Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:11 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode number 79.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Upgrade is brought to you this week by the good people at Casper, premium mattresses on the Internet,

00:00:21 ◼   ► Squarespace, beautiful websites, I guess. I'm gonna make that one up.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Mail route filtering spam and bounce mail out from your mail before it even

00:00:30 ◼   ► gets to your server. I'm Jason Snell, I don't normally read that part because

00:00:34 ◼   ► Myke Hurley is usually here, but Myke Hurley is in transit from America where

00:00:38 ◼   ► he attended Matt Alexander's wedding in Dallas this weekend and he is on the way

00:00:44 ◼   ► back to London. So I have brought in one of my special guest hosts to join me for

00:00:49 ◼   ► this week's edition of Upgrading. You know him from, among other places, the

00:00:53 ◼   ► Accidental Tech podcast and Reconcilable Differences as well as, of course, many appearances on

00:00:58 ◼   ► The Incomparable. Mr. John Syracuse, hello!

00:01:01 ◼   ► I was disappointed. I thought you were going to do the accent.

00:01:04 ◼   ► Oh, I can't. Oh, no. That would be really bad. My English—I'm not prepared to do my

00:01:09 ◼   ► English accent and I can't do a Myke Hurley impression. That I really can't do. I can

00:01:13 ◼   ► do some fake English accents that I learned from watching BBC shows when I was in high

00:01:17 ◼   ► school, but I don't think I could do an impression of Myke. Hello, mate! That's about all I got.

00:01:23 ◼   ► We can work on that. We can work on that together.

00:01:25 ◼   ► All right. Well, that was what Myke and I—that was our code. "Hello, mate. This is a podcast."

00:01:31 ◼   ► That's it. That's all I got. Do some Spinal Tap lines. Do some Princess Bride lines. That's

00:01:36 ◼   ► about it. That's all I got. Those are fake accents, too.

00:01:40 ◼   ► So normally in the show, we do follow-up/follow-out. I know that these are not entirely approved

00:01:47 ◼   ► terms by John Siracusa, but there it is. I wanted to mention that we did—you and I,

00:01:53 ◼   ► along with a bunch of other interesting people did an episode of The Incomparable that posted

00:01:57 ◼   ► this weekend about Firewatch, the game from Campo Santo and published by Panic. And people

00:02:02 ◼   ► should listen to it if they want to hear. Yeah, they might want to hear what I have

00:02:05 ◼   ► to say about it or Tiffany Arment or Brian Hamilton or Tony Sindelar or you. See, that's

00:02:14 ◼   ► the big piece there. You also, that is your like official, so far your official statement.

00:02:20 ◼   ► Runde Caldwell's on that too, although she had the flu and so she was very tired. That's

00:02:24 ◼   ► your official statement about Firewatch so far is episode 290 of The Incomparable.

00:02:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I think we covered it all. Like, I don't think there's a need for me to talk about

00:02:34 ◼   ► it in any other podcast. I think I haven't listened to the episode yet, but I felt good

00:02:38 ◼   ► after it was done. I felt like everybody got, you know, their opinions out there.

00:02:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think it worked out pretty well. And it's a good game. People

00:02:48 ◼   ► should play it. It's reasonably priced. My understanding is on most modern Macs it will

00:02:52 ◼   ► play fairly well. You may have to crank down the settings, the frame rate may be kind of

00:02:57 ◼   ► low but it's playable and if you've got a PS4 you can buy it and play it there too.

00:03:03 ◼   ► And I'm fond because I'm not somebody who invests dozens of hours of time like you do

00:03:07 ◼   ► in something like Destiny. I'm never going to play a game like that for all of those

00:03:13 ◼   ► hundreds of hours. I love these short games that take, they're sort of like movie length.

00:03:20 ◼   ► They're a little bit longer, but I think I played Firewatch in like three hours, three

00:03:24 ◼   ► and a half hours or something like that, and it was a great experience and I was happy

00:03:28 ◼   ► that I had done it when I got to the end. And I might play it through again, I'm actually

00:03:32 ◼   ► hoping that my wife will play it through and maybe I'll watch while she does that. But

00:03:36 ◼   ► I love those, I love these short games that are, you can tell a story and have an experience

00:03:41 ◼   ► and get to the end and not have it invested, you know, a week or two of your life.

00:03:45 ◼   ► That's the key that you you will be able to get to the end. Like, for the most part,

00:03:50 ◼   ► if you can make it five minutes into this game, you will be able to get to the end.

00:03:53 ◼   ► You will not find yourself thwarted by, like, "I started playing this game and then it got

00:03:57 ◼   ► too hard and I couldn't." Yeah, it's not one of those games.

00:04:00 ◼   ► You'll make it through. Can you move around in a 3D world? I mean,

00:04:02 ◼   ► if you can move around, like... Yeah, I mean, that is a barrier, to be fair,

00:04:06 ◼   ► but if you make it past the first five or ten minutes, you'll be fine. And you'll be

00:04:10 ◼   ► sucked into it and you should block out three hours to play to play it straight through

00:04:14 ◼   ► because it's fun. It's a page turner of a game if that makes sense.

00:04:17 ◼   ► Yeah, and people were asking about the incomparable episode, they said, "Are there spoilers?"

00:04:21 ◼   ► And I think we did a pretty good job. If you want to be completely unspoiled about the

00:04:27 ◼   ► game, you shouldn't listen to the episode until you've played it. If you—we talk

00:04:31 ◼   ► about things that sound like they could be major spoilers, but I feel like they aren't

00:04:36 ◼   ► because they're things that happen in the first couple of minutes of the game, so they

00:04:40 ◼   ► aren't spoilers for the game play, they're just spoilers for the premise of the game,

00:04:46 ◼   ► which is, I feel like, a different kind of spoiler. And when we get to the point where

00:04:49 ◼   ► we start talking about what happens at the end of the game, we blow the spoiler horn.

00:04:53 ◼   ► But it depends on how lightly do you want to be spoiled going into it. We do talk about

00:05:00 ◼   ► it a lot before we get into the "what happens" part of the story.

00:05:04 ◼   ► story. Yeah, and to some degree, if you have no awareness of the game, you have to at least

00:05:09 ◼   ► like read a summary somewhere, start reading a summary to know what kind of game is this.

00:05:14 ◼   ► But if you don't really care and you just want to take our word for it, going in cold

00:05:17 ◼   ► is always fun. It's like going into a movie that you, you know, maybe you've never seen

00:05:20 ◼   ► an ad for it, never seen a poster, know nothing about it, and you just show up. And sometimes

00:05:26 ◼   ► that can be fun. I saw the demo at XOXO, which was really interesting because it's, um,

00:05:34 ◼   ► I knew part of the game but not the beginning because the demo is a part

00:05:42 ◼   ► where you're sent on a mission because you see some fireworks. You know the part

00:05:46 ◼   ► I'm talking about. You have to go investigate by the lake.

00:05:48 ◼   ► What's the source of the fireworks and get those people to stop shooting off

00:05:51 ◼   ► those fireworks. But watching the game I had no idea of the backstory of the

00:05:56 ◼   ► character and that's the first five or ten minutes of the game is this

00:05:59 ◼   ► backstory of how this person ends up, who you are playing, ends up out in the

00:06:03 ◼   ► the wilderness. And so it was kind of fun to go through that, because I was like, "Oh,

00:06:07 ◼   ► that's why he's out here!" Because that part I hadn't seen. I'd seen a chunk from sort

00:06:11 ◼   ► of like the 20-minute mark in the game, not from the very beginning.

00:06:17 ◼   ► That's always a challenge for those games. Like, if you're going to give a demo, what

00:06:19 ◼   ► do you demo? Because it's very difficult to--you don't want to spoil the game by demoing it,

00:06:26 ◼   ► but you do want to show people what the game is like, and usually don't have time or money

00:06:30 ◼   ► to make a custom segment that's not actually in the game that merely shows, I don't know,

00:06:35 ◼   ► what the game would be like.

00:06:36 ◼   ► Right. That mini-game that I want, where all you do is stand there and look for fires in

00:06:42 ◼   ► the wilderness.

00:06:43 ◼   ► That is not what the game is like, though.

00:06:45 ◼   ► That is not like the world's slowest arcade game, where you're there for an entire summer.

00:06:50 ◼   ► It's not like desert golfing.

00:06:53 ◼   ► It rolls out in real time, so you literally have to be there for an entire summer.

00:06:56 ◼   ► Yeah. And on day 31, there's a little puff of smoke, and you're like, "Oh, is that

00:06:59 ◼   ► 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.

00:07:05 ◼   ► Anyway, it's a good game. We all liked it.

00:07:10 ◼   ► We had criticisms because, you know, nothing is so perfect, as somebody told me, that it cannot be criticized.

00:07:16 ◼   ► 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,

00:07:21 ◼   ► you should be able to play it, which is nice.

00:07:27 ◼   ► I also had a little bit of follow-out for ATP, the latest episode, 159, which I started

00:07:34 ◼   ► listening to live and then I had to make dinner for my family and then it turns out I tuned

00:07:40 ◼   ► out just as my name was being mentioned, which is hilarious because I totally missed that

00:07:44 ◼   ► part. I could have been there when it happened. Because you were talking about my Ethernet

00:07:51 ◼   ► port dying the other week with the Stealth software update where they banned, Apple banned

00:07:56 ◼   ► its own Ethernet driver from activating, which I figured out because I have my Ethernet connected

00:08:03 ◼   ► to a Thunderbolt breakout box, and I thought something had happened to the Thunderbolt

00:08:09 ◼   ► box, like it had died, so I plugged the Ethernet into my iMac and it still didn't work and

00:08:13 ◼   ► I thought, "Okay, that is creepy." Like, I got another cable and plugged it in and that

00:08:18 ◼   ► one didn't work either, and then I was completely mystified about what was going on for a while

00:08:22 ◼   ► there so but you know it's all good now I got my ethernet back and I actually

00:08:29 ◼   ► leave my Wi-Fi turned off because there's an annoying bug in OS X where

00:08:33 ◼   ► sometimes even though Ethernet is prioritized over Wi-Fi sometimes the

00:08:41 ◼   ► Wi-Fi seems to just decide it's going to be used instead and so I'll be copying a

00:08:48 ◼   ► you know, 20 gigabyte podcast folder to my server, and I have gigabit Ethernet,

00:08:56 ◼   ► and it will and I will find that it's transferring it really slowly. And it's

00:09:00 ◼   ► because it's it's using Wi Fi instead. So I generally leave my Wi Fi turned off,

00:09:04 ◼   ► because that's the one way that I can force my computer to always use the

00:09:08 ◼   ► Ethernet. But as a result, when my Ethernet ports died, I knew immediately

00:09:12 ◼   ► because I was off the internet. And all my audio plugins with their annoying

00:09:17 ◼   ► DRM that have the phone home to make sure that you're authorized. They're all based

00:09:22 ◼   ► — not only could they not get on the internet, they're all based on your ethernet ID, apparently.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And it couldn't see my ethernet cards, essentially, my ethernet hardware on any of my ethernet

00:09:35 ◼   ► devices attached to the system. So they all failed, too. I didn't get any editing done

00:09:40 ◼   ► on my Mac.

00:09:41 ◼   ► I always leave the Wi-Fi turned off for that exact reason. And also, around the same time

00:09:46 ◼   ► this bug happened, one of my ethernet switches went bad. As far as I'm able to determine,

00:09:51 ◼   ► it really did go bad because it didn't not see the ethernet port, it was there, and it

00:09:57 ◼   ► would sort of work when I would reboot my switch. It would appear to work for a second,

00:10:00 ◼   ► but then it would become disconnected and then I would watch my switch reset. Anyway,

00:10:03 ◼   ► I think I actually really did have a bad switch, but it was kind of weird that I had an ethernet

00:10:07 ◼   ► problem at the same time that other people were having to disable my ethernet driver

00:10:12 ◼   ► Yeah, wired internet. It's still a thing. It's still, I mean, the speed I get with

00:10:19 ◼   ► that gigabit Ethernet, it's so great. I copy these huge files and they copy so fast.

00:10:25 ◼   ► It's amazing. I love it. And I'm still a little baffled about why the system tries

00:10:32 ◼   ► to use the deprioritized network adapter. Like, it's down at the bottom of the list.

00:10:38 ◼   ► really don't use Wi-Fi and it's still finder copies will still happen with

00:10:44 ◼   ► Wi-Fi and you know you can't tell if it's a small file but when it's one of

00:10:47 ◼   ► those 20 gigabyte folders and it says this will take 40 minutes and you're

00:10:51 ◼   ► like that's that's too long it should take less time but I don't know there's

00:10:58 ◼   ► something there it must I don't I'm mystified about it because it's not like

00:11:01 ◼   ► my ethernet connection goes up and down it's always there it's solid I can see

00:11:07 ◼   ► the cable, you know? And yet it'll be like, "I'm just gonna use Wi-Fi now. That'll be

00:11:12 ◼   ► fun. Let's throw these bits in the air just for kicks."

