just grab the window and toss it up there and it's full screen yeah and the split screen stuff is really good so talking about that presentation that i'm i'm working on see i'm working on 25 inch monitor here so i have keynote open in like you know effectively it's full in size and i also have the notes app pinned to the side because i the side because I've written my outline for my presentation in the Notes app and then I'm transferring some into my speaker notes and using it to help me go through the presentation and add slides in and stuff like that.

So the split screen is fantastic for that. I wish there was a more elegant way to bring apps out of full screen. Currently going up to the menu bar and hitting the green, well, what used to be the green button or whatever it is now. It's a really inelegant solution. So do you know the other way to do it is in Mission Control, you can actually, if you go to the space that is your split screen, instead of having the X to get rid of the space,

it has this little icon that's like it basically means blow apart and if you click it the two both of the windows go back into um regular mode yes there is a way to do it faster but right but but you should have a keyboard shortcut on that on that green button i think or the green button should just pull both of the apps out. I think this is one of those cases where the fact is Split View is just full screen mode with two apps in it.

And they both think they're in full screen mode on a monitor that's narrower. My ideal way of doing this is if you have two apps in Split Screen and you go into Mission Control, it shows you those two sort of broken out and then you can move them individually that'd be nice right yeah it's just it's it's not i this is one of those features that will get refined over time i think but exactly but in

this first version it's a little bit of a hack it is it is two apps in full screen mode but running side by side they don't really know about each other i have some issues with the fact that apps don't so many apps are not written to have some issues with the fact that apps don't, so many apps are not written to assume that if they're in full screen mode, they might be sharing space with another app. And so they don't often indicate whether they're active or not.

And that's problematic because, you know, you can only type in the one that's active. And in some cases, things like scrolling or pinching and zooming are limited based on whether the app is front most or not. In full screen mode, there's no concept of frontmost kind of. They're going to work this stuff out. But I agree with you.

You should be able, right now, if you click that green button, one app goes back into the desktop and the other one stays full screen, which I'm not sure should be the default behavior. But at the very least, it would, you know, it would be nice if there was a very quick way to do that, to uncouple them both and send them back to their respective spaces rather than having to like click one and then go swipe back to the other one and click it too. And right now the fastest, there is a shortcut to do that, but it's to go to Mission Control and blow up the little space that they share with the little icon in the corner of the icon at the top of the screen

in the Mission Control bar. Not ideal. I know that you've spent more time time thinking um and reviewing naturally um os 10 than i have are there any other features of uh el capitan that that excite you or that interest you i mean for example if there's anything good in safari i don't know what it is because i'm using chrome like a gentleman uh well pin sites i actually like pin sites okay um which is uh like mega favorites uh i wish i could call them that instead the uh because i use the bookmarks bar or the favorites bar or whatever they call it now

and uh and it's uh the favorites bar and uh i've got a bunch of stuff up in there. But the pin sites is these little tiny tabs. They live in the tab bar. And they have an icon if the site has given an icon. Although I found in Safari that the icons sort of come and go. I don't really know why. Sometimes they're there. Sometimes they aren't there.

But you can pin those sites and they stay there and they're in every window. And so if you've got sites that you visit a lot, you can just pin them and then they're always available. They're a keystroke away. It tries to keep them up to date, so they're preloaded. If you click on a link that's in the pinned site, it stays in the pinned site. But if you click on an offside link, rather than closing your pin site and opening and, you know, opening the, the, that link in the same window, it just flips you to a new tab and, and the place you left on your favorite site is still there. Um, so there's some nice things about that, um, that I, I think it's, I think it's kind of cool. And I think, uh, Safari, oh, that changes the keyboard shortcut behavior, which is kind of annoying if you're somebody who did get used to the keyboard shortcuts of the bookmark bar. And then there's the audio muting feature, which is nice, which is your autoplay video

feature. If you've got a tab that suddenly starts making noise, and people who have lots of tabs open, this happens a lot, you can mute your browser tab if it's playing in that window you can also mute all the others and just say whatever wherever that thing is playing i don't want to hear it and that's a nice uh that's a nice feature yeah so so there's there's some stuff in there notes got big improvements that sync up with the ios 9 improvements i should have mentioned notes because it's one of my favorite apps now. Just flat out, I love it.

All those features that use the iCloud. First off, it's the iCloud syncing, so you don't have to just use IMAP email boxes for your Notes. They actually sync with iCloud now, and iCloud Notes get all these other features where there's more check boxes, and you can do sketches on iOS, and you can view those on the Mac, although you can't create them.

You know, it's it's I think like in my review on Macworld, I liken this to putting better a better selfie camera on an iPhone and putting a camera on the iPad is one of those things that maybe Apple, when they were building these products, didn't expect it to be as popular a behavior as it turned out to be. And once you realize that it's popular, you say, well, we should probably make it better than if it's going to be popular, people are going to use it, we should make it better. And I feel like that's what happened with notes is they realized that everybody uses notes for something, because it's pre installed, it's super easy to get to, it may not be the greatest thing in the world. Yes, there are competitors that do a better job, but it's still crazy popular. So let's make it better.

