Upgrade - 79: Turkey Dinner Pizza

Episode Date: March 7, 2016

Guest John Siracusa joins Jason to talk about HDTV, the future of the Mac, and pizza.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 79 upgrade is brought to you this week by the good people at casper premium mattresses on the internet squ Squarespace, beautiful websites, I guess. I'm going to make that one up. And MailRoute, filtering spam and bounce mail out from your mail before it even gets to your server. I'm Jason Snell. I don't normally read that part because Mike Hurley is usually here, but Mike Hurley is in transit from America where he attended Matt Alexander's wedding in Dallas this weekend. And he is on the way back to London. So I have brought in one of my special guest hosts to join me for this week's edition of Upgrading. You know him from, among other places, the Accidental Tech podcast and Reconcilable Differences, as well as,

of course, many appearances on The Incomparable. It's Mr. John Syracusa. Hello. I was disappointed. I thought you were going to do the accent. Mr. John Syracusa, hello. I was disappointed. I thought you were going to do the accent. Oh, no. That would be really bad. I'm not prepared to do my English accent, and I can't do a Mike Hurley impression.

That I really can't do. I can do some fake English accents that I learned from watching BBC shows when I was in high school, but I don't think I could do an impression of Mike. Hello, mate. That's about all I got. We can work on that. We can work on that together. All right. Well, that was what Mike and I, that was our code. Hello, mate. That's about all I got. We can work on that. We can work on that together. All right. Well, that was what Mike and I, that was our, that was our code. Hello, mate. This is a podcast. That's it. That's all I got. Do some spinal tap lines, do some princess bride lines. That's about it. That's all I got. And those are fake accents too.

So, um, normally in the show we do follow up slash follow out. I know that these are not entirely approved terms by John Syracuse, but there it is. I wanted to mention that we did, you and I, along with a bunch of other interesting people, did an episode of The Incomparable that posted this weekend about Firewatch, the game from Campo Santo and published by Panic. And people should listen to it if they want to hear. Yeah, they might want to hear what I have to say about it or Tiffany Arment or Brian Hamilton or Tony Sindelar, or you. See, that's the big piece there.

You also, that is your like official, so far your official statement. So Randy Caldwell's on that too, although she had the flu and so she was retired. That's your official statement about Firewatch so far is episode 290 of the incomparable yeah i think we covered it all like i don't think there's a i don't think there's a need for me to talk about it on any other podcast i think i haven't listened to the episode yet but i felt i felt good after it was done i felt like everybody got you know their opinions out there yeah i think

so i think so i think i think it worked out pretty well um and then it's and it's a good game people should play it it's it's reasonably priced my understanding is on most modern macs it will play fairly well you may have to crank down the settings the frame rate may be kind of low but um it's playable and if you've got a ps4 you can you can buy it and play it there too and uh like i'm fond because i'm not somebody who invests dozens of hours of time like you do in something like destiny i just i'm never gonna play uh a game like that for all of those hours hundreds of hours um i love these short games that take they're sort of like movie length they're a little bit longer but um i think i think i played firewatch in like three hours, three and a half hours or something like that.

And it was a great experience, and I was happy that I had done it when I got to the end. And I might play it through again. I'm actually hoping that my wife will play it through, and maybe I'll watch while she does that. But I love these short games that you can tell a story and have an experience and get to the end and not have invested a week or two of your life. That's the key, that you will be able to get to the end and not have invested, you know, a week or two of your life. That's the key, that you will be able to get to the end. For the most part, if you can make it five minutes into this game, you will be able to get to the end. You will not find yourself thwarted by, like,

I started playing this game and then it got too hard and I couldn't finish it. Yeah, it's not one of those games. You'll make it through. Can you move around in the 3D world? I mean, if you can move around, like... Yeah, I mean, that is a barrier, to be fair, but if you make it past the first five or ten minutes, you'll make it through. Can you move around in the 3D world? I mean, if you can move around, like... Yeah, I mean, that is a barrier, to be fair. But if you make it past the first five or ten minutes, you'll be fine.

And you'll be sucked into it. And you should block out three hours to play to play it straight through because it's fun. It's a page-turner of a game, if that makes sense. Yeah, and people were asking about the Incomparable episode. They said, are there spoilers? And I think we did a pretty good job. If you want to be completely unspoiled about the game, you shouldn't listen to the episode until you played it if you we talk

about things that sound like they could be major spoilers but i feel like they aren't because they're they're things that happen in the first couple of minutes of the game so they aren't spoilers for the game the gameplay they're just spoilers for the premise of the game so they aren't spoilers for the game the game play they're just spoilers for the premise of the game which is a i feel like a different kind of spoiler and when we get to the point where we start talking about what happens at the end of the game we blow the spoiler horn but um you know it depends on how how you know how lightly do you want to be spoiled uh going into it we do talk about it a lot before we get into the you know what happens part of the of the of the story yeah and to some degree if you what happens part of the of the of the story

yeah and to some degree if you have no awareness of the game you have to at least like read a summary somewhere start reading a summary to know what kind of game is this right but if you don't really care and you just want to take our word for it going in cold is always fun it's like going into a movie that you you know maybe you've never seen an ad for it never seen a poster know nothing about it and you just show up and sometimes that can be fun i saw the demo at xoxo uh which was really interesting because it's um i i so i i knew part of the game but not the beginning because the demo is a part where you're sent on a mission because you see some fireworks.

You know the part I'm talking about, and you have to go investigate by the lake what's the source of the fireworks and get those people to stop shooting off those fireworks. But watching the game, I had no idea of the backstory of the character, and that's the first five or ten minutes of the game is this backstory of how this person ends up, who you are playing, ends up out in the wilderness. And so it was kind of fun to go through that because I was like, oh, that's why he's out here because that part I hadn't seen.

I had seen a chunk from sort of like the 20-minute mark in the game, not from the very beginning. That's always a challenge for those games. Like if you're going to give a demo, what do you demo? It's very difficult to, you don't want to spoil the game by demoing it but you do want to show people what the game is like uh and usually don't have time or money to make a custom segment that's not actually in the game that merely shows i don't know what the game would be like right that mini game that i want where all you do is stand there and look

for fires in the in the in the wilderness that is not what the game is like though it's not that is not it's not like the world's slowest arcade game where you where you're there for an entire summer it's not like desert golfing it rolls out in real time so you literally have to be there for an entire summer yeah and on day 31 there's a little puff of smoke and you're like oh is that a oh no that's nothing and then the rest of the summer passes. That's not what the game is. It's not like that at all. Anyway, it's a good game. We all liked it.

We had criticisms because, you know, nothing is so perfect, as somebody told me, that it cannot be criticized. But I think totally worth playing. And since there's a Mac version of it, if you've got a Mac that's at all modern, you should be able to play it, which is, which is nice. Um, oh, I also had a little bit of follow-out for ATP, the latest episode 159, uh, which I started listening to, uh, live and then I, I had to make dinner for my family and I, and then it turns out I tuned out just as my name was being mentioned, which is hilarious. Cause I totally missed that part. I could, I could have been there when it happened um but uh because you were talking about my ethernet port dying the other week with the stealth software update where they they banned apple banned its own ethernet driver um from from activating which i figured out because i have my

ethernet connected to a Thunderbolt breakout box. And, um, and I thought something had happened to the Thunderbolt box. Like it had died. So I plugged the ethernet into my iMac and it still didn't work. And I thought, okay, that is creepy. Like I got another cable and plugged it in and that one didn't work either. And then I was completely mystified about what was going on for a while there. So, um, but you know, it's all good now. Um,

I got my ethernet back and I actually leave my wife. I turned off because there's an annoying bug in OS 10 where sometimes, even though ethernet is prioritized over wifi, um, sometimes the, uh, wifi seems to just decide it's going to be used instead and so i'll be copying a you know 20 gigabyte podcast uh folder to my server and i have gigabit ethernet and it will and i will find that it's transferring it really slowly and it's because it's it's using wi-fi

instead so i generally leave my wi-fi turned off because that's the one way that I can force my computer to always use the Ethernet. But as a result, when my Ethernet ports died, I knew immediately because I was off the Internet. And all my audio plugins with their annoying DRM that have the phone home to make sure that you're authorized, they're all based, not only could they not get on the Internet, they're all based on your ethernet id apparently and uh it couldn't see my ethernet

cards essentially my ethernet hardware on any of my uh uh ethernet devices attached to the system so they all failed too i didn't get any editing done the same thing i'm on my imac i always leave the wi-fi turned off for that exact reason. And also, around the same time this bug happened, one of my Ethernet switches went bad. As far as I'm able to determine, it really did go bad because it didn't not see the Ethernet port. It was there, and it would sort of work. When I would reboot my switch, it would appear to work for a second,

but then would become disconnected, and then I would watch my switch reset. Anyway, I think I actually really did have a bad switch, but it was kind of weird that i had an ethernet problem at the same time that other people were having the hey it's disabled my uh ethernet driver problem yeah wired internet it's still a thing it's still i mean the speed i get with uh that gigabit ethernet it's so great i i copy these huge files and they copy so fast it's amazing i love it um and i i'm i'm still a little baffled about why the system tries to use the deprioritized uh network adapter like it's down at the bottom of the list like really don't use wi-fi and it's still finder copies will still happen with Wi-Fi.

And you know, you can't tell if it's a small file, but when it's one of those 20 gigabyte folders and it says this will take 40 minutes and you're like, that's too long. It should take less time. But I don't know. There's something there. It must, I don't, I'm mystified about it because it's not like my ethernet connection

goes up and down. It's always there. It's's solid i can see the cable you know and yet it'll be like i'm just gonna use wi-fi now that'll be that'll be fun let's let's throw these bits in the air just for kicks yeah i have no idea why it does that either i mean i've seen the same thing and you know i in fact i get to the point now where i know i don't trust the ordering at all. If I see the little fan symbol in the menu bar because I've forgotten to turn it off, I just immediately turn it off. Yeah. Yeah.

That's it. The only problem is, um, is handoff stuff. Although, um, handoff stuff is, I think some of the handoff stuff now works even when you're on Ethernet. If you've got Ethernet and Bluetooth. Like it'll say, oh, you're on the network and you've got Bluetooth. But in Yosemite, I know that I couldn't use handoff with anything if I had Wi-Fi turned off. So if I wanted to handoff something, I had to like kind of destroy the purpose of having a convenient way to do handoff. I would have to go turn Wi-Fi on and then hand something off and then turn it back off, which is dumb.

