Upgrade - 61: Accidental Trek Podcast

Episode Date: November 2, 2015

Special guest Joe Rosensteel joins Jason and Myke to talk about our first weekend with the new Apple TV. We cover setup hassles, the design of the new remote, the power of integrated voice search, and much more. Plus there’s time for some follow-up and answers to listener questions on #askupgrade.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 61 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com casper and stamps.com my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hello mr mike hurley how are you sir good morning i'm doing fine. Good morning to you. Good day to you, sir. Good day to you, sir. And we say good day to a special guest this week. Yes, one of our rare special guests. Mr. Joe Steele.

Joe Steele. Good day to you both as well. Good day. Double day. Good day. Good day indeed. Joe is usually in our chat room and he's actually on the show this time.

He can talk back to us when we hear him. That might not be a good thing. So Joe is here because we want to talk about the Apple TV today, and Mr. Steele is renowned for his opinions on the Apple TV. So we're going to talk about that a little bit later on. But, of course, we must stick to the format, and we have a follow-up slash out section. So we're going to talk about that a little bit later on. But of course, we must stick to the format. And we have a follow-up slash out section.

And I would like to begin with a clarification about something I was talking about last week, which a few people wrote in about. But Mr. Stephen Hackett got... Who? Basically, exactly. Attacked me and Jason in the Slack room about something that I said last week. So I was talking about... Vicious attacks. Indeed, vicious word attacks.

If you remember, I was talking about the fact that I was having issues with apps that I was trying to open them on my new iMac, and then I said that they basically had to be deleted. And when I deleted and reinstalled the apps in the Mac App Store, I was surprised at the

fact that all of my preferences remained. So Stephen reminded me that app preferences are saved separately, even for Mac App Store apps, like they are for all Mac apps. There's like a prefs folder. Now, I knew this. I remember back in the day using an app called Little Zapper. Do you remember Little Zapper, Jason? Nope.

Oh, is it called Little Zapper? It was some kind of... It was an application... This is the follow-up that creates more follow-up. This is perfect. It was an application that had a ray gun icon. And you used it to fully uninstall applications. So you would drag an app onto this app. I think it was called Little Zapper or something Zapper.

And App Zapper, I'm being told in the chat room. And what it would do is it would not only install... Oh, it still exists. It still looks the same. Look at that guy. You would drag apps onto it and it would remove all of the preferences files and everything. So it was

completely uninstalled from your Mac. This is something that continues to boggle my mind to this day that there isn't a simple one install that gets rid of everything and i was just i just naturally assumed that apps from the app store were treated in this way like they are on ios so that was why i was surprised my natural assumption failed me well it's yeah it's the there's uh well you're thinking that it's Sandbox, and so it's all in the app, but they have access to a preferences place. And it's for this very reason that if you delete your app and then you bring it back later, it remembers all of the stuff.

Yeah, but it doesn't do that on other platforms though, right? Like unless it syncs with iCloud in some way. So it's just a confusing thing, I think, to me. But there you go that explains why um in a great piece of follow-out um i inadvertently or we inadvertently created an entire segment on this week's episode of the accidental tech podcast episode 141 um so they and they were talking about follow-out if you if you remember. John does not condone the use of the term follow-out. But to that, Jason, I say I don't care. John owns follow-up.

He does not own all of the follow-up verticals that we have helped to spurn here. Do you care? Do you need John's approval for follow-out? No, I don't. Good. I don't. We also, didn't we learn the the identity of uh the inventor of follow-out as a concept too this week one of our uh actually linked i'm trying to pull up the uh

the uh the tweet here because it was um and i can't find it but we actually did have the the he cited his tweet from january where uh where where uh he coined follow-out for us oh okay i'll do i'll look that up while you explain what happened on atp um basically they discussed my storage issues and thinking about whether i would need a nas or something locally attached for to solve my storage problem right because i have stuff that i want to store um that like big files like logic files and stuff like that but you know i have a terabyte of storage and i want to keep them off of the imac so the guys were talking about and they kind of got pretty deep into the weeds about like nas and sonology um even though that they all knew and

said on the show that that's that's not something that can work for me. My network set up an arrangement here is not something that will work for me. So I will probably end up going with a attached route. So I'm going to start looking into, this is something that Marco was mentioning. Ideally, I would like this to be an SSD solution because I don't want noise and heat because it will be in the same room right if it's going to be connected so i'm going to start looking into something like that maybe some kind of ssd enclosure i don't know if something like a drobo works in this way i haven't looked into that yet because i do want

speed and silence but i liked something that john mentioned where he was talking about the fact that it's crazy that this problem still exists today. And that the problem is inherently that everybody's needs are different and there isn't a solution that can fix it. And it remains to be one of the only computer hardware issues that lives on in this way. And I think, I may have mentioned this last week, but I think one of the reasons this remains is because everybody assumes that the world is going to infinite cloud storage

and infinite bandwidth, which is great. It world is going to infinite cloud storage and infinite bandwidth which is great it probably is on an infinite time scale but um ding they uh but not now you know right not now you don't have infinite bandwidth you have very limited bandwidth and you you know there's not infinite cloud storage and um and so i understand why companies wouldn't want to invest in something that might only be technology that nerdy people would want for, you know, and maybe consumers, I think that that's the feeling is like the cloud storage stuff is going to be the solution that works for general consumers. And that's just going to continue to grow. And it makes it for people like us who have

these more specific needs, there's not a perfect selection of things to choose from. So we're all kind of choosing from this imperfect collection. I've got this, I've got this Drobo and I love it because it's huge. It is, there's so much space on it. You know, it does make a little bit of noise, although it's about six feet, eight feet away from me. And when it, when it runs, it mostly sounds like, like faint, like sounds of rain on the roof or something like that. It's this little, very soft, gentle ticking kind of sound. And I could probably put it further away and not hear it at all. Um, but it doesn't, it doesn't bother me. It doesn't show up on recordings. It's not a, it's not a problem. Um, and I love the size of it. And what I hated was I used to have a stack of

terabyte drives, like multiple, you know, one terabyte drives. And then it's like, which drive is it on? And they're really loud because they've got individual enclosures. So they've got their own spinning disks and their own fans. And I hate that. So SSD enclosure might work. It's going to not be cheap, but that might be, that might be one way to do it. And the other thing I would say is, yeah, if you could get like a FireWire RAID of some kind and, or not FireWire, Thunderbolt RAID of some kind, you could, you could possibly even get like a really long Thunderbolt cable and put it like far away from your computer where you're not going to hear it as much.

In my current setup, that doesn't really work so much. Maybe in the future, like in the future, I could maybe go with some kind of NAS storage solution, but right now I can't. So I really appreciate if anybody has any recommendations of SSD enclosures. I like the idea of Adrobo, right, because of their kind of solution that, you know, like you can take drives out, put drives in, that kind of stuff, and it's not an issue. But I'm not fixed to that idea. Basically, I just want something that I can mount, you know, and I have a few terabytes of SSD storage.

I'm completely aware of how expensive this is going to be. But it is the solution that I want and need, so I'm willing to put the money in if I know that it's going to be worth my time. Yeah, I think that's reasonable. And there was just one thing that I wanted to mention before we get into the Apple TV today, which was a really great post on the Twitter blog, where they were addressing some feedback that they had from developers. So during their flight conference a couple of weeks ago,

Jack Dorsey sent out a tweet and he was like, you know, use the hashtag Hello World and let us know what you developers want to see, right? He wanted requests, he wanted ideas. And on this blog, they go through and they list some of the most popular requests and they talk about those, which is really interesting. And they highlight certain ways that

they're thinking about some things they don't really address any specific changes but to me the fact that they're talking about things like rate limiting and token restrictions and they kind of talk about why that's difficult for them to address but to me the idea that they're even mentioning these things as bad things is good to me this feels like a change of some kind is coming right that they are openly talking about the issues that developers have with their platform i like that i think this is a really positive change it's on the full-on blog it's not like on a developer blog um i think this is really really awesome yeah and it sounds like they don't know, you know, they're not committing to anything.

No, but they don't need to right now. They're just saying, we hear you and we're thinking about it. And yes, they may come out and say, well, when we talk about developers and APIs, we're really talking about these, you know, value add, vertical, blah, blah, blah, blah, kind of things that ride on top of Twitter. But, you know, I, I think they, they're certainly aware of this perception that the Twitter client isn't the be all end all for all users and that they used to have a really vibrant third party client environment, but the API has been strangled and they have the, the, you know, the tokens, which they mentioned, like

how it's a pain for developers because they've got tokens that they have for per user and all of that. And I'm, I'm encouraged by that. My gut feeling is we're not going to ever have, you know, sort of like what it was, but it may be better than it is now. And I think that would be great. And, you know, I'm okay with them saying, and they said in that blog post, actually, we want to be able to create new features and get them out. And we don't want to roll things out on the API when we're not sure how they're going to work or whether people are going to use them.

And their examples were like Twitter polls and the lightning bolt moments feature, right, where they want the freedom to be able to explore this stuff. And you can imagine, like, if they rolled out Twitter polls with an API and said, okay, here's how we're doing polling. Everybody support this. This is how it's going to be. And then, like, in three months, they're like, oh, yeah, we did that wrong. We're going to change it or we're going to kill it.

And then all the developers are like, well, I just spent all this time implementing polls and you're killing the feature? They want the freedom to be able to say, yeah, you know, actually, yes, we are. We want to try these features out and change them or kill them and not have developers...

If we have to support this whole developer environment and these APIs and all of that and be concerned about the developer reaction to some of these new features, we may not launch the features we need to launch. And I see that. I totally get that.