And so they did. And so it's better across iOS and OS X. And I think they did a good job. And I'm glad they finally put in the effort to not make it like use your email boxes in order to do notes, because that was dumb. It was a hack that lasted for like eight years. Crazy that it did.

I don't know how that managed, but it's done now. And it's very easy to migrate to. You can actually just select your notes and drag them into iCloud and they move over to iCloud and it's fine. You can set up folders for your notes. And they did a very good job, I think, with updating notes. Yep. And photos, since I'm the author of Photos for Mac,

a Take Control Crash Course, a book available, an ebook available for download now, I pay very close attention to the Photos app because I wrote a whole book about it. And now that there's an update to Photos version 1.1 that comes with El Capitan, I wanted to go through that and and find all the new features there because i'm gonna have to update my book it will be a

free update uh but i'm gonna update my book for uh for 1.1 and and there are a few they knocked off the uh the biggest uh feature request keeping in mind photos for mac only came out in the spring they haven't had a whole year to update it so it's a it a 2.0, it's a 1.1. But the top complaint of users of photos was that you couldn't geotag photos in the app. You couldn't edit geodata, and you couldn't add geodata to photos that didn't have it embedded in it, like taken from an SLR or something, some other device that doesn't have location information. And you can now. It uses the same, you know, Maps database that everything else does by default. That's the Apple Maps database. But you can, I selected a whole bunch of pictures

that I took, you know, 10 years ago that aren't geotagged. And I was able to select them all and choose, you know, command I to bring up the info pane and enter in the name of the location where we were and hit return and boom, they were all geotagged. And it automatically syncs over iCloud. So if I search later for pictures from Seattle, those pictures that I tagged are now going to show up. So that was a, it should have, you know, it should have been there, but it wasn't. Batch geotagging, individual geotaggingging batch changing of titles and descriptions and keywords that's all in there now so you know um and the other thing is extensions i actually wrote about this on on six colors you can now app developers can write extensions that work in photos uh editing extensions similar to the concept of photo editing extensions on ios which there haven't been a lot of um but I've counted like four or five that are in the Mac app store right now that will let you still waiting on that VSCO. Uh, one that they demoed on stage with iOS eight or whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah. That didn't, uh,

that didn't get a lot of pickup, did it? But, uh, but I did, I tried BeFunky, and Pixelmator's got one that's coming out with an update to Pixelmator. And, you know, we'll see how the developer adoption goes of this. And the idea is that third parties can add things. Like there are some filters that are black and white filters inside photos, but tonality from MacFun, which is like an $18 app. And it's funny because as an app, it is just like a blank. You know, you open a picture and it brings up an interface and you make changes and it creates a, you know, a really nice, usually like black and white image and you press OK and it saves it out.

It's not much of an app. And it actually makes sense as an extension inside of photos, because then you're editing a photo, and then you get to the point where you want to run it through this, this third party extension. And you can do that. And then you save it. And you're still you never left photos, you just use the functionality of that inside of photos. So that got added. We'll see if it's a curiosity or if it becomes more valuable. I think that one of the nice things about it is it lets people who have pet features that there's some subculture of people, some subsection that really, really wants this

feature, but it's never going to be enough for Apple to add it. Now somebody can develop an extension that does it and it'll work inside photos and apple doesn't have to go down that path so um that's beyond that i mean el capitan is where it's it's compatible with everything i believe they haven't reduced compatibility for uh an os release since Mountain Lion? I think all the same systems run Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, and El Capitan. Not all the features work. But Apple very much

wants everybody. And in fact, you can upgrade from as long, if you've got a compatible system from as far back as Snow Leopard, you can upgrade directly to El Capitan. That's good. Yeah, well, Apple wants everybody on the current version. And that's where all the biggest security updates are. And that's part of the reasoning for doing it this way, is they want everybody on this version. They want, that way, you know, they're not spending all their time maintaining Windows XP, right?

They're like, look, if you've got any computer that we've sold, almost any computer we've sold in the last six years, you can just run El Capitan and you'll get all the updates. So I think that's interesting. It's free, it's a download, and it works with pretty much any computer from the last five years. Anything else, El Capitan? download and it works with pretty much uh any computer from the last five years anything else el capitan i don't know i feel like i've uh i've got it all there that's that's uh it's free it's it's been solid for me i uh i think people should uh yeah i think you should give it a try again we, we just talked about,

if you want to wait a couple of weeks to see if issues get shaken out, then do so. And then I guess the other thing I would say is, if there are apps that you rely on day to day to do your job, go check and see if they are okay in El Capitan. Because if they're not, don't upgrade. That's like rule one is, if there's stuff that you rely on that doesn't work with it. Because I heard from somebody who said, oh, I upgraded El Capitan. It turns out that these two programs that I use that I totally rely on that are like five years old don't work in El Capitan without installing all of these extra things. And it was a disaster. So I went back to Yosemite. I'm like, well, yeah, I think if you if you're relying on especially old software, check out to Google around a little bit.

