Upgrade - 62: I Am Nerd Face Guy

Episode Date: November 9, 2015

This week we extoll the virtues of emoji and how it could be better, and Myke finds his perfect emoji at last 🤓. We also preview the iPad Pro, talk about how we’re using our iPads today, revisit Myke’s external storage needs, and follow up on week two of the new Apple TV.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 62 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com stamps.com and casper my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by mr jason snell hi mike hi jason snell how are you i'm doing uh i'm doing fine. It rained here in California today, so we don't know what to do with ourselves. Well, I wonder what that's going to do for the show today. I don't know. It's not raining now, and the thunder and lightning have stopped because in my only semi-insulated garage, I have found that it's quite pleasant actually when it rains, but it's audible. So that would be interesting to do the uh the rain podcast but alas i think it stopped raining now it has not rained here today so we are in kind of bizarro

land it is weird the sun the sun appears to be coming out right now because it is california that's it dry up all that rain get us back to the brown i bet it's still like 25 degrees celsius when it rains it's uh It's 51 right now. I don't know what that means. That's 10. Okay. That's similar to here, probably. Let me see what my weatherman says.

We have... Oh, 16 degrees. Look at that. It's the weathercast. It's warmer there, too. It's all messed up, Mike. Everything's ruined. Should we do some follow-up? Yeah, I think some follow-up would be perfect.

So I've come to a decision, I think, about my storage needs. Storage, vertical. Vertical. And I think... So I've had a few people suggest this this but i had seen it but didn't really pay too much attention to it which is a product called the drobo mini the drobo mini is as much smaller box and it can connect by thunderbolt and usb3 i think uh but the what makes the drobo mini different is that the drobo mini can take two and a half inch ssds in it so this

is probably the product i'm going to go for because i can attach it locally which is what i want to do and it's ssd so it will be super fast quiet um and everything else that i want up to four uh laptop drives essentially but that includes ssds so you could get up to four SSDs in an array that's not quite arrayed because it's Drobo and Drobo's not quite arrayed, it's its own thing. That's interesting. That's an interesting, that'll get you your fast silent storage, won't it?

It will, but there is one, there is two problems with this. SSDs are still relatively small. And expensive. And extremely expensive. That's a problem too. So I found on Amazon, because I wanted to take a look at the prices of SSDs, what was available and what was kind of tested and approved by Drobo.

And there are some SSDs that I found. I think they were Samsung, which are a terabyte, but they're 250 pounds each, and the enclosure is 500 pounds. That's very heavy. That sounds much heavier than it should be. Oh, you mean money. Okay.

That's still, that's very, that's actually very heavy for money. Very expensive. Wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah. Well, we converted Fahrenheit to Celsius earlier. It's only fair. That's, yeah, it's not cheap.

So I will be looking at four terabytes for 1,500 pounds. Oh my God. That's like buying another... How much did your iMac cost? That's half the price of my iMac. Wow. So basically, this is the solution that I am planning on going for. But now I need to get the money to get it.

And with the iPad Pro just around the corner, it might be a couple of months away. But this one feels like the right one for me. Again, four terabytes is a lot, but it's not like, you know, it's not as much as I could get in another solution. I understand that. But I have to kind of weigh up what I'm looking for. And I'm not looking to keep everything that I make forever. I'm just looking to keep a bunch of things for a long time. And four terabytes is probably more than enough to do that. By the time that I would need more, I'm sure I could get bigger SSDs for cheaper. I think I'm only using about two or three terabytes in my archive where I'm literally not throwing away anything on my Drobo, my big Drobo.

And although some of that space will be used by Drobo because it does its thing where it's redundant. So if something dies, something else lives and all that. And it depends on how you set it up. But yeah, I mean, that's a lot of space. And silent, which is the other key thing instead of having... The thing that I hated about having the external hard drives was that I ended up with that stack. I ended up with like three one terabyte hard drives in their own enclosures. And they were all noisy and they were all in a chain and you had to find a place for them.

I just hated it. So something like this, it's a clever idea. And the nice thing about it is that you don't have to fill it up, right? You could put two in and then buy another one later and slide that one in and it adds to your storage and then add a fourth

and then at some point down the road when the SSD prices are better, take one of the smaller SSDs and replace it with a bigger one and it all just kind of keeps working. So that's interesting. I may get the enclosure and one SSD, right? One, one terabyte SSD, or maybe like two 500 or something like that. And go from there. I think that that might be a good, good place to start.

Like I don't need to max it out immediately. So this is probably what I'm going to go for. It seems to take most of the boxes. And I did kind of want something like a Drobo because I like the idea of the Drobo system, right? Where it kind of, you don't get four terabytes by putting four terabytes in it, but what you get is data redundancy.

And that seems like a good thing for me considering the setup that I have. I have limited bandwidth, so I can't back up a lot of this stuff to an online backup. So it has to be offline. So I like the idea of data redundancy in my offline backup system. If I get online and offline right way around, then I'll be in a much better stead for this conversation. But that's kind of what I'm thinking about doing this seems like the right solution for me so that's that's what i'm considering and then maybe in a couple of years time or maybe in a year or so

when we're in our own place i might be able to look at something that's network attached as well as this so i have a big honking disc that is attached to this thing and then I could also back up everything to something like a Synology as well step one Jason step one it's a good it's a good place to start I uh I'm very happy to have a big a big drive that is you know one and a big logical volume because that's the other problem about having those three drives is that they're three different volumes. So you end up having to kind of manage what goes where and what's full and what's not. And I hate that.

I hate that too. So it's nice having just a huge volume. I can chuck all my stuff in there and it's there. My problem has been, and I haven't mentioned this yet. So I've been using CrashPlan as my primary online backup for a while now. And it works well you know it's not the most beautiful thing to look at but it works pretty well um but i discovered the other day that it was basically um failing at backing up my entire server volume which is this big volume because it didn't have enough memory allocated to it, because it runs in Java and needs memory allocation. And I'm still struggling with

that. And I talked to a couple of people on Twitter who said, yeah, that's why I ended up switching to Backblaze was because my data set was too big. And it's a little bit infuriating because CrashPlan offers unlimited data, basically. But clearly their app, by default, cannot, you know, its idea of unlimited is pretty limited. And their support said, okay, well, why don't you add more memory to the memory allocation?

You click here and you type something in. And I did that. And it's still kind of churning. But, you know, there are rumors that there's a crash plan native app coming that doesn't require Java. And that would be, that'd be nice because this is, and I paid for like three years of crash plan. So I'm not, I would really rather not just switch to another backup provider at this point. And also, you know, I, this is what I paid for is it's a volume attached to a computer in my house and it, it, uh, I'm paying for it to be backed up. And it was

basically, uh, the most disturbing thing about it was that it thought it was backing everything up because it was sort of backing up everything that it could see before it sort of ran out of memory. Um, and that's the worst thing is that it didn't say, Hey, I can't, you know, I can't back up all of that because there's not enough memory and sort of alert me. Instead, it just sort of silently went about backing up not everything. And that was not cool. So this is an edge case, I will admit, because I'm asking it to back up a couple of terabytes of data. But that's why I'm that's why I've got the service is to do this. So I will report back.

