Upgrade - 596: The 2025 Upgradies

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

From Relay, welcome to the 12th Annual Upgradees, simulcast from London, England and Mill Valley, California. This broadcast is brought to you by Century, eCAM, and FitPod. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am honored to be joined by my esteemed co-host, a master of ceremonies Jason Snell Hi Jason Snell Hi Mike Hurley

It is good to finally get the ceremonies in line They were out of line They were causing trouble Yeah But I've gotten them back in line As is my job as the master of ceremonies So this is what we rely on you for Ceremony's lined up all

We're going to fly right here It's the upgradeies again 12th annual remember Unbelievable I like to think of it as the What 11th anniversary Of the first annual I think about this often

Whenever I hear somebody say first annual, because you hear it, and then someone inevitably goes, you can't say that, I think to myself, you can't say that. You absolutely can. You can, you're just wrong. You can't. You did say it. Twelve years later, here we are. 12 years later, here we are. Because I knew it. I knew this is going to be a success. I knew it was.

The upgrade is at the award show where we get to crown our favorite things of the year in a wide variety of categories from media to hardware to stories of the year. You can find a history of previous winners, over at Upgradees.com and in the show notes of this episode

there are appropriate links to all of the nominees so I guess spoilers for the show notes people ask for this every year so I've gone through and taken care of that for you the way that the Upgradies works is Jason and I will be sharing our personal nominations where we have them for each category

will also share the top three nominations as voted for by our listeners and you'll get to hear us then between the two of us deliberate who and who we think deserves the trophy of the year. And also, as a reminder, for a category that can only, you can only win on an app or a podcast or whatever can only win a category, a maximum of three times.

And then that winner will be raised into the rafters, given a lifetime. Upgraded to the Hall of Fame, really? Lifetime achievement. Hall of Fame is a different thing. Oh, you're right. You're right. Upgraded to the Lifetime Achievement. The Hall of Fame is.

is something that we honor every 10 years. That's a ridiculous. So we had our first Decadal Hall of Fame. Yeah. I was thinking about this today. Of like, maybe it'll be five years. Maybe we'll do around in five years.

It might actually, that's actually a good idea. We'll see. But even every five or ten years, we take a look at all of the previous winners and then we decide who gets to be put into the Hall of Fame. But Lifetime Achieve. Award is what you get. And if you're a lifetime achievement award winner, you are forever

mentioned in the category in which you've won. So it's a little nod to you, but it's so we won't have, I don't know, ATP win forever. Basically, this is the ATP rule. That was why it was instituted. And now everybody else benefits. Before we get into the first categories, I would like to mention this is the absolute last call to get 20% off an annual plan of Upgrade Plus. So you can get for just $56 a year, longer ad-free episodes, you'll be helping to support this show. If you're listening to this episode and you're enjoying it, you're an upgradian and you absolutely should become an Upgrade Plus subscriber because you're in with us now. You know, like you're in it. You get it. If you like this, you'll definitely like Upgrade

plus. It's an additional bonus topic every week. It's always a good fun time and you don't have to have any interruptions in your listening. But yes, with the code 2025 holidays, check out at getupgradeplus.com. This will only be available until the end of the year. So if you're listening to this and you've yet to sign up, then please go and do that. And you'll be helping to support the show too. Thank you so much to everybody that does. Shall we get on with the first category, Jason?

Yeah, before we do, I have a little disclaimer I want to make here. I just want to make this clear to people. While other podcasts and websites in our sphere have decided that they're going to manufacture your trophies and mail them out to people, we don't. No. Just to be clear, if you're a winner, do not wait by the mailbox for your trophy.

If you are a winner and you would like a digital trophy, I can send you artwork and assets for your heart's content if you want to display it on your website, as many people have. The reason that we don't do trophies is because we don't just award, like, indie apps. We're also awarding, like, best movie of the year. And I don't think water brothers We don't send a Lusite slab To the winner of the best book

That I pick every year I mean we could We could Especially if Dan Moran wins I know that Dan will take the award Like I He's gonna be in the Hall of Fame Runners Up Hall of Fame

That's where he's gonna end up For dad Did we put him in the Hall of Fame I don't remember No No because he never wins He only is a he's only always a runner up I do want to say

I want to shout out Rogamiba because if you scroll down to the bottom of the audio hijack page and this was something that we may have actually helped instigate with with Paul Kaffasas at Rogamiba

but it says what people are saying about audio hijack and the first one is three-time best Mac app winner enshrived in the life in the lifetime achievement section with a big logo we love to see it if you want to do that

we'll be happy to provide I'm just saying don't wait for the trophy I provided some of these assets so that could be done because the little reef one is of that. Yeah, so like, and there's many people I think Casey has put it on the core sheet

website. Oh yeah, that's true. That's true. Many people have used it. Official keeper and Upgrady's historian Zoe Knox points out that Dan Moran did win for the Caledonian Gambit his first novel. So way back in 2017. I didn't have my spreadsheet open enough to see that way back in 2017.

The spreadsheet is so large. now because we've been doing it so long. Spreadsheetsheet's too big. Spreadsheet can be helpful, but it's a big old spreadsheet. So we get into our first category, which is the best overall iOS app. So we have a newcomer iOS app that we'll talk about in a little bit. There are two Lifetime Achievement Award winners of this category. So we would like to recognize both Overcast and Flighty to apps that continue to get lots of great updates year after.

a year. So they are definitely two of my favorite and most use apps. I would still pick them if I could. I honestly every time, I traveled a lot this year as I know from my flighty passport that I received. Yep. And I

rely on flighty more and more as time goes on. This is the least I have flown since I started using flighty this year. Interesting. I flew more in 2020 and I did this year. Wow.

Yeah. Well, at the beginning of 2020, we were going all over the place. Like, we had some family stuff going on. We also went on a California vacation. We had a great time. So for me, 34 flights, four days of flight time, almost 39,000 miles. Yeah. Now, I will say you said you would recognize it.

You actually did put it in the document. So you put flighty in there. Yeah. Well, you didn't have the lifetimes in there. And so I figured we would get there when we got there. And so Jason did one. to award flighty again but again why not why not well i tell you why not because that's the rules that's why not so jason what do you have is your nomination your personal nominations for the best

ios app this year you know i i i struggle with this because i every year we do this and i struggle with it because the fact is i find these apps that i really rely on and like flighty and overcast and i stick with them of course i'm i'm i'm a i'm a committer mike i say that because and people don't need to know this, but they can figure it out from the fact that, for example, this is episode 596, that the incomparable is it's episode 798. I've been married for 31 years. I've lived in the same house since 1999. I'm a committer. I like commit. And when I'm in, I'm in all the way. And the problem with that is I'm not of a mindset. I like, I will try things, but to integrate something into my like core workflow it's a high bar because i've done a lot of optimization and like

it's a high bar so it is hard for me with i'm not somebody you know like i admire the max stories folks that they do like here's 15 different weird apps that i tried this year i just i i mean i'll sign up for a test flight i'll try stuff i'm just saying it's a tough nut to crack yeah uh And iOS has become increasingly more so because as the platform has aged, I have optimized even further. I would love to have a revelation about a different text editor for my iPad than the one I'm using now. But it hasn't happened yet. I've tried. So anyway, this is me lamenting the state of my ability to give awards and app categories before we start the app category.

I, Mike, you have multiple recommendations. Overcast and flighty are. off the board. So, okay, I've got two. One is Final Cut Camera, which we relied on a couple of times this year. Yep. And it's, it's on the iPhone, turns the iPhone, I mean, you can use it in a bunch of different ways, and it is like a camera app, but it is also the remote for Apple's pretty cool final cut for iPad remote camera capture feature that I like a lot. I don't know why it isn't supported on the Mac, too. But it's not, I don't know. There are a lot of mysteries about Final Cut, but I'm not nominating Final Cut for iPad here. I'm nominating Final Cut camera,

which I was just very impressed with its performance. We used it a lot. That's an app I hadn't really used before. And it's not grandfathered in in this category. So I'm going to say Final Cut Camera. And then the other one that I wanted to mention is Call Sheet. I mean, I know it's by our friend Casey Liss and therefore we are, you know, we don't recuse ourselves. We'll pick, you know, we'll give our friends awards if we want to. Colchite won best newcomer in 2020. But here's the truth of it is, I just use Colchid all the time. I mean, it's true.

I use it all the time, all the time. And Lauren uses it all the time. And to look up, we were just doing it last night. We're literally like what we watched Wake Up Dead Man, which was great. And the main actor in that were like, where have we seen him before? And Lauren took it further. She's like, well, it's Prince Charles from the Crown, but where else have we seen him? And it's like, to the call sheet.

Like, that is where you go. Turns out where we'd seen him recently was in the trailer for the new Steven Spielberg movie. That's where we saw him recently. Oh, in an upcoming. Anyway, so call sheet absolutely is one of the, is one of mine. What do you have? I would just say, I love the news, call sheet all the time. do just want to echo final cut camera. That is a stunningly impressive piece of software.

Like, what that is doing to do the multi-cam stuff is, feels like it would be incredibly complicated. And that it's absolutely fascinating that it is able to do what it is doing and the way it is doing it. I think that is really interesting and a really cool piece of software. My nomination is Mango Baby. So Mango Baby is a baby tracking application of which there are many available. Find my baby? Yes, find my, where's my baby? Where's a baby?

Track the baby now. Track the baby, where's the baby? It's not. It's like tracking the behaviors of your baby, right? You're not actually tracking your baby. You should know where your baby is at all times. Sleep, bottles, medication, all this kind of stuff, right? So this is a thing that basically many new, I won't say all, but many new parents do now.

They have some kind of app and they're tracking something. And different parents track to different degrees. there are lots of apps available and most of the apps that exist are really expensive subscriptions that are very surprising to me you know like we've tried out some apps that are 10, 20 pounds a month

which is just it's a lot of money for an iPhone app like I just have a lot of money for an iPhone app and I think that a lot of the times these apps are priced this way because they know parents are desperate and they hope that the sleep tracking app will help them get their baby to sleep. Mango Baby is simple in that it is not trying to do anything predictive or anything like

that. You're just tracking the things that have happened. But it is a, I believe it's a subscription app, but it's a yearly subscription and it's very fairly priced. I love that it allows you to sync with ICloud between multiple parents, which is also great. Jason, some of the apps that I've used, they're like. yes, you can use the multiple parents.

Just share the login. It's like, that's not, that's not, that's not what we're doing here. Like, let's try and find a system to sync this information between two people. But it's also, it is an indie app made by an indie developer. So it looks great, acts great, shortcuts, actions has built a bunch of great shortcuts using it. It has widgets, which are really great, nice charts. I love Mango Baby. And I'm so happy that an app like this,

existed. I think I asked on this show if people had recommendations before the baby came, and this was the one that I got recommended to me. Great live activities too, great live activities, but to be fair, they all have that, which is really good. The Upgradions, this is one of the categories where we get the most votes. The iOS, like the most singular different things, if that makes sense, different nominations, different apps. So at 6% of the vote was Carrot weather. Ivory comes in at 5.4% of the vote and call sheet at 4.3% of the vote. So, okay, trying to work out a winner for this is complicated because there's not a lot of overlap here. Right.

So I would like to give Final Cut camera a runner-up. Okay. Sounds good. I don't think we would say it was the winner. That's fine. I'm not opposed But I feel like that For me and you at least This is a good app to put in

Because we have used it to success This year multiple times Yeah Obviously Mango Baby I don't think I'm gonna be able to push that to win I mean this of the year you had a baby I'm not opposed to it It's one of my favorite apps of the year

Like I think And I think it is a fantastic app That I want more people to know about And so I would love it to be the winner this year Because I just think it's brilliant Call Sheet is obviously in the Upgradians votes And is in yours as well I will mention

Carrot Weather Carrot Weather has won twice Twice, yeah, it's right on the threshold Yeah It's also a Hall of Fame It's a Hall of Fame winner Anna's won this category twice. And Carrot Weather is an app

that continues like the ones we mentioned previously to just get better and better and better and better all the time. Brian Carrot, Brian Weather, does not stop. Brian Carrot Weather. Brian, the carrot weather.

Yeah, Brian Carrot Weather. Carrot weather. Doesn't stop. It's true. Okay, so I like carrot weather a lot. I will say that we recently had a lot of rain here. I know California. How is it possible? But it rained for eight straight days. Are you blaming carrot

weather for the rain? What I found is that Apple weather did a better job of telling me when the rain was going to stop. Like Apple weather seems much more aggressive of like the rain is stopping in 15 minutes and then resuming two hours later. So basically go walk your dog now.

And Carrot doesn't do that. Although maybe it does do that and I just don't have it set to do that because maybe I just have it set wrong. But I I found myself turning to Apple weather a little bit more. I guess in that scenario, you could have the Apple weather source in carrot weather. Yeah,

I just don't know if it warns me the same way that the weather app does about like the comings and goings of rain. It wasn't. I will say for me it does. Absolutely. It does. Okay. You can even have live activities pop up and stuff like that to tell you. All right.

Okay, I guess I need to reconfigure my carrot weather. So that was a thing. And then I also pay for another weather app, which is Mercury Weather. And I do that primarily because it's got that trip setting that lets you have a widget that shows you the temperature where you're going to be in the future even if it's not where you currently are.

It's just a great feature. It's just a great feature and it's worth it for me to pay for that. So my own I like care of weather a lot. It's on my home screen. My only hesitation there is that I use three different weather apps. That's good. Look, Jason, you're a weather aficionado.

You're using three different weather apps, no matter what. You know, no matter what, you're using a bunch of different weather. Actually, the best thing about carrot weather to me is that it does actually let me plug in my my ID from my weather station. And so when it shows the temperature, it is my weather station temperature, which I love. It's a pretty great feature. It is. It is. I do love carrot weather. What do we want to do here? Well, what I want to do is give Mango Baby

the wind and Carrot Weather the other runner up. Okay, let's do that. Amazing. So Mango Baby is the best iOS app of 2025. Let's do it. This is also a personal thing because Mike had a baby. Let's do it. So my baby is also the best iOS app. Best baby.