See if there are issues because that can be a problem. I didn't have any issues like that because I'm using mostly recent software. Like an app that many podcasters use, the Levelator, apparently broke in El Capitan, although Tidbits posted an article about there is a way to fix it. It's an unsupported app from a company that no longer exists, but people are trying to keep it alive. But, you know, with the exceptions of if you've got a mission-critical app that just won't work in it, I'd say. Otherwise, it's a pretty smooth update, I thought. I thought it's almost routine.

otherwise it's a pretty smooth update i thought i thought it it's almost routine and that's a good thing that that apple um is trying to make this as smooth and routine as possible and not not have these upgrades seem uh upsetting to people and uh and i think they did a pretty good job with el capitan it's a you know it's uh i can't measure the speed improvements they say it's a lot faster it's probably more measurable on slower systems than the 5k iMac that i was using for most of my testing because it's pretty fast as it is um but uh by using metal underneath instead of OpenGL the game performance should be a lot better and a whole bunch of other graphics stuff should be a lot smoother because core animation and core graphics are now using metal instead of opengl cool but it didn't fix your computer sorry no it didn't did not fix my computer at all um actually let me take a second sponsor break all right now and then then i want

to talk about amazon a little bit okay yeah because there's some interesting stuff going on there this week yeah this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by go to meeting think about all the time money and hassle that it takes to hold a meeting like getting everyone in the same place getting the projector set up sorting out refreshments checking everybody's calendars is just difficult enough but when you think about the time and hassle that it takes to bring people physically into the same room, even if it's in the same building, that can just be tiresome. It's just horrible. But there is a better way. You can meet your clients and co-workers online with Citrix GoToMeeting. It really is a smarter way to meet. People don't need to leave their offices to go to a different office. People don't even need to leave their desk or the floor of the building that they work on to meet with you over something that's important or mission critical for your

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With GoToMeeting, everyone sees what you're seeing. So you and your team can get on the same page and get going quickly stop wasting time with the crazy logistics of arranging meetings go and sign up for go to meeting today you can try it for free for 30 days there's nothing to lose just visit gotomeeting.com and click the try it free button and you'll have your first meeting up and running in just minutes once again visit gotomeeting.com for your free 30-day trial. Thank you so much to GoToMeeting for supporting Upgrade and RelayFM. So over the past few days, Amazon have issued a kind of a release and have then subsequently stopped selling devices like the

Apple TV and the Chromecast. And the quote from Amazon is, over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime, is what they said in an email that they sent out. It's important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion. So basically what it seems like and what the assumption is that Amazon and Google have not yet come to an agreement over how to work together to get Prime onto their platforms. Google or asking Amazon to design in a certain way that they're uncomfortable with, or Amazon is saying, we're not going to go through your in-app purchase system and we want people to sign up for their accounts, whatever the reasons are, they've basically come to a stalemate in which Amazon has now taken some pretty harsh action. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird. Um, I see both sides of this and I know that that it's been very popular for people to just point at Amazon and say, Amazon, you're evil. Boo. Um, if you're Amazon and you've spent, this is the conflict. Amazon has spent a lot of time

and money promoting their video services, their streaming video services. and money promoting their video services, their streaming video services. And so now they're a video platform owner. They're also a seller of products. And some of those products don't work with their video platform. And I totally understand somebody at Amazon saying, this is confusing. We're getting complaints. I have to explain to people that,

uh, no, just because you bought that video streamer on Amazon and you're an Amazon customer, it doesn't mean that you can get your video from Amazon on that product that you bought from Amazon because it's from Apple and they don't like us. And so they like us to sell their stuff, but they don't like us to put our stuff on their boxes. I get that. I actually do get that. I think that as computer nerds, it's easy for us to say,

oh, well, come on. Everybody knows that you can't do that on the Apple TV and all that. But I don't know. If you're an Amazon customer and you're using Prime Video and you say, oh, you know, I heard you can put that on a TV.

Well, I've got Apple stuff. I'm going to get the Apple TV and use that. Although you can, you can use AirPlay to play Amazon Video on the Apple TV, but you just can't use the app. So I guess what I'm saying is I understand that this is the difficulty of having this platform and also being a seller of hardware is that you are going to have issues like this where the stuff that you're doing over here is not compatible with the stuff that you're selling over there. It's hard not to see this as a power play, though, as like the equivalent of Apple taking a publisher's books out of the Apple store as a, you know, an expression of discontent in some way. It also seems kind of bizarre to me in the sense that I

think we all assumed that Amazon would do an app for the new Apple TV. And if that is the case, wouldn't they not make such a big deal about sweeping the old Apple TV out of the store? I don't know. It seems weird. It seems weird. I think that Amazon probably want an app, but what they also want to do is sell subscriptions. And that's why this is happening. So that's why I believe this is happening right now is because I assume that Apple and Amazon are meeting about the Apple TV. So Bezos is like, we're not getting what we want. Screw this.

