Upgrade - 88: Happy Apple Watch Users

Episode Date: May 9, 2016

A year later, Jason and Myke are still using their Apple Watches. Amid high-profile users abandoning Apple’s new wearable, why do we still enjoy it? Where does the platform need to go to grow and become more successful? Also, we rage a little bit about a New York Times story about attempts by high-profile podcasters to change the way the industry works.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 88 today's show is brought to you by casper and pingdom my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hi mike how's it going very good. Jason, are you familiar with bingo calls? You mean like I 4 or I 38? There's a slightly different way of doing it in the UK where

it's all numbers, but there are certain types of bingo that you can play where some of the numbers have names attached to them, and 88, if you call it in bingo in some places in the UK, would be Two Fat Ladies 88, because eight and eight together look like two fat ladies. That's the old idea.

And there's like two little ducks is 22. It goes on and on and on. Is that where the Two Fat Ladies got their name? Yes, probably. The cooking show with the two ladies? Two Fat Ladies is like a known phrase in the UK. So I would expect that, yes, that's where they got it from. So I'll put a link in the show notes to a Wikipedia article of British bingo nicknames.

So you can go there and brush up on them and say them to me and see if I'll recognize them. We only have one piece of follow-up this week. It's a good one. It comes in from Matthew. So last week we were talking, somebody wrote in last week to ask about safe battery cycling on the Mac. And Matthew recommended Fruit Juice,

which is an application that lives in your menu bar and gives you lots of really good battery information. And you can also kind of get an idea of maintenance and cycling and all that sort of stuff. So it will give you the data that you might want to ensure that you're keeping your battery healthy on your Macintosh. Do you know what I really like about iOS?

I don't have to think about it. You don't have to do it. But those are mobile devices where you're never leaving. iOS devices don't just stay plugged in all the time. Of course. I think that's the problem is that oftentimes a Mac laptop will stay sitting on a desk for a long time and is only sometimes used for travel. And then it becomes a problem.

Because I know for a fact that ios devices do a charge cycle where they once they get up to full they they actually stop charging right and they they drain a little bit even when it's plugged in that's a that's a thing that a technique apple does in the software in ios but on the mac uh there are some challenges there i i heard a couple of things and i can't i can't find all the email email now. I know there's a guy who wrote to us who was working on a product that is not out yet that is called Battery Bypass that listener Tim sent in that he's working on that does this sort of thing where it will stop. Basically, it will stop using the battery or start using the battery and stop using the AC power for a little while and then kind of do the cycle thing. But the simplest way is just to unplug your laptop

every now and then, let it drain a little bit. I'll put a link to the battery bypass page. Tim has a little sign up. It was funny to me. It must've been funny to Tim too that we were talking about. He's like, I'm working on this. I'm working on it.

I got an app that's coming out. It's in beta right now. Unless this was an elaborate ploy from Tim and he posed to be somebody else last week. He's an opportunist. Bravo to you, Timothy. Yeah. We have been putting off this topic for a couple of weeks

just because things have been getting in the way. And it's not going anywhere, right? That's very true. And it's probably about time that we got to it. And we want to talk a little bit about the Apple Watch. Yeah. The Apple Watch has been in our lives for over a year now, just about, right? They shipped in March, didn't they, if memory serves?

Yeah, I think so. Something like that. April, maybe? Yeah, March, April. A year ago. Yeah, about a year ago. So this has, is i think prompted a lot of um articles to be written by people lots of reflections you know and now it's bringing us

to do this now and this kind of started off with a wall street journal article talking about kind of the sales pace um of the apple watch compared to the original iphone Jason, could you sum this up? Sure. Basically, the Wall Street Journal article says year one of the watch was double that of the iPhone. And when we look at the smartwatch market, it is kind of holding a dominant position. And what's interesting about it is all those numbers are great, but people still think it's a, it's a, it's a failure in some ways, or a huge disappointment, which is funny, because it's all about your expectations. And I would argue that people's expectations for this

product, as with most Apple products are probably unreasonable, because they all think they're going to be the iPhone. But, you know, I think the real question is, how's this market doing? And is this, you know, is this market going to be something or not? Because it looks like Apple has a, an incredibly strong position in this market. But is it a, you know, is it a small market? Is it a disappointment of a market? One of the things that I find funny from this piece is kind of comparing it to the iPhone and being like, you know, the watch is sold more than the iPhone. So it's fine. But I think we're in a very different world to how we were 10 years ago. Certainly. I mean, the iPad sold more than the iPhone, too, in year one.

Look how that's gone. The bar for the iPhone sales are, I mean, that was that first year. It was, it accelerated as time went on. It was singular only. It was in the US for only for a long time. And really, the only comparison you can make, in my opinion, between the watch and the phone is that they came from the same company. And that's kind of where it ends. Because, you know, there are so many things like you can't buy the watch unless you're already an iPhone owner.

The iPhone was a revolution. And no sales numbers were needed to prove that it was a revolution like we just knew it when we saw it the apple watch not so much really yeah yeah it's it's uh also the expert i mean the expectations of what apple is doing are totally different today than they are they are then and their marketing reach is greater and their user base that they're selling this to is huge and and so it's a different world. So it's not, it's not a really good argument, but I like the sentiment of it, which is basically like, uh, in lots of metrics and that's probably, uh, the worst one to choose, but in lots of metrics, the Apple watch seems pretty successful for a first hack at a product. But I think people have this expectation that, uh,

Apple's first hack of the product is going to be like the one that makes, that bowls everybody over. And I think the only time that actually happened was the iPad. And what happened is it bowled everybody over and then everybody bought one and then people stopped buying them. So is that an indicator of future success that you have a big first release that everybody rushes out and buys immediately? I'm not sure it tells us anything other than that this seems to be in its category a fairly successful product in terms of sales. We'll see how ongoing sales are, and we'll see how that category goes. But it's really a lot of people looking at numbers or looking at anecdotes

talk about the Apple Watch being a disappointment. And, you know, everything is relative know everything is relative disappointment compared to what so saying about that there have been i guess lots of posts recently um again with the idea of reflection that people are unhappy with the apple watches or you know like for example marco as is funnily enough the apple watch has pushed him to mechanical watches. I wonder there, what do you think of this trend? Is this the type of thing expected from people, or is this a peculiar thing that the Apple Watch has come into people's lives and then they've pushed it away?

I think the class of people, different classes of people for these products, right? So you'll get people in who have always worn a watch, and they'll get the Apple Watch, and they'll be like, I prefer a mechanical watch. And other people are like, oh, yay. Now, instead of a mechanical watch, I've got a smart watch on my wrist. That's great. You've also got people who... Yeah, and I'm one of those people, too, who I've always worn a watch, uh i'm happy now that i've got one that is smarter than the one that i had before you're also going to have people who didn't wear a watch who were like oh but i love apple i'm going to

wear the apple watch even though i don't wear a watch and some of those people are like oh i kind of like it and other people will say i i uh i don't want to wear a watch it turns out i just don't like it and then there are people people like Marco Arment who are instead saying, well, I kind of get why people like the watch, but I don't like the Apple watch. So I'll buy another watch. And in Marco's case, he got into it because he's a person who tends to fall into these enthusiasms like he does. He gets very enthusiastic about stuff. He got into like fancy mechanical watches.

But it could just as easily have been somebody saying, you know what? I like I like having something on my wrist. I'm just going to go out and buy a nice watch or like a Fitbit or something. I think a lot of people have moved that direction, too. Right. It's like turns out what I really want. And my prioritization is entirely about fitness. So getting a dedicated wearable fitness tracker is a better use, too. That's that's another use case.

