Upgrade - 77: I Don't Know Why You'd Call Them Friends

Episode Date: February 22, 2016

Jason and Myke lightly cover Apple’s beef with the FBI, Myke gets excited by new phones at Mobile World Congress, Jason grapples with making his home smarter. And of course there’s follow-up about pizza and “Back to the Future”—that’s how it works.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 77 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile mail route and fresh books my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. You sound fresh today. I feel good today. I'm completely mended. Oh, good. It's good. I'm glad that you're feeling fine. It's a good thing. We've got an action-packed show today. We do. There's a lot. There's a lot to cover. So much so that we have things in the document that we already kicked out until next week so it's one of those one of those weeks but we should start off with some follow-up uh i see a very proud note here at the top well i mean we i didn't think that marcel proust was

going to come up on the the podcast but it did and uh you you thought it was more like dave prouse who played dar Vader than Marcel Proust. You know, I think that was genuinely where I was getting that pronunciation from. I think so. I think so. But several people said that it's Proust. So there you go. That's what several people say that I'm right. Who am I to argue? I have found that when people say you're right on the internet, you should embrace it and run with it. Just say yes. Thank you. Yes. Great. We did learn something, though, from listener Gordon.

We did. We learned a word about a word. So if you remember last week, I was saying I liked the name Colossal and said that it had a sound to it which made it sound big, but it's obviously not onomatopoeia. made it sound big, but it's obviously not onomatopoeia, and listener Gordon wrote in to say that that is called an idiophone, when a word sounds like its meaning as opposed to the action of the

word, for example, with onomatopoeia. So, thank you very much, Gordon, for that little tidbit of information. Yeah, that was for all I know. I didn't check on listener Gordon that he may have made that word up, but it sounds great, so I'm going to say yes. That's, again, thank you.

That's awesome. It does, colossal. It's amazing and colossal. Somebody wrote in, a few people wrote in and asked about the Daily Kindle newspaper that I mentioned. They're like, oh, I'm intrigued. What's that all about? And the answer is, it's my local paper. It's the San Francisco Chronicle.

And I get it because I want to know what's going on locally. I don't read it every day. I sort of go in. There are times when I read it and times where I don't read it, sort of in cycles. But when my favorite sports teams are in action, I'm more likely to read it because they've got the articles about the sports. It's funny. Kindle newspapers, actually, because I've got a Kindle Voyage. I love them, actually. They're super simple. It's text with like a single picture on some articles, you know, black and white, obviously, because the device is black and white. If you read on the iPad, they're in color. But it's just there's no fancy layout. There are no ads. They are, you can navigate by article. So if you don't want to read a particular article you just sort of

swipe up and you go to the next article you can bring up a table of contents and jump to a different article they're actually pretty great and they're pretty cheap actually if you compare them to your digital subscription to a newspaper that lets you see it on the web

or in an iPad app or something like that I'm really dreading the day that the Chronicle says, we're not going to do the Kindle newspaper anymore if that ever comes to pass because they want to force me into their iPad app, which they just recently updated. And it's actually much better than it was because their iPad app up until about two months ago was the one that essentially it's the one that came out

when the iPad came out or a few months later, where they're like, oh, newsstand is a thing and we'll build this thing. And it wasn't it wasn't it was very old. And the new one is better. But still, it's like it brings you a big grid of stories and you have to tap around and there's no just list of here's what we want you to read now or read today. And it's got ads in it all over the place. And and it costs more. And I rather read on Kindle, read text on a Kindle than on an iPad, honestly. So yeah,

it's one of those things that I don't know how many people actually even do Kindle newspapers anymore, but I kind of like it. That's exactly what I want in something like that. I want a bundle of news, in this case locally relevant to me, dropped on one of my devices once a day in a fairly simple text format that I can read. And the Kindle newspaper subscription actually does that. So I still do that. And, yeah. So I know it's kind of old school. And if anything in an e-book reader can be old school, this might be it. Do you kind of read it every day still, the newspaper?

No, I don't read it every day. I read it, like I said, it's more likely when my sports teams are in season because I want to read those pieces, although sometimes I've already read them on LinkedIn from the Twitter accounts of the writers. Also, it's frustrating. The Kindle stuff is not tied into their subscriber database. So they have some subscriber features. Like you can read this if you're a subscriber. You can read this on the web now,

but otherwise you'll need to wait until tomorrow morning to read it. And I can't read those because I'm not a subscriber in that way. I'm not in that database. So sometimes I'll read it. It really is like if the spirit moves me and I do get in these cycles where I'm reading the paper every day

and then other times where I'll go a week or two and I just I haven't read it at all huh yeah it depends on what I'm reading and what else I'm doing and sort of just how the time of my life is if I'm reading a book I'm less likely to read that on the Kindle because I'm reading the book. And if I'm going to pick up the Kindle and do some reading, I'm going to do it. It also depends on what's going on in Twitter and Slack and email, because that's one of my morning routines. We should talk about routines at some point. But one of my morning routines is I get up and I feed the dog and I

pour some tea that's been made by the automatic tea machine and I make myself some breakfast and I check Slack and email and Twitter and basically if there's not as much going on there then I will move on to the newspaper. Whilst we're talking about news, I just wanted to touch on something real quick. Now, I've mentioned this in many places that I actually try and actively avoid big news

stories and things like that like i just don't keep up with the news um for choice but i have been checking out the quartz app um quite simply because it is fantastic it's the best take on news i've ever seen uh effectively this app it's it's a iPhone app, I'll put a link in our show notes. It basically treats news reporting like an iMessage conversation. So it sends you little snippets, it's laid out like a message conversation with bubbles, and it sends you little snippets, little headlines or whatever, and then you can ask for more information about it. They have the replies that you can send the Quartz app display to you in little buttons so you can say like give me more about this or tell me the next story and they send charts they send silly gifs

and stuff like that like you're actually having a conversation and it treats it like it's a real conversation like it greets you good morning and stuff like that and it has a really great um i think it's fantastic the way that it does ads so when you're done with all the news stories it'll be like oh we you know there's nothing more now we'll maybe let you know things later oh and by the way it's brought to you by mini and then they should just show a picture of a mini it's just like little things like that is really good. And it has notifications, but the notifications don't buzz or play sound on your phone unless it's huge, huge news and you can choose what you want on and off. But even when it sends you the message,

so it's sending you new messages, it shows the little animation of that, like in my messages with the bouncing balls, which it doesn't need to do that because it's not thinking, but I love that it does that because it makes it feel more alive. It's a very, very interesting app. And that's the main reason I'm looking at it because it's designed in a way

that I haven't seen before, especially for an application that does what it does. So I think it's worth at least just checking out. So there you go. All right. Listener Kathy indulge herself with a pineapple and pepperoni pizza yeah so it's funny we um talked about pizza that was that was something

that we talked about in ask upgrade last week and i mentioned my love again that some people are horrified by for pepperoni pineapple pizza which is just canadian it's a hawaiian pizza without the canadian bacon and pepperoni instead if you want to think of it that way, if you want to try to make it fit into your boxes of pizza instead of just letting it be free like pizza should be, ooh, free pizza. Yay. So we talked about it and that was last week. And then I went out to lunch with David Sparks after the show because I was down in Orange County where he lives. talked about it and that was last week and then i went out to lunch with david sparks on um after the show yeah because i was in in down in orange county where he lives and uh i i we get to one of these it's like a brew pub it's got this enormous menu it's the kind of menu where there's like a

table of contents because there's so many things on the menu and and i ended up uh seeing that they had pizza and i thought you know what i had a pepperoni pineapple pizza uh and it was delicious and i tweeted pictures of it and then um so thank you for that for the inspiration and then yes And I thought, you know what? I had a pepperoni pineapple pizza and it was delicious. And I tweeted pictures of it. And then, so thank you for that, for the inspiration. And then, yes, listener Kathy also took a picture of a, although hers had like a pineapple ring on it. It didn't look like the pineapple had been cooked. I think, well, you don't really cook the pineapple.