I'm in touch with their support people and I'll report back. But it's a little bit disappointing because I do have stuff on there that I want backed up, eventually backed up offline or backed up online somewhere. And it can take its time and back up at night and, you know, slowly trickle out. But I thought it was doing that. And it turns out that it's sort of not been doing that. And that's that that's frustrating. For me, that's like finding out that happened. I don't think I could trust it anymore. And yeah, well, I'm, we'll see. We'll see where it goes. I've already paid for a couple more years of it. So I'm not going to, I'm not gonna, I'm going to

see if I can either get it to work or get them to give me their forthcoming non-Java version, if it truly exists or what. But yeah, it's, hey, it reminded me of the days back when you had to allocate memory to Mac apps by selecting them and choosing get info in the classic days. And, you know, that was like one big troubleshooting thing was that you would select an app and choose get info and then you'd change how much memory was allocated to it. There was like literally, I don't know if you remember this at all, there was literally a box

that would say like 900k and you could put it at 1900k. No, that was before my time on the phone. Oh man. And this was exactly what I got with the Java thing. It was like, oh, allocate more memory. Click on the thing to bring up the console and put in this command line command and it will allocate more memory in Java for the app.

And I thought, wow, feeling like 1998 all over again. They are a sponsor. I use Backblaze. I pay for Backblaze as well. And I have them running on my laptop, which is connected to my home internet, which is not, I don't have it running on my iMac because that's connected to the LTE hotspot that I pay for.

So basically, whenever the MacBook is on, it sort of trickles data up to Backblaze on a very, very, very slow internet connection that I have. But I like that it's there and it's just another place for me to basically for me to back up my dropbox right so it's just like a secondary place that all of that stuff goes to which i kind of like that i have that um but it doesn't cause me the issues and i really don't like the the idea that it looks like it's backing up what you're having, but it's not. That is a kind of like at that point, it's kind of horrifying.

It's basically not seeing everything when it sets the backup set for some reason, because it runs out of memory or it times out or something like that. And then rather than throwing an alert, it just says, okay, I guess this is it. I'll back it up. That's probably not good. Also, just before we recorded today, there was an update

for the Apple TV. Apparently it's 9.0.1, which is what it relates to from the beta builds. It doesn't say that on the Apple TV. It just says there's a software update available, and there are no release notes, so there's no way of knowing what it does.

But, I mean, 9.0.1, you'd assume bug fixes. And no matter what it is, I'm happy to see the pace of release. It shows that there are at least some people working on it, right? That they had 9.0.1 released basically a week after the product came out. So I think that's good. I think it's good to see. Yeah. Wish it was let you provide some detail though right yeah i mean my feeling about it's just gonna say bug fixes you know it's just gonna be one of those ones anyway so there's kind

of no what it's showing there's kind of no point in seeing it um but you know i'm just happy to see that something's going on there yeah let's talk about apple tv a little bit um but before we do that we'll follow up from last week all good stuff to say this week i think or at least less bad stuff this week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by braintree code for easy online payments if you're a mobile app developer check out braintree braintree is the payment solution used by companies like uber airbnb hotel tonight living social and munchery braintree is the payment solution used by companies like Uber, Airbnb, Hotel Tonight, Living Social, and Munchery. Braintree has made the payment experiences in these apps seamless and magical. And now you can add a similar experience to your own app.

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including PayPal, Apple Pay, Bitcoin, Venmo, cards, and more, all with a single integration. It's with you across all platforms with superior fall protection and their fantastic customer service with those fast payouts. To learn more and for your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go to BraintreePayments.com slash upgrade. So it's been a week since we last spoke about the Apple TV, so we both had a little bit more time to play with it. And I was wondering if there's any changed opinions or just any kind of feelings or thoughts that you may have having spent a little bit more time with the product

and gotten over the initial frustrations that we were finding last week? Well, yeah, I think one of the challenges is I haven't set it up again, right? Yeah, sure. If the complaints are about getting on board, this is when we talked about the iPhone, it's the same thing, which is everybody complains about it and then they forget about it for a year and they hope that it's better and it's not and then they complain about it again. So I have no further complaints about setting it up because I haven't done that. I wrote a piece

on Six Colors about my daughter's birthday party this weekend where they ended up basically playing music on the Apple TV and singing along for like an hour loud. It was kind of amazing and impressive. And once I got it in the music app, just because they wanted to hear a particular song, then my daughter took the remote away and pretty much was able to drive the rest of the entertainment. But the one limitation was she kept navigating to the things she wanted and then pressing the menu button or the play pause button. And she was like, Daddy, what is happening? Which is sweet because that's the sort of thing that she used to say all the time when

she was seven and not so much when she's 14. And what ended up happening was she didn't realize you could physically click on the trackpad so she was she was moving with the trackpad and then figured she had to press a button um and so i said no no you can uh you can just click just actually click and she's like oh like real click and she went and she was like okay and then that was it she they had a great time and uh so that was a real world kind of experience where they were able to navigate without any problem and they were playing a lot of music on apple music playlists and things and um some music videos too

that they watched and they uh yeah they had a great time and then we did some we took some pictures we set up like a photo booth kind of thing in my garage office space actually I put up some lights and stuff and I shared those over iCloud photo sharing and then we watched those that was sort of the last part of the party was that they were watching all the they looked at all the photo booth pictures on the tv and there was much laughter at the photo booth pictures and we just kind of kept that running as a screensaver um while people picked up their their daughters at the end of the day from the party so yeah so that was i would say a positive interaction with with apple tv and i've done a couple other a couple other thing

things this week with it that um let's see we played uh we played crossy road two player a little bit more and had a good time with that and And yeah, I have had pretty good experiences with it. There are apps that I wish were on there that aren't on there yet. And I haven't used it as much as you would think just because, like I said, I usually just watch Netflix through my TiVo at this point because it serves as that. And it runs Plex now too, so I don't really need to go to the Apple TV for that stuff. But yeah, I'd say it's been a perfectly fine experience. The one thing that I would say that, because we obviously got a lot of feedback about last week's episode, one of the things that people pointed out is the remote itself is um not uh how should i put this

it it's the remote itself is a rectangle with buttons on it right and so it's hard to detect which end is up when you pick it up in the dark which i think for a remote control this is the same reason why a pure uh like a touch screen interface where you have to look at the screen is bad for a remote control because nobody wants to take their eyes off the tv in order to control the remote well the apple tv doesn't have a screen so that's good good call um but you can lose the orientation where it's not it's not uh it feels symmetric symmetrical um but somebody pointed out it's not. The buttons are not, right? The up-down buttons are connected. The plus-minus buttons are connected.

And the Siri button is actually concave, a little tiny bit. The problem is this reminds me actually of, it's not quite as bad as the third generation iPod, but if you remember that one with the four buttons across that to orient, cause I, I used to listen to that when I was, uh, waiting in my room for my, for my daughter to fall asleep. I, you know, after I would read the story, she'd want me to stay there until she fell asleep. And I did that for a little while and it was really boring. So I'd have like one earbud in and I'd be sitting there listening to a audio book or music or something. And, um, and to orient with that, you had to move your fingers on the iPod to try and figure out which button it was.