So it's it you know it runs the gamut here's here's a different part though for me and you which i don't know if this is different but we shared this we both wore pebbles before the apple watch yeah i did i mean i wore a regular watch before that but i did wear the pebble before i wore the apple watch and the experience wasn't you know wasn't fantastic but again it told the time and it sent me push notifications and so that was. And the Apple watch is a much nicer watch than the pebble. And it tells the time and sends me push notifications and does a little bit more that I use. And so it's, you know, it's, it's an upgrade. It's better. But, uh, you know, it's, it is it we'll talk about like,

is it disappointing and does it have room to grow and like yeah totally of both of those but um but i still use it and that was so when casey list wrote this piece i i it's funny because i felt the same thing about about it is his poor apple watch piece which he talked about which he felt like he was surrounded by and uh on atp they kind of marco kind of poo-pooed him on it but i felt the same thing which is that suddenly there were a bunch of people writing stories about, especially like tech nerds saying, oh, I got rid of my Apple Watch. It's dumb. And I think as somebody who wears it every day and likes it, at some point you feel like you've got to stand up just to be counted as saying, look, not everybody is writing

the breakup post with the Apple Watch. Hello. And I didn't, you know, I don't post a weekly blog post that says still wearing my Apple Watch. Right. So instead, what you get is the people who are saying, oh, it's irrelevant. I've given it up. I've sold it, whatever it is.

You know those canary in the coal mine type things for, is it legal representation? They have those things in a page somewhere on companies' websites. You should have one of those. In your About page, you should have one of those like in your about page you should say like jason is an apple watch wearer jason still is still wearing his apple watch and then when it comes away then you'll know then you'll know so i appreciate i appreciate casey writing it because you know i i didn't feel like he was defending the apple watch so much as saying you know a lot of us a lot of us wear the apple watch i wear the apple watch and like it and I like wearing it. And it doesn't mean that I don't have lots of criticisms

about it in my personal case, but like Casey, um, I, that doesn't mean that I've stopped wearing it or finding value in it. And it's just, it's funny because, you know, like I said, people don't say that people don't write those big blog posts about how they are still using a product and like it. It's only the ones who are angry and making a change or disappointed. And so I appreciated his thing because I feel the same way. And I know you feel the same way too. It deserves a lot of criticism, but it doesn't mean I'm not wearing it. So let's talk about how we use our watches then.

Because the stage is set both me and jason are happy apple watch wearers you know we've spoken many times about i have at least all the bands that i have i put it on every day it sits next to me on my bedside table it's one of the first things that i do in the morning and if i for some reason forget to put it on it feels weird like i'm like why do i not know anything about my life today oh my watch my watch isn't on my wrist, right? Because like, I'm moving around the house, I'm doing whatever, and that, and notifications are coming in on that thing. And, you know, I have a lot of my devices set up that really the watch is the primary way that I get notifications. I have everything on Do Not Disturb, you know, I have things not showing up on the screen. And the watch is kind

of my gateway, my guardian, I guess, to the things that are happening that require my attention in my life. So that's kind of like the overall reason of why I wear this thing is because it is the way that people can get to me. And I have it set up perfectly for me. So it works like that. But this isn't the only way that Apple want the watch to be used. And I think this is where it starts to break down. I think most of the people

that even have left the Apple Watch are like, I quite like it for the fitness stuff and I quite like it for the notifications, but everything else is a mess, right? Like that's kind of the general feeling is third party apps, glances, complications, they're all a mess. They're all full of problems. So I think that tends to be the general consensus for why people leave this. So I wondered, between the two of us, what do we actually use outside of notifications coming in? So, Jason, what do you use on the Apple Watch outside of just notifications? Well, I use built-in. I use the timer.

I use the alarm clock because I do use the nightstand mode and have it next to my bed. I use the fitness when I remember to use it when I go for a walk or a hike. That's actually one of my complaints about it is I feel like the... I want it to be smarter about what I'm doing. I, I know that there's some amount of logging that happens regardless, but like, if I am wearing my Apple watch and I start running Apple watch would be like, Oh, you're running your, your pulse is elevated. I'm, you know, I'm being, being jiggled around a lot. I'm going to check your pulse. Wow.

Your heart rate's way up too. I'm going to monitor this again. Oh yeah. It is again. I'm, you know, I'm being jiggled around a lot. I'm going to check your pulse. Wow, your heart rate's way up too. I'm going to monitor this again. Oh yeah, it is again. You know what? You're on a run. I'm going to turn into run mode and I'm going to log this automatically. And it doesn't do that as far as I can tell. I agree with you completely.

Like today, I did the seven minute workout today in the afternoon after having, you know, sat in my chair for the morning and then all of a sudden i'm doing jumping jacks but i forgot to tell the watch that i was in fitness mode but it has no idea like you know my my my green uh fitness ring is not has not moved by seven minutes today you know like it just has no idea and and you're right i feel like there are enough senses in this thing or could be enough sensors in this thing. There are enough. It should understand that stuff's happening right now.

I think part of the problem is that they're worried about the battery. And we know that the sensors use a lot of battery, the pulse sensor especially. Because if you leave your thing in fitness mode for a few hours, it'll kill the battery and we know that the the sensors use a lot of battery the pulse sensor especially because if you leave your thing in fitness mode for a few hours it'll kill the battery but you know i still feel like it should be smarter about turning those on and monitoring and checking every so often how you're doing um and it will do so it will give you some credit for some things as you go but like seriously um one of the things that I had hoped I would get with the Apple Watch, and we'll get to it later because I'm sort of jumping ahead. But I had hoped that it would be smarter about keeping track of my fitness times and logging them and letting me look at them. And given all of its sensors and all of its connection to my phone, I shouldn't have to kick off a fitness event.

It should just be able to tell me and then I should be able to go to an app or a website later and say, Oh, this is that that run I did yesterday without having to do anything on the watch to start it going because that I think that's and that goes back to a core problem we'll talk about later, which is putting things on, you know, having to launch an app and wait for it to launch and press some buttons to get things going. And then remembering to press those buttons again later to turn it off is, um, it's not fun on the current version of the Apple watch. It can be very slow, but regardless, it should be smart enough. And I think it has the technical ability to be smart enough to intuit this stuff. I shouldn't need to tell it, right? I should, it should just be able to say, oh, you're running, right? It should be able to do that. And it can't

right now, or it doesn't. And that bugs me. So anyway, I do use those in terms of third-party stuff. Like I use Offy, the two-factor authentication app. A lot of times I'm sitting at my desk with my watch on and my phone is plugged into the charger in the kitchen. And I get a two-factor, you know, put it in the six-digit code request. And I can use the Authy app to bring it up on my watch. I don't use Authy. I feel like I should check it out. I mean, I kind of do everything by text message, I guess.

Yeah. Well, some things won't do text message. Right, okay. And so I use Authy. You can use Google Authenticator, but Authy's got a nice, when it works, it's got a nice Apple Watch app. It doesn't always work. Well, the worry that I have with text message is,

what if I'm on a plane, you know? And I can get data but can't get texts, you know? And for that reason, I have a lot of, you know, a lot of services will just dump you a list of codes that you can save in something like 1Password. But yeah, I've heard lots of people talk about Ulthi. I feel like I should take a look at it. Yeah, and Dan wrote a nice piece in six colors about it.

So maybe we'll put that in the show notes. You bet it will be in there. All right. And so I use that. I use the weather underground complication on my watch face, which doesn't update as often as I would like. But it's a pretty good reflection of the local temperature. Because as I've said, I think on a past show, where I live, there's a huge temperature gradient like south of me, especially in the summertime. South of me and north of me, the temperature changes dramatically.

