Upgrade - 65: Holiday Firewall

Episode Date: November 30, 2015

Special guest host Merlin Mann joins Jason to talk about the holidays, Apple TV, iPad Pro, and how to recommend Apple products.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 65 i am your host jason snell my co-host mike hurley is unavailable he is on assignment i believe stealing headphones and microphones from marco armment's closet. The show today brought to you by Lynda, an easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn. MailRoute, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam. And Making Light, craft a daily ritual to focus on what matters most. Joining me, filling in for Mr. Mike Hurley is your friend and mine, the internet's own, Mr. Merlin Mann. Hi, Merlin. Hey, Jason. Thanks for doing this. I appreciate it. Hi. You know, just what time and what do I wear? I'm always ready.

I'm honored. I'm honored to be here. You're a busy man. It's a podcast. It's not really work. Yeah, but you got a lot of podcasts now. No, don't tell them that. I've told them. I've convinced people that podcasting is work. Tell the kid to cut that out. It's very... The kid. Who's the... Do you mean Mike?

Yeah. Mike's very young. He's the kid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was Thanksgiving last week, and I wanted to... This is not really follow-up.

This is like calendar-based follow-up. Follow-up to previous days listed on a calendar. This is follow-along. Yeah, let's come up with another thing that'll drive John Syracuse mad. Triple dagger. Yeah, exactly right. Thanksgiving. Do you have a – I was realizing when I was in Ireland a couple years ago for the UL Conference, I was in like – was that it?

Or no, I was in Ireland for an IDG thing. And it was October, and I was sitting in the airport in Dublin and there was Christmas stuff everywhere. And it was like late October. And I thought, what happened here? And then I realized, I think we're fortunate in the United States to have Thanksgiving because it's like a firewall. It's a little porous and it gets more porous all the time, but it's like a firewall. It's a little porous, and it gets more porous all the time. But it's like a firewall between us and Christmas. It's a good signal, I think, that now the next one up is Christmas.

Now you can do it. And I don't know. I feel like that has given me added appreciation for Thanksgiving. Just that it's not only a nice holiday where we think about what we're thankful for, but it's like our last line of defense against Christmas being a thing that happens year-round. Yeah, I totally agree. I think the implicit five weeks of Christmas holiday stuff is plenty. It's perfect. You have a big turkey dinner.

You get another turkey dinner, and then it's New Year's. Boom, you're out. Yeah. But most of what I know about Christmas comes from what KOIT is playing. Because, you know, when KOIT starts playing Christmas music, it's all over. You know, because then my daughter makes us listen to Christmas music. That's easy. What's Coit's call?

K-O-I-T 96.5. If it is like easy listening, is it soft, jazz? KOIT is the music that you can play at work. It's unobjectionable music year-round. That's good. But also the seasonal aisle at Walgreens. Because once we go to Walgreens a lot,

and when they move out the Halloween candy, and they start moving in the Christmas stuff, it's all over. But I agree with you. I think it is a good firewall. I still feel like this is not going to fly with my kid, but I still wish it was a little like the Olympics. I think we should have like a big Christmas every four years. And then the other three years, it should just be, you know, maybe we just watch a little more TV for a week. But that's it.

It's just too much. It's just too much. Would it be in the summertime on alternating every two years? That's right. And cities would lobby to be the home of Christmas. That's nice. I don't know. I mean, I enjoy it.

I'm trying to let go and let God and just be more mellow about the whole holiday thing. Actually, this is not a plug, but, or I guess it is, but the upcoming episode of Reconcilable Differences with John Siracusa and me, we talk about holidays and how John is very healthy about it. And I get sad around holidays and we talk about holidays and how john is very healthy about it and i i get sad around holidays and we talked about that so that'll be a fun way to kick off the holiday season that's nice it's like a like a tradition well you know the this weekend's incomparable episode was um our tradition which is to ruin things that people love about the holidays i haven't listened to it

yet did you how did you add another layer to the... Well, let's just say that the Rankin-Bass 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, while having a heartwarming story of overcoming people's inability to accept differences, and that how you can be different, and that's okay, and you should be yourself, which is admirable. In doing this, it portrays the North Pole, Santa Claus, the elves, and all the other sort of North Pole culture as horrible. He's the worst kind of manager. Yeah. Because he acts like he really respects everyone's skills, but he doesn't, and he'll totally undermine you the first chance he gets.

Yeah. Especially if your dad thinks you're kind of a jerk. I mean, Rudolph gets, I mean, when Rudolph is born, there's a scene where Donner, his father, basically says, sees the glowing red nose and says, well, it's over. It's like he's not like all the other reindeer and therefore his life is over which again you know this is the story rudolph the redness reindeer is that is that they exclude him and then turns out that he's very useful and so suddenly he matters and i would stop and say wait a second that's the only reason that rudolph is is kept around is he might be of some use at some point and then all is forgiven rudolph we've ruined your childhood by not letting you play the

reindeer games what i'm saying is we ruined that in that episode. All that scarring made you stronger. Like Johnny Storm's mom says, have you tried not being a mutant? Yeah. Rudolph basically is a mutant. That's what I realized when I was watching it. Which is a mutant. It's basically about being gay. Yeah, exactly right.

And Hermie the elf who wants to be a dentist. Oink, oink. There you go. Right there. He pulls all of the abominable snow monster's teeth. That still completely freaks me out. That's messed up. Oh, my God. What's he going to do? At that point, we're like, what is his life like after that?

Is he just gumming? Glenn Fleischman suggested he just gums the occasional elf at that point in the future. Well, that's like somebody who aspires to be an oncologist, and their first thing is they're really excited to tell somebody they have cancer. It's like it's the worst part of being a dentist. Now I am complete professionally. I have done that. Ham hocks and guitar strings.

Anyway, so that's my – I like the holidays. I just am very happy for them to have a cap. And that's one of the things. I like Thanksgiving. I think it's a fun holiday. I get to make a turkey. I made a turkey. It was great. A little brine, the turkey, and roasted it. a fun holiday. I get to make a turkey. I made a turkey. It was great.

A little brine, the turkey, and roasted it. Oh, nice. It was all good. And there's the side dishes. And Lauren's parents came. And that was all great. But I also like it because that's like the starting gun. And so, you know, I'm not going to crack up, open the Christmas music in mid-November.

I'm not going to do it. Can't do it. Even when I want to. I'm like, no, no. You know what? Not time. Let's defer it. It's going to be more pleasant to play that Vince Giraldi, Charlie Brown Christmas album. I'm going to be playing it for the entire month, essentially,

continuously. So let's wait. And it'll be all the sweeter when I can press play. Well, you got to tune. I'm pretty sure you can get KOIT where you live. And if so, you'll be treated to an hourly playing of Christmas in San Francisco, which is the worst. I think it's Victimone. And it's just, it's just, it's just terrible. And something about clam chowder in a bread bowl. Fisherman's Wharf and that crazy chicka chicka Chinatown. Whoever paid them to mention them in Christmas in San Francisco.

Well, happy holidays to all. Whatever your background, it's going to be cold and sad, and we want to be there with you. Yeah. It was pretty spectacular this year here in Northern California. I felt as if they just flipped a switch on November 1st and said, all right, it's winter now. In our absence of seasons, it was literally like we had our summer period, and then they flipped it, and then it's like our winter period, which I'll grant you, it's not particularly cold. It's not particularly wet. It's not like other parts of the world.

But it was funny this year that we just, there was one season for a while and then you woke up the next day and it was like, oh, I guess we're in the other season. We're in season B now. It finally feels like it finally feels a little bit like fall. The weather's gotten so weird in San Francisco. I hate to be that person who's always saying, oh, climate change. But in the 16 years I've lived in this same house in western San Francisco, the weather has definitely changed. It's definitely not as foggy and depressing all the time. And I think that's not a good sign. But, you know, hey, it's Christmas.

It's Christmas. Yay. Jingle jangle. That's right. Chain rattle, chain rattle. You don't swap out your bell for, like, jingle bells during the holidays, do you? I move the bell away, Jason. You know I move the bell away. You should have the jingle bells,

though, that you can do that instead. That'd be very seasonal. I will do that. I do have some actual upgrade follow-up. Follow-up. Yeah, yeah thank you it's all sound effects now so this is um lister sam wrote in about uh a comment i made we talked we talked about the fuselage of apple press releases and i was trying to remember and i looked it up and it was 2008 where they made essentially they had a product release every week for about three months

and uh i think then they thought better of it. I don't know why they did it. Maybe they thought it was just a rolling thunder was a good idea. Maybe Steve Jobs put them up to it. I don't know the reason. But Lister Sam wrote in who works in the auto industry. And I thought this was actually kind of fun. He said, going a whole week between press releases from one of the major companies is unheard of and would be a sign of something seriously wrong. At the end of year all hands meeting at one of the major automakers, communication staffs, the VP of communications proudly proclaimed they had published 500 press releases in 2013, a year in which there were only 251 working days, meaning that for every work day, they released two press releases. And sent a link to a an auto

blog that posted a satirical story with the headline ford sends out 15 millionth press release and the lead is for today issued a press release saying it has reached its goal of sending out 15 million press releases so immediate release so it could be worse um although you know that's a little that's a little different but um you, the thing is most of the Apple press releases in that era were substantial. At least there was a brand new product. And at Macworld, we had to jump on that. And clearly this is a boy who cried wolf situation where, oh, another Ford press release. It must be the afternoon.

Right. Well, the funny thing, I'd love to hear more about this from your position inside an actual publication. But it seems to me that, you know, Apple in the years that it's gotten a little more tight-lipped, I guess you could say. Oh, yeah. You know, you've talked about this in other places, the pretty Steve days where there's all kinds of rumors floating around. And they've gotten so tight-lipped that now that's the official burning bush is like what comes out on stage and what comes out in those press releases but i think one of the i'm wondering if you agree with this it seems to me like one of the interesting things is what they choose to highlight and how they choose to frame it and maybe by

extension what they leave out that you wouldn't know if you didn't read beyond the press release does that cover does that does that change the way you cover something when you look at it in context with like, oh, they're not mentioning, oh, when they announced there's going to be this upgrade to this particular product, but they're not talking about having more RAM or something. Do you, do you end up doing any kind of Talmudic interpretations? Well, it's like a, it's like a tiered information system. And I have, I've talked about this before where it's, um, you're in this hermetically sealed, uh, keynote bubble where all the information you've got – I mean, you're on the internet, but if you're covering the event, you're not – you know, Tim Cook isn't on stage talking and you're being like, I'm going to read the tech specs on Apple.com. I need to do that now.

You don't do that. You're covering what's happening on stage, and then you're usually brought into the hands-on area and you're looking at the products there and talking to people. But meanwhile, they've also dropped this load of information on their website, not just the PR, but like the marketing pages. And so that's a tiered information where you come out of the keynote knowing this stuff and having like being some of the only people who've touched these products that are not shipping for a few days or a week or a month or whatever. But then there are the people who are not there who have been scouring the internet to see what they say there. So the first thing you do is kind of compare notes there

and like what made it in? What was the spin in the keynote versus what some of the details are? Because sometimes those things will be interesting. Well, they'll say, oh, did you realize that there's no blue version of this thing? And you'll be like, oh, I didn't realize that. I assumed that all of the new products came in blue. And'll say no no it's only these few and there's a and there's a surcharge for the blue

model and uh and so you get those details and you're like oh that's interesting they didn't mention that i wonder why um and so you think about that and then uh separately then there you get the product and you realize that there are all sorts of things in it that were not mentioned. And sometimes that can be good and sometimes that can be bad. And then you're comparing it with what sort of your expectations are and what do they not talk about at all. And if you ask them about it, they have no answer for you. And that can be telling too. So there's like little layers of information, the stuff that they want to tell you, the stuff that is so important.

Because on stage, a lot of stuff gets dropped because there's not time and what you get is the narrative and then there are the details that you can get hands-on and they're the details that they want to market in their marketing material and then there's the you know at the center of the egg there's the uh or the onion whatever metaphor we're using here it's probably a food metaphor there's like the the actual product and then, and, and so you have to like, you're calibrating around all of those different things. And, and the differences there are often the most interesting parts of the story. Cause it's like people expected this, but it was not that. It would seem kind of shocking when you come out and you're so focused on that experience of being in the room. And then, you know, obviously the experience of using this thing that you

learned about an hour ago, and then coming out and finding out probably in some cases that there's a big controversy already. And you're like, what? Yeah, that must be really strange. Did you realize that they killed the iPod classic today? No, there's no press release for that. And they didn't mention on stage. So I didn't know that. Which is also great when you do your podcast right afterward. And people are like, what about this? I don't know. Did you read that on their site? Because I haven't read their site yet. And there's a weird imbalance there. But it can be useful.