Best baby. Your baby is now the mango baby. Best baby of 2025 is a secret category. Yeah. Boy, it would be a shame if she didn't win that one, right? Can you imagine? I think technically, technically she could be the upgrade baby now. She could just be the new upgrade baby.

That feels a bit bad to original Upgrade Baby, to take that away from them. The original Upgrade Baby is like 12 now. Yes, absolutely. Are you ready for the next category? I'm not because I have no nominations in the best newcomer iOS app category.

I'm sorry. I apologize to all developers everywhere. Jason, Books is coming, you know? I know, books is coming. I'm going to fill in. I'm going to kill it with books. I have one. this year. I have multiple apps I could name here, but I'm making one because I am so impressed

with this app. And so I want it to stand alone. And it's called Athletic. So I had been trying out a Whoop band for the best part of a year and never really got into talking about it because I was never sure that I actually liked it. And what was interesting about Whoop is whoop would do things that Apple Health will not do and it's a consistent frustration I have of Apple Health which is you have all of this information

about me but you never overlay this data to try and give me anything useful and they're continuing to do this so like now they give you your sleep score but they're not taking into account

anything other than how many hours you slept essentially to give you that score when there are vitals information that they could take and put into that which everyone else does everything else that tracks your sleep if it has access to vitals information

will also take that into building like a recovery score or a sleep score for you but Apple still refuses to do it I don't understand but whoop this is their whole thing but I felt like whoop was a little bit more focused on athletes

like people who are much more focused on that kind of fitness than me. You're getting imposter syndrome from your health band. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And also, I didn't like wearing a second thing. I just, over time, it became frustrating to me. And then many people recommended this app to me, Athletic. Athletic is essentially taking the data from your Apple Watch and showing it to you in a

whoop-like interface. It has great charts. It comes up with sleep scores, recovery scores, exertion scores. exertion scores. So like taking information about you throughout the day and it shows you how this information works together. It uses on-device Apple intelligence like the local models to like take a look at the data from a workout and say like, hey, this one was a little bit lighter than your previous workouts and this is how it might make you feel like little things like that. Looks great. Works great. I am really impressed with this app. I think everyone that has an Apple Watch

should at least download and try this app out because I think it is doing a really, really good job of taking the information that you're giving to the health app and doing something genuinely useful and interesting with it. So big, big recommendation from me. The Upgradians voted for Tapestry with 8.7%. Focus friend with 7.6%.

Athletic with 4.3% and cassette with 4.3%. Cassette is a great app. Cassette is that app that came out. It had a little bit of a splash earlier in the year where it had like a really cool interface to turn your video library into basically like a VCR kind of thing where you could press play it

and it would like load videos and just start playing video clips from your library. It's a really nice app that one. Yeah, that was an interesting app. I never really got it to work the way I wanted to work. Yeah, but it's nice. It was a nice app, like just like a fun thing to play around with for a little bit of time, but it's not going to, at least for me, at least, is not going to become like the main way that I start watching videos on my iPhone. I wanted to mention here, by the way, I am on a test flight of two apps that are not out of beta that perfectly fit this category.

But I, they're not even public. I mean, I think they're both known to exist, but they're not even like more broadly being beta tested. so I have to sit on those. I just have to. Well, next year, Jason's going to come in with a stormer in this category. I'm just roaring in with newcomer iOS apps here and there. Cool, Abe man. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, your case for Athletic is great. I think that, I think, I mean, I want to get it right now. Try it. Seriously. And check it out. It's really, really great. So I have no problem giving it the win here. Yes.

Um, I'm, I'm going to say something. We're so positive here on the upgrades. Yes. I'm going to say something a little negative here. Oh, oh. Which is, um, I want to be as kind as possible. Um, tapestry number one from the upgradians. Yeah. I haven't written about tapestry very much. I haven't talked about it really much. It feels like a miss to me. And I was the biggest fan of Twitterific out there. I feel like they decided to do this kind of, we're going to reinvent everything. They were so burned by focusing on Twitter. And I understand that. They're like, we're going to just have it be feeds. But I just think all of those,

we're going to build an all-purpose feed reader app are a misfire. The whole concept and the whole category, reader would fit into this as well. Yes. I feel like I want to use social media in a different place than I want to read news. Yeah, I absolutely agree.

Or see images. And what they've implemented is technically impressive. And every time I use it, I'm like, this is a very cool app. And then I stop, but I never keep using it because I think it's just completely misguided. And again, I think coming out of the Twitter client debacle, I understand their reaction. But as somebody who always preferred Twitterific to tweet bot, I still think it is a cry and shame that the icon factory doesn't make a client for Mastodon and or Blue Sky. Yeah.

Because I would love to see that. And instead, they've built this app that just, I mean, if you love it, that's great. But every time I open it, I think this is just not the way, this is not an app I want to see. I don't think it works at all like I wanted to work. And it just frustrates me because I like the work that they've done before. that Sean and Craig have done, especially in the past, on this kind of thing. And I think it's technically very interesting. But, and it's not just them.

But like, like I said, I think this whole idea of we're just going to have this neutral feed reader thingy, it's like, I don't, I don't live like that. And also, I don't consume that content in that way. That's the, that's the truth of it is. A news story is not the same as a social media post. Or a YouTube video. Or a YouTube video. It's not that, look, it's not that I couldn't see a scenario where I use a single app to browse two or three of those media types, but not in a one-size-fits-all container, which is what these apps provide. Yeah.

I would never, I mean, you basically need to become a meta app at that point where I can go into video mode or go into newsreader mode. And at that point, yes, you are building a newsreader separate from a social media client, separate from, a video player, at which point I would say, perhaps you should just build one or more of those apps instead of this thing that's kind of not good enough. And, and, you know, anyway, I don't want to beat up on the icon factory here, but I will say that they keep adding, like, bookmarking features or reply and it goes to a different app. And like, I just, I wish they would just say, you know what, we're going to embrace our knowledge of social media clients and actually build a proper social media client because I think they would kill it.

And it's sad to me. So I appreciate the Upgradians voting for Tapestry, but like I just think I think that whole category of apps is a failure. Yeah, I'm very happy for them that they have a user base that love it as much as they do, that it was the top newcomer iOS app as voted for by the Upgradients. I think that's fantastic. But I could not agree with you more. I don't understand these types of applications.

Like, it's mixed media for me. Like, maybe I'm old school, but I would like my RSS and an RSS app, YouTube and the YouTube app, and social media and social media apps. Like, that's just where they are very different types of media for me. Now, of course, I very often will see an article on Blue Sky and read it, but I'm reading stuff I'm not already subscribed to in that scenario, right? And so that's why I might check something else out that is new. To put it all in one spot, and yes, the new reader is exactly the same. Yeah. I think these apps are built on a promise of federation that has not come to pass and will not.

I'll even, I'll go one step further, which is to say I think they're built on the premise that the important part is the feed. And that is a very purpose. programmer-centric view of the world, and as a consumer of content, who knows enough to know that they're all coming in from feeds, the fact that they come in from a feed is immaterial to me, because it's not how I use the content. I use the content because that is a blog post and an RSS feed or a news headline. And that is a social stream. And if they, if, again, like another version of this app that could exist is one that curates your social stream, like Nuzzle, you. used to do. And Sill sort of does, but you've got to use, like, I would love a good app that looked at all your social streams and pulled the headlines out of them and generated a headline feed for you. That would be a thing that would be feed-based. But again, the fact that it comes from feeds, while important as an implementation detail, is immaterial for me as a consumer of content. Like, the fact that my social media can come in a feed and my news articles can come into feed

doesn't make them the same. And I think all of these, I get why programmers would say this is a beautiful future where everything is an open feed and that's all we're going to support. I totally get why you would do that. But as a user, I just don't want it. So that's sorry. Sorry, there's our, there's our side. Our side in this category. Athletic is the winner. Um, runners up. I don't know. I think cassette is actually a good runner up. I agree. Right. Completely. Yes. Because it's, it's a fun thing that people should check out. Um, I think Focus Friend is a really interesting app. Um, this is like it's a like a, essentially like a

Pomodora timer but it's one of these apps part made by Hank Green it is one of these apps which is taken

as far edge of the screen time APIs there's a few of these now where you can have essentially

have an app locked down your phone and so you can't use apps that you shouldn't be using for a period of time

I think that's really interesting or we embrace it and put tapestry as a runner up even though since we slagged

it I'd love to put tapestry as a runner up because I think it's technically very impressive. I just, I just, I think it's unfocused and or misfocused, and I would like to see them turn it into something different, because this isn't it. But we'll give it, like, I appreciate that from the ashes of their relationship with Twitter, the icon factory built this, uh, impressive piece of technology. I just, I just think it's a misfire. And they, they should recalibrate. This episode is brought to you by Century. applications break in all kinds of ways from crashes to slowdowns to regressions the stuff that you only see once real users are using it sentry though it catches all of it that's s-en-tr-y century you get traces replays errors profiles and the details around them like stack traces commits releases and the developers who broke it all in one connected view so you're not jumping between tools trying to figure out what happened

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upgrade 26 to get $100 in Century Credits. Our thanks to Century for their support of this show and Reli. So we now move on to the best overall Mac app. The Lifetime Achievement Award winner in this category

is Rogamiva's Audio Hijack, an app that we're both using right now. Right now. In fact, I just used it to your voice uh during the ad read i put your voice on the speaker out in the living room that it's also an audio hijack thing upgrade plus listeners upgrade plus content they know what that's all about they know what that's all about people know what's going on there i have a lot of nominees in this

category see look at him go let's do it i'm i am a mac user through and through including a surprise that i that i added just as we were recording so you're going to have to add it to the show notes after the fact little behind the scenes i'm sorry i'm just i'm still riffing here. I'm revving up my creative engine. Numbers. I added numbers. I, and I probably said a version of this before, but just to say it again, I stopped paying for Microsoft 365, which I used to pay for for ages because I had so much internalized Excel knowledge. And I realized that at some point in the last couple of years that Excel was no longer my home and that I felt more at home in numbers and Google sheets. And so why do I need to pay Microsoft?

anything and we dropped it and that does mean that every now and then Lauren's like what is going on here I'm like sorry sorry we don't have Excel anymore but um I've used numbers I did a bunch of stuff with numbers to modify the way I do my charts I do all my charts that way I had I was on a podcast with Allison Sheridan where I complained about having to move all the little bars around every month or every quarter and somebody said you can use this uh formula to build a version of your chart that auto updates and I did that I spent a bunch of time uh in a bunch of bunch of different apps or a bunch of different spreadsheets in numbers digging through numbers formulas and they're really powerful um my only complaint and it's a funny one like the

advantage one of the great advantages of google docs is that it's fundamentally multi window because it's a shared thing so if i have a giant spreadsheet with a couple different tabs i need to be in at once i can open multiple browser windows and do that and numbers still doesn't let you open a second window into the same sheet it's also like while you can share and collaborate in numbers, it's not as easy or as slick as sheets. Yes, anything I do

with a collaborator I do with Google Sheets. Yeah, absolutely. Basically. But I use this, I use it a lot. I love it. I think it is my favorite by far. And I used to use, I used to use Keynote a lot. And it's also great. I don't use pages. Don't at me.

I just don't care. But numbers is great. I love numbers and use numbers all the time. If I'm ever making a spreadsheet for myself, if it is never going to be shared, I will definitely always use numbers for that. Because I just like the way it looks. I like the way it works.

It's very simple. I will say I also never use pages, except if you ever need to create an invoice, pages is very good templates for that. Yeah, that's literally the only way I ever use pages is to make an invoice. It's good for that. It's great invoice. They should call it invoicer.

Invoicer. Invoicer. Envoicer. So numbers is good. Mimstream, which has won the best newcomer twice. It's my Mac email client and I love it and it's really good. I mean, what can I say? It's really good.

It's a Gmail client. It's great. Wouldn't it be great if they had an iOS app? Well, if they did. it's still in test flight and I can't give it an award so we'll be incredible when they win

best newcomer again maybe in a different category in a different platform three time best newcomer award that would be amazing I'm going to say and this is maybe a little controversial but

I put chat GPT and Claude in here and here's my reasoning both of them have interesting connections that they can do to things on your Mac that I think make them intriguing.

ChatGPT supports... Is it chat GPT supports M... Is it chat GPT or is it Claude that support connectors?

Claude is more of the connectors on the MCP stuff. Claude is better at this. ChatGPT has some interesting things. Claude is better at this. Yeah, Claude supports on-device connectors so it's connected to

long play which is an app that supports the format the MCP format um Claude supports control your Mac

which is basically like command line and OSA script which means it can do Apple script I actually have a statement here's here's the

give and take of these apps Claude has no way to remember a phrase and fire it off on command no way to do that nor is it scriptable in any way

so it is ironically uncontrollable but good at controlling things which just drives me mad but I have a paragraph block that I was doing over the weekend based on a Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Rang post about using LLMs as proofreaders and his was more like he gets the chatbot

to give him a list of corrections and I said well what I would like is for the chatbot to take my file look at it, insert the corrections in line below each paragraph where the corrections are there with a little flag

and then put it back in my text editor. And I can get Claude to do that. Claude will look at the top window and BB edit using OSA script. It will then proofread it. It will insert its corrections as I request, you know, not in line,

but below the paragraph where the correction is there with a big like a bunch of greater than symbols just as a marker, and then we'll take that and open a new BB edit document with that as the contents. And it just does it, which is amazing. Except, again, okay, great, how do I wire that up to a keyboard shortcut? I can't. I can't. Instead, you have to, like, script the interface. It's so, so dumb. So it's, on the one hand, it's super brilliant. And both of these apps are like this. They have really nice aspects of them and then really stupid aspects of them. But what I,

what I like and the fact that they bought that ChatGPT bought Software Applications Inc or OpenAI did is I feel like we're right on the verge of something even more interesting in terms of really proper integration between these. Now I could do this now using shortcuts and

on device models or the private cloud compute models but we know you know it's Apple's models they're not quite as good but anyway so having those apps exist and be Mac apps and have some things about them that, like, do things on the Mac, I think is really good because I'm much more interested in using these things when they're integrated into my Mac than I am when it's a web browser window. So I want to mention both of those. I'm glad that these companies that Anthropic

can open AI are actually doing Mac apps and that there's the potential that these Mac apps could become even more interesting over time. I like that. ChachyPT also does, they have an Apple Music integration now, which is kind of nice. Yeah, anyway. And then the other app I wanted to mention is ICE because this is, you know, bartender got, you know, there was a question about like, bartender got sold and like, who are the new developers? And then the people who have used the new version of it say it's not that impressive, but it broke, Tahoe broke compatibility with it. And so everybody went around looking for other menu bar utilities. And ice is a good one that is a free open source and works. And I like that, that it's those things. So I want to mention ice as well.