But if you touched the button, which was the only way to orient, it would do whatever that button did. It was a really bad design. Is that the one with the touch-sensitive buttons? Yeah. Yeah, that's the problem, right? Yeah, exactly. So I would say that that's the problem with this is,

yes, if you look at it, you can orient it properly. properly but by feel you have to sort of move your fingers across the buttons and if if you if you accidentally press a button or if you accidentally move your finger across the trackpad there's some input problems there but it is true that you can if you become savvy enough you can detect uh that really it's like your thumb if your thumb is oriented on the the up and down button properly, you're like, okay, I've got it in the right direction. So it is there. It's just really subtle. I guess if you were criticizing it, you would say maybe a little more subtle than it should be. But it's not identical by feel.

feel so one of my big differences from this time uh last week is i now have one of the game controllers so i bought the steel nimbus controller um and i would say everybody that i'd spoken to about this seems to have vastly different opinions about this controller um i think it's pretty good uh the buttons are fine the d-pad is fine the um the analog sticks are a little too concave uh in the middle uh for my tastes um they kind of they dip in way too much so they're not great to hold on to but the triggers are also really good the it waits pretty well and it gives you just another way to control the ui right the d-pad controls the entire ui of the apple tv um it's better than i expected for some games and it has improved every game i played with it except for beat sports because beat sports is excellent with the remote have you played that yet uh no i haven't you really need to trust me like if you

want a good gaming experience on this device, that is it. Because it's built for the Apple TV remote, where others haven't been. They've been ported, mainly. But the controller really does change the way so many games are played. It's better for games like Alter's Adventure. Way better for Crossy Road, right? Having a D-pad that I can click makes it just easy to play and i also found a game uh called evil kenevil which i had an amazing amount of fun with you

drive is evil kenevil on motorbikes and jump things and do loops and i was playing it for hours on the apple tv very happily i also now have it on my iOS devices. It's a really great game except for one flaw in that it doesn't sync your progress across devices which is kind of weird because it's a universal app on three different devices but it doesn't sync your support.

You're saved. But I mean it's fine because I enjoy the game enough that I actually don't mind replaying all the levels. But it's a really fun game that works really, really well. And when they showed me the Apple TV remote instructions, I was like, this would be impossible to play. But with the game controller, you just use the shoulder buttons to make him flip left and right and to make him go backwards and forwards. And I thought it was really good. So if you are serious about this, like about playing games on the Apple TV, I actually think that it is beneficial for sure to pick up one of the remotes.

And the Steel Nimbus is the one that I have. I think it's the only one that's currently available that is at least ordained by Cupertino. But it does a good enough job, I find. And it does make playing games, a lot of games a lot better like also geometry wars which is a analog stick game it's a two-stick game and i again i haven't even tried to play this with the remote because i don't even know how you would do it like the game has

been all about two sticks on multiple platforms for a long time and it plays really really well with this thing with the with the Nimbus controller. So I would suggest it, but I would also really suggest Evil Knievel. That is my top tip of this week's episode. It's a fun, fun game that I haven't seen much of elsewhere. Huh. Interesting. Yeah, I haven't seen that either,

but with a controller. Yeah, or play it on iOS ios devices it's really good on ios devices so yeah that's that's kind of where i am with the apple tv i haven't spent too much time with it otherwise in just to play some games here and there um like this was funny so yesterday evening uh me and my girlfriend were going to watch we're currently working our way through 30 rock um and we were laying in bed and i said uh you know i could just we could just watch this on the apple tv because we're at the point now where we have to buy the seasons from itunes because only the first three are on amazon i was like

we can just watch it on the apple tv and she's like i'm like yeah i know like it's just at the other side of the room but it's like well that's over there and we've got this we've got the laptop right in front of us. That is our way, right? That is just our way. And she said to me, as I've said before, when we've got our own place, when it's kind of in the way that we want, we'll put the Apple TV on our big TV in the front room, and we'll watch it there.

But at the moment, it just makes a lot of sense for us. But it did make me think about the fact that the ipad pro right is the same size as my mac pro so maybe that will change in a couple of weeks what device we're using to watch this stuff on yeah well the the ipad pro is going to be a despite its name it's going to be a great um tv yes and movie and movie watcher and they know it which is why they put those four speakers in with auto detect stereo all, stereo, all of that. This is the story of Apple. We've talked about it before on this show. You got to learn the lesson that people are going to use your product in all sorts of ways that you didn't intend. And so that's why the selfie or take pictures with their iPads, but people are going to do it. So you might as well give them a good experience. And this is an example of that where the iPad Pro, no, it's probably not a product that you should target at watching, you know, movie watchers. This is a big screen for watching movies.

And yet it's going to be really good for that. And who are we to judge people who buy it just for that but also keep in mind that pro users watch movies and tv shows too so it makes and and why would you not watch it on that big beautiful screen if you're if you're not preferring to watch it on a big tv somewhere so uh it'll be it'll be interesting to see i am laughing at the fact that you you've spent uh did you get the big or the small Apple TV? The small. Okay, so you spent the equivalent of about $200

on this product that you were not interested in. Yeah. Okay, because you bought the controller, the $50 controller. Yeah. Well, I mean, because I'm more interested in it for games than TV, though, right? That's true.

That's always been the way. I like to play iOS games at home, so this is a nice way to play iOS games at home. Yeah, that's true. the way like i like to play ios games at home so this is a nice way to play ios games at home that's a good point but i still don't care about it enough like i've bought this device so i can talk about it on this show right yeah because otherwise i'll be sitting here going jason what does the apple tv do and it just doesn't feel for to me anyway considering this is what i do for a living that doesn't feel professional enough, which is why I put the money down on it, which is why I'll also be putting an incredible amount of money down on an iPad Pro, because I think I want it, but I don't know if I want it.

Yeah. And I might return it. We'll come back to that in a minute, actually, because we finally had the pricing. But I just wanted to touch on this emoji article that you wrote. Emoji vertical! I really like this, because you kind of indeed you kind of uh surfaced a frustration that i had but wasn't really 100 sure in in how to kind of express it and it's so you wrote this piece for mac world um and you're basically talking about how great emoji are which they are and all of the new emoji are fantastic i love them i love the little nerd face guy because i previously use that a lot i use it all the time uh i was previously using the sunglasses guy as a way to represent me so i would use the sunglasses guy because he wears glasses but now i have the nerd face guy and his glasses look like my glasses so it's like that is

me i am nerd face guy so i love all new emoji, but you have highlighted a problem in this is as they have added a ton more, they are becoming more and more difficult to find in the Apple list that they have. Yeah, well, there's a, and it's a huge number. It's the 9.1 and 10.11.1 update added another 184 of these. It's funny.

In Indianapolis, I spent some time at the Release Notes conference, the mingle thing afterward after dinner, talking to Jeremy from Emojipedia. And that was cool because he knows everything about emojis. You could say his knowledge is almost encyclopedic. Encyclopedic, yes. 184 new symbols. And Apple is the first company to have this cover the whole Unicode standard for emoji, which is cool. And it's not as simple as you'd think.