Then again, there are things that they withhold from their APIs that are just standard things in Twitter, and they're withholding them because they're jerks. And it would be nice if they didn't do those. So I think there's maybe a balance here where some new features might only show up in the official clients at first, and that's okay. But right now the non-official clients have no access to basically any new features or almost any new features added over the last four years. And that would be nice if they could change it.

And it would be nice if the token limitations were lifted so that developers could actually have a reason to invest in development. Because I know that why do we not see Twitterific for Mac updated from the version that dates from like five years ago? And I think, I don't know this for a fact. I've talked to those guys about Twitterific a lot, but I don't know this for a fact. But my guess is that's going to be a lot of extra work for a smaller audience because the Mac is a smaller audience than iOS. And again, if you've got limits and TweetBot is the same way, where you're limited to the number of customers you can have, then it's very hard to invest more development effort in these products because at some point you're going to not be able to sell any more copies of that.

And so it might spur investment in Twitter-related apps if they were to change the story on something like the tokens. So, yeah, I share your optimism, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. There's still a long way to go, and we may not like everything. We may not like everything we get, but it's good that they're talking about it because that's better than what it was. This is actually, and this is some breaking news, which is like this morning, they came out with a story in the Hollywood Reporter about how it looks like CBS is setting up at a production company that's going to deal with them to start exploring doing a new Star Trek TV show. And Joe and I, I know, are very excited about that. And it's like, I had a bunch of people say, well, you know, they're still looking for a writer.

And we don't know about these producers. And people who don't like the J.J. Abrams movies are like, well, these are J.J. Abrams guys, so I don't like that about it. And I had the same thought as about this Twitter post, which is, look, it's a step. There were previously no steps. It was silence. So it's a start.

We may not like everything that comes out of that Star Trek TV show, if it ever even happens, but at least they're talking about it. That's how I feel about Twitter. That was some nerd stuff there. Hi, Joe. I like that you tried to find any possible way to bring up that Star Trek news.

I did. Just any way you could get around to that. I wasn't going to do it. And then suddenly there it was. So I had to take it because it's the same thing, right? It's like the first news about anything. You're like, well, I don't know.

You know, and you want to be restrained. You don't want to be like super like, oh, it's going to be great. It's going to be awesome. It's the greatest thing ever. And then, you know and you want to be restrained you don't want to be like super like oh it's gonna be great it's gonna be awesome it's the greatest thing ever and then you know but you also want to acknowledge that for things to exist there has to be that first step where like we're considering that this might exist and I feel that way about the Twitter thing too it's like hey they're paying attention they may not do what we want but they, they seem to be paying attention and that's good.

Yeah. Twitter and Star Trek. Exactly. They're the same. Yeah. That's what we've learned. Legacy of squandering something really great. And then trying to figure out what to do with it.

Well, I'm pleased you've learned some valuable lessons. And so it's time to move on now. Well, actually one more thing. I promise this. Michael Tofias is the coiner of Follow Out. He sent us a tweet that was dated January 19th, 2015, where he said to you and me and Upgrade FM,

the follow-up on other podcasts, Vertical, should be named Follow Out. So I think we have to give Michael his due as the coiner of follow-up which I like as a term so congratulations you have you will go down in the history books now I like that there are two favorites of this tweet one is you one is me we both agreed immediately with this notion so actually I just I just faved it this week when he linked to it again he he linked to it and was like that was me I'm like oh okay fave super Super fave. Okay. That's follow-up. Out. This week's episode is brought to you by lynda.com, the online learning platform that has, believe it or not, over 3,000 on-demand video courses that are there to help you strengthen

your business technology and creative skills. As a listener of this show, you can get yourself a free 10-day trial by visiting lynda.com slash upgrade. Let's say you're trying to learn something new, right? So you have maybe a hobby that you've always been really interested in, but you don't know where to start. Like let's say you want to get into photography, but you're not really sure how to use the apps needed. You're not sure the best ways to take portraits. This is the stuff that lynda.com can help you learn. Let's say you're preparing for a big presentation you've got coming up and you need to do some data crunching. So you need to learn some new tools in Excel so you can wow your bosses to get that promotion you've been looking for. This is the stuff you can learn with Lynda.com.

Let's say that you're looking to start your own business and you want to understand how income tax works or you want to understand some crazy things about maybe how to go paperless right so you can have the best possible setup for your business you can learn this stuff at lynda.com you will be taught by top experts who are super passionate about teaching you'll be able to stream from thousands of video courses all on demand and you can learn at your own pace with lynda.com. All of their courses are structured into bite-sized chunks, so you can watch them from start to finish or consume them in any order as you'd like. And you can create and save them to playlists, so you can customize your own learning path and share these with other people as well. You can

even watch and download courses to your Android and iOS devices, so you can learn on the go, wherever you want, whenever you like. Your lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics for one flat rate whether you're looking to become an industry expert you're passionate about a hobby or you're just looking to learn something new go ahead and visit lynda.com slash upgrade for your free 10 day trial thank you so, lynda.com, for the continued support of this show and RelayFM. You know, Mike, when we started doing those ads, that number, that 3,000 number was much lower.

Yes. It keeps getting bigger. It's just, I've noticed the pace of content being added to lynda.com is kind of spectacular because that used to be like 1,000 or 1,500, I think, when we started talking about them and it's at 3,000 now. It's crazy.

Yeah. I also know of a friend of ours who's been working at lynda.com for some exciting videos that I'm really excited to talk about when they go up. So that's something to look out for. Stuff that I think our listeners of this show would really like. So Apple TV, we all have one right yep yes everybody has an apple tv um i just want to preface this conversation to say that i think that most of my views and opinions are tainted on the fact that i don't care about the apple tv like i have you i set it up played with it, and I haven't touched it since.

And I know that I will, and we'll get to that in a bit, why I think that there could be some stuff here for me. But just my kind of habits don't really lend themselves to the Apple TV, like the way that I consume entertainment. But Mr. Rosensteil, you are an Apple TV user are you not? like you were a fan of the product or at least used the product prior to this? yes

I am a passionate user I guess of the third generation one that came out quite some time ago and that one was in sore need of an update and so I ran out and bought the fourth gen. And I have had opinions about both things in the past. I think that it's a good product for Apple to have in general, which is why it always surprises me when you talk about how you can't fathom using it.

But I could understand maybe if you have all of these devices so close to you, your computer and your iPad, etc., that it might not seem necessary to turn on the TV to go plod through these apps. What about you, Jason? Somebody, Mrs. Soup, in the chat room mentioned that purchasing all four generations of Apple TV. I've done that i had the i had the the uh the hand warmer uh giant uh running i looked it up it was like running tiger i think it was a mac essentially a very small mac mini flat mac mini and then the two black boxes the the thin black boxes and now that the tall black box. I use it. I used to use it more. I mentioned this, I think maybe last week, I used to use it more.

But lately I've been using my TiVo more as a streamer because the TiVo now supports a bunch of the streaming services, but I also have a lot of content on iTunes. So I ended up, you know, it ended up being at the very least an iTunes streamer but I used to I used to use it as our that it was our Netflix box too and now we mostly use Netflix through TiVo and actually one of the reasons we do that is because there's a there's a tied-in search database that that has those shows and when so if you if you search for a show or you can kind of pin a show on the TiVo menu it will have Netflix and Hulu links in there and Amazon, which is not yet on the Apple TV. So I've been using it on and off for its entire life,

I think it would be fair to say. So I want to talk about the setup experience, which is my favorite topic for any Apple device right now, just because I've been setting up so many Apple devices recently. So my first bugbear with this you take it out of the box and apple do not include a hdmi cable with the apple tv which i think is a problem because i believe that there would be a lot of people that would buy this device maybe from not an apple store right maybe from a best buy or something or they buy it online and it arrives and i really don't think that the best experience for a new product is it arrives and you don't have the cable to plug it into your tv like you're just like oh well now i have to go get another cable i just think put it in there

and increase the price by ten dollars if you really have to but there should be a hdmi cable in my opinion in this box well one of the baffling things is that they include the lightning cable um instead of like you said an hdmi cable and it's like i have i have some of those uh around my house uh and it's not like you constantly need it for the remote um so it would have made more sense probably for that to have been an hdmi cable and they don't even cost that much anymore uh relatively speaking like monoprice cables or amazon basics or whatever i knew it didn't have it inside of the box, but I also knew that I had one from the old TV that I wouldn't need. I don't know the buying experience for most people.

If they will know to look on the box where it says that it includes these things and not that other thing. So hopefully nobody gets it for Christmas and can't plug it into anything. The guy, so I ordered one online on Monday while I was on the tarmac at Phoenix Airport. And I didn't want to pay the extra shipping, so it's going to arrive today probably. While we're doing this, it may actually show up at my front door. So on Friday morning, I just went on to the Apple store and they had an in-store pickup. And I just ordered one and went and got it at 10 in the morning on Friday and was using it. But when I picked it up, the guy who brought it out said, do you have an HDMI cable?

They very specifically, and I assumed, have been trained at the Apple stores to mention HDMI cables because they know it doesn't have it in the box. I think that's interesting because it's an upsell for them, I'll grant you, but also it's an awareness that this may be an issue. Right. But see, the thing is, that is a problem, not a good thing. I think some people would hear that and be like, oh yeah, no, that's good because they're asking you, right? They're making sure you've got one. But what that actually shows is if they have been trained apple understands that this is a bad thing right they understand that people may have this problem so they're telling people to talk about it's crazy making to me it's good retail customer service but it's caused by a decision by apple the product part to not include it in the box yeah well and i actually had a different experience

because i i to similar to jason i was like oh no it doesn't say like when it's going to be available in stores i better go buy it online now and then it was available that friday uh so i went to uh the apple store in century city picked it up and the employee there did not mention uh the hdmi cable it's because people in LA are awful. Yes. Just the worst. We live in LA. We all understand how TV works.