You need five people to be caught up with all that stuff. Yeah, I don't have a staff anymore is the thing. So that's trickier now than it was back in the day. But it's still, it's interesting and you do look for the differences. That's definitely a part of it. I'll tell you one thing that I think is a little weird. Not weird exactly, but something that there's some strange holes

I've noticed in what people do or don't know. You could call it tips and tricks, but it's funny to me, like almost everybody, I saw this today on Muni, where you will see people still quitting apps. And I'm not one of those people to say you should never quit an app

because you can actually do sometimes need to quit an app if it's like eating processor stuff or whatever. But on iOS, everybody knows how to quit apps. And I'm not one of those people to say you should never quit an app because you can actually do sometimes need to quit an app if it's like eating processor stuff or whatever. But you know, on iOS, like everybody knows how to quit apps. But like last week, I'm back to work. And this is not to single out Dan, but Dan didn't know the contraction trick. And I would never bother to tell most of my friends the contraction trick on iOS, because I assume they've all known about it for years. But I still meet people every day who are like, you've got to be kidding me. You know, that, you know, the trick, like where you do like W E L L L and it makes it into wheel. Oh yeah. Yeah. Sure. Or you do W O N T T and it'll make won't. But what's amazing is like,

as soon as I mentioned that somewhere, like all these people come out of the woodwork and they're like, I've been using this thing every day for years and I never knew that. Or, or for example, I discovered, I think I mentioned this on Slack one time. I still have not found a comprehensive list of every, when I say every Siri command, I don't mean every iteration, but I have not found a comprehensive like KBase article on the official list of everything you can do with Siri on iOS and everything you can officially do, you know, and so a couple of things, I mean, one thing is they really want you to use Siri. And I don't mean this as a slam. I just think it's interesting. It's like, I'm kind of amazed there's not a place to go where they could say, hey, you know, you got a half a day to spend on

this. Here's where to get started learning this stuff or to learn the trick that we've all taught each other now with Apple TV of saying like, find the show Agent X or whatever, where you have to sort of give it a little bit of help with keywords. There's so many little bits of that stuff that can over time really change your experience that's not all out there. So I don't know, I always think it's really interesting that like there still very much is a place I think for some of that tips and tricks stuff, especially when one of these new things comes along. Because I guess the larger point I'm trying to make is that we all have a certain kind of tunnel vision about what we know. There may be people out there who could reel off every chipset

in every device, but may not know how they can make a contraction by typing an extra letter, you know? They seem, I suspect there is an initiative somewhere at Apple to do more of this stuff. And it seems like a no-brainer to me because how-to content is very strong in general, I can say, when you're writing about technology. It does really well. It indexes well. It lives very well over time. People search for this stuff. They want to know how to use something.

They search on the Internet. And you know who the number one website would be for any how-to information about Apple products? The Apple.com, right? And so they do more of that now. But I'm a little surprised that they haven't gotten to the point where the day that the Apple Watch comes out, there isn't like a whole, you know, I mean, because they have marketing pages, but and unless they maybe feel like it's a failure if they need to have it, but it's not a failure. It's just like people more more directions of information, more channels that you can you can reach if you need help to have the ultimate help guide with a whole bunch of articles, whether it's like the knowledge base, old style tech knowledge base, or whether it's something that's a little more friendly and feels like it's just, oh, this is the apple.com help zone or whatever for Apple Watch. And we posted 40 articles today

about things you can do with your Apple Watch. And they've done a little bit of that, but I feel like that would be a huge opportunity for them. And that's, I mean, like they've hired a bunch of people that I used to work with, right? And I'm a little surprised that there isn't that there isn't more of that.

And and it may be that some of my former colleagues are doing some of that content. But, you know, that was always our fear at Macworld was that the how to stuff was really great. And if Apple wanted to do it itself, the jig would be up because, you know, they would dominate because everybody would go to go to the source. because they would dominate because everybody would go to the source. Well, and to that point, though, I think Apple has over the years, apple.com has become more and more of a mullet site, you know, where you got the party in the front

or the party in the back business in the front, where it's like, for example, when I put out a call on Twitter and say, hey, does anybody know of a page that actually has a comprehensive list of every kind of thing that you can do with an example in Siri. And the best I found is a blog post from a blog I'd never heard of is the most comprehensive

thing I've found. Now, the thing is, what surprised me was, you know, of course, what people suggested was we'll go to the page about Siri on Apple.com, which you can do, which is beautiful. And the images move around and everything. But it's a marketing page. Not that that's bad, but, you know, it gives you a few examples Not that that's bad, but it gives you a few examples. And as you scroll down, it gives you a few more examples. The trouble is the part where it becomes a mullet site is if you fall off the map when you go into the support area or you go

into the fora, because it's not the friendliest experience in the world. It's sometimes very difficult to find exactly what it is you're looking for for the version of your OS. And that's where it really does start to feel a little bit like a Dell site or something. And I don't know what the answer to that is. As we all know, Apple's not the only company in the world that has trouble with findability. But I think for now, those sites are going to be very safe. The super list of, you know, this will blow your mind when you see these 516 things you didn't know you could do. Here's one.

Try this. I mean, I'm already seeing people on Twitter saying they didn't know about the contraction. Try this one. And I had to mention this three different times on Back to Work before Dan knew what I was talking about. Hold down Siri and say Open Calendar. Hold down Siri and say Open Deliveries. And you will discover, especially if you've got a 6S or a 6S Plus, that it's actually faster than navigating to the icon. It will open the app for you in like less than a second.

And way faster than swiping down and typing the name of the app in search. Which has been my go-to. I treat it like Quicksilver all along. So anyway, not to belabor that, but still a lot of opportunities out there. But, you know, the thing, and I've heard you talk about this. A lot of my friends have talked about this. I've tried to really dial down my blind anger and stabbing because, you know, first of all, it's not very healthy to do that as an adult. But also you have to always remember everybody's got a story about finding out how many people are actually working on something at Apple.

Yeah. I mean, it really is mind-blowing. I remember first hearing this about the team down in Menlo. Oh, what was that nice guy? Andy was the head of the office team down in Menlo on Microsoft stuff. And you hear like there's five people at that time working on Office for the Mac. And you're like, you've got to be kidding me. And then you hear, have you heard the story about one guy that does like Wi-Fi connectivity test and terminal. And there's like one guy doing five apps. Yeah, I've heard that story. Yeah, Dan Morin was writing about some app

that's a stock app that is not super well known, but it's an app that is a very useful utility in OS X. And he got the word that that was a guy who did it. It's not a building. It's not a wing. It's just, it's Bob, basically. Bob from the terminal. They asked him to do something else.

And so he just sat there for a while because he was pulled off to work on something else. And it's like, yeah. Then again, there's apparently 40 people working on Twitter for Mac and Twitter mobile apps. And nothing is happening there. So maybe it doesn't matter. I don't know. Let's get through a couple more follow-up items before we move into topics

because we got a lot of topics too. But I don't want to read the first sponsor before I finish follow-up or I will feel ashamed. So two more items. Listener Will wrote in and we were talking the other week about the iPad Pro, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, and how I felt like it's a progression in the metaphor. And that some of the resistance Mac users have to the idea that you could work productively on an iPad is because it's a different metaphor. And we heard a lot of the same resistance from people who use command line computers when the Mac first was introduced. And Lister Well made an interesting point, which is that Macs have a

command line now, but the iPad doesn't have a window and cursor system. And what I'll say is that's an interesting point, but you're overlooking the entire classic mac os era where there was no command line underneath the mac that was we're spoiled as modern mac users that just as a a side effect of the fact that there's unix underneath as a decision that was made by next back in the day as purely as a side effect and i believe i truly believe that they tried to minimize it as much as possible and that if they could have completely hidden it and you know poured concrete into the terminal and thrown it off into the water they would have um we got it when os 10 came out but the classic mac os had no command line there was literally no command line you could run apps that kind of like faked a command line but they weren't they weren, they were just apps in the end. Think about, uh, you've talked about this before.

Think about arrow keys. Were there arrow keys on the first Mac? No, no, because they didn't want you to use the keyboard. They wanted you to use the mouse. Yeah, absolutely. And the terminal would have been, that would have been a disaster because people would have been just like going back to the command line. But that was, and that And that was why it was held over my head as a Mac user by people who use PCs with that classic, I can type a couple of keys and delete everything on my hard drive. Yeah, good for you. But that classic Mac era up until that first whatever 16 years of the Mac's existence, there was no command line at all. There was no secret command line that you could get to. There's literally nothing. So it was a clean, it was a pretty

clean break. And that's how the iPad feels to me. So, yeah, I mean, and just to, to further to your point, I don't know, this will probably get into this more with the iPad Pro and what makes an iPad Pro, what is the Pro part of that? But, you know, you have to wonder what inflection point happens for a couple things to happen. Because there's several things that would need to happen for us to see the kind of leap that people are talking about. Which, sure, we could imagine a day where there's an iPad OS where it has something like windowing.

But in the meantime, I mean, you know, even what they've got right now, it's a little rough. Like what you can do with the slide over stuff. And you're going to have to see an app market where people are willing to put some resources into making the sort of apps. I mean, you know, it's a lot of Hakuna Matata, you know, music goes round kind of stuff in order for people to put more attention into them. iPads are going to start selling more iPads. Don't you think? I mean, it feels like it's more complex than just launching a giant new OS and hoping it does everything in the world.

That's a lot of resources. It is. Although I think something I wrote about in my iPad Pro review was that it depends on how you look at it. I think this is the challenge for Apple is do you look at this as a tiny fraction of what the iphone does so we should focus on the iphone or do you look at it as a business that sells almost twice as many ipads as max a year and the same amount of revenue as the mac and therefore probably deserves that level of attention and even though it's the same os as the iphone

you know the ipad business is the same size as the iPhone, you know, the iPad business is the same size as the Mac business. And do you think the iPad features in iOS really get the same level of attention as Mac OS? And I love OS X and I use it every day, but I get the distinct impression that the Mac gets a lot of attention because it's got a dedicated team and that the iPad doesn't get so much attention because it's really all just part of iOS and the iPhone is always going to take precedence there. And iOS 9 is the sign that they seem to have walled off some resources for iPad features, which they should, because even if we say, oh, well, it's not the next smartphone because it was never going to be that. And, oh, its sales are sluggish, which, yeah, there's no real iPad sales growth right now. Still, it's a pretty big business. And one of the reasons, one of the ways you get it to grow,

perhaps, is to focus more on it. I don't know. You pointed out to me, and it's in the show notes, that just because you can't access your iPad's command line doesn't mean you can't do lots of interesting things with attaching to Mac interfaces and command line interfaces. Yeah, this is a little bit random, but I just wanted to mention two quick things that can really, if you are a power user on an iPad Pro, two things

to look at. One is, one of our favorite companies, Panic, makes a really neat iOS app called Prompt that's a fantastic implementation of a terminal shell on your iPad or iPhone. I don't have much need to use it, but when I do, I'm typically, just as with all Panic products, I'm really astonished with how well it works. Have you used Prompt before? Yeah, Prompt and also Coda, which has the command line stuff built in. So you connect to a remote, which has the command line stuff built in.

So you connect to a remote system that has a command line. Usually it's a Unix system, and you're in. You're logged in, and you can do all that stuff. That could be something as simple as needing to change I mean, I don't know. I haven't done web development in years, but needing to change file permissions or something like that, go create a new directory,

anything like, you know. There are certain kinds of things. Jeff Veen always used to say, if he ever had to do anything, you know, involving like a ton of files, he always felt like he was faster at doing that with the terminal. And that's the kind of mind you get. It's not so different from deciding whether to use, like, how do you decide? Should you use a keyboard or a mouse? Well, you use both because they're for different things. So Prompt is a great one to look at. But I wanted to also kind of cut the knot by mentioning an app I like a lot called Screens, which I'm sure you've got to be familiar with, right? Oh, yeah.

So Screens is a – check my terminology here, but it's a VNC app and client that lets you – you know, you can do this by just turning on – oh, what's it called these days? Is it still back to my Mac? Yeah, it is still back to my Mac, or just screen sharing in general. Right. But what I like about this, screens have some nice things, especially if you're sharing multiple Macs. There's all kinds of things you can configure to have it remember. And I tooted

at the folks who make screens about a request, and apparently, just for what it's worth, well, let me explain what this does. If you've never used this before, if you have screen sharing enabled on the Mac that you want to get to, and you're on your iPad in particular, you can also do this on your phone. It's a little rough on a phone. You have the ability to go in and basically just use your Mac on your device. You can do this from a Mac, or in this case, you can do it from an iPad Pro. It's surprisingly not that bad to use. If you've got to go in and do

something where you need the interface and you're not real comfortable with the terminal, the reason I mention it here is I believe it is rumored that Screens 4 will add a fantastic feature, which is the ability to automatically log you in. You won't have to enter your good password over

the VNC. It'll be able to remember that for you. It's an app I like a lot. It's one of those apps where it's almost like PDF pen where like when I have to use it, I'm usually really frustrated. And when I use it, I really want that tool and it really, really works. I've got one more piece of follow-up,

but before I do that, let me tell you about one of our fine sponsors in this episode of Upgrade. This is the job that, it's a heavy lifting that Mike usually does, but I'm going to do it. And I can do that because I've actually used this product and I like it. This episode of Upgrade brought to you by lynda.com, the online learning platform, over 3000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business technology and creative skills. For a free 10-day trial, visit lynda.com. That's L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash upgrade.

Now, lynda.com, basically, if you can think about it, there's probably a course on lynda.com that will teach it to you. And they get experts. They get experts in the field. They get experts who actually have been involved in building the tools. This is not something, speaking of things that Apple doesn't do, this is not something that Apple does, but some people like experts on the Adobe software and I think Microsoft software are under embargo and build all these courses. And then the new version of Creative Suite comes out and there are lynda.com courses almost right away about them, which is incredibly impressive. them, which is incredibly impressive. I took a bunch of courses in using Logic to edit podcasts because it's a music tool. And although I'm sort of self-taught with Logic, there are so many buttons that I am afraid to press for fear that I will do. I have gotten

in some very, very bad situations with Logic where I'm like, why when I change this track, does this track get louder? That doesn't make any sense to me. They're totally separate. Apparently, I pressed a letter on my keyboard at some point. Logic is really great about that too. Now you're, now you're ducking. It doesn't have modifier track or keys for everything. Sometimes it's just like, Oh, you press D. Uh, so the logic courses were really great because those are people who actually know how to use it. And I was able to dive in and Linda, uh, lynda.com courses, the way they work, they're really like chapterized and stuff. So you can sit back and watch a whole course on a subject or you can just jump to the solution to your problem. And I've used them in both contexts.