I mentioned this in the article, and I find it fascinating even if nobody else may, which is emoji, we mentioned on the show so upgradians know all about it emoji fragmentation the idea that there is no like art that is given to somebody to support emoji it doesn't work that way so platform owners and website developers basically need to make their own emoji or rely on the platform of the users, but it'll come down to the platform user. There's no, like Unicode, the Unicode consortium doesn't have a budget and go out to an artist and have an artist come up with the official emoji and then give that away to everybody. None of that happens.

In fact, my understanding is that Emojipedia will sometimes help because Emojipedia likes to mock up potential future emoji. I think that since Jeremy from Emojipedia is on the Unicode emoji subcommittee, which is a great thing to say, the emoji subcommittee, bureaucracy crossed with emojis, what could go wrong? And I think they actually, he's helping them out by having Emojipedia do some mock-ups because I think the Unicode consortium has no ability to do that. They have like little silhouettes of what the emoji are supposed to be. But basically it's incumbent on Apple and Google and Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter and anyone else who wants to do it for their custom, for their websites to build this stuff. And so it's a lot of work and Apple has been dedicated. They are paying a designer to come up with this consistent emoji design across iOS and OS 10, which is really great. But there are so many of them. And this was what my article was about that on Mac, you can

bring up, I think it's control, command, space. You can bring up a little floating emoji palette. And if you scroll up, it's got a search box. And you can put in smile. And it'll bring up things that have smile in the name. And if you put in Germany, I believe it will show you the German flag. And you can click on it so that you insert a German flag when you intend to and not a Belgian flag, which I did once.

And this is what started this whole story because I was sleepy and I realized that on iOS, you can't search for emoji. You've got all 184 new ones and the total number is some ridiculous number of how many 1620 total emoji characters possible. And you can't search for them on iOS. So I think, you know, yes, this is not an earth-shaking subject. It's a fun subject. But emoji are fun, and they're easy to type sometimes.

And it would be nice if Apple, which has been so supportive of the display of them, maybe took a look at better ways to choose them. Because on iOS especially, it's kind of hard. You get to the flag segment, and literally they are alphabetized by their country code. And you end up playing this game where you're like, let's see if there's a flag near the flag that I want that I recognize. And then from there, maybe I can orient

and find out if it's alphabetically before or after that. And you have to know the country codes because if you're looking for the German flag, you have to know that that's DE. It's, yeah, it could be, it could be better. And on the Mac, you know, the Mac one is okay, but I ended up using LaunchBar. Although other, there are other sort of text expansion utilities that offer this, but I use LaunchBar because LaunchBar has emoji built into it now. And since I already use LaunchBar, I can type emoji, you know, tab, and then the thing I'm looking for, and it'll pop it up. But I feel like the best example of this right now is Slack. Slack does such a great job with emoji.

Not only do they have a good picker, but they have a shortcut that searches the emoji dictionary. So if you type a colon and start typing something after the colon, it will auto complete a bunch of options for other emojis that you could pick. And my gut feeling is that something like that might be the way for Apple to do it on iOS is a button somewhere, not just switch to the emoji keyboard and good luck, but like an emoji button on the regular keyboard, or I don't know, I'm not a UX designer, but something that lets you very quickly go, I want a smiley here, and it shows you smileys, and you go to that one, or I want a flag here, and it shows you flags, or I want the German flag. I know the code for that, and it auto-completes to that. So I just, I would like that part to be better. That's what the article's about.

Yeah, there's a few things about this. Like one, uh, talking about Slack, never ever would I have imagined that the, uh, emoji reactions feature that they have would have actually caught on. Like, I really love using that, which is where you can add an emoji to a line of text. So somebody says something and you can react by just adding an emoji to it. Like we use that a lot, right? We, we? Yeah, absolutely. That was a surprise to me. I wouldn't have necessarily considered that that would have actually been something that we continue to use. But it's fun. I think that I believe that Apple will help surface the emoji by a search or something on iOS in the future. But the reason they haven't yet is because

this has only really become a problem with 9.1. Well, it does. It certainly exacerbates the existing problem. Well, they added so many in one time. Well, 9.0 added a lot of them too, right? So they've actually added a lot of emoji symbols very quickly in the last few months. By the way, Jeremy, since he's on the committee, of them too right so this is it's out of they've actually added a lot of emoji symbols uh very quickly in the last few months by the way jeremy jeremy since he's on the committee um pointed out

to me that their goal is i think to only add about 60 only 60 a year so this is only going to get worse although it's not going to they're not going to drop 180 at once like like happened in uh in 9.1 he says that the spec they're shooting for about 60 a year. Right. Okay. We'll see. I mean, I expect that there will be some differences. I mean, it's a different tool. It's fun.

On the Mac, there are lots of options. And on iOS, we should say, there are some custom keyboards. Actually, Apple's keyboard for Chinese input, I believe, auto-suggests emoji. And it may on some other keyboards, but somebody sent me a screenshot. The problem is you need to know the Chinese characters to get to that point. And there are custom keyboards that do a better job and have searchable emoji.

And there's, in fact, Emojipedia. There's a link in our notes to this because you put it in there. Emojipedia makes an app that I believe just shows you all the flags. Yeah, they worked with Quartz, the news agency, to create an emoji flag search keyboard. Yeah. So there's some options out there, and they're good. And like I said, I'm using LaunchBar on the Mac. You could set up your favorite emoji in TextExpander.

I mean, there's so many different ways you could do it. But it would be nice. I think this could be something. The delight, I'll put it this way, because this isn't even, it's the positive show, right? This isn't even a criticism of where Apple is so much as to say, I didn't realize how great it was to have easy access to emoji until I used Slack more. And I saw how Slack had said, you know what? Emoji is kind of part of the parlance of online conversation. And if we make it easy for people to use it, they'll use it more and that'll make the conversations richer. And I agree with that. I feel like that was a smart move on their part.

I think they're right. As silly as emoji, I heard from somebody this week who said, basically, what are you, 12? No adult should use emoji. And it's like, well, I disagree. No adult should use emoticons. No adult should use LOL. Okay, you can say that. I will get off your lawn sir but uh i think it adds to the richness of the conversation and is fun to boot and once i saw how slack did it where i was auto completing into emoji and i started to think in terms of well if i want the german flag that's flag de i know what to what to type to get it um once that happened, or is there a snowman? And you do, you know, colon S-N-O-W, and you realize, oh my God, there's a snowflake and there are two snowmen now. Oh, it's crazy. It opened up a lot of thinking of what could be done with emoji input that I

hadn't thought of before. And that's my point here is that having seen that, I look at that and I look at how it currently works on iOS and even on the Mac. And I think there's an opportunity there, especially on iOS for a better emoji input. And that would make everybody's online conversations a little more fun. So, you know, it's an area I think that Apple could add a lot of richness to iOS, especially if they put a little more emphasis on emoji input. It's silly. It is silly. It is not going to change the world. But, Mike, you know, you have to admit, I mean, in the Slack channel that we share and in the other Slack channels that I'm in, too, the emoji are like part of the,

they make everything funnier and better. And I think richer. I agree. Whether it's just in the conversations or those emoji reactions, which are also hilarious. Merlin Mann does not agree. So, and if you would like to hear Merlin's view on this, listen to episode 13 of Reconcilable Differences.