It gets way foggier and cooler to the south, and it's much warmer, much hotter to the north. And so a lot of canned weather apps, you know, you put in a zip code and it finds the whatever its forecast is for, you know, for a city near there. And so for me, sometimes I'll get something that's saying the temperature and the highs and lows, and it's 10 degrees too hot, or it's 10 degrees too cold, because it's just, that's where I live. So with Weather Underground,

it's using my local, ideally it's using my weather station in my backyard, but it's certainly something very local that I can, so the temps are much more realistic. So I use that. But really almost everything I do with the watch is stuff that is on the face is launched from the face or is notifications. Um, and then the only other thing I'll say that I throw in there is, you know, I do use the timer, uh, for cooking and things like that. I will, I will use Siri to activate the timer, uh, you know, the, and have it be for five minutes or eight minutes or whatever.

So I use a few apps, actually, but they kind of come to me through the complications. So I use Fantastical and Carrot Weather for my calendar and my weather. And they both have applications that load relatively quickly, especially Carrot Weather. I find that one to be very reliable. It loads quickly, has a really nice loading animation where it just flashes up different glyphs of weather, but it doesn't take a long time to load. And the actual Apple Watch app displays a fantastic amount of information on the screen. So like I'm looking at it now, I see the temperature. I get the feels like temperature, the speed of the wind.

I get the idea of how much rain there's going to be for the next hour and what the temperature is going to be like over the next six hours, all just without scrolling. And then I can go down, like scroll down and see a seven day forecast. I think it's fantastic. I kind of like the Carrot Weather app on the iPhone. I love it on the watch. It's far superior for me on the watch than it is on the phone, which is kind of funny.

The Carrot Weather app on the iPhone doesn't have great information density because it's more about the character, which I appreciate. But I really like it on the watch because that typically is where I want the weather anyway. It's on my wrist rather than on my phone. I want to check it quickly. The Fantastic L1, it does a decent job. It does a fine job of showing me the agenda stuff. I just like the complication

because I can get an idea of when my next appointment time is and the small complication. I use the, what face is it? The simple face because I like the monochrome everything i would i would have loved having uh appointments and things on on my watch before went back when i had a real job but now i now now it's irrelevant to me essentially because all my all my appointments are just notes to myself and i don't and and when i need them i'm at a computer that has them so So I feel like regret.

It's like, oh, that would have been so great to have when I had all those meetings. But I don't now. And I don't regret not having those meetings. I just, it's like, that would have been a really great feature when I was that person. In all honesty, I probably don't even need this complication there. But like, it fills the space and it's fine. I also, the timer, i actually have a complication for the timer because i use the timer probably about four times a day for like coffee and cooking

i love it it's one of my favorite features on the apple watch is having a timer just there constantly um i also use the dew app d-u-e um i made the the way that this you know i used you for a lot of like you have to do this thing now and you can set it like it has great notifications where you can say remind me in 30 minutes remind me in 15 minutes every now and then I'll open the due app and dictate a little thing to remind me to do like this is for stuff like take out the trash do the washing up that kind of thing like these things I don't really feel need to go in omniFocus. They're just like little tasks to do throughout the day. And the app actually works pretty well. I think it is one of the best apps that could be made. Like it has a bunch of problems, but some of the, all of the problems

feel like problems with the watch rather than what the developer does. So they're kind of the apps and stuff that I use. And basically outside of that, I don't really do much else. You know, I use Apple Pay constantly. Oh yeah. I didn't mention that too, but that is of that, I don't really do much else. You know, I use Apple pay constantly. Oh yeah. I didn't mention that too, but that is the, yeah, I don't use Apple pay on my phone because why just two, two taps and, and hold it up. You don't even need to look two taps and you hold it up to the thing and it beeps or, and your watch buzz or vibrates and that's it. I did that the other day. We, uh, we went out late to, uh, to walk the dog and, uh, we'd had dinner and we were, it was, we were, we basically were like, we're going to get ice cream.

Basically that was it. And, uh, since we don't have like an ice cream place nearby, but we have whole foods, I just went and I got a little tiny pint of ice cream for the, uh, which is, you know, for the four of us, that's not, that's not too bad as a little present. little present uh and i just like literally just walked the pint of ice cream up to the check stand and handed it to the person and she went you know beep and i put my watch on the thing and it went beep and i said thanks and i walked out and i was like there we go that's you know that's the stuff and uh yeah it's great so i use apple pay on the watch that's and i know people are like oh but you could just bring out your phone it's like yeah i could but i don't this is this is better i love it yeah like every time i leave the house i use apple pay like at least four or five times because like i use it to get on and on

and off the tube right you know like it's i use it to buy like a drink at the shop you know like a juice or something yeah pretty soon all the all the vending machines are gonna have it too i would think so yeah i have seen a bunch in the states, and I've used my watch to varying success. Sometimes just everything gets really upset when I try and use my Apple Pay in other countries, but it's the same with contactless cards as well. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Yeah, there's still some contact terminals here that fail on Apple Pay, and I don't really understand what their problem is, but it's all going to change.

But that's not all there is, there's also like the glances and I use the now playing glance and that's the only thing for me swiping up from the bottom is just to get now playing like it's nothing else that I ever use in there I do actually I also use the other stock one because I will occasionally ping my phone. I'll be standing in the middle of the house and say, should I go out to the garage and get my phone off my desk or is it over here on the coffee table? But otherwise, yeah, but now playing glance, I was actually thinking about this this morning when I was walking the dog

that I was, I'm using these, what is it, the Jaybird Blue Buds earphones and a listener've a listener who heard me complaining about the cords rattling around a few months ago and said well you know you there's a little clip in that comes with them and you kind of like wrap them around this clip like five times and it makes them uh basically suspended that exactly whatever size you want it to be and then they just sit behind your head and they don't rattle,

which totally worked and made it a much better, more enjoyable product to use. The problem is that in that configuration, one, you can't use them for talking on the phone because the microphone is now behind your head. But two, the controls are also behind your head, the remote control. And I can reach back there to turn the volume up and down or play it or pause it but you know what i can use my apple watch for that and so that i use the now playing glance to do to do that you know volume and and and uh pause and stuff like that it's funny that like on the watch both me and you just use that swipe up like control center on the phone right to get the

media things and like the little quick tasks well i and and doesn't this i i feel like what we've been talking about now is is very much like how how we're using the things in the watch that work well and what what is and when we look at like where we go where does apple go with watch os3 which is i think going to be pivotal for the future of the apple watch is has apple looked at how people use the apple watch has apple had time now because it's been a while right it's been it's been a year and a half basically since the watch was announced um has apple had enough time to read to to decide that their first take on the apple watch wasn't quite right watch os2 was just you you know,

they might as well have called it WatchOS 1.1. It was a quick fix. It was announced like three months after the watch. Photo faces! Like, it was nothing. Yeah, but WatchOS 3 is like the first real reconception of the watch, at least opportunity for it. Will the faces change? Will how faces work change?

Will there be more faces? Will you be able to change them? How does the app model change? least opportunity for it what will the will the faces change will how faces work change will you be will there be more faces will you be able to change them how does the app model change there all these questions that are out there and and i think that that uh when we describe how we use it that's that's telling about like the stuff we don't use they are so proud when they launched it they were so proud of the app uh interface and those little little round uh app interface and those little round app icons and all of that stuff. And I just avoid them and you largely avoid them too. And it's because it's a bad interface and it's not that good. They're not fun to use. They take forever to launch. Sometimes they don't launch. There's so many things about it that are bad, but then we love interacting with notifications or swiping up to get to a glance or looking at the complications on the watch face.