I mean, you bake it with the pizza, so it gets sort of softer. Sure. But, yeah, it looked like kind of a pineapple ring had been plopped down on it. I'm not sure that is ideal, but still, whatever. It's pineapple and pepperoni. It's going to be good anyway. Anyway, so thank you. At least somebody has gotten the word about pepperoni pineapple pizza. Thank you, listener Kathy.

Okay, so what else do we have before we round out follow-up this week? Well, the other big thing is my task management philosophy or lack of saying that we talked about a lot. I really enjoyed having that conversation. I thought that was fun to break from the rehashing the news of the day and get some topical, you know, stuff in that's a little bit different. I thought that was fun. We should try to do that more. And what I heard from a lot of people was that they are still struggling with trying to find a system that works for them or struggling that any system they try doesn't seem to work for them, which is, boy, I hear that. That is definitely something that I identify with.

So I just wanted to say, you know, we're all just kind of, not everybody can have their problems solved by some of these systems. And, you know, you can either give up or you can just keep trying or you can build your own system. I was encouraged by the number of people I found to sort of feel like me that any time invested in categorizing your to-dos is time you could spend doing things. And I totally understand the other argument there, which is that, no, you're investing in organizations so that it'll pay off with more productivity later. I totally understand that, but it's been a difficult thing for me to deal with. So it was nice to hear from people who also have felt that way. And then I came across a post by Dr. Drang about, and this was a conversation that actually happened in the

Incomparable Slack channel. I think Lisa Schmeiser and Dr. Drang were talking about this, writing things down on paper. You'll like this. It involves pens. And what Dr. Drang wrote this post, and we'll link it to it in the show notes, that it's called putting the paper in task paper. And he uses taskpaper as his organizational system, the app taskpaper. But what he does is he prints it. So he prints the to-do list out of taskpaper, and then he can take notes. He puts it in a binder. He can take notes, he can check things off. And then it sounds like he checks them off in the app at the end of the day and uh and the next day he'll print a new one this is a good system because i believe it or not tend to disagree with uh having a completely analog task management system uh mainly for the fear of losing

it right right so this this keeps it around i mean he what he says is he doesn't want to rewrite the mainly for the fear of losing it. Right. Right. So this keeps it around. I mean, what he says is he doesn't want to rewrite the ones that are still on there. He doesn't want to go and copy them to a new list. So this keeps a clean list every day. Although what Lisa said is she finds that she does tasks. I thought this was really interesting.

So many games that you can play with your own mind, right? She does tasks sometimes because she doesn't want to have to copy them to the next day's to-do list. That's a pretty great system. Which is brilliant, too. So there's a lot of ways to go here. But I think that Dr. Drang's system is very interesting, and this is very Dr. Drang, actually, I feel. He's got a technological system that leads to paper. And I think that's kind of a cool idea, right? That's a, if it works for you and it works for him, that he's using an

organizational app, Task Paper, to build these to-do lists, but then he's printing them out and putting them in his binder and he's got his pencil and he's checking things off and writing things down. And then at the end of the day, he, or, or the beginning of the next day, I'm not sure he kind of rewraps and does it again. It's an excellent system indeed. And you can use a pen with it, which I love. I,

I know, I know things about you. I had one other entry, and this goes way back to when we talked about back to the future too, on Mike at the movies. And I just wanted to put a link and we'll put a link in the show notes to it. Todd Vizzieri, who

works at Industrial Light and Magic, he did the, among other things, he did that shot of the TIE Fighters coming out of the sunset in The Force Awakens. Pretty amazing stuff. But he sent a link out to this article that was in

starlog magazine in the 80s uh that i just wanted to share it's pretty cool it is you got to read it on like archive.org and a scan from the article but it's it's interesting because it'll make you think about back to the future a little bit differently and how the time travel works in it and basically i'm not sure I entirely agree with the theory, but it's really interesting. The idea of if Marty changes the past, spoilers, by the way, for Back to the Future, a movie that came out 31 years ago. If Marty changes the past so that his family's got a nicer house and his dad's not an unsuccessful nerd, but is a successful nerd, and he's got a better truck and all those things

that's what happens at the end of back to the future the question is who's the marty who grew up in that family like if you believe that that you're creating like a parallel universe uh with time travel rather than just rewriting it there must have been a marty who grew up in that life and that isn't our marty our marty didn't up in that life. He grew up in a different life. And so it takes that and it runs with it and suggests that there's a second Marty who grew up in that life who travels, who also is working with Doc Brown, but his Doc Brown doesn't know about meeting Marty in the past. Or no, his Doc Brown knows about meeting Marty in the past, right? Whereas Marty's Doc Brown doesn't know. know anyway and it goes from there and basically the suggestion

is that that marty ends up in the first marty's timeline which is terrible because in that timeline doc brown has been shot to death and his and his parent he doesn't have the truck he just has the skateboard in his parents house is ratty and ramshackle and his dad is kind of a failure. So they swap. Now, I'm not sure I buy that entirely, but it is a fascinating idea that there has to be a second Marty who grew up in that timeline. And where does he go? Now, maybe he goes to a third timeline. Maybe when but the idea there is that when he travels back, maybe they landed the DeLorean on top of it. So, no, the idea is, I think that when he goes back in time, his Doc Brown is prepared because his Doc Brown met the original Marty. And so he probably, he says to Marty, don't change history, don't tell anybody.

He goes, he has extra plutonium to use in the time machine to time machine to get back. Cause the doc, cause doc Brown knows what's going to happen. And he doesn't hit the tree that they knocked over. Cause they knocked it over in the first movie. So they, so they go back. And I think that's the idea is basically that Marty doesn't change history. He just goes back to the present, finds doc dead.

And that his parents now live in this worse house and he doesn't have his truck anymore. And that's good have his truck anymore and that's good luck Marty and that's the end of his movie that we don't see anyway it's a cool theory and I wanted to share it so thanks to Todd he said that he used to read that article like over and over

and over again as a kid trying to understand the wiggliness of time travel so it's fun fun theory thank you for sharing that but now trying to understand the wiggliness of time travel. So it's fun. Fun theory. Thank you for sharing that. But now... I feel bad for Marty too now, don't I? I feel very bad for him.

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Jason, there is a story that we must talk about. Yeah, we must. Because I don't know if we'd be able to get away with it otherwise, and that is the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Apple Incorporated. The little interesting scenario that's going on right now. So about a week ago, this all came to light because Tim Cook published an open letter over on Apple.com. Now this so far, I think, has been spoken about and written about everywhere that technology is spoken about or written about. And will continue to be.

Yes. And it changes just since I put this in the document last night, which just appearing behind the scenes about my enthusiasm of us diving into this topic is the topic actually I literally typed, I guess we need to talk about this, huh? Yeah. that in, the FBI director posted on a blog about national security, basically saying, no, no, no, this is just one thing that we're doing. And it's fine. So you should let us do it. And then Congress can pass laws that outlaw encryption later. Right. All right, let's do it. And then Tim Cook this morning did a letter to Apple employees and they posted an FAQ about Apple's take on this issue too. So this is moving fast. It's not just that everybody's talking about it, but it's also happening at a rapid rate.

There's quite an impressive kind of war of PR happening between Apple and the United States government. I'm going to actually put a link in the show notes to a great roundup of links and articles over at Mac Stories. They have a bunch of like notable things in there, so you can go and check all that stuff out. Now, basically, my feeling on this is there is no point in us going back and telling the story. Again, you can go and read the articles if you want to. But there were just a couple of parts that I wanted to talk about, which were. Which felt important to me. And if you want to throw anything in that you can. The thing is, this topic is very messy.