Reconcilable Differences, yeah. Of which whilst I was editing, I was shouting at Logic back at him. Which is a fun episode, especially because John really kind of like parades Merlin around like in this episode to make him kind of the worst he can be. It's a fun one for us to do.

I should also mention when talking about Slack that another feature that I love in Slack that is not applicable to this conversation, but I want to mention it is Slack is also great because they let you make your own emoji. Yeah. And that also fills me with delight. In the incomparable chat room, we have a Skeletor emoji. It is fantastic. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's fun stuff. It's, it's no different than expressing yourself with, like I said, emoticons or animated gifs or acronyms or any other kind of

nerd, nerd code speak that's been going on since the beginning of the internet. This is just, it's pretty and visual and fun. And I like it. Today's episode is also brought to you by GoToMeeting. Think about all the time, money, and hassle that it takes to hold a meeting. You've got to get people in the same place. You've got to get all the IT stuff set up. You've got to get a projector set up. You've got to get refreshments sorted out.

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try it free button and you'll have your first meeting up and running in minutes. Once again, visit GoToMeeting.com for your 30-day free trial. Thank you so much to GoToMeeting for supporting this show. So we found out today as we're recording, which is Monday, the 9th of November, 2015,

that the iPad Pro will go on sale on Wednesday, the 11th. Wednesday, yes. Online, and there will be stock in stores later this week. Later this week. I love that. Might be Thursday, probably not. Might be Friday, probably.

Some places, if you don't get a Friday, Saturday is still part of the week. I expect it's just depending on the store, right? I bet some stores will have them on Wednesday. Yeah, if I had to bet, I would say they'll have them Friday. And then some of them will get them Saturday. If I had to guess, that would be my guess that they won't, that there'll be a gap there. But you're right. It could be. It could be that when they open sales on Wednesday, they're already in some stores. Entirely possible. So I will be logging on

on Wednesday to see if I can try and maybe reserve one for an in-store pickup. Because that's what I like to do these days. I hate waiting at home for these things. Otherwise, I'll just be popping down to a store later on in the week. I finally, as of today, have the pricing information that I've been waiting for. This is the first time that any pricing has been released outside of the US. the first time that any pricing has been released outside of the US. So I will be able to get the 32 gigabyte model for £679 as Wi-Fi, and it goes up to £899 for the Wi-Fi and cellular 128 gig. It doesn't have the pricing for the 128 Wi-Fi, but I can assume that that

will probably be in the £700 range. It's whatever they usually add on for the cellular version, I would imagine. In the US, it's always whatever it is. Good point. So I can just see what that amount is and just reduce it from the £899 figure. So it's probably around £750, £760, something like that. The Apple Pencil will be available for £79. And the smart keyboard available in charcoal gray for £139. It's going to be an expensive week again. Well, so what did you say? The base model is $679?

Wow. You are really getting it in the wallet there. That's $1,000 US. This is the usual pricing? For the $799 model. So that's $226 equivalent dollars more than it is in the US. That's what the VAT will do to you.

Wow. Because if you remember, all of our sales tax is included in the price, right? Oh, well, that's true. That's worth remembering. That's true, because then I will have to add it in. But $7.99 is $5.29. Yeah.

And you're paying a lot more than that. I have some friends who are visiting london they've been there this last week i think they're they're going home soon but uh one of them said a had a tweet uh who's they said uh london is great let's live here looks at uh looks at rental prices well gotta go back to work back home in canada because uh uh yeah things can be expensive there but although you're right that you've got inclusive tax in the prices where we have the hidden secret surprise taxes that just appear yay so even though the products are more expensive here anyway at least the tax is included which

means we don't have like sticker shock at the checkout yeah well also apple is and and and this has come up on past shows and i wrote about it at Six Colors too, Apple is also, I think, anticipating a strong dollar continuing. And they want to have, the stronger the dollar gets, the smaller their margins get. So I think that's part of it too, is that they are pricing based on what they think the currency markets are going to do. But still, that's, yeah, that's pricey. You're going to be spending a lot of money on it. Are you going to get the 32 currency markets are going to do um but still that's uh yeah that's pricey you're gonna you're gonna be spending a lot of money on are you gonna get the 32 are you gonna get the 128 are you gonna go with 128 cellular i'm gonna have to go 128 because if i think i'm seriously going to use this device 32 is ludicrous all right um i will probably go Wi-Fi because I just tether, you know?

And I'm fine doing that with my current iPad. I always have my iPhone with me. I can just tether. So that's probably what I'll do. But I'll also be going in for the pencil and the keyboard because I want the full experience. Right. So there's been some stuff today.

There's been some press today. there's been some press today, like Eddie Q did a kind of half-hearted demo to CNN Money, which there's just been a few little bits and bobs flying around today. It looks like the executives are in full PR force right now,

because I saw Tim Cook is somewhere in London doing something, and I think he was presenting to someone from the press as well today. So they're doing what seems to be the usual now for a product launch, right? They're making themselves very visible around this period of time. So I wanted to just bring this up because it's a little bit of news, but I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the iPad and how we're both using them now,

because me and you both upgraded to the air 2 after wwdc right because we have to take advantage of all the ios 9 ipad related features so are you still continuing to use uh the air 2 if you switch back to the mini like where are you currently on this spectrum i am uh using the air 2 um i i haven't gone to the Mini. I still have my Mini 2 is still in a drawer. And because I don't know, I keep feeling like I'm going to go back and look at it and consider it again. I'm actually working on a story that will probably not be out for a couple of weeks, which is sort of like a survey of all the iPad models for Macworld. They do this every year. And now it's as a freelancer, it's nice when they're like, hey, we'll pay you to do this story

that you used to write for free in your spare time when you worked here. So I'm thinking about this a lot. The Air 2, or the Mini 2... When you say a survey, what does that mean? Oh, just like an overview. I'm going to write about every single available iPad and basically

say which one is right for which person. Okay, like a buyer's guide. It is a buyer's guide. Exactly. So my Mini 2, I love it. When I pick it up, I think, oh, it's so light and small and great. But as I discovered in the last year, I'm really feeling the fact that I am on the precipice of needing reading glasses at 45 years old. And I fought it as long as I could. You got fought. It's going to, but it's going to happen. I mean, I've got the long, because I'm nearsighted. So I've been wearing glasses since I was 18, but now I'm going to have to do that.

And the iPad Air 2 just has as many pixels as the Mini does, but they're bigger and spread out over a larger distance. And when you're getting old and your eyes are going bad, it's nicer for it to be bigger. And I do things like read comics on it. So I'm fully kind of committed to the Air 2 as much as i like the size of the mini and every time i pick it up i think oh you're so nice um i just i i think i think the air 2 is uh that big screen and and it is more powerful than the mini 2 certainly let alone the mini 4 that's out now that that one is more powerful but it's still not as powerful as the Air 2, is my understanding.