Yeah, I mean, you have like 5,000 HDMI cables because you watch so much TV. That's right. It's like spaghetti. I don't know. Maybe I was lucky then. I noted that they did. I have so many extra HDMI cables that it was really like, no, no, no. I don't want. Maybe I was lucky then. I thought I noted that they did. I have so many extra HDMI cables that it was really like, no, no, no, I don't want any more. Please don't sell me your

whatever it is. Probably among the more expensive HDMI cables to buy would be one at the Apple store, right? Rose gold pleaded. I expect that most people listening to this show have cables. I expect that most people listening to this show have cables. Like, I had an extra HDMI cable. Of course I did. But it's really confusing to me that you don't do it. Like, if you buy a games console, right, so the Xbox, PlayStation, they come with them in.

And I know it's a different price point, but it depends what market Apple think they're operating in because they really do like to think they're a games console about 50% of the time. And it just is very peculiar to me that you wouldn't include those cables. But anyway, let's talk about setting up, right? So I plugged the Apple TV in and I'm starting to go. And it's like, you know, heavens above have opened and I can hear the angels sing as it tells me to set up my device by holding my iOS device nearby, right? So I'm like, this is fantastic. I don't need to enter all the passwords. So I put my iPhone real close to the Apple TV, so it will work. And then it just said, couldn't activate,

try again later. So I tried again three more times and it wouldn't activate. So I had to do manual setup. It's like they knew, they knew that I would be annoyed if I had to do this. So I had to go through, I had to type in all my Apple ID, I had to type in all my passwords a couple of times. And then quite strangely, as soon as I set up the Apple TV, I got a pop type in on my apple id i had to type in all my passwords a couple of times and and then quite strangely as soon as i set up the apple tv i got a pop-up on my mac telling me that my apple id was now being used on a new ipad which i found really surprising i was like okay apple tv you think you're an ipad uh so that was my setup experience it was so close, so close to being what I wanted but wasn't what I got, I assume that you two maybe had a better experience than me

different Jason you go first with yours I too got the iPhone setup thing and it worked and so it associated my iCloud ID with the device. And that was great. And I thought, wow, good job, Apple. You know, I've got an iOS device. You know, I've got my iPhone here. That makes it much easier. I mean, you don't have to have it, but

chances are pretty good that you've got an iOS device around. I've got that. It's got proximity. I'm verifying who I am. We're good to go. And that was great. Except later in the process, I was asked to enter in my iCloud password, which is a complicated password with symbols and upper and lowercase letters. And I had that moment where I thought, oh, well, you know what we need to do is go to the remote app because the remote app gives you a keyboard when there's text input on the Apple TV. And so you open it up in your iPhone and then you can type in, and I don't use it for like searches and things

on my old Apple TV, but I do it for passwords and stuff because passwords are long strings of characters, right? So I have to admit at the event in September, I specifically asked an Apple person at an Apple TV if the remote app would be updated to work with the new Apple TV. It seemed logical because the new Apple TV has got a touchscreen, and it's got sensors, and it's got all the stuff that's also in an iPhone. So you should theoretically be able to run an app on your iPhone that makes your iPhone kind of like an Apple TV remote.

And one comes in the box, but you have your iPhone around. Maybe that would be another way to do it. Plus, it's got the ability to do things like input passwords. And so I asked this guy at the Apple event, and he said, nope. And I thought, that is really weird that it's a no. It's not an I don't know is really weird that it's a no. It's not an I don't know anything about that. It's a no. Well, it turns out that guy is right because they haven't updated the remote app. It doesn't work with the new Apple TV. And so I got to input my complex iCloud

password, even though I'd already paired it with my iPhone. I had to put my complex iCloud password in again using the trackpad and that one line screen and also can I mention that it's a one one line keyboard screen instead of one with with rows so instead of being able to so if you want to go from A to Z you have to you have to move all the way across instead of being able to kind of go down and around like a like it's emulating a keyboard or sometimes they call that the Ouija board interface. So I had to do that multiple times. I think for the type of trackpad that Apple have created,

I think that this sliding left to right is maybe the best. I think it's debatable. I think it's debatable. I think that a grid would have been better because the actual surface area of it, it's so narrow that going all the way to the left and all the way to the right, you're just dragging your thumb multiple times to go back and forth. And oftentimes you skip over letters and stuff because you're trying to go very quickly to the other side. So I found it to be imprecise and probably one of the worst software keyboards I've seen Apple make in a long time. And I didn't even like the one that was on the previous apple tv where it was the grid but with with something like this it would have been preferable to the just one giant line my thinking is that if you

have multiple rows um it would be i don't know if the people's movement on the touchpad is precise enough to drop down the row simply enough i can imagine a scenario where you mean to go down one, you go down two. Because if you have that problem going left to right, imagine that in both axes. I just think it increases the amount of errors that could be made when trying to select a letter. Yeah, but your software should be pretty smart about knowing the kind of velocity of what you're doing and know that if you're moving to the right but your angle is a little bit down to just sort of keep it to the right, but your angle is a little bit down, to just sort of keep it to the right.

And they do that on iOS all the time. Sure. I wish Apple would have done this. The best software keyboard and kind of control input mechanism that I've used, it's PlayStation 4, where you can go into this mode where you hold the controller and you move the controller in 3D space, like you're pointing at the TV. And as you move the controller up 3D space, like you're pointing at the TV,

and as you move the controller up and down, it moves the selection. So you kind of aim the controller at the TV, move it left, right, up and down, and it hovers over the letters and you just tap the one that you want. I like that. That worked really well for me. And it's kind of like, imagine,

it's like text input on a Wii, right? You point at the remote and you point where you want to go and you hit it. And I would have liked to have seen Apple do this because they have the technology in the remote to make that kind of keyboard occur. So I think it would have been nice to see something like that. But yeah, the text entry system is not great. And it is really frustrating that it's the only way that you can do this. Yeah, the remote app is a great fallback for these moments when you need to do that.

And so the fact that Apple has an app and the previous generation supports it and it just doesn't exist for this, it's ridiculous. So there's that. And I haven't gotten to my best part yet, which is not only do I have to enter my iCloud password in not once, but I think I'm going to say three times, which is crazy. And this is a problem, Mike, you and I have talked about on Upgrade about iOS updates and going to a new phone where it sure seems like we should be able to enter our Apple password in fewer times than we do. But in addition to that, when I went to download an app that was, it was Madefire, so it was a free app, but with in-app purchase. And I don't know if that, I think that maybe triggers a different buying thing than doing an update or downloading a free app

and i was told you need to verify your credit card security number yeah i had that too that made me furious and and what it said was go to your itunes accounts open it iTunes and go to your account screen. Oh. And I thought, whoa, wait a second. So it basically kicked me to my computer. I had to go to iTunes to the account screen. So you have to know where that is because it was really vague. It was like the account screen in iTunes, which you have to put on your name and you go to the account.

And then on the account screen, there was a line of text, of text toward the top of the screen, but not at the top of the screen. It was not a particularly prominently displayed line, I would say. It was actually pretty small. And it said, before you can complete the purchase you started on your Apple TV, you must click edit next to your billing address and verify your payment information. Now, I don't know why my credit card information was flagged, and I know other people have not had to deal with this, but I looked at this and I'm like, are you kidding me to set up my Apple TV to download a free app on top of everything else?

You're kicking me back to a computer, to iTunes, to a detail screen, and then get this really non-obvious line of text that says that you need to click edit next to your billing address, of course what where else would i do it and then bring that up so that then i can enter in the space where my uh my security code is i could enter the three digit security code or for whatever it is little security code and then when i did that then i got the message that you you uh mentioned which is oh now uh an ip iPhone or an iPad has been associated, another device has been associated with this Apple account. And at that point, I went back to my Apple TV and it asked me for my password again.

And then when I input it again, laboriously, my long complicated iTunes password, the free app finally downloaded. And this is going to be, I mean, a lot of people have written about this. Basically, we'll talk about the post setup part. And I had a much better experience with that. But the setup part, I mean, it's just, this is the same story as when we were talking about the iPhones. Apple is making attempts to make it easier. That initial pairing with your iCloud account is pretty great. But then it just kind of fell apart. And once I got it, all the flags were ticked. Everything was checked.

And it was like, yes, now you're validated for everything. Once I did that, it was smooth sailing. But it was ridiculous what it took to get there. I had the card verification thing pop up, but I just had to enter the CCV code on the Apple TV. That was all I had to do. Yeah, I don't know what it was about my setup that it made me go to iTunes,

but it's bizarre. I don't know. I had it on my screen as well, like Mike did, but I clicked away because I didn't have my card with me right at the time. And so then when I went back later on, I just went to my computer to authorize it and update it. But that is really unpleasant. And it's a number of times that it kicks you to your computer to do that.