Oh, well, anyway, that wasn't even my follow-out. My follow-out was that you talked about HFS+. I don't know if I have that ding sound effect that I can put in that Marco always puts in for ATP. But I just, I loved you talking about HFS Plus and the whole story behind how if you attached an HFS Plus drive to a Mac, and this is Mac OS 8.1, right, that this happened. It was like 1998. And if you attach an HFS Plus to a Mac

that didn't support HFS Plus, it had that little teach text file that was basically, here's why you can't see what's on this disk. And you could open it and it would tell you and it was just baked into the format was this kind of fake old style HFS disk that had this one file in it. But what was really funny and also kind of sobering in terms of how long ago this was and that I remember it is that was right when I started at Macworld. I started Macworld in late 97. And I remember the briefing that we had about 8.1, where they had a whole like white paper about HFS Plus. They came into the Macworld offices. HFS plus, um, they came into the Mac world offices and this was back in the time when Apple executives came to computer magazines because Apple was not, you know, in great shape and like extolled the virtues of their updates and stuff.

So we had like Phil Schiller. I'm not sure if he was in that briefing. He might've been, you know, I definitely remember Phil Schiller coming in for OS X briefings, coming, you know, schlepping up to San Francisco and coming to presumably all of the magazines and sitting down and doing a demo of what they were doing with the operating system. And I definitely remember,

I remember the room it was in that we had that briefing for OS 8.1 and HFS+. And they were talking about how exciting it was that they had this new update to the file system. And it was going to be the Mac OS extended format. And it was going to offer all of these possibilities and possibilities for the future. And I remember at the time, it was just sort of like, okay, this new file system, that's a little wrinkle. But I would never have guessed that 18 years later we would still be using it on all of our computers 18 years later it's still just hfs plus like i think that when

they made os 10 or when they make these these grand new things they're like we believe this is they're going to be the foundation for the mac platform for the next 15 years or something like that even then they don't say like 18 to 20. Maybe they said 20. I don't know. But like the sort of grand vision of like we are setting the foundation for, you know, the next era. And this was just like now you can have big volumes and your block size won't be humongous. Well, yeah, and they didn't even have this was not even in the, you know, this was the what?

This was the very beginning of the Steve Jobs return era, but really, this was obviously in the works before Steve got there. This was before the next acquisition happened that they were working on this thing. And all our devices still have it. Now, it's not like they didn't add stuff, right? They added journaling at one point and of course there was that question of whether this was going to be the file system that os 10 used uh which ultimately uh yeah it was in the end but um we still have it all the all this time later and we're not going to do i i somebody actually asked what we what um when i asked what we should talk about on this episode somebody said everything that john likes to talk about except file systems.

Okay, wow. But I wanted to at least reminisce about this a little bit, just because this seemingly innocuous briefing that I remember from 1998, and it's still with us today. I just find that mind-boggling. I mean, I feel like I've been in the house that I live in forever, and we bought it in 1999. That was 17 years ago.

HFS Plus, longer than that. Wow. Another fun tidbit about HFS Plus was it had support for 255-character file names. Up to that point, the Mac had been limited to 32-character files. So the file system supported it, but the operating system didn't yet. Right. So they could kind of sort of brag. They're like, oh extended hfs plus and it has these new features and you can change these new attributes to let you have larger volume sizes and you can have 255 character files but not really

because the os doesn't support that yet but we'll support that soon so it's like you had a file system uh that supported a feature but then an operating system that kept you within 32 character file names which was just weird but back then something like that was was the least of apple's problems yeah okay well at least i suppose in a future update assuming apple is still in business they'll have this thing where we were so beaten down at that point it's like whatever okay fine great you know yeah it was a different era because windows had true 255 character files at that point and so there was a little bit of a competition there yeah i remember we you know you get the finder and you start to type and you can't you know they're like hey long file name support is

here but you'd still get to what 32 characters and it would be like boop nope that's it that's all you get until they updated the whole os to support it later um and then the os 10 error there was that there was all the like are they going to support uh a case insensitive or case sensitive and uh there's yeah it's actually kind of a miracle that although they made that huge operating system switch with os 10 they kept the file system it's kind of amazing but yeah i mean there was the option to install on ufs for a little while in the early days of OS X, but that eventually went by the wayside. Yeah.

I like how that went, too, because over time, it just got more and more. The warnings got more and more dire. Do you remember that where it was like, you probably don't want to do this? And then I think maybe at one point it was just in the server install. It was like, well, OS X server could do it, but you really don't want to. And it's got their issues, but we'll let you. And then finally, it was just like, well, OS 10 server could do it, but you really don't want to. And it's got their issues, but we'll let you. And then finally it was just like, no, you know, it's OS 10 extended. Your Mac OS extended is required now.

Um, I had a couple more pieces of followup and then we'll get into our topics. Uh, I thought it was, um, uh, we got, we got a note from Michael, listener Michael, based on last week's show where Mike and I talked about the naming of the iPad and iPad Pro. And this question seemed to have your name written all over it as somebody who used an iPod Touch for a very long time, which is, if we go to iPad and iPad Pro lines, how about the iPad line adding a third size and using that to replace the iPod Touch? Could they just change the silk screen on the back of the iPod Touch and call it an iPad Lite or something? The iPad Nano, right? iPad Nano. Yeah, that's it. Okay. All right. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this idea of bifurcating the ipad no as as incredibly confused as the ipod touch uh product name is uh i don't think it would be an improvement to call it an ipad because ipad means tablet for

everybody and when you see this tiny little thing you could say whatever you think it might be but it's definitely not a tablet it's not you know what i mean it's barely i mean smaller than all that all of apple's phones smaller than the phones exactly that's exactly it so why would you do that yeah so it just it just they can apple will continue to call the ipod touch and customers will continue to call the ipod and that'll be fine yep that's that's it i don't know i'm still i I kind of have come around to the idea of splitting the iPad line in two. But, yeah, it's still going to be weird if they do it. And I'm not quite sure. What do you mean by two?

Like pro and non-pro? Yeah, pro and non-pro. The idea that the things that are the top of the line features are the, I wrote a piece that was on Macworld that I'll put in the show notes about the idea that, yeah, so your pencil support and your smart connector and the top-of-the-line processors basically are in something you call the iPad Pro. Even if they come in what we think of as the iPad Air size and the iPad Pro size now, and they end up calling those the, you know, whatever, 10 and 13 or some fraction of those versions. And then separately, you have the iPad line, which is basically your slower, lower featured and cheaper version. And that's treating them like laptops, instead of treating them like iPhones, where they're currently treated, which also means that last year's model is no longer what's for sale for cheap.

Instead, it's just the lower product line model that's for sale for cheap. Yeah, that all makes sense because they've shown that they're willing and able to add features on the high end. And so, I mean, they've already done it essentially themselves. Bifurcating the line is not just a naming difference. It's not just a size difference. The iPad Pro is different in fundamental ways from the rest of the line. So I think you can move the pencil all the way down, but the smart connector in particular, the whole idea that you're going to treat this as more of a Microsoft Surface-style system

or more of a laptop replacement, like that Apple has finally gone there instead of being like, well, some people like to use it and you can use a Bluetooth keyboard and blah, blah, blah. Like, no, there's a connector for it. It's a keyboard. We sell it. We fully expect you to use this more like a laptop eventually we'll get the os support there but like i said i think the pencils can go all the way down if they want because i don't think pencils are a pro feature i think they just happen to have started off there i think they can go all the way down the line i think they could go all the way down the line to

the phones and it would be fine um with customers anyway if not with apple but the other things like oh we've got tons of ram and we've got the really high refresh rate for like drawing you don't need that if you're just going to use like a stylus like on the you know galaxy note or whatever um and uh the the smart connector and the keyboard support and whatever else they do the whole idea of a high-end product means uh not just capabilities but like if we have a choice uh you know the regular ones for consumers we're not going to shove like four gigs of ram in them because we don't think they need it but for this one we are because uh we want you to be able to run pro level applications then they can start bifurcating the software as well they get the

real benefit from it where why is someone going to buy a thousand dollar ipad well what if i told you that there's special applications that only run on the Pro line, and then people can write software just for the Pro line that takes advantage of all these faster CPUs and more memory and whatever other capabilities they want to give? Yeah, I kind of like the idea of, and I wonder if some of this is just thinking

that the iPad doesn't behave like a phone market it behaves like the tablet market or i mean behaves like the laptop market or the computer market they've got like longer refresh cycles and all that so it's like let's name them like we name our laptops we don't keep last year's macbook around we don't we don't do that or well there's that one with the non-retina other than the one for education that's just sort of like don't please don't buy this but we you know schools want it so we're going to sell it but you know the new macbook retinas don't come out and then the old macbook retinas are still for sale for slightly cheaper like they they don't do that

instead they've got they did that with the MacBook Airs, too, right? No, but the MacBook Air got updated. The MacBook Air actually got updated, right? Which is weird. But again, I think that's a price difference. It got the innards bumped a little bit, but, like, they didn't go retina with it, which is what they would have done. So they sort of kept that line around because they weren't entirely confident in its replacement. And they did bump the innards. It's a transitional product here but yeah

but it's not last year's models it's this year's model of this thing that's going to go away but they did bump it a little bit right whereas the iphone it's just sort of like yeah it's last year's model but it's a hundred dollars less so you could buy it i feel like that's what they're trying to do with the ipad is is maybe go in that direction if that rumor is true that the just say you know this is how we're going to do it is it's differentiated by product lines and within the product lines there are different sizes but that's what you get to buy you can buy the cheaper ones or the or the more expensive ones that are a little bit nicer uh but you've got what we've got here and not the one from you know you can buy the three or the two or the one or whatever with a mini it's like you could buy the four or the two but you're thinking they're gonna uh keep uh two versions of the what used to be the full-size

ipad one with the smart connector that's called a pro and one without that's not i mean it's not in the rumor but i kind of feel like they've got to have a full i don't understand how you could take the current ipad air make a new one, and call it an iPad Pro, and not still have an iPad Air or maybe just iPad that's also available. Because that is, by all accounts, as far as I can tell, the mainstream iPad. That is the one. It's the classic one. And it's probably the best-selling one. And I feel like, you know, why would you make that a pro?