We'll show them. And this is in the middle of the discussions. He said, well, we'll take it out of the store. And Apple go, fine, try us. And they go, okay. And they pull it out. That's what I assume is happening right now. And then somebody pulled down their pants

at some point and just exposed their butt. But we don't know who that was. That could have been either side, really. It was a very juvenile meeting. They should have ended it long before. You say that, though. I expect that this is a lot of why this is happening. And the reason it's happening right now

is because of the upcoming Apple TV. That is my feeling about this. So the thing is that the way that I see this is I don't fully know if I can reconcile in my mind why it's okay for Apple to take a cut of signups for Amazon Prime video. I can't work out in my head. Like, so people like, oh, you know,

people call foul on Amazon. But why should Apple be taking a cut of signups anyway? Well, the standard approach has been, if you don't offer it in the app, it's okay. That's why you can play Amazon Instant Video

stuff on an iPad. Sure, but why shouldn't people be able to sign up in the app? Well, I think that's a separate issue. I think it's a separate issue. I think it is the issue. Well, I... Because this is probably... I mean, this is one of the major problems that Amazon and Apple

have together, right? Sure. This is behind ripping all the commerce out of Comixology, too. It's the same story. And why the Kindle app? You can't buy books in the Kindle app. And yeah, it's the same same story and why the kindle app you can't buy books in the kindle app and yeah it's true and and i wonder like why apple think that this is something that it's okay for them to to demand because you can buy physical goods right so it's not like there's a problem with we can't allow other payment processing because other payment processing happens in apple app store apps it's just this

idea of a subscription service which they won't play ball on yeah when like you could just sign into your amazon account and purchase it in the app like how you do a toaster that that's that so i my feeling on this is if amazon don't want to use the in-app purchase system, I don't know why Apple think that they deserve to say you can't do any kind of account generation. I don't think I'm following you here. I mean, I have to admit, I am surprised that this took a turn into Apple's 30%. Okay. Maybe I'm not being completely clear about what we're talking about here.

I don't think that needs to be relevant because there are these two issues. There's the issue of, does our box play your stuff? And historically, Amazon, again, does not have an app. There's a Netflix app on the Apple TV, but there's not an Amazon app. But there is an Amazon video app on the iPad. And there is a Netflix app on the iPad. And the Amazon app, you can, just like there's a Kindle app, but there is an Amazon video app on the iPad and there is a Netflix app on the iPad

and, and the Amazon app, you can just like there's a Kindle app. You can get to your stuff, but you can't buy it on the device. You can't subscribe other than in Safari. You can't do it in the app. Um, and, and that's, that's dumb, but at least you can watch your stuff. Um, I don't think people are signing up for prime necessarily on these devices in app. And so maybe it's not that big an issue. Now, separately, which is your point, is that's still a bad experience. And that's got to be part of the conversation here. Imagine all the engineering work that Comixology had to do to rip out all of their stuff. They did a whole update of their app that essentially was trying to make it more palatable after they had to rip out all the commerce on iOS. And this is all because of this 30% thing that Apple is charging that Amazon doesn't want to pay. Because they don't have the margins for it. They can't give those margins to Apple.

So, like, it's just, I maybe didn't connect the dots correctly, but basically my feeling on this is that Amazon are unhappy with any device in which they can't sign up customers on. So, like, you know, with the iPad app, for example, you can just go to safari and sign up for a prime account you can't do that on the apple tv there's no flow for that so somebody

downloaded it like they want to be able to push people to new accounts like that that's my assumption here and which is why i feel like there's always been this problem because like i was really surprised to see netflix is now selling their subscriptions via in-app purchase. And I really wonder, I look at that and be like, are they going to let Apple take 30% of that? Like, I wonder if it is the standard deal. Like, you know, you look at that and like, I don't know if Netflix needed that, but they've done it. I mean, and Apple are promoting it like crazy for doing it. So I really wonder what the play is.

I mean, maybe it's because there doesn't seem to be any preferential treatment for the Apple TV because they've come out and said, Apple have said that the API to have your content show up in universal search is available to all. And it's stuff like i'm like wonder why netflix did it so like all of this adds fuel to the fire for me in like that there is something about the creation of accounts that hold is holding up amazon that's my feeling about this anyway

yeah uh i don't know what's going on with the netflix thing and if they are i mean so far everything i've heard from apple is that 30% is 30%. That's just the deal. And so is it possible that Netflix is just figures that it's more important to acquire those customers and pay Apple the 30% than it is to not? And that maybe they will try to do something later to convert them?

Or is it that Apple cut them a deal and they're only paying Apple 10% or something like that? Maybe they feel it's just an important percentage of their customer base, but not a huge percentage. And they'd rather have them at a lower rate than not have them. Yeah. Maybe Netflix know the amount of people that download their app, try to sign on and have no account. Also, something like Amazon Prime is problematic because Amazon Prime Video is not a video streaming service. It's part of a much larger package. And I'm sure Amazon is not willing to give Apple 30% of a package that only includes the video, right? Amazon's business doesn't make a lot of sense with the 30% model. That's why

you can't buy books in the Kindle app. It's because Amazon's whole business is based on these low margins. There's no room there for them to hand somebody through. They're not a business designed for a middleman, right? And Apple is the middleman here. When it comes to selling of content, who are Apple to boss Amazon around, right? They're both so huge, right?