It's very complicated. And as Jason mentioned mentioned it is still changing and it is changing at a rapid pace um and i think that really the best thing for us to do will be to come back to this when the situation develops to a resolution which is going to be over the next couple of months and there may be big things that happen in over the next few weeks but i don't think it's worth us spending an hour today going through the whole thing but one of the things that i wanted to just touch upon is being in the united kingdom and how this affects me i was gonna say because this isn't

spoken about a lot right because a lot of the news and a lot of the articles are generated in the u.s now there is a lot of outrage in the US about this, of course, because if the FBI does something, sets a precedent, and that's a problem there. But there's also the potential which Apple references is like, once this software is created, once this version of iOS is created, it could find its way into the world, right? That is a risk.

There can be a lot of things put into place to try and stop that, but we don't know how this is going to develop, right? Like, for example, if the FBI get it, and the FBI have this software because the court orders them to, and that's how it ends up being, it could leak out, right? There is a possibility of that. And then anyone in the world can have it. Being in the United Kingdom, or also, just quickly,

if the government mandates that Apple need to change the way that ios works and it's like it can't be this secure anymore or whatever you know we don't really know how this is going to continue so this is another example of and this happens a lot and this is probably going to upset some people but i'm going to say anyway of for some reason the united states of america thinking that they run the entire world and can make decisions that impact everyone. Being outside of the US, we feel a lot of this kind of stuff, that companies are told they need to do things or that things are, you know, laws are being put in place that will change everyone. And this is another one of those types of things. I'm in the UK. Why should my security be implicated because of a US law? And that is

potentially how this is going to run. Unless what I hope would happen is that there would then be multiple versions of iOS. Some are in the US and some are outside. Because at least where we are at the moment in the European Union, the European Union tends to have more of a harsher line on these types of things, I think. And I can be corrected if I'm wrong, but at least I feel that way. Now, the United Kingdom has its own problems and we have our own stupid laws, but they don't really seem to affect the wider world as much. And this one is just being outside of it and looking in. It's very frustrating to me that all of this is happening and that there are potential ramifications for everyone

rather than people that are just in the U.S. Yeah, it's true. I mean, if you look at it on a broad scale, like just looking at Apple's financials, the U.S. is its biggest market. They feel financials, the US is its biggest market. They feel that China is going to be its biggest market. The European market is roughly, I think, where the Chinese market is right now. It's a huge market. And so you've got these three entities whose markets are vitally important to Apple's business, present and future.

And all of them have an impact, right? I mean, Apple is an American company. And so what the US government wants to have them do, it definitely has a huge impact. But we've seen examples in the past where the EU has thrown its weight around and made companies behave in certain ways. And sometimes those have ramifications worldwide because you don't want to have three different products in three different places. And China is the same way. Although, I mean, one of the things is there's nothing stopping China from demanding certain things of Apple other than the fact that it is difficult for Apple to comply with them. But if Apple is changing its strategy to open up cracks because it needs to for the FBI or for the Justice Department or for the NSA or for whoever in the US government, then those cracks are

open and then China can say, well, we want that too. We know it exists. And if you want to do business in our country, you will give us access to that stuff too. And so that's part of it is once you engineer that thing in, the place that has the most leverage forces you to that stuff too. And so that's part of it is if once you engineer that thing in the place that has the most leverage forces you to engineer it in and then everybody else says, well, yeah, I want that too. So I mean, yeah, it's a mess. There's so many different things going on here. It's highly technical when you're talking about encryption, there are legal issues. And then there are these cases where there are ramifications way beyond specific issues,

because it does impact every, you know, potentially every Apple product sold in the world, even though it's a, you know, a request by the FBI in the United States. And then, you know, you keep pushing it and it's not just Apple, it's everyone, right? Sure. I mean, Google is on the line here too. You know, Google's challenge is that so many of their, they're an American OS vendor and, you know, obviously services vendor. But with Android, they make the operating system, but they also got hardware partners. So it's a little more complex there and a lot of their hardware partners are not in the United States. But still, you know, if this impacts Apple, then it's going to affect Google and it's going to affect Microsoft.

And that's going to be a challenge. And this is, I'd say, everything we know about this now, this is a fight that is being picked by the US government. And it's being picked as a precedent. And it's being picked in the most extreme circumstances where this is about the phone of somebody who killed a bunch of people and pledged their support for a terrorist organization. And it killed a bunch of people on apple which has been the most extreme in terms of the companies the tech companies in terms of defending its customers from intrusions from the government so this is a choice that the fbi has really made um and and that's a fact because apple actually asked for this to uh happen behind the scenes in a in-the-record, sealed discussion, and the FBI said, nope, because the FBI wanted this to be public. This is their calculated choice to raise this issue with this heated example and with the most extreme tech company in terms of fighting them on this

stuff. So here we are. Yeah yeah one of the other things i find really interesting and this might just be because i've been watching making a murderer so there's a lot of mistrust about law enforcement in my brain uh the idea of the past the icloud password being changed and and what that means for all of this uh john gruber wrote a great article on this um that again we'll put in the show notes but that is a whole big thing that apparently uh the county um changed the past the san bernardino county changed the icloud password for the account that was attached to the phone at the fbi's request which is so it just adds this like layer of what is happening here?

And Gruber sums it up quite nicely. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to destroy it by trying to summarize it. And did they do this because they were stupid and didn't realize that this would then mean that the phone couldn't back up to iCloud where Apple could extract data? Or did they do this so they could set this whole thing up? Yeah. Nobody knows. Nobody knows.

That's very interesting. Nobody knows. There was a colossal IT failure there, unless it wasn't a failure. But I think, again, I would choose incompetence over malevolence every time. Yeah. It's probably technical incompetence because there's a lot of technical issues here. I expect the same. It's interesting that Apple was saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don there's a lot of technical issues here. I expect the same. It's interesting that Apple was saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. And meanwhile, somewhere somewhere else was like, yeah, let's try that. See what happens. And so that's what they did. They reset the password. And that was a mistake because otherwise it could have been on a familiar Wi-Fi network. Also, one thing that you won't find the FBI talking about a whole lot is that both of the shooters had their own personal phones and they destroyed those phones after the attacks, I believe, and before they were found, they destroyed those phones. And that changes the narrative a lot if they're like, well, we got to get access to his work phone that he used for work because there could be a lot of special stuff on that. And it's like, well, what are the chances that there's a lot of special stuff on that,

given that they had other phones that belonged to them and that they specifically destroyed after the attacks so that you couldn't see what was on them? All right, you know, but again, that clouds the narrative, so that doesn't really come out. It's, yeah, it's a fascinating thing. I will say one thing that I have learned in all of this is brute forcing a passcode, which is what the FBI wants Apple to do and which it can, you know, Apple could even do on devices beyond the 5C because it turns out that the secure enclave firmware can also be altered theoretically by apple to allow this and that's what the fbi wants is to attach this iphone to a computer and just send it passcodes until it unlocks you know and not auto

not auto wipe they want to modify that and be able to send it remotely so that instead of sitting there going oh oh one you know that you can just have a computer going and trying all of them until it gets it open that was my sound effect of a computer very good boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, and trying all of them until it gets it open. That was my sound effect of a computer. Very good. Boop. It boops is what it does. So, you know, in brute force scenario like that, a four-digit passcode is going to fall really fast. So Apple has already switched.