Not everybody is going to want a pro. So it seems like that makes sense to sort of say, well, the new one is a pro, but we're going to keep the old one around. Maybe it's the Air 2. Maybe it's the Air 1. We're going to keep it around. But, you know, those are your choices. You can get this regular one or you can get the pro one. Yeah, sense for now anyway yeah it's hard to get there see the lines i would still

like to see the lines extend like the pro to get more pro-y and for the low end for them to drive that down i agree because they're still kind of hanging on to the idea that like the mini is like well the mini is just as good as the air too it's just a smaller size and it's like you can make that mini a lot cheaper if you backed off a little bit on that and just to recognize that it's an actual low-end device i feel like that's what where they're going with this the question is how committed they are to that and how how low do you go and and that that's the mystery because that you know they haven't done something like this before, I think. So, but there's room. I mean, observers of the tablet market suggest that, you know, cheaper, one of Apple's problems is that they rule the premium tablet market, but there's this huge other tablet market that is not a place

that Apple wants to play. So does Apple want to push down there with the iPad? If they've got a pro line, can they afford then to sort of take the regular iPad line down a little bit in scope? And maybe they can. Maybe that's good. Well, see, they didn't do it on the Mac. They never really went like super low end. The Mac LC, never mind. Yeah, they never went for like the really low end. They never made a netbook. They never actually made a Mac that was this cheap, right? But the iPod line, they totally did line they totally did the ipod line they said sure we'll sell you a shuffle for 50 bucks so they tried on the ipod line to go pretty much as low as you can go i mean maybe it wasn't 25 but they were selling you an ipod for 50 bucks for 49.99 or whatever they went low end on the ipod did that

i mean it was didn't i don't think it really helped that much or hurt that much the ipod but it was an experiment for apple to say let's take this product line the ipod that we've diversified and then we can kind of see the growth curve and it's kind of going away but you know what let's go all the way down all the way as low as we can go how cheaply can apple make a thing and still call it an apple device but really get a price point that's like just a little bit more expensive than an ipod sock yeah it's hard to compete against the uh six pack of amazon tablets but uh it's you know but they aren't iPads, right? So it'll be interesting to see if they go this route what they do and how low they do go. Yeah, we'll see.

We'll see. It gives them some room. Although I would say that, yeah, Apple never made a netbook, but they have experimented in how low they can go. Like the fact that there is now always a Mac laptop available for just under $1,000. That's still a premium laptop. It is, but Apple didn't used to go down that far with their laptops. It used to be you had to get $1299 or 13.99 to get into a mac laptop at all and they're not immune to pc pricing pc pricing has come down so much the average selling prices of

computers has just gone yeah you know our graph has gone so low that they have to be pulled down a little bit so and then you break under the four digit price and that's kind of important and plus really you're going to get argued back up there by your friends telling you to get a mac with more ram anyway sure but that's the i look at that and i think well that that's kind of important and plus really you're going to get argued back up there by your friends telling you to get a mac with more ram anyway sure but that's the i look at that and i think well that that's sort of what this is which is tablets are exerting pressure to come down in price but it's still you know they're not going to go they're not going to go too low they're not going to sell six the ipad shuffle with no screen it'll be really cheap to make. Super easy. All right. Well, I want to do a sponsor.

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and Casper will come and take your mattress away. So easy buying experience. It's risk-free. When you buy it, it comes in a box. It's kind of magical. You open it up, it expands to fill the space. I really like mine. And there's even a deal. Listeners of Upgrade can get $50 toward any mattress purchased by visiting casper.com slash upgrade and using the code upgrade. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you to Casper for supporting Upgrade and all of RelayFM. I just bought some pillows and sheets from Casper that are coming tomorrow. You excited me with your discussions of Casper pillows on ATP. So I'm trying those out.

It's pretty neat. I like the advancement of pillow technology instead of just being a sack stuffed with stuff. Yeah, pillow stuff. Now it's multiple sacks,'m led to believe i don't know anyway it's cool yeah they got a whole technology thing there so yeah i'm looking forward to trying that stuff out now that i got the mattress i figure just let's just go all the way let's just all casper all the time uh okay so we're gonna come back to pizza i have pizza down as a as a topic um because why not but uh i thought we would talk about home tech a little

bit this is one of those things where every now and then on um on atp i feel like um like you're talking to people who don't understand you and that maybe i'm more um i'm more like your people than they are in the sense that I, like you, have like a TV and a I have like a home theater set up and I care about how my TV settings are. And, you know, Casey seems to not care if he's watching soap operas. So I just I thought maybe we would talk a little about tech in our homes, especially entertainment stuff, because you and I are not cable cutters. We have TiVos. We have lots of other little boxes. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about that a little bit since we have that in common and that a lot of our colleagues, like Mike, is basically a cord cutter who only watches. He seems to maybe watch a little bit of video on TV now, but he basically doesn't understand why a TV exists.

He would rather just watch TV shows on an iPad. He just watches YouTube on his phone held two inches from his face. Yeah, well, I get the sense that he's watched all of Seinfeld, like sitting on a couch with an iPad, which as it was meant to be, as it was foretold in the old times. So you have a TiVo Romeo, right? Like I do. Is that right? Yeah, I have whatever the fanciest one is. Yep, yep, me too.

Me too. And when I hear you talking about this stuff, you were mentioning Plex on there and how Plex on TiVo does some things and not others. I think the Plex app on TiVo is limited to 720p, which is kind of infuriating. I think that's the case. We're on Apple TV.

I think it might just be the menus that it's limited to, but I'm pretty sure it down mixes everything to stereo, so it's a non-starter. Yeah. I love my TiVo. I want to say that it seems totally passe to talk about a TiVo. This is an old product. TiVo's been around since like 2000.

It's just a DVR, whatever. I can get one from the cable company, but I really kind of love it. I find I use that. That is my primary device for entertainment on my TV now. I do have the Apple TV and I use it some, but most of the time I'm watching, even when I'm watching streaming, most of the time it's coming through TiVo because they've got the Netflix app and the Hulu app and the Amazon app. And so a lot of the time I end up just using the TiVo. And the TiVo OS having support for like, this show is on Hulu. Would you like to watch it on Hulu?

And it just sort of plays through to the Hulu app. So I'm really happy with it. It's sort of eliminated a lot of the use cases I used to have for the Apple TV. Yeah, they've been getting better. Like they have a million apps on TiVo, but most of the time I would not use the TiVo for those things. If I had any other choice, I would use some other box. But they've been getting better. Like I think, you know, and the tail end of the previous generation Apple TV, it started to really be unreliable for me that the old apple tv used to be my go-to netflix box um because the tivo netflix client was just really slow and took a long time and

would crash sometimes and just you know and the apple tv was much more slick and nice but eventually just like we learned you know oh let's watch a thing on netflix and you go to the apple tv and get some weird error or the thing doesn't start. And eventually I said, all right, well, now it's time for TiVo to have a shot. And the TiVo Netflix app was slow to launch and weird, but it would play the show. And eventually it started to win. And then the TiVo Netflix app started to get better.

Still not as good as the one on Apple TV, especially the new Apple TV. But sometimes you just, you know, TiVo is also our main thing. That's like basically our input number one on the television and the receiver. If you're already there, sometimes it's just easier to go to the Netflix app there than switching inputs and going to the Apple TV. But mostly I'm watching recorded shows in the TiVo. And so that covers a lot of my and my children's television watching.

Yeah, well, I've discovered that although I can watch like HBO Go and all of that, but I've got the shows on the DVR. So I just watch them on the DVR. And likewise, I've got Hulu, so I can watch shows on Hulu, but I recorded them. I end up watching them recorded. And TiVo is up their game on the software side a little bit. The apps like the Netflix app and the Hulu app are better, but they've also added the integration where it knows those episodes are streaming, and there's a shortcut to take you to the streaming app it'll launch the app it'll take you to that episode in that app so i'm impressed by that and then on the live tv stuff they added the uh oh oh that's only in certain markets though that's like in sanford you don't have

the d button yet do you oh for skipping commercials yeah no we've got that do you have that feature where you get to the yeah i think they rolled that out have they rolled that out to everyone now um that's so great so so when it gets to the end of a of a part of the show and it goes into the commercial break a little thing comes up that says press the press d to skip all the commercials and it's for supposedly it's like in prime time ish for the top like 20 most watched channels because they've got to have like a sweatshop somewhere where people are just like putting in the time codes of all the commercial breaks. And if you watch a show right when it's on, it's not there. But like an hour or two later, the skip information gets put in.

But that's such a great feature because you can you know, you can watch the commercials if you want to and you can skip them if you want to. Whether you, I know you were a big 30-second skip guy and I kind of went back and forth between, you know, ba-doop, ba-doop, ba-doop or just 30-second skip. But now you just press the button and it just jumps over all the commercials. And that's a great feature too. Yeah, it means people without my amazing 30 second skipping skills can successfully skip commercials even a child so easy even a child can do it my son controlled the remote the other day and he just pressed the d button when the thing comes up and it says skip of course like this is leading to their ui having you know i don't know what their ui is thinking like how

many badges can you fit at the end of a thing like they've already got the hd one and then now we have the skip one as soon as not going to be any room left left for the title there's gonna be a series of badges and then like a colored dot well also how many things can they overlay on the picture because you you have when it goes to commercial it puts the skip to d and then and then it's got that other stupid feature which is like smart speed sort of an overcast where it's like watch the show but slightly faster which i don't understand that at all i don't know why anyone would want a lot of tv to get through they really need to go faster yeah i've got advice for them just watch take a bad show that you don't like and don't watch it and save time watch them all at the right speed instead of at this weird

compressed like it's like those movies where they would um what was it was it in england that they they did this? The standards conversion thing where rather than like converting the frames, they would just play it faster. Or maybe it was taking movies and playing them on TV and you play them too fast. But it's that same idea. It's like, why are these people moving strangely fast? And the answer was because we just didn't want to worry about the frame rate. We just played it at the new frame rate.

It's not a good idea. Don't do that. But TiVo's got it there. And every time you press the play button, it brings up the thing that says, did you know that if you press this button now, everybody will talk a little bit faster and it'll be really annoying? Yeah, I know that TiVo. I don't care. Yeah, the main problem that TiVo apps still have is they all suffer in comparison to the native TiVo watching recorded television interface. So, for example, like I just finished watching the first season of Man in the High Castle, and I watched it through my TiVo on the Amazon thing.

And every time you launch the Amazon app, there's no commercials in it. But there is a one minute and 20 second credit sequence that I would love to skip. Right. There is no D button to skip it. There is no one minute and 20 second credit sequence that I would love to skip. Right. There is no D button to skip it. There is no 30 second skip. You can skip it, but it doesn't work the same way as the regular TiVo timeline works. You have to essentially fast forward, you know, 2X, 4X, whatever. Because these are all these Opera, they're basically HTML apps.