It's like, why should we have to do anything you tell us? And I hate this subject. I hate this subject because it says to me, I feel like this is some of Apple's worst tendencies. Yeah. And you get that aspect of wanting complete control and being a dictator is what gets you a lot of positive things about Apple stuff.

But this also has to be the whiff of one of, I think, the least enjoyable parts of Apple's personality as a company, which is this idea that anybody who's making money in their playground owes them a cut because they're making money off of Apple's greatness. And, you know, in some circumstances, maybe that's true. But at some point it becomes, I feel like, more than that. It's not about that anymore. Like, is degrading, we've talked about this before, we talked about this about comiXology, is degrading the user experience of being a comic book reader on an iPad worth it to Apple because they don't want to, they need that cash. If you're going to sell comics on my platform, you've got to give me the cash.

I need that cash. Well, they don't really need it. ever at a point where their business is really based on making 30% of a skim off of everything that's sold in their financial transactions in the App Store and through iTunes IDs, then their business is in trouble because that's not really their business. That's a side business. And taking some reasonable cut is fine, but 30% is a pretty large cut. And for an established business like Amazon, it's incompatible. And so Apple has said, hey, comic book readers,

here's the most popular comic book reader on the platform. And it's going to be worse now because we have this 30% rule and that's just how it has to be. That bugs me. That bugs me because I feel like the users get hurt because Apple and Amazon are fighting over this. And in this case, I'm going to take Amazon's side and say, Amazon's business is not built so that they can give Apple 30%. They can't do it. They can't do it. Because they're acting as the middleman.

There can't be another middleman. So, you know, I feel like the reasonable solution here would be for Apple to either have these tough negotiations behind the scenes, which who knows might happen. And that may not have gone well. And that may be why we saw Amazon take its ball and go home like they did. Or throw Apple's ball in its face and stalk off the field. That might be a better metaphor for it. metaphor for it. Or have Apple say, we're going to work with a few partners who are trusted,

you know, trusted third party partners who have their own existing commerce sites and let them do in-app purchases, but it's going to be limited to this list. And people always complain. It's like, no, no, no, Apple can't do that. It's got to be fair. And it's got to be the same for everybody. It doesn't. It absolutely doesn't. It's Apple's door. It's Apple's rules. Apple can do whatever it wants. Apple could very easily say, these five outside parties, we're going to allow this because they're established and they have these much more complicated businesses. Apple could do that if it wanted, I think, and it wouldn't be a big deal for them and for their business. And it would probably improve the quality of buying books and and stuff like that on on ios devices uh through amazon that much better um but i feel that on the flip side in the in the same

instance if amazon want to remove products from their store they can it's their store and they can do their store amazon's not a public utility Amazon, and that's what I was saying initially, is I see the argument, again, I don't read it this way. If Amazon had done this maybe a little more quietly, I don't think this is actually why it went down the way it is, but I see the argument that if you're Amazon and you're really invested in getting people to sign up for Prime and use this video service, and there are these devices that don't support what you're doing. I can see taking them off, not because you're trying to improve a point to their manufacturers,

but because it's confusing to some of your customers, and they have every right to make those decisions, just like every merchant has a right to decide what gets stocked in their stores. Yeah. All right. There's one other thing that I wanted to mention today because it news broke this morning and we've spoken about it a ton um that jack dorsey is back in as twitter ceo yeah jack's back jack is back i mean you know we were talking about it i mean do you have any feelings on it right now? I mean, it's kind of a bit like, it's like, okay, what now? Like, you know, what are you going to do? Right. Um, he had a, a tweet storm, um, this morning and yeah, that's kind of the guess you the way you should

do it. Right. I liked it. It was, it was good. I'll put, um, a link in the show notes to his tweet and also to Adam Bain's tweet, and you can kind of see the tweet storms trailing off them. Adam Bain is now the COO. This was the change that people wanted to see. This was the exact changes that people were asking for. I am hopeful for difference in Twitter. I mean, I believe in dorsey um i endorse him

not saying that again uh but i i'm interested to see where it goes now i think that twitter as a company clearly is aware that they have to make some changes and again as we've said before that doesn't mean that it's going to be the changes we like but it's just going to be changes yeah we don't we don't know um but boy he does sound like he gets the product that's what what i think we've been saying all along here is that he he knows and understands the product and he loves it he cares about twitter he wants to be better there was an interesting story that came out over the weekend about sort of like the the personal growth of jack dorsey and how he's changed a lot and grown and become a much better CEO over the years and a much better listener and

a much better manager, which on one level, I think was a really good story. On another level, I had this moment of like, hmm, I wonder what the story is behind this particular story launching at this particular time. Like, how much of this is organically happening and how much of this is the Jack Dorsey PR train happening? But either way, it became very clear over the last couple of weeks that there was nobody else to do this job.