The Upgradians voted for ChatGPT with 6.8%. Mindstream with 5.3%. Obsidian with 3.4% and Things at 3.4%. Got a lot of organized... Things is in this every single year. Every year. Things is voted for by the Upgradians. I know. You know, every time I use things, I like it.

I appreciate it and then I just go back to Reminders because Reminders is more than enough for me, even though things is very impressive. I'm just not, I'm not Omnifocus either. I'm just, these are not, this is not my life. I, I, I, I love Mimstream as a nominee or winner. I like, I like numbers as a nominee or winner.

What do you think? I would struggle to make ChatGPT the winner. Well, this is what I was going to say is, I think Claude is better than ChatGPT. Okay. That's the thing. I think Claude is better than ChatGBTGT. Okay.

As a Mac app. Even then, yeah. All that control over your system and the MCP server and can talk to other apps like LongPlay. ChatGPT does interesting stuff where it can detect your window, right? I mean, you can... It does. It does. It's using accessibility framework so it can look at your window.

it's true it's true it's got things too that's why i mentioned it yeah i would um if this is me and you i'm putting numbers and it is me and you i'm putting numbers of the winner because i i think that's fun and i also use it and i think that's hilarious so let's let's make numbers the winner numbers is the winner and then let's put claude as a as a runner up and mine stream too yeah i think so more to come yeah from these AI apps but i i feel like the AI apps have the potential to do some really interesting things and integrate with the Mac and elevate the Mac experience a little bit more. But it's early days yet. But I'm really interested in these kind of, my feeling about AI in general is like if you can come up with targeted, focused, tool-based things that use them that are

good and help you in your life, great. Like, that's the stuff that I'm interested in. I'm not interested in having a conversation with it. I definitely agree with you. We move on to the best newcomer Mac app what have you got Jason Longplay came out for the Mac I mentioned it earlier it's got an MCP server it very much is like

it'll do shortcuts it'll do AppleScript I talked to the developer and the developer is like I had to figure out how to do an AppleScript dictionary it may be the last new app ever

to have a full AppleScript dictionary but bless it it does that it's controllable in all the ways what it is it was one of my favorite iPad and iOS apps I've mentioned it before now it came out on the Mac

if you want to listen to a playlist all the way through or an album all the way through long play it's a very nice interface it shows you your albums in your library you can you can play them so the new mac version came out it's very controllable so you can actually ask as Claude to say you know can you find me an album that fits these things

and play it in long play and it will just do it which is awesome that's a very cool feature as well that's supported by this and you can write your own automations if you want to because it's totally automatable its biggest weakness is that there's a failing in the APIs of by Apple to do AirPlay so the only way I think this is still true certainly in the beta process the only way to play

and I use AirPlay speakers to play music from Longplay through AirPlay speakers was either to use a third party app like Sound Source from Rogamiba or to set all of your max audio output to an AirPlay speaker which is not great because things get weird. Then you want to play a video and there's a weird delay

and like I don't like it. But so glad to see this app on the Mac because I listen to most of my music on the Mac and I don't, you know, I shuffle through lots and lots of playlist, but I do have some desires, you know, where it's like, I want to listen to this album.

And this is a really nice way to do that. Plus I like the innovation. I like the fact that this developer built in every kind of automation possible. This is kind of like the perfect new mac app in that it's got one foot in the past with apple script it's got a second foot in the present with shortcuts and it's got a third it's got its eye on the future how about that there's no third foot it's got its eye on the future with mcp so okay um other ones in here super whisper is a

really interesting app that uses uh AI stuff not only to do speech interpretation so you run it and then you talk to your mac but it will process your audio into text, but it will also then you can set it up to use it to use an AI API to process the text that you're doing in interesting ways. And it can change based on context, based on what app you're using. I paid for it for a little while and then sort of realized that I wasn't really using it. I'm not a strong kind of like dictation person. But like I really admire the the expansiveness of this idea that you can have like when you trigger your microphone and you're in this app, you want a totally different prompt and a totally different set of output than you do when

you trigger it in this app. It's just really smart. So that's Super Whisper. Put ICE in this category because it is, I don't know if it's new, new, but it's new to me. Claude and ChatGPT are in here. And then Simon Sturving's Festivitas, which came out very, very late last year. And so we didn't really cover it last year. But it's back this year with a 2.0 update.

And so I think it is going to be under the wire as in it's new enough. since the last upgradeies, and it puts holiday lights on your desktop and snow, and it's automatable as well. So I have, I talked about this on a previous podcast, and I just want to say it again, now that it's happened. Like, I built a shortcut that has a random number generator in it to only drop snow in festivitas. It runs every 20 minutes, but it only drops snow one in seven times. And I cannot tell you how delightful it has been over the last month where I'm just using my Mac and it starts snowing. And I always have that same thought, which is, oh, it's snowing. And it's delightful every time. It's so delightful because it's random. When it happens,

it's just kind of amazing. So I think Festivitas is a lot of fun. Is it necessary in life? No. Does it make my Mac a nicer place to be in the holidays? Yes. And in fact, I may keep I may turn the holiday lights off and keep the snowfall on for a while longer because it's just that much fun. My best newcomer Mac app is also festivitas.

What I like about this app is it is I mean, I love it on the iPhone too. But what I love about this app is it is essentially pointless. Right? Like, you know,

its usefulness is that it doesn't have it. Except that it is fun. And there has always been a long history of Mac apps that exist just because they are fun to have because the Mac allows you to do weird things like this that other platforms do not allow. It is firmly in the tradition of the talking moose

which lived in your menu bar and watched your mouse move around and would say things, which was, did it do anything? The extension that turned your trash can on the desktop into Oscar the Grouch trash can from Sesame Street and he would come out when you empty your trash and sing a little song of After Dark, the screen saver that included, of course, the Flying Toasters.

And the one that it really reminds me of is there was an after dark kind of like competitor called Underwear. And its whole premise was basically like it was drawing essentially screensavers, but it was on your desktop. And it would do things like a guy, a window washer would come out and like squeegee one of your finder windows in the background

and it's just like did this take up CPU time? Yes. Was it a waste of time? Yes. Was it delightful? Yes. And part of the fun is to do stuff like that. So this is a great, I would love to see more Mac apps like this

because again, it does it gives me something. Is it, is it a productivity utility? No. But does it delight me and make me enjoy using my Mac, which is a device that I also used to be productive? It absolutely does. I wish there were more apps like Festivitas. So congratulations to Simon Festivitas. Stovering. Simon Festivitas scriptable. Stovering for his win because this one's going to win. Yeah, it's absolutely going to win. So I'm going to put that in now. So Festivitas is the winner. It's a winner of the best newcomer Mac app for this year. The Upgradians voted with for Affinity at 5.5%. hyperspace at 5.5%. It's on Syracusa.

ChatGPT at 4.6%. But there's more. But wait, there's more. Ghostie at 4.6%. And tapestry at 4.6%. There are five here because there were two sets of ties. Ghostie is a terminal app I'd not heard of. Yeah.

And obviously, Affinity is the designer kind of Photoshop competitor, which is also now interesting because it is completely free. It was bought by Canva, and they've made it completely free now. So I'm sure more and more people are using it. Apparently, it's very, very good. So a lot of great new Mac apps there. What would you like to make as a runner-up? Should we put long play in there? I think we should. Long play for sure. For sure. And I want to put, I think, Super Whisper in there, because even though it's not quite for me, what I like about it is it's using AI tech to do something interesting

with the Mac and not just be an empty box where you type things. And I like, I want to see more of that. I think as we said in our last round, I feel like ways of taking the Mac interface and just pumping up little bits of it with AI stuff, that I find very interesting in a way that, again, here's a blank screen with an empty box. You type in. Like I know this is very popular.

I find it so uninteresting because it is the equivalent of a command line. And I know that it's very powerful and I use that stuff too to do very targeted work. But like in the long run, a chatbot box is the wrong interface. It just is the wrong interface. A box you type in in an app that's targeted or something that knows what app you're using or what tool you're using or what project you're in and that can help you. Very interesting to me. Yeah. It's already coming with a lot of the context baked in.

The developer has done that you don't need to do that. Exactly. So a relatively context-free window you have to type a whole command into, while I do find the act of crafting a command can be very focusing and a good intellectual exercise and I think is actually work, I'm less interested by the interface list, context list. Well, to bring up that proofreading example again, I appreciate that Dr. Dr. Dr. Drang can paste his story in a, his blog post in an LLM and have a prompt that he wrote that says, please proofread this and give me back.

And then it does that and it gives him back text in that window that says, here are the mistakes I found. And then he can switch to his text editor and implement those himself. Like, I appreciate that. But like, there's got to be a better way, right? Like, those tools should be integrated into the text editors. And if you don't want them to change your words, that's fine. They should be able to mark your words or like I did with my experiment, put them right under and say, here's a thing you should look at. Just more integration because as users, we should demand more than, I mean, like, as amazing as some of the responses to a chatbot can be in an app.

Like, it's not good enough. It's just not good enough. It needs to be better. They need to be way better. So I like to see apps that are trying that. And Super Whispers is a good example of like. What if we could give some more context to what's going on here? We now move into the best feature round.

So this is a category that changes year to year. So we will pick a feature in the Apple platforms as the thing that we would like to see highlighted. So the first year was the best example of this so far, which was widgets. So like the best app that have widgets. The problem is in like in past years in 24 and 25, Apple has kind of not really had something in the OSs that can be widely adopted. I mean, you could have said look at glass this year maybe, but anyway, we came up with best implementation of a 26 year OS feature.

Now, when we came up with this, my thought was a third-party app that takes one of the features and does a good job of it. But everybody else, including Jason, has just recommended different features from the different 26 platforms, which is fine. Yeah, I thought about it, right? I did think about it. And I thought about my apps that I use that do a good job implementing liquid glass. You know, unfortunately, apps only really have access to onboard models, AI models. if they had access to private cloud compute, things would be a little more interesting.

But they don't, which means you have to bridge it with shortcuts, which makes it not really integrated. But in the end, I decided that my favorite 26 features deserve recognition. So that's sort of where I went with this category. And what are they? iPad multitasking is number one. They did it, Mike. They did it. I remember having our conversations in June about,

I mean, we have been talking about iPad multitasking for so long. And it's been so, you know, there's the potential and there's the frustration and all of those things. And I think they did a great job implementing it. And then with point one and point two, they have filled in a lot of the cracks that remained. I like, you know, I like the idea that like the platform isn't solved. There are lots of problems on the iPad platform involving software.

Federico has talked about this a lot. But interface-wise, I feel like it is where it needs to be. I feel like there's this toggleable thing. You can go into this mode, and then it can be as multitasking as you want it to be. And like, I think they did a good job. It feels right. It feels good. I have little to no criticism of how they implemented it.

It really is a very good implementation. what else um clipboard history on the mac this is the year so the short version of the story is two or three years ago i had a a reader wrote into six colors and said you know what utilities should i install when i first get my mac because i'm switching platforms like what utilities do you recommend and i thought this was actually a really good intellectual exercise for like where are the gaps but the truth is most of the utilities that i rely on have been replaced by system features. And I do fundamentally believe that if you can use a system feature,

you probably should give it a try because adding another app on top of it, not only do you have to pay for that app, which, you know, if it provides you a feature, then pay for it, by all means, support that developer. But like, over time, what's happened is that Apple has improved macOS underneath me

while I, you know, back 20 years ago, installed LaunchBarr or whatever and because Spotlight wasn't good enough. And this whole thought press has led to me realizing the one great unimplemented feature on the Mac ever is clipboard history. That I rely on multiple clipboards and clipboard history all the time. There are a bunch of apps that do it. And those apps can do things that are, like I know people in Tahoe who still use Pacebot because it does things they like that the clipboard history doesn't. But to provide to all users a clipboard history where even if it's just a friend,

who doesn't know anything about this. And they're like, oh, no, that text only, I lost my text and it only exists on my clipboard. And you can be like, has it been within the last seven hours? Let's go and look at your clipboard history. And you can retrieve it from the clipboard history. Such a good feature. And I'm using it now.

You know, this is, I stopped using launch bar, which I use for clipboard history. And I just am using the system clipboard history. And it works great for me. So it's just a huge step forward for them to do this. This is, this is, it. It made me one of my favorite things in Tahoe because it feels like Apple actually paying attention to the empty spaces in the Mac where they could potentially do some good work and doing it. And it works well for me. So, a couple of history.

And then my last one is what I mentioned just a moment ago, private cloud compute and shortcuts. I, you know, Apple's models aren't the best, but Apple's cloud model is way better than it's on device model. and I've built multiple shortcuts that use Apple's cloud model and right now it's basically free like there are other you can get API access to chat GPT and Claude and all of that

but like private cloud compute you just get it because you're a Apple device user and you can write a shortcut and so like my best example is that I updated my shortcuts that upload images to six colors when I'm writing especially on the iPad and like now it it generates alt text it generates a file name that's relevant based on the

contents of the image and that's because i'm uploading the image a scaled down version of the image to private cloud compute and saying okay give me a description give me a file name and uh i crafted that prompt and then i got to check it a little bit because lLM's that can do weird stuff but like it does it and it's a revelation so having access to an lLM essentially for free to use in my automation so you can take things that used to be impossible to automate because they were linear and turn them into these things that are you know you never really know what you're going to get but it means that instead of having like i run the command and then i have to sit there and like go through and i have to show it shows me the image and then says what do you want to name this image

and then what do you want to have as the alt text and all that and it's gone and i see the result and i can decide whether i like the alt text or not and like the file name or not but um i think it's a really great feature that augurs good things for the future that Apple has built it in, even though, yeah, they need to be able to provide app developers with access to it as well. For me, I recommend one app, which is athletic again, because I think that it's done a really good job of the liquid glass design aesthetic from a style perspective and a navigation perspective. I think it looks and works really great, but also they are using the on-device models for giving workout insights in a way that I think is quite impressive.