Another example of Apple trying to kind of like outpace this apple already has switched to recommend that people use six digit passcodes which really helps in terms of the amount of time a brute force method would take and if you go to an alphanumeric passcode which i i have now and um since i got touch id um and i i would recommend uh that's much harder to be brute forced so you know and again it's like well i can hear somebody saying well what are you saying before we commit crimes i'm like no you know this is the thing is i have nothing to hide i'm not a lawbreaker is the is is the exact wrong thing to say because this starts with uh searching a horrible crime like this But there are lots of places that it can end up where things that you do that you're fine with,

things you believe could end up being something that is sought. And we carry our lives in these little devices, and it's very important. I actually think it's not just important in terms of us as a society in the world, not just in the United States, but I think it's also important in terms of technology. Because if it becomes very clear that the data we put on our phones is compromised and viewed by everybody or viewable by everybody, one of the things it's going to do is it's going to hinder the progress of technology, potentially. Because people will start to say, I can't trust my phone. I'm not going to use that method. I'm going to use different methods. And that's kind of crazy, but that could happen. So I don't know. There's a lot here, and it's ongoing. And I'm firmly in Apple's camp on this

one. I really am. I think that this is a, I think the, the law enforcement always wants everything it can possibly get. And it is the job of everybody else in society to say there, there are, there's a line you cannot cross because yes, they want to make us safe, but they also want to know everything and have complete control and have the right to do anything they want. And police states and totalitarian states can be very safe and very low on crime, but they're not a place anyone will want to live. And so you got to back off that and you got to say, where do we draw the line where we give law enforcement power to enforce the law and to investigate horrible crimes without opening

the door to governments and criminals from looking at all of the things that we do in our lives. And I think Apple has to push back on this because at this point, the environment in the United States government, it seems to be that there's nobody else who is going to say no because they don't understand the technology and they don't understand the ramifications. And it is very hard to stand up and say no when somebody says, these are radical terrorists who killed innocent people in California. Why do you want to, as one senator said, US senator said last week, why do you want to protect the terrorists like Apple does? Somebody has to stand up and say, this isn't about protecting terrorists. This is about protecting the citizens of our country

and free people all over the world and giving them privacy and security. Let's leave it there on that for today. I'm sure we'll come back to this over the next couple of weeks. I'm sure there's more to come. All right, so we actually both have kind of pet topics today, things that both of us really care about. And the other one is maybe a little bit lukewarm about.

I don't know, but we'll see. Way to sell it, Mike. Get ready. Get ready for half the host to be less interested, people. Woo! What we're probably going to be doing now is splitting our audience, right? So we're going to be tickling the fancy of 50% at a time. I promise to be enthusiastic about what you're talking at a time well i'll be enthusiastic i promise

to be enthusiastic about what you're talking about no i'm sorry i can't make that promise so i'm always interested in this every single year it's mobile world congress so this is where tons of mobile phone stuff happens and usually it's a bunch of android phones because apple's never there and they also have a lot of you know now we're getting a bunch of Android phones because Apple's never there. And they also have a lot of, you know, now we're getting a lot of additional products as well because mobile phone manufacturers manufacture tablets and cameras and wearables and all that kind of stuff. But there were two phone announcements that happened yesterday that I wanted to touch on because I think it's showing an interesting, a few interesting developments and maybe some

stuff that I would like to see come to my phone of choice. So Samsung announced the Galaxy S7 and the S7 Edge. And I'll put some links in the show notes to some videos and kind of first hands-on type stuff from those. And I wanted to run through a few of the features in the S7 line that I think are very interesting. Now, this first one, bear with me, an SD card slot. Now, Samsung removed this in the S6 because they removed the ability to have a, the back used to come off, right, on phones but in the s6 it was all sealed in so the sd card slot wasn't available anymore but now they've put it back in it looks like a sim card tray now the reason that i think an sd card slot is interesting is it removes the 16 gigabyte

problem because the phones are expandable now i don't think Apple would ever add an SD card slot to the iPhone. Correct. But I think it is an interesting thing to think about as a way to remove something that we all consider to be an issue, which is the 16 gigabyte iPhone, the fixed storage. I don't think Apple thinks it's an issue. Oh, no, I was very specific in saying that we think it's an issue. Yeah.

Yeah, well, I mean, it allows you to do a phone with a lower spec in terms of storage and say, look, if you want more storage, just throw in a card. It does that. And it allows you to let it grow over time, right? You can keep expanding it. And this actually brings me on to, this wasn't a phone that was announced at Mobile World Congress, but it is a really interesting take on phone storage, and it's a phone called the Nextbit Robin. And what this does, this phone, it's an Android phone, it comes with a 100 gigabyte cloud account.

I think every single phone is 32 gigabytes. They don't offer anything else. And what it does is the OS is built so that it will automatically offload data to the cloud. But not just your photos and that kind of stuff, but also applications and the data stored inside of applications. So they are removed from your phone from a storage perspective and saved in the cloud. And what they do is those applications, their icons go gray, and you can download them on demand. And I think this is really interesting. If I look at some of the apps on my phone,

I may use them very rarely, and having that storage back might be good for somebody who has a smaller phone with the ability to just grab the application within like you know 30 seconds as a wait for it to download and this the idea of everything happening automatically you know like it's just all the phone handles it for you feels like a very apple way to solve this problem yeah i mean it introduces a bunch of other issues though right it introduces the issues of uh what if that's an app that you only ever use when you're out in the woods? It's your hiking app, right? Then you have to either set it as being don't delete or...

Which you can do. doing app management in terms of manually saying what do i want to sync and what do i not sure or or you know depending on your uh you're somewhere and you've got a limited data plan and now you're somewhere and you're on cellular and and now you have to download um there are issues i mean it's clever it's clever and and i i feel like at some point this is going to happen with all of our devices, is you're not going to think about storage anymore. Because transfer speeds will be so huge, and our data allotments will be so great, and the intelligence of these devices will be so great, that you won't really even know what's on your device and what's in the cloud. That's where we're going eventually. Yeah.

I think so. And so going back to the, so that was one thing, but going back to the S7 again, a couple of other features that it has is waterproof up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes, which I think is something that we can all agree is something we'd like in the iPhone, right? Just let it be waterproof. Yeah, exactly. It has a wireless charging by induction like the apple watch you can put it on a pad uh and it also has fast charging i would like both of these features on the iphone the fast charging stuff is really cool i don't know the statistics because all the android phones differ but it would get you to a much higher percentage in a quicker period of time right like that it's i know this happens a lot with the with phones right that they charge quicker up to a certain point and then it's like

the last 20 takes the majority of the time but these phones are built and android is built with the capability to get to that point much faster which is very interesting but the key feature that i really like here is an always on display so. So the black area of the display, right? When it's off, you know your phone's just black. You can have the S7 display information to you, like the time and date. You can have a calendar on there, or you can even have notifications pop up,

and they'll just pop up on the display. The display doesn't turn on. It just appears in those areas, and I think it's because they use a Super AMOLED display. Yeah. Now, those features, especially those last three, three i mean the sd card slot i don't care for it but it's it is an an option to solve a problem but those last three features i want all of those things in my iphone today i'm i'm a i'm a wireless charging skeptic i'm not sure it's it's all in the details there, but...

I'll tell you why I would like it, and it's the Apple Watch that has made me want it. I put my phone in the same place every night. I would like to just put it down as opposed to find the cable and plug it in. And I know that's such like a what is wrong with you kind of thing, but I really like that I...

Because my Apple Watch charger is fixed to my bedside table and just taking it off and putting it down and picking it up again i like that because as well a lot of the time i'm putting my phone on charge when the room is dark and i have a few cables i have like a an iphone cable and a macbook cable plugged into the same part next to my bed and i will guarantee you no matter whatever I do I always end up with the MacBook cable in my hand so then I have to find the iPhone cable so I put the MacBook cable down and I pick up the MacBook cable again right like this happens every night as and then I have to try and find the way to plug it in and I plug it in and I put it down

I would much prefer to just rest my phone on the little charging cradle or whatever and it just charges. That's nice. A couple of things. One is that the Apple Watch can only charge that way. And these phones that can charge by induction will also be able to charge via a wire. Because one of the challenges with the Apple Watch is you have to bring that thing with you, the little puck, everywhere you go because it's the only way to charge that thing. You can't double up with a lightning cable or something like that. And again, I think it's in only way to charge that thing. You can't double up with a lightning cable or something like that. And again, I think it's in the details.

If every device that you own more or less ends up being something that you can have a pad in a couple places in your house where you can lay things down and they charge, then that's great. That's not a feature that super excites me, induction charging. It's fine. I see why it appeals to you. I think waterproofing is more exciting because, you know, I was just in Orange County over the weekend, and my mother-in-law went and got a new iPhone because her iPhone fell in the toilet. Oh, man.