Who was, you know, that the other, for whatever reason, that this was the only name. And they didn't want, you know, they wanted him, for whatever reason, that this was the only name. And they didn't want, you know, they wanted him to leave Square and do this. And he said, no, I'm not going to do that. And they still did it. They still hired him. So clearly they didn't have some other candidate in the wings that was going to be, you know, a better choice than him. So it's going to be him. And he's going to have to split his time between twitter and square but i feel like the people at twitter believe in him and that are energized by the fact that he's back and um having a having a founder come back and take up the reins we know that that can be that can be a good experience and i i hope it is for twitter it sounds like they've already got a bunch of stuff in in motion and you know i don't know if

you saw this the most telling thing in the last like couple of weeks about twitter was that there's this rumor that they're going to do something that breaks the 140 character limit for tweets and it's unclear whether that means something like they're going to be twitter posts that are going to be embeds in a twitter in a tweet or whether they're going to take some of the metadata and move it out of the tweet of counting it for the tweet length it's unclear and we can debate whether that's a good or bad idea for twitter but this is the part that really got me is they talked to somebody at twitter i think maybe anonymously who said there was huge internal debate about something like this and jack came in and said it's okay

and everybody's like oh it's's okay. And then they went about their business and building this feature. To me, that's like, wow, that is a company that is desperately looking for vision and leadership. And as the CEO and co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey has the authority to say, here's my vision for Twitter, and we're going to do this now, and not have people be like, well, does it really fit? What do you think? Let's debate it. He has the ability to cut through that and say, it's fine, build it. And I get the feeling, hearing that story, I start to think about Twitter meandering for the last few years and think, yeah, maybe that is one reason why, is that there was nobody to say, you know, Dick Costolo didn't say, we're going to do it this way about the product. Cause I think

he kind of maybe didn't care about the product so much. I think he was focused on other areas. And, um, I don't know, again, I'm just, I'm just in the peanut gallery here, but that that's, that's my take on it is I was impressed with that anecdote that that was Jack saying, it's fine, do it. And, And everybody felt freed to do it then. So that actually mirrors completely a tweet from Adam Bain today where he said, Jack has the insight as well as the moral authority as a founder to push teams to make big, bold changes.

Yeah, right, right? Because otherwise you're afraid, am I screwing up Twitter now? And Jack of all people is going, no, it's fine. Oh, well, if Jack says it's fine, then let's do it. But it's also the other way where it's like people like Jack, we shouldn't do this. And he's like, do you know what, though? It's mine, so whatever.

Like, what are you going to do about it? Like, I came up with the idea. This is another idea that I've had. So therefore, it is the actual thing, right? And those things do kind of marry up in a weird way, I think. I think it's great. And another tweet that I just wanted to mention, which I really loved from Dorsey, where it's like, Twitter is the most powerful communication tool of our time. It shows everything the world is saying right now, 10 to 15 minutes before anything else.

Also, Adam Bain, you mentioned, he got promoted to COO, Chief Operating Officer from Chief Revenue Officer. And I think that's telling, because I think that what that's saying is, how is Jack going to work as a CEO when he's also the job, right? He's going to keep Twitter running and focus on some of these areas, including sales and the revenue stuff. I get the feeling that Jack as CEO is, in addition to being the leader of the whole package, is also going to be much more focused on parts of the product and that Adam Bain gets to sort of run parts of the business under Jack's thumbs up. And that's a structure that makes sense to me too. Well, because it's impossible to not compare Dorsey to Jobs right now. If you think about the way that Steve ran Apple, especially later on,

he did things that interested him and that he thought was important and Tim Cook took care of everything else. And Tim Cook handled the rest of it. And hey, it worked for them. maybe it will work for twitter too and twitter doesn't need to and doesn't do things at the scale that apple does so it's true it's true it's a yeah it's it's a much smaller group i'm excited to see where this goes yeah me too i i at this point i we've we've detailed this on past shows um Twitter needs to move its product forward. And we may not agree with all the changes that come from that, but they need to move the product forward.

I did see somebody had a little exchange with Jack today on Twitter that ended with the person saying, essentially, you should bring back the third-party developers. And it would be interesting to see. back third part the third party developers and that's it would be interesting to see i'm not i wouldn't put money on that happening because i feel like maybe we've just gone down the road too far but i look at i look at the state of the twitter app on the ipad and then i look at tweet bot 4 and twitterific and this is so clear that twitter as a company right now can't make a good mobile experience um and third-party developers can so i don't it'll be interesting to see what they do there whether they embrace the third-party developers or whether they actually make an effort to get their internal mobile development team in shape was we've we've talked about before the the the whispers are that they bring talented developers in to work on Twitter's mobile apps, and then they leave not too long after.