They're like Opera web apps. So the UI is totally unlike anywhere else in the TiVo when you're in those apps. And it's not as good. It's not as responsive. No, it's not. Whereas on the Apple TV, even though the apps all seem to vary a lot, all of them have a fairly responsive scrubber that responds to the swiping of your thumb, and most of them seem to respond to the 10-second forward skip thing in a similar level of responsiveness, whereas the TiVo, it's like it's clear.

Am I using the real TiVo, or am I using one of those weird apps? And the weird app ones just are much more delicate and you can't really perturb them because you might be seeing some spinners and you might not know what you're skipping to and from, and you might have to wait a while to catch up. You know, the real horror is I have a 4K TV, which, you know, it was cheap. And my TV... which you know it was it was cheap and my tv so listening to you and knowing we're in this era as you talk about on atp a lot where the plasmas are gone but the the new wonderful tvs aren't here yet my tv died and i was like god i was hoping it would hang on but it just it died it's like fried onto stasis for five years i know

exactly just don't not watch tv for a while be like mike just watch things on my ipad for a while i mean like uh like fry and futurama like going to the stick going to stasis one of those little things freeze you you wake up it'll be five years later president trump what uh but give me a tv and i'll be fine so um so i went to costco and i bought a costco tv and this was my strategy was not basically i'm not going to pay too much for this muffler that was my strategy is like look i just want a tv i don't care if it only lasts a few years i don't care i just want to i just want to have a tv until i can one day buy a really good new tv that's going to be fancy and let me see in all the colors that i can't see because I'm colorblind.

What did you get, a Vizio? I got a Vizio 4K that was decently reviewed. I stood there. I did the thing where you stand in the middle of the TV department at Costco and look up reviews on your phone. And there was a Samsung TV that was about the same cost that was rated similarly.

And then there was this Vizio one, and it was a 4K TV. And I thought, well, that's got more Ks, so I'm going to get that. And, you know, it's not bad. I have bought a couple other Vizio TVs at Costco, and what I would say about them is Vizio TVs have gotten a lot better since the first one I bought. I would say that.

Wow. So much better. And they're cheap. And for like, I've got a TV out here in the garage that gets used rarely, but it does get used. And it's a good use for it. But for the main TV, so I got this 4K TV and it looks pretty good. And the UI isn't fantastic, but the price was right and it looks pretty good. And it's got this 4K, so it's like, okay, 4K. What can I do with that? Is that anything?

Can I even discern the difference in quality? But the thing about it is, how do you get 4K content onto a 4K TV? Right now, you could buy, I guess Amazon has a 4K Fire TV you can get now, but when I bought this TV, that wasn't out yet. The answer is Netflix and Amazon's apps that are built into the TV support 4K streams. So sometimes I watch Amazon and Netflix content not on my TiVo or my Apple TV, but on like an animal on the TV app on the TV set itself. Yeah, like you should do the math for the viewing distance. I'm pretty sure that you're not getting any benefit

from the resolution. You may be getting a benefit from the wider color range or the more flexible frame rates, depending on how this stuff is created, but you're probably getting stuff subtracted by the massive compression that those streaming services are using so overall

it's probably about a wash but you might get better and the other problem is like the the slightly wider color ranges that are supported by the 4k televisions uh the content may not be mastered in that way so it may not be helping you and the other thing is even if it is and even if they send it that way the television that you bought at costco may not be able to even display exactly so it's probably a wash but it's probably not hurting you too much. And that is, of the two possible viable strategies for buying TVs now you picked one. One is get the cheapest television you possibly can. You didn't even do that because you got a 4K.

It would have been better if you just got a much cheaper 10E. Well, I wanted to be good. Well, that was the thing is I almost got the Samsung, which was basically within $100 of the price and was not a 4k tv but was uh you know well reviewed and was in the was in the ballpark but it was that like i want it to be good enough that i feel like i'm going to enjoy watching this tv and it's this is not a long-term investment just like get me through until there are better tvs but although i gotta say having bought these three tvs over the course of the whatever, six years, they are a lot better than they used to be.

Like that first Vizio TV that I bought was so bad. Like the black levels on it were so awful. And even just the LCD TVs have come a long way. But about the 4K, my thought, and I haven't tested this, and I actually haven't even looked up. It may or may not be true it's very hard for me to test this like a do ab testing of this because the amount of time it takes for me to switch from like daredevil here to daredevil there and compare the 4k you just kind of can't do it my thought is that the 4k stream is probably a higher bit rate

than the 1080 stream that you know 2160 stream it's probably seeking to a higher bitrate than the 1080 stream, that, you know, 2160 stream, it's probably seeking to a higher bitrate, basically the way Netflix works, you know, it's scaling based on how much it can get across the pipe. And you might get something that starts in 480, and then goes up to 720, and then goes up to 1080. And if you're watching on a 4k TV, it will then keep going, and it will go up to 2160. And so my thought was, well, maybe what I'm getting here is a better quality picture because it's able to, you know, the 4K stream is a higher resolution, but also, even though it's heavily compressed, more bitrate than the standard 1080 stream. That could also be totally fiction because it's very hard for me to tell i i cannot

say surely that i'm absolutely seeing 4k level of detail on this it's like oh no no i totally see the 28 no 2180 no it's it's not no i i can't say that i think it may be a placebo but my hope is that it looks better in general i don't know yeah and you still haven't had a television with decent black levels in your house i know you the lcds have gotten better but it's kind of a good thing that you've never seen what these shows are actually supposed to look like including on your max by the way that's not true i don't have great black levels either that doesn't that's not true though because um uh i think you know this that i i the land of the forbidden television fruit is is arizona where when my parents when my

parents moved into their house five years ago they bought two huge beautiful panasonic plasmas and i was down there the other week and i was uh it was when the expanse was on and i decided i was going to watch the expanse when i was down there rather than waiting and i told lauren you know go ahead and watch the expanse and and i'm going to watch it down here and when i get back we'll compare notes about it and i watched that and that's a space show so there's a lot of black like outer space stuff in it and i watched it on that huge like i don't even know what it is 70 inch plasma in my in my mom's living room oh my god right it's just like so i've seen i you know i've had a few years to know what the black levels look like on a TV.

It should never have looked. They're even more impressive on OLEDs, of course. Sure. I should never, I should avert my eyes whenever I go down there. It's a beautiful TV. I told my mom if she ever decides to move to a smaller house, I would like to take that plasma. It's not going to fit in your entertainment center. You're going to have to tear down that whole side of the room.

And I will. And instead, there will be a giant TV that's erected on a wall and it will be good i don't know it's uh it's funny i'm happy with the the tv we got um whether the 4k is a real thing or not um it looks it looks good it looks better than the tv we had and uh you know that's that's good enough for now i i what i find funny talking about giant tvs is every time i shop for a tv i say no no it's got to be bigger than the last one because the last one wasn't that big it's like that old steve martin routine do you remember that where it's like i got i got mono and then i got stereo and the mono sounded like sounded terrible so then i got quadraphonic then that sounded you know made stereo sound terrible and

then i got like google phonic where i have a thousand speakers but now it sounds terrible too i feel like that with tvs like i keep saying no no it needs to be a bigger tv oh no no this one will be a little bit bigger this one will fit in the entertainment center um so next time i'm going to get one that sort of sticks out the sides but it'll still fit on the base so it'll be fine and i still have that now where i got the so i got this tv that's several inches diagonal bigger than the last one and now i look at it and go it could be bigger could be bigger yeah yeah i mean the tv manufacturers do that for you uh because like when i bought my big tv which is not even that big the smallest size it came in was 55 that was the smallest and that was like so much bigger than any television I'd ever had before.

I'm just waiting until the small size you can get is 65. I don't know if they're going to go there, but the minimum size for the good TVs is going up and up. And it's at the point now where you can't even buy small televisions. Like, if you want to get... Like, we wanted to get a television for our bedroom that was smaller, but not crap, it was impossible. It was like, I don't want a 55 inch television in my

bedroom can you have a small tv that doesn't look like crap and the answer is no we don't make those i recommend the ipad again we'll go back to the mic now the ipad is not a good tv no i agree i agree it's not mike mike will disagree with that but no it's hard i mean just just display wise just like it is it does not perform well as a television, ignoring the size and how close to you. Because I do watch things on the iPad, not things that I care about too much, but re-watching old television shows or whatever, I do watch them on the iPad, and it's fine.

But by no means is this a good television. Yeah. I looked at the small TVs when I was at Costco, and I was kind of aghast because, yeah, below a certain point, you're like in novelty TVs. It's like, I guess you could have a tiny TV, but it's also a microwave and has an FM radio like. Yeah, it's like a kitchen TV and it's like you can make it look good. Like it's still going to be cheap, but you just put a decent size.

But, you know, it's not the way the economies of scale work, I guess. Like they have the lines that are making these television. They have to make them a certain size to make their money back, and they don't want to sell you one for $200 that's 40 inches or 30 inches. Yeah, and that's now a small TV. That's the funny thing. 40-inch TV. Meh. A little shrimpy.

Could do more. Well, I've got some more stuff to talk about, but I would like to take a break, I think, maybe now. It's a good time to tell you about something else that's cool, as Casey List might say. This episode of Upgrade brought to you by Squarespace. Yes, the simplest way for anyone to create a beautiful landing page, website, or online store. Start building your website today at squarespace.com.

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The commerce platform is built right in. extra. It's just part of Squarespace. The commerce platform is built right in. And if all you want is something super simple, like a single page, because you've got an event, or you want to tell people about yourself and how awesome you are, you can build something called the cover page. It's a single page website that looks fantastic. And there are a whole bunch of amazing templates that you can use to build those too. Their hosting is great. The Squarespace sites stay up just endlessly. They're not going to come up and down. They are rock solid and fast. And if you want to stretch Squarespace even further, yes, they have a developer platform. You do not have to just take the templates that are,

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the offer code upgrade you'll get 10 off your first purchase and you will show your support for upgrade thank you to squarespace for their support of upgrade and all of relay fm um i i feel like it's a miracle that i didn't at any point call them spare squace in that ad john because that's uh what the guys at the flop do. It's their own fault for having a confusing enough name to confuse Dan McCoy. Lots of simple words confuse Dan McCoy, though. So, yes, we should, I loved, I will say this a little follow-up, too. I loved you and Merlin talking about Flophouse on Reconcilable Differences, which is a great podcast.