00:11:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I have no idea why it does that either. I mean, I've seen the same thing, and you

00:11:21 ◼   ► know, in fact, I get to the point now where I don't trust the ordering at all. If I see

00:11:25 ◼   ► the little fan symbol in the menu bar because I've forgotten to turn it off, I just immediately

00:11:30 ◼   ► turn it off. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. The only problem is

00:11:37 ◼   ► handoff stuff. Although handoff stuff is, I think some of the handoff stuff now works

00:11:45 ◼   ► even when you're on Ethernet, if you've got Ethernet and Bluetooth. Like it'll say, "Oh,

00:11:49 ◼   ► you're on the network and you've got Bluetooth." But in Yosemite, I know that I couldn't use

00:11:54 ◼   ► handoff with anything if I had Wi-Fi turned off. So if I wanted to handoff something,

00:11:59 ◼   ► I had to like, it kind of destroyed the purpose of having a convenient way to do handoff,

00:12:04 ◼   ► is I would have to go turn Wi-Fi on and then hand something off and then turn it back off,

00:12:08 ◼   ► which is dumb. Oh well. Anyway, that wasn't even my follow-up. My follow-up was that you

00:12:14 ◼   ► talked about HFS Plus. I don't know if I have that ding sound effect that I can put in that

00:12:19 ◼   ► Marco always puts in for ATP. But I just, I loved you talking about HFS Plus and the

00:12:27 ◼   ► the whole story behind how if you attached an HFS+ drive to a Mac, and this is Mac OS

00:12:33 ◼   ► 8.1, right, that this happened. It was like 1998. And if you attached an HFS+ to a Mac

00:12:43 ◼   ► that didn't support HFS+, it had that little like teach text file that was basically, "Here's

00:12:52 ◼   ► why you can't see what's on this disk." And you could open it and it would tell you,

00:12:56 ◼   ► it was just baked into the format was this kind of fake, old-style HFS disk

00:13:02 ◼   ► that had this one file in it. But what was really funny and also kind of sobering

00:13:08 ◼   ► in terms of how long ago this was and that I remember it is that was right

00:13:11 ◼   ► when I started at Macworld. I started Macworld in late '97 and I remember the

00:13:15 ◼   ► briefing that we had about 8/1 where they had a whole like white paper

00:13:19 ◼   ► about HFS+. They came into the Macworld offices and this was back in the time

00:13:23 ◼   ► when Apple executives came to computer magazines because Apple was not, you know,

00:13:32 ◼   ► in great shape and like extolled the virtues of their updates and stuff. So we

00:13:37 ◼   ► had like Phil Schiller, I'm not sure if he was in that briefing, he might have

00:13:41 ◼   ► been. I definitely remember Phil Schiller coming in for OS X briefings,

00:13:45 ◼   ► you know, schlepping up to San Francisco and coming to presumably all

00:13:50 ◼   ► of the magazines and sitting down and doing a demo of what they were doing with the operating

00:13:55 ◼   ► system. And I definitely remember, I remember the room it was in that we had that briefing

00:14:00 ◼   ► for OS 8.1 and HFS Plus, and they were talking about how excited, exciting it was that they

00:14:05 ◼   ► had this new update to the file system, and it was going to be the Mac OS extended format,

00:14:11 ◼   ► and it was going to offer all of these possibilities and possibilities for the future. And I remember

00:14:16 ◼   ► at the time, it was just sort of like, okay, this new file system, that's a little wrinkle,

00:14:20 ◼   ► But I would never have guessed that 18 years later we would still be using it on all of

00:14:29 ◼   ► our computers.

00:14:31 ◼   ► 18 years later it's still just HFS+.

00:14:33 ◼   ► I think that when they made OS X or when they make these grand new things, they're like,

00:14:38 ◼   ► "We believe this is going to be the foundation for the Mac platform for the next 15 years,"

00:14:42 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:14:43 ◼   ► Even then they don't say like 18 to 20.

00:14:45 ◼   ► Maybe they said 20, I don't know.

00:14:47 ◼   ► like the sort of grand vision of like we are setting the foundation for you know the next

00:14:51 ◼   ► era. And this was just like now you can have big volumes and your block size won't be

00:14:56 ◼   ► humongous. Well yeah and they didn't even have this was not even in the you know this

00:15:00 ◼   ► was the what this was the very beginning of the Steve Jobs return era but really this

00:15:08 ◼   ► was obviously in the works for before Steve got there this was before the next acquisition

00:15:13 ◼   ► happened that they were working on this thing. And all our devices still have it. Now, it's

00:15:19 ◼   ► not like they didn't add stuff, right? They added journaling at one point, and of course,

00:15:24 ◼   ► there was that question of whether this was going to be the file system that OS X used,

00:15:28 ◼   ► which ultimately, yeah, it was in the end. But we still have it all this time later.

00:15:35 ◼   ► And we're not going to do… Somebody actually asked what we… When I asked what we should

00:15:40 ◼   ► talk about on this episode. Somebody said, "Everything that Jon likes to talk about

00:15:44 ◼   ► except file systems." Okay, wow. But I wanted to at least reminisce about this a little

00:15:50 ◼   ► bit just because this seemingly innocuous briefing that I remember from 1998, and it's

00:15:57 ◼   ► still with us today, I just find that mind-boggling. I feel like I've been in the house that I

00:16:03 ◼   ► live in forever, and we bought it in 1999, that was 17 years ago. HFS Plus, longer than

00:16:09 ◼   ► Wow. Another fun tidbit about HFS+ was it had support

00:16:14 ◼   ► for 255 character file names. Up to that point, the Mac had been limited to 32 character file

00:16:19 ◼   ► names, so the file system supported it, but the operating system didn't yet. So they could

00:16:23 ◼   ► kind of sort of brag, like, "Oh, we've extended HFS+ and it has these new features, and you

00:16:29 ◼   ► can change these new attributes to let you have larger volume sizes, and you can have

00:16:32 ◼   ► 255 character files, but not really because the OS doesn't support that yet, but we'll

00:16:35 ◼   ► support that soon." So it's like you had a file system that supported a feature, but

00:16:40 ◼   ► then an operating system that kept you within 32 character file names, which was just weird.

00:16:44 ◼   ► But back then, something like that was the least of Apple's problems. You're like, "Okay,

00:16:49 ◼   ► well, at least I suppose in a future update, assuming Apple is still in business, they'll

00:16:53 ◼   ► have this thing."

00:16:54 ◼   ► We were so beaten down at that point. It's like, "Whatever. Okay. Fine. Great." Yeah,

00:17:02 ◼   ► it was a different era.

00:17:03 ◼   ► Because Windows had true 255-character file names at that point, and so there was a little

00:17:07 ◼   ► bit of a competition there.

00:17:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I remember we, you know, you get the Finder and you start to type and you can't,

00:17:12 ◼   ► you know, they're like, "Hey, long file name support is here," but you'd still get to what,

00:17:16 ◼   ► 32 characters, and it would be like, "Boop!

00:17:17 ◼   ► Nope, that's it.

00:17:18 ◼   ► That's all you get," until they updated the whole OS to support it later.

00:17:24 ◼   ► And then, you know, the OS X error, there was all the, like, are they going to support

00:17:29 ◼   ► case insensitive or case sensitive and the

00:17:32 ◼   ► There's yeah, it's actually kind of a miracle that although they made that huge operating system switch with OS 10

00:17:39 ◼   ► They kept the file system. It's

00:17:41 ◼   ► Kind of amazing, but yeah, I mean there was the option to install in UFS for a little while

00:17:45 ◼   ► I'm the early days of OS 10, but that eventually went by the wayside

00:17:48 ◼   ► Yeah, I like how that went too because over time it just got more and more the warnings got more and more dire

00:17:53 ◼   ► Do you remember that where it was like you?

00:17:55 ◼   ► probably don't want to do this and then I think maybe at one point it was just in the server install it's like well

00:18:00 ◼   ► OS X server could do it, but you really don't want to and it's got there are issues

00:18:05 ◼   ► But we'll let you and then finally was just like no you know it's OS X extended

00:18:11 ◼   ► You know Mac OS extended is required now

00:18:13 ◼   ► I had a couple more pieces of follow-up, and then we'll get into our topics I

00:18:20 ◼   ► Thought it was um

00:18:22 ◼   ► We got we got a note from Michael listener Michael

00:18:25 ◼   ► based on last week's show where Myke and I talked about the naming of the iPad and iPad Pro and

00:18:30 ◼   ► This seemed this question seemed to have your name written all over it as somebody who used an iPod touch for a very long time

00:18:36 ◼   ► Which is if we go to iPad and iPad Pro lines

00:18:39 ◼   ► How about the iPad line adding a third size and using that to replace the iPod touch?

00:18:44 ◼   ► Could they just change the silkscreen on the back of iPod touch and call it a an iPad?

00:18:51 ◼   ► Light or something iPad with the iPad nano iPad nano. Yeah, that's it. Okay. All right

00:18:57 ◼   ► I don't know if you have any thoughts about this idea of like do that by for caving the iPad

00:19:02 ◼   ► As incredibly confused as the iPod touch

00:19:06 ◼   ► product name is

00:19:09 ◼   ► 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

00:19:16 ◼   ► 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

00:19:21 ◼   ► It's smaller than all of Apple's phones at this point.

00:19:24 ◼   ► It's smaller than the phones, exactly. That's exactly it.

00:19:27 ◼   ► So why would you do that?

00:19:29 ◼   ► Yeah, so Apple will continue to call it the iPod Touch, and customers will continue to call it the iTouch, and that'll be fine.

00:19:36 ◼   ► Yep, that's it. I don't know. I kind of have come around to the idea of splitting the iPad line in two.

00:19:48 ◼   ► But, yeah, it's still going to be weird if they do it.

00:19:54 ◼   ► And I'm not quite sure…

00:19:55 ◼   ► What do you mean by "pro" and "non-pro"?

00:19:56 ◼   ► Yeah, "pro" and "non-pro."

00:19:57 ◼   ► The idea that the things that are the top-of-the-line features are the…

00:20:02 ◼   ► I wrote a piece that was on Macworld that I'll put in the show notes about the idea

00:20:07 ◼   ► that, yeah, so your pencil support and your smart connector and the top-of-the-line processors

00:20:13 ◼   ► basically are in something you call the iPad Pro.

00:20:15 ◼   ► if they come in what we think of as the iPad Air size and the iPad Pro size now, and they

00:20:21 ◼   ► end up calling those the, you know, whatever, 10 and 13 or some fraction of those versions.

00:20:29 ◼   ► And then separately you have the iPad line, which is basically your slower, lower featured

00:20:34 ◼   ► and cheaper version. And that's treating them like laptops instead of treating them

00:20:40 ◼   ► like iPhones where they're currently treated, which also means that last year's model

00:20:44 ◼   ► is no longer what's for sale for cheap, instead it's just the lower product line

00:20:47 ◼   ► model

00:20:48 ◼   ► that's for sale for cheap. Yeah, that all makes sense because they've shown that

00:20:52 ◼   ► they're

00:20:52 ◼   ► willing and able to add features on the high end and so

00:20:55 ◼   ► they've already done it essentially themselves by for creating the line. It's not just a

00:20:59 ◼   ► naming difference, it's not just a size difference. The iPad Pro is different in

00:21:02 ◼   ► fundamental ways

00:21:03 ◼   ► from the rest of the line. So I think you can move the pencil all the way down, but the

00:21:07 ◼   ► smart connector in particular, the whole idea that you're going to treat this as

00:21:10 ◼   ► more of a Microsoft Surface style system, more of a laptop replacement, like that Apple

00:21:16 ◼   ► has finally gone there instead of being like, "Well, some people like to use it and you

00:21:21 ◼   ► can use a Bluetooth keyboard and blah blah blah."

00:21:22 ◼   ► Like, no, there's a connector for it, it's a keyboard, we sell it.

00:21:26 ◼   ► We fully expect you to use this more like a laptop.

00:21:29 ◼   ► Eventually we'll get the OS support there.

00:21:31 ◼   ► But like I said, I think the pencils can go all the way down if they want, because I don't

00:21:33 ◼   ► think pencils are a pro feature.

00:21:35 ◼   ► I think they just happen to have started off there.

00:21:38 ◼   ► They can go all the way down the line.

00:21:39 ◼   ► I think they could go all the way down the line to the phones and it would be fine.

00:21:43 ◼   ► With customers anyway, if not with Apple.

00:21:45 ◼   ► But the other things like, "Oh, we've got tons of RAM and we've got the really high

00:21:49 ◼   ► refresh rate for drawing."

00:21:50 ◼   ► You don't need that if you're just going to use a stylus like on the Galaxy Note or

00:21:54 ◼   ► whatever.

00:21:56 ◼   ► And the smart connector and the keyboard support and whatever else they do.