So, you know, I love the Mini. It's really cool, and I would use it and love it if I didn't have the Air 2, but the Air 2 is just that much more, you know, bigger. It's all about the screen size. you know, bigger. It's all about the screen size. So are you finding yourself in a situation where you're taking advantage of the multitasking features and stuff like that? Do you find them like, do you use them seriously or do you use them as like a novel thing? Well, the way I use my iPad, the multitasking features don't get used very much. I have those moments. have those moments. Um, one of the ways you fight, uh, especially when you're writing, cause doing podcast stuff, you kind of need equipment for, but when you're writing, um, one of the ways you fight that kind of sluggish time,

when you fight the, you fight the, the tedium of like, you're staring at the cursor and you know, you need to write something. And I'm not going to call it writer's block because I think writer's block is not a thing. I think there's lots of different things that make you not be able to write that get rolled up into writer's block and it becomes this legend. But it's more like you're just staring at the screen like I need to change what I'm doing here. Sometimes I will take like in the summer, I'll take my laptop and I'll sit outside and I'll try to write outside because staring at the screen in the office isn't working. Let's try it. Let's try to change the location. And sometimes I'll do that with the iPad, either on the keyboard or I'll get out the Bluetooth keyboard and I'll go set it up at the dining room table and try that as a different

kind of experience. And sometimes the iPad is a very nice focused experience. But most of the ways that I use the iPad day to day are not that. And so I don't use the multitasking features very much. I don't even use slide over. I think I forget that slide over exists until I'm trying to go forward in Safari. And I use that gesture to go forward that doesn't do that anymore because it's the slide over gesture and I need to press the forward button instead. That's so I don't use it that much. Mostly what I'm using is ideally when I leave the office at the end of the day or if I'm taking a lunch break or whatever, I have a big iMac here.

It doesn't come with me. I have a laptop, but it just stays docked behind me most of the time. The iPad is what I'm using in the house. That's my thing, my connection to the internet is that iPad. That's how I use it. You mean when you're not in the, in, in the house. That's my thing. My connection to the internet is that, is that iPad. Uh, that's how I use it. And you mean when you're not in the office, when I'm not in the office, uh, when I'm in the rest of the house, that that's how I'm using it. And so for, for me, you know, I've, I, I, there are moments where I'm like, Oh, I should split screen this and, and use it. But most of the time I don't. Cause most of the time it's, uh,

especially on that screen, this is something I'm looking forward to trying in the iPad Pro, even on the Air 2 screen. You know, a split view with two apps, it feels a little crowded. It feels a little cramped. I could put Slack on one side and Twitter on the other or something like that. And I have done that, but it feels kind of cramped and it's actually easier just to have both of them open and just swipe between them. So I usually just do that. And I have done that, but it feels, um, it feels kind of cramped and it's actually easier just to have both of them open and just swipe between them. So I usually just do that. So, you know, I'm not using those features a lot, but I do use my iPad all the time. And I, and I love it because it is fulfilling the, the, uh, the, the space that a laptop used to take in my life, where I would have a laptop on the dining or in the like the living room like the coffee table just so that I could flip it open and look at something

on the internet and it's nice to not have to worry about that and you know the iPad does that instead no I definitely use the split view stuff all the time um I love it it's it's the thing that makes the iPad a useful tool for me again because so what are you pairing what are you what are you splitting so quite a lot of the time um I might be doing something and then maybe an email will come in or something like that and I will slide over Outlook um and take a look at it I may then turn it into a of like a a multi-pane view to like look at something in Chrome, right? And bring it in. Like say, for example, somebody wants to buy some sponsorships,

I can bring up our sponsorship calendar in Chrome and take a look at it there, right? And kind of compare to see what's available. And then I can go flick back over and like into, well, I can just tap into Outlook on the right side or whatever and reply to it.

If I'm on Twitter, if I'm in Tweetbot, I usually will have something like Slack open as well just because they kind of just go together for me because they're both just kind of like goofing off type stuff. There are still some apps that need split view support for me, like the Google Drive apps. And when I have those as well, it will go to a whole

other level where I'll be combining notes and Google Drive to do show preparation. So I currently do that, but I'm like flicking over into the multitasking view and going back or I'm using notes in slide over and then I go back into drive and then I slide over notes again and go back into Drive. So I see only, for me, a continuation of my use of this feature as time goes on, in all honesty. I feel like it is, after having used it for a while now, I feel like the next logical step for it is a little less maintenance, if that makes sense. One of the problems I have with it is

it doesn't always do what I kind of, I've realized I want it to do. And again, as a first iteration, I think it's fine. But, you know, obviously there are things like the list of multitasking available apps that you see in the slide over is not sustainable with a large number of apps on your device. That is an inalienable view.

Yeah. And then the other thing I would say is I kind of want, and how you make this work with gestures and have it be something that regular users can understand, I don't know. But I find myself wanting pairs of apps to live together. And so- I feel the same. Yeah. So I press one icon and have two apps launch yeah like if it

knows that when i have a tweetbot or twitterific open i want slack to be with it or when i have slack open i want a twitter client to be with it whatever my choice is um that when i'm in the home screen and i tap on slack that it open in the split view with the app that goes with it. But if I have some other app, I have Safari open, it knows that, well, Safari is open with notes. And so I will open Safari with notes. And right now it doesn't do that. It sort of like you set the sidebar item, whether it's slide over or split view that the right hand side item, and that's the app that opens with whatever app you open. And again, makes sense for a first crack at it,

but I find myself wanting context there. I find myself wanting these apps to know who their buddy is and bring the buddy along. Come on, buddy. It's time for us to open up. Both the apps are going to open up, and that doesn't happen right now. Yeah, I think that would be nice.

I think that is, you know know i would love to see an app like workflow have the ability to do something like that right like you create a custom icon that you hit and it opens the two apps together oh yeah that'd be nice but it can't right there's no way you could do that right now no it's gonna have to be a it's gonna have to be a system thing um the other thing i would say is uh with the work that apple's done on the proactive stuff in ios 9 especially i think you see that on the iphone i would love to see a proactive uh list of suggestions of apps for the sidebar right so so it so it could actually make a good guess about what app you probably want to load. Yeah. As opposed to just time based be like, oh, well, when you have this open, you usually want this open.

Yeah. And have it be even if it doesn't select it for you automatically to have it be a suggestion at the very top, because those those can work pretty well. I'm shocked when I switch to the proactive view and go, oh, there it is. That's the app I wanted. It doesn't always happen, but it happens more than I thought it would. So, you know, these are other directions. But for me, I think it actually does limit my use of split view because I feel like once I'm in split view, I'm also committing that I have to do maintenance on split view. Then I load another app later and I'm like, oh, I still had split view. I've got to close that out or I need to change apps or something like that. And I'd like it to be, I'd like it to just be less work. I'd like it to sort of, again, how you do this is an open

question and what encumbrance you add on top to get this stuff to be set up that way, I think is an open question. And it's a challenge for whoever is designing that feature at Apple, but wouldn't it be nice if I know that this app, always want to open full screen but the this app i always want to open with this other app next to it that would be that would be cool let's see how the or if the ipad pro will change our your opinion at least on the split view right the more real estate may help that just more more room oh that's going to be more room room will be huge. Yeah. So we'll see. I'm becoming more and more excited about the thought of it just because of how much I'm using the Air.