And that's a bad sign. So I'm curious about how that goes, about whether Twitter says, you know what, third-party apps are an important part of our ecosystem, and we're going to do more with them because that's an important part of what we need to do to grow. Or whether they'll say, no, no, no, we need to own that, but we're going to do more with them because that's an important part of what we need to do to grow or whether they'll say uh no no no we need to own that but we're going to do a better job i don't think there's an option other than one of those two though i don't i i will be grossly disappointed with the the the new jack dorsey era if their uh presence on the ipad remains what it is now which is a joke so they just shut it down and point everyone to to tweet what's terrific yeah well my fear is that they'll shut it down and point everybody at the web and say just use the web version of twitter it's like no no no well yeah you're probably right

then again have you seen twitter for ipad i know but at least it looks better than what they had before i know there's a lot of white space, which is terrible, but that previous version was just horrific. Yeah, it was. It was. So, you know, we live in hope. We do indeed. Should we do some Ask Upgrade?

Yeah, it's a good idea. Would you like to thank our Ask Upgrade sponsor this week, Jason? Yes, I would. I would like to thank them. Ask Upgrade this week brought to you by Stamps.com. You know, as I've told you before, it can be difficult, mailing and shipping and getting that job done. Thank you. very expensive. There are multi-year commitments and hidden fees often. There is a better way, though. It is stamps.com. With stamps.com, you get to buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package and do it right from your desk using your own computer and printer. You can even get special postage discounts that you can't find at the post office. Plus, stamps.com is more

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type in upgrade. That's stamps.com. Enter upgrade. and type in upgrade. That's stamps.com, enter upgrade. Thank you to stamps.com for supporting upgrade and hashtag ask upgrade. I need to get an actual sound effect for you. Justin has asked, regarding display zoom,

do you use standard or zoomed? I use standard. I use standard too. Oh, wow. On the 6 Plus. Well, you know, you're taking full advantage of the room then. I know some people. So my wife uses it zoomed on the 6 because she's getting a little far-sighted.

She needs reading glasses now. So she uses it zoomed. So when she went from the five to the six, she put it in zoomed mode. And that means that she's got essentially the same real estate as she had on the five, but everything's bigger. And that's actually worked great. Previously, she was struggling with kind of cranking up the font size on things. And that's really inconsistent in iOS because not everybody's using the right font APIs in their apps. And so now she's using it Zoomed. But I'm still on standard.

So if you remember many weeks ago, I spoke about my mom getting a new phone for my mom. Yeah. We got her a 6. It came a couple of days ago. And I set her up on it. She is using it standard standard but she has the text bumped all the way up and bold text on because it makes it easier for her to see

but she loves the iPhone 6 she loves it she's coming from a 5C we've got Touch ID set up which she thinks is awesome because she wasn't using a passcode before so we set her up with Touch ID although she found the whole

process of enabling touch id hilarious she just was really giggling like can you keep lifting your thumb like your your finger finger or thumb putting up and down up and down i was telling her to do it and she just thought it was so funny to the point where she couldn't stop laughing so much that i had to hold her hand and do it for her it was a whole big family silly moment uh but she really really loves it she thinks she loves the big screen she did say that she kind of wishes it was bigger like she she's interested in the plus but she wouldn't be able to use it it'd be too big for her hands um which she understands but she really does like her six a lot um and i'm i'm happy that we've got her on a on a new phone and and she seems she seems really

happy about it and she's uh learning how to use apps more and she transferred her banking app overall by herself and stuff which is great because like my mom has never used a computer like she uses a windows machine at work which she only knows how to use that exact machine with the programs in the exact way right she's she's one of those kinds of people that she knows how to use. My dad never used computers, but I set him up with an Excel spreadsheet for his office's accounting for his books. It was just an Excel spreadsheet with tabs for every month. And every year I would make him a new one. And he never did anything else ever on a computer, but he knew how to turn on the Mac SE, I think, or maybe it was a Mac 2. It ended up being a 2Ci after a while.

And he knew to click on the folder with the year and click on the month and put in the numbers. And that was it. But he knew how to do that one thing. That was using a computer. Yep. And that's exactly it. That is computer, right?

But yeah, she knows how to use her iPhone. She was talking to me the other day about Googling things. Like, it's awesome. And I love that this device is easy enough for her to understand. But we did have that conversation again. I had it with her, as I have on this show a lot, about the complexity stuff. Like, she completely agrees with me about how there are,

you know, as it gets more complex, it's harder for her to understand because something changes in the phone that she doesn't get. So she just knows if there's anything she doesn't get, she needs to tell me because plus I say to her, it also is really good for the shows because it gives me something to talk about.

Yeah. Whimsy asked, what's your solution for storing all of the watch bands that you own? I just put mine in a drawer, which is in my bedside cabinet. Yep. I don't have like a box or anything yeah that's mine too i i it's in the it's in the drawer drawer solution it's i i look at them now now that i have another one i look at them and think i should probably do something about that but i haven't done anything beyond just have them around. I would love to see someone make a little box.

Mickey wants to know what we think will come first, Apple stopping selling 16 gigabyte iPhones or more free iCloud storage? Can I choose the death of the universe? The end of time, the sun expanding into a red giant and melting the earth every now and then i mean you will have seen this more than me but i feel like in the time that i've been interested in this stuff there is a story in apple uh press that becomes a thing and it becomes like a for a while and the 16 gigabyte iphone one is that now to the point where I think Apple are kind of into a corner of having to change it?