00:22:00 ◼   ► The whole idea of a high-end product means not just capabilities, but if we have a choice,

00:22:07 ◼   ► regular ones for consumers we're not going to shove like four gigs of RAM in

00:22:10 ◼   ► them because we don't think they need it but for this one we are because we want

00:22:15 ◼   ► you to be able to run pro level applications and they can start by

00:22:17 ◼   ► forgetting the software as well they get the real benefit from it where why is

00:22:21 ◼   ► someone going to buy a thousand dollar iPad well what if I told you that there's

00:22:24 ◼   ► special applications that only run on the pro line and then people can write

00:22:27 ◼   ► software just for the pro line that takes advantage of all these fast memory

00:22:30 ◼   ► and fast faster CPUs and more memory and whatever other capabilities they want to

00:22:35 ◼   ► give. Yeah, I kind of like the idea of, and I wonder if some of this is just thinking

00:22:44 ◼   ► that the iPad doesn't behave like a phone market, it behaves like the tablet market,

00:22:49 ◼   ► or I mean behaves like the laptop market or the computer market, they've got the longer

00:22:52 ◼   ► refresh cycles and all that, so it's like, let's name them like we name our laptops.

00:22:57 ◼   ► We don't keep last year's MacBook around. We don't do that. Well, there's that one

00:23:05 ◼   ► with the non-retinas. Other than the one for education that's just sort of like, "Please

00:23:09 ◼   ► don't buy this," but, you know, schools want it, so we're going to sell it. But, you know,

00:23:14 ◼   ► the new MacBook retinas don't come out, and then the old MacBook retinas are still for

00:23:18 ◼   ► sale for slightly cheaper. Like, they don't do that. Instead, they've got the MacBook

00:23:23 ◼   ► Pro. Well, they did that with the MacBook Airs, too, right? No, but the MacBook Air

00:23:26 ◼   ► got updated. The MacBook Air actually got updated, right? Which is weird, but again,

00:23:31 ◼   ► I think that's a price thing.

00:23:32 ◼   ► It got the innards bumped a little bit, but they didn't go retina with it.

00:23:36 ◼   ► It was what they would have done.

00:23:37 ◼   ► So they sort of kept that line around because they weren't entirely confident in its replacement.

00:23:42 ◼   ► It's a transitional product here, but yeah, but it's not last year's models.

00:23:47 ◼   ► It's this year's model of this thing that's going to go away.

00:23:50 ◼   ► But they did bump it a little bit, right?

00:23:51 ◼   ► Whereas the iPhone, it's just sort of like, yeah, it's last year's model, but it's $100

00:23:55 ◼   ► less, so you could buy it.

00:23:56 ◼   ► I feel like that's what they're trying to do with the iPad is maybe go in that direction

00:24:00 ◼   ► if that rumor is true, that just say, you know, this is how we're going to do it,

00:24:04 ◼   ► is it's differentiated by product lines, and within the product lines there are different

00:24:07 ◼   ► sizes, but that's what you get to buy. You can buy the cheaper ones or the more expensive

00:24:12 ◼   ► ones that are a little bit nicer, but you've got what we've got here and not the one from,

00:24:19 ◼   ► you know, you can buy the three or the two or the one or whatever. With a mini, it's

00:24:22 ◼   ► like you can buy the four or the two.

00:24:24 ◼   ► But you're thinking they're gonna keep two versions of what used to be the full-size

00:24:30 ◼   ► iPad, one with the smart connector that's called the Pro and one without that's not?

00:24:35 ◼   ► It's not in the rumor, but I kind of feel like they've got to have a full...

00:24:39 ◼   ► I don't understand how you could take the current iPad Air, make a new one, and call

00:24:45 ◼   ► it an iPad Pro and not still have an iPad Air or maybe just iPad that's also available,

00:24:52 ◼   ► because that is, by all accounts, as far as I can tell, the mainstream iPad. That is the

00:24:59 ◼   ► one, it's the classic one, and it's probably the best-selling one. And I feel like, you

00:25:04 ◼   ► know, why would you make that a pro? Not everybody is going to want a pro, so it seems like that

00:25:10 ◼   ► makes sense to sort of say, "Well, the new one is a pro, but we're going to keep the

00:25:15 ◼   ► old one around. Maybe it's the Air 2, maybe it's the Air 1. We're going to keep it around,

00:25:21 ◼   ► you know, those are your choices. You can get this regular one or you can get the Pro one.

00:25:26 ◼   ► Yeah, that makes sense for now anyway. Yeah, it's hard to get there. I would still like to see the lines

00:25:30 ◼   ► extend, like the Pro to get more Pro-y and for the low end for them to drive that down more.

00:25:36 ◼   ► I agree. Because they're still kind of hanging on to the idea that like the Mini is like,

00:25:40 ◼   ► "Well, the Mini is just as good as the Air 2, it's just a smaller size." And it's like,

00:25:44 ◼   ► 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.

00:25:51 ◼   ► I feel like that's where they're going with this. The question is how committed they are

00:25:55 ◼   ► to that and how low do you go. And that's the mystery because they haven't done something

00:26:01 ◼   ► like this before, I think. But there's room. I mean, observers of the tablet market suggest

00:26:07 ◼   ► that cheaper—one of Apple's problems is that they rule the premium tablet market,

00:26:14 ◼   ► but there's this huge other tablet market that is not a place that Apple wants to play.

00:26:18 ◼   ► So does Apple want to push down there with the iPad?

00:26:21 ◼   ► If they've got a pro line, can they afford then to sort of take the regular iPad line

00:26:26 ◼   ► down a little bit in scope?

00:26:28 ◼   ► And maybe they can.

00:26:29 ◼   ► Maybe that's good.

00:26:30 ◼   ► Oh, see, they didn't do it on the Mac.

00:26:33 ◼   ► They never really went super low-end.

00:26:35 ◼   ► The Mac LC, never mind.

00:26:37 ◼   ► They never went for the really low end.

00:26:39 ◼   ► They never made a netbook.

00:26:40 ◼   ► They never actually made a Mac that was this cheap, right?

00:26:42 ◼   ► But with the iPod line, they totally did.

00:26:44 ◼   ► The iPod line, they said, "Sure, we'll sell you a shuffle for 50 bucks."

00:26:47 ◼   ► So they tried on the iPod line to go with pretty much as low as you can go.

00:26:50 ◼   ► I mean, maybe it wasn't $25, but they were selling you an iPod for $50 for $49.99 or

00:26:54 ◼   ► whatever.

00:26:55 ◼   ► They went low end on the iPod.

00:26:56 ◼   ► Did they – I mean, it was – I don't think it really helped that much or hurt that

00:26:59 ◼   ► much, the iPod, but it was an experiment for Apple to say, "Let's take this product

00:27:03 ◼   ► line on the iPod that we've diversified, and then we can kind of see the growth curve

00:27:06 ◼   ► and it's kind of going away, but you know what?

00:27:08 ◼   ► Let's go all the way down, as low as we can go.

00:27:11 ◼   ► How cheaply can Apple make a thing and still call it an Apple device, but really get a

00:27:15 ◼   ► price point that's like just a little more expensive than an iPod sock. Yeah.

00:27:19 ◼   ► It's hard to compete against the six-pack of Amazon tablets, but it's, you know,

00:27:25 ◼   ► but they aren't iPads, right? So it'll be interesting to see if they go

00:27:29 ◼   ► this route, what they do and how low they do go. Yeah, yeah, we'll see.

00:27:37 ◼   ► We'll see. It gives them some room. Although, I would say that, yeah, Apple

00:27:43 ◼   ► never made a netbook, but they have experimented in how low they can go. Like, the fact that

00:27:48 ◼   ► there is now always a Mac laptop available for just under $1,000.

00:27:55 ◼   ► That's still a premium laptop. It is, but Apple didn't used to go down that

00:27:59 ◼   ► far with their laptops. It used to be you had to get $1,299 or $1,399 to get into a

00:28:04 ◼   ► Mac laptop at all. And now it's less. They're not immune to PC pricing. PC pricing

00:28:09 ◼   ► has come down so much. The average selling prices of computers has just gone so low that

00:28:16 ◼   ► they have to be pulled down a little bit. And then you break under the four-digit price,

00:28:20 ◼   ► and that's kind of important. Plus, really, you're going to get argued back up there by

00:28:23 ◼   ► your friends telling you to get a Mac with more RAM anyway.

00:28:25 ◼   ► Sure. But I look at that and I think, well, that's sort of what this is, which is tablets

00:28:30 ◼   ► are exerting pressure to come down in price. But it's still, you know, they're not going

00:28:34 ◼   ► to go too low. They're not going to sell a six pack.

00:28:39 ◼   ► make the iPad shuffle with no screen. It would be really cheap to make.

00:28:42 ◼   ► Super easy. Alright, well, I want to do a sponsor. Let's do that. And then we'll

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00:31:04 ◼   ► I just bought some pillows and sheets from Casper that are coming tomorrow. You excited

00:31:10 ◼   ► me with your discussions of Casper pillows on ATP, so I'm trying those out.

00:31:15 ◼   ► It's pretty neat. I like the advancement of pillow technology instead of just being

00:31:19 ◼   ► a sack stuffed with stuff. Yeah, pillow stuff.

00:31:23 ◼   ► Now it's multiple sacks, I'm led to believe. I don't know. Anyway, it's cool.

00:31:27 ◼   ► Yeah, they got a whole technology thing there. So yeah, I'm looking forward to trying that stuff out.

00:31:31 ◼   ► Now that I got the mattress, I figured, just let's just go all the way. Let's just all Casper all the time.

00:31:35 ◼   ► Okay, so we're going to come back to pizza. I have pizza down as a topic, because why not?

00:31:43 ◼   ► But I thought we would talk about home tech a little bit. This is one of those things where

00:31:48 ◼   ► every now and then on ATP, I feel like you're talking to people who don't understand you.

00:31:56 ◼   ► and that maybe I'm more like your people than they are in the sense that I, like you, have a TV and a home theater set up

00:32:10 ◼   ► and I care about how my TV settings are and you know, Casey seems to not care if he's watching soap operas.

00:32:17 ◼   ► So I thought maybe we would talk a little about tech in our homes, especially entertainment stuff, because you and I are not cable cutters.

00:32:25 ◼   ► cutters, we have TiVo's, we have lots of other little boxes, and I thought it would

00:32:29 ◼   ► be interesting to talk about that a little bit since we have that in common, and that

00:32:32 ◼   ► a lot of our colleagues, like Myke is a, basically a cord cutter who only watches, he seems to

00:32:39 ◼   ► maybe watch a little bit of video on TV now, but he basically doesn't understand why

00:32:42 ◼   ► a TV exists, he would rather just watch TV shows on an iPad.

00:32:46 ◼   ► So.

00:32:47 ◼   ► He just watches YouTube on his phone held two inches from his face.

00:32:49 ◼   ► Yeah, well I get the sense that he's watched all of Seinfeld, like, sitting on a couch

00:32:54 ◼   ► with an iPad, which as it was meant to be, as it was foretold in the old times. So you

00:33:00 ◼   ► have a TiVo Romeo, right? Like I do? Is that right?

00:33:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I have the whatever the fanciest one is.

00:33:06 ◼   ► Yep, yep, me too. Me too. And when I hear you talking about this stuff, you were mentioning

00:33:12 ◼   ► Plex on there and how Plex on TiVo does some things and not others. I think the Plex app

00:33:17 ◼   ► on TiVo is limited to 720p, which is kind of infuriating. I think that's the case.

00:33:23 ◼   ► We're on Apple TV.

00:33:24 ◼   ► I think it might just be the menus that it's limited to, but I'm pretty sure it down mixes

00:33:29 ◼   ► everything to stereo, so it's a non-starter.

00:33:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:33 ◼   ► I love my TiVo.

00:33:34 ◼   ► I want to say that it seems totally passe to talk about a TiVo.

00:33:41 ◼   ► This is an old product.

00:33:42 ◼   ► TiVo's been around since like 2000.

00:33:43 ◼   ► It's just a DVR or whatever.

00:33:44 ◼   ► I can get one from the cable company.

00:33:46 ◼   ► But I really kind of love it.

00:33:47 ◼   ► I find I use that.

00:33:48 ◼   ► That is my primary device for entertainment on my TV now.

00:33:53 ◼   ► I do have the Apple TV and I use it some, but most of the time I'm watching, even when

00:33:58 ◼   ► I'm watching streaming, I, most of the time it's coming through TiVo because they've got

00:34:02 ◼   ► the Netflix app and the Hulu app and the Amazon app.

00:34:07 ◼   ► And so a lot of the time I end up just using the TiVo and the TiVo OS having support for

00:34:12 ◼   ► like this show is on Hulu.

00:34:14 ◼   ► Would you like to watch it on Hulu?

00:34:15 ◼   ► And it just sort of plays through to the Hulu app.

00:34:18 ◼   ► So I'm, I'm, I'm really happy with it.

00:34:21 ◼   ► It sort of eliminated a lot of the use cases I used to have for the Apple TV.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Yeah, they've been getting better.

00:34:27 ◼   ► Like they have a million apps on TiVo, but most of the time I would not use the TiVo

00:34:31 ◼   ► for those things.

00:34:32 ◼   ► If I had any other choice, I would use some other box.

00:34:35 ◼   ► But they've been getting better.

00:34:37 ◼   ► Like I think, you know, and the tail end of the previous generation Apple TV, it started

00:34:41 ◼   ► to really be unreliable for me.