These are things that it does well. So I think it'll be interesting to see, do they double down on like the app thing and like, no, no, no, this is totally how it's going to work it and let's make it more about more capable glances, more capable complications, launching apps from complications and glances, and maybe more capable notifications too. Because that's actually one of the funny things. Like when I get a text from messages, it's got the replies and stuff that you can do. And actually Twitterific does this too and those are great and then i get a slack dm and the slack app is bad on the watch yeah slack are not good with notifications like you can't reply even on the iphone from notification so often i just want to say reply okay and and then slack i can't do it so anyway i you know

there's there's there's the stuff that that they do really well and the stuff that it doesn't do well. And for me, that's the real big question here is what happens with watchOS 3? Do they change their approach to the interface? Do they make those buttons behave differently, right? Do they say, ah, that friends button? You know, a lot of people don't use that. So we're going to do something else with it or give you the option to do something else with it. And, you know, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll double down like, no, no, we totally got it right.

This is perfect. Everybody loves it. But I'm hoping that they will, you know, not that they will rethink it, that they will have seen what I think a lot of us who use it have seen, which is some of these ideas seemed like good ideas at the time, but in practice are not the right approach. So I think that there's definitely an amount of rethinking that will occur, right? It's just natural with a product this early on in its life. I think it would be a mistake to heavily pull back from apps. I think it's not the right move for the future. I think that they should do some stuff to make the apps better. I think they should do some stuff to make the apps better. I think they should do a lot to make the parts that people use even better, you know,

like the complications and notifications and, you know, maybe give me more of a reason to use glances. But I think it would be a big mistake to say, you know, that app thing that we did, don't worry about that so much, you know, like, and I think a lot of people saying that, you know, they should kind of just get rid of apps and make it just what we use it for but i don't think that's a good idea i think the idea of an app is too important you know like even just from a naming perspective like people just expect there to be apps you know you get this watch are there any apps for the watch no i don't have apps for the watch but the notifications are really cool it's like no way man we need apps you know like you get my where i'm going with this it's like i

think apps need to be a part of this system but they need to just be rethought and retuned and in a lot of areas powered up to be honest yeah well i'd almost rather um yeah i mean i don't love that app interface i think it's hard to find. And I'd almost rather be able to pick apps or even consider the glances to be like an app switcher for my most commonly used apps. I don't know. There are lots of different ways they could go with it. But I don't think the only problem with apps is that they don't launch fast enough and aren't reliable enough. I think getting to them is not great. And for a device that only has two buttons, i think it's not using the buttons well so but i thought that

at the time right at first time i saw it i thought really that button is only to give you little pictures of your friends so that you can send them dumb little uh you know send them fingerprints and dumb little sketches that you do with your finger it kind of wore off i mean me and adina use them every now and then but like not really i mean that really seemed like it was going to be a great thing but in actuality i think most people don't want to do that and you know in the amount of people in their life that they would want to share that sort of stuff with is incredibly small so small that it's not necessary to to really dedicate this much of the UI to it, I think. It was a really great idea, you know, digital touch.

And it's a great way to sell Apple Watches, right, to more people within a household. But I just think that maybe there's more they could do with that. They could do more digital touch stuff, which might be cool. I think it'd be really nice if these little things could work as walkie talkies i think that would be fun you know um like you hold the little button and speak into it and then it like plays through the little speaker your girlfriend you know like i think that might be kind of fun there i think there's more they could do with that but i just think again with everything to do with watch os there's more to be given uh and and i think that that is a good thing that we can even see a lot

of this stuff because it means that definitely Apple can see it. Tim Cook certainly thinks he can see it. So he was on Mad Money last week. This was kind of after the earnings stuff, right? He pops up on Mad Money every now and then. And this is a quote from Mad Money. He said, in a few years, we will look back and people will say, how could I have ever thought about not wearing this watch because it's doing so much for you? And then it will all of a sudden

be an overnight success. Everything about that is phrased interestingly to me. It's like admitting that it's not a massively essential thing for people right now, which is good that they do admit that because they'd be kind of crazy

if they said, oh, everyone needs one of these things because everybody knows that they don't. And the idea of like Apple is confident that what they're doing is going to make this more of an essential product for people. I think it's good because I would have hated for them to back away from the Apple Watch. I think really it deserves doubling down on, especially because, you know, this is Tim's product, right? Like this is the product I think that most of us

can point to and be like, this was 100% after Steve and this is his thing. You know, they spent so much time in it. He made such a big thing about it. They brought the one more thing back for it.

You know, like I think it means a lot to him and I'm pleased to see that they're like we're keeping on keeping on with this thing because we've got some great ideas yeah um i mean he's obviously been a big uh champion of it and uh i think i i also they're on the they're on the downward slide now right they're not as much about selling the current apple Watch and Apple Watch software as they are talking about the next big thing and thinking about the next big thing and admitting, you know, a year and a half ago, if they came up on stage and said, well, you know,

you're gonna look back on this product and think, wow, it's not nearly as good as the Apple Watch now. But hey, it's our first crack at it. And we're gonna learn a lot. And then in three years, the Apple Watch is gonna be great. You can't do that. You say, this is a product unlike anything you've ever seen. Cause it is. And it does stuff that will surprise you because it does. Um, but now it's a year and a half since they did that. And presumably there'll be an OS announcement in June and, and, and probably a watch announcement in the fall maybe. And, uh, and so I think that this is a logical step, which is to take, you know, to, to move to the next, move to the next thing and start saying, look, you know, there's a process here. We, we, this is where we started and we're, we're,

we're continuing to advance it. And we think in the long run, this is going to be a product that people are just not going to want to give up. And I feel that because I, like you, I don't, I don't want to take it off my, you know, my wrist. I, I, and I feel weird in like in the morning when I'm walking around and I'm like, oh, I didn't put the Apple watch on because I got distracted by this or that when I was getting up and, uh, and I rushed to go put it back on. So I, I think so, but it needs to be better. There's no doubt about it. Mac rumors, uh, a couple of weeks ago now reported some Apple Watch 2 rumors. Apple is working on adding cell network connectivity and a faster processor to its next generation watch, according to people familiar with the matter. I mean, I think we all could have guessed that it was going to get a faster processor, but I wouldn't have expected Apple Watch 2 to have cell network connectivity.

Is this going to make the watch better i don't know well i was thinking like um if they do this that it's going to be uh like how the kindles have cell um data where it's going to be uh access to the slower some slower data network like i suppose at this point that would be like a 3g network because i think they're turning off all the 2g networks because i am not interested in paying a cell plan for my watch so that's my theory my theory is that rather than it being like at&t will allow you to spend ten dollars a month to add your watch to your plan my theory is that this is a kind of thing where apple does it that where apple has got like amazon has done with the Kindle, that Apple has deals with wireless providers for their less used, slower old networks. This is like the T-Mobile thing where T-Mobile said you get free, what is it?

Is it 2G in Europe? If you're a T-Mobile person in America, they're like, you can just have free 2G data, free slow data. It's yours. That kind of thing, where Apple would take an old network, maybe it's 3G network, not the LTE network necessarily, but I could see that. I could see something like that. I think that would be

a good idea. Or how T-Mobile has the iPad plan, right? Where if you have a T-Mobile account, you plan, right? Where like if you have a T-Mobile account, you get 200 megabytes of data for free every month. Like I get that because I have a T-Mobile account because I have a US T-Mobile SIM. And when I signed in on my iPad,

it's just like, hey, there you go. This is your data now. It's like, awesome. Thanks, T-Mobile. I have the same thing. And so, yeah, so that's my thought is that this is probably not gonna be used for intensive data, right? I think that this is slow data, not a lot of it.