One thing about setting up an Apple TV is also it only really sets up that pairing thing once. I was kind of curious to see how it would happen if I actually moved. So I went from my boyfriend's apartment to my apartment, and I tested the Apple Apple TV and I paired it at his place and it loaded up all the Wi-Fi stuff for his place. And when I went to my apartment, it didn't recognize the network because it doesn't download every network your iPhone has ever been connected to. It only does the one that's inside of the room. So when I went to my place, I had to enter in my network. It showed no network. I had to go select the network. I had to enter in the Wi-Fi password through the remote app. And then it was authorized

to be on the network here. But that's one of those curious things. You can't trigger that same Bluetooth thing again, apparently. I'm sure if you hard reset the entire device, you probably could. Why didn't you do that, Joee yeah if you're like taking this to an event or something like that like i know a lot of people take apple tvs to like business meetings or something so they can use it to airplay things um uh like you you would have to enter in the password every single time and there's no remote app to do that quickly uh and there's no way to do that fast pairing thing on the spot. So that's just kind of a very strange omission. You'd think it'd be like, hey, I don't have a network I recognize around me.

Are you sure you don't want to set up a new one with your iPhone? But whatever. I feel like setting up Apple devices now is like death by a thousand cuts. Like that's what any kind of Apple device that I have used in the last year, as they are becoming more and more complex as a company, there's just all these tiny little things you have to do, but they add up. Like there was that, I think there was a tweet floating around where it was showing it was like 47 steps or something like that to set up a new iPhone. Was that it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was the iOS 4 setup, which is three screens, and then it's the current setup where you're asked all of these different questions.

And I've heard from people, because we complained about it then, and one of the things I heard from people was, well, this is all because of security. Apple doesn't want to have some golden ticket that you can have access to that unlocks everything, because at that point, there's some security issues. And to that, I would say, okay, Apple decided that it's going to hang its hat on security and privacy, but it also hangs its hat on user experience, right? And this is one of those cases where one, if that's the reason, one is in the way of the other. And I'm sorry, but this is Apple. The user experience needs to win. And if they want to keep it secure, which they should, they need to find a way to make it have a good user experience. Saying, well, security or privacy as a reason why there's bad user experience, it's not an excuse. It's got to be better. And I'm encouraged by the fact that they seem to be trying to make it better, at least on this Apple TV with that initial pairing thing.

But my and we talked about this a few weeks ago when we were talking about the iPhone. My gut feeling is that the iCloud authentication stuff is so gnarly behind the scenes that there are lots of cases where the left hand just doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And their default has been, oh, I'm going to just throw up another password dialogue here. And I get them, you know, we all get them all the time. It's not just on setup, but it's like all the time I get these, put your iCloud password in. It's like, why am I doing that? What has happened that means I need to put my iCloud password in again? And on setup, it's even worse.

So this is a challenge for Apple. I hope that they recognize it and that little pairing attempt at the beginning of the Apple TV process is an indication that they are working to make this easier. Because, yeah, it needs to be a lot simpler. Think about the attention they put into boxes, right? Think about the attention Apple puts into the unboxing experience. All of the things they do with the cardboard and the printing on the boxes and the feeling, you know, you open the box and then the device is wrapped in there and they've got the little bundle with the user guide and all of that stuff is in there. And Apple has like, Apple does unboxing better than anybody, right? And then you plug it in and that attention to detail honestly isn't there for the setup. And this is a case where their hardware or their supply chain side is in order and they're making great hardware and

they're putting it in great boxes. And then they've got their software and services are letting the product down. Yeah. And to go reinforce something you said about the security and privacy. When you set up the device, there's a location setting screen where it's asking if it's all right for applications and the operating system to use your location. It's sort of like iOS, except it's sort of vague. It's not like, it seems like a one-time authorization. And so I was like, no, I wonder if I'll be prompted at some point. I still haven't been prompted to enter in that location for anything at all but i was very curious why they had like phrased it in such a vague manner and uh another thing is like you're signing in with one id on this device and you have to go into a screen to swap to

another id so if you're using this on a tv in your family, almost everyone's going to be using whatever ID is on that device at the time. So whoever the account that is, dad, mom, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever, that's the device that'll probably be signed in almost all the time and everybody will work out of that one device. And there's even the thing of like, when you first enter your password for purchase purchase it'll ask do you want to uh be prompted for this all the time every 15 minutes or never again and so i i of course pick never again but i can just imagine yeah i can just imagine like in a shared environment where you you push the other thing people accidentally buying things on other people's

apple ids uh children are notorious for this sort of thing. And it's just one of those things where it's like they made it easier there in the way that you don't have to enter the password. But that's because entering the password is so terrible. But the end result is you're also not really having that filter control over the purchase experience anymore. Weirdly, it makes more sense for me to have that pop up on my iPhone, which is my personal device, than the Apple TV, which is a shared device.

Well, you know, Amazon lets you put in a code for purchases that's not your password. And so, you know, you authenticate with them, and that's ideally a high security password that you're using, your Amazon password. And then you get to set a code for for purchases on their devices and or on other devices actually it's like it's your purchase code across all the apps that amazon uses where you can purchase things because i get it on my tivo too and it's like a digit code on my tivo so it's really easy i can just put in the numbers but it would be very easy to set something like that up um i think and uh but instead, it's sort of like either you buy everything or you get to enter in your password, and that's not good. Or you just hold down on the Siri button.

You say, my voice is my passport. Verify me. Please verify me. All right, guys, let me take a break here because then we can carry on talking about all the things that we love and hate about the Apple TV. Woo! Yeah, okay, give us, we need a break.

We're going to get some air while you give us a break. Yeah, okay. We need a break. We're going to get some air while you give us a break. Thanks, Mike. No problem. This episode is brought to you by Casper. Casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses that you can get for a fraction of the price that you will find in stores.

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And listeners of this show can get a lovely $50 towards any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com slash upgrade and using the code upgrade at checkout. Terms and conditions do apply. Make sure that you check the site for details. Thank you so much to Casper for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, let's talk about the things we actually like about this device, right? Because we spent a lot of time complaining about it. Jason, what is kind of speaking to you as a thing that you enjoy, some things that you enjoy about the new Apple TV? I mean, I really like what they did with

the interface. I think this is a fun interface it's so interesting um the little floaty it's very beautiful it really is a very very beautiful interface like top to bottom uh i think it's really great like i also love the way the app store looks in the same same vein yeah i think i think it's a nice sort of rethink i mean it's been so long it's been since like the year after the second gen model came out when they did a refresh. It echoes it, but it's a little bit different. I loved moving all the apps around. The fact that the top row, which is basically like the dock, you can take Apple stuff out of it and put your apps that you want in it.

So I can put Netflix and Hulu up there and HBO Go. And that's great. I like that a lot. Playing games on it. It's funny how some, and these are the ones that are on the Apple TV, right? But you don't think about how limited the interaction is on some iOS games until you play them with a remote control on an Apple TV. I played Alto's Adventure for how long?

And about a minute of playing it on the Apple TV. Like I played Alto's Adventure for how long? And about a minute of playing it on the Apple TV, I was like, wow, this literally is just a, you know, a one button interface for this entire game. Like, you know, you've got that whole complex touchscreen with all the gesture support and really all you're doing is tapping. And so you can put that on the click. So I just wanted to call it the interface. I think even the stock, um, some of the apps I used are video apps, like the NBC sports live extra that are essentially using the stock kind of like library that comes with, um, that, that comes with, uh, the Apple provides to developers and, uh, those look great. So I was impressed by that. And then Netflix, I wanted to mention just because I think it's an interesting, I was

wondering what Netflix was going to look like. And it's not quite like the sort of generic Netflix app that's on all other connected devices that Netflix is on, that is basically a web app. But it's pretty close, right? It feels like an interesting, and I think actually the Apple TV interface is very similar to what Netflix was doing anyway. And so, uh, I was, it, it fit, it seemed to fit with what Netflix's brand is all about and what the Apple TV looks like and, and not be some weird mishmash. So, um, so yeah, I, I, that, that's the number one thing I wanted to call out is, you know, it,

it, it's responsive. Uh, It definitely feels faster to load everything than the old one did. But I just, I like, I like the interface touches. I like the sounds. I think they did a really good job. And I was as skeptical as I was about using the trackpad. For most cases, I think once you get used to it, the trackpad is, I see, I see why it's there. It's kind of fun. A directional button probably would have been fine um i did very quickly uh recognize that if you tap to the right or left side of the of the trackpad you can basically you can use the trackpad as a d button by tapping this is a this is a tap to click which i had to learn because i'm not a tap to click personclick person on trackpads, but it has tap-to-click D buttons. You can basically tap up, down, left, right on the remote, and it'll move you up, down, left, right.

Also, be sure you hold the remote in the right. I actually really love the remote. I love how it looks. I think it's a cool-looking remote, and it feels pretty good. It's definitely some great Apple design. Yeah, but as everybody has pointed out, the problem feels pretty good it's definitely some great apple design but yeah but as everybody has pointed out it uh the problem with it is it's because johnny i've wants everything to be symmetrical is that it's symmetrical and that means you can't tell in the dark whether

you're holding it upside down or right side up and that it should be asymmetrical in some way so that you can orient it orient better in the dark yeah like the old one had a big circle thing right that was the button it was easy to see and hold yeah like the tivo remote is like shaped like a peanut but it's an asymmetrical well actually they made i've got a couple of them that are symmetrical and they're terrible but the asymmetrical tivo remotes are great because in the dark you can always tell which end is up and that's important yeah i i actually have more slightly more negative feelings about the remote. I hit it. Yeah, I know.