00:34:44 ◼   ► The old Apple TV used to be my go-to Netflix box because the TiVo Netflix client was just

00:34:49 ◼   ► really slow and took a long time and would crash sometimes and just, you know, and the

00:34:54 ◼   ► Apple TV one was much more slick and nice, but eventually just like we learned, you know,

00:34:58 ◼   ► "Oh, let's watch a thing on Netflix," and you go to the Apple TV and get some weird

00:35:01 ◼   ► error or the thing doesn't start, and eventually I said, "All right, well, now it's time for

00:35:05 ◼   ► TiVo to have a shot," and the TiVo Netflix app was slow to launch and weird, but it would

00:35:10 ◼   ► play the show, and eventually it started to win, and then the TiVo Netflix app started

00:35:13 ◼   ► to get better.

00:35:14 ◼   ► It's still not as good as the one on Apple TV, especially the new Apple TV.

00:35:18 ◼   ► But sometimes TiVo is also our main thing.

00:35:22 ◼   ► That's basically our input number one on the television and the receiver.

00:35:26 ◼   ► If you're already there, sometimes it's just easier to go to the Netflix app there than

00:35:29 ◼   ► switching inputs and going to the Apple TV.

00:35:32 ◼   ► But mostly I'm watching recorded shows on the TiVo, and so that covers a lot of my and

00:35:36 ◼   ► my children's television watching.

00:35:38 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I've discovered that although I can watch HBO Go and all of that, but I've

00:35:43 ◼   ► got the shows on the DVR, so I just watch them on the DVR.

00:35:46 ◼   ► likewise I've got Hulu so I could watch shows on Hulu but I've got I recorded

00:35:50 ◼   ► them I end up watching recorded and they TV was up there game I on the software

00:35:54 ◼   ► side a little bit like the the apps like tea like the Netflix app in the hulu app

00:36:00 ◼   ► are better but they've also they added the integration where it knows those

00:36:03 ◼   ► episodes are streaming and there's a shortcut to take you to the streaming

00:36:07 ◼   ► app it'll launch the app it'll take you to that episode in that app so I'm

00:36:10 ◼   ► impressed by that and then on the live TV stuff they added the oh oh that's

00:36:16 ◼   ► only in certain markets though it's like in in San Francisco you don't have the D

00:36:18 ◼   ► button yet do you? Oh, for skipping commercials? Yeah. No, we've got that. Do you have that

00:36:24 ◼   ► feature where you get to the... Yeah, I think they rolled that out. Have they rolled that

00:36:27 ◼   ► out to everyone now? That's so great. So when it gets to the end of a part of the show and

00:36:33 ◼   ► it goes into the commercial break, a little thing comes up that says press the press D

00:36:38 ◼   ► to skip all the commercials and it's for supposedly it's like in primetime-ish for the top like

00:36:44 ◼   ► 20 most watched channels because they've got to have like a sweatshop somewhere

00:36:48 ◼   ► where people are just like putting in the time codes of all the commercial

00:36:52 ◼   ► breaks and if you watch a show right when it's on it's not there but like an

00:36:56 ◼   ► hour or two later the skip information gets put in but that's such a great

00:37:01 ◼   ► feature because you can you know you can watch the commercials if you want to and

00:37:06 ◼   ► you can skip them if you want to you whether you I know you were a big

00:37:09 ◼   ► thirty-second skip guy and I kind of went back and forth between you know

00:37:12 ◼   ► badoop badoop badoop or just 30 second skip, but now you just press the button and it just

00:37:17 ◼   ► jumps over all the commercials. And that's a great feature too.

00:37:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it means people without my amazing 30 second skipping skills can successfully skip

00:37:25 ◼   ► commercials. Even a child, so easy that even a child can do it. My son controlled the remote

00:37:29 ◼   ► the other day and he just pressed the D button when the thing comes up and it says skip.

00:37:33 ◼   ► Of course, like, this is leading to their UI having, you know, I don't know what their

00:37:37 ◼   ► UI is thinking, like how many badges can you fit at the end of a thing? Like they've already

00:37:41 ◼   ► got the HD one and now we have the skip one. As soon as there's not going to be any room

00:37:44 ◼   ► left for the title, there's going to be a series of badges and then like a colored dot.

00:37:47 ◼   ► Well, also how many things can they overlay on the picture? Because you have when it goes

00:37:51 ◼   ► to commercial it puts the skip to D and then it's got that other stupid feature which is

00:37:55 ◼   ► like smart speed sort of in Overcast where it's like watch the show but slightly faster,

00:38:00 ◼   ► which I don't understand that at all. I don't know why anyone would want to watch that.

00:38:04 ◼   ► They've got a lot of TV to get through. They really need to go faster.

00:38:07 ◼   ► Yeah, I've got advice for them. Just watch. Take a bad show that you don't like and don't

00:38:12 ◼   ► watch it. And watch them all at the right speed instead of at this weird, compressed

00:38:19 ◼   ► like, it's like those movies where they would, what was it? Was it in England that they did

00:38:25 ◼   ► this the standards conversion thing where rather than like converting the frames, they

00:38:29 ◼   ► would just play it faster or maybe it was taking movies and playing them on TV and you

00:38:34 ◼   ► play them too fast. But it's that same idea. It's like, why are these people moving strangely

00:38:39 ◼   ► fast? And the answer was, because we just didn't want to worry about the frame rate.

00:38:43 ◼   ► We just played it at the new frame rate. It's not a good idea. Don't do that. But TiVo's

00:38:48 ◼   ► got it there, and every time you press the play button, it brings up the thing that says,

00:38:51 ◼   ► "Did you know that if you press this button now, everybody will talk a little bit faster

00:38:55 ◼   ► and it'll be really annoying?" Yeah, I know that, TiVo. I don't care.

00:38:59 ◼   ► Yeah, the main problem the TiVo apps still have is they all suffer in comparison to the

00:39:03 ◼   ► native TiVo watching recorded television interface.

00:39:06 ◼   ► Sure.

00:39:07 ◼   ► So for example, like I've just finished watching the first season of Man in the High Castle,

00:39:11 ◼   ► and I watched it through my TiVo on the Amazon thing, and every time you launch the Amazon

00:39:16 ◼   ► app, there's no commercials in it, but there is a one minute and 20 second credit sequence

00:39:22 ◼   ► that I would love to skip.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:24 ◼   ► There's no D button to skip it, there's no 30 second skip.

00:39:27 ◼   ► you can skip it, but it doesn't work the same way as the regular TiVo timeline works.

00:39:31 ◼   ► You have to essentially fast-forward, you know, 2x, 4x, whatever, and like—

00:39:34 ◼   ► Because these are all these Opera—they're basically HTML apps.

00:39:37 ◼   ► They're like Opera web apps, so the UI is totally unlike anywhere else in the TiVo when

00:39:42 ◼   ► you're in those apps.

00:39:43 ◼   ► And it's not as good.

00:39:44 ◼   ► It's not as responsive.

00:39:45 ◼   ► No, it's not.

00:39:46 ◼   ► Whereas on the Apple TV, even though the apps all seem to vary a lot, all of them have a

00:39:50 ◼   ► fairly responsive scrubber that responds to the swiping of your thumb, and most of them

00:39:54 ◼   ► I'm seeing to respond to the 10-second forward skip thing in a similar level of responsiveness,

00:39:59 ◼   ► whereas the TiVo, it's like, it's clear. Am I using the real TiVo, or am I using one of

00:40:03 ◼   ► those weird apps? And the weird app ones just are much more delicate, and you can't really

00:40:07 ◼   ► perturb them, because you might be seeing some spinners, and you might not know what

00:40:11 ◼   ► you're skipping to and from, and you might have to wait a while to catch up.

00:40:15 ◼   ► You know, the real horror is I have a 4K TV, which, you know, it was cheap.

00:40:24 ◼   ► And my TV—so, listening to you and knowing we're in this era, as you talk about on ATP a lot,

00:40:30 ◼   ► where the plasmas are gone, but the new, wonderful TVs aren't here yet, my TV died.

00:40:38 ◼   ► And I was like, "God." I was hoping it would hang on, but it just—it died.

00:40:42 ◼   ► It's like fry. You've gone to stasis for five years. I know, just don't watch TV for a while.

00:40:47 ◼   ► Be like Myke, just watch things on my iPad for a while.

00:40:50 ◼   ► I mean like fry in Futurama, like go into stasis.

00:40:53 ◼   ► One of those little things frees you, you wake up, it'll be five years later.

00:40:56 ◼   ► President Trump, what? But give me a TV and I'll be fine.

00:41:01 ◼   ► So I went to Costco and I bought a Costco TV and this was my strategy.

00:41:07 ◼   ► Basically I'm not going to pay too much for this muffler.

00:41:11 ◼   ► That was my strategy. I was 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 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."

00:41:25 ◼   ► What did you get, a Vizio?

00:41:26 ◼   ► 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.

00:41:37 ◼   ► And there was a Samsung TV that was about the same cost that was rated similarly, and

00:41:42 ◼   ► then there was this Vizio one, and it was a 4K TV.

00:41:45 ◼   ► And I thought, "Well, that's got more Ks, so I'm going to get that."

00:41:49 ◼   ► And you know, it's not bad.

00:41:51 ◼   ► I have bought a couple other Vizio TVs at Costco, and what I would say about them is

00:41:56 ◼   ► Vizio TVs have gotten a lot better since the first one I bought.

00:42:00 ◼   ► I would say that.

00:42:02 ◼   ► Wow.

00:42:03 ◼   ► So much better.

00:42:05 ◼   ► they're cheap and for like I've got a TV out here in the garage that gets used

00:42:08 ◼   ► rarely but it does get used and that it's a good it's a good use for it but

00:42:13 ◼   ► for the main TV so I got this 4k TV and it looks pretty good and the UI isn't

00:42:18 ◼   ► fantastic but it was the price was right and it looks pretty good and it's got

00:42:22 ◼   ► this 4k so it's like okay 4k what can I do with that is that anything can I can

00:42:28 ◼   ► I even discern the difference in quality but the the thing about it is how do you

00:42:32 ◼   ► get 4K content onto a 4K TV. Right now you could buy, I guess Amazon has a 4K

00:42:38 ◼   ► Fire TV you can get now, but when I bought this TV that wasn't out yet.

00:42:41 ◼   ► The answer is Netflix and Amazon's apps that are built into the TV support 4K

00:42:49 ◼   ► streams. So sometimes I watch Amazon and Netflix content not on my TiVo or my

00:42:56 ◼   ► Apple TV but on like an animal on the TV app on the TV set itself yeah like you

00:43:05 ◼   ► should do the math on for the viewing distance I'm pretty sure that you're not

00:43:09 ◼   ► getting any benefit resolution you may be getting a better from the wider color

00:43:13 ◼   ► range or the more flexible frame rates depending on how this stuff is created

00:43:18 ◼   ► but you're probably getting stuff subtracted by the massive compression

00:43:23 ◼   ► of those streaming services you're using.

00:43:24 ◼   ► So overall, it's probably about a wash, but you might get better.

00:43:28 ◼   ► And the other problem is the slightly wider color ranges that are supported by the 4K

00:43:32 ◼   ► televisions, the content may not be mastered that way, so it may not be helping you.

00:43:37 ◼   ► And the other thing is, even if it is, and even if they send it that way, the television

00:43:40 ◼   ► that you bought at Costco may not be able to even display that whole range.

00:43:43 ◼   ► So it's probably a wash, but it's probably not hurting you too much.

00:43:47 ◼   ► And that is, of the two possible viable strategies for buying TVs now you picked one.

00:43:51 ◼   ► is get the cheapest television you possibly can. You didn't even do that because you

00:43:54 ◼   ► got a 4K. It would have been better if you just got a much cheaper 10E.