Yeah. What do you think about the always-on display stuff? I like that. I think that's a great feature you gotta have an an oled screen to do that because of the way like on the apple watch because you need to um use power the way it works is it only when you light up a pixel is the only time it uses power and that's different from the um the lcd screens that have to shine the bright lights behind uh in order for you to see anything so i think it's very clever and I would love to see Apple do something like that.

You know, on the Apple Watch, too. Yeah, most definitely. The Apple Watch should have it always on display, too. But they would have to kill animations and reduce... There's a lot of work they would have to do, and it's unclear whether they could do that and have all day battery life, because if they could, they perhaps would have, and have and they didn't so they probably can't but i would love to see that on an iphone i would love to be able to get the time and some basic notifications on a glance on the iphone without at any at any moment but there are android yeah where devices that do this and they

have all day battery life and they show the time and they show basic information always so it is technically possible to do so I would love to see Apple do that too please I think if we don't get we've either watch OS 3 or we've watch 2 basically if we get to the end of this year and the Apple watch

isn't always on that I think that's like that's ridiculous to me I think that is something that has to happen um because it's it's frustrating as an apple watch user to like i'm looking at my watch right now it's down over there where it's holding the pen the pen for my pen tablet and i can't see the time yeah you know and and the gesture doesn't work every time if the gesture worked 100 at the time of me lifting my wrist then it would be mainly okay but it doesn't work every time. If the gesture worked 100% of the time of me lifting my wrist, then it would be mainly okay.

But it doesn't, right? Because technology doesn't work like that. Yeah. Another phone which is interesting in different ways is the LG G5. So a couple of things the LG G5 has. One of them is a dual camera system, and this gives the phone a wider field of view and I think helps with focusing.

The reason I bring that up is because there was a rumor earlier this year that the 6 Plus will have two cameras for this stuff, which will allow the phone to be able to push photography in a further way. But what interests me about the LG G5 is this modular nature of it. So you can pop out the bottom of the phone, like the chin comes off, and it brings the battery out with it. And currently they have two other, they're calling them friends, which is one of the worst names I've ever heard in technology.

I don't know why you'd call them friends. Call them modules or adapters or anything else. Friends is such a weird name. But these, they're basically additional functionality that you can add to your phone with hardware. So one of them is a camera grip. And what this does is you plug this into the bottom. It gives you a bigger battery.

There is a grip that you can hold. So it's more like how you would hold an actual physical camera, right? So you can put your hand around it and grip it with one hand. It has a zoom dial, a shutter button, and a dedicated video button as well. So if you are someone who really loves to take photos with your phone, it gives you additional functionality to do that in hardware, which is interesting. They also have a tie-in with Bang & Olufsen to have a DAC and amp built into it that you can plug in.

This does introduce a second 3.5mm audio jack to the phone, which is very peculiar, but it allows you to play high quality audio streams so these are things that are interesting apple would never go down this route but i really like the idea of being able to put together your favorite phone well that's the best thing about about android is that you can have this level of variation because most most almost all people do not want the uh you know some of these features but exactly you know it's a differentiator for for lg and uh lets you customize and you know more like a computer where you can kind of slide things in and out and have those modules that you want installed and not the ones

you don't and i think that's i think that's very interesting. Yeah. This is not the thing that's interesting here. I think for me is this idea of the dual camera system, because there have been rumors that Apple is working on something like that. And that makes a lot of sense. How do you up your photography game? Because that's one of the places where Apple needs to continue to improve where the competition is is strong. And just even without competition, you want the iPhone camera to be better. And so the more clever things you can do with software and multiple sensors to make that better and improving the sensors is really important. I'm a little less – I'm one of those people who just rolls their eyes when I hear about high-quality audio

because most audiophile stuff – sorry, audiophiles. about high quality audio because most audiophile stuff sorry audiophiles most audiophile stuff is not actually provably better than less audiophiley stuff but um and i believe the b b and o thing that goes in this phone is actually up sampling which why but uh anyway but there's a market for it because there are people who pay a lot of money for the highest quality DAC and amp. And that's, you know, bless them. And the camera thing is interesting because, you know, we've seen these like things you attach onto an iPhone, onto the edge of an iPhone that make it into a camera and stuff. So it's an interesting idea to say, you know, you pop in this module and your phone is now a really good camera. That's a cool idea.

I've heard him talk about this on shows as well, but do you remember David Sparks had that little camera, XOXO? Yeah, that's the one, yeah. So you would take it. You didn't even need to have it plugged in, but you'd plug in this camera at the end of your iPhone. So there is a market for this stuff, and the modular nature is interesting to me.

I've had my eye on and will continue to watch out for Project Aura, which is a company that Google bought, and they're basically trying to build a smartphone where you would basically compile it with all of the things that you want yeah so that's never gonna happen yeah well you know if it does it'll be amazing if it doesn't then shame on that oh there was one thing i went to go back to the galaxy s7 for a moment and i'm sorry i forgot to mention this but i want to go back to the Galaxy S7 for a moment. And I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this, but I want to go back to this quickly. I want to talk about the design of the phone.

Because I think the argument of Samsung copying Apple, I think is a little played out at this point. We know it happens. You can continue to show me the phone stacked on top of each other. I understand that the grill placement and the phone jack placement, it looks very similar. I get that. But I wanted to draw attention to the edge. So this is the phone, the Galaxy S7.

And the Galaxy S7 edge, the edge is a slightly larger phone. And it has a screen which wraps around the edges. So the screen actually wraps around the edges, right? So the screen actually wraps around the edge of a curved glass. I think this is one of the best looking smartphones available today. The curved screen adds a little bit of utility and functionality, but not a ton, but it adds some extra bits and they're putting more into it. Very little. They've put more into it. I mean, whatever. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I just think that the design of this is very different to what we've seen before.

Nobody else makes a phone like this. And I think it looks stunning. And I wanted to point that out because I think in our community, all Samsung ever get is you copied, you copied, you copied. But this is something that they did on their own that I think looks good. And I look forward to the email that I will receive. And being told, as I'm usually told when I ever say things like this, that I should switch to Android because I don't deserve Apple devices. So I welcome that feedback. I was just going to say that the edge display is very Samsung

in that it's something that they know how to do technically and have no idea what to do with it. And it's not useful in any way. And they're desperately adding software features to try to explain how it could be useful. But they're really not good at software and they're really not good at user interface. So it's just kind of pointless. I agree it is a very impressive bit of technology. It is probably the other premium smartphone really compared to the iphone is the gal is the galaxy s6 and now 7 edge because that's the that's like the high end of the of the

high end of the of the samsung phones and um i think it's fair uh i think it was fair for people to really knock samsung for the s6 because um were not just aping Apple, but they were turning their back on some of the key features that people want in an Android phone to ape Apple, like the fact that it didn't have upgradable storage. Yeah. And they've gone back and fixed some of that now, which is good. And they addressed that by putting it in the SIM tray, I think. But that was, I think, a fair accusation for the S6 because I think the story was not just that they were copying Apple, but they were actually kind of like breaking some of their important features that their customers had relied on in order to copy Apple, which is like, no, don't do that. That's bad.

But, you know, yeah, so I think the Edge is an impressive device. I just I'm skeptical because all the, you know, Samsung, the story of Samsung to me is that they have very impressive hardware, and then they put their kind of software junk on top of it, and most of their software is junk, and it makes Android worse. It does. They try to justify features that they add that are kind of dumb, but they can add them because they have the hardware prowess, and then they just kind of can't live up to it with their software.