Reconcilable Differences is the podcast that I think, man, I don't get to talk about any of this stuff on any of the podcasts I do. And I do a lot of podcasts, but they're all about stuff. You're just going to keep making up podcasts until every single thought that enters your head has an outlet and a podcast. Well, you would think that I would have already had all of those things, right? You'd think I would have covered it, but I haven't because all my podcasts are sort of about stuff. And Reconcilable Differences is not about that stuff. It's just about, like, life. It's like Mike and Casey do on Analog.

It's just about, like, feelings and growing up and being a parent and stuff like that. So it's a great podcast. People should listen to it. But you guys did talk about Flophouse, and I thought it was really endearing that the first time you just assumed that everybody knew that you were huge super fans of the flop house and so you gave it a little tough love about like the sound quality problems and all that and merlin referred to it as like that weird show and then the guys who did the flop house that wasn't tough love we were explaining why we loved it i just didn't sound like it but we were well yeah but you know fans sort of like can talk it's like talking to a member of your family it's like you don't you don't you don't protect them quite as

much i think you're like yeah you know i love the flop house of course you know i love it so when i tell you that it's got all these terrible technical problems i'm saying it with love right but i felt like maybe that got lost in translation a little bit where they're like you know i think dan mccoy is a little who who edits the episodes and and sets up and is the recording studio and he's the designated technical guy i think he he is still bugged by the fact that they are are riddled with technical problems when they record that podcast so you guys came back the next time comedy show yeah it is a comedy show it's not a it's not a tech podcast they're not not tech experts. They're comedians. In a comedy show, though, they can be laughing with you or they can be laughing at you. But in both cases, they're laughing.

So success. Yeah. Exactly. But two weeks later, you had to come back and explain your love again for The Flophouse, which I thought that was sweet. friend uh our friend steve lutz from the incomparable um took your advice ultimately and listened to the flop house from the beginning and it says that he likes it now he's like in episode 60 or something yeah and he tried to say the listening from the beginning was a mistake but now he has done it like it's an important it's an important thing to have done like puberty is probably a mistake too but you're glad to have done it sure okay i'm just gonna let that let that go i mean consider the alternative exactly that's right

would you want to stay 11 forever peter pan i don't think so uh the other thing i want to talk to you about is about uh the future of the mac you know we could go on forever about and i don't want to do that but i i think it's worth at least touching on. I was thinking of you when I read that blog post about the WWDC wishlist from Steve Troughton Smith, who, uh, I mentioned this last week, I think on upgrade use the phrase OS 10 is a dead platform. Um, and I just was interested in what you thought about sort of overall, you know, where is the Mac today and where can it go from here? Where should it go from here? Where will it go from here if it goes anywhere?

Because Steve Trott and Smith's point is sort of like all the OS X advancements in the last few years have been sort of keeping it in sync with mobile. And that's not particularly exciting. and that's not particularly exciting. And then you see sort of like the Mac App Store being kind of rotting on the vine. And there's a real question about like, is the Mac done? Are we just sort of like, it's not like we can't keep using it,

but is there more to be done there? Or is it just this thing that's gonna sit there and be what it is for the rest of its life? Does it have more change in it? Or is this sort of all that it will ever be? And, you know, you and I have been using the Mac for since time immemorial. So I thought I would ask you, what do you think about that? There's always more to be done on the Mac. Like, you can always make it better. There are plenty of things wrong with it where it can be better. But in terms of the future of the platform, There are plenty of things wrong with it where it can be better.

But in terms of the future of the platform, outside any sort of artificial constraint where Apple could decide to do, of course, whatever it wants to do. But outside of anything like that, it's not dead until something kills it. In other words, if there are things that you can either only do on a Mac or do much more easily on the Mac, that means that the other platforms have a ways to go before they prove that the Mac is a dead platform. It's not as if just because there is a new platform and a new way of doing things that is better in some ways that you should ditch the other one. So again, Apple could decide to ditch the other one to sort of force the issue. But we all know right now that there are certain classes of things that are either only possible on the Mac or so much easier on the Mac that if we were forced not to use the Mac to do them, it would be a handicap. And no one wants to make themselves less efficient or less capable to sort of prove a point. So it's up to the other

platforms, whether it's iOS or any other platform from any other company, to show that the old way of doing things with personal computers is not valid. And I think we all know, technologically speaking, however you might want to describe it, there are attributes to what we currently know as personal computing that will surely live on regardless of what the future is. If the future is all iOS-type devices or tablets or whatever. As we can see, tablets like therosoft surface and the ipad pro and stuff sprouting keyboards that's kind of a confirmation that regardless of the future surely there will

be a role for something like a keyboard in the future of computing does that mean that the mac will live forever no but it does mean that hey that whole idea from the pc world of having a keyboard that you type on that's probably a keeper like maybe you know that's there's still some life in it uh maybe goes away entirely when we have thought control or whatever but for now no matter what the future of the platform is keyboards are good mouse indirect pointing device touch is good touch is much better for tons more things than the mouse is pen input is also good mouse is also pretty good too it's a precise pointing device you can use it on large screens

or whatever i think uh the jury's kind of still out on it but in general right now uh you're not going to get rid of the mouse until something can do everything the mouse can do better oh i don't need the mouse anymore because x and so far the answer to x has been because i have a finger or a stylus and that's not really you know they don't do all the same things right so it's you don't want to tie up, like, the Mac as a particular platform and OS X as a particular OS with all the technology. So I just look at the capabilities and say, if I didn't have a Mac, what would I use to do these same things,

and would it be just as good or better? Because that's what you're looking for. You're looking for just as good or better. You're looking for progress. It's not just going to switch over entirely. And the wrinkle in that is that the mac does continue to get better again how can the mac get better it can get more stable god knows it can you know more reliable not crashing wise but it can do its job uh more predictably it can get faster it can always get faster it can get more capabilities that it's capabilities that are that it can have that other devices can't

right now still uh the mac has a higher power envelope than than its competing devices whether they be laptops or ios devices which means you can put bigger hotter things in there which means you can have better graphics for games and uh faster cpus not much better graphics for games not much faster cpus but still it's ahead. When that all evens out and basically the fastest processor you can get in the entire world fits into a phone's power envelope, that will be another strike against the Mac. But then you've still got the ergonomic issues in terms of how big of a screen can I put on? Do I have to hold the screen? Do I have to carry it around with me? Does it have a big keyboard? What about a precise input with the pointing device? Besides the stylus and a a finger can i use a mouse um so i'm not particularly worried because it seems like apple has its head on its shoulders

about not sort of artificially deeming the this to be the end of the road for the mac and from now on they're just going to make ios devices because uh i think they know if that happened then everybody who currently uses a mac would not be uh their needs would not be as well filled by other devices that apple sells and they would go buy something from some other manufacturer and apple's like no you can keep selling a mac we'll keep making them you keep buying them until we ourselves apple come up with something that is better than the mac in all ways or at least is good or better in all ways we'll keep making and selling macs and that's a smart decision by Apple.

And that's why OS X is currently not a dead platform. My concern though, is that I was thinking about this when I was writing my review of the iPad pro that my concern is that the Mac is becoming a, that it's limited in how much it can change not just because it's a mature platform but because it represents stability in a world of change and this is an imperfect metaphor but you know i feel like sometimes the mac is like cbs where um there are there are are way more cutting-edge TV shows on cable. And CBS could try to put on a show that was a cutting-edge show,

like you'd find on cable. And its viewers would reject those shows, because they don't want that. They want the comfort of the thing they've come to understand as a TV show, which is CBS. Now, CBS is profitable, and it's healthy, and it's a very successful business, but they are also trapped in their success in the sense that they are not going to push the envelope forward. The rest of the industry is doing that in various pockets,

but their audience loves them because they are what they are. And it's not a perfect metaphor, but that's my concern about the Mac, is that you can't radically rethink what the Mac is because they're already radically rethinking computing with iOS. The Mac is more like, for people who prefer a computer like we had in the old days, the Mac will always be here. Which I think is a good thing as somebody who's been a Mac user for 20 plus years. But it does sort of make you ask the question, is there something it can do that's new? Or is it all just sort of, you know, it could be faster, it could be more stable, it could just keep doing the stuff that it's already doing, just do it a little bit better. I think you're underestimating the flexibility of people who use personal computers or Macs to get their jobs done. If you just think of, I mentioned before, the idea that Apple would say, you know, Mac OS X is going to be the foundation for the Mac platform for the next 15 years. I think that Mac users today would absolutely accept another Mac OS X style discontinuity in the operating system which if you think about it

discontinuity between what we know is classic mac os and os 10 was tremendous i mean they were the same os barely in name only like the old os ran in a little emulation layer until apple could ditch it and eventually it transitioned everything to essentially the next apis and a new language and it was just like it was an amazing transition they made it but like what does os 10 have in common with the mac now so little if you were an old school mac user they kept the apple spirit is there they kept the apple in the apple menu but that's only when we complained about it it wasn't actually originally even even there in that yeah and some quick time apis and some file system apis and lots of stuff from carbon that's hanging around but a lot of that stuff is slowly deprecated but like really like technologically speaking interface paradigm it was just you know and it was type of thing okay

maybe mac users back then were more willing to accept it because it was like look at this or the company goes out of business and we were missing some major new features but for the most part uh even diehard classic mac os users were like this is cool like when os 10 came out like this this i don't you know maybe i want my classic apple menu back or whatever but the this is cool. Like, when OS X came out. Yeah. Like, this, I don't, you know, maybe I want my classic Apple menu back or whatever, but the dock is cool. The window system is cool. The whole sort of, some people might say it's just fashion or whatever, but it wasn't. It was like, we're rethinking what a personal computer interface should look like. We're changing the standard that basically, I always described it to people like a movie computer.