But what it means is that if your watch can't find the iPhone and it can't find a Wi-Fi network, it can still see the Internet and update your complications and stuff like that. And I think I think that's good. I do think this probably suggests some changes in watchOS 3 to make the watch a little more independent from the iPhone because right now so much of what it does is sent to it by its iPhone that it's paired with. And unless they're I mean, maybe this is that, you know, them being able to use the internet to talk to each other if they're both on the internet, but they're not together. Or maybe this is something where it's going to do more stuff using cloud, you know, well, I guess that's the same thing using cloud services to look for stuff instead of independently, instead of just relying on the watch. We'll see. I would not put that down as a must have. I feel

like faster makes sense in terms of having apps launch. I would say faster processor is the number one priority I would make more than battery because it does get through a day and more than cellular connectivity or GPS or anything like that. if they've got a strategy about making the watch smarter and have more access to the internet and feeling like it doesn't always have to be tethered to the phone, that they would try to do something like this. But I hope it's that and not, like you said, the $10 a month to add your watch to your plan, because forget that. That would suck. You'd have to give me a real good reason. And, yeah, I just, but, you know, like I said, Amazon does, and it's an extra price for those Kindles,

but they have these cellular Kindles and you don't pay a bill. They just, you know, they just are on that, the data network. I had one for a while. I probably told this story on this show before, but when I got the second gen Kindle, which you could buy, like you could buy it in the UK,

but it came from amazon.com, like the US. And like you got a US AC adapter and stuff. But I had the one where it just came with data. And I was using roaming T-Mobile. Or was it AT&T? It was AT&T, but it was roaming. It was so slow. But it was doing roaming data.

It was so funny. It was just hilarious to me that they didn't bother to do any deals deals with uk cell companies it's like i would just roam no problem and it used to just if i had the cell radio on it just burnt through the battery i'm sure because it was trying to find who knows what to connect who knows who knows what but so you apple watch users out there you apple watch lovers we're with you don't worry we got your back yeah we we we both like it but uh it needs to be better right it needs to be better there's absolutely no design denying it needs to be better i'm so interested i am more interested in watch os 3 than i am in the next versions of os 10 and ios only because i feel like it's pivotal

i feel like this is Apple's opportunity to say, here's where we're going with this device. Now that it's been in the real world for more than a year, we had a lot of time to think about where it's going next. And here's our conception of it. And will I be disappointed if they basically say it's more of the same? Yeah, I will be because I think there,

I think there are some clear flaws in their approach. And I would hope that they've seen it too and that they would make some changes to make it more useful and maybe emphasize the things that are working really well and de-emphasize some of the stuff that is not so great. This week's episode is brought to you by Pingdom. You should start monitoring your websites and servers today, and you can do this by going to pingdom.com.

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and use the code UPGRADE at checkout to get 20% off. Thank you so much to Pingdom for their support of this show. All right, gloves are off, my friend. Oh, no. Let's talk about this New York Times-Apple expose in the podcasting realm. So I want to give a little bit of background to people in case they may have missed this because, you know, you probably did miss it. The New York Times posted a thing over the weekend stating that there had been some kind of secret meeting inside of Apple where a bunch of leading podcast professionals were brought in to talk about how Apple can probably make things better for them.

I assume that this meeting came because there were people complaining to Apple, so Apple brought them in to talk to them. There are a couple of different meetings between these leading podcast professionals and Apple, and then Apple internally with Eddie Cue is what they talk about in this New York Times piece. And then this piece came out where lots of people are very secretive and leaking stuff to the New York Times, probably because they weren't happy with what Apple had suggested that they would or would not do. Basically, the ideas put forward by these leading podcast professionals was that they wanted more data about their listeners. They wanted Apple to help better promote them

and give them more promotional tools and mechanisms. They wanted Apple's support in trying to help direct listener support come through. And, you know, basically it seems like they went to the new york times because they maybe apple said we're not going to give you this or they wanted to kind of light a fire underneath apple uh they called out some people by name um mentioned steve wilson who is a great. And it is that part is true. So they talk about the fact that like, there's one person that you have to kind of get in contact with if you want your show to be featured. And this is because the podcast team inside of Apple really, it seems

like is very small. But they do actually have people that are dedicated to doing it. And there are different people in different territories. In the past, I have worked with people in the UK and I've worked with people in the US. And they call out these people by name in this piece for a reason I'm not completely sure why. But they do. But that part of it is very true. If you want to get featured, you have to kind of be seen by this person. But my experience is whilst some of the promotion has changed and it has shifted

more towards these general interest large shows away from tech shows, the people inside of Apple are still very supportive of shows of all kinds and do a good job of promoting everyone. And I know this kind of sounds like now I'm trying to cover my butt, but there have been many times where we have a new show launching and I email Steveve and they help us out with it and in all honesty like they were very helpful for us when we started let alone where we are now so you know whatever but anyway let's get back to the meat of this um this outraged a lot of us in the kind of more independent tech space because it kind of goes against everything that we want. Yeah, and suggests a level of some of the reactions to it and some things in the article suggest a level of misunderstanding of how podcasts work. That is kind of from our perspective.

Yeah. Well, no, I mean, some of it is from a technical perspective of not understanding how it works like there is a a so-called technology columnist for the wall street journal who uh seems to not understand this at all but that doesn't stop him it didn't stop him on twitter from making comments about it but he it's like literally like you literally don't know how this works but uh why should that stop you comment away yeah marco wrote a great piece piece. Marco, naturally, having made Overcast, understands a lot of this as well as being a podcaster of his self. And one of the reasons that he made Overcast was to actually fight against some of these bigger players, right?

That was one of the reasons that Overcast even exists. And he does a good job of breaking down why a lot of the requirements from leading podcast professionals is an issue. So asking for more data about listeners requires Apple to kind of lock down their apps. So in case you don't know, the way that it works right now with the iTunes podcast directory, you submit an RSS feed to Apple. They kind of take note of the RSS feed. And when you subscribe to a show in one of the podcast apps that Apple makes, you subscribe directly to the RSS feed that that person provided.

Apple don't take the files. They don't re-host the files. Nothing like that. They just basically do a handshake between the subscribe button and the submitted RSS feed. That's effectively how it works. For a lot of this stuff to be found out, for there to be more data about listeners,

to know stuff about where you are in the world, to know demographic information, how old you are, to know if you've listened to the whole show, what parts you've skipped. For Apple to know this information, they would have to kind of lock down a lot of the way that podcasts work. They would probably need to be hosting the files and reserving them on their own. They would need to do more tracking. And then they would also be providing all of this data to the podcast creators. And what Marco is arguing is that this would kind of stop the free open nature of the way that podcasts have worked

with the RSS feeds and you know you just subscribe to a feed and it comes to you and also you know what if Apple then decided they wanted to start reviewing things more tightly they wanted to start tracking you you know and sending that data out to other people which would then be sold to advertisers like that's the idea of this

and I think that it was a really great piece and then federico wrote a great one as well um yeah where federico talks about how what he likes about podcasting right now is it feels like blogging for him that you know everything is is free and open there's no proprietary file formats you know and he says something and federico talks about this sort of stuff a lot and i like he says i want to know that 30 years from now i'll be able to look up one of my podcast episodes from 2016 like i can look up a blog post from 2009 on my own server yeah it is uh some of this is about kind of being contrary to how podcasting works technically it is an open standard people there's a fundamental misunderstanding uh in a shocking degree that apple is hosting podcasts and acting as a gatekeeper for podcasts and it's just not

true apple publishes a directory when you click subscribe on a podcast in itunes or in the podcast app you know apple knows you clicked subscribe and that's it like your your RSS is being downloaded from the provider. Your MP3 file is being downloaded from the provider. Apple might have some stats in terms of the download count. And I think they do because they do like what I do with my RSS feed and what you do with yours, which is you put a tracker inside that basically is a redirect.