But I don't know how I would feel about the bigger device, right? The added weight, the added size, like all of those things. They're all of the unanswered questions that make me consider how good the potential functionality could be when compared to the adding on of the rest of the device, right? Well, I can't wait. I mean, not only will we be able to get them this week, but presumably there's a whole set of embargo reviewers out there

who are getting ready to drop their reviews this week. So there'll be a lot to read. There'll be lots of things to order and spend money on, and then there'll be products. So it's an exciting week. It's iPad. I think I did a post on Six Colors today that was basically, hey, it's iPad Pro week, it turns out. Apple released a press release that says, iPad Pro, this is the week we are excited about it.

So hopefully next week will be the week where we get to talk about it on Upgrade. That should be a lot of fun. Yeah, this is relentless, right? This is the last one, I think. But it has been quite a fallout from that September 9th event, which is we've got a lot of products to show you, and then we're going to be dropping them over the course of the next two months. Because it's two months today since that event. It's been busy. They've been busy.

So we've all been busy. And it's good. But I feel like this is probably the last one until next year. Yeah, there's nothing else, right? busy they've been they've been busy and uh so we've all been busy and it's good but i i feel like this is probably the last one until next year yeah there's nothing else right yeah there's nothing else from that event nothing promised no i mean they could they could you know call call me up next week and say hey we got some new come on down and visit us but i i think it's unlikely i hope so i think they've got some christmas shopping to do and they're done this has been uh like a season that i don't think there's ever been before like product release wise actually okay so i think it's the most that's the most we've seen in a while but there was a year

and i can't remember what year it was um and my colleagues at macworld will back me up on this from back in the day uh there was There was a year where the first, the Tuesday, every Tuesday there was an Apple product announcement for like 12 straight weeks, 15 straight weeks. Some of them were minor, some of them were major, but there was something. There would be like an iLife rollout, and then there'd be a new iPod, and then there'd be a new laptop, and then there'd be an update to Final Cut then there'd be a new laptop and then there'd be a an update to Final Cut Pro and there was there was and I talked to Apple PR at the time about it and they're like yep well this is somebody obviously said what if we were just in the news

forever and everything we did we just dripped it out one at a time and that was exhausting it was a lot of fun and when you're doing a monthly magazine I have always said to the people at Apple at Apple PR when I when I was at Mac, I would always say to them, you know, one really awesome looking new Apple product every month works for us. It's like, that is great. Because there's nothing better than putting a new Apple product on the cover of a computer magazine. It was always the best thing you could do. So they did that for a while. And then there was one Tuesday where it was like, no PR.

And it's like, let's call Apple PR, see if they're okay. And they're like, yeah, it's done. It's over. But they did it. This is the biggest one I can remember since then, where there's been a real march of products over time. But they did do that kind of masochistic product rollout one time, where it was like three months where there was something new every week.

It was crazy. I would really love it if you could follow up on what that time what was and what the products were i'll look into it i'll look at the apple pr archive i would really like to know that now but it was a it was crazy time we could maybe go back in time right and we could do each one little historical upgrade yeah that sounds like fun all, I think it's time for Ask Upgrade. I think so. Jason, could you please thank our Ask Upgrade sponsor for this week? Ask Upgrade is brought to you this week by stamps.com. Trips to the post office, never convenient, often unpleasant.

We're getting toward the holidays. Oh, it's not a good time to go to the post office. You can get postage, though, right in your desk. You don't have to go to the post office. You can use stamps.com. It'll even give you special postage discounts that you cannot get at the post office. And that includes first class and priority mail and express international. You're sending something to Mike and more. You'll never have to pay full price for postage again. So here's how it works. You use your own computer. You use your own printer. You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package.

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That's it. You don't have to make a long-term commitment like postage meters often require. There are no markups on postage. In fact, you can get postage discounts with stamps.com. So it's really a no-brainer. Right now, you can sign up for Stamps.com and use our promo code, which is UPGRADE, and get a special offer for a four-week trial and a $110 bonus offer, including postage and a digital scale. Digital scale, very cool. Plug it into your Mac. You go to the Stamps.com webpage. It weighs whatever is sitting on the scale and autofills it. Pretty amazing. So don't wait. Go to stamps.com before you do anything else. Click on that microphone at the top of the homepage and type in upgrade. That's how they know that we sent you there. That's very important. Makes them like us. And that's stamps.com. Click on the microphone and enter upgrade. And thank you to stamps.com for saving me from visiting the post office and for sponsoring Ask Upgrade. First question comes from Jimmy. For Christmas, I need real lasers. We can look into that. I'll give you some laser sound effects for Christmas, maybe. Jimmy had a question for me

this week. Jimmy would like to know what case I use for my iPhone. So, Jimmy, let me tell you, because Jimmy's just joined the Plus Club, the only good club to be a part of, of course. And the case that I use is just the Apple Silicon case. I'm very happy with the Apple Silicon case. It does a good job. It's maybe a little bit bulkier than I would

like at times, but I like the colors and I like the grip and it has the Apple logo on it, which is nice. So I think it does a really good job and it's the case that I like to use. Nice and simple. Alright. Do you use a case? I bet you don't. I have the leather I have the Apple leather case.

It's the same one that I had on the 6 that I've just moved over to the 6S. It fits slightly more snugly on it, but it still fits. And I like it because it adds that extra grippiness to it. And so I've gotten used to it. It's the first case that I have used in an extended way over my entire lifetime of iPhone ownership. But I like it. It's just the black leather Apple case. There you go. Now Vic has a question for you.

Vic wanted to clarify something from last week's episode. And Vic asked, did I hear correctly that you said that Apple would not intend to support the iOS remote app on the new Apple TV? That is a quote that you said you were told from the mouth of Apple PR to your ears. Well, from a guy. So what happens at these Apple events is it's every device that's out there, and there are lots of them that's being demoed. There's an Apple employee with it that's sort of its minder.

And those are Apple employees. They can't all be Apple PR and marketing people because they don't have that many of them. Or maybe it's marketing people, but it's not just the Apple PR team. It's they don't have that many of them. Or maybe it's marketing people, but it's not just the Apple PR team. It's a lot of other Apple employees. They are often not people you've met before. You don't know their names. They don't wear name tags. They don't identify who they are, but they've all been trained to say basically the same things. What to demo, what not to demo, what to allow you to do, what to not allow you to do. It's all pretty well-trained.