And I really like that, that you can sit back and you're taking a course from an expert, or you can use it more like you would search the web for an answer to your problem. Instead, you can search Linda's library and go to the lynda.com course on that subject and click and boom, you're at the 20 minutes in or 15 minutes in where it's got the actual answer and it's on screen and the experts showing you how it's done. And I've had those moments numerous times on lynda.com where I'm like, oh, it's so simple. A child could do it. But I was completely incapable of doing it before I was able to see it in front of me.

So this is all possible with lynda.com membership. You get the top experts. The videos are very high quality. They have a whole studio. It's not the shaky cam videos that you might find on YouTube. They've got course transcripts so you can follow along. You can save playlists so you can save them for later if you don't have time now to watch video. And you can customize that and even share them with friends or coworkers.

If you're on a team that's trying to learn something, you can kind of curate a playlist. And you can even watch and download courses to Android and iOS devices and learn wherever you are. So your lynda.com membership gives you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics for one flat rate. Go to lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com slash upgrade and sign up for your free 10 day trial. That's L-Y-N-D-A.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to lynda.com for teaching me not to press the D key in logic and supporting upgrade. Great service. It really is. This is some amazing content there. I like to go to the video that is most interesting to me. Start with the one that even if it's over your head a little bit is most interesting to you.

And if you don't know what's going on, work backwards. I mean, it's great because you can go through them in order. But I also, I love the idea, like you said, of how they break it down into pieces, where it doesn't feel like a death march. It doesn't feel like you're going to have to like sit here and eat your vegetables. You can go and try to learn just the thing you want. And then if you are confused about something, because of the way they are so carefully broken up,

you will very likely be able to go, oh, what does ducking even mean? I'll go back to this section and learn what ducking is. I had a, yeah, I had that moment where I was go, oh, what does ducking even mean? Yeah. We'll go back to this section and learn what ducking is. I had a, yeah, I had that moment where I was like, yes, adding compression to a side chain. That sounds really exciting. Let's do that. I was kind of envisioning like a, like a motorcycle with a sidecar or something. And then I started listening to that and I was like, oh no, let's back up.

Right. Cause it's like, I was in too deep. Back it up a little bit. But yeah, great service. Hey, my last piece of follow-out is John Syracuse and not approved, but it's to Reconcilable Differences, your podcast with John, which you mentioned earlier, episode 14. You guys talked about fashion stuff, and that got mentioned on ATP last week as well. I just wanted to say it made me laugh, this idea of the John Syracuse paper doll. Yeah. Because a friend of mine, my friend Andrea in college, used to refer to me as a paper doll.

Because your outfits are so diverse? No, because any outfit beyond my default would appear to be temporary and uncomfortable. Like an appearance in court? So basically, Andrea was a friend of mine the first couple of years in college and then she transferred. My family just visited her on our summer vacation.

We drove past where she lives and we dropped in and saw her and her family. But for a couple of years, we're in the dorms together. So we saw each other all the time. And you're living with these people. So they don't just see you when you're out in public, because either there is no privacy, you could view it that way, or you could view it as that the dorm floor is an extended family. But regardless, she discovered, being a very savvy person, that I was at home wearing shorts and a t-shirt and probably no shoes on the dorm floor anyway. And so then she would see me like with a college shirt and a sweater um and jeans or khakis walking about right and and or like at a at a college function or something like oh the the dean's having a

reception for the college and you're invited and you gotta come and like all right fine and and she said yeah it's just like they just took that shirt that sweater and they just pressed it over you temporarily like yeah totally legit but. But the truth was that lurking underneath it at all times was the default, which was the shorts and the t-shirt, which is totally true. Totally, completely accurate. So embarrassing. I, whenever I have to go anywhere, like I do a monthly comedy thing with Scott Simpson and I'll put on a pair of pants that mostly don't have holes and I'll put on a shirt with a collar and my daughter will say, daddy, daddy, why are you so fancy? I'll be like, fancy? I'm wearing blue jeans and a shirt.

It's because I really do kind of look like a hobo most days. That's the paper doll. Well, it was nice. What was his name? David Galetli, I think his name was, was very kind to actually make a Photoshop file where you can go and dress up John Syracuse however you want. It's every boy and girl's dream.

He jumped on it fast, too, because our podcast sometimes co-conspirator, Mr. Philip Moselak, was definitely working. He posted some sketches of his own John Syracuse paper doll drawings in the Incomparable Slack chat that were pretty

funny, too. So I feel for John. He's like, stop drawing me! Stop picturing me in underpants uh but anyway so paper doll i i feel you is what i'm saying i totally get it i totally get it yeah are you a fellow are you a fellow non-combatant uh yeah yeah no i and what i realized is that i had to embrace it, that I, I, I fought it for a long time and felt guilty about it. And, and I remember like in high school, in high school, you know, I wore, it was the eighties. I wore the, I wore the, the long sleeve button up shirt with a sweater. sleeve button-up shirt with a sweater that was sort of my thing and then but but even then i would be like i'd unbutton the the um the sleeves and roll them up because i couldn't bear it did you roll them up over the sweater uh no no i would take off the sweater and roll up the sleeves

or i'd push up the sweater sleeves i cannot abide the rolled up sweater sleeve no no no i find it very troubling you'll ruin your sweater that way too absolutely but um i i just i was i rebelled against it and then you go to work and you're like well i gotta wear the work clothes and and and fortunately being in both journalism and technology the dress code for those things on the west coast not high not for either of those right so i got i got i got away with like jeans from the beginning i wore jeans to work uh but i had you know i wore i had button-up shirts i had polo shirts and you know 10 years in i was wearing a t-shirt and jeans and and i realized this is

essentially what i wore to kindergarten and this is my this is my default and the jeans are only because people would make fun of me if i wore uh like a pair of like sweatshorts to work which is what i would have preferred to do yeah when when you're playing at that level and now now you work in your own garage so sky's the limit that's right on uh this well now that we're in in uh in season California, I usually will wear pants out here. But in season A, it's shorts. Absolutely. During season A.

So, yeah, paper doll. It's a true thing. But you have to admit it. Now, John is very special about this because John essentially just has, like Steve Jobs with the turtlenecks, John's just got the rugby shirt. He's the king of rugby. Yeah. No question. Yeah.

But for me, just that t-shirt. I feel kind of bad. He was a very good sport about it. I was not trying to take the mickey out of him. And I was just kind of playfully jostling. But I should have realized, knowing how viral the John Syracuse product is, I should have known that this would happen. But I apologize because I did not mean to make him an object of scorn, but people love him. What are you going to do?

It's not scorn. It's love, right? Oh, it's affection. People want to see him look like an angry professor. Who wouldn't want to see that? It's true. Hey, we should talk about the Apple TV. Yeah. We had Joe Steele on a couple weeks ago and he was very grumpy and we got a lot of feedback saying, wow, that guy's grumpy. Oh, God, that's right. This is Upgrade. Everybody's going to get all mad.

I forgot. Oh, that's right right everyone gets mad when you're honest uh yeah i know it's a it's a it's a hard thing it's tricky so let's skip let's skip the discussion of setup i think we beat that one to death it's not that good it's not it's not that good some people some people had not as bad a condition as i did where I was told, go to a computer. I had that again. I had that again. I let my iTunes Match subscription lapse because I'm an Apple Music subscriber right now. And I love iTunes Match, but there's no point in having it and Apple Music, as far as I can tell,

as long because Apple Music includes the ability to scan and upload things, I believe. If not, I'll be turning it back on. Jason, I hate to admit, I've tried to learn it, and I'm still so confused about what does what. All I know is I get a pop-up now that I've reached my limit on iTunes Match. Every time I open iTunes, it tells me. They said by the end of the year, they're supposed to fix the limit, but they haven't yet. But my point is not about that particular rabbit hole to go down it. I haven't yet.

But my point is not about that particular rabbit hole to go down it. I specifically decided to let it lapse, figuring this would uncover whether I need it or not. And then, like, I mean, I've got all my music. I can just re-up if I need to. But the point was that I ran into the same thing I ran into with my Apple TV setup, where I got an email from Apple that said, your iTunes match subscription is about to lapse. said, your iTunes Match subscription is about to lapse. If you would like to renew it, go to your computer and launch iTunes and renew iTunes Match.

Didn't it? I mean, if I remember right, it sounded like it was implying your credit card was weird or something. Wasn't it giving you some kind of flag about... So on Apple TV, it asked me for my security code on my credit card. And I can't decide whether that was because something in the back end information about the credit card changed or they hadn't verified it in a certain amount of time or what.

Or because I have more security turned on in my account. I don't know the reason. But it said, you know, you need to go to your computer, to iTunes, click on your account, then click on edit account information, and then enter in your security code, which seemed kind of a bit far. But I had the same idea when I saw the iTunes match thing, which just kind of blew me away. See, here we are not talking about setup by talking about setup. But I feel like Apple, as a maker of the iPhone, should probably never send an email that says go to your computer. Well, it actually raises a question

I can't believe I hadn't thought of before. What do you do if you don't have a computer? Yeah, well, find a friend. Well, no, I mean, honestly, I mean, I'm asking honestly, like to me, Apple TV is up there as one of the, potentially one of the gateway devices, right?

The kind of thing like an iPhone or an iPod is the kind of thing where you all give this a throw. I think they figure iTunes match, you've probably got a computer because you've ripped your files and all that. And Apple TV, they figure you've probably got a computer somewhere. And if you don't, you probably don't even have an Apple ID, right?

So if you get into this weird circumstance, then you've probably got a computer. I can see it. It's just to be told you're on this device. No, no, no. Go to a computer, which used to be like, all right, well, yeah, that's where I go. Because where else would I go?

And the answer now is, well, I could go to my phone or my iPad. Anyway, the setup, it was mixed bag. We can leave that aside. But now that it's up and running, I've been using it a lot. lot have you been using it a lot yeah absolutely um yeah i'd love to talk about that i mean it's it's always fun to talk about this stuff as soon as it comes out but the way you really learn whether you like it or not is using it for a while so yeah i would i would love to talk about that yeah i have the um so for me uh i've been fairly positive about it i still get frustrated by the trackpad sometimes um i i where where it goes it also um when i first started it like uh has to detect that

the remote is there so i'm like clicking and and and swiping furiously and nothing's happening and then it goes connected and then it goes and it swipes everywhere i'm like no stop no but um but things that i liked about it, like I've got Plex running on it, which is a lot of fun because I used to have files that needed to be, that were not in a supported format for the Apple TV. And I realized what's happening with Plex is that the Plex server is basically transcoding it to something that the Apple TV will play, but I don't have to do it. And I think that's kind of nice. Yeah, absolutely. Plex is the killer app for me. And it is, well, it's funny,

as the Apple TV previous editions got a little long in the tooth, I found myself, my affections moving more to the Amazon Fire TV, which is tough competition for Apple, to be honest, because it is blazingly fast. And Plex, if you're running, if you have a Plex server running on a pretty fast Mac and you're using Amazon Fire TV to go from zero to something is so much faster on Amazon Fire TV. I have to say, and I'd love to mention this just a little bit, even today, it's so much faster to go from everything is off to everything is on to stuff is running. You know, the basic John Syracuse test, how long does it take to go from nothing being on to me watching the show I want to watch?

So that's, I got really spoiled with the Fire TV. I was able to look past some of the interface stuff. But you know, now, however many weeks in, I mean, there's a lot I really do like about it. But that, what I like about it has come from a somewhat forceful retraining, sort of similar to how I'm trying to use my iPad Pro, is kind of forcing myself to say, look, hey, how does this thing want to be used? Instead of like, what do I expect it to do?

That seems like a pretty smart approach when you get, you know, in this case, a fairly different interface with some cues. I'm talking here about Siri. They really want you to use Siri on this thing. And so that's really what I've been trying to spend my time on. Yeah, and I can go any direction you want. There's a lot I like about the Siri part. A lot that's frustrating. The remote

continues to drive me a little crazy for the same boring reason as ever, which is it is difficult to tell which end is which. I've gotten to where I do sort of automatically look. Is the long button on the right? Okay, yes. Then I have it in the right direction because that means the volume is on the right i do the shiny i do the shiny test when i'm picking it up it's laying on the table i do the is it you know is it the shiny one touch the shiny part the shiny part won't won't mess you

up by being the touch the the trackpad so touch pick it up by the shiny part that's oh that's good that's my test but i'm forever i mean, I'm forever like scrubbing and luckily scrubbing doesn't go until you hit the button, but I still find myself scrubbing all over the screen. Just, just like putting the thing down or picking it up or moving it, or honestly, just even like having it on the couch, you know, there's like these glancing blows, but there is a lot. I like, it's a very 1.0 thing. I think you put this really well. You said you can't really think, you really need to think of this as a 1.0 because it's such a rethinking. It looks a lot the same, but so much is different

under the hood and so much is different with what Siri will mean to how we use this. So I'm trying to be sanguine about that and take that as my approach of like learning how to adapt to how this thing wants to be used. And even then it's a little tricky sometimes, but I'm generally, I'm generally happy. I think. Can you, if you, if you're watching a video and you accidentally swipe on the trackpad, is there a, a, a button to press that like undoes it and just makes it go away and it continues to play? Can you, can you menu out of that? I think menu... I thought I had this. I haven't done it because I'm too terrified. I know, I know, because you're going to

lose your place or whatever. And then, of course, there is also, unlike the third generation, this one has a strange sense of place. It used to be that whenever you menued out of an app and then went back to that app, you start at the top and now you end up on the detail page of wherever you're... Say you were on a detail page for a show inside of Plex. That's where

you go back to. So now you have to menu inside the app. It's a different paradigm that takes some getting used to. But I, so I, at first I got really confused because that's my style. I got really confused because I kept scrubbing accidentally or causing something to happen just by glancing blows on the touch pad that I had heard from somebody, well, actually don't sweat that because as long as you don't press the button after you scrub, it won't start playing at that point. And then I feel like I heard somebody say, if you hit menu at that point, it'll go away. But like I've hit menu, I feel like I've hit menu when I've done that and gone out of the show. I feel like maybe like flipping up and down.