Like, you know how you see those computers in movies that look ridiculous because some graphic designer comes up with an interface? Well, Apple built that. This is a real thing. It's a real working interface where everything is double buffered and things magnify under your mouse cursor and everything is photorealistic and zooming and squishing. Kind of like the iPhone was like a movie interface too,

like things sliding around a touch interface that no one had ever seen before uh and yeah there was consternation from classic mac users but in the end we were like okay apple show us the way this is the future of personal computing let's go with that it has been what how many years now 15 years more or less i'm not saying apple needs to radically uh overhaul os 10 in that way they have been slowly evolving it if you were compare you know the os 10 today to 10.0 you would think that they're also very different operating systems but uh an interface paradigm shift in the next five years where they rethink the whole idea of the dock and the finder and the menu bar and a lot of stuff like maybe or or like

you said maybe they just decide this is a stability thing we'll just keep it until we can replace it but they have to do one of those they have to say they have to increase the capabilities of the ios line until we can all do our jobs better or at least as well in that interface paradigm which is you know forgetting input device just in terms of uh are there files and folders and a dock and a bunch of windows or something else like we either need to advance those capabilities or they need to keep evolving the mac as they have been um and don't underestimate the the impact you can have things oh just make it faster just make it more stable like there is a step change in a lot of those things what does

faster or more stable mean uh you pick two different directions right so let's take the mac and say say apple decides what's going to differentiate the mac is going to be reliability and all they do for the next five to ten years is just make it like bulletproof like you know industrial grade sort of uh you know the most reliable thing you can imagine that just squash every ounce of every bug every cosmetic glitch everything it doesn't work how it's supposed to and it just works and in comparison to our phones and ipads that are rapidly evolving those will seem like pieces of crap and it'll be like the mac will become like the mainframe of the world where it's like it always does exactly what it's supposed to do they've removed as many bugs as they possibly can

uh server side thing will probably be a killer heels for this but anyway this would be one way to differentiate the Mac would be uh like is it going to be just that stable thing then it damn well better be stable and I will accept that it is not evolving at a rapid rate if I know that you know that this is this is the rock this is the foundation this is the boring stable thing or they could go in the other direction and say let's take advantage of our higher power envelope and just make everything lightning fast. Let's make iOS devices look like the slow, crappy RAM star things that they are. And let's find ways to accelerate the Mac, taking advantage of the technologies that we have here to try to make the Mac just feel and act so much more responsive. try to make the Mac just feel and act so much more responsive.

And whatever it is that is currently time-consuming on the Mac, make it faster, whether that's storage or some sort of encoding tasks or graphics-driven things where you don't have the power envelope to do it on the phone. That's probably a tougher sell because the personal computers are getting faster, much slower than other devices are because other devices are creeping up on them. Like so it's harder to get more performance at the top end, but the highest end performance that you can fit in a phone keeps going up and up and up. So

anyway, those are two possible directions to make the Mac to differentiate the Mac as a platform, as opposed to simply sort of saying, well, it's going to be like it was kind of going along at a similar rate that it was, but, you know, not really taking advantage of the fact that it isn't the tip of the spear anymore. I like the idea of refining what we have and making it that much better and using what traits the Mac already has that are its assets and using those to its advantage. I think that's great. I think in terms of doing another radical rethink, I guess that's sort of my point is I feel like Apple doesn't have it in them to do that because where where they're exploring and where they're doing new things, the energy is all being poured into iOS for that. And that it feels to me like even if apple wanted to give the mac a radical rethink uh i don't think they they would uh because they don't have the energy for it

and i'm not sure economics too yeah i'm not sure the audience wants it either though i mean if you look at what microsoft did with rethinking windows you know there were several years of real pain where essentially the their market rejected them and windows sort of they had to back off of a lot of their attempts because the people who use Windows, which are not Mac users, they're a very different audience. But still, they said, no, no, no, we don't want that. We just want Windows. We just want what we know. mac world too plus yeah the sheer number of of iphone users out there and the value the iphone has for apple as a company if you're going to innovate and if you're going to try lots of crazy new things you know the iphone seems like the place that you want to pour all of your energy

it is your younger operating system it is where there's the most action it seems like the logical place to do it well so the windows 8 thing like when you're going to make a radical change to your most popular platform which the mac was the time os 10 came out it was apple's uh primary platform uh you have to have two things one you have to have the resolve that apple has shown they have and microsoft has not shown they have like sort of the courage of your convictions to stick it out because it's not like people didn't complain about os 10 in the early days i was one of them like there was a lot of pushback from traditional mac users a lot of it right and apple listened to some of it a little bit but in the end just

kept plowing through and the other important thing you need to have that microsoft probably didn't have is you kind of got to be right or at least writer right you know it has to it has to actually be better in the long run and it's debatable whether it was in microsoft's case certainly they didn't have the courage of their convictions they backpedaled real fast and real hard and tried to come up with this compromise thing and maybe they end up in a better place for them or maybe they were just on the wrong track you know it's so hard to tell because you can't sort of a b test the two different timelines uh although i'm not sure how that works in the man in the high castle because i never read that story and i'm only

done through season one. But anyway, as far as I know, you can't A-B test the timelines to see how things turn out. So I think Microsoft is kind of a cautionary tale, but I think I have more faith in Apple to do both of those things well, to both have a better answer and also to stick it out and power through and to realize that the customers will be there on the other side.

And they might be different customers, but that's fine. If you had to guess, where do you think the Mac will go in the next like three years? What do you, what direction do you think they will take? I think, uh,

it's conceivable in the short term that they do another branding related thing, uh, tied to, I don't know what they're going to tie to but like you can like how long do you keep calling it os 10 when ios gets to 10 do you decide that you need to flip it time for mac os time for mac obviously yeah i know yeah other than that other because if they do that maybe they could drop the x then too i mean that's just so uniform we do it up but i'm thinking like aesthetically uh more like they did do sort of an ios 7 style revive in yosemite but still it you know i don't know i i think

there's a room for a lot of apparent quote-unquote big changes that really aren't big changes they're mostly like changes in marketing and how it's branded and trying to present tv os ios and mac os with the lowercase letter in the beginning all as this family of operating systems as if it's branded and trying to present tv os ios and mac os with the lowercase letter in the beginning all as this family of operating systems as if it's some new thing as if they haven't all been darwin under the covers forever and all the other stuff right um so there's a place for that but i think that's not really going to be significant for users um and then which direction are they choosing like it doesn't seem like they are really doubling down on stability. It seems like they still feel like every other year or so they have to do something to the Mac,

that they have features to tout or whatever, but I really hope they reconsider that. Because if there isn't anything big on the horizon, besides the little lowercasing the M and maybe dropping the X and stuff, if there isn't anything big on the horizon, then please do double down on the stability and bug fixing. Like we can go three, four years without saying,

now you can mark up things in the whatever application. Like just, you have a lot of features there, make all of them work. And your current customers who like Macs will like them even more. And that is probably the safest strategy for the Mac, if you don't have any great ideas for a Mac OS 10 style revolution in the next five to six years. And it just seems to me that Apple has its fingers in a lot of pies or whatever the phrase is these

days, that and the Mac volume, the Mac just doesn't sell in the volumes, I think it does that they have their hands full just making the Mac the best Mac it can be and hurry up with these other platforms that you hope will eventually cannibalize the Mac because you have to make them a lot better before they can. Do you think the Mac needs a yearly marketing operating system update to hang its hat on, or is that not necessary? It's probably fine. You can do that every year, have a new product and a new name

but stop with the expectation that you're going to have a bunch of feature bullet points like just make it more like like when you know in the car industry where the you know the honda accord will go through a redesign and it'll be several years in which it's basically the same accord they just change the front fascia, the plastic trim, maybe some of the options available. But it's the same car. And then they have the generational turnover. And they sell the same Honda Accord for many, many years,

not just one or two years, right? So they could do that with the Mac, have a yearly release, but make it clear. I don't know how they make it clear. The marketing purpose, we understand that from year to year, don't expect like, is this the new generation of the Mac? No, it's just another revision of the current generation of the Mac operating system. And so that will give them breathing room

while still giving them something to say about the Mac on stage every year at WWDC. Yeah, I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the Honda Civic and realized that I had a fifth generation Honda Civic, I think, or maybe it was a sixth generation and now i'm driving an eighth generation honda civic but that but it's the same thing where they've gone through like 10 different generations of honda civic but they keep them around for like four or five years yep i mean that's what the car industry does because the investment costs of a particular platform are so huge even if it's just a mild evolution of the previous platform that you need to recoup those costs you want to sell

it for several years and like they make cosmetic changes every year small cosmetic changes small trim level changes fixing a component with replacing a component with more reliable one and they realize you know what maybe but in general uh you're not getting the next generation car for several years. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I'm with you there. I think that they're welcome to call it a new name every year, but our expectations should probably change,

and they should not worry about, like, we've got 300 new features, and we did this, we did that. Yeah. Just, yeah. I mean, we rely, there's so many people who rely on the Mac i don't know if the mac needs to you know make news i think it just needs to be good and keep getting better and it can make news by by being better and more reliable like the the most compelling word of mouth especially since they're not selling them anymore like you know for money but the most compelling word of mouth thing you can hear is there's a new

version of the Mac operating system. I installed it and problems X, Y, and Z that I used to have one away. That is a feature that if you heard someone say that, like, oh, you have to get this one because the previous one, I had all sorts of problems that I installed the new one. Those problems went away. You know, one of them don't ask you, okay, well, fine. But what new features does it have?

It's like that. That's a feature. One of the banner features of El Capitan, I think is the fact that on El Capitan, I think, is the fact that on slow internet connections, mail actually will check your mail instead of trying to sync like 20 iMac mailboxes. And that was a feature that they trumpeted,

that they went out of their way to tell me is, hey, it turns out that when you're on airplane Wi-Fi, Apple Mail was really inefficient. And as somebody who'd been on a bunch of cruises, I was already aware of this. But that was a great feature. And that was a fix to Mail to make it not behave badly when you don't have a super fast connection. And you know what? That's a great feature, even though it is just a fix. Sure. All right. Well, I think we have just enough time for some Ask Upgrade, special John Syracuse edition of Ask Upgrade.

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The first item, which I moved down here from higher up in the show, was just pizza. Mike and I have been talking about pizza a little bit on the show, and I sided with Joe Steele on the pepperoni and pineapple pizza, which I enjoy greatly, which I am certain is not John Syracuse approved. But I was going to give you this opportunity to school me on what you decide real pizza is and what you have determined real pizza is. This is not robot or not. This is slightly different than the podcast we do about whether things are robots or not. This is pizza or not, which I think is a single ruling is going to make it clear. This is pizza or not, which I think as a single ruling is going to make it clear. I just want, before you speak, I was going to say, one time I had you over to my house and I made pizza and I made a traditional sort of red sauce mozzarella.