I think that's my knock on Samsung, and I'm surprised that they haven't gotten i mean i guess they've gotten better at it but it's still a problem with them not really it took them six months to put the most recent version of android out i'm just saying if i if i were to buy an android phone today i would not buy a samsung i would buy i would buy one that's running stock android i would buy one of the nexuses i did actually buy a 5x but i did it because it was cheap and i wanted a reference system so i can i can say oh here's what this app looks like on android and i didn't want to spend the money on a on a six yeah i am going to buy as nexus 6p at some point because i'm very interested in it and i like to have an android device around so that's that's on my shopping list sure i want to i want to throw out one thing which is the sony xperia ear um just because

i've talked about this before this idea that uh perhaps the future is not vr goggles or glasses that you wear with cameras on them perhaps the future is things like things that talk to you and that you talk to um and i think it's interesting that people are increasingly interested in and intrigued by the Amazon Echo, not just Dan Morin. And I think this is because that's a speaker, but it's also a voice interface that just sort of hangs out and waits for you to talk to it. And the Xperia Ear is this thing that Sony is doing. for you to talk to it and uh the Xperia ear is this thing that Sony is doing and I have I I'm not going to make a judgment about whether this is going to be a good product or not I have my

doubts but um it's interesting in that it is the idea there is you stick it in your ear and then you can talk to it and you can hear what it has to say and it's paired with with your Sony Xperia phone and I think they even are going to make like a thing you can clip on your shirt that is a camera. And the idea of like, and again, I think this is not the right approach now, but I think that as technology improves, these are going to be approaches that are interesting. The idea that instead of wearing Google Glass, you're going to just stick a thing in your ear and then your intelligent agent will talk to you and you will talk back and

it knows where you are and it's talking to your phone i do think that that's sort of where it's going so i thought it was interesting that sony actually had a product at mobile world congress that is a phone accessory that is just a thing you stick in your ear and you're saying isn't that just sort of a smart bluetooth uh headset kind of, but they're trying to make it more like it's an Amazon Echo that is just stuck in your ear. It's interesting, but impractical, it seems. So I always find Mobile World Congress interesting. I think that there's some interesting stuff happening in Android.

I'm happy that it continues to happen because there's a lot of competition there, and you can see how they compete with each other and they try and push things forward. Not everything works, but at least there's stuff happening. Yeah, it would be not a very interesting world if everybody, it was just Apple and then everybody else was just sleepy. Apple needs to be motivated and competition is good. This week's episode is also brought to you by FreshBooks.

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To claim your 30 days of unrestricted use, go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade and enter the code upgrade in the How You Heard About Us section so they know that you came from this show. Thank you so much to FreshBooks for their support of Upgrade and RelayFM. So what's your topic, Jason? Oh, my topic is home automation. Okay.

We've had this on the schedule for a while. I just wanted to touch on it. I thought it would be fun to talk about something that's a little less tied to the news of the day. I got an Amazon Echo, as mentioned earlier. I got one over the weekend. All of my friends are buying them. Federico just bought one. Tiffany and Marco just bought one, yeah.

Why did you do it? I did it because I feel like enough people are trying it and using it and then integrating it into their lives that it, it seems like there's something there that this is not the, none of those people who bought them have reported to me that they use it for a while and now they don't use it anymore. Instead, they keep saying, Oh, I use it for this thing now. And now I use it for this other thing. And I think that's interesting. And it shows that Amazon keeps trying to improve the product and tie it in more stuff. And so I was intrigued by that. And I thought, well, I need to actually try this.

I was going to buy it when it first came out. And Dan basically said he was going to buy one. I said, well, then you go ahead and you write about it. And it's become one of his favorite things. So I bought one. I'm also trying to find replacements for my audio stuff in my house because the Logitech stuff is, is kind of fading, fading away the squeeze box stuff and doesn't support Apple music and, and doesn't do, you know, it doesn't have Bluetooth. And so it's kind of, it's more problematic,

although the things I still like about it. So I've been trying some Sonos gear out. And then I decided I would try the Echo for that too, because it's a speaker, internet connected, and it's got Bluetooth. So I can attach my phone to it if I want to listen to a podcast or something like that. So yeah, so I bought one and I set it up over the weekend. What are you liking about it? What is it adding or what are you replacing? Well, I've got it in the kitchen where I have had, I tried out a Sonos speaker there and I had the Logitech squeeze box there

for quite a while. And it's taking some getting used to. It's tied into this Amazon ecosystem. I don't have access via voice control to all of my music. If I want to listen to Apple music, for example, I have to stream it from my phone

because it's tied to Amazon's Prime Music Library. And Amazon's Prime Music Library has a bunch of stuff. I haven't uploaded my entire music collection onto Amazon. So I can't sort of arbitrarily tell it to play one of my playlists or all the songs from particular artists that I have in my library. I'm less far along than I think some people will be with it because it doesn't integrate with a lot of the home automation stuff that I do have. I think this is one of the problems is that it's so early for this stuff that a lot of it hasn't really connected with everything else. They're still sort of competing in their own silos in some extent so i've got a couple of lifex light bulbs and there's there's no native support on the echo for that uh there's there's a task i think they call it where you can connect uh and

it doesn't work i can't get it to i can't get it to control my my light bulbs um i can get it to control wemo switch like dan moran does um i can't get it to talk to the nest thermostat because nest doesn't have direct integration and the third party thing that connects has apparently run into its api limit with with nest um what what third party thing is that there's a third party connection see this is one of those things where you can do third-party connections inside the Echo where it's, like I said, I think it's called a skill. It's a skill. And basically a skill is like a plug-in that goes out to the web and does something and then brings the information back. But it's not something that's programmed directly by Amazon.

Have you taken a look at Wink? I have. This is something that Dan Moran suggested and i'm using it for something yeah yeah so there are there are connections and i have more to explore but it's just interesting that a lot i've run into a lot of um roadblocks but um the nice thing about it is it is it is good at some things and it's a Bluetooth device. And that's actually great because one of the challenges I had in my kitchen was that the squeeze box doesn't have Bluetooth. And so if I wanted to play something from my phone, I have to plug it into a cable. And it's nice to not have to do that. And so I've got access to everything. It'll play everything that I've got on my phone,

as well as everything that it has access to. And there'll play everything that I've got on my phone as well as everything that it has access to. And there is something nice about being across the room and saying, you know, play this kind of music. And it does a, you know, an Amazon Prime playlist shuffle. That's pretty cool. So I think this is a good idea for a product. I'm a little surprised. One, I'm surprised that Sonos doesn't have voice stuff built into their stuff yet. And I'm a little surprised. One, I'm surprised that Sonos doesn't have voice stuff built into their stuff yet. And I'm a little surprised that Apple hasn't built a little home hub with a speaker and with Siri built in. I'm a little surprised that we haven't seen a HomeKit essentially hub with Siri built in. Because one of the appeals of the Echo is that it has really good microphones.

It can pick up sound a lot better than your iPhone can. So you can control it from all over the place. And if your phone's in your pocket, you can't control Siri right then because it's in your pocket. So you got to take it out and all that. And this is just, it's ambient. It's just in your house and you can send it commands.

And I think, and then it'll play music and it'll talk to you and things like that i think that's pretty smart i think that's clever i think having a device that's not just you know oh go to your iphone for that or go to your apple watch for that but like no i've got this hub in my house that talks to my other stuff and talks to me i think that's a good idea so i'm a little surprised that we haven't seen more of these i suspect the echo seems to have gotten some momentum i suspect we will yeah it seems more and more possible that this type of thing could exist because the echo exists and is seeming to well at least in our world games attraction who knows how many people are actually really buying this thing well you know they had a super bowl ad um they're

they've been supply constrained it's often very hard to find you know it goes in and out of stock uh they they um one of the reasons that i bought one this may have happened for several of us is that uh they were suddenly saying it'll ship right away it's like wow it'll ship right away i won't have to wait for three weeks to get the new shipment and that's pretty great so um but i think i sometimes i think that too much is made of the idea that in our circles, people are interested in something and that doesn't mean that other people will be interested in it. Because the way I've always approached it, and I found this to be the case, is tech savvy people are not... How should I put this? Tech savvy people are telling us what non-tech savvy people will want