00:43:57 ◼   ► Well, that was the thing. I almost got the Samsung, which was basically within $100 of

00:44:03 ◼   ► the price and was not a 4K TV but was well-reviewed and was in the ballpark. But it was that I

00:44:11 ◼   ► wanted to be good enough that I feel like I'm going to enjoy watching this TV and this

00:44:15 ◼   ► is not a long-term investment. Just get me through until there are better TVs. Although

00:44:20 ◼   ► I gotta say, having bought these three TVs over the course of the last, whatever, six

00:44:24 ◼   ► years, they are a lot better than they used to be. Like, that first Vizio TV that I bought

00:44:30 ◼   ► was so bad. Like, the black levels on it were so awful, and even just the LCD TVs have come

00:44:37 ◼   ► a long way. But about the 4K, my thought—and I haven't tested this, and I actually haven't

00:44:44 ◼   ► even looked up it, it may or may not be true—it's very hard for me to test this, like, do A/B

00:44:49 ◼   ► of this because the amount of time it takes for me to switch from like

00:44:51 ◼   ► daredevil here to daredevil there and compare the 4k you just kind of can't do

00:44:56 ◼   ► it

00:44:56 ◼   ► my thought is that the 4k stream is probably a higher bit rate than the 1080

00:45:02 ◼   ► stream that you know 2160 stream it's probably seeking to a higher bit rate

00:45:07 ◼   ► basically the way Netflix works you know it's scaling based on how much it can

00:45:11 ◼   ► get across the pipe and you might get something that starts in 480 and then

00:45:15 ◼   ► goes up to 720 and then goes up to 1080 and if you're watching on a 4k TV

00:45:18 ◼   ► it will then keep going and it will go up to 2160. And so my thought was, "Well,

00:45:25 ◼   ► maybe what I'm getting here is a better quality picture because it's able to,

00:45:30 ◼   ► you know, the 4K stream is a higher resolution, but also even though it's

00:45:35 ◼   ► heavily compressed, more bitrate than the standard 1080 stream." That could also be

00:45:41 ◼   ► totally fiction because it's very hard for me to tell. I cannot say surely that

00:45:47 ◼   ► I'm absolutely seeing 4k level of detail on this. It's like, oh no, no, no. I totally see the 28,

00:45:53 ◼   ► no, 2180. No, it's, it's not, no, I can't say that. I think it may be a placebo, but my hope is that

00:46:01 ◼   ► it looks better in general. I don't know. Yeah. And you still haven't had a television with decent

00:46:07 ◼   ► black levels in your house. I know you, the LCDs have gotten better, but it's kind of a good thing

00:46:10 ◼   ► that you've never seen what these shows are actually supposed to look like, including on your

00:46:14 ◼   ► Max by the way. The Max don't have the great black levels either. That's not true though because

00:46:17 ◼   ► I think you know this that I the land of the forbidden television fruit is Arizona where

00:46:25 ◼   ► when my parents when my parents moved into their house five years ago they bought two huge beautiful

00:46:32 ◼   ► Panasonic Plasmas and I was down there the other week and I was it was when the Expanse was on

00:46:38 ◼   ► and I decided I was going to watch the Expanse when I was down there rather than waiting and

00:46:43 ◼   ► and I told Lauren, "Go ahead and watch The Expanse, and I'm going to watch it down here,

00:46:47 ◼   ► and when I get back, we'll compare notes about it." And I watched that, and that's a space

00:46:50 ◼   ► show, so there's a lot of black outer space stuff in it. And I watched it on that huge,

00:46:55 ◼   ► like I don't even know what it is, 70-inch plasma in my mom's living room. Oh my God,

00:47:00 ◼   ► right? It's just like, so I've seen, you know, I've had a few years to know what the black

00:47:05 ◼   ► levels look like on a TV.

00:47:07 ◼   ► You should never have looked at it. They're even more impressive on OLEDs, of course.

00:47:11 ◼   ► I should never I should avert my eyes whenever I go down there. It's a beautiful TV

00:47:14 ◼   ► I told my mom if she ever decides to move to a smaller house. I would like to take that plasma

00:47:18 ◼   ► It's not gonna fit in your entertainment center. You're gonna have to tear down that whole side of the room and I will

00:47:23 ◼   ► And instead there will be a giant TV. It's erected on a wall and it will be good. I

00:47:29 ◼   ► Don't know. It's a it's funny. I'm happy with the the TV. We got whether the 4k is a real thing or not

00:47:36 ◼   ► It looks it looks good. It looks better than the TV we had and

00:47:40 ◼   ► And, uh, you know, that's, that's good enough for now.

00:47:44 ◼   ► I, I, what I find funny talking about giant TVs is every time I shop for a TV,

00:47:49 ◼   ► I say, no, no, it's gotta be bigger than the last one.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Cause the last one wasn't that big.

00:47:52 ◼   ► It's like that old Steve Martin routine.

00:47:54 ◼   ► Do you remember that?

00:47:55 ◼   ► Where it's like, I got, I got mono and then I got stereo and the mono sounded

00:47:59 ◼   ► like, sounded terrible.

00:48:00 ◼   ► So then I got a quadraphonic.

00:48:02 ◼   ► Then that sounded, you know, made, made stereo sound terrible.

00:48:04 ◼   ► And then I got like Google phonics where I have a thousand speakers,

00:48:07 ◼   ► but now it sounds terrible too.

00:48:08 ◼   ► I feel like that with TVs.

00:48:10 ◼   ► Like I keep saying, "No, no, no. It needs to be a bigger TV. Oh, no, no, no. This one will be a little bit bigger.

00:48:14 ◼   ► This one will fit in the entertainment center, so next time I'm going to get one that sort of sticks out the sides,

00:48:19 ◼   ► but it'll still fit on the base, so it'll be fine."

00:48:21 ◼   ► 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,

00:48:27 ◼   ► and now I look at it and go, "Eh, it could be bigger. It could be bigger."

00:48:31 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the TV manufacturers do that for you, because, like, when I bought my big TV,

00:48:38 ◼   ► Which is not even that big the smallest size it came in was 55

00:48:42 ◼   ► That was the smallest and that was like so much bigger than any television I'd ever had before

00:48:46 ◼   ► I'm just waiting until the small size you can get a 65

00:48:48 ◼   ► I mean, I don't know if they're gonna go there, but the minimum size for the good TVs is

00:48:53 ◼   ► Going up and up and it's at the point now where you can't even buy small televisions

00:48:57 ◼   ► Like yeah want to get like we wanted to get a television for our bedroom that was smaller but not crap

00:49:02 ◼   ► It was impossible because I don't want a 55 inch television in my bedroom

00:49:06 ◼   ► Can you have a small TV that doesn't look like crap?"

00:49:08 ◼   ► And the answer is no, we don't make those up.

00:49:09 ◼   ► I recommend the iPad.

00:49:10 ◼   ► Again, we'll go back to the mic method.

00:49:12 ◼   ► No, the iPad is not a good TV.

00:49:13 ◼   ► No, I agree.

00:49:14 ◼   ► I agree it's not.

00:49:17 ◼   ► Myke will disagree with that.

00:49:18 ◼   ► But no, it's hard.

00:49:19 ◼   ► I mean, just display-wise, just like it does not perform well as a television, ignoring

00:49:24 ◼   ► the fact of the size and how close to you.

00:49:25 ◼   ► Because I do watch things on the iPad, like not things that I care about too much, but

00:49:30 ◼   ► rewatching old television shows or whatever, I do watch them on the iPad, and it's fine,

00:49:34 ◼   ► but by no means is this a good television. Yeah, I looked at the small TVs when I was

00:49:40 ◼   ► at Costco and I was kind of aghast because yeah, there's below a certain point you're

00:49:44 ◼   ► like in novelty TVs. It's like, I guess you could have a tiny TV, but it's also a microwave

00:49:50 ◼   ► and has an FM radio. Yeah, it's like a kitchen TV and it's like, you can make it look good.

00:49:55 ◼   ► Like it's still going to be cheap, but you just put a decent size, but you know, it's

00:49:59 ◼   ► not the way the economies of scale work, I guess. Like they have the lines that are making

00:50:02 ◼   ► television they have to make up a certain size to make their money back

00:50:05 ◼   ► and they don't want to sell you one for 200 bucks that's 40 inches or 30 inches

00:50:09 ◼   ► yeah and that's now a small TV that's the funny thing 40 inch TV yeah a little

00:50:14 ◼   ► shrimpy could do could do more well I've got some more stuff to talk about but I

00:50:21 ◼   ► would like to take a break I think maybe now it's a good time to tell you about

00:50:25 ◼   ► something else that's cool as Casey Liss might say this episode of upgrade

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00:53:12 ◼   ► support of UPGRADE and all of Relay FM. I feel like it's a miracle that I didn't at

00:53:18 ◼   ► any point call them Sparesquace in that ad, Jon, because that's what the guys at the Flop

00:53:22 ◼   ► House do.

00:53:23 ◼   ► It's their own fault for having a confusing enough name to confuse Dan McCoy

00:53:29 ◼   ► lots of simple words confuse Dan McCoy though, so

00:53:33 ◼   ► Yes, we should I loved I will say this a little follow-up to I loved you and Merlin talking about

00:53:40 ◼   ► Flophouse on

00:53:42 ◼   ► Reconcilable differences, which is a great podcast that

00:53:44 ◼   ► Reconcilable differences the podcast that I think man

00:53:47 ◼   ► 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

00:53:52 ◼   ► but they're all about stuff.

00:53:53 ◼   ► - You just gotta keep making up podcasts

00:53:55 ◼   ► until every single thought that enters your head

00:53:57 ◼   ► has an outlet and a podcast.

00:53:59 ◼   ► - Well, you would think that I would have already had

00:54:00 ◼   ► all of those things, right?

00:54:01 ◼   ► You think I would have covered it, but I haven't

00:54:04 ◼   ► because all my podcasts are sort of about stuff

00:54:07 ◼   ► and "Reconsiderable Differences" is not about that stuff.

00:54:10 ◼   ► It's just about life.

00:54:11 ◼   ► It's like Myke and Casey do on "Analog."

00:54:14 ◼   ► It's just about feelings and growing up

00:54:17 ◼   ► and being a parent and stuff like that.

00:54:19 ◼   ► So it's a great podcast, people should listen to it,

00:54:21 ◼   ► But you guys did talk about Flophouse and I thought it was really endearing that the

00:54:24 ◼   ► first time you just assumed that everybody knew that you were huge super fans of the

00:54:28 ◼   ► Flophouse. And so you gave it a little tough love about like the sound quality problems

00:54:32 ◼   ► and all that and Merlin referred to it as like that weird show. And then the guys who

00:54:36 ◼   ► did the Flophouse heard that.

00:54:37 ◼   ► That wasn't tough love. We were explaining why we loved it. It just didn't sound like

00:54:40 ◼   ► it but we were.

00:54:41 ◼   ► Well, yeah, but you know fans sort of like can talk. It's like talking to a member of

00:54:45 ◼   ► your family. It's like you don't protect them quite as much, I think. You're like, "Yeah,

00:54:51 ◼   ► know, I love the flophouse. Of course, you know I love it, so when I tell you that it's

00:54:55 ◼   ► got all these terrible technical problems, I'm saying it with love, right? But I felt

00:54:58 ◼   ► like maybe that got lost in translation a little bit, where they're like, you know,

00:55:02 ◼   ► I think Dan McCoy is a little, who edits the episodes and sets up and is the recording

00:55:07 ◼   ► studio and he's the designated technical guy. I think he is still bugged by the fact

00:55:12 ◼   ► that they are riddled with technical problems when they record that podcast. So you guys

00:55:16 ◼   ► came back the next time.

00:55:17 ◼   ► Well, it is a comedy show.

00:55:18 ◼   ► Yeah, it is a comedy show. It's not a tech podcast. They're not tech experts. They're comedians.

00:55:22 ◼   ► Well, so in a comedy show, though, they can be laughing with you or they can be laughing at you,

00:55:29 ◼   ► but in both cases they're laughing, so success! Yeah, exactly. But two weeks later you had to

00:55:34 ◼   ► come back and explain your love again for the Flop House, which I thought that was sweet. Our

00:55:39 ◼   ► friend Steve Lutz from The Incomparable took your advice ultimately and listened to the Flop House

00:55:46 ◼   ► from the beginning and it says that he likes it now. He's like in episode 60 or something.

00:55:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and he tried to say listening from the beginning was a mistake, but now he has done it.

00:55:58 ◼   ► Like, it's an important thing to have done. Like, puberty is probably a mistake too,

00:56:02 ◼   ► but you're glad to have done it. Sure. Okay. I'm just gonna let that go.

00:56:07 ◼   ► I mean, consider the alternative. Exactly. That's right. Would you want to stay 11 forever?

00:56:13 ◼   ► Peter Pan? I don't think so. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is about the future of the Mac.

00:56:21 ◼   ► You know, we could go on forever about it and I don't want to do that, but I think it's worth at least touching on.

00:56:25 ◼   ► I was thinking of you when I read that blog post about the WWDC wishlist from Steve Trotton Smith,

00:56:31 ◼   ► who, I mentioned this last week I think on Upgrade, used the phrase "OS 10 is a dead platform."

00:56:39 ◼   ► And I just was interested in what you thought about sort of overall, you know, where is the

00:56:44 ◼   ► Mac today and where can it go from here? Where should it go from here? Where will it go from

00:56:50 ◼   ► here if it goes anywhere? Because Steve Trotton Smith's point is sort of like all the OS X

00:56:55 ◼   ► advancements in the last few years have been sort of keeping it in sync with mobile. And that's not

00:57:03 ◼   ► particularly exciting. And then you see sort of like the Mac App Store being kind of rotting on

00:57:09 ◼   ► the vine. And there's a real question about like, is the Mac done? Are we just sort of like, it's

00:57:15 ◼   ► not like we can't keep using it, but is there more to be done there? Or is it just this thing that's

00:57:19 ◼   ► gonna sit there and be what it is for the rest of its life? Does it have more change in it? Or is

00:57:27 ◼   ► this sort of all that it will ever be? And you know, you and I have been using the Mac for since

00:57:32 ◼   ► time immemorial so I thought I would ask you what do you think about that?