And I think maybe there were pepperoni on it. And then I also made a barbecue chicken pizza. And my recollection is you said, this is pizza, and this is some other thing that is not pizza. So can you educate me a little bit on what real pizza is? You and Mike talking about the pizza is like the blind leading the blind. The guy from the UK and the guy from California talking about pizza. So you might as well be talking about zebras. I lost your vast experience with zebras that you both have.

Well, there's the Californiaifornia zebra kitchen so yeah yep um i to my record you left out the most salient detail of the pizza you had at your house i believe was it both of them you can tell me one or both of them had cheddar cheese on well the barbecue chicken pizza had cheddar cheese on it the the other one might have although i will tell you that that i was um thoroughly uh cleared up about the proper use of cheddar cheese in pizza by you. And now I will still put some cheddar in a barbecue chicken pizza, but the traditional red sauce pizza is only mozzarella. Yeah. So my whole pizza thing, like so many of my culinary things, it's all about where I'm from.

I'm from the New York metro area. I grew up on Long Island. about where I'm from. I'm from the New York metro area. I grew up on Long Island. And all my rulings on all those foods are entirely based on what I grew up with, which I think is true of everybody who has some particular, you know,

thing about some food, whether it's someone who grew up in the South and can tell you exactly how grits have to be, right? You know, or I don't know, like crawfish from New Orleans, whatever it is, like there's some local dish that is, you know, that you're from the area where that dish in America anywhere, you know, that dish is known to come from there, right? And so you kind of get authority in saying, you know, and I would say the same thing, for example, about Chicago pizza, like this is not Chicago pizza.

I can tell you what Chicago pizza is. I'm from chicago and i you know you can you can sort of definitively say that but in the end um it doesn't mean anything more than anyone else's like it only is what it is you have to recognize that it's that uh that all you're hearing is this is where this food became famous or is most well known and all this person is doing is telling you how close the food that you're eating and calling the same thing is to the place where this food came from and it's well noted um everything beyond that especially when it comes to california is something else because california makes a lot of

things that are like good food like made with good ingredients like not crappy food that nevertheless are abominations of the original food item it doesn't mean they're bad food and might not taste bad or whatever but it does mean and it's almost worse when they're like you know good as opposed to someone making an abomination out of like processed food and gross things that it does mean though that that they're that it's like they're that food in name only or that someone had has heard a story about that food and then made it like they've never actually seen or tasted one but they they heard about it um and so this is what they've come up with i was told that i put cheese and sauce on bread it would be pizza

right exactly and so what kind of cheese what kind of does it really matter what kind of cheese or sauce and can i take some other meal like hamburgers or fried chicken and put it on top of there and yeah why not turkey dinner put it on top it's a turkey dinner pizza is that still pizza um so anyway yeah all of my rules are uh you know and and for the people who are from these areas tend to be like a purist it's like this is the way it has to be this is what you put on it and you don't put other stuff on it because the pizza seems so versatile it's like you can put anything on there can't you you can but now you're making something different even

chicago pizza for example which is not pizza by east coast new york standards it is a separate thing and they can have rulings about whether you're making a chicago pizza but it is so incredibly different so um the new york pizza is so simple like like so many of the original places it is boring you know it's just you got the dough you got the sauce which is always tomato sauce with a certain set of spices that is very limited. You've got the cheese, which is always mozzarella cheese. And you've got a couple handful of toppings. That's it.

And within that frame, you can do it badly or you can do it well. And you're judged based on that. But once you start branching out into like, this seems like a, you know, I can do anything. I don't like mozzarella cheese. Well, then you don't like pizza. You know, I want to can do anything like i don't like mozzarella cheese well then you don't like pizza you know i i want to have pizza but i don't like mozzarella cheese well then make something else that you that is inspired by a flatbread with something maybe a delicious meal that you love like there are lots of interesting things you can put on top of things

that are sort of dishes inspired by pizza but if you're ever going to have any sort of ruling about like what is and isn't pizza uh you have to pick your definition and i pick my definition from where i came from which is the the place in america where a pizza was popularized and so that's what i go so no cheddar cheese uh no no barbecue barbecue chicken yeah no turkey dinner no no cheeseburgers no chocolate cake no no bacon. So what toppings are allowed by you? Because so far you have not ruled out my, which I know you're about to, you've not ruled out my pepperoni and pineapple.

All right, so here's the twist in this. Where I'm from, the toppings are fairly straightforward. You've got pepperoni, sausage, olive. You've got things like meatball that are in there. You can't say that they're not because it's a topping that you can get in most places. And it doesn't stray much from it. You've got peppers and onions and mushrooms, right? It doesn't stray very far from that.

But there is what's known as Hawaiianaiian pizza which is pineapple and ham right which is not not pineapple and pepperoni which is not a valid you know but pineapple is this far out the weirdest pizza that you have to say is that is that included in one of the value because you can get it in new york in most places in the new york metro metro area even when i was growing up chances are good if you ask for her wine you got a 50 50 chance maybe that the pizza place will know what that is and they will have it um is he good i never liked it um did most people get it no like i think it was probably more reviled than anchovy which is also another valid topping um but it was for sale so i'm have i have

difficulty uh judging that. As far as I'm concerned, I feel like that was maybe like the first chink in the armor of like... That's where it all went wrong. Right, right. But it was, like, it is not something that I had never heard of. It's just something that I never chose to eat, but I saw other people eat it. So I'm going to rule against pepperoni and pineapple, which is just a made-up thing. But Hawaiian pizza, quote-unquote,

that's borderline. But you see, the difference between ham and pepperoni, these are salty pork-based meats. They are not that different. There's a difference. They're not that different. They don't go, like, because with Hawaiian, what you're going for is that sort of,

I mean, you've got the whole spam polynesian hawaii type like ham is different than pepperoni it is just very very different it's not as good it's not as spicy it's not just yeah so i i feel like both of them for me i it's not my thing or whatever and i think the only way you can sneak in is going with hawaiian and saying it's ham and pineapple pepperoni and pineapple i feel like you're just making things up well it's a hawaiian where it's like saying it's like saying bacon and pineapple or like or even or even you know sausage and pineapple those are not those are not combinations that's not hawaiian so my only ham and pineapple my parents would always order what i've considered to be the most baffling pizza ever which is um beef and onion so it's like

ground beef it's like sausage beef mean it's ground beef it's basically like sausage that is that is not a top see that's like you can't just take ground beef and put it on top of pizza it's not apparently you can and then onion and i find i don't understand it i'd never heard of anybody but you can apparently get this in lots of places a beef and onion pizza i don't know why you'd want to i i don't know i don't know well see the variants in pizza across the country the other problem is like even if they're using all the ingredients you think just like plain straight up mozzarella cheese tomato sauce and and yeah there's such incredible variation and just those three ingredients such incredible vile variation

that there's no safety and like you have no idea what you're getting and so once you branch out even even the new New York metro area, meatball pizza was the most dangerous, because how do they make their meatballs? There's sort of no standardized, what is a meatball? You kind of have an idea of what it's supposed to be like in Italian meatballs. A meatball is like a big ball. How do you even put that on the pizza? Do you chop it up?

Do you make little mini meatballs? You make them smaller. Sometimes they're cut in half. It's weird. That's the other thing. In Italian restaurants in the New York area, I would never get spaghetti and meatballs because the variation in meatballs from restaurant to restaurant was just fantastical. It could be any kind of meat.

They could have onion or celery or other kind of crunchy stuff in them, which I always hated. Or do they have breadcrumbs? Yeah, there's a lot of variations in that. So it was not really safe to get. But most of the toppings are olives or olives. All the vegetables are basically the same. You very often cut the same way. All right. Pepperoni, even though there's variations in quality, you can kind of tell pepperoni when you're eating it and when you're not eating it.

Sausage, Italian sausage, seems to be a little more consistent. Meatball starts to vary. Pineapple and ham were pretty consistent too. All right. But around the rest of the country, they can Pineapple and ham are pretty consistent, too. All right. But around the rest of the country, they can't even get, like, the sauce or the cheese or the dough right. And so forget about their topics. Who knows what you're going to get? Yeah.

I use some wheat flour along with white flour in my dough. So that probably puts me in the crazy California side. You are in California, so, like, why wouldn't you? I mean, why not put sunflower seeds in there? And I put beer. Put some avocado on top. Well, yeah. I mean, we know about avocado.

I can tell the rest of the country they're doing it wrong when it comes to avocado. If you're putting it on pizza, you're doing it wrong. And mission-style burritos. Those are our local foods that we can control. All right. Well, this is why we talk about robots on Robot or Not. This has been Pizza or Not as part of Ask Upgrade. I have a couple really quick Ask Upgrades that I wanted to get your thoughts about.

One is from Bobby, who says, what comes first, true family iCloud photo libraries, a new file system, ding, or a full iTunes rewrite? What would be your prediction? Which one of those will come first? I'm going to predict the new file system first, not because I think it's imminent, but just because full iTunes rewrite just seems like it's not even a glimmer in anyone's eyes, but it's hard to tell. And iPhoto libraries, they've done so much with photos lately, and they probably feel like that need doesn't exist anymore because of the shared streams. It does. It totally does.

I agree. I feel like there's an iTunes family piece that's still going to keep dropping of like all the other stuff getting integrated into family iTunes accounts. But all that stuff is like the photos one especially probably doesn't feel as pressing to them because they just made such a massive improvement to photos that it's time to like refine and build on that. I asked them about it too. iTunes just seems stuck in a rut. I asked them about it and they brought up something that I thought was interesting interesting which was who's to say that everybody in a family wants to share photos which i thought was like okay interesting take on that like your kids do your kids really want all their pictures dumped into your photo library you should have said to them is like we're not

talking about the whole family although that does happen for when the whole family goes on vacation but surely in families that have more than one parent, which I believe there are a lot of in the world, surely the parents want to share the pictures they individually take of their children. Indeed. That is a common use case. So you're going to say file system. So anyway, yeah. So I'm going to say file system just because it's been so long in coming. It hasn't arrived.