two years from now, four years from now, six years from now. I think that I have found that to be more often the case, especially when it's not like, oh, well, I picked up this new gadget because it's a new gadget and I pick up all the new gadgets. But it's like, no, I really like this one and I've integrated this into my life in this interesting way. I feel like more often than not, when you observe the early adopters, you are getting a read on what the world will do later. Yeah. Right? And so that's what intrigues me about this, is that this is an interesting product that might point the way

to something that that has you know it's the equivalent of having that all whole home computer that you talk to that's in a science fiction movie this is basically that it's amazon plopping a microphone and a speaker down in the middle of your house and you can talk to it and it tells you what's going on and uh that's that's cool and you know a phone focused company like apple uh didn't do that yeah well because they think i guess that it should all be in the phone right yeah or the apple or the apple tv remote i guess i mean that that's that's the interesting thing is if you're yeah i mean i guess you can it's in the phone and the watch and the apple tv remote and i think what's intriguing about the echo is that for some people, in some circumstances,

it adds that level of ambient sensing, right? Where you don't have to do anything, take anything out, push any buttons. This is true if you've got your iPhone out somewhere laying around. But if you've got it in your pocket, you can't really talk to it in there. And its microphones are not going to... They aren't as effective as picking the stuff up as the Echo is. I don't know. It may be ridiculous. It may be a ridiculous product and I may end up not liking it, but I feel like it got to the point where I wanted to try it. So, you know, and I've got, my house is a mess. I mean, I don't need to go into more details about this, but, you know,

I've got the Nest thermostat the nest, uh, thermostat. I wrote about smart thermostats for wire cutter and sweet home. I wrote about IP cameras, like the, like the nest cam and, and the canary and there are a bunch of others or for wire cutter. Um, I got that team making machine that, that is not that there's something to be said for devices that are not smart but are smart you know they're it's a dumb device it isn't connected to the internet it isn't connected to bluetooth or anything but it's does some clever things yeah it moves it you know it makes tea

on a timing schedule it'll drop the back boil water drop the basket pull the basket back out again and beep at a particular time uh you know it's it's interesting um although immediately dan morin's thought was when he got one was it would be great if i could like tell it to go with my with an app on my phone i'm like all right fine yeah i suppose um but uh i don't know the the there are some things you could do right like i'm sure you could could you plug it into a swimMo switch? No. No, this is the same with the dehumidifier that I have in my house. Powering it on and off at the plug does not turn it on and off.

Tell you what we need. Somebody to create a little robot thing. Button pusher? Yeah, it's just a button pusher. A little actuator, a little button pushing robot. That probably already exists. Beep. Yep. What's the sound effects today tied it to a raspberry pi and you know it crawls along your it crawls along your your uh your

kitchen counter john syracuse would say that's still not a robot um and pushes the buttons that you need to so i have to say that the uh the connected home stuff is becoming more and more prevalent in my life i feel like I'm talking about it more often. For example, we've been talking about it quite a bit on Connected. Stephen and Federico have been going down this route a lot more than I have. Federico also just bought an Echo. And we spoke about that on last week's episode. The only thing that I have is a Canary,

which I bought recently as a home security device. And having something like that is opening my eyes up to more. But I'm not really going to be digging in too much right now because I'm waiting until we actually buy our own place before I start putting stuff like this in. Like I want a nest and all that kind of stuff. Like I want to have all of that, but it's kind of pointless putting it into the house that i don't plan to be in from for hopefully too much longer yeah yeah exactly it's uh well then you'll move into some place that's got old wiring and then you'll be foiled again to take it from me um and and that's i think i think one of my questions about smart home stuff in general is how can we get to the dream?

Because the challenge is you want, you want a house that feels like a normal house, at least in our, for some values of normal, um, but is actually smart. You know, what I found is, is you can get a lot of things to be smart if you take all your light switches and turn them all on and then do you know put in bulbs and things like that but that's weird because then the light switches are all on and they don't you know you can't turn them off or the whole thing breaks because then there's no power going to these smart devices right so what you need to do is rethink how power gets to devices and then those switches on the wall are actually just talking to the smart devices but they don't actually they aren't actually connected to the if you want switches on the

wall at all i mean it all starts to unravel um so so you can't do that so instead you kind of go from the other direction which is you start adding little things here and there and you know how long do you want to rip your part your house apart to rewire it to get it to support some stuff you can't you know we upgrade our phones every year or two we don't upgrade our houses every year or two like to a brand new house and throw away the old house or recycle the old house so um and there's new tech because this is all moving so fast so you keep on you know throwing out the old light bulb that is perfectly fine as a light bulb, but it doesn't support the latest firmware that does something neat. I don't know.

It's a fascinating area because like the smartwatches, this feels like an area that everybody's trying lots of stuff and nobody really has it right. And it feels like it's early days and it's going to be a while before it all settles out.

I would be hard pressed to recommend any smart home product to a not tech-savvy person right now and say, no, no, you should totally get a whatever because you'll love it. I feel like these aren't objects of love yet. They are more like curiosity. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it and we're really early in this and so considering what this stuff is out setting out to do i think it's best that it just stays within people that are really interested in technology yeah you know because this stuff is going to change a lot and there's going to be problems with it and you, you know, at least for a while, everybody's going to be upgrading their stuff every couple of years. Yeah, yeah. And the standards are going to fight and some are going to win and some are going to lose.

And in the end, there'll probably be a kind of acceptance that everything is going to interoperate. And that'll be good. Actually, you know who i really pity is the people who are buying new homes right now like newly built homes that are being built by somebody who thinks they know what smart home features are going to be because i think that's going to be the worst scenario because you're going to you know potentially i don't know if this is actually happening but i assume it is somewhere when i go visit my mother they're building like 8 000 houses around her in Arizona.

I assume that somebody's like, oh, no, no, no, we're going to wire you for smart home and it's got all this stuff. And then that is your house is going to be out of date in a few years. That's going to be bad. Yeah. Yeah. You need to take your house and get out there. Yeah. I need a house upgrade.

Well, that'll cost many thousands of dollars. What kinds of things are you looking for from this? Like what are the things that you want to be able to do that you can't do? I don't know. I mean, some of it, like the lighting is a good example where it's like, I like the idea of having lighting that changes based on conditions, but whether it's based on the weather or light in the house, how much light is getting into your house or time of day. And I have set that up for the two bulbs that are outside with the light switch that's permanently on now. And that's all based on time and stuff like that. I like that idea. But again, I've got banks of light switches in my house and the wiring is what it is. And that's a good example of like, well, if all the lights were smartly controlled and could be programmed

and all of that, that would be kind of neat. But there's so much overhead there that it's just never going to happen. And yeah, tying it in with my weather station and my thermostat and having them all talk to each other and be able to make interesting decisions about what we want to do at a certain time of day or night. And, you know, the TV comes on and we're watching a show and it knows that when I'm watching TV in the living room after eight o'clock, I want this bank of lights off. I want that bank of lights off. I want this bank of lights at 40%, you know, and, uh, I just, I just do that all now and it's fine. I flip all the switches and I'll sit down to watch a show and I'll realize that certain lights are on, that I'm seeing the reflection in the TV set and I need to turn them off.

Eventually, that stuff should all be sort of like, oh, I see what you're doing and I know how you want the house. Or at the very least, you could say, hey, could you put me in TV, in movie theater mode or whatever it is. in movie theater mode or whatever it is. But it's just, there's so much complexity there. And I'm not willing, nor do I think it would be wise for me to invest in something because it's too early, right? I don't see some shining system out there that I'm like, yes, if I buy that controller

and rewire my entire house and put in all these light bulbs in all these places and have all these other sensors, suddenly it'll, you know, that tech is not good enough yet. It's not all here yet. But I think that's the dream, is like for all of the stuff that's in your house,

maybe even down to the team maker and stuff, to be able to talk to each other. Maybe not the team maker. I just want the team maker to, you know. The team maker needs to talk to the robot butler. That's the important part. It really, I feel like a lot of this is about the team maker i just want the team maker to you know the team maker needs to talk to the robot butler that's the important part it really i feel like a lot of this is about the team maker and the robot butler sure you got to get a robot butler that's that's the missing piece in every smart home of the future is a robot butler to bring you things thanks jeeves should we do some upgrade i think it's time hashtag Hashtag Ask Upgrade.