But then also, I recommend, I'm nominating iPad multitasking because it's fantastic and has totally changed the way I use my iPad for the better. And I'm also going to nominate Liquid Glass. I think overall, while it is not perfect, I think that it is a good step forward for iOS, personally. I think that the system is more interesting to use again. And I think, I know, what monsters, what monsters would recommend liquid Glass.

Boo-uns? Was that Boo-uns? So, Mike, what of the upgradins say? 50. This,

this to me, was one of the most exciting things that could have possibly happened. With 15.7% of the vote is

liquid glass. Look at that. And that to me really is like that, you know, like the loud, like there is a group of people that are really

loud about liquid glass, but even in our audience, nearly 16% of the people who wrote in said that Liquid Glass was their favorite thing over iPad multitasking, which is the next one, at 8.8% of the vote. So twice the amount of people said that Liquid Glass was their favorite feature of like 26th year. And then at third is call screening at 6.9%, which is a feature that I really like. I think this is a great feature where essentially your phone starts having a conversation with the person who's calling you, and it will show a little.

little icon and then it will eventually pop up and show like a text conversation going through. I think it's really well done and I like it and use it a lot. I think the winner of this should be probably iPad multitasking. Sure. Yeah, I agree. Because it's on everybody's lists and it is fantastic. I agree. And then I guess what? Liquid glass and clipboard maybe. That works for me. Yeah. Because I also, I'm happy, I'm really happy that the clipboard history is there but I'm still using Raycast for it because honestly I know this sounds

this sounds wild but the main reason I've continued to use Raycast is it's one keyboard shortcut not a keyboard shortcut and then another keyboard shortcut to get to the clip well that's that's one of the things that I think that they need to fix is that you need to make you should be able to assign a keyboard shortcut to clipboard history

that said I have my old keyboard shortcut for clipboard history on launch bar. I have that in keyboard maestro where I press it and it does the double key entry to get me there. And it's transparent. So I do command backslash and immediately the clipboard history shows up. But that should be a feature. You should just be able to assign a key. You shouldn't have to enter spotlight and then enter clipboard history. That's real dumb. This episode is brought to you by eCAM. If you're a Mac user who creates videos or

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many Mac tools and apps that you already know and love. Now, one of the things that I really like about Ecam Live is how Mac like it feels. Like you really feel like you were just using a Mac app. It doesn't feel like an open source app that has a wrapper around it or anything like that. It feels like a Mac app, works like a Mac app, and actually makes live streaming and controlling lots of video and audio inputs a really possible and easy thing to do on the Mac, which hasn't always been the case. You can upgrade to Pro and unlock ECAM for Zoom that lets you feed your polished setup straight into Zoom meetings or webinars, share Zoom comments on screen, and even capture each participant's audio and video separately for easy post-production work. To get 15% off, go to eCAM.com.

slash upgrade FM and use the code Upgrade FM. That is 15% off at eCAM.com slash upgrade FM. That's E-C-A-M-M-D-M-E-C-A-M-W-E-C-A-M with the code Upgrade FM are thanks to ECAM for their support of this show and Reli. Time for Game of the Year, Jason.

What is your game of the year? Yeah, I don't play a lot of games. People know this. I... Actually, the game I played... maybe the most this last six months on the iPad is the carcassan game by the coding monkeys that's no longer in the app store, but still works.

Oh, wow. They lost the license. It not only does it still work, we had a conversation on Mastodon about this. The way they implemented the graphics means that even though it was made a long time ago, the graphics still looked like super sharp because they're high-res graphics that just get scaled. It still works, and it's great. And the shame there is basically they built this amazing Carcassonne game and then they lost the license. And the new Carcasson game is bad because we people have seen this with other things, too.

I think Scrabble this happened too, which is like at some point, one of these really bad game companies buys, they've got money to buy a license. And then they make a garbage app. And you can see the difference between an iOS app built with care by like an indie game studio. and then in comes this game studio that just does a crappy job with a, it just a lousy app that's full of garbage. So I played carcass on a lot.

I'm not going to give it an award, but just to say that if you bought it back in the day, it still works. You should download it. Because it's still in the app store as a purchased item. It stays there forever, which is awesome because it still works.

The game that I played that came out this year that I really loved and played all the way through was on the Switch 2 and it was hurdling, which was published, by panic. Yep. It is like journey except with herding, journey with goats. It's more, they're not goats.

They're like weird beasts, but journey with weird herd beasts that you go around with. Great music, great visuals, really affecting. And also you can do it in like three hours, which I really love in a game. It's such a good game. So that was my real winner. There are other games that I have wanted to play more. I do have a switch to. I have played it very little.

But Herdling came out and I realized this is the kind of game where I should just buy it and we're going to sit down one night. I think we finished it the next night. Lauren and I are just going to sit down and take turns playing. It's a single person player. But I played the first few levels and then handed her the controller and then she did the next few levels. And it's just a really delightful experience. if you have a platform that Herdling is on, I highly recommend it,

especially if you like games like Journey. It really reminds me of Journey, and I think Journey is one of the all-time grades. So it's the classic artsy-fartsy short, you know, narrative game with pretty visuals and pretty sound. And I just, just a great vibe. Loved it. What do you have?

Donkey Kong Bonanza is my game of the year this year. Yeah. This was a game that when it was first shown off when the Nintendo Switch 2 came out, I was intrigued about it, but couldn't imagine that it would be to the level of which, of the quality of which it is. And then information started coming out about this game and who was behind it. And it was the same team who made Mario Odyssey from nearly 10 years ago. And then things started to change.

This game is fantastic. I've never played a video game quite like it. There is a game that is like so destructible and interesting. and it's doing some, like, really fantastically weird stuff with the fact that you can just essentially destroy everything in the game. You can just tunnel down into the ground.

It sounds like so much fun. I just haven't gone there, but I want to play it. It sounds like amazing. It's really fun. My only knock on this game is it is a tad long. There is a part in kind of like towards the end where you're like, okay, we could skip a couple of these levels. But this game ends in an absolute,

fantastic crescendo. I loved this game. I had so much fun with it. The Upgradians give 10.1% to Donkey Kong Bonanza. Bellatro at 8.1%. Definitely not a 2025 video game. I did play a lot of

Balotro this year. Me too. Oh, I've gotten back onto Balotro big time on my iPhone. Again, I went back on... I did Balatro and then I... So it was the progression mic was Marvel Snap to Belatro.

To Suwika. game to Carcassan. Oh, see, I went from a swicker game back to Balatro. And then Clare Obscure Expedition 33, which is a game that I have started after it won. It's basically swept up

at the game awards. This is a very interesting, and I can tell a very special video game, but I'm not very far into it yet. So, Balatro won Game of the Year last year. So what I would like to do for this category is Donkey Kong Bonanza as a game of the year, with

Huddling and Claire Obscure as a runner-up. I love it. Favorite movie time, Jason. What are your nominations for favorite movie? Four favorite movies that I've seen this year, Thunderbolts, Marvel, it is a great, for people who have gotten tired of Marvel movies and are like, whatever,

and Thunderbolts has no real recognizable characters and it's minor characters from other Marvel movies. We did an whole incomparable episode about it. It is great. It is a great movie. It is fun and fun. it has something to say about like because these are kind of like

it's really easy to read it as being the Marvel version of the suicide squad which is it's a bunch of terrible people who are put together and forced to be heroic. That's not what it is. It is more like Guardians of the Galaxy in the sense that these are people who are kind of in difficult places

even more than guardians. They're more rag tag but they're like they've made mistakes and are in bad places in their life and it's a real question of like are you going to dig yourself out of it and how do you do that and one of the ways the answer the movie says is is making connections with other people is really important and that's the theme of the movie it's funny it's got david harbour gives a great performance as the red guardian who is the who is

the dad of the new black widow which is florence pew gives a great performance he's the russian captain america essentially which is yeah he is the russian he's like the the the kind of old fat russian american russian captain america hilarious character um and then there is is like Bucky is in it, right? And he's used in a funny way. And Julia Louis Dreyfus is actually pretty good as the kind of villain of the piece. But like it's funny. And there is a moment midway through the movie where it just takes flight.

And I'm not going to spoil it. But there is a scene that happens out in the middle of the desert after they've sort of been ejected from where they have been held captive, where everything kind of falls of part and then David Harbour arrives on the scene and it just takes flight. It is a delight. I love it so much. So like if you have not seen a Marvel movie recently,

please give it a shot. And I adore Julia Louis Dreyfus in that movie. She's fantastic in it as well. So really great. Really, really great. Yeah, yeah. So that's Thunderbolts. Great. Superman. The new Superman was really good. Yeah. I saw that in the theater. and we saw Nymax and even my son,

my 21-year-old son, we walked out of it and he's like, that was too loud. Which I thought was really funny. It was too loud. They had the volume of too high. We watched it again when it came out on home video because Lauren didn't go with us to see it because we saw it like during the week on a weekday when she has to work her job. And I took my son and we went and saw it in IMAX.

It's still really good. I watched it again. I was like, oh, I really like this. I really like Nicholas Holt's performance as Lex Luthor. I think he gives the best performance in the movie. I was so impressed. He apparently read for Superman and James Gunn was like, how about Lex Luthor instead?

But I think he does a really good job. He's not Superman. As with most blockbusters, I could play the game where you look at any blockbuster movie and there's at least one action set piece that I would just like to delete from the movie because it slows the movie down and makes it too long. And it's like, guys, you got a Superman movie here.

You don't need this. You don't need the scene where there's the anti-matter river and they're, like, you don't need it. It's a waste of time. It's boring. The rest of the movie's great. What's her name? Mrs. Maisel is great. Rachel Brosnahan.

Yeah. Is great as Lois Lane. Love her as Lois. And the two of them have such great chemistry. Yeah. No, no, it's really good. It's really good. And he's a good.

What's his name? David Correnswe. David Corencewet is a good Superman. I like this take on him. There's some funny robots at the beginning. I like the idea that he's trying to live up to his parents' ideals, but his parents' ideals might not be what he's living up to. It's his own ideals.

I thought that was a really good twist. And the choice James Gunn makes to have other superheroes in the movie and have them be interesting and funny, like there's, Mr. Terrific, who is, seals the movie in many ways, is so great. And you've got Green Lantern, and it's a jerky Green Lantern, which is great. And then Hawk Girl, and they all have their kind of like interactions together. That part is really fun, too.

So Superman, really good movie. Highly recommend. Turns out James Gunn can make a good superhero movie. Like, if we didn't know it already. I think actually it turns out that James Gunn is a flexible enough director to also get the material for Guardians of the Galaxy and get the material for Superman. and realized, and he did the suicide squad, the second

suicide squad, the suicide squad, I guess. A good one. And thematically, like, you got one that's kind of dark, one that's really dark, and then you got Superman, and the fact is, he has range. He understands the tonal range necessary for that

character, and so Superman does not go places that you might think from James Gunn. It goes some places you'd think, but other places it knows what Superman is what he represents and why he's a good character and not a character

who previous Superman director sometimes treat him as a very boring character and that's the wrong take to have if you're going to direct a Superman movie. Also, on this list, the winner for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars this year was Flow. It is a dialogue list movie

about animals in a flood. It includes the greatest lemur and, oh, there's another great, lemur and a capybara are in it. amazing and it's about a cat and it goes some weird places and I love it. It looks, does it look like a very long video game that you don't

play? A little bit, they made it entirely in Blender but like it's a really good movie. They made the movie in Blender? In Blender. The entire movie is in Blender. Whoa. Whoa. Wow, that's good for Blender. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, it is good for Blender. It's good. It's real good. And this is a movie that I think people haven't seen because the title is probably

a turnoff. But there is a movie called My Old Ass The concept of the movie is that that Aubrey Plaza is an adult 39 years old

and and that same when she was 18, she's played by a different actress and she gets high on mushrooms and sees her future self basically like this. The premise is She gets high on mushrooms, and what she ends up seeing is she has a conversation in a series of ongoing conversations with her future self.

And her future self is like, you get the sense that there are terrible things happening in the future, but the future self is trying to insulate her past self from them. It is a really great movie. I highly recommend it. People should see it. It's kind of like the movie it's most like, and maybe this will sell some people on it, is a rival. And I know that seems unlikely, but it is. it's like a rival but instead of spaceships there's a boat so my old ass good movie overlooked definitely worth your time on my list is Superman I loved Superman I was so excited that Superman and Fantastic Four were coming out like so close to each other and to me it was like well

Superman is you know it's going to be a good time but I'm gonna Fantastic Four I was so hyped for Fantastic Four, I liked that movie. It's a good movie. I loved Superman. I cried like three times watching Superman. Like, there is something about this movie that is so good. And James Gunn understands how to, like, hit an emotional moment with an image and a piece of music. And they use the Superman theme in this movie, maybe better than any title theme I've ever heard used in a movie.

They just, every time they use it, it is perfectly used. and they use it in a perfect way. This whole movie, I loved it. I love this movie. Makes you want to stand up and salute. It absolutely does make you feel like that. It's wonderful. Thunderbolts, I had forgotten, came out this year

until I saw it in your list. And I also really liked this movie. Again, I would probably want to rewatch this before I want to rewatch Fantastic Four. I liked Fantastic Four. I was just let down by Fantastic Four because I wanted to be blown away by Fantastic Four. I liked it a lot, but I think Thunderbolts is the best Marvel movie of the year by far, which is not what I, this is the thing, it's all about anticipation. I was very surprised going into Thunderbolts and I just thought it was great. Fantasy Four is good though. It was really good. I don't think it was a bad movie, but this was an expectation that's not met kind of scenario for me. But unfortunately for Fantastic Four, my expectations were incredibly high and didn't meet that. And then F1, I loved F1. I loved F1.