I mean, what are you gonna do? I don't like the metal on the back. It makes my hands feel clammy, especially if I'm doing something like playing a game. Like you're saying, the symmetricalness of it, it's terrible. I have, in the short time that I've had it, I have picked it up the wrong way several times and gone to click the completely shiny surface and been like, nope, that's not it. Also, if you have it like on the couch arm

and it slides off into the couch and then you go to fish around for it, you're going to accidentally hit the touchpad and drag your finger across the TV somewhere and click on something you didn't mean to or skip around in the movie you're watching, which I don't enjoy. I think that that is actually one of the things that makes it a worse remote than the previous

remote where you couldn't accidentally trigger it unless you actually pushed on it. The other thing about it is that I see the functionality of it in terms of like all of the things that it can do. But like you're saying, it ultimately feels like it's been boiled down to basically do all of the things that the D-pad interface can do. And a couple other

extra things, like having a dedicated Siri button and having the I don't know how to describe it, the TV button? I forget the exact term for that one. And having the play pause, which if you have to actually switch from what you're doing in certain applications

where you're sliding around in the time slider and you want to hit play again. I think I was in Crackle or something like that and I needed to shimmy down to hit the play pause instead of clicking. It was weird. And the volume's fine, but it works over ir and the uh power does the weird thing over hdmi um and when i was at my uh boyfriend's using his tv the power

the the sleep that it asks you for when you when you hold down on the button it it turned off his tv but wouldn't turn it back on again yes that happened to me too yeah and when i went to my place it works for off and on i have no idea why that is and so it's one of those things where it's like you guys spent a lot of time thinking how you wouldn't have to uh have like all this universal remote stuff but it would be like smart enough. And it's like, but it just kind of isn't exactly smart enough if it can't turn on and off a television. And it also doesn't really like completely replace

everything you might want to do with your television set. So you still wind up having to like fish around for other things. I think it's sort of annoying. Like you can't, uh, I couldn't switch the, the input, um, with it. Uh, so like, if you want to go back to watching like, uh, another television input, then, then it wasn't working for anything. So that's ultimately another reason why it's kind of annoying. It's like, I wish it would do more things.

Uh, and I, I think about all the expense that goes into kind of annoying. It's like, I wish it would do more things. And I think about all the expense that goes into the remote, and I'm just like, could it have maybe been a slightly cheaper device if it was just a D-pad versus this? Because I don't think it's a particularly good game controller, and I don't think it's a very good television remote. So it's one of those quandaries where it's like, it's a beautiful device and remote so it's it's one of those uh quandaries where it's like it's a beautiful device and it has great build quality but i i i really wish it was something else i i

can confirm by the way that um i've got one of the original apple remotes the little white ones and totally works with it which is which is kind of hilarious so if you want to do you know it'll work on your ipod hi-fi and on your brand new Apple TV. The ones that used to come like magnetically attached to the iMacs, the front row was a thing. Yeah, yeah, it totally works. And also you can program in other universal remotes

to work with your television set, like my Logitech Harmony. Because it will listen on infrared, yeah. Yeah, so it's just like... Which is nice. One of those things where it's like, so the interface has been boiled down so it'll work with any basic remote so then what's so fancy what is the requirement of having the fancy remote i i don't i don't know it's play games

not very well play games it's it's it's really terrible at playing games or maybe i'm just terrible at using it to play games but uh like alto's adventure was probably one of the better ones but like you're saying it's basically a button um well they screwed up because you have to click to jump which is not good for timing you should be tapping to jump so alto they actually screwed that up like cannibal they nailed it it's tap to jump but alto's eventually you click and just so like if you are trying to hit something at just the right time you're just a millisecond or so off which can make the difference so really you should be tapping not clicking in my opinion well like crossy road crossy road is i think is is much better on um much better with a d button

yeah then then with then with the trackpad because because you can you have to click to go forward in crossy road but you can or you can swipe but you have to swipe to go sideways and it's not a very good mechanic and the click and the and the swipe to go forward is not as efficient so i'm what i'm saying is i'm much worse at crossy road than i am on the ipad i i am also worse uh the swiping gesture i also keep trying to do diagonal like it is on the iPad. I am also worse. The swiping gesture, I also keep trying to do diagonal like it is on the screen, but it's not diagonal in my hand.

It's driving me a little wacky with that. One of the worst I've only played a few, but a terrible game, I think, is actually the Disney Infinity Battle of Yavin. Star Wars game thing, branding experience that you can get for free.

And if anyone has an Apple TV, I highly recommend you download it because it's sort of fascinating to see this thing because it is sort of poorly made and you're flying through different things. There's weird loading screens. I had it crash on me when it tried to load content, so I don't know what that was, but it worked fine after that. I was clipping through parts of the Death Star, which is not good, and the controls are just miserable. You have to hold it horizontally in your hands, and

the touchpad is underneath your left thumb, and you're using controls from the volume and everything else with your uh right thumb it's it's it's very weird i don't i don't find it comfortable uh because it's too small to hold like that and it's very imprecise and so it kept flying into things and couldn't aim at anything i also tried a manticore rising um i had seen uh people raving about that on twitter um and that i is a gyroscope-controlled one.

And I found that I was just sort of spinning my wrist around trying to find enemies, that it was too inexact for targeting most of the time. So it was just sort of the, I don't know, wrist-spinning equivalent of button mashing. I haven't found anything that I really think is a better game on the tv than it is on ios which is sort of disappointing i think so most people that i've spoken to that are having good gaming experiences are using the nimbus controller so they bought the third party nimbus controller but i think that is blank um yeah so you don't have to beep that i think that is blank because it is it's ridiculous

apple should have made one i mean i go but i'll keep doing i'll keep talking about this over and over and over again like if they really believed in gaming there should be a controller that apple makes built in but it's just it proves the point right which is why i brought it up that like people that are enjoying video games on the apple tv are using a real controller because this thing is not one this remote is not a game controller except for beat sports which works really really well i haven't tried that uh but i i would suggest it okay i really i i'm just sort of frustrated with the notion that you have to buy a third party controller which isn't an apple device and it's not even it's not even like apple sells the tv and they're like oh and here's our game controller you can buy for extra 50 or whatever uh because that would seem somewhat more

palatable than just like just take your chances and buy whatever uh and especially when you know that the game itself is boiled down to work with basically this remote, so that this is the bare minimum of the requirements, is this thing that it ships with. So then it's like, well, why is it so bad at these things? Jason, what do we like? We need more things that we like. Like I said, I like the interface. I like the sounds. I think that it's more responsive.

I think having the apps that have put in the work to be different. Apple TV in the old day with the channels, right? Those were all really generic and sort of set up with text files. And it was like an XML schema kind of thing. And now these are apps. And the apps that are taking advantage of that, there are some really nice features. I really did enjoy looking at a bunch of the different video apps

and seeing the ones that felt like the NBC Sports Live Extra. Their app on iOS is actually not that great. It, like, puts a banner ad down at the bottom of the screen and stuff like that. And it's really awful. But the their Apple TV app is very nice. And it works really well. And and I did, I looked at a motion comic and made fire at once I got it downloaded. And I thought that was a really interesting experience to to maybe not my favorite way to to read a comic book but i thought that they did a i thought that that putting their motion comics on the tv made a lot of sense uh that that's an interesting place to try that stuff uh so yeah i i think i'm encouraged by the fact that some of

the apps look really good that over the course of the next six months that uh or year that people are are uh getting their getting their legs on what an Apple TV app looks like, that we're going to see some even better stuff. But I think it does mean that even the basic video watching experience is going to be better. I will say I'm a little surprised that Apple, turning negative slightly here again, I'm turning negative slightly here again, but I'm a little surprised that Apple doesn't preload or aggressively suggest certain apps. Like, you know, because the old Apple TV, select the ones you'd like to have, and we'll download them automatically right now. I think that might not be so bad because to go

to have part of your onboarding experience be, I have to go to the app store and download Netflix, and I have to go to the app store and download HBO Go, and I have to go to the app store again and download Hulu, instead of just sort of being either having them preloaded or having them kind of like prompt you to do a really quick auto download of those. I think that would probably be better than what they offer. I also wanted to say, I like the services that put up a little code and have you go to their webpage to log in because it's much easier to do that. Hulu did that.

HBO Go did that. Major that hulu did that um hbo go did that major league baseball did that and abc sports live extra did that and the best thing about that is the ones that have cable uh or satellite tv or tv provider verification um when you go in your browser whether it's on your iphone or on your mac um it uh once once your cable provider sets that cookie um the next one you don't even log into your cable provider because your browser already knows your username and your password or it's already got the cookie. And so that was really kind of easy to do. And although it's not ideal, you know, it would be nice if there was some magic way for me to just sort of speak to the TV and log into those things. I thought that was better than what I had to do with Netflix, which is slowly peck out my email address and then slowly peck out my Netflix password, because that sucked.