Basically, I'm pissing on a spark plug, to quote War Games. I would just try anything just on the pad to see if it makes the interface go away. But I don't actually know the official way to get out of that. Yeah, I've had a few cases where I press the buttons and I'm sort of like nothing is happening and then everything is happening, which suggests that something is lagging there, which this is pretty impressive hardware it probably shouldn't do that but you could probably chalk some of that up to the fact that it is buggy and new and presumably they're you know they're working on that one would hope but uh i i definitely have had those have had those instances where it it feels a little laggy siri the siri search has been kind of nice. Um, I have the fire TV stick and I don't have the,

the, so I don't have the microphone remote on, on fire TV. Okay. Um, so this was my first experience with the kind of TV. Um, well,

I mean, we've got an Xbox, but the Xbox, um, voice control stuff is, I don't even want to try it because it's such a, it's really annoying because it's sort of like, ah, Microsoft wants you to

interact with it in a very particular way. And I just want to play a game or something. And I just have never even bothered to spend time with it because it just seems really annoying to me. But with the Siri thing, I've been sitting on the couch and thinking I could go to the movies and I could type in something with search, but I don't need to do that. Let's hold this down and do it. And I have enjoyed that. I have enjoyed being able to say we were looking for a movie just the other day. And, you know, I pressed the button and said, you know, show me the movie The Lion in Winter.

And it jumped right there, which was i was pretty happy with i thought that was a pretty good feature it's pretty good it gets a little bit tripped up on what's the word homonyms um which is understandable understandable but i've had good luck with i mostly use it for like um my daughter really likes the uh the adele song skyfall from the movie and i let her watch a few minutes at the beginning of skyfall because it's not horribly violent but i really like the credit sequence. I just say, you know, hit the button and say, find Skyfall. And it's pretty good at that. It pulls it right up. Movies, pretty good. Because with a movie, if you think about the hierarchy, here's the hierarchy

mostly is you say, you know, find whatever the exorcist or whatever. And so a page you know, find whatever, the exorcist or whatever. And so a page comes up, a detail page comes up for the movie. And then the options, I think, are things you've bought or can buy on iTunes, Hulu, and Netflix. And is HBO on there as well, Showtime? I'm not sure. I think maybe HBO is on there. I don't see them on there much.

But for us, it's usually Hulu and Netflix. Yeah. And so for a movie, it's actually pretty great. A movie is very simple, and they do that very well. I think that part I don't really have much qualm with. I think they've done great. TV shows are complicated in a lot of ways on the TV, I think. Because one of the things is, and this is not Apple's fault,

but so you say, for example, you say, find Doctor Who. And it's going to guess what you mean. And if it you say, find Doctor Who, and it's going to guess what you mean. And if it's something, Doctor Who is maybe not a great example. But if it's confused about what you're looking for, you'll get the little pop up at the bottom, where it'll say, well, which one of these is it that you want? It could be a movie, it could be TV, whatever. Not a problem, really. But you hit the right Doctor Who, you go to it. And it gets real complicated, because there's different seasons available in different places yeah and they need to drill down into that and then candidly i've bought a lot of tv on on apple uh itunes store i find the interface for going through seasons of a tv show actually worse than

it was before the like horizontal scrolling thing yeah is pretty rough where we had to get to a walking dead from this season and. And just in fairness, you can say, for example, find Doctor Who season nine. And it pretty reliably will pull up season nine. But the interface is not, it's a weird side scrolling,

isn't it? Like a right to left where you go through season after season after season? I think so. That's a little rough, but I think there's room that they could improve that.

But you know that we can't get past, we should not overlook the miraculous part that the series stuff actually does work saying you know i can't say this one enough you know go forward 30 seconds what did she just say that stuff really does work and i we actually use it a lot the um for scrubbing the yeah the the thing that uh i i tripped it up with uh like you said it's it's homony. It's things that are words that sound like other words, so to speak, where I was asking for you're the worst. And I think I offended Siri. I think I don't know how to do that. I think Siri thought that I was decrying Siri and all she stands for.

But I was just wanting to watch the TV show You're the Worst. So I rephrased it as something like show me the tv show you're the worst and then she got it but it took that extra let's add some verbiage to give you more information about what i'm actually searching for and you know which you don't do when you're typing it because you know what you're searching for but you have to like give it a little spin in order sometimes for it to understand what you're saying. And then the frustrating thing is that you can't use it in enough places yet. I mean, that actually is funny, which is it's such a great feature.

I use it so much on the phone for Apple Music. And there's no music connection in Apple TV. It's madness because I actually tried to do that the other night. I wanted to play a playlist. And on my phone, I can do it with, you know, I can just call out, shuffle this playlist and boom, it's done. And it's just not there yet. this. I love the catalog and I love the service, but all the different ways of using it are, each one is more perplexing than the last to me. So I almost always, I'm like an old man. I always end up just going and searching for something and then, you know, finding, cause then once I'm there, I have no idea how do I locate what album this is on? Is the album available in America? Why is

Skyfall not available on this collection? That's really weird. You know, there's all these kinds of things that I do end up doing that searching a a lot, and I think I will use that tons once it's available on Apple TV. But again, back to our earlier point, doesn't this potentially go to show more of what we talked about before? The silos and the resource constraints? I'm just guessing there was a meeting

at some point where they said, you know what, it's not going to be ready. The Siri integration is not going to be there for Apple Music on day one. And it's, this is, I mean, there for Apple Music on day one. There's been so much speculation, and I don't think anybody knows the truth who's talking, but there's been a lot of speculation that this perhaps is a side effect of the strange route that this product took to being available, where rumor has it that a lot of this stuff was done a long time ago, relatively speaking, and has sat on the shelf because they wanted to make deals and so there are a lot there's a lot of speculation about you know was the was the software you're saying like basically that team got moved somewhere else right i mean that's the speculation and i i've heard nothing direct to confirm or deny that but i've heard rumors that that one of the problems with this product as it currently exists is that

it didn't have your usual kind of through line where the whole team was working on it and they finished it and they shipped it, but that it sort of like got stalled. I'm not sure whether it got stalled and what they considered finished or not. And it may very well be that it got a possibility is it explains things like why Apple Music integration isn't there and why iCloud Photo Library isn't there. That's so strange. Because those are both initiatives from 2015. Yeah. And I had somebody say to me, oh, well, you know, iCloud Photo Library is new. It's like, well, it was announced publicly in, like, March.

It's like, well, it was announced publicly in like March. And it's been, and the first version of it shipped with the OS update in April, I think it was, maybe May. It was a while ago. It's been public for a long time. So even the people working on the Apple TV, theoretically, would have heard about it a long time ago. And yet there's nothing in there. There's PhotoStream and shared stuff, but that's not iCloud Photo Library. But that's a major new like cloud initiative from Apple, and the product doesn't support it out of the box.

There may be reasons, but it's weird. And Apple Music the same way. It's like this is Apple's huge push into music, the subscription service. They've spent so much effort pushing it. And although there is an Apple Music app on this device, which is great because the old device didn't have it, which was also weird. So it's great that the app's there, but it lacks the Siri integration that TV and movies have and that the phones have, which is just – it's one of those things of like, I don't know why this would be that they wouldn't have built this into this product.

It would seem to be on the list of features that would just have to be there on day one. And there's got to be a story there that we'll never hear. But it's just a little baffling. And again, you can look at that two ways. You can say, look, it's a 1.0 product. It'll get better. They'll work on it. And then you can also look at it as,

right now it means that product is not as good as it should be because right now those features aren't there. It's a weird product. Right now it means that product is not as good as it should be because right now those features aren't there. Yep. It's a weird product. It's weird because there's so much interesting and good about it and then there's so much that's kind of baffling. And I haven't – there hasn't been an Apple product in a while that's had this mix of both of those things. Well, you know, gosh, what's the phrase from the Christopher Nolan movie, you know, the prestige? Like there's the promise and the prestige and, you know, there's the phrase from the Christopher Nolan movie, the prestige? There's the promise and the prestige and there's all the parts.

The funny part is with Apple, they are so good at figuring out this idea for something that if and when implemented well will make a demonstrable improvement in how you work or how much you enjoy using those devices. It seems like – and I don't mean to beat up, but it does seem like at a certain point it's funny how scattered the implementation can be. Because when they're on stage talking about it, I mean, part of the reason that people like us are such sad sacks sometimes is because we bought it. We bought the promise. We bought the idea of what this effect is going to be. Now we want to see it.

And so when you get something like the photo stuff, photos are very personal to people. Music, man, Jim Dalrymple takes his music extremely seriously. More than maybe might be sane. But like that really means a lot. I mean our friend Steven has been having some problems this weekend with losing some photos. Like, you know, those things mean a lot. And so it seems like a natural fit, as you say, to like when you flip this thing on, you get a first-run experience. You put in all of your data.

How great would it be to have your – put in your Apple ID information and like you instantly see pictures of your kids. You instantly see the movies that you bought, all those kinds of things. So when we kind of piss and moan about the first-run experience on this. It's partly that I can very easily imagine how what feels like a relatively, I don't want to make it sound easy. I know single sign-on is not easy, but there's a part of me that thinks like this thing is going to be a real banger, especially when that stuff gets settled. And let's be honest, you know, there's still this part of me that thinks the Apple Music announcement still felt so weird to me on stage. And it really felt like, in my gut, I think they wanted to announce, guess what? Cable TV

is coming to your living room, but it's not going to come from a cable. And I think it didn't work out on time. I don't know. That's just my gut. That's just my gut, because that felt like such a weird presentation. Imagine this box replacing coaxial cable for your TV. Suddenly, you look at it really differently. When that piece gets on there, we might look at this thing very differently, and this interface might make a lot more sense. Do you know what I mean? I've said for a long time that you should never buy a product based on the promise of what it might add later in terms of features. And that comes from a history of buying things, and they say, no, no, no, it's going to do that later. And it turns out that that gets delayed.

And then it turns out that they're going to do a new version of the hardware that has it and that the old version might get it later. And then the old version doesn't get it. That happened so many times. I cannot tell you how many times. It's like you can never say, oh, well, I'm sure this will be upgradable later to this other thing that they say that they're doing. But you really need to judge it based on what the product is today. The only reason I don't do that to a great extent with the Apple TV is that this is very clearly Apple's TV platform probably for the next five years, some version of this. So I do think most of this stuff is coming. I think as people who talk about Apple and try to figure out what Apple's doing and where it's going because we like the products, because think it's important because we think this is one of the,

one of the ways that the industry changes and that our futures change. There are lots of reasons why we talk about and, and analyze and criticize what Apple does. This, this product is particularly interesting because of that, because I think, I think it is the worst case scenario in some ways about all the different tendrils of all the, all about Apple's ambition and about

Apple's limitations. And it's all mushed up together. So like Apple's ambition is to have this totally mind blowing TV service that doesn't require TV anymore, but they haven't been able to make the deals. And their ambition is to have this amazing music service, but they couldn't get that implementation on all their devices. So the Apple TV doesn't have it yet. And their ambition with the photo library, right, is to have it be that your photos are accessible everywhere and it just syncs to the cloud and it just works and

it's great, but they've had problems with that. And the way that they're structured, sometimes I wonder that you were talking about the silos. Sometimes I wonder about, obviously, parts of this business work incredibly well and are incredibly efficient. And some of them appear to be not able to run that fast. And we talked about it a lot in the context of hardware versus software. But I think it's also true of the online services stuff where, you know, sometimes you get so used to the way that Apple's supply chain works and their hardware design works where I think you could very easily argue that they're better than anyone at the world at it by far, like way out in front of everyone else. We know that they can be, but again, times of confusion, right? It's like you guys have talked about this in lots of different

places, how odd it is that there'll be the announcement that something's coming and then like an announcement about when you can order it in the future and then the announcement about when it'll actually arrive and that is mysterious it is mysterious because they do control at some point they controlled all of those dates but i feel i feel like what you're yeah i i think that is sometimes a symptom of the fact that apple is so ambitious on the hardware side and they're trying so many new things that sometimes they're out on the cutting edge and sometimes they get bitten by a problem. And they're like, oh, man, we got to do that. But still, in the end, the build quality of their hardware is really good. Like Greg Kanig did that post about how people don't understand that Apple

is probably the company that's best in the world at aluminum, like at aluminum. Oh, right. That was a great post. Yeah. Like machining aluminum and all that. And so there are all these areas where I would say that Apple is an A or A plus kind of company. The problem with that is that Apple is so ambitious that they're also doing, unlike most companies, they're also doing the software stuff and the services stuff and all this other, and making deals with content companies. And those parts of the business, not A to A plus level work a lot of the time. And I think that's a really interesting problem for them of like, how do you get the other parts of your business to be able to run at the pace of the of the hardware because the hardware is there and i feel sometimes like the hardware is dragging

the software along and the services are aren't even dragging anymore they're just sometimes they're just by the side of the road yeah i know you probably need to do a break here huh i do i do let's talk let's talk about something do. Let's talk about mail route. Hey, tell me about something you like. Let's talk about mail route. How about that? Woo! And I've got a little bit of a hashtag ask upgrade to happen in the middle of the mail route ad, which is listener Mike wrote in, listener Mike Hurley wrote in to say, can you please say mail bagging?