So you can measure a download. That's literally all you can measure because it's an MP3. You can't, unlike the web where you're loading a page, as Marco says, web pages are software. They can run code. All we can really, it's like the hits days of the web. We can measure the download. And that is all we can measure. But there's this idea that somehow Apple has this incredible ability. So you can't conflate the iTunes app on the Mac and the podcast app on iOS with the iTunes podcast directory, because those are separate. And there's some basic data you can get from the podcast directory based on what they've got now. Now their app gives them more power because that is a very popular app. One of

the reasons why Google added podcasting, I think to Google play music is because they don't have an on platform, like on device, every device podcast answer. There are obviously many third parties, but there's no on device thing. And they decided to sort of like stick it inside their music app, which I'm a little disappointed. They don't, they didn't just build a podcast app, it inside their music app, which I'm a little disappointed they didn't just build a podcast app, but they didn't. So Apple's got this huge amount of data. By the way, Marco has data too, if he wanted to get it, where you could wire into your app, monitoring the behavior of the users and radioing back with how long did they listen

to that episode? Where did they skip? Did they listen to it all the way through? When did they abandon it? And they could roll all that up and present it to podcasters. And I think that's part of what they're doing here. But the way it gets spun, like the New York Times story says, I want to quote this directly, Apple does not allow shows to charge people to download episodes and does not support paid subscriptions. Apple has stuck with an advertising model for podcasting. Now, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how podcasting works.

This is people saying basically, password-protecting RSS feeds is complicated and it kind of doesn't work very well. And that's inherent in the format. So I guess what they're saying is, I wish Apple could be a gatekeeper and divert podcasting from being what it's been and turn it into something like the App Store or the iTunes Store, where they would come up with a system that would only work in their apps, presumably, to have people pay for episodes. By the way, if you wanted to put your episodes up for pay, you could do it.

You'd make them audiobooks. You'd put them in the iTunes store. That would work. Or you write your own app, put that in the app store, and people do that, and you can charge it that way. But the podcast format doesn't really allow that. So you would have to really subvert the format in order to make that happen. And the concept of Apple has stuck with an advertising model is so removed from reality. And this is what led to that Wall Street Journal columnist from saying, you know, Apple has refused to support advertising and podcasting since 2005,

which is just not, that's not, that's not what it is. It's, it's the idea here is Apple's just using, providing a directory. I guess the leading podcast professionals are saying, Apple, please intervene here and become a gatekeeper and allow us to make money on these podcasts in new ways. But it's just really unrealistic. I think the only realistic thing they're asking for is more data, and specifically more data from the podcast app. I think that's going to be the most important place, and from iTunes on Mac and PC, I suppose. And I can see why you might want to have more data, although the web has a lot of data.

And how's that web experience for everybody, right? It's bad for media companies. The ad rates are terrible. It's bad for users because web pages are terrible and they're full of ads. But they've got it all measured, right? Whereas every other medium in existence doesn't have that, right? They don't measure eyeballs on billboards. They have to estimate it. They don't measure eyeballs for magazines or newspapers or broadcast television or cable television. They have to do samples and hope that their samples are right. Or some places now have data based on DVR boxes and things like that, but it's limited samples. The web is the best place for perfect ad tech

data. And look at the web. It's a mess. It's a disaster. Media companies are struggling to make money on the web. So they want that for podcasting? It's terrible. It's a mess. It's a disaster. Media companies are struggling to make money on the web. So they want that for podcasting? It's terrible. It's a terrible idea. Plus, it's not podcasting anymore. Why? Well, because to do it, again, the idea of does not allow shows to charge people to download episodes, does not support paid subscriptions.

That's kind of inherent in how the RSS format works. And I suppose if there's a standard for password protecting RSS feeds by individuals, I mean, you can use like HTTP authentication to do it or something like that, but it's not a web page. It doesn't work like a web page. Then I suppose if there was a standard and everybody else was using it, but Apple's got the most popular client, and they're not using it, so they could beseech Apple to support it. I could sort of see that. But that's sort of not just not how the podcasting is structured, because it's just these RSS feeds. And that's just how it is. You know, we don't have the when when you want to create a premium podcast, you do what Midroll is doing with Howl. You do what Audible is doing.

And you build your own tools and charge people to listen inside your tools. But podcasting is more open than that. What the leading podcast professionals – we're trolling by saying this. I know we're being kind of silly, but I can't help it. They're asking for Apple to do what's Google and Spotify are doing. And I want to address this because RelayFM shows are now on

Google and Spotify. I know The Incomparable is now on Google. Basically, what these systems are doing is they take your feed, they take your file, and then they reserve it so they can get data. They are closed systems that we have opted into.

And the reason that we've done that is because if there is the way that I look at this is if there is going to be another big player like Apple, it's going to be one of those two companies. So from a business perspective, I want to be there. What I don't want is Apple a company that has done things in an open way to now become that as well because then what it does is

closes all of the major systems and I don't like the thought of that I like that we have a mix right now we have some systems that we opt into that are closed because their terms are good like we don't, we're not in Stitcher and there are things like TuneIn I don't like the way that their contracts look, but I like the way that Google

and Spotify's did. So we were happy to enter into those relationships. But I like that there's a mix. So we have these, a couple of things that we're trying out. They're small for us right now. They might get bigger, but then we have all the third-party apps that we work with that are very open. They just take our RSS feeds. We have Apple, who is a huge player with a big marketplace, who is also open. I like that mix. I don't want everything to be closed.

Right. Because Google and Spotify, they're experiments for us. Yeah, there's a huge difference between having an open market and then also participating in closed markets and having no open market. Exactly. Talk to CGP Grey about how great it is to just be reliant on YouTube. So this is the other part, right? For us, why it's weird. So I just looked at, we've spoken about this before, way earlier in the day about our statistics on this show. Over 50% of the listeners that listen to upgrade listen

and overcast and then it's like 20 listen in itunes so the thing is it doesn't for our existing audience whatever apple does is not that much of a problem because of where our audiences skew they skew to third-party apps but what i don't want is the whole of the industry changing to think that you have to have this data because i like that my listeners choose and i want that to continue you know yeah i've got um and and just for the record i mean the data that itunes currently provides people is basically like downloads and subscriptions that they're estimating like this is this is how many downloads and subscriptions we got and that's coming out of apple's platforms yep um what what's being asked

for also i have to say it's a little disingenuous um some people are saying well what we really want are plays which is basically yes once you download if if if you're like me you've got 30 podcast episodes in your in your play queue and you'll only ever listen to about eight of them if you're like me but they all count as downloads because honestly without intervention by the app the that you're listening to you nobody knows that you're listening to, you, nobody knows that you listen to them. Only the app knows, uh, from our side, you downloaded our file. That's all we know. So it, it, I get why they're saying, well, I want to know how many people press play or how many people got to the end or where people stopped and how long they listen. And, and the fact is you can get a lot of that through, uh, through a sample. You could probably do that

where you could find a partner who would give you a sample and you could say, oh, well, on average, you know, the first 30 minutes are good and it's 70% of downloads are listened to or 40 or whatever it is. You don't necessarily have to measure everybody, although that's sort of what they're asking for. But some of these things are even weirder than that. Some of the things people are asking for are like ad rates, like ad listens, who listened to this ad, who skipped that ad. And that data is so sophisticated because now you're talking about tagging up a podcast episode with time codes based on what ad spots are where, and then having a system. I mean, it gets really complicated really fast. Is it surprising that Apple is not interested

in participating in that? And let's keep in mind, Apple's not doing this now. It's not like Apple is providing this complete service and refuses, as it's been characterized, refuses to add these features. Apple would have to build something completely new to do this, and it would need to take our files and reserve our files, which would take all that data away from us

and we wouldn't understand it anymore. We would have to use their tools to do it and rely on them. And that goes back to the independence thing. And so what they're asking for seems, if you phrase it a certain way, very simple, but it's not simple. It's extremely complicated. I'm not sure they need it. And I feel like it ends up driving a race to the bottom where you end up with really crappy marketing and really awful marketers who are marketing things in

very specific ways because all they really care about are essentially the equivalent of clicks. And that's the other thing about podcasts is podcasts don't generate clicks. So you can't measure clicks like you can on the web. All you can measure are listens. So I'm fine for more podcast data. I would love to be able to know how many people actually play my episodes. But what's being asked here, I think is unrealistic and goes way beyond that.