Yeah, well, in terms of preloading things, it is a little barren, but they do a good job of putting all of the things that people might want in that top row inside of the app store. One of the things I'm surprised that they don't expose though is they have the purchase history and if you go to the purchase tab in the app store you can see all the ios apps that also are universal apps for the tv yes which is many almost all of the basically all of the media things are shared between the two as far as i could find um except for you know amstrad prime whatever uh but the uh in terms of that experience i wonder if it would almost be better during the setup process to be like hey i found all this stuff you own would you like

these to also be on your tv and you'd be like yes that would be kind of nice because i'm probably using exactly the same channels on my uh television set as i'm using on my phone um and i do have to kind of disagree with the activation thing like i wish there was a single sign on uh for activating all of these i agree with that i should be able to put my comcast username and password into the apple tv and have it validate everything that uses the comcast validation right yeah i mean if it was just another field in iTunes and you're just like, hey, do this everywhere. Because I mean, Apple's totally fine being the middleman for this stuff most of the time. So it's sort of surprising that they

leave it up to all of these vendors to come up with their own solutions where it requires you to use another device inside of your house to go connect to this thing every single time you want to do it, which is actually really one, like you're saying, Mike, one of those paper cuts is just that every app you download that requires it is individual entry for that. So every single one you have to go to whatever slash activate, Flickr slash activate, you know, YouTube, you have to activate as well. That sort of experience is unpleasant i think it would be nice if it was sort of bundled together or at least you could share the

credentials from the ios apps that you have that are uh universal binaries um when you're doing that initial setup that would be i think more pleasant than uh the experience of having to to do that to stop whatever you're doing every single time and then go enter it. Maybe in a couple months, you know, once all that stuff's just sitting there, then it won't feel like a burden anymore. Because you're not, we're in a compressed time scale here where we're downloading things and talking about it immediately. And of course, one of the first things we're going to notice is that the activation process is a little messy. But I don't know if it's going to continue to feel like a burden later i'll say something nice i promise like like jason i like

the interface it's very pretty um it is a little sparse in some places uh where more info often terminates it before the end of a sentence uh for some of the descriptions of games and channels but positive joe positive okay it's beautiful to look at uh universal search um is very nice uh most of the time um it it shows me netflix first uh over itunes if it's available there um and you can even say things like show me all the star trek stuff on on netflix and it'll show you exactly what is available, which turns out they took almost all of the movies away except for Nemesis, which is so great. But the experience of doing that, I think, is great, except for when you have a universal search entry, and it shows you the screen with your search results, and then you can

click to go to iTunes, and it looks exactly like the same screen, and you're kind of like, I wish you guys had differentiated that just a little bit, but it is far superior to the old experience of searching for anything. So that is something that I feel very positive about, and there are only a couple cases where it was like certain homophones would mess it up

or like proper names of things like wrath of con and it's wrath of con c o n and it's like i can't find anything it's like you could use some context clues uh to figure out that all of the other words that i said that you recorded correctly probably match up to something i was searching for the uh uk spy uh TV series called Spy, which is a comedy. And that was funny because I had to, it's on Hulu. And I did, I did a search that was, you know, find spy. And it's like, I, you know, I hear a bunch of spy movies on iTunes. I'm like, that's not what I'm looking for.

And I finally, but I was able to, I think my third try, I said, show me the TV series Spy. And it popped up a list of TV series with Spy in the title, the second of which was the TV series Spy. So I got, some of it is like, okay, how do I target this? And how, what is it listing for? And all of those things for the series searches. But yeah, that's a great feature. for the, for the Siri searches. But, uh, but yeah, that's a, that's a great feature. And the fact that other video, um, apps can tie into it so that, you know, if I've got Showtime and HBO Go and Hulu and Netflix and, you know, and, and, and they're all in there, then when I search for a

movie or a show, it doesn't, I don't need to know, um, like, oh, it's, it's actually, cause I've done this right where it's like, this movie's on HBO this month and I can stream it. But, oh, it's actually, because I've done this, right, where it's like this movie's on HBO this month and I can stream it. But instead I rent it from iTunes because I'm a dummy. But it's really because I've only trained myself to look in like two places. So being able to do that right from here and say, oh, look, I can get that for HBO, which I think you can't do right now. But I think that that's coming, that more sources are being added. I think that's a good thing. Yeah.

And I also like that you can use it for characters as well. So you can say like, show me stuff with Mickey Mouse or show me stuff with Captain Kirk and then it'll show you those titles that feature that character rather than just being constricted to the actor.

So you can see Chris Pine movies and William Shatner movies. It's just sort of an interesting feature. And the cases where it didn't work were so tiny that I overall give it a standing ovation for that. Yeah, I should say HBO Go is in the universal search now. Some of the other apps will be added later. So if you search for The Wire, it'll say those are on iTunes and on HBO Go is in the universal search now. Some of the other apps will be added later. So if you search for The Wire, it'll say those are on iTunes and on HBO Go. Cool.

So yeah, there's a lot of good things about it. I did want to mention that I'm very sad that the photos support in it is essentially the same as the old Apple TV, where it'll show you the photo stream and it'll show you your shared albums, but it won't actually show you your iCloud photo library. Like I've got all of these albums in my iCloud photo library. They're not available.

Only if I put them in the sharing screen will they show up. And that seems dumb to me. That was like a major photo initiative of Apple was this iCloud photo library. And the Apple tv just basically doesn't support it it's it's sort of supporting the stuff that was already there before they introduced iCloud photo library oh well that's sort of go goes hand in hand with their music support here on the device as well yeah i have a theory about this so we had a a tipster by the name of carlos uh on connected who informed us that this was the case right that music just didn't work and it seems like that all of these services and teams

are just they're all developing their products in silos right so like the photos teams over there the music teams over there the tv team is over there and like they don't know about each other until the products launch because of the secrecy stuff and then it ends up that the tv comes out without without some proper support for two of apple's newest services because they couldn't talk to each other beforehand that's the way i read this it supports music but you can't search or control with the voice search music it's like the music team had to build an app like every other developer, which is madness. A third-party app.

Yep. I was happy to see that the computer feature still exists, that you can use your sharing. Home sharing. Yeah, and go to the computer thing and actually see the iTunes that's on a computer. I was happy about that because i wasn't sure they they they cared enough to do that but they did yeah and it works uh very

very well uh very quickly another thing i should say positively is also uh in terms of like loading things and and speed like even like loading up the album art off of my computer, it was doing that pretty fast. And in terms of music, while it's annoying all the things that are wrong, especially if you are an Apple Music subscriber, I'm not, the fact that it just immediately has access to your purchases in iTunes and will just stream right away is great

in terms of just a general experience. Searching for things whatever like uh as annoying as you would expect but uh just just having it there is is uh handy you talk about the speed i i think it takes some getting used to but i i i think it's very clever what they're doing with their transition animation which is that uh you know you're instead of the classic apple tv transition which is a black screen with a circle spinning around in it for an unknown amount of time, instead they've got this thing where it's like the,

you know, it's the blurred out background that kind of fades in and fades back out again. And yes, that is a magic trick. It is trickery. It is trying to fool you into thinking things are happening when they're not actually happening. But behind the scenes, that can cover, the device is fast enough that that can cover a lot of pauses, like just that moment. And I'm sure John Syracusa, if he were here, would say, it's extra time. I don't want the extra time. You should just jump

to it as soon as it loads. But for me, I felt that was a a better way of kind of bridging the transition where give me something to look at it's kind of pretty it feels like it's all kind of of a piece it's all flowing into the next thing and you know i i like that you still will see occasionally the spinning circle if it you know if it gets to the end it's like nope still loading things you'll see that but i i thought it was a nice touch one thing i don't don't like about the uh that but i i thought it was a nice touch one thing i don't don't like about the uh the blurry thing it is nice as you say but except that uh when you blur things and have like a smooth transition from one color to another color or one value to another value um that works differently across different tvs and you're gonna get banding artifacts on different tvs uh and i've noticed that both on

my tv as well as my uh boyfriend's tv like you just get like couple of times, you'll use like a nice little like band of different color where it just drops off not smoothly. And I'm just like, I wish that was just like, if you'd done solid colors, you wouldn't have that problem, but it wouldn't be as visually interesting, I suppose. Right. That's just a minor little tiny nitpick. Super positive show, right, Mike?

Well, because the thing is like i i am i am i get annoyed right like and there's many things that i'm annoyed about but i'm i'm just very conscious of the fact that i feel like i'm complaining a lot at the moment but it feels like everybody is and and i wonder what it is like is do we put i don't have to believe it's probably because we put apple under a real microscope um microscope because we expect greatness from them at all times, right? Which is why we do this and why we treat them so harshly and with such criticism over the work that they do. Well, it's also that they put themselves on that pedestal when they say they've solved TV and the future of TV is apps. they put themselves on that pedestal when they say they've solved TV and that's the future of TV is apps.

So if they, if they, uh, don't talk it up, then I probably think we would have slightly lower expectations. Like when they said it was a hobby before, it was just like, okay,

well this is good for being a hobby. And then now it's like, we're, we're, we, we got to go and we got it solved here is spend $150 on this, uh, three years,

three years in the making yeah yeah yeah yeah that is that is an issue that they make the marketing so grandiose it puts a massive target on them so on twitter i i after i ranted about my setup problems i mentioned uh you know i basically said so in short this is a 1.0 product and it feels like it but on the positive side there's room for improvement and I had a bunch of people who responded and said, I think you shouldn't be making excuses for Apple. And I'm like, saying that Apple's big new Apple TV product is very clearly a 1.0, and there's lots of room for improvement. I'm not sure you understood the subtext there, which is this should be, because people are more like a 3.0 or a 4.0, right?

And I was like, no, no, this doesn't build on what they've done before. This is a 1.0 again. And it feels like it. The good side of that is that these are things, I think there's a lot of strength here that can be improved upon. And there's a lot about this product that I really like, but it's got some rough edges and it's kind of painful to use parts of this product that I really like, but it's, you know, it's got some rough edges and it's kind of painful to use parts of it. And I feel like there are things that Apple can do to address a lot of these things and hopefully will in the next few months. But it does, it absolutely feels like a brand new thing that is not, I'm not going to say

not done, not ready. Although some of it feels, I suspect like, like with the photo stuff and the music stuff. It's like, why isn't that there? And the answer is because we needed to ship it now, and we weren't ready for that stuff. That will come in time, but it's not there now. So that's what a 1.0 product is, right? Maybe parts of it aren't finished, and it's got some bugs, and people who buy it right now are going to have to deal with some of that stuff i think that's just the reality of this product this is not you know a refinement of the last generation apple tv this is a this is a new new product on

a new platform with a whole lot of potential but it's a 1.0 and you know judge accordingly yeah i i completely agree with you especially since i I think in many ways, this is sort of like when they reset some of their applications in terms of like, oh, it's the same name, but it doesn't do some of these old things and it does some of these other new things that are great. And so it's sort of like walks that line, especially, you know, we talk about remote app. We talk about like, there's a lot of stuff that's similar, but slightly different.