So just pay attention, Merlin. That's what I'm saying. I will. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by MailRoute. Email, very important to all of our daily lives. We get a lot of it. I certainly get a lot of it. And I've got a lot of important stuff in there, and there's also a bunch of junk in there.

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And if I had had MailRoute then, it wouldn't have been a problem. I could have kept running my own mail server because MailRoute sits in between. All the mail that the internet wants to send you comes to MailRoute. MailRoute servers, which are very smart, very smart pieces of software, can detect what the spam is and what the good mail is. And they let the good mail through. And that goes to your mail server. And the bad mail never gets to your mail server. Your mail server is unburdened by that. It stays out at mail route. It gets in, it's like in a holding bin for a while. You can get sent a message that says, here's what I got.

I love reading this, uh, that message because it, it shows you what the in, uh, uh, spam lines are spam subject lines, which are, um, let's see, the latest one a couple weeks ago was I got three or four messages that were, you might be having a heart attack. I guess they're afraid that they think people are going to be checking for mail from their doctors. And I don't even know. Unusual place to share that. I know. And yet that was the trend, but it changes because they're always changing to other crazy subject lines that they think are going to get through the spam filters. But you know what? They don't. MailRoute stops them before they get to you so that all their mail in the future will get through. But it very rarely happens that I see anything good in there. Usually it is just for entertainment purposes that I read that. It's easy to set up MailRoute. It's trusted. You don't have to worry. Large universities and corporations trust them.

ACM, the world's largest and oldest governing body for computer sciences, uses MailRoute for email protection. So very easy to use. If you're an email administrator or an IT professional, they've got all the tools that you need. There's an API for easy account management, and they support all the buzzwords, LDAP, Active Directory, TLS, mailbagging, outbound relay, everything you'd want from the people handling your mail. So to remove spam from your life for good, go to MailRoute.net slash upgrade. That's MailRoute.net slash upgrade. You'll get a free trial. And this is kind of a mind-blowing deal.

10% off for the lifetime of your account. Not for one month. That's a really long time, Jason. Not for a trial. For the lifetime of your account is potentially forever. That's all of the times. It could be like 2 billion years in a Doctor Who picture disc. That's a really good deal.

Thanks to MailRoute for supporting Upgrade and also for filtering all that spam out so that I can just be entertained by the subject lines. Do you have any more about Apple TV before we go on? You know, just a general observation. Not really. It can be short, but I was on a show with our friend Andy Anotko talking about Project Runway. And I was talking about one of the things I always notice on Project Runway

is that no matter how great the design idea... Let's start right at the beginning. No matter how great somebody is, or thinks they are at what they do, no matter how great their design is, no matter how good they are at cutting patterns, like what really matters is how that thing fits on the model when they go down the runway. And like, no matter how great all those ideas were along the way, and I'm always watching the person who's had a lot of experience with making a

garment look good on a specific person. And, you know, it's a little, it's kind of a cheaty way to watch Project Runway, but the people who are fast at making a design that fits well, they don't have to be the most creative in the world as long as their implementation is flawless. And that's the thing is that's what's weird about this. When you think about what Tim Cook brought to Apple in terms of operations, it's like, I just feel like there isn't as much sense of the garment looking great on the model on runway day. And that's the part that gives me the fear just a little bit. And I just want to clarify, I have no intention of ever using anything but Apple stuff. I love the Apple idea. I love the Apple thing. I like my Apple stuff. But you know,

you get the fear a little bit sometimes because it feels like, like there are the times where you feel like this isn't really up to sort of what I expected or what I would hope for. But then sometimes with things like iCloud or like some of the occasional disasters, it just makes you think like, you know, are they still making sure this is the best that it could possibly be and using their expertise to make something that is polished on runway day? And that's the times where you get that accumulation of like, and I have to say with the Apple TV, I still think it's very promising. I think it's extremely promising. I bet it's extremely promising. I bet there's tons they can do with software, tons they can do with the relationships that

are going to make this a better device. It's certainly got the firepower. Like, for example, it's ironic to me that the slowest thing on my Apple TV is waking from sleep still and starting a movie. It still is appallingly slow for apple stuff where it's not for stuff from netflix and hulu which seems so weird to me i used to think it was just me but the beauty part is with a device like that there is still so much hope for them to make it great so i don't know if you take the analogy but that's when when people like old men like us are like

i think it's because we feel like gosh we gosh, we've seen them execute so many things so well. We all look at the first iPhone and go like, how did they ever pull that off? And that's kind of what we're hoping for each time. If anything, it's an overabundance of optimism about what Apple's capable of that makes us kind of pick nits about the hem on the finished garment. Well, in tech nerd circles, it's very easy to say because we a lot of times know what goes into making this stuff. And I mean, I heard this. That was one of our reactions when Joe Steele was complaining about the Apple TV.

Somebody actually gave a piece of feedback, which was about how they feel bad for the people who worked really hard on the Apple TV at Apple, which is like, well, yeah, I totally we're not saying people are bad people, but, but the, the, you know, criticizing the product isn't saying that somebody is bad, but sometimes you have to criticize some, sometimes the product deserves criticism. And I think it's very easy for us to come up with excuses or reasons or, or just set the bar so high in terms of the level of difficulty that you can, you can say, look, you really shouldn't criticize it. They worked really hard.

Or you really shouldn't criticize it. Do you know how complicated it is? Yeah, when's the last time you made an Apple TV? Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, that is the best piece of fallacy is that— Is that all you do all day? Is that all you do all day is complain about what other people do? The only person who can review movies is Martin Scorsese. He's the only guy. Right, right, right. Nobody else is allowed to review movies except if you

make them. So my point is, you can make all those excuses. And there's truth inside them. It is true that oftentimes what Apple is trying to do is extra complicated, whether it's on the hardware or the hardware software integration or on the services. A lot of times Apple is incredibly ambitious with what it does. And it's important to not lose sight of that. But at the end of the day, you are absolutely right. In the end, it's about the product and the product experience. And it doesn't matter if it was hard for them to do it. It does not matter if they're doing things that nobody's ever tried before, because if the experience is bad, it's a bad product. It doesn't matter what the degree of difficulty is. It's not Olympic diving, right? It doesn't matter. Is the product good? Does it work? Does it do what you

promised? Does it meet expectations? No matter who set them, does it meet reasonable expectations? Perhaps it doesn't meet unreasonable expectations. That happens with Apple a lot. That's one way that Apple is treated unfairly. But, you know, saying, well, the reason the Apple TV isn't, you know, maybe it deserves to be criticized, but you got to understand it was a small team and they got pulled off of it a year ago. And because they wanted to make these deals that fell through and boy that less moon viz he's tough negotiator and so everything's getting slowed down and okay all that's true and it's interesting but in the end that's not an excuse the product still has to deliver what they're what they wanted to deliver and and and i i agree with you i think the apple tv actually has

a lot of potential and there's a lot of good in it but in the end you know you're right it's about how it fits on the runway and that's how a product should that's how products should be judged all products should be judged that way yeah speaking products you want to um i've been i am still using the ipad pro i i um i still haven't decided whether i'm going to buy one this is my apple review unit that i'm going to have to give back maybe next week i don't even i've got a look about when they want it back, which is going to make me sad. And I'm just wondering what you've thought.

We've been talking about this in the whole Apple podcast sphere and blogger sphere and all of those things. Blogger sphere, not a word, by the way. Not a word. Not a thing. Not a thing. What are you thinking about this giant iPad? Well, I've been listening in. I've been listening and I bought one when it came out.

And I got my pencil yesterday. I've been playing, or Friday, I should say, I've been playing with it. You got the Apple Pencil? The Apple Pencil, yeah. Okay. Because I got to caution people, don't take a real pencil and write on the Apple, on the iPad. Oh, no, you're going to want to go ahead and definitely not do that.

No, don't. It's like writing with a permanent marker on a whiteboard. Don't do it. But I'll tell you, man, every time I just think about like a little kid, like getting the wrong end of that thing, and just like, oh, I live, I still live in fear of screens getting torn up. But you know, to be honest, my reactions are very similar to a lot of other people's for a reason, I think. And my reactions are, first of all, the first words out of my mouth, anytime anybody talks about it, it's so big. It's so much bigger

than you think it really really is really really big and and even i think i mentioned this to you somewhere maybe maybe on slack is just that i uh i keep using it and keep wanting to make myself use it my original idea was to do like a serenity and like say like okay can i make myself do almost everything on this except what i absolutely can't do on this? And I have to tell you, I found it incredibly challenging. I was very excited to have this new thing. Um, but I suddenly felt a lot of friction about the bigness of this to where even four days into it, I'm not proud of this statement. I found myself still falling back to using my iPad air two more often because it felt so much easier to use in, in my hands. But with that said,

I mean, I do think, again, this is a product that could have a very bright future. I think the good parts of using this, I mean, I finally thought, oh gosh, I haven't watched a movie on this yet. I should do that. So I fired up Mad Max and I was frankly blown away with the speakers, with the way it looked but especially with my god the quality of sound so much separation so loud without being distorted this is the first IOS device I've had

that I could without using a Bluetooth speaker I could just listen to while doing the dishes which is really saying something so that experience is great comics I mean gosh I'm guessing you've looked at comics on it yeah that's one of the rare things where I'll turn the brightness all the way up So that experience is great. Comics, I mean, gosh, I'm guessing you've looked at comics on it. I have. Yeah, that's one of the rare things where I'll turn the brightness all the way up

and just it's the first time I feel like I prefer to read a physical comic just because I like seeing the whole page. This is the first time that I've really felt comfortable reading in full page view and not feeling like I'm missing anything at all. You know, it actually even makes reading a two page spread in landscape readable, which is crazy. It's totally doable. And it's difficult to share with somebody what this actually looks like.

Because if you put up a photo, you're not really seeing it in context, but stuff, all kinds of stuff. Like I have to say anything like involving maps. My daughter loves to, like when we're on a car trip, she likes to follow along on the map and flip around a 3D view and look at all the buildings and stuff like that and look at the Pacific Ocean for a long time. She's an odd kid. But that stuff's all really fun. I guess I'm still struggling to figure out where this belongs and who it's for.

But I want to just stipulate. I love it and I want to love it, but I can't quite figure out where it goes in my life. And I really wanted to go somewhere, but there's no use I've found for it yet where this will be my first thing that I pick a lot of the time. And that's an odd place to be, especially given how much, I mean, I spent some dough on this thing. I want to love it. I just haven't really quite found the place. And I feel like a lot of people's reactions mirror that. A lot of people say, I love this. I know this is going to be great for somebody else. I'm trying to figure out how it's great for. And I feel like a lot of people's reactions mirror that. A lot of people say, I love this. I know this is going to be great for somebody else.

I'm trying to figure out how it's great for me. I feel like I don't deserve this pencil. Like this is obviously like for real artists, like everybody wants to love this thing, but we're still struggling with some of the limitations of it. Yeah, I, I agree.

I think some of it is that we have to get out of our, um, it takes a bit to, we've seen this with a lot of these Apple products lately, especially the MacBook. We saw this. The iPhone 6 Plus, we saw this, which is there is, I think, a very human tendency to be disappointed when a product is not for you, especially if you're a fan of a company and its products and you like their products, that when they release a product that does not speak to you, that you get, you're a little disappointed, right? This is, oh, this is not for me. It's like a clip show of a TV show or something. It's like, well, I've already seen all the episodes. I know this by heart. I don't need to see this anymore. I don't need, you're doing a special explaining how Doctor Who

works. Well, I've seen all the episodes. I don't need to do that, right? But that happens with Apple stuff. It certainly happens where the MacBook comes out and people are like, I don't know. I don't want this. It's stupid. It's like, well, maybe it's not for you. Oh, absolutely. And the iPhone 6 Plus, it's huge.

It's stupid. Well, maybe it's not for you. And the iPad Pro is a little bit like that where because there's an iPad and an iPad Mini, I mean, it's one of three products in this product line. It doesn't need to be for everyone. Plus, the iPad itself is not necessarily for everyone. So it's for a very particular market. It doesn't need to be. We all talk about it.

It's been the discussion of the month because it's the Apple product of the month. So we're all talking about it. But in the end, it's not going to be this product that everybody's using it's a product that some small subset and we don't know how small or how big but it's still going to be a subset of people are going to use it because it's just ipad users and it's just the ones who want to use this big the big screen for me when i think about giving it back and then what i do after that because i have this unique case where Apple gives me one and I get to have it for three weeks

or a month and I have to give it back. So for me, I get to use it for a while and think, do I want to buy one of these? And I'm coming around to the idea that I may actually want to buy one of these. And the reason would be because

although it is not as comfortable to use in some circumstances as the iPad Air, because yeah, when I wake up in the morning and I'm drinking tea and checking Twitter and Slack, it's kind of large and unwieldy and it's harder and I can't thumb type and stuff like that that I could do on my iPad Air or my iPad Mini. But when I attach a keyboard to it and I'm standing in my kitchen writing a story, it's kind of magic. Having that big screen makes a difference. Doing that in editorial and having it, I can tell you, Jason, I know you are a famously, ridiculously fast typist, but I'm an okay typist. I mean, I'm an okay, like 50, 60 words a minute

typist, but everything changed for me when I learned, I don't even know what they're called. I think it, I don't know if it's even Emacs related, but like the ability to use the arrow keys and like option and command keyboard shortcuts. Yeah. But I mean, you know, it's, what's weird. I think a lot of people may still not know about these. So I'm trying, the only way, of course, what is the only way to do this? So like option left and right arrow takes you a word at a time.

Option shift arrow lets you select and so forth, up and down, left and right. And then you can do things like, you know, option down and up to get to the end of lines and so forth. I can't tell you what these commands are. All I can tell you is that I learned them. And when I learned them, everything changed. I wish we could find a link for them.