And it doesn't help that the New York Times is shaping the public perception of how this works in a way that is distorted by the desires of a bunch of people who came from public radio and took a lot of investment money and are now trying to find a way to scale their businesses and hire more people to their new startup and have them all work locally in Brooklyn, which is one of the most expensive places in the world, let's say, and do all of that. And now they need more revenue. How do we get it?

Well, let's make it more like the web then. And it's like, and they go to Apple and they get a meeting with Apple and they're like, all right, Apple's gonna listen to us. And they go in there and Apple's like, okay, we hear you, but there's stuff we're willing to do and there's stuff we're not willing to do. And they leave and they're all mad. Like,

why did we even come here? Apple doesn't care about us. Apple doesn't care about us increasing our revenue and becoming, being able to pay back our investors. Let's leak it to the New York Times. Well, you know, I guess that's how the game is played. Fundamentally, one of the things that I want to mention is like, we're not shafting our advertisers. Like we're not hiding things from them. They're not getting a bad deal. Like the way that it works is just how other untrackable, like completely untrackable advertising works. We're not completely untrackable. That's the thing is like television is completely untrackable. Magazines, magazines are completely untrackable beyond the number of, of ones you put out there or newspapers, right?

And television, right? It's just like we ask Nielsen to give us a sample or something like that. But there are television ads that work like how we do, like they use specific codes, they use specific URLs, like specific phone numbers. Yeah, that stuff all exists, right? And that's kind of like what we do. But at the end, like basically, like I came from a world where this was a thing, right? Like working out television buys and working out billboard buys. There are statistics that you can do. And especially with podcast ads, because we use those codes, people can see if there's been a direct response to the codes. And I have lots of conversations with advertisers and they're like, the renewals in the code were great.

You know, all the renewals in the code are not so good. How can we work around this? And it allows us to be more creative because I work with the advertisers to think like, how can we make this work better for you? Like, what's the copy that's better? If they have like such specific data, which shows this worked and this didn't work, I think everything would get a lot more robotic.

People will be less willing to try out exciting things. And fundamentally, the reasons that you might hear some advertisers quite a lot on these shows is because the advertising is working. They're not just throwing money into a pit. And, you know, I also would say, I think podcasting needs to have better measurement standards. I think that everybody needs to be using the same numbers. I think that right now it's very hard to define what the size of a podcast audience is. And I would actually welcome some standards there. I think sometimes that some of the stuff that I do is unfairly compared to some other things.

And that my things are probably unfairly compared to other things because different platforms measure things differently. And so, you know, I get the idea that you want to have better measurements. That said, if you're somebody who's being sold something that is 30,000 listeners and you get a return and you're happy with it, and then a new measurement tool comes out and says that it's actually 40,000 or 20,000, if you got the value out of it, has anything really changed other than that the number is being measured in a different way? Because in the end, I get if you're Coke and all you really want to do is brand advertising,

which is actually a thing that the web has kind of ruined because everybody wants to get clicks instead of accepting that there's value in just putting your brand in people's faces so that they know it. Podcast brand advertising exists. Squarespace is brand advertising. It is. I mean, why are there so many Squarespace ads? Because they want you to think of Squarespace when you want to set up a website.

And direct response is a part, I guess, of what they look for. But that's certainly not the only benefit they get from doing that. So I don't love advertising. It's not my favorite thing in the world. But, you know, when I see people sort of representing an entire medium that I'm in and they don't represent me making arguments that seem to be based at least in part on misunderstandings of how it all works, I do feel a little subverted and offended by their ideas that they desperately need these things to make their business work. I don't feel like I need to be called into Apple to have a conversation with a Q, but I just want someone who does the type of thing that I do to be in that room,

or I just don't want this to happen at all. I don't feel like I need to be there. It'd be nice if Leo Laporte was there, right? like as the person who represents what we do because he's the biggest and it's the closest to what we do right um but again i don't care if that's there either i just want apple to be sensible about the way that they're going to do this and to be honest the reason this new york times article exists is because they're probably not being sensible but so they are being sensible. Yeah, not being sensible to them. Yeah. Yeah.

Not being sensible by the metrics of the leading podcast professionals who have seen, you know, in the past that like if you shame Apple in the media, then you can twist their arm. Yeah. All we really need is IAD for podcasts and this will solve this whole thing, right?

And look how well that turned out. Yeah. Yeah. There are platforms that do measurements of podcasts. Podcasting as an open standard. There will continue to be innovations on that front that will give us data. this he said on numerous occasions like one of the reasons he did overcast and made it free is because he feels like it's dangerous to have these huge players and he's he seems resolved to not measure his customers behavior right and that's what they want that's what these guys want is they want to they want to know exactly what you listen to and how long you listen to it for and

they can't do that without i'm actually a little surprised that they haven't funded. Maybe they have, but we know several major independent podcast app manufacturers. So I don't think this has happened yet, but I'm a little surprised that the leading podcast professionals haven't just funded a new app that is the most awesome podcast app in the world. And I shouldn't give them ideas, but like, and, and reports all the data back and is like the super like ad app. And then you put inside of that, you make it, you put in e-commerce where people can subscribe to paid podcasts

and all of that. And I'm sort of surprised that hasn't gone further down the road. Maybe there's something out there, but you know, something that poses as a podcast app, but is actually a plant to harvest data. I feel like that these people couldn't agree, right? They don't want their own.

That may be, and it would be collusion and all that. But I mean, or that somebody who's the equivalent of Nielsen, essentially, builds a podcast app with all that built in so that they can, at the very least, have a sample of podcast user behavior. But because that's what they're really asking for is they want, it's a little bit like saying if you couldn't measure ad responses without getting Apple and Microsoft and Google to modify the web browsers to report back on every page you went to, right?

It's like we could really use that data. But fortunately they don't need to ask. Apple has long not supported the area of blogging, right? They've not given the data back to the advertisers. It's time that Apple rewrite Safari so people can track where their mouse clicks go. I don't know if this is interesting to you, listener. I hope that it is. I would love, if you want to know anything more about this, send us in some questions. Send us on Twitter. You know, use the hashtag AskUpgrade. Send us emails.

If you want to hear us talk more about this, right, because there's so many different avenues of this. If you want to hear us expand on any of it, let us know. If you don't ever want to hear us talk about it again, just don't say anything and we'll get the message. This week's episode is brought to you by Casper, a company that is focused on sleep. Casper has created a perfect mattress that it sells directly to consumers, eliminating commission-driven inflated prices. Casper is revolutionizing the mattress industry by cutting the cost of dealing

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casper.com slash upgrade and using the code upgrade. Terms and conditions apply. Thank you so much to Casper for their support of this show. Alright, so it's time for Ask Upgrade. Okay, the first question this week comes in to us from Adrian. How do you handle

significant others not understanding tech the way that you do? For example, my significant other refuses to use one password but can never remember any of her passwords. Jason, do you have any kind of ways to softly strong-arm the people that you love into using technology the way that you like it?

No, I will extol the virtues of things that I think have virtues and offer to set them up to try to use them and they can decide. And, you know, beyond that, quite frankly, I can help their understanding, but they need to judge whether they think it's worth it. And if I think it's worth it for them and they decide it's not, it's not my place to say that they should change their behavior. So I try to lay it out there for them. So I do that with my mom.