Uh, and it is a hard reset in terms of like, well, now there are applications and it's a different operating system. So they worked hard to get it up to being able to do most of what the old one did. But, uh, but I mean, most like almost all, um, but, uh, but yeah, it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Um, I, especially, I think the biggest missing piece is a unified content strategy for some other kind of subscription service like the over-the-top service we've seen them talk about. Like Les Movies, CBS president always talks about. If you want to have a secret, don't tell it to him because he'll just talk to Kara Swisher about it whenever he feels like it.

Les Movies doesn't care. He just doesn't't care he just doesn't care about your secrets you know how you know how little he cares he he cares so little that he's going to use a new Star Trek show to sell his uh online video streaming service that's how little he cares Les Moonves doesn't care so Mike are you really happy about the number of times you've mentioned Star Trek on the show I'm so pleased that you were here for this if If you weren't here, Joe, then he'd just be mentioning it to me, and then I would just be sitting here quietly about it. Ah, well that's no fun. So at least Jason got to have

his nerdy some way. It's the only way. It's the whole reason I'm here. Joe, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find your work on the internet? You can find me at joe-steel.com or at Joe Steel on Twitter, and I have a podcast with Dan Sturm on the Incomparable Network. you can find me at joe-steel.com or at joesteel on twitter and I have a podcast with Dan Sturm

on the Incomparable Network yeah this is total nepotism that's why I'm here so called defocused yeah it's called defocused no banding artifacts on that though because it's an audio podcast

maybe there's audio banding listen carefully great thank you so much for joining us Joe because it's an audio podcast. But yeah, maybe there's audio banding. Listen carefully. There might be. Great. Thank you so much for joining us, Joe. Thank you for your thoughts on the Apple TV. There you go, Joe Steele. I'm glad we don't have guests that often,

although I'd like to have some more often. But I've been wanting Joe to talk about the new Apple TV for so long because he has so many opinions about Apple TV. So I'm glad we all got to use the product over the weekend and talk about it a little bit. Well, the good thing about our guests is they're guests for reasons, right? Yeah, exactly. And not that often. I think he might be our fourth, third, something like that.

Not very many. Who knows? Nobody knows. Nope. But you know what time it is right now. Is it time for hashtag AskUpgrade? Lasers, lasers. And who is the sponsor of this week's AskUpgrade?

It's who you'd expect. Who else would sponsor hashtag AskUpgrade this week? But Stamps.com. I have some boxes, Mike, right here next to me that are about to go out when my letter carrier comes to my door. And they've all been paid for and the shipping labels output from my printer, from my Mac, using stamps.com. It's an easier way to mail letters and packages. You can mail and ship anything with stamps.com anywhere with your own

very own computer or printer. Nothing special needed, not even special paper or special labels. You can just print it out on regular paper. Anyone can do it. You click, you print, and you mail it. With stamps.com, you can buy and print official US postage right from your desk. It does all the work for you. They'll even give you a digital scale. It's this USB scale. It calculates exact postage. You can use it standalone. You can plug it into your computer and it'll actually fill out the form for you with the postage, with the weight of the thing that is on the scale. It's pretty cool. Any letter, any package, any class of mail. You can even go and get the standard boxes at the post office and bring them home. And there you can say, I'm using

the standard box and it'll set it up that way too. So pretty much anything you can think of. Setup is easy. You'll be printing your very own postage in minutes. You never have to go to the post office again. Never, never. And it costs only $15.99 a month. That's it. You don't have to make a long term multi-year commitment like a postage meter might require. Somebody might come to your house or your small business and say, I'd like to sell you on this postage meter. But there are a lot of catches with that. With stamps.com, you don't have to make any of those commitments. There are no catches like that. There are no markups on postage. You'll even get special postage discounts with stamps.com. Right now, sign up for stamps.com. You can use the code upgrade for a special offer.

You get a four-week trial and there's $110 bonus offer, including postage and the digital scale. So don't wait. Go to stamps.com. Before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in the name of our show, Upgrade. It's stamps.com. Enter upgrade. And thank you to stamps.com for sponsoring this week's edition of Hashtag Ask Upgrade. Jorge would like to know,

do either of us use screen protectors on our iPhones? We had this question on Connected recently, and it always surprises me when I hear people ask this stuff because I would never put a screen protector on my phone. I do wear a case, which is kind of interesting, right, that I do one and not the other. But the case kind of protects my screen in the way that it doesn't let it shatter. I'd never worry about my phone scratching, which is, I assume, the reasons that people use screen protectors. I've never had a scratch on an iPhone. And I just don't like the

way that the screen, I've never liked the way that the screens feel with those protectors on them. My understanding is, my understanding, this is the material science that has really improved on the iPhone, is that these screens, although they will still shatter if you drop them in the right way, my understanding is that they don't scratch as easily as they ever had before. And that there used to be, people used to do iPhone screen scratch tests, PC World used to do it when I worked with those guys, where they would take some keys and you know awful stuff and try to scratch it up and earlier iphones could scratch fairly easily and you know if you wonder why nobody does scratch tests of phones so much anymore it's because they don't really scratch so much so i don't either i

don't like the feel of them i don't like the having to put them on and like little bubbles uh that you can get in there. I used to have screen protectors when I had the Palm, what was it, Trio? That one had a screen protector, but that was like a resistive touch screen. It was not a very good touch screen, and it was pretty fragile. And if you want like an anti-glare, I know there's some people who have real glare problems. problems again they've made a lot of headway and having glare be less of an issue on the iphone i know some people will do an anti-glare uh screen protector but i've never felt the need for anything like that either so no i haven't i think i tried one once for a couple of weeks like years

ago and since then not at all so there you go No screen protectors over here. And I know that you can kind of get them and they're apparently like partly made from glass now so they feel better, but it's just not something I would want. You know, when you use a screen protector, the time you use a screen protector is when you've got a slightly cracked screen. Yeah, to stop it from like destroying.

Yeah, and so it'll still be usable for a while and you can put a screen protector on there and you can actually use it and not get splinters of glass in your fingertips i have had friends who've done that where their phone was still usable even though it had a crack across it and and that that will kind of hold it together a little bit longer but i wouldn't i wouldn't put one on a regular phone. Right. So next up in this week's ask upgrade to, to, to,

to, to is Wayne would like to know, what do you think of the possibilities of the Apple pencil used in conjunction with the new magic track pad? I mean, so I wanted to put this in because I've been using a way calm as a input device for the last couple of weeks um because i'm i've mentioned this before but like some rsi stuff i'm just trying to mix up stuff

that i'm using um and i think that that could be really nice if they work together especially as this trackpad gets bigger i mean it would have to probably be bigger than this uh to be used as a any kind of system that people would want to use so so you'd need a bigger trackpad. But there is a potential there. I just find it very unlikely that Apple would make that product. Yeah. Also, the Magic Trackpad, it's got pressure sensitivity built into it. The Apple Pencil has its own pressure sensitivity built into it. So now you've got two devices that are measuring the pressure separately. It doesn't sound like that's the right way to go to me. No. I mean, it's an interesting thought experiment, but I think Apple would say, for the most reasons that people would want that, just get an iPad Pro, right? Because you think

about drawing with it. Yeah. And I think on the Mac side, they're happy to have the third parties with doing that. Gary would like to know, Jason, you mentioned about an upgrade that you did to your mom's computer. Could you reiterate that and maybe give a little bit more information about what you did?

Yeah, so Gary asked and I did what I could. I wrote a post last Friday on Six Colors answering Gary specifically. Wow. How about that for service? Called New Life for an Old MacBook Pro. That gives some of the details of it. And so you can read that there. one of the readers about that story where they said, is there any reason why you bought all your

stuff from Otherworld Computing and didn't go shop around and get the best deals? Because stores like that are going to have markup and all of that, and there are cheaper models and you can get it. And I thought that was a really interesting point that I wanted to mention just here too, which is there was a time when I was happy to put in the research about here's exactly what the issues are with this particular model and the kinds of drives it needs and the kinds of drives it'll take and the ones it won't take. And, you know, and with some Mac models, that's complicated because there's like, you need to have the ones with the sensor or you need to have the ones with this kind of mounting bracket or things like that, that there's like, you need to have the ones with the sensor, you need to have the ones with this kind of mounting bracket or things like that, that that there's sometimes some unexpected complexity there. And, and you know, you want to find the lowest price, but you want it to be a

reputable product, you want it to be reliable, you know, is the seller somebody who's trustworthy? Is this is the company that makes it? Is this a reliable, reliable model? And, you know, you do a lot, you can do a lot of work and come up with the right product and find it at the right price and save money. There is no doubt about it. I came to the point where I didn't want to do that anymore, where I didn't want to fret about, is this exactly the one that will work in my model? You know, or am I reading this wrong? Because on eBay, they sell five different versions of this or on Amazon, they're selling three different versions. And did I, did I pick the right one or not? I've had it happen where I bought stuff and gotten it and gone, Oh, this is

the wrong one. Um, and had to send it back. And then you have to get a return authorization number and then you have to ship it and maybe go to the post office. And you know, I don't like that. And I, I just decided I would call back to, uh, to our sponsor. Um like that and i i just decided i i would call back to uh to our sponsor um i just i just decided i wouldn't i'm fine with paying a little bit more for a product that it's like i i've i've ordered from these guys before and it doesn't it's not just other world i mean there are there are other there are plenty of other uh resellers that that uh are out there that sell stuff like this that you could go to. But the point is I'm comfortable with them.