Because really, if you just spend even like a couple evenings learning this, everything will change for you. And I'm persuaded there are people who came up in the Mac community that may not know this. It's a little bit nerdy. And what's great is I open editorial. I have this little Logitech keyboard. And I'm flying. I am flying through everything. This is a perfect writing machine in so many ways, but, but when you're using it with, again, so the KarmaSuck side of it, there's no way to use this keyboard comfortably. I mean, when you're holding it in landscape, which is how I would hold it to look at almost everything that I use day to day,

landscape, which is how I would hold it to look at almost everything that I use day to day. It feels improbably large and my little tiny girly thumbs can, can rarely make it to J and K without causing tendinitis. Well, you can't, you can't hold it up and type comfortably on it. I'm a lazy man, Jason. I like to lay in bed and look at my iPad and it's pretty challenging. I'm with you. I, I, well, it's, it's, um, it's a little bit like, imagine holding your laptop up by the keyboard part and then trying to type, right? It's a really good way to put it, actually. You wouldn't, because it's basically the same size. It's slightly smaller, but you wouldn't do that.

It would be really bad, right? And then sideways is just ridiculously large. But if you put it on your lap, it's not so bad. But the thing is, a lot of times, most times, I'm not sitting there with my iPad in my lap looking down at the screen in my lap. I'm holding it with my hands. And then I want to key in something. And, yeah, maybe I should start using dictation more, although that is just going to annoy my wife when I'm sitting there and she's still waking up. And I'm like, ha-ha, that is a funny tweet that I am responding to now.

Beep. I am laughing out loud. Yeah, exactly. Smiling face emoji. Smiling face. Top hat emoji. So, yeah, that's when I'm in that moment of like, oh, this isn't so great. Maybe I can prop it up on my knees and I can, I can do that. And it's just, it's not as good. Whereas the iPad air

and certainly the iPad mini, I could, I could navigate that pretty easily. But, but my feeling is maybe that's worth the trade off for the fact that I, that big screen in a lot of contexts is really amazing. And I feel like, uh, for split view and split and, split view and slide over, it's a lot nicer to do that and maybe could replace my laptop for when I'm traveling. Yeah. So this is something I talked about on the show with DownRimple, but I bought this for a couple of really silly reasons. One is it was a little bit of an impulse buy where I realized it was midnight and I could buy one. And I thought, you know what? I'll buy this. What the heck? I'll be seeing now Mike Hurley, he actually returns things.

I don't know. I say I'm going to return it, but I rarely do, but I thought, you know, I'll try this, but you know, honestly, the impulse that, that, that lie underneath this was, I felt like in a way that I can't really describe, this might be a new kind of device. It might not be, it's a gamble, right? It's a gamble. But like, I think there's, I feel like I'm talking about this all the time, so forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but there are kinds of technology, hardware and software,

that are very focused on what we can do now that replicates what we've done in the past. And there's another kind of software and hardware that represents what we're not even sure we understand, stuff we may not exactly understand now, but we won't realize for two or three years in the future that that's what we wanted to do all along. And Apple has been improbably good at getting that right. Do you know what I mean? Like, they have been awful good at going like, you know what, you're not actually going to need that floppy drive. You know what, you're not actually going to need that Ethernet port.

So who knows what part of that is chicken and egg. But I just want to say for what it's worth, unlike the Apple TV, the Apple TV I got because I wanted a faster version of stuff that I do all the time. It's an appliance to me. If it's a sexy appliance, that's great, but it's still an appliance, but something, you know, a little tickle in my gut said that this iPad pro I, and I still believe this could be something special and different. And so I'm really going to try and stick with it. I, you'm a ding-a-ling for spending that dough on it, but I really do feel like this is going to be the beginning of something interesting, if not big. And I kind of want to be there. I'm usually the technology naysayer who's saying, like, oh, this thing doesn't run Bash.

But, like, in this case, I'm excited about it. I'm going to make myself stay excited about it until I figure it out because I do think there's something in this that could be special. I agree. Now, the pencil, I'm not going to buy one of those. For real? Yeah, I'm not going to buy one of those. It's pretty neat.

It's just not my thing. I was so happy to be free of the day of taking handwritten notes, and I can't draw. My handwriting is awful. Although I did, I did use OneNote and it was able to OCR my words and make them searchable. And I suppose that in certain, if I was, if I was frequently in a, you know, in a conference room, taking notes on a pad of paper, I would do that. But when, when I was in those meetings back in my days at IDG, I would just have my iPad or my laptop or my phone and notes app open. And I would just type them on that. And I would much rather do that than write with a pen. So it's just not, it's not for me. So that part of it is not for me.

Well, part of it also is, I mean, it is also that I want my kid to have access to these things. If, you know, whenever it's reasonable and and affordable i'd like her to have the chance to use this stuff too where uh i mean everybody was really when they did their field trip to the apple store everybody was really impressed with how much you know she was able to do with the apple uh equipment really easily which makes me feel good because she she has pretty much open exposure if it's games and stuff we dial it back but like if she ever wants to open up paper the app paper and like draw that's fine. So part of this is I also want her like, you know, it isn't just like a celebrity and prestige, you know, FOMO thing of like, oh, I was there when this began. It's more like these, if these are the tools that end up being similar to the tools she'll use in

the future, I'm okay making that investment because what she does with that pencil will be way more interesting, maybe 20 years from now than what I'm doing right now but it is it is it is weird but i'm do you do you think i'm being crazy do you think we're being crazy to to see do you think we're reading too much into this possibly i i honestly don't know i think i really believed it the day i got it i was like first of all wow this thing's really big but then the other part of me i kept going like i wonder if i'm just being a delusional fanboy i think it's the tech well this is often the challenge here is trying to think about i had people ask me things like for the apple watch people are like are you gonna get an apple watch and i'm like guy guys i write about apple for a living. Of course I'm going to get an Apple Watch.

It's my job to get an Apple Watch. So don't let my answer influence you in any way. It's like, well, if Jason's getting an Apple Watch, he must think it's good. No, I'm going to get an Apple Watch because it's my job to get an Apple Watch. I'll tell you later after I use it if I think it's good. But, you know, I'm not – my business is to do this and try this stuff. And so you got to step back from that. So on one level, I think we are crazy in the sense that we are, we talk about this stuff and write about this stuff. And then we're also enthusiastic people

who are trying to see, because we're going to talk to others about it. We're trying to see what it might be used for, right? I want to be able to use this thing enough to answer the question when somebody says should i get one yeah which i'm going to reply with what would you use it for because you really have to ask that it's not just a yes or no but i want to be able to do that and that's going to require time with it and when i wrote i wrote a piece about the that um that federico vatici linked to which i thought was funny because it was sort of written for him, which is about how I realized that I've been using the Mac a long time and that using the iPad, one of the reasons you would reject it is because it doesn't do things the way you do them on your Mac. And we Mac users, we built up all these muscles about like how to do things. And, you

know, text expander does this and my Apple script does this and my automator service does this. And, and that's all great. Although you may not use all that stuff as much as you know, text expander does this and my Apple script does this and my automator service does this. And, um, and that's all great. Although you may not use all that stuff as much as you think, but it's still a change and it's different to go to the, to the iPad. Um, but I feel like us, especially as people who write and talk about this stuff need to make the effort to get outside ourselves and think about, you know, it's not just about me. It's about, you know, what, what would people use this? And it's hard, you know, it's hard just about me. It's about, you know, what would people use this? And it's hard, you know, it's hard to do that. But so I feel like some of it is just science experiment kind of time, which is, you know. Yeah. And I realize we don't have time today,

but that's what leads me to like the ultimate question here, which is when you're thinking about what you're going to get or what you want to suggest to other people, I talk about, you know, you know, crazy times. Like, I feel like this might be one of the most confusing times for deciding what array of Apple products to have in your life. Times of confusion. Times of confusion. Thank you, Tim Goodman. But I feel like there's never been quite the kind of breadth of selection. But also, like, like in my head i had this in the little show note thing like the the like ridiculous uh calculus that you have to go through what did i say actually to think about the combination of um size screen weight capacity input price

size screen weight capacity input and price with my basic theory being that most apple people tend to focus on having two devices but any but it's like heisenberg or something like anytime you're going to pick one of those it has a giant effect on what else you use like do you want to have a macbook pro and an ipad pro and a 6s plus well probably not unless you're just being fancy like how do you pick complementary things and how do you decide which things you're going to do what things on? How much do you need to know what you're going to do with that before you buy it? And maybe you said this. Actually, I think it was Gruber that said this.

But you think about, like, how unusual it is that this is, you know, it used to be that you could say, hey, I want the nicest, I want the best one of these there is. Which should I buy? Well, go buy the most expensive one. I don't think that's, I agree with my friends who say that's not true anymore. I'm not sure that the iPad Pro is the best iPad for everybody by a long shot. Ditto the MacBook Pro. Do you really, do you want all of that?

I mean, there's, I think there's a lot of nuance to deciding how you're going to buy. And thank goodness there's people like you that are out there and trying it out and can say like, here's who this is good for and why. Times of confusion. Times of confusion. You're right. Well, this is, I mean, I kind of mentioned this before. It's the shift that Apple has had from the, you know, you can get an iPhone to would you like the iPhone 5? Would you like the iPhone 6? Would you like the iPhone 6 Plus? Would you like the iPhone 6S? Would you like the iPhone 6S Plus? They're all available, right?

Or iPad? I'd love to have a 5S, but guess what? All you can get is 32 gigs. Okay, now I'm thinking about space. Where do my photos go? Oh, it depends. Are you going to have, you know? It's so, once you actually really start pulling that thread,

it's so much more complex than you realize. And it isn't really just about saying, I want a big screen and a little screen. There are tradeoffs to every single one of these. And in order to get the most out of these devices, you have to be very canny about how you pair them. Yeah, I think it's an interesting thing that we – it says something about us that – because I wrote a piece about this about the Apple Watch where I became completely paralyzed about what Apple Watch to buy, because there were so many different options involving, well, these bands are available for these models. It's like an SAT problem. And yeah, and they're on a train going 20 miles an hour toward Chicago. But the orange bands are on a train headed for San Francisco. So it is... Johnny has five Milanese loops.

so um it is johnny has five millionese loops but but from a consumer uh psychology perspective it's good business because people want choice uh but for some people it's this tyranny of choice that that is like i can't decide what to do and um and those those kind of are are battling i think in the end is it better that there's an iPad mini, an iPad Air and an iPad Pro than if there was just a single one size fits all iPad? Yeah, it's totally better, but it makes it more complicated to decide which one to buy. So that's the trade-off. I would not go back to a world where there was literally just the iPad Air and there wasn't a mini and a Pro, right? I don't want to live in that world because it's better that we've got these choices. But I wrote 1500 words for Mac world last week about um the five ipad models that are available now and who should

buy what right because there's also the air original and the mini 2 that are still being sold right so with each one of those you're not just thinking about price you're thinking about screen you're talking about size remember you got to carry two of that you're going to carry two of those devices when you travel well i don't know't know. Let me think about it. Okay. What about the capacity? Like it really, and the RAM, like what you want to do with this? It all really starts to matter. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say for people who write about and talk about Apple products for a living on one level, it's great because we always said this, when there are times of confusion, when customers have questions and

they're seeking advice, whether it's how to use something or what to buy, they look to the media, basically. And these days, they're looking to their peers on the internet and all that, but that's still media of a sort. They're looking for help. And that's a great opportunity to talk about this stuff and write stories about it and all of that. But it also is that it's tough because, like I said, you also want to personalize the recommendations. And that's the thing that I have the hardest problem with when we're talking about buying advice is people say, should I buy the Apple Watch or should I buy an iPad?

And, you know, I can't say yes to any of that. That's like saying, should I buy a condo? Yeah. It depends, it depends, it depends. Should I invest in real estate? Well, is it in Detroit? Or is it in Hawaii? Yeah, so that, and that's something to keep in mind,

because I think a lot of times this does get really reductive, where people are like, oh, the new Apple stuff is stupid, don't buy anything from Apple. It's like people are like, Oh, it's the new Apple stuff is stupid. Don't buy anything from Apple. It's like, all right, well that's dumb. You know, there,

there, there are people for whom an Apple product is probably the wrong call. Right. And certainly specific Apple products, but maybe even all the Apple products. For example, if you've never used a tablet, uh,

I mean, the thing is you hear from people who love having a tablet, you're not going to hear as much on a regular basis from people who had a tablet and didn't like it. You're really, you know what I mean, the thing is you hear from people who love having a tablet. You're not going to hear as much on a regular basis from people who had a tablet and didn't like it. You know what I mean? There's a kind of a false positive in that way. So like you might want to go out and get one of those cheapy – well, I'm not saying to do this. But you might want to pick one up cheaper, use or borrow a friend's for a weekend or something to find out if it's really for you. And again, making that leap to Retina.

Like the difference between a Retina iPad and a regular iPad, like once you see that, you don't want to go back. It's hard to downgrade in some ways. Once you've got enough stuff that you're relying on having a one terabyte drive, I don't mean to beat this into the ground. I just mean that I think that when we think about these things, there's so many different angles to consider rather than just like, oh, go buy the most expensive Apple thing, because it really does depend. Hi, I'm Jason. I'll be your personal shopper.

Hi, Jason. Have you brought your essay about what you plan on doing with your Apple products? I'll need that. The summer that my grandma died was the worst summer ever. That's not the essay that I attended, but we can go with it. What kind of things did your grandma like to do with her computer? My grandmother was a very sweet lady. And she, now, I, boy, how'd you do on essays?