I do that with my wife. I do that with my kids. I will provide them with, you know, you could do it this way. And sometimes they're like, eh, it's not worth it. And other times they'll be like, oh, yeah, tell me more. You know, that sounds good. And, you know, that's it for me. I feel like I can diagnose their issues and I can explain to them what's going on

and I can offer suggestions and then I kind of have to leave it. I will take them as far as they want to go. And if they don't want to go, then I'm not going to push it. I mean, I guess if it's dangerous, if it was like a security thing where I'm like, no, no, seriously,

you can't do it this way. You cannot have 123 be your password to this thing. But I've never really come into something that that serious i actually can pretty much agree with you like i will if i think that something is right for adina i would explain to her why i think it's right and try and like display to her what i think she would benefit from because she understands like if something is beneficial to her that she'll use it like she is a one password user now we're still kind of going down that road of getting her to put more passwords into it and

changing some passwords and stuff but now she understands it she can see the benefits she can see why like she doesn't have to remember all her passwords anymore like it's a it can be good and we move down that road you know but i think that's the important thing like i don't think that you should try and strong-arm people and force them to do something but like try and explain it to them because it's not about not understanding it's like they just don't care the way that we do so they don't take the time to learn anything about it so it's kind of if we feel it's important it's our responsibility to try and explain it in a way that isn't boring yeah alex said uh my apple bundle services together in the future because you know paying for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple, you know,

Music Match or whatever, iTunes Match or whatever it's called, maybe a potential TV service, other services could end up adding up. Do you think, Jason, that they will do kind of like a one price for everything at some point? Need to get it all? My guess is no. It's possible that they do something

Prime-like, but what they offer is so different that I think that they'd rather have people pay for the things they use and not for the things that they don't. And that there's not a lot of extra value to be gained in bundling it all together. Presumably they'd bundle it for a discount or something like that, which I imagine they wouldn't want to actually do. They would like to charge you for everything so it's possible if they had a huge just raft of services that they could buy you and all you could buy an all-in package but i wouldn't bet on it i think i think they're more comfortable to just let you pick and choose what you want i have to say as a as a user of prime i do love that you get it all i i agree i i my question is just how would you do it like i i guess i I could see an Apple thing where they threw in iCloud storage or something like that. And you get this storage. We'll just throw that in just as a value add kind of thing. But I don't know. I have a hard time seeing Apple's offering as quite as coherent as even Prime. prime luke would like to know could apple regain a little traction in the kind of the echo amazon echo market by introducing some alexa alexa-esque api hooks for siri and ios 10 so allowing more

services to tie in with siri the way that the echo does you know like say you want to turn your lights on and off that kind of thing what do you think it might do that do you think that it would help if they did well problem is that um i mean one of the problems is home kit where apple has taken the stand like you know you're either with us or you're against us so um i wish i wish that would happen um that they would they would open that up a little bit on the on the uh uh siri side yeah i i think that that's one of the big problems with siri is that people have been wanting to tie in they've been wanting to tie their apps in.

And then you could also talk about, you know, web apps and things like that. Just tie in more ways where you could set up Siri. I think Apple wants Siri to have no interface at all. Right. I mean, basically you turn it on and off and to do the stuff that you do with the Amazon echo,

you, you, there's an interface you need to, you need to kind of wire it up a little bit. And I'm not sure Apple wants to go down that, that, that rabbit hole, but boy, it would sure be nice. I, yeah, I find, I find Alexa so much more useful for so many things than Siri at this point that it's kind of, uh, uh, yeah, it's frustrating. So yes, uh, they, I think it would help. I do think Apple still needs a box

that is listening to you though, like in the air, and not something where you have to push a button. And your phone is not, you know, as we've detailed in previous shows, your phone is one of those options. But I think that the echo has showed that there's probably room for something else. All right, final question this week comes from Brent. And it's kind of directed to me how do you decide which topics to cover on Upgrade versus Connected and this is a good question and lots of people ask me this and they say like how are these shows different I think that these shows are very different in in many different ways right like mine and Jason and our relationship the way that we talk and interact about these topics is very different to the way that the three of us do. I think connected is generally more sillier, right?

Like it's, and this show is more, we've debate more and that kind of thing. I think in tone, they're quite different. There are many topics that will spread across both shows. Like when iOS 10 comes out, we're going to talk about that on both shows. But something that I try to do a lot is to keep my keep specific points for certain shows so like I might have a feeling about something that I don't express on upgrade I express it on connected instead because and you and I you and I will often talk about a topic and you'll say I want to talk about this stuff on upgrade and I want to talk about this stuff on connected which doesn't mean

that I can't talk about the other aspects but like when you want to delve into like a personal take or tell an anecdote sometimes you will break those up. And so this feels like this story about me doing this. So we'll say, oh, well, you bought a second iPad. And although maybe that gets covered on Cortex instead. But sometimes we'll do something like that and be like, well, let's talk about this part of that here. Or we'll just say, oh, yeah, you're going to talk about that or you just talked about that on Connected. Or we'll just say, oh, yeah, you're going to talk about that or you just talked about that on Connected. So we do kind of plot out a little bit of like what information you release so that you're not saying the same thing on every show that you are co-hosting.

But what we don't do is shy away from a topic because – and people who were listening to the live stream last week will have actually heard us do this on the live stream, which we usually don't do, which uh we don't shy away from covering a subject just because connected covered it for example we will do it again mike will modulate how much he participates because he doesn't want to say the same thing on every show yep because i feel that my role on most of the shows that i'm on is to encourage the conversation from the other person right so i just try and bring out your thoughts and i try and bring out steven and federico's thoughts and and genuinely like one thing that i try very hard to do is to actually make it better if you listen to all of the shows right that you know so like i like so say for example cortex and and upgrade and connected like when i got when i kind of started to delve deeper into iPad craziness,

I tried to spread some of my thoughts across all of them. So if you listen to all of those shows, you get more out of it. Because I remember back in the day when those 5x5 shows, like you had the talk show and build and analyze and hypercritical. When they were all there, you would listen to all of them, and stories would go across all of the shows and i like that and i try and bring some of that to to what i can influence so that's it i mean yeah there are times where we're going to talk about the same topic but we talk about them in different ways and i would hope that anybody

listens to both of those shows would know that yeah yeah exactly but i think it's a good question and it is just definitely something that we think about. And not to, I mean, people who are listening here either skip to that previous segment, or they survived us talking about the insider-iest of inside baseball topics about podcasting. But all of you are podcast listeners. I like to make that point. 100% of the people listening to this podcast, listen to podcasts. And that's why we love you but um but i i just would say sometimes i feel like there's a perception that some of these conversational shows are half-assed and some of them are but more than you'd think aren't and that i tell you what this isn't thought goes thought goes into these shows uh some of these shows and uh and this is i think this is a good example of that where behind the scenes we are talking about what we're going to talk about, what points we're going to hit, what we're not going to talk about, what show, what, you know, what conversation goes where, you know, there is, there is preparation and planning that goes on, uh, to lead us to the conversation that we then have in the show. So, um, it's not, it's not scripted or anything like that, but there is definitely consideration put in up front before we get to the recording.

I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much for listening to this week's show. If you'd like to find our show notes, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 88. If you'd like to find Jason's work online, go to sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. Jason is at jsnell on twitter j s n e double l i am at i mike i m y k e upgrade as a part of relay fm there are many other shows in relay fm

like connected and cortex rocket disruption the list goes on and on and on there is something for you if you enjoy this show there is something elseayFM that I am positively sure that you will enjoy. And it's called Liftoff. Don't forget Liftoff, the space show, the pen addict, the pen show. It goes on and on and on because we have a great selection of content that you can go and enjoy to your heart's content. Thanks to Casper and Pingdom for helping support this episode.

But most of all, as always, and I really do mean this, thank you for listening. We couldn't do this without you. Until next time, say goodbye, Mr. Snell. Goodbye, everybody. We love you.