I thought it was a really great action movie of the kind that they aren't really made anymore and I think that they did a good job of it I think technically it was very impressive and it ticked all the boxes that I wanted ticked for a movie like this I've really enjoyed this film

we watched F1 the same day that we watched we re-watched Top Gun for an incomparable episode and then that night we watched F1 so it was really, and I was struck by how similar they are. They are movies that are more about, and you know, and Tom Cruise did a, did a racing movie, Days of Thunder, but like where they tried to do Top Gun but racing, but F1 feels very much like Top Gun but racing in the same way that, you know, Brad Pitt is great and he holds it together just like Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer do in Top Gun, but the point of the movie in Top Gun is that there.

are planes flying around. And the point of the movie in F1 is that there are cars. And there are some shots in F1 that I kept thinking this is doing to me what Top Gun did. There are some shots in F1 where you're in kind of like behind the driver in the car and you're looking through the windshield and crazy things are happening on the track right in front of you. It's just like, oh my God. Like this is what movies were made for, right? On one level, on the pure, not on themes and et cetera, et cetera. not on that level.

On the level of pure motion picture, what can it do to an audience to excite them with sound and visuals? There are a few moments in F1 where I'm like, look at that, look at they did that. And I think, I didn't love it because I think part of it was the comparison to Top Gun, which I actually think is a better movie

because it's even more impressive, but the original. But they're both of a kind in a way where it's like, I appreciate the filmmaking, here. And I didn't, you know, for it to be transcendent, that amazing visual stuff needs to be kind of like coupled with a really great story. And I thought

that the F1 story was, fine. It's not a bad movie. It's a good movie. But like, some of those visuals are incredible. I saw it in IMAX. Like, one of the huge IMAX screens, like it's one of the screens that they show 70 millimeter IMAX on. It was

intense. I love that movie. The Upgradians voted with 13.1% for sinners, 11.9% for F1, and one battle after another at 11.1%. I've got sinners on my list. I guess I got one battle on my list as well, but sinners is like on my list of the next couple of movies I need to see, and I just haven't seen it. Part of that is I'm not sure whether Lauren wants to watch it or not. So I got to really ascertain that because she may not be interested in a movie that's got some of that content

in it that might turn her off. So we'll see. But I've got I've got sinners on my on my list and it sounds great. So I don't, I just haven't seen it. What do we want to make? Because of our movie of the year? I don't know. What would you vote for here? Superman?

Hmm. Yeah, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that. And then F1 and Thunderbolts? Yeah. I was just, I was so blown away by Superman. I was very surprised at how good that movie was. Yeah, it's really good.

Marketing campaign of the year goes to Thunderbolts, though. if we did that. That was the marketing campaign for that was very fun. Yeah, I still think a lot of people just gave it a skip and they shouldn't. You should go back and watch it. It's good. Favorite TV show, Jason, what have you got for us? Got a big list here. Good year for TV. Good year for new TV. The Pit on HBO Max starring Noah Wiley, brought back the ER-style hospital drama. I know there's a lawsuit, but he's playing a different character. And it's really kind of taken a modern take on on this. Also really taught

the team they took a gamble on it because it's like 15 episodes but they shot it on it's primarily on just a single set in this in this emergency room and I think a lot of other streamers are going to try and replicate it

because it's this idea that you can get 15 episodes a year out of a show instead of eight or six every two years is a good one and they killed it. It's just it's it's emotional.

It's pulse-pound It is, like, there's so much life and death, life and death drama and human drama to be found in intense medical situations and the pit knows what it's doing. There are a bunch of, you know, the premise is similar to ER in the sense that and, and to ERs in general and emergency rooms in general, which is you've got attending physicians who are like the bosses, but then you've also got a bunch of people who are like interns and medical students who are also working. And so you get young people who are being exposed to these things for the first time. You've got people who are a little more jaded, and then you've got kind of like the senior people who are often really jaded, but also can be wise.

Really good combination from Noah Wiley. He was the fresh-faced medical student in ER, and he is the grizzled veteran here. Great performance, great show. Loved it to death. Coming back next month. Coming back in a few weeks for another extended run. So I love that, too,

that they can make more of this show. Still, not available. Not available in the UK. So HBO Max, is launching here in March and for some reason they're holding the pit for that even though they're continuing

their deal with Sky as well which has some shows. I don't know why the pit has been kept in this limbo but it has. So at some point I'll watch the pit and I'll look forward to it. Maybe I'll have two seasons. Yeah. That'd be good for me. That'd be good for me. All right. Pluribus on Apple TV.

Yep. I love it. Fantastic. The whole thing really makes you think looks great, interesting characters. Another, you know, it's just Vince Gilligan doing his thing. It's really good.

Love it. Great performance by Ray Seahorn. Just good stuff. Ludwig, which actually came out in 24 in the UK, but it hit the U.S. in 25. This is David Mitchell as a puzzle creator whose identical twin brother is a detective who solves crimes.

His brother goes missing. They make the bad decision. of replacing him pretending to be his brother and so he doesn't know anything about police work but he does know how to solve puzzles and David Mitchell is so funny

and it is there are good mysteries but also just kind of ridiculous at the same time it was a real find David Lora recommended it on the incomparable best of last year episode and a bunch of us like that feels something like David Lowe

would like that feels like a David Lowe TV show yeah I mean it's a mystery kind of thing but it's so good I just, it's so good. So it's on Britbox in the US and BBC in the UK. So you can just check it out. So good.

It's like six episodes. It goes by fast, but it's exactly my jam. British TV. Exactly my jam. Severance. They did it, Mike. They made another season of severance and they didn't blow it. Seriously, a very hard task that they succeed.

Yeah. And I mean, it sounds like they spent a lot of money to make that because it seems like they reshot a bunch of stuff at the end. Yeah, they had to fix a bunch of stuff. of stuff. They brought in Bo Willemont to run season three and he ended up having to run the back half of season two in order to get it where they wanted it to be. But they did.

They did get it there. And, you know, there's one episode this season that I didn't like, but most of them I really liked. And I feel like they carried it off. And it's not I mean, of course, season one was so great. But like, honestly, at the end of season one, I was like, this is amazing. This was an amazing ride. But I also had

part of me that was like, I'm a little worried about whether they can carry this off going forward because they're going to have to complexify the world. and the details and the characters. And are they going to be able to do that without losing the magic? And the answer is that they did. We'll see if they can do it for season three,

but they did it for season two. It really, they killed it. Absolutely. And I forgot that this was this year. And then I was reading one of these stories that this TV show is based on and I realized that it was this year and I want to give a shout out to another Apple show,

MurderBot, based on the series of novellas by Martha Wells about a killer robot. that becomes is freed from its servitude and has to figure out how to navigate the world. It is a sci-fi comedy. It is both a good sci-fi show

and a funny show about humanity. And yes, the killer robot teaches us all about humanity. It's a humanoid robot. It wears like a mask and stuff to look like a robot, but then it takes off the mask and it's just a person.

and that deeply disturbs the other humans because it's not a human. It's a person but not a human. And what does that mean? So it's got some real depth to it while also being fun and exciting. So like it's right at my alley. Murder Bot.

I highly recommend it's great. I will echo Severance, which is brilliant. Loved it. Loved every second of it. Great show. Expertly done. Incredible performances all around.

Like wonderful. but my show of the year was the studio. I think the studio was a creative tool to force. Yes, it was a very like, do you like Hollywood type show, right? Like, I think that that helps. Like, if you care about how movies and TV are made, you're going to enjoy this more. But I don't think it is a prerequisite to enjoying the show,

but I think there's a lot of inside jokes that you would enjoy. Like, basically, if you listen to The Town, which is a podcast that we love and recommend and I think as a previous favorite podcast winner then you will love the studio but I think that it is just fantastic every little thing you see about how this show was made only elevates it in my mind

but irrespective of all of the technical stuff it is just a very fun, funny, entertaining watch with great casting the whole way through fantastic guest performances I adored this show brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff Great show. The Upgradians voted for Pluribus at 21.5%.

I should say, I haven't finished it yet, by the way. So it's not going to get nominated by me because I haven't seen it. We're only a few episodes in. Severance, 18.2%, and the studio at 7.4%. I think maybe you wouldn't put the studio as the winner. It's not in my top five. It is in my top 10, but it's not my top five. But I would be very happy to put severance as the winner.

Yeah, yeah, let's put severance at the top. And what do we want to do as our runner-ups? Peribus? Yeah, yeah. We can do pluribus in the studio. That's fine. All Apple. Well, we spoke about this in the draft.

They're doing great stuff over there. They are. They are. All right. It's your time to shine, Jason Snell. Favorite book? Oh, right. Mike doesn't read. Correct.

I did like Apple and China, a book that you should read. Yeah, I will. I absolutely will read that book. You know, when you're trapped under a baby and it's five in the morning, one thing you could do is read. I was trapped under a baby at 5 o'clock in the morning, but what I didn't want to do last night was to stimulate my brain in any way because I wanted to go sleep so I could recall the upgrades today. Yeah, yeah. I had a moment where I realized that I was chatting with Mike, and he was awake in the morning and I had not gone to bed yet. Yep, it was rough, rough stuff. Yeah, I just watched a football game. and then there's Mike texting and I'm like Mike what's going on and like there's a baby what's

particularly bad is if me you and Stephen are in the group chat together talking at the same time because I can wait most mornings I'm awake before you could conceivably have gone to bed right but this was like yeah we're we're middle of the night territory now that's yeah because it was like 930 here yeah yeah and Stephen was still up late they were still up They were still up, which is... And you were awake. And I was awake. Anyway, Apple and China, it's good.

Patrick McGee. If you're looking for nonfiction about Apple, that is the pick. It is one of the best books written about Apple ever. I got to read it. I got to read it. Great, great details. Just amazing details. What a good job.

I can be one of those podcasters that says, it's like what they say in Apple in China, because I hear that all over the place now. Oh, yeah, from the Apple in China book, they say that this happens. You should probably read it. I could also be one of those podcasters. Yeah. or I don't know is there an audio book

Get the audiobook There is And that's how I would do it That is how I would do it But right now Jason I'm re-listening To a bunch of the rest of this history Because I can't be stopped

I'll talk about this in a minute Okay Two best books I read this year Are Moonbound by Robin Sloan Moonbound So this is the author of Sourdough

Which was kind of like a tech industry book that's fun and weird and oh, Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore, which is also a very good book that I really enjoyed. But moonbound, it's a wild book. It is

sort of sci-fi and a little bit fantasy. It's set in the far future, but it's got some concepts from the present or the near future mixed in. There are dragons on the moon. There are sentient robots that have their

bodies distributed all over Earth, but they have one consciousness. There's a character who's on a quest, very fantasy-like. There is a secret spaceship that is revealed at an interesting time. There is a character who's basically like an Instagram influencer from the 21st century who just appears on the scene. You're like, what? It's bananas and great. I loved it. Moonbound, Robin Sloan, highly recommended.

And then the other book I want to recommend is Automatic Noodle. by Annaline Newitz. That's a great name. I've read a bunch of their stuff. This is really good. It's short. It's basically a novella. And it is cozy.

It is a very nice story about a bunch of robots in the mid-21st century after a kind of apocalyptic civil war in San Francisco. Cozy. But it is. This is what I'm saying. So the world around them is strange and a little bit disturbing. but in the end, what do the robots want to do, these sentient robots? All they want to do is open a noodle shop and make noodles for people.

That's all they want to do. Are there any people, though? There are people. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's not. No, there's people. There's like a civil war. So California is now its own country.

And they're like, some of these robots used to be war robots, but now they just want to make noodles. And like, and there's some plot stuff that goes on. But like in the end, like how Travis Baldry wrote a book called, what was that? that called Legends and Lates. That was basically a fantasy novel about a warrior. But really what she wants to do is open a coffee shop.

This is like that, except it's more sci-fi because it's about robots. But it's the same idea that robots just want to open a neutral shop in San Francisco. That's all they want to do. They have to deal with mean review bombers who give them bad reviews online. It's great.

I love it. Automatic noodle by Emily Newitz. The Upgradians voted for Apple in China by Patrick McGee at 10%. The Corrie Docter O book, the title that I don't want to say on the show, is 2.9% of the vote. Also, it's just a phrase that really annoys me. Yeah, I just really annoy me. People have really attached to it. Oh, and it's just not a good phrase.

And like, I just don't like it. And sometimes you can make your point about using that language. And people misuse it, too. Yeah, it's too clever by half. I never liked it. Anyway, so that one's not winning And everything is tuberculosis by John Green also at 2.9%.

Yeah. What would you like to be the winner of the category, Jason Stone? I think it is going to be moonbound. Love it, moonbound. Congratulations to Robin Sloan. Great book. And then

Automatic Noodle and Apple and China are our runners-up. Perfect. Does your list? Because I can, you know, I get to choose and I'm not going to, I know there's a tech nonfiction book about Apple that we could make the winner, but I'm just not going to. It's a good book, though. People should read it.

Favorite podcast. There are two Lifetime Achievement Award winners in the favorite podcast category. That is ATP, the Accidental Tech Podcast, from when we had a favorite tech podcast category, but we folded those together over time. And the Flop House, which was also a Lifetime Achievement Award winner. Jason, what are your nominations for Favorite Podcast of 20? Well, my overcast tells me that the podcast I listen to the most this year is the rest is history. Yes. And that's accurate because I love the rest is history. It is the best.

And then my other nominees are connected, which I still listen to as well. It's a very nice podcast. And I want to do a shout out to the Crash Course Podcasts, The Universe, which is a It's a limited like nine episodes series. It came out last year, but I found it this year, so it counts.

It's Katie Mac, the astrophysicist, who has been on, she was on the top gun episode of The Incomparable, which was great because there's somebody who has a PhD in astrophysics in that movie,

and they're people who fly planes, and Katie does both. Oh, that's great. Anyway, Katie, theoretical astrophysicist, wrote a book about the end of the universe, and she walks, John Green through how the universe came to be and all the way it works and all the way

into the far future and how it will end over the course of nine episodes. And John Green comes from a place that I think listeners will appreciate because he comes not understanding a lot of this stuff and having Katie explain it to him and asking a bunch of questions and being upset by some of the facts that come out and then being encouraged by some of the facts that come out. So, um, so we're getting the Green Brothers in the upgrade this year. Um, but, but Crash Quartz Pods, the universe, really great podcast that I enjoyed this year as well. So those are my three that I picked. Uh, my nomination is the rest of history, uh, is number one. The Rest History is one of my favorite podcasts of all time at this point. Um, I have actually

started re-listening to episodes I listened to a year ago. I don't think I have, I have ever done that to a podcast. Basically, one of my other favorite podcasts that I listen to every day is a way for holiday break. So I have less stuff to listen to. And I was looking for some comfort podcasting, like just things that, like, I didn't want news. I wanted, you know, it's the holidays, just want, you know. So what I decided I'd listen to was assassination of JFK. I was like, it was a comfort, I guess.