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That's it. That's all they do. They do it better and have been doing it longer than everyone else so go to mail route.net upgrade thank you mail route for supporting hashtag ask upgrade i sit the whole time just waiting waiting for the word wondering what i'm gonna do waiting for the word first from our essential enemy it would appear do you feel as though the impactful size of the iPad Pro has normalized after months of usage? I found that it normalized for me very quickly, like within days. Yeah.

So my wife's got an iPad Air. And I picked it up the other day and I'm like oh it's so cute it's so tiny um you do lose perspective after a while with the ipad pro i i when i pick it up i still recognize that it's a really big ipad i mean the that hasn't gone away but uh it's changed and it is normalized to a certain degree i would say i wouldn't say 100% essential enemy, but I would say, yeah. There was a moment, in fact, where when I was in Arizona visiting my mom, where I was working on my iPad Air or my MacBook Air. And it's 11-inch MacBook Air. And I pulled out the old iPad Pro and I realized, oh, my god, this is so much larger than the display

on the laptop. So much larger. It was a funny moment. When I pick it up, I can still feel it, and I'm like, boy, this is a big iPad. It definitely seems normal now. Without a shadow of a doubt,

it's my iPad. I agree. It's amazing how that works. i uh i uh picked up my son's ipad mini the other day and i was like wow this is like yeah this might as well be an iphone at this point yeah i didn't use an ipad mini and i think it's hilarious i think what's amazing about it is it's got all the pixels of the ipad air and and if you've got the mini 4 it's got most of if not all not quite all but most of the power of the iPad Air 2 so the iPad mini is a an impressive bit of hardware but it's just compared to the iPad Pro it's just kind of staggering how they you know they're the little

tiny dogs that can fit in a teacup, and then they're like Great Danes. And they're all dogs. But boy, are they different sizes. That was a very weird analogy to make. Right? I mean, iPads come in all sizes. It is definitely correct. But lots of things come in different sizes.

Yeah, I suppose. I was thinking about it. We were dog sitting this week for a couple of days. I was thinking about it. We were dog sitting this week for a couple of days. And I feel like my dog is a normal size of dog, but this was an enormous golden retriever. And my dog looked like the little mini sidekick dog compared to this dog. And my dog is not tiny, but not compared to this dog.

So I was thinking about dog sizes. Moral questions on the ipad pro uh jr wrote in my biggest ipad pro gripe is it does not allow you to split the on-screen keyboard this is very weird i i thought that this was crazy uh when i first tried the ipad pro that you couldn't do a split screen keyboard because it feels like the only ipad that really needs it right right because it's so it's so wide and if you want to hold it with two hands and thumb type you would want it to be split because there's no way you can stretch your thumbs across the width of the screen and it's got so much screen that you could leave that keyboard up and you've still got huge amounts of screen space that are not covered by it but yet they took it out or they didn't build it for

the ipad pro keyboard is probably a more accurate statement because that's a new keyboard that they built and they didn't build in the the split i think it's weird right i mean there there are a lot of apple made some choices with the ipad pro um because they had to rebuild some things that they couldn't just bring over from the original you know set of ipad you know screen sizes and uh this is one of them uh the the you know the height of the number keys i keep mistyping on the number keys because they're they're short that that bothers me the pen the question about how pen the pencil gets used is a question there's a lot of little quirks i mean it's definitely part of having the first iteration of a product is that there's stuff

like this that you you wonder why is it like this nobody knows yeah somebody knows they're not talking jeff wanted to know this is hulking back to a little bit of discussion from earlier do you think apple will either end the 16 gigabyte base model iphone or they're ultra stingy uh jeff's words five gigabytes of free icloud storage you think that either of these things are going to go away i mean on an infinite time scale everything changes uh it's gonna happen and i had to search for that bell i didn't know where it was turn around and i had to scoot across the room yeah but i found it uh if i had to predict i would i will once again predict i think the 16 is going to

go away this year on the on the uh on the iphone 7 um and the icloud i don't know they had they changed the pricing they had the opportunity right there and they didn't do it i feel like they need to i think that's actually a huge um and i've ranted about this before here. I think that's a huge user experience problem that they've got is so many people have an iPhone and an iPad and they can't use their iCloud storage and, you know, give away basic backups, you know, just give it away, give away the basic backups and then try to get them hooked on more services above that. But I feel like you should have, when you buy a new Apple device, the basic backup of data on those devices should just be covered.

And then if you want to go up, I'd also, if they wanted to keep the five gigabyte, I would say, can we make it additive so that all of your active devices on a particular Apple ID get five gigabytes toward your iCloud allotment? That might be another way of doing it because I hear that

from people all the time. They're like, it's telling me I can't back up. And the last thing you want is for your iPhone not to be backed up. And I appreciate that Apple wants to do services and make more services revenue. But I think there should be a base of the free iCloud storage. And it should be based on what is a reasonable amount for somebody to back up per device. But that one, I'm less sure that Apple thinks of that as an issue, which is surprising because I actually think it's a big issue. And finally today from Chris, if you could spend the day with any celebrity, who would it be? I'd think about this, and I know that I will probably have a better answer

if I thought about it every day for the next two weeks but I think one of the obvious ones for me is Stephen Fry because he seems like such a lovely and very interesting person I've been a big fan of Stephen Fry for many years and I would very much like to spend the day with him and just talk to him because he would I'm sure he'd always have stuff to talk about as well which you know and having had a very brief conversation with steven fry once um he is very personable and seems like a very very nice guy uh i don't think i have a good answer here i've been thinking about it and i'm not sure i've got a good answer i'm not sure i want to spend a day with a celebrity I kind of don't want to bug them

Yeah but they're happy Yeah I don't know I don't know it would be interesting It would be interesting to spend a day with somebody Like the President of the United States Or the Prime Minister Of Great Britain

Or hey the FBI Director What the prime minister of great britain um or hey the fbi director what the heck that would be an interesting day um but in terms of like celebrity like a musician or a or or an actor or a writer or something like that i don't i don't know if i have huge you know huge desires in that i i'll uh parachute me into wherever they're brainstorming the new um the new star trek movie maybe i would maybe i could just be a fly on the wall there or uh i don't know some or somebody who made something that i really love like let's say joss whedon maybe who you know buffy is my favorite tv show ever and uh i don't know what he's doing and i might catch him on a bad day where he's just sort of like sitting on the couch watching reruns

but um that would be an interesting person to have a conversation with what he's doing and I might catch him on a bad day where he's just sort of like sitting on the couch watching reruns. But that would be an interesting person to have a conversation with since he's created some stuff that I really love. But I don't know. I'm not a celebrity person, I guess. I don't know. I always find that awkward. Whenever I see famous people, I kind of like want to give them their space and run away from them and not talk to them. people i kind of like want to give them their space and run away from them and not talk to them even if it's in a perfectly reasonable environment where i should talk to them i am always like too like shy and i kind of just want to when i saw george lucas eating lunch i

just was like my gift to you george lucas is i'm not going to bother you because if i did bother you i'd have some things to say that was before the prequels but let me tell you yeah after the prequels we just left him alone i would have scowled and left him alone yeah i think that brings us to the end i think so if you'd like to find our show notes for this week's episode head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 77 thank you so much listening as always if you'd like to support us, you can support our lovely sponsors, the great people over at MailRoute, FreshBooks, and Smile PDF Pen this week. Thank you to them for helping us out this week. If you'd like to find Jason online, he's over at sixcolors.com,

theincomparable.com, and he is at jsnell on Twitter. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E, and I write the occasional thing over at mikewasright.com. If you would like to find us on the Twitter with the show, that's an interesting way to phrase that sentence, it is underscore upgrade FM. Jason tweets from that account every now and then, and it's always fun to see. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snell.

Goodbye, Mr. Hurley.