Because now it's being brought up in reviews in the more general tech press. It needs to come out because if they don't stop it now for the iPhone 7, it's going to get away from them. And it could end up being a bigger point than it is now so i think that no matter what they were intending with the way that the discussion because we'll just keep talking about this for the next eight months um we will it's gonna have to go away the 16 gigabyte now that's my feeling and if they don't do it then they need to they need to have a very clear reason as to why that they will communicate to people. Then again, it gives us something to talk about.

The next 50 shows aren't going to talk themselves. I mean, that's the problem, right? Because we need stuff to talk about, so we'll keep talking about that. So that's why they have to change it, is because the press just keep going around and around and around. I'm going to go with you. Next fall is an opportunity for Apple to revisit the 16 gig lower end when they do the iPhone 7. It seems like a perfectly appropriate time to go up to 32 or more, but let's say 32 with the low end model. They had the opportunity.

They changed the iCloud storage rates so infrequently, and they just changed them, and they didn't increase the free number from 5 to 10. So my gut feeling is that will probably take longer. Although there's so much – oh, topic for another episode. We'll preview this. There's so much more that needs to be done on the shared services in a family. Because I was trying this weekend to get my wife's iPhone to back up to my terabyte of iCloud storage that I'm paying for. And I can't do it without losing Find My iPhone, basically, or Find Friends for her. Because you have to choose one or the other.

And there's so many things they need to fix. So sometimes I wonder about that, like could families pool or could you have a bunch of different devices that each get five gigabytes that increment toward a larger number up to a limit? Lots of things they could do there. But my gut feeling is since they didn't do it when they just revised all the plans that they probably won't do it again for a couple of years at least because they would have done it if they were planning on doing that. revised all the plans that they probably won't do it again for a couple of years at least because they would have done it if they were planning on doing that and finally today Oz would like to know

if we have any thoughts on the round pebble design so pebble came out with another new watch called the pebble time round which is a round face and it has some slightly different features I believe I haven't looked into this too much, to be honest, Jason, which I think is inherently part of the problem. I say to them, bravo for trying new things. I like the idea. I think the bezel is too much. I mean, I can accept the little flat tire thing on the Moto 360. I agree.

Well, I buy Motorola um reasoning for that which is i say is otherwise they would need a bezel probably like this one because they need to put the display driver somewhere um i think that this is more of an indication to me that pebble are in trouble because it's another version yeah they're trying everything um i will note that uh it's now a two-day battery life it used to be like six six or seven now it's down to two i think this is because it's so thin maybe yeah maybe could be uh i think i think it looks it looks nice, although the bezel is huge. Bevel. Bevel, bevel. But I admit that I've written off Pebble because I don't think their iOS story is compelling.

I think. I mean, I think even their Android one is getting harder to do. I think even their Android one is getting harder to do because some of these device makers now are making full-on smartwatches with full-color screens like real little computers that Pebble don't make that. But the battery life is starting to get better and better and better on these Motorola stuff and the Asus stuff. They're losing their competitive advantage day by day now.

Yeah, it's tough for them. and the Asus stuff, they're losing their competitive advantage day by day now. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough for them. Especially, you know, if their competitive advantage is battery life and they've just released a really good looking one, but they've cut the battery life significantly, then at that point, why would you not go for a Moto 360?

I don't know. For $250. I mean, that's the other thing is if this was a $99 watch then I would say oh well that's nice because I do think there's a market for a cheap light smart watch something that doesn't really do a lot but it shows the time and maybe it gives you some notifications or maybe it's a tracker or something but it's cheap and it's and it's uh you know but this is but it's $250 for this so that doesn't seem cheap to me. That seems like a lot.

I don't think they've got a long time left in them. I especially don't think they have long left in their current size and scale. I wonder if at some point they might be an acquihire kind of thing where they've been thinking about smartwatch stuff for a while and if somebody might buy them just for their engineers and all that but there may be too much it may just be too late and and uh i don't know we'll see if you're a company like motorola um asus uh somebody like that you know these guys and girls have been doing this for longer than anyone uh you should you should get them because you know, these guys and girls have been doing this for longer than anyone. You should get them. Because, you know, that software idea for the Pebble time,

I thought was really smart and innovative. You know, like the way that everything was in a timeline. I thought that was really clever and it made a lot of sense. So this is the type of stuff that they could think about because they've been doing this for as long as they have. So I think somebody should consider scooping them up. Maybe we should buy them, upgrade timepieces. Exchange for some relay stock.

Yeah, yeah, we'll work on that. We'll work on that. If you want to find show notes for this week's episode, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 57. If you want to find Jason online, he's over at sixcolors.com and he's at jsnell on Twitter j-s-n-e-l-l I am at imyke

i-m-y-k-e Thank you so much for listening as always. We really appreciate it. If you have questions, comments thoughts, follow up, follow out, follow in, you can use the hashtag askupgrade. It is a great way to get all of that stuff to us because we look at it for all of those reasons.

And thanks again to our sponsors, the great people over at lynda.com, gotomeeting, and stamps.com. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.