Easy listening. But it's incredible. So I listened to that. then I listened to America in 68 again then I listened to Britain in 76 I think is the series and then I just listened to the the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the lead-in to the first world war one

and basically I'm I essentially ended up reminiscing on me of a year ago I listened to all of these a year ago when I first discovered the show and I've never done this before but like it's so relistenable still because now I'm listening to those shows understanding a lot of the references I didn't get because I've now listened to a lot more

of the history of the show I still have perfect things in their archive that I want to listen to me too that I would pick out before although I'm running out but there are still ones that are in there. This was purely a... You just wanted to have the relisten experience

I wanted an easy thing to listen to that you'd already heard. Yeah, it's a great podcast. I mean, I've recommended it to so many people. And, you know, everybody seems to go, oh, oh, yeah, actually. I get so many people who come back to me and say, I can't, I can't believe. And yes, it was Apple's podcast of the year, but it was our podcast of the year last year, too. So we were there first.

And it is great. And I highly recommend it. And I recommend, it's actually a little like the flop house where I'll say, go in the archive and find a subject you're interested in. The one that hooked me was the American Revolution, because it was, was British historians talking about the American Revolution and they had a totally different viewpoint than any American school child has ever heard. And I've been thinking about those episodes a lot while watching Ken Burns's The American Revolution documentary and noting the way

that it's framed. And that there are things in it that I'm like, aha, that is, the rest is history made that same point that, you know, sometimes it's parliament and not the king. The king was an easy punching bag for Americans who wanted political support. but parliament had a lot to say about it too um yeah really interesting uh podcast totally worth your time find a subject that interests you uh and dive deep because those guys uh dominic and tom the hosts are historians they're great storytellers yes and they do their yeah they it's a very funny relationship um and they do a great job of like one of them takes the lead in doing the research for the episode and then the other one kind of like chimes in

and it works it's just very effective to get their perspective on this stuff that's why the show works so well they just did a Jack the Roper series which was brilliant it's great

it really is great just a brilliant show I also want to recommend so I mentioned one of my favorite shows is off right now it's the kind of funny games cast

this is a show it's about video games but I essentially just listen to this show every day it is a daily show because I just love the relationship between the people

like it's like a group of 11 guys and it's like a rotating panel and I just I just enjoy so much the ways in which they interact of each other and so I love it

is it it's up there as well like these two are like my favorite podcast but the racist history is just like a different level of the kind of show and what it is

I also want to recommend Waveform which is MKBHG's podcast what I like about Waveform it is a you know ostensibly quote unquote new it's been around for many years but like a new-ish tech podcast which is like the types of shows

that we make. It's like people that enjoy each other's company talking about tech. And that is just becoming a rarer and rarer thing in technology podcasting. And so I love that they do that and they do a good job with it. And of course, Marquez has access to everything. So that really helps from a topic-based perspective. And then all favorite the town. I still love the town. I listen all the time. I think it's a brilliant show. And it's been really good the last few months of all of the wild stuff going on in the entertainment industry. the upgrading is voted for the rest is history at 12.7% of the votes connected at 11.3% of the votes and the little podcast that could upgrade at 10.6%.

Someone put in brackets like, come on, you've got to do it. And the answer is no, we will never do it. So obviously the rest of history is the winner for the second time in a row. It is going to rocket itself into the lifetime achievement. category, I'm sure. So look out for that next year. What are our runners-up? Oh, boy.

I want to put CrashCorp's Pods of the Universe in there. Yeah. Katie and another green in there? Yeah. And then you want to pick one from your list? Yes, I do. And I'm going to pick the kind of funny games cast, because that's just a thing that I, that's for me.

That one's for me. Love it. Paul Stephen Hacker. He had a writing campaign and everything. It was successful. Not even nominated. Not to get up to 11.3%. No, Connect is up there, 11.3%.

That's what we're doing. Yeah, I know, but it's not one of the finalists. Ah, yes, it's not one of ours. Because you asked me what I want to put in there, and you know my rule. I'm not, I'm not going to award anything that I do. I know. I know. And I wasn't going to push it

because I wanted to put Crash Course Course Pots the universe in there instead. So there we are. And there it is. This episode is. brought to you by FitBod. If you're looking to change your fitness level, getting start, it can be tough. This is the time of year when a lot of people think about this kind of stuff, right? You're thinking about the year that is ahead for you. Maybe you've indulged

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by going to FitBOD.me slash upgrade. So go now and get your customized fitness plan at FITBOD. dot me slash upgrade. Once again, FitBod.combe for 25% of your membership. Our thanks to FitBard for their support of this show and Reli. Jason, what is your or what are your favorite Apple Pro? product of this year. Oh, boy. That's a tough one. I think Apple had a kind of low-key good year.

Yep. Not super dramatic year, but a low-key good year. And a good example of that is the iPhone 17 Pro, which they redesigned. It has a color. And it just, it's a really nice phone, a really good design. They fixed the biggest issue, I think, with the, 16 Pro, which was the heat issues. I have none of them.

And again, I just want to emphasize they made a pro phone in orange, which is incredible. And they did a great job. So from a distance, you'd be like, it's just another iPhone. I was like, yeah, but they really killed it. Also, the iPhone Air, which is a, I think, an amazing product. I feel like it feels like, it feels like the

future. I know there are issues. People don't like the battery life. I think the screen, it makes it harder for me to hold it, but like I really do appreciate that larger screen in this thin and light device. And I, I, using it makes it feel like I'm using future tech, which is one of the things I really love about technology. And it makes me excited for what is to come because they're flexing their muscles here in a way that they haven't before. And I think it's going to lead to interesting things next year as well. Yeah. The iPad Pro M5, I know it's just a, you know, an update. I bought one this year. I hadn't bought an iPad Pro in a while. And so I bought the M5 iPad Pro. And it's like that M4M5 iPad Pro generation is just so good. I have the larger one.

So it's the super thin one as well. And like it's great out of a case. It's super thin and light. In a case, it's great. In a keyboard, it's great. It's got the multitasking. It's got everything. Like, it's just, it's just such a great example of that product.

and then I'm going to throw out the MacBook Air M4 because again I just think the MacBook Air continues to kill it it is an amazing product, an amazing value and having it be on the M4 processor and soon on the M5, I think they keep doing a really great job there and of course this year, sky blue, a color that is taking the world by storm if you can notice that it is not silver.

for me it is the two main iPhones of the year in my mind at least the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone Air I think that they are both great examples of what Apple does well the iPhone 17 Pro is a really good incremental improvement of the iPhone Pro line so the color is great I love the design the edge to edge plateau the iconic plateau but also the the two-tone glass design. I really like that. I've also been really happy about the fact that there have been very few occasions where I felt my phone even get slightly warm since I've had it. This was a big problem for me with previous phones getting too hot to touch when being charged, for example. Well, kind of like downloading apps, like it was, well, like every time

I went into the lock screen customization, my phone would get too hot to holes. Like, that's not, that's not right. Something bad's happening. Don't have that anymore. And then the iPhone Air is just an engineering Marvel. Also with the Pro, the 17 Pro actually, I've really liked the advancements to the camera, both the selfie and the 4 and 8 times zoom

as well as the, you know, the whole camera system. I've been really impressed with this year. But the iPhone Air is really a fantastic device. It feels wonderful to use. They put way more high power technology in that device

than we didn't necessarily expected they would like promotion and stuff like that. They did a really, really good job with that phone. And it's a shame it hasn't done well for them, but I don't think that that realistically feels like a problem, essentially. Like, this phone is a, it is kind of a development ground for different technologies in a way that the fourth phone spot wasn't before. The mini, they were not developing anything new with the mini.

The same with the plus. They were just like, here's things we can do. but it's not going to proliferate across the line. But there are a bunch of technologies in the air that I expect, we all expect at this point, will come to other phones, whatever they might be in the future. The Upgradians voted for the iPhone 17 Pro

at 25.9%. The AirPods Pro 3 at 15%. And the iPhone Air at 14.7%. Airpods Pro 3, I like those a lot, but I had such a new. negative first impression. I just couldn't imagine putting them even as a nomination.

So I guess which iPhone do we want to be the winner? Hmm. Hmm. That's a good question. I think it's the 17 Pro. I think the fact that they did a good... It's good execution, change of the design in a way that I really like.

I really like the curve back and all that and then the orange on top of it. Yeah. I think that's the winner. And then I'd like... like to put the Air and the, I don't know what the third one should be. What do you think? Maybe the iPad Pro. I mean, I have the M4 version and love it.

And at least that is a more recent revision than the MacBook Air as such. So iPhone 17 Pro is the winner. iPhone Air and iPad Pro M4 as runner-ups. Now we move into M5, M5, M5. Because it's one better. 4, but it's M5. It's M5. It's one better. And then again, one of the features of the Upgradees is that you get to see.

Back when I did the Eddie Awards for Mac user and Macworld, we would get in a room and we would argue this stuff. And then you just present the winners and nobody is privy to the conversation, whereas our listeners get to hear the conversation that leads to the awards. That's the beauty of it. Beauty of the Upgraties. It is beautiful. Favorite non-Apple product? What have you got for us, Jason? A couple weeks ago, I haven't read about this or anything.

talked about a couple weeks ago when iRobot filed for bankruptcy and got taken over by a Chinese company that was its uh i guess uh yeah they were the manufacturer they they're they owned the chinese company manufactured the robots and i robot owned that owed them a ton of money yeah exactly so they took it over um the story of i robot is is long it includes the fact that they were prepped for sale to amazon and then regulators said no they're too dominant and we can't allow to be dominant here, which, ironically, by rejecting that, they basically killed that company. So, so much for it being dominant, they also, partially because of that, but in general, they resisted a bunch of innovation that was happening with Chinese robots, the robot vacuums

that got way ahead of them. Anyway, over the, over the holidays, I bought a Robo Rock vacuum for like $220. And I've only had it for a couple of weeks. It's not the fancy ones because there are a lot of $1,000 robot vacuums out there. This one was a couple hundred bucks. And it is superior to my old Roomba in every conceivable way, except that it, although it claims to have short cuts support, it doesn't work. So I guess that is bad because its shortcut support is bad or broken.

It's Siri support is broken. But in every way, as a vacuum, it is superior. It's quieter. Its app is better It shows you where the robot is It's like And I had that moment where I thought Oh

This is why I robot is going out of business Because although they have added some things lately In some of their newer revisions To try to catch up to the competition This vacuum cleaner It's got like I don't know whether it's got LIDAR And cameras or whatever

But like it knows where it is It vacuums in a proper way It's just night and day So it was like, I, anyway, I'm only a couple weeks in, but that's a pretty cool product. The Switch 2 is great. Yeah. I haven't played it enough, but I have one and it's great and I love it. Combustion is a company that makes a, it's like a temperature probe for when you're cooking stuff and you stick it in the stuff and it's wireless and then you can look at it on your phone and it will predict when it's going to be ready based on the target temperature.

It's really smart. and I use that a lot when I'm cooking and I've enjoyed my Trager pellet grill this year where I've made a bunch of things using wood pellets

and smoking meat and it's been really nice so those are some of my favorite Apple products for this year non-apple products for me it's an easy one it's the Nintendo Switch 2 I was waiting for this device

for years and years and I think they did a really good job they did not do a perfect job I wanted an OLED screen but I will have to wait for a revision for that. It's a very powerful piece of hardware that provides

me of a much better gaming experience for my Nintendo games and others. And now, like, it is now my preferred system to play games on. It was the seam deck for a while, but I prefer the hardware. I have to Switch 2 to the seam deck. So, really

an excellent games console. The Upgradians voted for on the Nintendo Switch 2 at 34.4%. the Bamboo Labs P2S 3D printer at 3.8% and the terminal e-ink display at 3.2%. There's a big drop-off from the Switch 2 to everything else. Switch 2 is clearly the winner. Yes, obviously.

Yes. Clearly the winter. Clearly. Let's put your, let's put your Robo Rock vacuum in there. Robot vacuum. Yep. I don't know what I'm going to do in the future. I have a Rumba that I really like, but who knows what's going to go on with that

company going into. tell you, I'll tell you. It's really, like, it's $200 or $220 that includes the cleaning dock. Like, it's, it's, I mean, yeah, I know, right? And there are so many that are $1,000 robots that are out there that I'm sure they're great and all that, but I was not going to take a flyer on a $1,000 robot vacuum. I just wasn't going to do it again after having gone through two Rumbas now. I was like, I'm just going to, I'm going to take a flyer on this thing that, uh, wirecutter said was quiet and good and a good value. And yeah, it's a winner. I would love. I would love. to put the combustion you got it in there as a runner-up because that is a it's good

it's really good their first generation kind of it died on me and they were like yeah we had a production problem here's a new one like great and then now they've got

the second generation one as well and the app is really good it'll do a live activity it's really nice Jason what is your worst gadget or most disappointing technology of the year

okay my nominees are One, the sky blue MacBook Air. The same one that was nominated in. Well, yeah, it didn't end up getting nominated, but I mentioned, yes, yes. It was, right, the MacBook Air M4? Was that not the... No, I think we were with the iPad, right?

Yeah, but you mentioned it. It was in your nominations. Oh, I mentioned it, sure, but I know it was good wins. It's funny, it's funny, it's funny. So most disappointing tech, we have wanted Apple to embrace color. They finally did it in the iPad Pro. We really wanted them to embrace it in the MacBook Air. We thought that would be a perfect place for it.

Could they do at least one color option that was not silver or midnight or starlight or, you know, or whatever? And the answer was yes, they did a color. They called it sky blue. And in their photography, it looks like a light, not super exciting, but a light blue MacBook Air. And then they sent me one. And I literally had to look at the box,

the sticker on the box, to see if they had just sent me a silver one. and it said sky blue, and I couldn't see it. And in certain light, in certain light, I could see, oh, it is a little bit blue. But I would say this is one of my greatest disappointments at the year that Apple finally added a color to the MacBook Air. And it is the least fun color because you can barely even tell that it's there. And I hate it. It represents everything that's wrong with Apple's color decisions in a year where they got the iPhone Pro Color right. So that was a big disappointment for me this year.