00:57:35 ◼   ► There's always more to be done on the Mac like you can always make it better there are

00:57:40 ◼   ► plenty of things wrong with it where it can be better but in terms of the future of the

00:57:44 ◼   ► platform outside any sort of artificial constraint where Apple could decide to do of course whatever

00:57:51 ◼   ► it wants to do but outside of anything like that it's not dead until something kills it

00:57:56 ◼   ► in other words if there are things that you can either only do on a Mac or do much more

00:58:01 ◼   ► easily on the Mac, that means that the other platforms have a way to go before they prove

00:58:06 ◼   ► that the Mac is a dead platform. It's not as if just because there is a new platform

00:58:10 ◼   ► and a new way of doing things that is better in some ways, that you should ditch the other

00:58:15 ◼   ► one. So again, Apple could decide to ditch the other one to sort of force the issue,

00:58:17 ◼   ► but we all know right now that there are certain classes of things that are either only possible

00:58:22 ◼   ► on the Mac or so much easier on the Mac that if we were forced not to use the Mac to do

00:58:26 ◼   ► them, it would be a handicap. And no one wants to make themselves less efficient or less

00:58:31 ◼   ► capable to sort of prove a point. So it's up to the other platforms, whether it's iOS

00:58:38 ◼   ► or any other platform from any other company, to show that the old way of doing things with

00:58:43 ◼   ► personal computers is not valid. And I think we all know, technologically speaking, however

00:58:47 ◼   ► you might want to describe it, there are attributes to what we currently know as personal computing

00:58:53 ◼   ► that will surely live on regardless of what the future is. If the future is all iOS-type

00:58:59 ◼   ► devices or tablets or whatever, as we can see tablets like the Microsoft Surface and

00:59:05 ◼   ► the iPad Pro and stuff sprouting keyboards, that's kind of a confirmation that regardless

00:59:09 ◼   ► of the future, surely there will be a role for something like a keyboard in the future

00:59:13 ◼   ► of computing.

00:59:14 ◼   ► Does that mean that the Mac will live forever?

00:59:15 ◼   ► No, but it does mean that, hey, that whole idea from the PC world of having a keyboard

00:59:19 ◼   ► that you type on, that's probably a keeper.

00:59:21 ◼   ► Like maybe, you know, that still has some life in it.

00:59:25 ◼   ► Maybe it goes away entirely when we have thought control or whatever.

00:59:28 ◼   ► But for now, no matter what the future of the platform is, keyboards are good.

00:59:32 ◼   ► Mouse — indirect pointing device.

00:59:34 ◼   ► Touch is good.

00:59:35 ◼   ► Touch is much better for tons more things than the mouse is.

00:59:38 ◼   ► Pen input is also good.

00:59:40 ◼   ► Mouse is also pretty good too.

00:59:42 ◼   ► It's a precise pointing device.

00:59:43 ◼   ► You can use it on large screens or whatever.

00:59:45 ◼   ► I think the jury's kind of still out on it, but in general right now, you're not going

00:59:50 ◼   ► to get rid of the mouse until something can do everything the mouse can do better.

00:59:54 ◼   ► 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 stylus

00:59:59 ◼   ► And that's not really you know that they don't do all the same things right so

01:00:03 ◼   ► 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

01:00:10 ◼   ► So I just look for I just look at the capabilities and say if I didn't have a Mac

01:00:16 ◼   ► What would I use to do these same things and would it be just as good or better?

01:00:20 ◼   ► Because that's what you're looking for you're looking for just as good or better. You're looking for progress

01:00:23 ◼   ► progress. It's not just going to switch over entirely. And the wrinkle in that is that

01:00:28 ◼   ► the Mac does continue to get better. How can the Mac get better? It can get more stable.

01:00:32 ◼   ► God knows it can, you know, more reliable, not crashing-wise, but it can do its job more

01:00:37 ◼   ► predictably. It can get faster. It can always get faster. It can get more capabilities that

01:00:43 ◼   ► it can have that other devices can't. Right now, still, the Mac has a higher power

01:00:49 ◼   ► envelope than its competing devices, whether they be laptops or iOS devices, which means

01:00:55 ◼   ► you can put bigger, hotter things in there, which means you can have better graphics for

01:00:58 ◼   ► games and faster CPUs.

01:01:01 ◼   ► Not much better graphics for games, not much faster CPUs, but still, it's ahead.

01:01:06 ◼   ► When that all evens out and basically the fastest processor you can get in the entire

01:01:09 ◼   ► world fits into a phone's power envelope, that will be another strike against the Mac.

01:01:13 ◼   ► But then you've still got the ergonomic issues in terms of how big of a screen can I put

01:01:16 ◼   ► on it?

01:01:17 ◼   ► Do I have to hold the screen?

01:01:18 ◼   ► with me? Does it have a big keyboard? What about a precise input with the pointing device?

01:01:22 ◼   ► Besides the stylus and a finger, can I use a mouse?

01:01:25 ◼   ► So I'm not particularly worried because it seems like Apple has its head on its shoulders

01:01:30 ◼   ► about not sort of artificially deeming this to be the end of the road for the Mac and

01:01:36 ◼   ► from now on they're just going to make iOS devices because I think they know if that

01:01:40 ◼   ► happened, then everybody who currently uses a Mac would not be, their needs would not

01:01:45 ◼   ► be as well filled by other devices that Apple sells and they would go buy something from

01:01:50 ◼   ► some other manufacturer and Apple's like, "No, you can keep buying a Mac, we'll keep

01:01:53 ◼   ► making them, you keep buying them until we ourselves, Apple, come up with something that

01:01:57 ◼   ► is better than the Mac in all ways, or at least as good or better in all ways, we'll

01:02:02 ◼   ► keep making and selling Macs."

01:02:03 ◼   ► And that's a smart decision by Apple and that's why OS X is currently not a dead platform.

01:02:10 ◼   ► My concern though is that, I was thinking about this when I was writing my review of

01:02:14 ◼   ► iPad Pro that my concern is that the Mac is becoming a... that it's limited in how much

01:02:25 ◼   ► it can change, not just because it's a mature platform, but because it represents stability

01:02:31 ◼   ► in a world of change. And this is an imperfect metaphor, but you know, I feel like sometimes

01:02:37 ◼   ► the Mac is like CBS where there are there are like way more cutting-edge TV

01:02:44 ◼   ► shows on cable and CBS could try to put on a show that was a cutting-edge show

01:02:50 ◼   ► like you'd find on cable and it's its viewers would reject those shows because

01:02:55 ◼   ► they don't want that they want the comfort of the thing they've come to

01:02:59 ◼   ► understand as a TV show which is CBS now CBS is profitable and it's and it's and

01:03:04 ◼   ► it's healthy and it's a very successful business, but they are also trapped in

01:03:10 ◼   ► their success in the sense that you know they are not going to push the envelope

01:03:14 ◼   ► forward. The rest of the industry is doing that in various pockets, but their

01:03:19 ◼   ► their audience loves them because they are what they are. And that's it's not a

01:03:24 ◼   ► perfect metaphor, but that's my concern about the Mac is that you can't radically

01:03:28 ◼   ► rethink what the Mac is because they're already radically rethinking computing

01:03:32 ◼   ► with iOS. The Mac is more like, for people who prefer a computer like we had

01:03:38 ◼   ► in the old days, the Mac will always be here. Which I think is a good thing as

01:03:43 ◼   ► somebody who's been a Mac user for 20-plus years, but it does sort of make

01:03:48 ◼   ► you ask the question, is there something it can do that's new or is it all just

01:03:53 ◼   ► sort of, you know, it could be faster, it could be more stable, it could just keep

01:03:57 ◼   ► doing the stuff that it's already doing, just do it a little bit better.

01:04:01 ◼   ► I think you're underestimating the flexibility of people who use personal computers or Macs

01:04:06 ◼   ► to get their jobs done.

01:04:08 ◼   ► If you just think of, I mentioned before, the idea that Apple would say, you know, MacOS

01:04:13 ◼   ► 10 is going to be the foundation for the Mac platform for the next 15 years.

01:04:17 ◼   ► I think that Mac users today would absolutely accept another MacOS 10 style discontinuity

01:04:24 ◼   ► in the operating system, which if you think about it, discontinuity between what we know

01:04:27 ◼   ► as classic MacOS and OS 10 was tremendous.

01:04:29 ◼   ► I mean, they were the same OS, barely in name only.

01:04:31 ◼   ► Like the old OS ran in a little emulation layer until Apple could ditch it, and eventually

01:04:36 ◼   ► it transitioned everything to essentially the next APIs and a new language.

01:04:40 ◼   ► And it was just like, it was an amazing transition.

01:04:42 ◼   ► They made it, but like, what does OS X have in common with the Mac now?

01:04:46 ◼   ► So little if you were an old school Mac user.

01:04:49 ◼   ► The spirit is there.

01:04:50 ◼   ► They kept the Apple in the Apple menu, but that's only when we complained about it.

01:04:53 ◼   ► It wasn't actually original even there in that.

01:04:56 ◼   ► And some QuickTime APIs and some file system APIs and lots of stuff from carbon that's hanging around

01:05:00 ◼   ► But a lot of that stuff is slowly deprecated but like really like

01:05:03 ◼   ► Technologically speaking interface paradigm. It was just you know, and it was type of thing

01:05:08 ◼   ► Okay

01:05:08 ◼   ► Maybe Mac users back then were more willing to accept it because it was like look at see this of the company goes out of

01:05:13 ◼   ► Business and we were missing some major new features, but for the most part

01:05:16 ◼   ► Even diehard classic Mac OS users were like this is cool. Like when OS 10 came out

01:05:22 ◼   ► Yeah, this this I don't you know, maybe I want my classic Apple menu back or whatever

01:05:26 ◼   ► But the dock is cool

01:05:27 ◼   ► The window system is cool that the whole sort of some of it people might say it's just fashion or whatever

01:05:32 ◼   ► But it wasn't it was like we're rethinking

01:05:34 ◼   ► What a personal computer interface should be looked at should look like we're changing the standard that basically I always

01:05:40 ◼   ► Described it to people like a movie computer like you know how you see those

01:05:43 ◼   ► Computers and movies that look ridiculous because some graphic designer comes up with an interface

01:05:47 ◼   ► Well Apple built that like this is a real thing as a real working interface where you know

01:05:51 ◼   ► Everything is double buffered and things magnify under your mouse cursor and everything is photo realistic and and zooming and squishing and doing like

01:05:59 ◼   ► You know kind of like the iPhone was like a movie interface to of like things sliding around a touch interface that no one had ever

01:06:06 ◼   ► Seen before and yeah, there was consternation from classic Mac users, but in the end we were like

01:06:11 ◼   ► Okay, Apple show us the way this is the future of personal computing. Let's go with that

01:06:16 ◼   ► It has been what how many years now 15 years more or less?

01:06:19 ◼   ► I'm not saying Apple needs to radically overhaul OS X in that way. They have been slowly evolving it if you were compare

01:06:25 ◼   ► You know the OS X today to 10.0. You would think that they're also very different operating systems, but

01:06:32 ◼   ► an interface paradigm shift in the next five years where they rethink the whole idea of

01:06:37 ◼   ► the dock and the finder and the menu bar and a lot of stuff like

01:06:41 ◼   ► Maybe or like you said maybe they just decide this is a stability thing

01:06:45 ◼   ► We'll just keep it until we can replace it, but they have to do one of those they have to say

01:06:48 ◼   ► They have to increase the capabilities of the iOS line until we can all do our jobs

01:06:53 ◼   ► better or at least as well in that interface paradigm, which is forgetting input device

01:07:00 ◼   ► just in terms of are there files and folders and a dock and a bunch of windows or something

01:07:06 ◼   ► else.

01:07:07 ◼   ► We really need to advance those capabilities or they need to keep evolving the Mac as they

01:07:10 ◼   ► have been.

01:07:12 ◼   ► And don't underestimate the impact you can have on things like, "Oh, just make it faster,

01:07:16 ◼   ► just make it more stable."

01:07:18 ◼   ► Like, there is a step change in a lot of those things.

01:07:20 ◼   ► What does faster or more stable mean?

01:07:23 ◼   ► You pick two different directions, right?

01:07:25 ◼   ► So let's take the Mac and say, say Apple decides what's going to differentiate the Mac is going

01:07:29 ◼   ► to be reliability.

01:07:31 ◼   ► And all they do for the next five to ten years is just make it like bulletproof, like, you

01:07:38 ◼   ► know, industrial grade sort of, you know, the most reliable thing you can imagine that

01:07:44 ◼   ► just squash every ounce of every bug, every cosmetic glitch, everything that doesn't work

01:07:48 ◼   ► how it's supposed to and it just works.

01:07:50 ◼   ► And in comparison to our phones and iPads that are rapidly evolving, those will seem

01:07:54 ◼   ► like pieces of crap and it'll be like, the Mac will become like the mainframe of the

01:07:57 ◼   ► world where it's like, it always does exactly what it's supposed to do.

01:08:00 ◼   ► They've removed as many bugs as they possibly can.

01:08:03 ◼   ► Server-side thing will probably be a killer deal for this.

01:08:05 ◼   ► But anyway, this would be one way to differentiate the Mac.

01:08:07 ◼   ► Would be, like, is it going to be just that stable thing?

01:08:12 ◼   ► a damn well better be stable and I will accept that it is not evolving at a rapid rate if

01:08:17 ◼   ► I know that, you know, that this is the rock, this is the foundation, this is the boring

01:08:22 ◼   ► stable thing.

01:08:23 ◼   ► Or they could go in the other direction and say let's take advantage of our higher power

01:08:26 ◼   ► envelope and just make everything lightning fast.