And my story is that when I asked him about the remote app, this guy who I didn't, I don't think I knew if I'm recalling correctly, said that they weren't, I expected him to be noncommittal about the remote app. And he said, when I said, are you going to be able to use the remote app? The answer was no. And I was like, well, that's weird and interestingly specific. And I just filed it away and didn't really think about it much more until the Apple TV shipped and it wasn't there. So that's a pronouncement from some guy who is an Apple person who was trained. It could very easily have been a misstatement. The fact is that remote app hasn't been updated. is that remote app hasn't been updated. It doesn't mean that there isn't a new Apple TV app coming that is more fully functional than that remote app, which is, if I'm being honest, kind of showing

its years. It was built to control iTunes on a Mac basically a long time ago. And it's, you know, they could probably build something new that's better, or they could retrofit it if they wanted to. But it wouldn't shock me if there was just an Apple TV app that came out at some point. I'm surprised that it's not out now and that there isn't a way to more easily input things like text and maybe even use to emulate the Apple remote on the Apple TV. Also, the Apple TV only supports one Apple remote right now, which I wonder about for game reasons and things like that. Maybe there's a software reason why it's not doing it yet. So there may be software updates for the Apple TV to come as well. But certainly it would be nice to have the ability to remote

control that Apple TV from an iOS device. I can't believe that there isn't something in the works, but the person told me no flatly when I asked. And that has been borne out in the sense that we're a week out with this product now, and that app hasn't been updated since April. Pascal has shared a wish kind of from the Apple TV to iOS, how great it would be for universal search for content in the same way that you can use the Apple TV. So, for example, hey Siri, play this song in Spotify. Or like, you know, hey Siri, play this song and it shows you the available places that you can grab it from.

Do you think that this is something that you would be interested in? I guess Spotlight goes some of the way by indexing content, but it's a little bit different as like searching for something that you don't know that you have, right? And it's showing you, or you can watch it on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu. Would you want to see that on iOS? Yeah. I mean, this is all the stuff. I don't know. It's weird.

The Siri stuff and the spotlight stuff, it's all kind of mixed around. And you would like to see it all kind of intermingle right i think it would be great to have the books i mean apps apps can contribute to spotlight on ios though right they can do that now they can contribute to the index um i'm not sure whether spotify is or or an app like it is capable of say downloading the entire spotify library of strings for all the songs and putting that in spotlight because it may make there may be limitations on that and it might make your phone explode um but uh yeah the more the more of this stuff the better it would be great to be able to ask siri about a song or an album and have it say,

here it is on Apple Music, or you're not logged into Apple Music, but Spotify has it or whatever. And I think we'll probably get there. Next up, we have a question from Rob. What apps are you hoping will come to the Apple TV? For me, I've really struggled with this question. So I just thought about a couple of the things that I really liked that I kind of wish were there already one of them is 3's I think 3's would work really really nicely on the Apple TV like the remote like the touchpad on the remote is kind of built for a game

like 3's really and I would also like to see Overcast on the Apple TV as well I'm going to say Overcast I agree with podcast apps in general there's an opportunity there apple's podcast app isn't there um amazon video yeah i didn't even think about it there i mean but yeah of course i think i kind of just wrote it off in my brain uh spotify yep there isn't a spotify app for apple tv yet is there? I don't know. I don't use Spotify. I use Apple Music for my sins.

So Jamie uses Spotify. My daughter uses Spotify. And at her birthday party, that would have made it much easier because she's got her playlist and everything like that. And she insists on using Spotify even though it's the unpaid Spotify with ads and low quality. Even though I have Apple Music, even though I have Apple Music. She has access to Apple Music. I don't understand it, but it's the kids today. What are you going to do? They should get off my lawn.

My lawn is dead. There's no water. There's no lawn anymore. So something like status board and other stuff like that that turns your TV into kind of like an information hub, I think would be interesting. I'm not quite sure how you would uh how you would architect some of that stuff but i would like to see it um you know their favorite games you mentioned threes i think that's i think that's a good example other other uh fun games would be uh would be nice to see but

but those are the two that i i think of as you know something like a podcast app something like status board from panic and uh and uh yeah other other media stuff like amazon and spotify just to load load that up with every media option that you could possibly imagine tristan has asked um any chance of the of an app of apple releasing an ipad air 3 within the next few months um tristan says, I want an iPad Air, but I don't like that it's last-gen technology. The last-gen technology thing is quite interesting, because it's kind of not last-gen. It was always

extremely overpowered, the iPad Air 2. So it's kind of current-gen. Right. Well, the shipping of the iPad Pro will mean that the iPad Pro has got a processor that is much more powerful than what's in the Air 2, right? Yeah, but... But you're right, the iPad Air 2 was way more powerful than what came before it.

So, like, but when the iPad Air 3 comes out, there is the potential of an iPad Pro 2, which will have a faster processor in it again right potentially um my answer to this question is the chances of apple releasing an ipad air 3 in the next three months are let's say what percentage do we want to ascribe to something that is highly unlikely but you never know because apple continues to do things that are unexpected that are not in the playbook from the last five years every now and then yeah it's not impossible but i think it's highly unlikely that you'll see an ipad air 3 before um you know first week second week of september next year it'll get announced and we'll do this all again,

where that one will get what the iPad Pro has now, and the iPad Mini won't get updated because it got updated last year. And we'll just kind of take this little product cycle and do this for a while. Yeah, I do believe now, my belief is that each iPad line will get an update every two years.

Yeah. The Pro may get updates faster than that because it's brand new and they want to make up uh make an impression with it um but other than that i here's what i would say to tristan i when i'm working on this macworld story spoiler alert i think i'm going to i'm um recommend the ipad air 2 wholeheartedly as the most mainstream if i need to get an ipad what should i get i have no hesitation to recommend that product even though it's the same product that they sold last year because it was so far ahead when it was released and it's still so impressive technically and it doesn't feel like a year old product it feels like everybody got got this year's product a year early so um that's what i would say is i i think people shouldn't have fear of buying the ipad air 2 i don't think it's going to get replaced in the

next few months and it's uh still an incredibly impressive piece of hardware and then finally today uh we have a question from scottott who wanted to know what i thought of the ipad pro keyboard being us layout only and he links to the uk page and it has a note right at the very top which says smart keyboard for ipad pro is available in us english keyboard layout which is disappointing to me because it's not the keyboard that I use. Right, I know. You use that funny keyboard with the pound sign. We have the return key.

The return boot. Which is, I don't know, it's very frustrating. I don't know why Apple is releasing a keyboard in just one configuration, especially when they know they're doing it because they own up to it. It just seems like a peculiar choice to make. I'll try it anyway. I think I could probably get used to it, but I'm not overjoyed at the fact that it will feel weird to me to type on this, other than the fact that it just looks like a weird keyboard anyway, right?

on this other than the fact that it just looks like a weird keyboard anyway right i don't know obviously it's complicated enough to make it that they are only currently making it with one localization i imagine that's the reason for it is not that they don't like other people but that they just don't have the wherewithal to make it in multiple configurations. They should have just chosen the UK layout because it's superior anyway. Oh, I see. That's the one that they should have chosen rather than the US one, I think. I see. It's the way they should have gone. It's a shame.

They missed out. If you'd like to find the show notes for this week's episode, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 62. If you want to find me and Jason online, there's a few places you can do that. We're both on Twitter. Jason is at jsnll, J-S-N-E-L-L. And I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. And you can read all of Jason's lovely work

over at sixcolors.com, which is where you'll find original pieces. And it's also a hub for everything else that Jason does on the internet. Thanks again to our lovely sponsors this week. Great people over at Casper, Stamps.com, and Lynda.com, and we'll be back next time, hopefully with iPad Pros in our hands. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, everybody.