I've ordered a bunch of stuff from them over the years. I've had ones that have failed in the past that they've covered easily, sent me a new version under their warranty. So there's a level of trust there. And then they do the work to say what's compatible with what so this was a MacBook Pro 5,5 that this particular model the mid 2009 MacBook Pro and they have on their site

here's the SSDs that we've got that we certify with a 5,5 and here's a how-to guide about how to install it if you want to do that too and I like that I like the fact that they did that work and I don't't have to worry about um oh well you thought that this was a compatible one but it turns out that this model isn't compatible for some esoteric reason and i

just yeah i just kind of don't want to deal with it so that this is the this is sort of one of those things about being a smart shopper on the internet is if you want to put in a lot of extra work you can save money and you just have to decide do you want to put in a lot of extra work, you can save money. And you just have to decide, do you want to put in the extra work or do you want to just have it be easy? And I'm fine to pay more and have it be easy. And your mileage may vary. This is a straight up time money equation. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And there's some stress too, because, you know, you order it from somebody on eBay and it looks like it's legit and they're 90% positive. So you're like, oh, it's probably fine, but you don't know where it's coming from or whether there's going to be an issue and uh you know that's that

so there's some of that too i think where there's stress of like i'm ordering this from somebody i don't actually know who they are and what it's what it's going to be like so there's a little bit of that but a lot of it is just the time that you know there are there are like imac models that have weird uh temperature and I think maybe MacBook Pros do temperature sensor stuff and you know there's the oh well this enclosure will fit this but it won't fit that and there's just enough complexity there historically that it's kind of nice to be able to just say uh these guys say this one works and so I'm gonna buy that so I thought it was a good question he kind of of couched it as like, are they a sponsor or something? I was like, no, no, they're not. I actually, I've written about them in the past and they used to be an advertiser, I think, of Macworld back in the day. But, you know, no, I just, as a Mac user, it became a lot easier to deal with a company that was going to take care of all the compatibility issues. And so I just sort of, I just want it to be easy.

issues and so I just sort of I just want it to be easy so anyway you can read that article it'll be in the show notes about all the details of my mom's old MacBook Pro which now has a new home with somebody who will use it with an SSD instead of the old

spinning hard drive and as a result it is dramatically better it has gone from being unusable to being usable again so that's great. And finally today, Robbie would like to know, Jason, I'll ask this of you. Do you ever think about how much your listeners or readers trust your judgment and how you can influence what they buy? For example, mice, keyboards, that kind of thing. It's a great question. Absolutely. I remember talking to Andy and Iko about this years ago. When I was at Macworld, especially, you're writing a review or recommending a product. You are absolutely aware that people are going to be listening and that you are influencing them.

You're also aware that you don't control them. So you can't just demand that they buy things. But you have to be aware that you're holding a megaphone, that you're holding a bullhorn and people can hear what you're saying and that there's responsibility that comes along with that. And sometimes the responsibility is just to explain and to contextualize what you're saying. And I do that a lot where I say, look, I am not your typical user because of X, but I use this product because I don't, what I don't want to say is, oh, I use, everybody should go to eBay and buy an iPod Hi-Fi right now because I love it and go buy them now. Right? Well, no. What I'd say is I have an iPod Hi-Fi and I use it as my external speaker for my iMac because I have it and it sounds pretty good. And even though it was a problematic product in terms of its features and its price, the fact is for my particular use case, it works for me. I've got it. It sounds good, right? So a lot of times it's that. It's where you put it in context and say,

look, because of the way I work or because of my personal, being aware of your personal preferences is part of it. It's like the flip side of also not reviewing a product and saying it's bad because it doesn't fit what you want from that product. Because that's not enough when you write a product review to say, well, I don't like it, so it's bad for everybody. So it all goes with the responsibility of knowing that you've got an audience and that people are listening to you to try to keep that in perspective. my opinion, because it might, this is the one exception. We used to debate whether we should write negative reviews of little pieces of software or hardware that were just bad. And I think what we decided was if nobody's ever heard of it, why would you review it? Because you're just being mean. If it's a prominent piece of software or hardware and it's bad, you do need to write about it because you need to warn people off from it. But that was one case where it's like, why do I really

want to step on these guys? Nobody knows who they are and their app is bad. And that's where you get somebody who emails you and says, can you review my app? And you say, well, send me a code and I'll look at it. And you look at it and it's terrible. And you have to choose, do I write a thing that says, hey, this app is terrible, haha, or do i just not write about it and and um that's the one case where i will not turn my audience on to a poor sad developer who made a product that they like but that is not very good and that nobody knows about you just you let that one go generally, you just have to be aware of the impact of your words. And, you know, you have to be aware of it, but you also can't control it. Because otherwise, you'll never say anything.

See, I'm on that side more. I try not to think about it. Like, if I like something, I like something. And I will speak about it. I try not to think about the fact that there may make a influence one way or the other like i just try and be honest about the stuff that i like and the stuff that i don't but you know you know people are talking about like the mic mouse right yeah about that mouse which now i can't use anymore which i know see it has caused significant

rsi problems for me um so in a way actually i do feel bad about recommending that because i don't know if it's going to cause that way for the other but it was the way i was using it the mouse is is actually built ergonomically but i was using it all kinds of wrong like i was i programmed the all the little buttons to do certain things and looking back now i can see how i programmed it to do more than i should have been doing with it like in a way I was editing with it and stuff like that and was basically moved all of my keystrokes to mouse strokes and it's not really built for that so much so when I fully regain the use of my right hand again I'm actually going to look into gaming mice because they're more made for macros and programs

of the buttons of them but it is a fantastic mouse and it makes me sad that I can't use it because I really, really love it, but I'm kind of stuck. Right. Right. But this is, I mean, this is the example of people are talking about it, which means you did, you did spread that around and it's a little bit different on a podcast, but it's not that different. And you know, it's one of those things that I think you're right. On one level, you can't think about it because you need to be honest and talk about the things that you're doing and the things that you're using. On another level, you have to be aware of it just in the sense of always remembering that it's going out to a larger group of people and that there may be an impact. Remind yourself to be honest and to be fair and to be responsible and to put it in any, if there's any context that's required, to put it in that context. And, you know, I think ideally that's your default anyway. But every now and then I think it doesn't hurt to remind yourself, like, if I say this is great and I love it, that people are going to hear that.

are going to hear that. And that's why I will oftentimes say, throw in caveats or throw in explanations, because usually if I love something, sometimes it's just unabashed love. But a lot of times it's like, well, I love it because it fits into this particular part of my workflow. Like, I'm not going to say everybody should run out and buy this USB mixer that I've got here, because it's probably not the best. Well, this happens with podcasting and microphones and stuff like that. It's like the Yeti, I'm still pretty comfortable as being a solid pick for people to use as a microphone, right? I don't use the Yeti or usually not. I've got one and I use it sometimes when I'm traveling, but I don't use it anymore. But what I'm using, people ask me, I'm like, well, yeah, what I'm using is more than that. But it was also more expensive. And I kind of do this for a living now. It's not the same as what I would recommend. And so just being aware of that, like that my context for microphones and podcast stuff is not the same as like what most people should probably be buying.

the same as like what most people should probably be buying. So it's just, I don't know. The short answer, Robbie, is yes, we do. We should have just said that. Yep, yep. We had to show our work there, but yes, that's a good question. You've always got to show your work. Yep.

I think we've reached the end of this week's episode. I think so. I want to just extend my thanks again to Mr. Joe Steele for joining joining us today it was a pleasure to have him on the show and you should check out uh joe's work he is at joe steel on twitter and you should check out the incomparable the incomparables lovely show defocused which joe is a part of which is really really great along with all the other great shows all the great shows over at the incomparable.com where of course you will find many of jason's other podcasts but he also hosts a plethora of shows on RelayFM, of course, including Liftoff and Clockwise, as well as the lovely Upgrade.

You are a podcasting marvel, Mr. Jason Snell. Mike, I love that you exist because you're the person who does more podcasts than me, so thank you. Anytime, anytime. I'll just keep adding them. You keep removing them. That's how we'll go forever. I love that you exist because you're the person who does more podcasts than me. So thank you. Anytime. Anytime. I'll just keep adding them. You keep removing them.

That's how we'll go. There we go. If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 61. I want to take a moment again to thank our friends over at stamps.com, casper, and lynda.com for sponsoring this week's episode. You can find Jason on Twitter. He is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. And I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. And you can read Jason's work over at sixcolors.com.

And we will be back next time. Don't forget, we do stream this show live. You can download the RelayFM app from the iTunes App Store. Do they call it the iTunes App Store anymore? Or did I just go back about five years? The App Store. There you go. The App Store. The App Store. because i was thinking it's not on android right so i was trying to think of uh the apple app store anyway from the app store um and you can uh sign up for

push notifications so when we do change our time around which happens every now and then you'll know and it also has the information for when our next show will be streaming live thank you so much for listening we'll be back next time until then say goodbye mr snell goodbye mr snell oh it's a special one