01:08:28 ◼   ► Let's make iOS devices look like the slow crappy ramstar things that they are and let's

01:08:33 ◼   ► find ways to accelerate the Mac taking advantage of the technologies that we have here to try

01:08:40 ◼   ► to make the Mac just feel an act so much more responsive and whatever it is that is currently

01:08:46 ◼   ► time-consuming on the Mac make it faster whether that's storage or you know some sort of like

01:08:52 ◼   ► encoding tasks or graphics driven things we don't have the power envelope to do it on

01:08:56 ◼   ► the phone that's probably a tougher sell because it's the personal computers are getting faster

01:09:03 ◼   ► much slower than other devices are because other devices are creeping up on them like

01:09:07 ◼   ► so it's harder to get more performance at the top end, but the highest end performance

01:09:11 ◼   ► that you can fit in a phone keeps going up and up and up. So anyway, those are two possible

01:09:15 ◼   ► directions to make the Mac—to differentiate the Mac as a platform, as opposed to simply

01:09:21 ◼   ► sort of saying, "Well, it's going to be like it was," kind of going along at the

01:09:24 ◼   ► similar rate that it was, but not really taking advantage of the fact that it isn't the

01:09:32 ◼   ► tip of the spear anymore. I like the idea of refining what we have and making it that

01:09:41 ◼   ► much better and using what traits the Mac already has that are its assets and using

01:09:47 ◼   ► those to its advantage. I think that's great. I think in terms of doing another radical

01:09:51 ◼   ► rethink, I guess that's sort of my point is I feel like Apple doesn't have it in

01:09:55 ◼   ► them to do that because where they're exploring and where they're doing new things, the

01:09:59 ◼   ► is all being poured into iOS for that. And that it feels to me like even if

01:10:04 ◼   ► Apple wanted to give the Mac a radical rethink, I don't think they would

01:10:09 ◼   ► because they don't have the energy for it. And I'm not sure the audience wants it either, though.

01:10:16 ◼   ► I mean if you look at what Microsoft did with rethinking Windows, you know, there

01:10:20 ◼   ► were several years of real pain where essentially their market rejected

01:10:25 ◼   ► them and Windows sort of they had to back off of a lot of their attempts

01:10:29 ◼   ► because the people who use Windows which are not Mac users they're a very

01:10:32 ◼   ► different audience but still they said no no we don't want that we just want

01:10:36 ◼   ► Windows we just want what we what we know and I think that there's some

01:10:38 ◼   ► aspect of that in the Mac world too plus yeah the sheer number of iPhone users

01:10:45 ◼   ► out there and the value the iPhone has for Apple as a company if you're going

01:10:48 ◼   ► to innovate and if you're going to try lots of crazy new things you know the

01:10:53 ◼   ► iPhone seems like the place that you want to pour all of your energy. It is

01:10:55 ◼   ► your younger operating system. It is where there's the most action. It seems

01:11:00 ◼   ► like the logical place to do it.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Well, so the Windows 8 thing, like, when you're going to make a radical change to

01:11:07 ◼   ► your most popular platform, which the Mac was the time OS X came out of Apple's

01:11:11 ◼   ► primary platform, you have to have two things. One, you have to have the resolve

01:11:17 ◼   ► that Apple has shown they have and Microsoft has not shown they have. Like, sort of the

01:11:20 ◼   ► courage of your convictions to stick it out because it's not like people didn't

01:11:23 ◼   ► complain about OS X in the early days. I was one of them. Like there was a lot of

01:11:26 ◼   ► pushback from traditional Mac users, a lot of it, right? And Apple listened to

01:11:30 ◼   ► some of it a little bit but in the end just kept plowing through. And the other

01:11:33 ◼   ► important thing you need to have that Microsoft probably didn't have is you

01:11:36 ◼   ► kind of got to be right or at least right-er, right? You know, it has to

01:11:39 ◼   ► actually be better in the long run and it's debatable whether it was in

01:11:43 ◼   ► Microsoft's case. Certainly they didn't have the courage of their convictions. They

01:11:46 ◼   ► backpelled real fast and real hard and tried to come up with this compromise thing and

01:11:51 ◼   ► maybe they end up in a better place for them or maybe they were just on the wrong track.

01:11:56 ◼   ► You know, it's so hard to tell because you can't sort of A/B test the two different timelines.

01:12:00 ◼   ► Although I'm not sure how that works in The Man in the High Castle because I never read

01:12:03 ◼   ► that story and I'm only done through season one.

01:12:05 ◼   ► But anyway, as far as I know, you can't A/B test the timelines to see how things turn

01:12:09 ◼   ► out.

01:12:10 ◼   ► So I think Microsoft is kind of a cautionary tale, but I think I have more faith in Apple

01:12:16 ◼   ► to do both of those things well, to both have a better answer and also to stick it out and

01:12:23 ◼   ► power through and to realize that the customers will be there on the other side.

01:12:27 ◼   ► And they might be different customers, but that's fine.

01:12:30 ◼   ► If you had to guess where do you think the Mac will go in the next like three years,

01:12:35 ◼   ► what direction do you think they will take?

01:12:37 ◼   ► I think it's conceivable in the short term that they do another branding-related thing

01:12:44 ◼   ► tied to—I don't know what they're gonna tie it to—but like, you can—how long do

01:12:48 ◼   ► you keep calling it OS X?

01:12:50 ◼   ► When iOS gets to X, do you decide that you need to flip it for marketing reasons?

01:12:53 ◼   ► It's time for Mac OS!

01:12:54 ◼   ► Time for Mac OS!

01:12:55 ◼   ► Oh, obviously, yeah, I know.

01:12:56 ◼   ► Other than that, because if they do it, maybe they could drop the X then, too?

01:12:59 ◼   ► I mean, that's just so uniform.

01:13:01 ◼   ► But I'm thinking, like, aesthetically more.

01:13:04 ◼   ► Like they did do sort of an iOS 7 style revive in Yosemite, but still, I don't know.

01:13:11 ◼   ► I think there's a room for a lot of apparent "big changes" that really aren't big changes.

01:13:17 ◼   ► They're mostly like changes in marketing and how it's branded and trying to present tvOS,

01:13:22 ◼   ► iOS, and macOS with the lowercase letter in the beginning, all as this family of operating

01:13:27 ◼   ► systems, as if it's some new thing, as if they haven't all been Darwin under the covers

01:13:31 ◼   ► forever and all the other stuff.

01:13:34 ◼   ► So there's a place for that, but I think that's not really going to be significant for users.

01:13:39 ◼   ► And then, which direction are they choosing?

01:13:41 ◼   ► Like it doesn't seem like they're really doubling down on stability.

01:13:44 ◼   ► It seems like they still feel like every other year or so they have to do something to the

01:13:48 ◼   ► Mac that they have features to tout or whatever, but I really hope they reconsider that.

01:13:53 ◼   ► And you know, because if there isn't anything big on the horizon, right, besides the little

01:13:59 ◼   ► lower casing the M and maybe dropping the X and stuff, if there isn't anything big on

01:14:03 ◼   ► the horizon, then please do double down on the stability and bug fixing.

01:14:07 ◼   ► Like we can go three, four years without saying, "Now you can, you know, mark up things in

01:14:12 ◼   ► the whatever application."

01:14:14 ◼   ► Like, just, you have a lot of features there.

01:14:16 ◼   ► Make all of them work.

01:14:18 ◼   ► And your current customers who like Macs will like them even more.

01:14:22 ◼   ► And that is a, that is probably the safest strategy for the Mac if you don't have any

01:14:27 ◼   ► great ideas for a Mac OS X style revolution in the next five to six years.

01:14:31 ◼   ► And it just seems to me that Apple has its fingers in a lot of pies or whatever the phrase

01:14:35 ◼   ► is these days that, uh, and the Mac volume, the Mac just doesn't sell in the volumes.

01:14:40 ◼   ► I think it does that.

01:14:41 ◼   ► They have their hands full just making the Mac the best Mac it can be and hurry up with

01:14:46 ◼   ► these other platforms that you hope will eventually cannibalize the Mac because you have to make

01:14:49 ◼   ► them a lot better before they can.

01:14:52 ◼   ► Do you think the Mac needs a yearly marketing operating system update to hang a tab on or

01:14:58 ◼   ► is that not necessary?

01:15:00 ◼   ► Uh, it's probably fine.

01:15:04 ◼   ► You can do that every year, have a new product and a new name, but stop with the expectation

01:15:09 ◼   ► that you're going to have a bunch of feature bullet points.

01:15:12 ◼   ► Just make it more like when in the car industry where the Honda Accord will go through a redesign

01:15:18 ◼   ► and there will be several years in which it's basically the same Accord, they just change

01:15:22 ◼   ► the front fascia, the plastic trim, maybe some of the options available, but it's the

01:15:27 ◼   ► same car.

01:15:28 ◼   ► have the generational turnover. They sell the same Honda Accord for many, many years,

01:15:32 ◼   ► not just one or two years. So they could do that with the Mac, have a yearly release,

01:15:37 ◼   ► but make it clear. I don't know how they make it clear. The marketing purpose, we understand

01:15:42 ◼   ► that from year to year, don't expect like, "Is this the new generation of the Mac?"

01:15:46 ◼   ► No, it's just another revision of the current generation of the Mac operating system. So

01:15:51 ◼   ► that will give them breathing worm while still giving them something to say about the Mac

01:15:54 ◼   ► on stage every year to see.

01:15:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I was looking at the Wikipedia page for the Honda Civic and realized that I had

01:16:00 ◼   ► a fifth-generation Honda Civic, I think. Or maybe it was a sixth generation, and now I'm

01:16:06 ◼   ► driving an eighth-generation Honda Civic. But it's the same thing, where they've gone

01:16:12 ◼   ► through like ten different generations of a Honda Civic, but they keep them around for

01:16:16 ◼   ► like four or five years.

01:16:18 ◼   ► Yep. I mean, that's what the car industry does, because the investment costs of a particular

01:16:22 ◼   ► platform are so huge. Even if it's just a mild evolution of the previous platform that

01:16:25 ◼   ► you need to recoup those costs, you want to sell it for several years. And like they make

01:16:29 ◼   ► cosmetic changes every year, small cosmetic changes, small trim level changes, fixing a

01:16:33 ◼   ► component with replacing component with more reliable one when they realize, you know,

01:16:38 ◼   ► what may be. But in general, you're not getting the next generation car for several years.

01:16:44 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, we'll see. I'm with you there. I think that they're welcome to call it a new

01:16:52 ◼   ► name every year, but our expectations should probably change and they should not worry

01:16:56 ◼   ► about like, "We've got 300 new features and we did this, we did that." Just, yeah.

01:17:03 ◼   ► I mean, there's so many people who rely on the Mac. I don't know if the Mac needs

01:17:07 ◼   ► to make news. I think it just needs to be good and keep getting better.

01:17:12 ◼   ► And it can make news by being better and more reliable. The most compelling word of mouth,

01:17:20 ◼   ► especially since they're not selling them anymore, like, you know, for money. But the

01:17:22 ◼   ► most compelling word-of-mouth thing you can hear is, "There's a new version of the Mac

01:17:26 ◼   ► operating system. I installed it, and problems X, Y, and Z that I used to have went away."

01:17:31 ◼   ► That is a feature. If you heard someone say that, like, "Oh, you have to get this one,

01:17:35 ◼   ► because the previous one, I had all sorts of problems, and I installed the new one,

01:17:38 ◼   ► and those problems went away." And they want to ask you, "Okay, well, fine, but what new

01:17:41 ◼   ► features does it have?" Like, that's a feature.

01:17:43 ◼   ► - One of the banner features of El Capitan, I think, is the fact that on slow internet

01:17:47 ◼   ► connections, mail actually will check your mail instead of trying to sync like

01:17:51 ◼   ► 20 IMAP mailboxes. And that was a feature that they trumpeted, that they

01:17:55 ◼   ► went out of their way to tell me is, "Hey, it turns out that when you're on airplane

01:18:00 ◼   ► Wi-Fi, Apple Mail was really inefficient." And as somebody who'd been on a bunch of

01:18:05 ◼   ► cruises, I was already aware of this. But that was a great feature and that

01:18:11 ◼   ► was a fix to mail to make it not behave badly when you don't have a

01:18:15 ◼   ► super-fast connection. And you know what? That's a great feature, even though it is

01:18:20 ◼   ► just a fix.

01:18:21 ◼   ► Sure.

01:18:23 ◼   ► Alright, well, I think we have just enough time for some Ask Upgrade, a special

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01:20:25 ◼   ► for supporting upgrade and this week's edition of Ask Upgrade. The first item which I moved

01:20:33 ◼   ► down here from higher up in the show is just pizza. Myke and I have been talking about

01:20:38 ◼   ► pizza a little bit on the show, and I sided with Joe Steele on the pepperoni and pineapple

01:20:42 ◼   ► pizza, which I enjoy greatly, which I am certain is not John Siracusa approved, but I was going

01:20:49 ◼   ► to give you this opportunity to school me on what you decide real pizza is, and what

01:20:53 ◼   ► you have determined real pizza is. This is not robot or not. This is slightly different

01:20:57 ◼   ► than the podcast we do about whether things are robots or not. This is pizza or not, which

01:21:01 ◼   ► I think as a single ruling is going to make it clear. I just want—before you speak,

01:21:05 ◼   ► I was going to say, one time I had you over to my house and I made pizza, and I made a

01:21:13 ◼   ► traditional sort of red sauce, mozzarella, and I think maybe there were pepperoni on

01:21:19 ◼   ► it. And then I also made a barbecue chicken pizza. And my recollection is you said, "This

01:21:24 ◼   ► is pizza, and this is some other thing that is not pizza." So can you educate me a little

01:21:28 ◼   ► bit on what real pizza is?