Were you good on essays? Yeah, I was good on essays. I was the worst kind because I thought I was good at essays. Oh, no. That's not, no, I was good at essays. Except, you know. And meeting poor people made me think about my life. A callback here is I was good at essays, but, you know know what I wasn't good at was writing out the essays legibly.

Oh, yeah. And for whenever I would have something like an in-class essay or like the AP English exam, you know, you had to write it, handwrite it. Oh, my God. It was the worst because I write slowly and semi-neatly or quickly and illegibly. And so I had to slow myself down when I'm writing the essay. And it was just, it was very painful, but I was good. I was good at essay, but you know, I'm a writer. I get paid to write things. I, it's not surprising that I was pretty good at writing essays. Well, I like the way that sounded. That was very noble. I'm a writer. It is what I do. I write.

It's what I, this is like people pay me to write things. So is it surprising that I was good at writing things? You brag about it all the time. Just go ahead and drop it. What's your correct words per minute? On typing? Yeah. It's not bragging.

It's just a fact. It does not make me a better person that I can type 110 words a minute. What it means is that my hands have become like claws because I'm incapable of writing things. I had to sign something at the orthodontist because my daughter's getting braces. And they're like, sign here. And I'm like,

signing with pen. Hmm. Interesting. And we were talking about cursive the other day. And I realized that I don't know any of the cursive letters except the ones that are in my name. I've forgotten all the rest of them because I know how to do my signature. That's it. That's it.

So what I'm saying is, yes, I do. I type 110 words a minute and my, my hands have, have, have devolved into a cave claws. Oh,

amazing. Cause I can't write things anymore with pencils. Well, have me back again. We have so, I have so much to talk about. Before we go, are you ready for some- No, no, I'm just saying

as far as the meat topics, I said there's a lot of meat topics. I got to hear about this ask upgrade from this week. We got to do some ask upgrade before we go. But yes, I would love to have you back sometime.

That would be awesome. I always, I'm afraid to ask you on things because I feel like you're- You like to deploy me tactically. Well, I feel like you're a busy guy. This is the thing I discovered because this was true with you

and with Andy and Natko and other other people i know where where they're like why don't you ever ask me on your podcast i was like because i figure you're like too big for my podcast and too busy and so um and now you got like all the other podcasts because you got the podcast with john roderick you got the podcast with dan benjamin you got the podcast with john syracuse and you got the podcast with jim dalrymple am i missing any podcast oh you got the podcast with max temkin where you're talking about The Top Chef, a show I've never seen. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm always available for you. You know that. You know that my only goal in life is to eventually be amusing on The Incomparable. It's the one show where I feel like I'm consistently

not up to my game. It's not accurate at all. Those are some of the best episodes that you're on. Oh, God, I try so hard. I think about it about i'm up at night yeah i'm like harry potter under the blanket doing uh doing spells yeah that's what he's doing uh let's do some ask you have a sponsor do you have a sponsor for ask upgrade i do ask upgrade this week lasers is brought to you by making light we've had them on before they actually just sent me some candles making light is all about helping you focus on doing your best work. When you sign up for a subscription to Making Light, every month you receive a beautiful box containing two handmade botanical soy wax candles. That's right. They're infused with essential oils. They come in recyclable tins. It's about two hours of focus each day for 20 days. The idea here is to create a ritual and give yourself

permission to focus. It's a great idea and the candles are pretty cool. So you light a candle when you need to get work done. You let the fragrances and the sight of the flame help you concentrate. Your brain kind of makes a connection that this is my time to focus. These are like making coffee or tea in the morning. I make tea, a pot of tea every morning. Merlin, do you have a morning kind of like the ritual? You get up and you do a few things? I get up, I curse the day, I have some coffee, but I could use some candles. I'm not going to lie to you. That's right. Well, that's, you know, so you make the coffee and that's a ritual. The candle ritual, though, it fits in. We are people, human beings, who like these rituals.

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it's not just about the lighting of the candles, but then having the candles there is, uh, it, there's something about the mood setting that it does. That's really nice. Um, and so I always look forward to that.

And then we, when we got the making light samples, my, my daughter's like, Oh, this is great. It's like, it's like Hanukkah,

except whenever we want, you know, candles are daughter's like, oh, this is great. It's like Hanukkah, except whenever we want. Candles are available year round. We don't need probation. We can have Hanukkah whenever we feel like it. Whenever we feel like it, at least the candle part. So, you know, definitely,

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candles can be used in your daily life. So thank you to Dan and everybody at Making Light for supporting Upgrade, all of RelayFM, and hashtag AskUp ask upgrade uh upgrading michael wrote in to demand that we list our top holiday season this is very specific top holiday season breakfast foods or meals oh man i don't i don't think i have four there's uh i don't know if i've got a top four breakfasts let alone holiday season breakfasts. You make a mean biscuit, though. I do make a mean biscuit. Buttermilk biscuit, not the British cookie kind of biscuit.

Oh, the make-for-a-cookie biscuit. Southern buttermilk biscuit. I do that. I do a good waffle. I did a waffle this weekend. And four, actually on christmas morning a lot of times i will make uh uh cinnamon rolls that it's the it's the alton brown uh cinnamon rolls you make when you put out put a beer can in it no you don't put a beer can that's just the chicken i used a

wine bottle to roll it out though because i didn't have i didn't have a rolling pin chicken. I used a wine bottle to roll it out, though, because I didn't have a rolling pin. So I just used a wine bottle, which totally works, by the way. Wine bottle, great as a rolling pin. It's a baking hack. It is. It's a baking life hack. But I made that, and that's really great. You bake it the night before, and then they rise overnight, and you bake them in the morning.

And that's pretty good. My kids love those. I'd make those more, but those are a lot harder to make than than buttermilk biscuits let me tell you well that's my holiday i'm gonna kobayashi maru this uh because all of ours involve takeout food um we i mean there aren't that many that there are our special occasion foods are often more like stuff from the neighborhood that we'll get uh there's a dim sum place nearby we like to get dim sum sometimes not too much not the healthiest food in the world. There's a place that has Irish food that we refer to simply as Irish breakfast. That's kind of a special thing for us. And, you know, that's mostly takeout things. I'm trying to think of what we make

at home that's special. My wife and my daughter will make cookies sometimes and things like that. That's kind of a holiday thing. That counts, right? Yeah, sure. Well, they're decorating the tree as I speak. So we're not bereft of holiday spirit. It's a firewall. The firewall's down. Our kids wanted us to get a tree this weekend.

And my wife was suddenly like, yeah, next weekend. We're going to put it off. Which I thought was a bold move because I was ready. That's super bold. We went to the mall downtown to see the good dinosaur. And we have this tradition where we go to the Hallmark store, and we each pick out an ornament for the tree. So she got a really, really cute little baby, like a Rottweiler. And I got Don Corleone.

And we got my wife, Daryl Dixon, which she was pretty excited about. Daryl from The Walking Dead. So now there's a man with a crossbow on our Christmas tree. Wow. So there you go, Michael. Things that are unrelated to what you asked. And happy holidays. Flaming Cheese on Twitter asks,

when do you think Amazon will stop being a butt and put Prime on Apple TV? Amazon Video. Somebody said that they got a, maybe just somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, but had a customer service rep at Amazon tell them that they were working on an Apple TV app for Prime Video. And they've got an iOS app. I don't see why they wouldn't do an Apple TV app. I'm going to be that guy and push back a little and say, I don't really see any reason why they need to.

I have not understood this kerfuffle. I think it's completely understandable that Amazon would do what they're doing. It's a business, and they want to... I don't know. I just don't think it's weird. Apple does stuff like this all the time, making decisions about what does and doesn't run. I don't think Amazon's weird. Apple does stuff like this all the time, making decisions about what does and doesn't run. I don't think Amazon is a hardware company.

I think Amazon makes hardware because it makes it easier to access their services. And that's why you can read a Kindle book anywhere and not just on a Kindle because they care about getting Prime memberships. So I feel like the Firebox, it's good because it gives them a thing that they completely control.

But I feel ultimately they want to be everywhere. They don't want to say, well, if you like Apple stuff, you have to buy another box from us because we're not going to be there. Because they really are motivated to be everywhere. Because in the end, they just want your money for Prime. That's what they want. But I mean, I'm trying not to sound like a complete idiot here. But I think there's a big difference between we want you. So I think Amazon's ultimate goal in some ways, obviously,

it's not to make money. Their goal in some ways is to make you think of them as the place you go for stuff. Not so different in some ways from what Google and Apple want. It just happens to be different kinds of stuff and that they're succeeding with. In Amazon's case, they want you to be where they want. They want to be the place you go to buy stuff. I don't know if they want to be the place where you consume stuff. I think they do. They want people be the place you go to buy stuff. I don't know if they want to be the place where you consume stuff. I think they do. They want people to have that. I think they will eventually – and part of the problem is with the wording of this.

I don't know if I agree with Flaming Cheese's wording of this. Stop being a butt. I don't know if I use the word butt. But I suspect at some point Amazon probably will put it out. But I doubt it's like a giant priority. put it out but i i doubt it's like a giant priority and not least of which is they don't want to appear to be uh i think i think there's a reason they didn't put it on the first day do you know what i mean yeah they're just they're just acting coy like yeah yeah they don't want to be like oh god thank you finally apple can you know can can can do this thing and save us so i

don't know i mean um i guess from a consumer standpoint yeah it's a bummer when anything happens that makes it harder to get the stuff that you like. But from a business standpoint, I don't think it's that hard to understand. I feel like if Amazon is okay putting Netflix on the Fire TV, then, you know, I think in the end it doesn't matter. Like the hardware is there as an enabler and they want to be everywhere. So, yeah, but I could see your point. I think maybe there's an aspect of it, which is we're going to play it cool. We'll get there eventually.

You know, we're not rushing out on day one, but we'll get there, and people will be happy. But, yeah, but I think they'll be there. I wonder how much demand, and I wonder, again, if this could be a bubble thing. I wonder how much demand for that there is amongst the corpus of Amazon users and power users? I'm, as an Amazon Prime customer, I would say I use their service a lot more when it's more readily available to me on devices. Oh, don't get me wrong.

I want it there. I guess my question is, like, I mean, people who have Kindle tablets and stuff like that, do you think there's as much of, I mean, think about the subset of that, which is people that own Apple TVs. Subset of that are people with Apple TVs and Amazon Prime. I feel like the Kindle tablets and the Fire TV, they're almost like the store brand.

It's like you got to have it, right? And they can control it. But it's not going to be the only path. And they're not – unless you're – I don't think – maybe Amazon's ultimate goal is to be Trader Joe's and have everything be a store brand. I don't think maybe Amazon's ultimate goal is to be Trader Joe's and have everything be a store brand. But I think more they want everyone to have their stuff and be, like you said, the place that people buy stuff. So if you want to rent a movie, you're going to look at Amazon to rent or buy a movie. And if they can get that on the Apple TV, that's great because now people are going to consider Amazon and their ties to Amazon instead of Apple. And that's good, just like, you know,

Comixology and Kindle Books and all that other stuff that I can read on my Apple devices and still, you know, and still buy it from Amazon. That's good. It's kind of perplexing, though, the way that they choose to break up their apps. Like, you've got the Amazon Store app on iOS, which is actually a pretty good app, I would say. I like that it's got Touch ID. It's got some nice Taptic feedback. It's a neat app. You've got a separate app, obviously, for Comixology. That makes sense. You've got a separate app for Amazon Video. That makes sense, I guess.

Have you done the Amazon Today, Amazon Now? What is it called? The one-hour, two-hour delivery service? No, I haven't done that. That's a separate app and it feels like a completely different experience, a completely different team. And it's not at all integrated with the rest.

It's not part of the Amazon app. It's really strange. You go in, it's a separate login. You can't track your orders in the usual way. It's almost like a completely different business unit, which is maybe exactly what it is. But it's odd. And I would have to imagine that a lot of that has to do with

choosing where you're going to put something, given that it might cost them 30%. I mean, do they pay 30% for the Amazon app? Do they pay 30% to Apple? No, because those are physical goods. Physical goods. Instead of digital goods.

But comiXology, still. Yeah. That's weird. I wish they'd bring that back I miss it I still miss it I I can really maybe it was other like other things happening at the same time but I can really track a huge drop in the amount of comics I was buying each week to um I hate to admit it but it's true to comiXology taking out that ability to buy maddendening. Yeah. That's a rabbit hole. Yeah, it still makes me mad too. So when do I think they'll do it? I think they will do it.

And I think at some point, I mean, do you think they'll bring back Apple TV on the store as well? Do you think that's permanent? No, I think they'll bring it back. I do too. Maybe after Christmas. Yeah, after the Amazon app is available on the new Apple TV, then they'll sell the new Apple TV.'m gonna say uh quarter to 2016 he said punditly okay well done

ding three points for you you're welcome mr cheese um michael wrote in to say i switch just switched to mac and my microsoft muscle memory is useless Do you have any tips or resources for learning the Mac fast, shortcuts, scripting, et cetera? My first thing is get a, I don't have a utility here, but get a utility that maps your control key to be your command key and you will get a lot of your muscle memory back immediately

because that's basically the difference or just start treating, treating the, realizing the command key is basically what your old control key is. That will get you 90% of the way there. Yeah, I think there's two, two, it's a great question. I think there's two general ways to approach this, no matter who you are, no matter what your skill level is. One involves certain kinds of software, which could include things like, like you're describing these, there's key remappers you can do. You know, for example, first thing I do on a Mac, one of the first things is go in and turn caps lock into control. That's just, there's no reason to have caps lock.

I don't need, I'm not Craig. And then there's obviously there's things like text expander. There are things like, what's my keyboard? I have a clipboard manager. I don't even know the name of it. Fly cut. A whole bunch of those things, definitely. But there's this whole other thing over here. And did I mention BetterTouchTool? BetterTouchTool, do you use that? I don't.