I remember those moments of hearing about them doing a sky blue and then seeing the pictures and then getting it and realizing. I mean, when they said it, I remember getting the briefing. I literally got the briefing while I was on vacation in Hawaii. So I remember very clearly getting the briefing and then going down to the pool and writing an article about it. And I remember thinking at the time,

is it really going to be sky blue or is it going to just look silver? And then I got, oh, open the box. I was like, oh, they sent me the silver one. I'm not going to be able to judge the sky blue. And then I looked at the box and went, oh, this is the sky blue. Oh, no. Oh, great.

Not surprising, but disappointing. I read a lot about e-readers, and so a few months ago, everybody was talking about this new cheap-ish e-reader that, and they're like, it has mag safe on the back, and it's little, and you can carry it with you, and it is the X-T-E-Ink X-4. So I bought one. And I'm going to write about it at some point, but I can't really decide how I'm going to do it because

I don't want to beat up a product nobody's ever heard about, but I had so many people write me about this thing. And it's just, it's, it's, it's super disappointing. It's just not good. It's cheap. But like, its ePUB rendering is bad. Its interface is terrible. It has, I'm a known fan of physical buttons on an e-reader. This thing has too many buttons.

It's got like, it's got like an on-off button and a up and down button and then on the front it's got two buttons but they're actually rockers so they're four buttons it's like i don't know which one to press uh and then the software on it is bad uh a thing that i've learned in covering these um chinese e readers uh like the ones from um from books right is that over the years they've gotten much better at sort of like customizing android to have it work the way you want it to work as an e reader and they've really advanced. I mean, they're taking a lot of like standard hardware off the shelf, but then they're, they're, they've really advanced in their knowledge of like how to get your,

your Android customization to be an e-reader. And this thing is just, there's nothing. It's not, I think it's not even Android. It's just, it's bad. It's bad. And if it was cheap and you could stick it on the back of your, your iPhone or whatever, or just in your pocket, I would say, you know, but it's worth it. But like, the e-reading experience, experience on it is so bad that I would never want to read anything on this thing. So, oh, also the whole, it fits on the back of your phone concept.

The, not the iPhone 17 Pro, it doesn't. Oh, the iconic plateau became too iconic. Two, I mean, it fits sideways. It's the classic. It fits sideways. Probably fits good on the air. I've got it, I'm sorry, I was laughing too much there.

Not at your reading. I went to the product page for this thing and they have like a, like a product image. and the image is the e-reader and it's got a bunch of phrases on it and I'd just like to read them. Yes, please. Uncompromising.

Minimalism. Brave. Confidence. Kind. Lose yourself in the words. Good night. Unique. XTE Inc.

Independent. Excellence resolute. Reading at your fingertips. Pure. Let every word linger. Do not go gentle into that good night. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Why is that one on there? Makes you think. Do not go gentle in today. Good night. So what I will also say is it doesn't have a light. So if you want to read it in a room that's not well lit, you have to like turn on a light or get a book light. So that's a real loser.

I mean, I get it. It's cheap. But like without a light, any ink reader that doesn't light, is a non-starter for me, and then the software is really bad. So, yeah, it's just a bad, look, a little tiny e-reader is a great idea. The, the, um, books palma is like a phone-sized e-reader, and it's not for everybody, but like, that is, I think it's really interesting to get to the point where you can have a little teeny tiny e-ink device that you take with you and it literally will just fit in

your pocket, even if your pockets are tiny or in a bag and you can just, like, I'm a big believer in e-readers as a standalone product. Like, you don't need to have it on your phone. You can bring this little tiny thing and it's not distracting. That's all great. I would like to see more things like this thing, but this thing is not good. It's just not good. Just that it exists

is not enough. It needs to be good and it's not. So disappointing. And then my other example here is I want to, kind of a concept piece, which is the cord cutting drama. It has gotten

so hard to figure out how what services you need because everybody is fighting with everybody else now. So I'm going to give you an example, which is I have been a subscriber of Fubo and of YouTube TV. These are both streaming services that offer you essentially a cable subscription. And in the last year, both of them have had extended outages where they've been in a dispute with another company. So YouTube TV was in an extended dispute with ABC and ESPN, so Disney, over those channels. And Fubo is still in an extended dispute with NBC Universal over their channels.

And it means that you end up in a scenario where you can't watch stuff. And they try. So, like, YouTube TV basically said, we're going to give you $15. off for as long as this goes and just go by you know, go get, go subscribe to ESPN over the top and you'll get everything that you're missing.

Yeah. And that was true. Although I don't think it got them everything that was on ABC stations. I don't think it did. I don't think you can watch, you know, everything over the top on your ABC station. So it wasn't entirely accurate. And as I was on Fubo

and the NBC stations went off and again, the attitude now is that everything is everywhere and that if you can't get it from us, you can get it from somewhere else. So Fubo is like, look, we're sorry. We're in a dispute with NBC. But here's the good news is you can get everything that NBC does on Peacock. So we're going to give you $15 off and just go sign up for Peacock. Except it's not true. It's not true because what NBC Universal does is withhold some of their content, some of their content like Premier League Soccer. There's one game that's on a cable channel that they don't even own anymore.

It's USA Network. It's Versant. It's, they spun it off, but it's still there. So, so, so one morning, I come out, I want to watch the Arsenal game and it's not on Fubo. And I think, oh, right, carriage dispute. And so I go to Peacock. And it's not on Peacock. Why is it not on Peacock? Because they've decided, NBC Universal has decided for strategy reasons to put it on a cable channel that they don't even own anymore. And if it's on that cable channel, literally the only way you can watch. it is by subscribing to either cable TV or to one of these $70, $80, $90 a month services, but not the wrong one because they're in a carriage dispute. I love it.

It's like, it's not on Fubo. It's on version. It's like, okay. It's not, yeah, it's on. So I actually canceled Fubo and went to YouTube TV because I, that was. And the attitude of these companies is like, oh, just subscribe to whatever. And it's like, well, I'm not going to pay two $80 a month things to get different chance. Like, that's not.

Only one is going to. win. And if it's not you, it's going to be them until it's not them. And then maybe it'll be somebody else. But this is, and this is why I say court-cutting drama. Part of this is we're in this really weird situation now where a lot of stuff that used to only be on standard television is now on streaming, which is good. But there still exists a little bit of stuff that if you don't have a 70, 80, $90 a month package, whether it's from your cable company or it's from one of these over-the-top providers. You can't watch it because it's locked to cable

because in many cases it's this old strategy, which is, well, we need to give value. Like, HBO Max has everything that's on T&T. And I believe the ESPN service has everything that's on ESPN and ABC, I think, at this point, for sports only. But like, I fell through the cracks with the Premier League on USA.

which disappeared from my TV provider. And I, like, we, it's 20, 25. It is almost 2026. If you're going to do disputes like this, make the content available, in this case, on peacock. I, I'm, I'm, I'm, so I'm super offended by Fubo for saying, oh, just get peacock, which is not true. And also by NBC Universal having a service that theoretically contains, all of their sports content, except then they take pieces of their sports content

and put it on cable TV and just say, sorry, even if you pay for our stuff, you can't get it. I hate... So at a time when we ought to be emerging from the fog of streaming service choices,

we are actually worse off. Terrible. I hate it. So my nomination in this category, I actually think is better discussed in a different category, so I'm going to hold it. Okay.

I will refer back to it later on. The Upgradians voted of 18.6% for AI, just in general, AI. Yeah, sure. Liquid glass, 8.7%. So here's the other side of the coin from earlier on, and Apple Intelligence at 7.7%. I also, I want to talk about Apple Intelligence, and I'm saving that for a later category. Yes. I, okay, so this.

This is tough. Yeah. This is tough. I was not disappointed in AI because my feelings about AI over this last year haven't really changed that much, which is that it's overhyped, but there's still some value in it. But it's overhyped in lots of terrible ways that are bad, which is not a great take, right, to say, well, you know, it's 70% bad, but 30% good. It's like, okay, well, what does that, where does that leave us? Yeah. I

I don't know what to do in this category honestly I mean I think that I think that fundamentally this is the year where Apple intelligence disappointed everybody yeah I think we should do it here I think I think it can win this is the year where Apple came out and last year was the year of Apple intelligence

and then this year was the year where Apple came out and said that the stuff we promised you about Apple intelligence we can't do it Yeah. And maybe it'll happen next year. In the coming year, a phrase designed. We say maybe. Yeah.

But in the coming year, a phrase designed to obfuscate what they were saying, which is that we've delayed this thing we promised in 2024 until 2026. That year is still to come. It's still to come. As of this recording, it is still the coming year. Oh, boy, imagine when it's the actual year. I can't wait. So I think Apple Intelligence as the winner of this category is fine.

Yeah. I would really like to put the sky blue MacBook Air in as a nominee because, I am super disappointed in it. And, you know, I'd be okay with liquid glass, but I kind of want to go with cord cutting drama. I think we should put cord cutting drama in there. I think that that is I like that more as a thing. Okay.

It's more interesting to me personally. Great. Most life-changing hardware now. All right. My nominees here are, again, the Robo Rock Vacuum cleaner, the Compustion Probe Thermometer. my M4 Max MacBook Pro I bought this year and a second desk in a different part of my house with a thunderbolt one cable thunderbolt connection

to either desk in my house that I want to work on. Well, that computer changed your life so much that you could come work here. Truly life-changing hardware to be able to do that. Well, I could have come and work there too, but I was able to come and work there. Well, except I didn't bring my laptop. That was the problem.

Oh, yeah. Only brought my iPad. Forget what I said. I should have brought my laptop. I was thinking in Memphis. You had your laptop. In Memphis, I did. I have my computer with me.

My whole computer. That's when I travel on my, I have my whole computer with me. I don't have to set it up and sync it up and update the apps or anything. It just is my computer wherever I go. I was needed to do something this weekend and I don't heat the office on the weekend. And I just walked in here into the cold garage and picked up my laptop and took it out into the warm living room. It was like, my computer came with me.

Imagine a computer you can take with you. What would we call it? some sort of laptop. And then I also bought some Lutron shades for my bedroom. And it's early days yet, but those are also looking like it's life-changing. Because, again, the idea here is you want, especially in the summer,

you want the shades closed when it's starting to get light and you want to be still sleeping. But when it's time for you to wake up, you do want to see the light from the outside and not oversleep. And the Lutron shades, I can settle that.

I can automate that so that they're open. open during the daytime and then they close at night automatically. My old shades were basically, you know, one of them was basically closed all the time and they were, they're translucent so they let in light but they that were in that you couldn't see out and they couldn't

be blackout curtains either. And these are a little bit of both. I really like Lutron, we've talked about it before. I saw Neely Patel throwing shade at Lutron the other day and like, I don't know what you're talking about dude. This stuff is rock solid. I love it. It's the best smart home tech that exists. I was

confused about that too. I think what that person, because Lutron have this whole thing where you can control your entire house via a box that they sell. Yeah, don't do that. That's what he was starting to say that. Don't do that. Yeah. Because the reason I know this is because when we were looking into Lutron here, it's basically

the only way Lutron will work. They have to do the whole home install thing. Oh no, no, no. Just not wanting that. No, no. Not wanting that. So for me, uh, the VTech RM 7767 HD, which is the baby monitor that we have. It's amazing. I saw it. It's amazing. Yeah, it's super good. I actually don't think they sell this model anymore.

They're probably going to update it or something. But there are a few things I like about this model. One, the screen is big. It is a 7-inch screen. I like that. I like that we have a big screen so we can see the baby. You can see it very clearly.

The picture quality is very clear. We have it connected via radio. It has Wi-Fi option two. parents go ballistic when you mention Wi-Fi. There is like, there is just a feeling that if you have a Wi-Fi-enabled baby monitor that people will look at your baby. Spies.

This is a prevalent thing. Realistically, what you need to make sure is that you have a Wi-Fi model that has some kind of video encryption, which basically they all do now. and that it is safe like you have good passwords or whatever I'm sure that there was a story that this was happening

that some model was bad but essentially we don't use the Wi-Fi but I expect at some point we will because they have an app and you can watch from outside of the house but we don't need to do that in some bigger homes the Wi-Fi can be helpful

to extend the range but we found the range on just the radio antenna to be excellent and it has less latency the Wi-Fi would have more latency. So we like it. So it's good and it's one of these cameras. You know, the camera has a bunch of sensors in it,

like humidity and temperature, which is helpful. And also you can move the camera independently from the display, right? You can move it like tilt, left, right, up, down. It's really cool. Additionally, having an iPad Mini mounted on a 12 south display arm thing in the nursery, super helpful. when the baby was really young and we were doing a lot of contact napping

it was good to be able to watch TV shows but it's also we use it as our white noise machine so we play white noise from it and we have easy access to all of our tracking apps as well so super good just baby and we'll baby tech this year Upgradions voted at 9.3% for the AirPods Pro 3

the Apple Watch at 4.2% and the Nintendo Switch 2 at 3.3%. This feels like an incredibly difficult category, this one. We're going to do the baby monitor as the winner. Oh, it's baby year. It's baby year. That's right. Baby monitor is the winner.

My M4 Max MacBook Pro is the runner-up. And let's put AirPods Pro 3 in this category. Let's do it. Because the Upgradians liked it, and I will agree, this is the year where, I mean, the two also has it, but it's the, we got live translation and hearing aid and stuff like they are a life changing bit of hardware. The noise cancellation is incredible. And it's so much better. In incredibly good. Change my life in that I don't need to travel with AirPods Pro Max in my backpack anymore if I don't want to. So I'm excited about

that. I've yet to deal with the whole thing of like needing headphones to record. But like, that's a problem for future me. But amazing. Final two categories now, Jason Snell. We're getting close to the end of the 12th annual upgradeies. So I'm going to move into Favorite Tech Story of the Year. I have a few. I feel like this is the year of people in over their heads a little bit. And these are kind of like they're tech, but they're also not.