It hasn't improved. Whereas iTunes has been improved many times over, and it seems like I'm not even sure they know what they want to do with iTunes. And the photo library, they just made such a huge, massive change to it. I feel like it is conceivable, 2017, that it could introduce a new file system, and it is conceivable that by 2017

neither of those other two things happen. So I'm picking file system, but it could be wishful thinking. I'm going to pick the family iCloud photo libraries, because I do feel like there's another shoe that's going to drop, that they've been working to add more features. Now that they've got the family feature out there, that we're going to see additional stuff thrown into it. I'm hoping that we're going to get a shared pool of data for iCloud and that we are going to be able to opt to have photo libraries go across accounts. That it won't be mandatory because, you know, again,

my daughter doesn't want to share her pictures with us and that's fine, but my wife and I would like to be able to share our pictures. And right now you kind of can't because to be logged into some things on your iPhone, you can't be logged into other things. You can't really use two IDs for everything. So, you know,

we can't do that right now. So I'm going to, I'm going to predict that also because I feel like, although it's work, it's, there's a lot of behind the scenes work that's already been done whereas a new file system and a full itunes rewrite are such huge projects that i'm also gonna think that maybe this is a thing we're already watching it happen and it'll just it'll it'll tick that box as it

moves forward with i the icloud family stuff because they my hope on the file system is that they have been working on it for years already yeah that's true many many years well maybe so maybe we'll get all of them at wwc in june right sure no not this year and this is the i have i cloud photo library like i would say like it is just a big improvement it used to be that you had to designate which computer was the iphone computer remember those days oh yeah like oh mom's computer is the iphone computer now we've made such an improvement now you designate which apple id is the is the photos apple id yeah which is is a actually a really big improvement because at least it's it's portable with the apple id and not tied to a piece of hardware or anything like that but yeah the next when i think about how it should work with families like it's not obvious how what is the best interface this we all see

the need like we i don't want to do the current dance that i do to try to somehow bring over the pictures that i take on my phone to get them into the family photo library which uses my wife's you know apple id and everything but like full sharing of everything is also the wrong answer and how do you present an interface that so people don't get confused about where the heck their photos are it actually is a pretty hard problem but it is a very pressing need. Yeah, iCloud Family stuff was introduced only last year. So I feel like there's going to be that year two of now we're going to do this. But, you know, that is also I got to I'm doing a lot of wish casting when I say that, too,

because I really want those features to be there and they may not be there. doing a lot of wish casting when I say that too, because I really want those features to be there and they may not be there. Listener Mahir wrote in to say, what is your most played song in iTunes and give us the reported play count too. I will go first. Modern Love by Matt Nathanson is the number one on my iTunes. It says I have 214 plays of that, but records are spotty. That doesn't cover until iTunes match started syncing plays across devices. But records are spotty, you know, that doesn't cover until iTunes match started syncing plays across devices. You know, I would delete things and add things and listen on different computers, and none of it would stay in sync. Now it all stays in sync. But that really is only so for the last like year and a half. I did used to do audio scrabble or to last FM.

So I went there and I haven't done that in two years but there were several years where everything i played on my mac at work especially got scrabbled to last fm and it i looked it up and the most played track there was let go by frou frou also 214 plays which i find just kind of peculiar so those are mine what about you john yeah i just want to reiterate that my lack of faith in the play counts because first of all they all seem way too low second of all i'm not even sure i do subscribe to itunes match and i have since the beginning but i'm not even sure that they're really syncing the way that they should be and third of all like i said the numbers just look look weird and inexplicable and just all way too low so i've been listening on itunes for since itunes existed since it was on you know classic mac os but surely these play counts don't account for that so i have

no idea what range these play counts are in but anyway my number one is rem's perfect circle for murmur play count is 321 all right yeah i i love play counts actually and it's funny i don't pay attention to them much anymore because for so long they were irrelevant because they didn't cover my ipod plays and they didn't cover the different macs and they wouldn't sync and then i'd remove something from my library for some reason and then bring it back and the play counts would be gone but since they did itunes match apple has actually synced play counts with all your devices, apparently. Yeah, I mean, my number three is down to double digits already.

So these can't be right. Wow. Yeah, that can't be right. I have a whole bunch of things in the upper 100s. So, yeah, I don't know. It turns out there's a song that I play. This is something i have in common with merlin actually a song i play when i'm in a certain mood especially at the beginning of the day and it's kind of a a dark or or angry mood i play something i learned today by husker do

and it's got 113 plays so that's how many times i've had i've been in that mood lately um it's it's in the top 20 anyway it's not in the mood lately. It's in the top 20 anyway. It's not in the top 10, but it's in the top 20. Yeah, the other complication is playing songs in the car for kids because my number two is Let It Go from Frozen. Of course it is. Yeah. Of course it is. Which I also listen to myself.

I'm not going to put all those plays on my kids. I like that song. I do listen to it in the car, but a lot of those are job related. Sure. all those plays on my kids. I like that song. I do listen to it in the car, but a lot of those are job related. Sure. Listener Rob wrote in to say, do you think Amazon is working on an Amazon video app for the Apple TV? And Rob would like to watch Doctor Who again, which is Doctor Who is moving to Amazon as an exclusive, the new series of Doctor Who. Mike and I talked about this a lot. What do you think? What's Amazon's strategy here? they want their their uh they're on ios uh do they want to be on apple tv do they not do want to do they want

to sabotage apple tv what's going on i try to handicap this i try to think about how many people are like us and how many people are more like a single box household because for my experience of television for the past many years has been, let's see all of the various applications on my various boxes compete against each other. Who has the best Netflix client? Who has the best, best Amazon video client, right?

I mean, because like, you know, down to my TV, my TV can play Netflix. My TV can play Amazon video. So can my TiVo. So can my Apple TV.

So can my PlayStation. So can my Wii. And I'm apple tv so can my playstation so can my wii it's like yep and i'm just picking among them and they change like who's got a good app this week or whatever but at no point am i like i really wish i could watch amazon video but unfortunately i don't have a box that can play it i have like seven boxes that can play it and am i the aberration because i have a million boxes connected to my tv and most people can't support that because it's ridiculous and most people just have like one thing like they just have their their cable box maybe and then maybe one other thing and that they're somehow being stopped from watching amazon i guess that

i mean maybe that's more common than what i have um but it just seems ridiculous to me that amazon would withhold their application from apple tv for any reason other than spite because it seems like yeah it's pointless you're not i don't think they're selling more fire tvs because of it people because those people who have only one box they have only one box because they don't want to have a million boxes and you know they're just going to like live without it then and it's stupid amazon if they're going to be a content company if they're going to pay and have man in the high castle made and pay all this money for the new top gear the show from the other people did the top gear whatever you got to get your show out to as many people as possible i mean even even apple made itunes for windows like you can't

you can't be like that if you're going to produce content you need to get it everywhere like netflix netflix was like do you have a a box that an electric cable goes into we want a netflix client on it like they wanted it everywhere that's's the right strategy, and I think eventually Amazon will see that. So I would predict that Amazon will eventually be on Apple TV. I think they're working on it. They're on iOS. Of course they'll be there eventually. Maybe there's some politics around when they go, but I think it's going to happen.

I think it's inevitable. If it is spite, it's stupid. Yeah. Oh, agreed completely. That's a terrible reason. If it is spite, it's stupid. Yeah. Oh, agreed.

Completely. That's a terrible reason. Listener Lucas has our final question today, which is, what topics can you only discuss when Mike is not around? Pizza, please. Pizza, definitely. Let's see. What else? Pens are dumb.

I don't like pens. And Mike was wrong. Big phones. The iPhone six plus is no good. The iPhone six S forever until the next iPhone. That's not huge. Any other terrible things we could say? Well,

USA, USA, we can do that. Well, Mike is not around. I don't know. I mean, I feel like you could talk about most of these things with him. It's true.

I don't know if there's anything that you can't. It would probably be something that he's not interested in. Is there anything that you're interested in that he's just that he would just roll his eyes and be bored and have nothing to say? Well, we talked about boxes that you attach to a television to watch things. He's totally not interested in that. What about baseball? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. But you're not that interested. You're not interested. I know. Like for you, what could you talk about? If you had someone who's really into baseball, you're not going to have these either. I know, but for you, what could you talk about? If you had someone on who was really into baseball, you're not going to have these deep conversations about baseball with Mike.

Honestly, the iPhone 6 Plus and 6S Plus, that's a thing that I can't really have when he's around because he just won't stop talking about how he's right. And I just don't agree. I don't like that big phone. I mean, it's not right or wrong. As you pointed out, it's personal preference. My personal preference does not match his. But yes,

baseball, we had a great question last week about sports, or as they say in England, sports. They only have one there. They just have the one. They have lots of maths, though. Lots of maths, only one sport. It's an interesting dynamic. We have a real cardinality problem over there.

They have priorities. They've got more math and less sports, and we went the other way. So that's sort of our cross to bear, I think. But he didn't even have, like, a point when he was 10 where he had a David Beckham poster on the wall. He's just never been interested in it, which is fine.

Lots of computer nerds, you know, lots of people in our culture are like that. I'm not one of them, but there are a lot of people out there who just didn't never, he said, don't play it. Not interested in it.

And I said, well, I don't play it. I played like basketball in the eighth grade. I was on our team, seventh and eighth grade basketball. That was my last venture into organized sports, but I still like sports.

Even though I can't play them. I don't know. Things about how England, well, I, I even insulting Englandland i could probably do around mike because his accent keeps drifting closer and closer to the united states oh yeah yeah we'll change him yet yeah we'll we'll reform him he did refer to uh to sports last week and not sport which i felt was an ultimate betrayal to all of our british listeners he should find listeners he can't help it's trying to say it's like when you have a conversation with somebody who you know you say gif and they

say jif and it's like a battle of wills to see during the conversation yeah the conversation is not about that you're just talking like at work about something this happened more when we actually used to word use gifs on the internet right but you're just discussing something and it is almost impossible to have an ongoing conversation over the course of a week with two people who say it differently. One will break, and when talking to the other person conform to their

way of saying things. And so it's your job to hold strong with the American pronunciations and everything, and eventually he'll break. Yeah. It's Jeff, by the way. This episode of Upgrade, brought to you by Casper, Squarespace, and MailRoute. Thank you to our sponsors. You can reach me at

jsnell. Mike is imike on Twitter. Of course, our guest, John Syracusa, is Syracusa on Twitter. S-I-R-A-C U-S-A. Syracusa. And you can reach him at atp.fm for Accidental Tech Podcast. And of course, at RelayFM, he has Reconcilable Differences with Merlin Mann. And at TheIncomparable.com, not only can you find many episodes with John. And of course at relay FM, he has reconcilable differences with Merlin man.

And at the incomparable.com, not only can you find many episodes with John, but of course, John and I do robot or not there every week. We talk about why something is not a robot. Usually, uh, John,

thanks for being on upgrade. I appreciate it. No problem, Jason. Anytime. Thanks everybody out there for listening. We will see you next week and Mike will be back in the UK. Bye!