Oh, it's awfully good. It's not just for touchpads. It basically allows you to map almost anything to anything. If you're using a touchpad, especially on your Mac, wow, you can do some banana stuff. Brett Terpstra has written a lot about it. That's where I learned about it. But then there's this whole other area over here, which is like, well, how do you learn the commands? Because learning the key commands, like we talked about with text editing, it just makes such a difference. And my only advice there is to start small.

Like, don't feel overwhelmed. Like, when I first got a copy of Learning the Bash Shell, I felt like I had to learn everything and that they're all equally important. I think, you know, learn, talk to a friend, find out which five or 10 commands could be time savers. And then every time you start noticing you're doing something a lot, get in the habit of going to Command-Shift-Question Mark, I believe. Is that right?

Command-Shift-Question Mark in most apps will bring up the help menu. And then, oh, Command, I guess. See, I don't even know what I've installed in here that's causing what. Command-Slash can, there's the one for filling in your keyboard, but basically learn the keyboard shortcuts. Every time you start doing something with the mouse, go and figure out if you could be doing with a keyboard shortcut, but don't feel like you have to learn it all. If you learn five that end up being useful to you, you're so far ahead.

And I'll throw in one more. The help menu has a search box in it that will search all the commands in the Mac menu of that app. So if you are convinced that there must be something called rules in the menu somewhere, go to help and type rules and it will give you a list of command labels in the menu that have that word in it. And we'll show you where it is, what menu it's under, and what keyboard shortcuts. So that's a good way to learn. Great tip. Lots of stuff in there. Listener Dan asks, what's your iOS device replacement process? Do you hand down to family? Do you sell it?

Do you keep it forever in a drawer? What do you do? Mine's pretty simple. It's usually hand-me-down. I've been trying to bring my, when I say bring my wife up to date, is like to be a little bit more kind about buying her new devices. And she's loving it. She got an iPhone 6S Plus. I'm blown away. She loves it. It's way too big for me, but she adores it. So generally what we do is we will sometimes, it depends how recent they are, sometimes we'll have as like bang around iPhones

for stuff like running BB-8 and things like that. But the iPads generally go to my daughter and then we also donate them to my daughter's school. They love iPads, even old iPads. Guys, if you have old iPads, consider giving them to a school. You will make their day. Guys, if you have old iPads, consider giving them to a school. You will make their day. Good one.

I also do the hand-me-down thing. My kids have my old iPhone and my wife's old iPhone. My son's been using my old iPad. And that's basically the plan. I do otherwise keep them around forever in the sense that, again, this goes to me not being a regular consumer. It's useful for me to have old devices around because I can refer to them when I need to write about things involving Apple. So, you know, like I will, why do I have an iPhone 5 and an iPhone 4S in my drawer? Well, one reason is that I can take them out and take pictures with their

cameras when the new holographic iPhone 8 camera appears. And I can compare and say, look how terrible these old non-holographic cameras were back in the day. And so eventually they go in a drawer, but I will- It feels kind of magic when you plug them in and they still work. Yeah, my original iPhone still works. It's crazy. So weird. Yeah. Well, I mean, like my 5S, man, I love my 5S, probably my pound for pound favorite iPhone

I've had. And I still keep it around the house. I mean, the battery is a little bit dicey. It's the reason I replaced it. But it's great for just around the house stuff. I would use it as a remote if I could. But those are great for just banging around. They're great for car trips and stuff like that, too. A little story about my son. He's been using my original iPad mini and loves it and has been just using it endlessly as a YouTube box and a game machine and all that. And it's the original. So it's not Retina and it's not Superfast. It's an iPad 2. And since I switched to the Air, I've had the Air 2.

I've had my iPad mini 2 in a drawer. And I thought, well, at some point I need to roll this down to him. And I had that moment where I thought, you know what? That kid takes that thing around and is like doing other things with it while he's doing this. And he's going to drop it. Yep. And he dropped it. And it got a little tiny crack in the corner, but it wasn't on the screen.

I was like, oh, well, okay. And then this weekend he dropped it again. Oh, you're so smart. And you got it. I got the big crack. So now he doesn't even know this, but I have one in reserve, that other one, to give to him during some holiday period. But right now we're in the interregnum where he's really sad that he doesn't have an iPad and has learned the new rules about taking care of his iPad. And we've instituted all sorts of like no traveling with the active iPad kind of thing. Because, you know, it's like, yeah,

it's great that you're making yourself a sandwich while holding an iPad and wearing headphones. This has got to stop. Slicing onions. But you're also applying the CGP gray thing, right? Three is two, two is one, one is none. Sure. You got to have a backup. That's true. I, ever since he talked about that on a cortex with Mike, I think about it constantly. It's a thing from the military. It sounds like you don't know this, but there's a thing in the military,

which is that three is two, two is one and one is none. That basically if you have, and that goes for backups, it goes for toilet paper, it goes for anything. If you're on the last one or only one of something, you might as well have none. Yeah. And in that case, you're being super dad. You've actually got two. So two is one. I was, I was never in the military, you're being super dad. You've actually got two, so two is one. I was never in the military,

nor did I go to any military-themed schools. Eyes front, soldier. Speedmaster asks, what are your favorite email clients for iOS these days? Do you want to go? I've been using Outlook for the last couple of weeks, and it's kind of amazing. It's pretty good.

The calendar leaves a lot to be desired. It is not. I don't trust that calendar. I put things in there. I'm not sure you can edit things on it. I put things in there and they don't come out anywhere else, which is not a good thing. Although it seems to show me what's in my calendar, but I don't think I trust to do any input in Outlook. But as an email client, it's pretty good. And before that, I was using the Rattle. What is it? Spark. And I like that too. But Outlook right now, good on the iPhone and kind of great on the iPad and really great on the iPad Pro actually.

So that's what I've been using right now. And that's unpopular to say. And I'm using my server as Gmail, but it's really good with it. It's just a good mail client. I was hoping I was going to surprise you by saying Outlook, but you stole the thunder. I have peer pressure. I listen to you and I listen to Vatici. Well, here's the thing. It's all business.

It looks good. It's not cute. No. It's all business. It looks great. The filtered view is really nice and does a good job. Oh, yeah. Rather than having like –

Smart inbox. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a toggle where it's got like your stuff that we think is important. And then you can quickly jump in and show all the other stuff that is totally not important. And it's very good at filtering it intelligently. And it works pretty, pretty well in that, in that sense, because when you're, when you're on the go with your iPad, you don't really, I mean, how much searching and running around and being in different mailboxes do you really need exactly i think about all the mailboxes and smart filters and flags and everything that i've made over the years on gmail and i don't use any of them anymore i basically got three folders that's that's all there is but no outlook's really

good i think spark is really good i'll be glad to see what that looks like on when they come up with an ipad version yeah me too it's not that the i really like spark and initially i really really liked it in the beta it was kind of blowing me away it's not super economical in terms of it's got a lot of chrome yeah it's pretty chrome but it's got a lot of chrome and some some tasks that you want to do um i realized like if i was in a message and i wanted to delete it i had to like tap the share button or something and then tap delete. But if I didn't, and I was like, well, that's, I got to do a couple of taps. That's kind of too much. But if I, if I just went back out of the message now it was marked as red and it would disappear and go down into the red mail. And I was like, guys, and I told them, I remember telling

them like, I need one, when I'm reading a message, I need one tap to archive one tap tap to delete. Those need to be on that screen. And, you know, they'll, they're working on it. But yeah, there's some fiddly, fiddly parts. But I like that they've had fun with it and tried to make something different and new with it while still giving you what you need. So I give them a lot of aloha for that. The other one is it wouldn't be an episode of Upgrade without me mentioning, uh, mailbox. Come on, guys. Is there any signs of life here? I feel like it's just over. I feel like there's longstanding bugs with that. And the way that it does stuff with text selection,

like it's, I don't think it's ever quoted correctly. Dropbox should never have bought it because they seem to have no intent to actually do anything with it. It's too bad. It's a shame because that's still the one I kind of, out of my, what's the word? Impulse or habit, I always open up.

But then I'm like, I should really go use something else. Yeah, I know. It's too bad. But I mean, I guess that shows that there's still room for somebody to excel in this. The surprising part is that Outlook,

for somebody who wants to be a grown-up with their email, Outlook is really good. It actually, it is. You should give it a try. Speedmaster. Speedmaster. So this next,

it's our last bit of feedback it's from listener Spencer who asks what is your oldest piece of equipment currently in use software or hardware and why hasn't it been upgraded this is such a good question

you guys did this on Clockwise a few months ago and it got me really thinking about it I'm sitting here trying to we may have to do a little bit of round robin on this I'll throw one out we have an airport express from I don't know when that we're still using to extend our network. What's one of yours? I'll see. Do you have a really definitive answer for this? we have an airport extreme that is the old classic uh square the uh the the baking tile the

oh the big boy yeah and not the tall the leader from the incredible hulk giant forehead uh laughably tall base station that they have now right which i refuse to buy because it is ridiculous at least i have one and if and it's got And it's got room for a hard drive, but if you don't want the time capsule, it's just empty space. It's just, why? Anyway, because they didn't want to make two enclosures. Because antennas, right?

Isn't it good for antennas? That's what they say. I don't know. I'm still using my old one. In fact, I got a fancy router that I saw on the wire cutter that they said was pretty good. And I used it for like two

weeks and it kept dropping. All my Macs would drop off. All my devices would drop off. It was infuriating. And the reason I bought it is because it's got traffic prioritization. Because it used to be when I did a podcast, I basically told my family, no streaming of anything. Oh, that's terrific. Linksys, there used to be a Linksys firmware thing you could do to do the bandwidth shaping. Yeah, yeah. So this router has it built in. So basically now all the Wi-Fi is turned off on it. All it does is do my network routing and prioritize my iMac so that I can do podcasting while my kids are trying to stream Netflix.

And Wi-Fi in the house is still being routed by that old airport base station because it's really reliable in that. It just doesn't do any of the traffic prioritization stuff that I needed from it. Well, I don't think I can come close. That's old tech. Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's other old tech that I've got. I replaced my Mac Mini. My Mac Mini is attached to this flat screen that I've got. I've got a, you know, I replaced my Mac mini. I, my Mac mini is attached to this flat screen that I got. Um, it's a, it's a little like 15 inch LCD monitor that I got like eight years ago, maybe an old, maybe even older than that. And it's

a little server and I very rarely turn on the screen and I usually do it with screen sharing like from my iPad or from my Mac. Um, but I do have a, uh, this little monitor attached to it that has, is still kicking around after all this time. It's, I'm so, I'm so glad things still last like that. Yeah. Some things. Let's see.

I got a couple here. Uh, the iPad, the iPad two, my daughter still uses every day. She listens to Harry Potter on it every night, uh, plays card wars and Minecraft on it every day. And, but you know what? Now here's my famous one. Now the story can be told. Until a couple months ago when I got an iMac,

I was using a 2006 Mac Pro. Yeah. With two read-only DVD drives. Classic. No, wait. No, I'm sorry. Not DVD, CD. Two read-only CD drives.

Oh, excellent. So you could rip two albums at once. I don't know what I was thinking. At one point, I actually bought the expansion kit from, what is it, OWC, where I could turn that into another drive bay. But man, that thing was a soldier. It stuck with me. All the lights were lit up.

I remember telling Marco, oh, I think this is bad. I had the door off the Mac, which John Syracuse hates. And I could see red lights on the cars. And he was like, um, that shouldn't even be working at this point. So I got every nickel out of that. It was good to me. I will miss you, Dexter. You were a good computer. So I have one more, which is 2008 vintage slim devices came out with, or it might've been just when they got bought by Logitech. They came out with the Squeezebox Boom, part of their squeeze box network music player which has now been it's now it's now been discontinued but i i have i have multi i have three squeeze

box booms that i kept collecting from people who no longer uh wanted them and i i also have a couple other squeeze box players we've got one in got one that is attached to the speakers in my living room. And, you know, they don't do Apple Music. They don't do Rhapsody anymore. I think they might still do Spotify. So the whole – it's an open source server, so it still works and it will still play all my local music. But anything I've got on Apple Music will not play, right? So it's getting near the end of its life.

But the Squeezebox Boom is great because like the iPod Hi-Fi that I also have sitting on my desk right i'm so envious of that i have an aux in port so the the squeeze box boom it's a pretty nice set of stereo speakers so it will stream internet audio i can listen to atp on it it will play back any of the mp3s on my on my server and i can just attach my iPhone to it and play a podcast or whatever. You could do an Airport Express also. I could, and I have done that. And I've also got a little Bluetooth adapter

that occasionally I'll attach to one, and I can just Bluetooth things to it. So they have a longer life, and the iPod Hi-Fi is the same way, that it's my set of computer speakers at my desk because they're good speakers. I mean, the uh ipod dock on the top is ridiculous and not supported but it's got an aux jack in the back it's a

standard you know the standard 3.5 inch headphone jack is a pretty great universal thing i think a company would be stupid to not put one on its products i can't um i can't imagine i think we'll probably have that forever yeah i think that Jack will live forever. I'm going to go ahead and say it. There's absolutely no chance that we will ever not have that. Do you think that'll happen? And Making Light, thank you so much to them. And thank you so much to Merlin Mann. Thank you for being my guest host while Mike is stealing stationery from Tiffany Armand. Oh, thank you very much for having me. I'm a huge fan of your show.

I never miss it. You're one of the very few shows where, well, no, for real. I listen to it live and I listen to it when it comes out. So it's an honor to be here. Thank you. Thank you for me. You don't have to listen to this one. You've already heard it.

It's a little good.