But I'm going to merge tech and entertainment and streaming together. together in one big morphous blob. That's this show, baby. That's what it's all about. So I, actually, my two favorite stories of the year were both by Elizabeth Lepado at The Verge. Yeah, Elizabeth had a bit of a bang a year, I think. There's a real, these are trends, but like these stories are the ones that really

were not afraid to throw elbows. And I like that. So one of them is called Larry Ellison's big, dumb gift to his large adult. son, which is a story about how Larry Ellison's kid, David Ellison, got money from his dad to buy Paramount and now wants money from his dad to buy Warner Brothers and merge it with Paramount. Yeah. And, you know, we talk about like, oh, Warner Brothers wants to, or Paramount wants to merge with Warner Brothers. But if you zoom out, and Elizabeth Lapado's story does this, like Larry Ellison is one of the richest men in the world

and his son is like Daddy I want that thing it'll be $40 billion and if you're Larry Ellison you're like am I going to throw another $40 billion at this kid maybe he likes the idea of controlling the media I mean who wouldn't but also there's a dynamic of it that is that I enjoy I mean David Ellison is an adult and probably has things that you could say about him

that are positive but what I would say about it is it's very hard for me to get over the fact that it's a kid of a billionaire who wants to be a mogul and is pointing at Hollywood icons and big companies

and saying, buy that for me, daddy. And Elizabeth Lapado's piece about their attempt to hostily take over Warner Brothers Discovery and beat Netflix out, which itself is a huge story.

right. Netflix buying Warner Brothers is a potentially huge story, but the fact that the kid of a billionaire who already bought one Hollywood studio and wants to buy another and merge them together for an amount of money that does not make any business sense. It just is like Paramount as an entity would never buy Warner Brothers. It doesn't make any sense. But because it's David Ellison and his dad has hundreds of billions of dollars, they could just do it. Even if it doesn't make a lick a sense, they'll do it. And not only will they have long-term ramifications because it'll never be worth it. And it will destroy a Hollywood studio, essentially. And the political dynamic of the fact that, you know, David Ellison's tantrum when Warner Brothers Discovery

chose the Netflix offer over his seems to have been in part the fact that, again, I think part of it was, but I said I wanted this to my daddy and why are you not giving it to me? But also, but my daddy gives a lot of money to Donald Trump

and we told you that we intimated that that was good because we could make a deal. And then the report came out that like 10 Sarandos that had been having dinner with Trump and stuff and like there was

and then Trump started complaining about things that CBS was doing that, you know, after David Ellison bought it. Like I think he got played and I think he exposed himself as a little bit of a, uh, an amateur.

but Daddy's got lots of money so in the end if Daddy wants to up his offer Netflix will probably not match it and then he can give his son another toy to play with so anyway I think that there's a story of the year in general

and then Elizabeth Lapato's story is kind of savage and it's a banger and I really liked it but more generally it's Netflix buying Hollywood studio David Ellison buying Hollywood Studios I think that's a story of the year the other angle on this story that preceded this

another banger from Elizabeth Lepado, which is memo to Bari Weiss regarding CBS News, you're doomed. Which is... Just good headlines. Just really good headlines. Yeah. So this is, this is, and there's an alternate version that's like you're hitting the glass cliff. The point here is that David Ellison put Bari Weiss an unqualified person whose qualifications are starting a substack and being an opinion editor at the New York Times for a little while before quitting and using that to start her substack. being the editor-in-chief of CBS News

completely out of speaking people out of their depth completely out of her depth we've already seen with a 60-minute story how she completely blew it not that the editor-in-chief of CBS News shouldn't have opinions about 60 minutes but when she doesn't show up at the meetings and doesn't watch the video until the very end of the process

and then she gives her notes and they take her notes and then she and they promoted the story and it's ready to go and then she pulls it again for reasons that I would say journalistically are deeply dubious. Like it's a great example again of somebody who is not qualified for their job. That happens sometimes

and is showing, as Elizabeth Lepado called it, showing that she's completely in over her head. Now, again, as with the purchase of Werenb Brothers Discovery, money goes a long way. If the rich guys want her to be in charge of CBS News regardless of how badly she screws it up,

she will remain in charge of CBS News. But she's already in the process of making terrible decisions that expose the fact that she doesn't know what she's doing because she is utterly unqualified to even be involved in journalism, quite frankly. Don't at me. I just look at her background. She got this job for one reason,

and it's because she's a darling of the people who work in the White House, and that's the only reason she has the job. She has no qualifications for it, which is not me saying that CBS News is not maybe insular and delusional and thinks it's more valuable than it actually is in terms of business. I'm not actually saying that. I'm just saying that you put somebody in charge who doesn't know what they're doing, and isn't that focused on it.

And even the people who are friends of hers will say she's legendarily kind of like, the quote I saw this weekend was, she can't even keep her calendar. She's supposed to run a network. Okay. Anyway, those stories were both bangers, and I thought they were great.

So those are the trends of the year for me in the tech world. One of mine is the ongoing Apple succession story, which has been playing out for a lot of the year, but really kicked up a gear in October and November. So Mark German wrote like a big piece in October. And then there was the Financial Times stuff in November.

And then there was, you know, the week of retirements. What was it like, what was the episode title of like everybody left or something? Like the week where everybody left or something like that we called it. That has been just something that I've been really interested in. This is something that feels essentially unprecedented. It is something that is unprecedented in the years that I've been covering Apple. to see so much movement in the executive ranks when just any movement in the executive ranks has been a big story in history, like in the time that we're doing this show.

And in the last month, there's been like three retirements. And there's been like four or five in total in this year. It's really a fascinating time. So that's been super interesting. But for me, my absolute favorite story of the year is something rotten in the state of Cumpidino, which Sean Gruber wrote in February. March, whenever it was, which was essentially the article that he wrote after getting the confirmation that Apple intelligence was going to be delayed. This story was just fantastic writing all around

from John with big ramifications. It hit big and broke out of our world for sure. And I think the reverberations of that are going to be are going to be ringing out at least into 2026 and beyond. John made a lot of claims. He had a lot of information. It all kind of lines up with what I expect was going on at Apple. And also it was just a very good introspective piece about how we've come to trust Apple and the way that they demonstrate their products in a certain way.

And now that has changed. And I think I expect for the next many years, Apple demoing things is going to just become more and more complicated because now we just don't trust them in the way that we used to. Super fascinating, well-written story, big ramifications. I think it doesn't come down to one story, but I think this is the biggest example of it. And you can see in how Apple handled 2025 at WWC,

that they know how badly they screwed it up, right? And so I think from now on, for a while, Apple is going to have a policy where they're not going to announce anything unless they're confident that it will ship. Like everything that they announced at WWDC 2025, I believe, has shipped now. Yes. Because they're not going to do this again. But John Gruber calling them on it, somebody who Apple is used to being someone who defends Apple and understands Apple, but like comes at it from Apple's perspective and is frequently the dissenter who says, you guys don't understand. Apple is doing this because of this

and John was like, nope, nope, they, I, I, and he was like, I'm kicking myself because I should have seen it and they, and, you know, he went into detail. And, you know, did Apple retaliate by like not, not supplying executives to the talk show live at

WBC and screening F1 opposite his time slot? I think, uh, we have no evidence, but I think it would be hard to imagine. the F1 part I'm not sure about right like I feel like I don't have an answer for that I mean potentially it could have just been bad timing but not having people go not having any Apple executives at the talk show was absolutely retaliation absolutely it was retaliation what this is the year you know what a surprise you know what that's how the game is

played you still got to say what you got to say and he did and let them do what they're going to do and I would say that them doing that is probably stupid the episode of the talk show that he made this year was the best one in years. He had Mila Patel and Joanna Stone and it was great. I thought it was a better episode of the talk show at WWC

than it would have been otherwise. Of course because the problem with Apple executives is that they are very good at staying on message and that means you don't glean a whole lot unless they're willing to share something and sometimes they are and that can be interesting but like it's just a different thing so it's fine. I mean John did what he

needed to do. I agree. I think that in our world that was the biggest story of the year. The Upgradians voted for Alan Dye leaving Apple at 24.1%. The AI arms race at 7.2% and the announcement of the Steam Machine at 6.6%. Steam machine thing I'm very excited about. We will talk about this, I think, on this show at some point next year, because I do think that there is an interesting story about the state of technology when looking at this product. I think Alan Dye leaving Apple is a, what is the thing It's a recency bias thing. Like, yeah.

This, yes, this was a big deal. It was not that big of a deal. Like, it's not that big of a deal. Like, that it is the most important story of the year or like the best thing that happened

this year. Like, I don't know. To me, it just doesn't ring. But I feel like we spoke about that to death. But I do think it's worthy of a runner up. It was a really big story.

I think maybe, you know, I'm going to put, as a runner up, I'm going to put Alan die. Slash Apple Succession. Slash Apple Succession. I'm going to lump them in together. Okay. All right. I don't know. I think it's part of that story, I think.

I'm going to put Apple Succession first. Yes, thank you. Thank you. And then why don't you put in, how about like movie studio consolidation as a runner-up? Yeah. That covers mine. Yeah. and we'll put something as rotten in the state of Cupertino

as the winner. I think it is rare in this category that an actual just article wins has happened before, but it's rare, but I do think that this is one of those times when absolutely just the article is the story of the year. Final category

for the upgrade is this year is the favorite tech screw up. What is your favorite text grew up with the year? I have two. Yep. One is Apple gives up on personalized Siri until the coming year. Yeah. The classic, I think the definitive.

Yep. And I actually think that Johnny Ive and Sam Altman's super awkward video where they share a coffee in San Francisco and vaguely talk about how they're going to do cool stuff that is hardware but is open AI and whatever and we're buddies and we're in San Francisco. I would, that was one of my. favorite things that I view as a screw-up because all it did was make me deeply suspicious of both of them and not believe anything they said. I was very excited about this news when it happened because I just think that it is fascinating, interesting news. I now view the way that they announced this as a screw-up because I don't think, well, I don't need to think this. They did not have a product at this point.

Nope. And they may have a product now, well, then they should have announced it now. they should not have I mean I know it's actually quite complicated like how would they have announced this because they were actually acquiring the company and the people but nevertheless they shouldn't have made the big deal out of it that they did until later but at the same time if you're Sam Altman

of course he's going to make a big deal out of essentially buying Johnny Ive but nevertheless the way in which they did it they shouldn't have done it they should have just announced it without the video right And I think that would have been fine. But the video was, the video was too heavy-handed at a time when they didn't have something to show.

So I'm looking forward to the product announcement in 2026 that they promised. So we'll see what happens there. I will say the one thing I admire about that entire rollout is the purity of it, by which I mean it's 100% BS. So they didn't muddy it up with facts or reality or anything like that. Jason, they get in a way. Ego-maniacal fantasy. And I hate it. That's get in the way.

They get in the way. Mine are Apple intelligence being delayed again. I think that is just, it is one of the monumental screw-ups. Like, it's one of the biggest. Apple's biggest screw-ups ever. Yeah. It is so high up there.

Because the ramifications of this are massive and will be felt for years. Like, just, they could not have bungled that more than they did. The other one for me is Apple, Epic, Judge Gonzalez-Rogers, the whole thing that resulted in Apple losing the ability to charge 30% on the in-app purchase stuff, being held in contempt, all that nonsense, where it was essentially Apple lost an appeal, which has resulted in the, like still at this point, they can't, developers in the US

can take third-party payments to don't have to give Apple anything. This will change. There is going to be a point where it is an amount of money willing to go to them? That's part of the screw-up, right? Is that they agreed,

the appeals court, agreed with Judge Gonzalez-Rogers that Apple was in contempt but did not agree with her remedy of banning Apple from ever charging anything. Which means that there's going to have to be another process

in that court again where Apple proposes a regime for charging that she deems fair, which is going to be another circus. Like, that is all she wanted. Like, this time in between, like,

realistically, this is the punishment that she wanted to give that. This is their punishment. Like, yeah. And so. Because they didn't, they didn't make a realistic attempt. They made this kind of bogus attempt

to inflate it back up to back, right? They basically backdated it, right? Because they wanted to re-inflate it back up to 30%. So it means that they then claimed poor facts. And so, yeah, the circus continues.

But yeah, that was a heck of a circus. The upgrading is voted with Apple Intelligence at 11.6%. The AWS and Cloudflare outages at 7.9%. And liquid glass. Liquid glass is all over the place at 7.9%. The outages is an interesting one. I didn't think about that. Sure.

We rely on stuff. No, real bad. Let's put Apple Intelligence delay has got to be number one, right? Yeah. Yeah. Apple intelligence delay is number one. and then I think that the epic Apple thing and Johnny and Sam are runners-up.

I absolutely agree. I'd already written Johnny Ivan, Sam, Alman, it was a nomination. So, oh, yeah. We've done it. We've done it for another year. For better or worse, we did it. But there are still some technical achievement awards

that I would like to give out. You know, like there's always the secondary award show. This is the credit rolling at the end of the year. For audio editing, Jim Metzenorf, video editing, Jamie Snell, Visual design, J.D. Davis. Music, Chris Breen, audio design, new category for Lex Friedman, record keeping. Zoe Knox, production, Mike Hurley, for good takes, Jason Snell. And the award for the best listeners, the Upgradians. To the Upgradians. Oh, what an upset. Oh, amazing. The rest of history finally loses. Yeah. To the Upradians.

Thank you so much for listening to this show this year. This is our last episode of the year, of course, because there's no more Mondays in 2025. No more Mondays. No more Mondays. I want to thank you all and wish you all the happiest of New Year's. I hope that you celebrate 2026 is beginning in a way that it is good for you. If you would like to send any of your feedback, follow-up questions for the show, go to UpgradeFeedback.com. Thank you to everyone to support solicit of a membership.

You can go to Get Upgradeplus.com to sign up. We appreciate you. You can find this show on YouTube by searching for the Upgrade podcast. If you do that for this episode, you'll see that Jason and I are wearing matching clothes. And we got our upgrade shirts. Of course. Thank you to our sponsors for this episode. That is Century, E-CAM, and FitBud.

But most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Happy New Year, Mike Hurley. No host. No host. Happy New Year to all. and to all a good night.