01:21:31 ◼   ► You and Myke talk about the pizza, it's like the blind leading the blind. The guy from

01:21:34 ◼   ► the UK and the guy from California talking about pizza. So you might as well be talking

01:21:38 ◼   ► about zebras. I had a lot of your vast experience with zebras that you both have.

01:21:41 ◼   ► Well, there's the California Zebra Kitchen, so...

01:21:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:21:45 ◼   ► Yep. To my right, you left out the most salient detail of the pizza you had at your house.

01:21:50 ◼   ► Was it both of them you can tell me? One or both of them had cheddar cheese on them?

01:21:54 ◼   ► Well, the BBQ Chicken Pizza had cheddar cheese on it. The other one might have,

01:21:58 ◼   ► although I will tell you that I was thoroughly cleared up about the proper use of cheddar

01:22:04 ◼   ► cheese and pizza by you. And now, I will still put some cheddar in a barbecue chicken pizza,

01:22:10 ◼   ► but the traditional red sauce pizza is only mozzarella.

01:22:14 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah. So my whole pizza thing, like so many

01:22:17 ◼   ► of my culinary things, it's all about where I'm from. I'm from the New York Metro area,

01:22:22 ◼   ► up on Long Island. And all my rulings on all those foods are entirely based on what I grew

01:22:29 ◼   ► up with, which I think is true of everybody who has some particular thing about some food,

01:22:35 ◼   ► whether it's someone who grew up in the South and can tell you exactly how grits have to

01:22:38 ◼   ► be, right? Or, I don't know, like crawfish from New Orleans, whatever it is. There's

01:22:44 ◼   ► some local dish that is, you know, that you're from the area where that dish in America,

01:22:49 ◼   ► where that dish is known to come from there, right?

01:22:52 ◼   ► And so you kind of get authority in saying,

01:22:55 ◼   ► and I would say the same thing, for example,

01:22:57 ◼   ► about Chicago pizza, like this is not Chicago pizza.

01:22:59 ◼   ► I can tell you what Chicago pizza is.

01:23:01 ◼   ► I'm from Chicago and I, you know,

01:23:03 ◼   ► you can sort of definitively say that, but in the end,

01:23:06 ◼   ► it doesn't mean anything more than anyone else's.

01:23:11 ◼   ► Like it only is what it is.

01:23:12 ◼   ► You have to recognize that it's,

01:23:14 ◼   ► that all you're hearing is this is where this food

01:23:18 ◼   ► became famous or is most well known, and all this person is doing is telling you how close

01:23:24 ◼   ► the food that you're eating and calling the same thing is to the place where this food

01:23:28 ◼   ► came from and is well known. Everything beyond that, especially when it comes to California,

01:23:34 ◼   ► is something else. Because California makes a lot of things that are like good food, like

01:23:39 ◼   ► made with good ingredients, like not crappy food, that nevertheless are abominations of

01:23:43 ◼   ► the original food item. It doesn't mean they're bad food and might not taste bad or whatever,

01:23:49 ◼   ► but it does mean—and it's almost worse when they're good as opposed to someone making

01:23:53 ◼   ► an abomination out of processed food and gross things—it does mean, though, that they're

01:24:00 ◼   ► that food in name only, or that someone has heard a story about that food and then made

01:24:05 ◼   ► it. They've never actually seen or tasted one, but they heard about it. And so this

01:24:09 ◼   ► is what they've come up with.

01:24:10 ◼   ► I was told if I put cheese and sauce on bread, it would be pizza.

01:24:13 ◼   ► Right, exactly. So what kind of cheese? Does it really matter what kind of cheese or sauce?

01:24:18 ◼   ► Can I take some other meal like hamburgers or fried chicken and put it on top of there?

01:24:22 ◼   ► Yeah, why not? Turkey dinner, put it on top. Is that still pizza?

01:24:27 ◼   ► So anyway, all of my rules are, and for the people who are from these areas, tend to be like a purist.

01:24:34 ◼   ► This is the way it has to be, this is what you put on it, and you don't put other stuff on it.

01:24:38 ◼   ► because the pizza seems so versatile. You can put anything on there, can't you? You

01:24:42 ◼   ► can, but now you're making something different. Even Chicago pizza, for example, is not pizza

01:24:47 ◼   ► by East Coast New York standards. It is a separate thing. They can have rulings about

01:24:51 ◼   ► whether you're making a Chicago pizza, but it is so incredibly different.

01:24:54 ◼   ► So the New York pizza is so simple. Like so many of the original places, it is boring.

01:25:01 ◼   ► You know, it's just you got the dough, you got the sauce, which is always tomato sauce

01:25:05 ◼   ► with a certain set of spices that is very limited. You've got the cheese, which is always

01:25:09 ◼   ► mozzarella cheese, and you've got a couple handful toppings, and that's it. And within

01:25:14 ◼   ► that frame, you can do it badly or you can do it well, and you're judge-based on that.

01:25:18 ◼   ► But once you start branching out into like, "This seems like a, you know, I can do anything

01:25:23 ◼   ► there. Like, I don't like mozzarella cheese." Well, then you don't like pizza. You know,

01:25:27 ◼   ► I want to have pizza, but I don't like mozzarella cheese. Well, then make something else that

01:25:31 ◼   ► you—that is inspired by pizza that you may enjoy.

01:25:32 ◼   ► Flatbread with something maybe a delicious meal that you love like there are lots of interesting things

01:25:38 ◼   ► You can put on top of things that are sort of dishes inspired by pizza

01:25:41 ◼   ► But if you're ever gonna have any sort of ruling about like what is and isn't pizza

01:25:45 ◼   ► You have to pick your definition and I pick my definition from where I came from

01:25:49 ◼   ► Which is the place in America where a pizza was popularized and so that's what I go. So no cheddar cheese

01:25:56 ◼   ► No, no barbecue. No barbecue chicken. Yeah, no turkey dinner. No, no cheeseburger

01:26:02 ◼   ► burgers, no chocolate cake, no bacon, no...

01:26:06 ◼   ► Yeah, so what toppings are allowed by you? Because so far, you have not ruled out my

01:26:11 ◼   ► -- which I know you're about to -- you've not ruled out my pepperoni and pineapple.

01:26:15 ◼   ► All right, so here's the twist in this. Where I'm from, the toppings are fairly straightforward.

01:26:22 ◼   ► You've got pepperoni, sausage, olive. You've got things like meatball that are in there.

01:26:28 ◼   ► You can't say that they're not because it's a topic that you can get in most places.

01:26:34 ◼   ► And it doesn't stray much from – I mean, you've got peppers and onions and mushrooms,

01:26:37 ◼   ► right?

01:26:38 ◼   ► It doesn't stray very far from that, but there is what's known as Hawaiian pizza,

01:26:44 ◼   ► which is pineapple and ham, right?

01:26:46 ◼   ► Which is not pineapple and pepperoni, which is not a valid – but pineapple is as far

01:26:52 ◼   ► out as the weirdest pizza that you have to say, "Is that included in one of the values?"

01:26:57 ◼   ► Because you can get it in New York and most places in the New York metro area, even when

01:27:02 ◼   ► I was growing up, chances are good if you ask for Hawaiian, you got a 50/50 chance maybe

01:27:06 ◼   ► that the pizza place will know what that is and they will have it.

01:27:10 ◼   ► Is it good?

01:27:11 ◼   ► I never liked it.

01:27:13 ◼   ► Did most people get it?

01:27:14 ◼   ► No.

01:27:15 ◼   ► I think it was probably more reviled than anchovy, which is also another valid topic.

01:27:20 ◼   ► But it was for sale.

01:27:21 ◼   ► So I have difficulty judging that.

01:27:25 ◼   ► As far as I'm concerned, I feel like that was maybe the first chink in the armor of

01:27:29 ◼   ► like—

01:27:30 ◼   ► That's where it all went wrong.

01:27:32 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:27:33 ◼   ► But it was not something that I had never heard of.

01:27:37 ◼   ► It's just something that I never chose to eat, but I saw other people eat it.

01:27:41 ◼   ► So I'm going to rule against pepperoni and pineapple, which is just a made-up thing,

01:27:45 ◼   ► but "Hawaiian pizza," quote-unquote, that's borderline.

01:27:49 ◼   ► But you see, the difference between ham and pepperoni, these are salty pork-based—

01:27:55 ◼   ► meats. They are not that different. There's a difference. They're not that different.

01:27:58 ◼   ► They don't go—like, because with Hawaiian, what you're going for is that sort of—I

01:28:02 ◼   ► mean, you've got the whole Spam, Polynesian, Hawaii type thing. Like, ham is different

01:28:06 ◼   ► than pepperoni. It is just very, very different. It's not as good. It's not as spicy. It's

01:28:10 ◼   ► not—just—yeah. So I feel like both of them, for me, it's not my thing or whatever,

01:28:17 ◼   ► and I think the only way you can sneak in is going with Hawaiian and saying it's ham

01:28:21 ◼   ► and pineapple. Pepperoni and pineapple, I feel like you're just making things up.

01:28:24 ◼   ► Well, it's a Hawaiian where they— It's like saying bacon and pineapple, or

01:28:29 ◼   ► even sausage and pineapple. Those are not combinations. That's not Hawaiian. Only ham

01:28:34 ◼   ► and pineapple. My parents would always order what I've considered

01:28:37 ◼   ► to be the most baffling pizza ever, which is beef and onion. So it's like ground beef.

01:28:43 ◼   ► What does beef mean? It's ground beef. It's basically like sausage.

01:28:46 ◼   ► No, that is not a topic. See, you can't just take ground beef and put it on top of

01:28:51 ◼   ► It's not—apparently you can.

01:28:53 ◼   ► And then onion.

01:28:55 ◼   ► And I find I don't understand it.

01:28:56 ◼   ► I'd never heard of anybody.

01:28:57 ◼   ► But you can apparently get this in lots of places, a beef and onion pizza.

01:29:00 ◼   ► I don't know why you'd want to.

01:29:03 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:29:04 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:29:05 ◼   ► Well, see, the variance in pizza across the country.

01:29:06 ◼   ► The other problem is, even if they're using all the ingredients, you think of just plain,

01:29:10 ◼   ► straight up mozzarella cheese, tomato sauce, and dough.

01:29:14 ◼   ► There's such incredible variation in just those three ingredients, such incredible,

01:29:18 ◼   ► vile variation.

01:29:19 ◼   ► There's no safety in like, you have no idea what you're getting.

01:29:22 ◼   ► And so once you branch out, even the New York metro area, meatball pizza was the most dangerous

01:29:26 ◼   ► because what do you, how do they make their meatballs?

01:29:28 ◼   ► There's sort of no standardized, what is a meatball?

01:29:31 ◼   ► You kind of have an idea of what it's supposed to be like in Italian meatballs.

01:29:34 ◼   ► A meatball is like a big ball.

01:29:36 ◼   ► How do you even put that on the pizza?

01:29:37 ◼   ► Do you chop it up?

01:29:38 ◼   ► Do you make little mini meatballs?

01:29:40 ◼   ► You make them smaller, sometimes they're cut in half.

01:29:43 ◼   ► It's weird.

01:29:44 ◼   ► That's the other thing.

01:29:45 ◼   ► Like, in Italian restaurants in the New York area, I would never get spaghetti and meatballs

01:29:48 ◼   ► because the variation in meatballs from restaurant to restaurant was just fantastical.

01:29:52 ◼   ► It could be any kind of meat. They could have onion or celery or other kind of crunchy stuff

01:29:57 ◼   ► in them, which I always hated. Or do they have breadcrumbs?

01:29:59 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a lot of variations in that. So it was not really safe to get. But most

01:30:05 ◼   ► of the toppings are olives or olives. All the vegetables are basically the same. You

01:30:11 ◼   ► very often cut the same way. Pepperoni, even though there's variations in quality, you

01:30:16 ◼   ► kind of tell pepper when you're eating it and when you're not eating it. Sausage, Italian

01:30:19 ◼   ► sausage seems to be a little more consistent than meatballs. It starts to vary. Pineapple

01:30:23 ◼   ► and ham are pretty consistent, too. But around the rest of the country, they can't even get

01:30:27 ◼   ► like the sauce or the cheese or the dough right. And so forget about their toppings.

01:30:31 ◼   ► Who knows what you're going to get?

01:30:33 ◼   ► I use some wheat flour along with white flour in my dough, so that probably puts me in the

01:30:36 ◼   ► crazy California side, too.

01:30:38 ◼   ► You are in California, so I'm like, "Why wouldn't you?" I mean, why not put sunflower seeds

01:30:41 ◼   ► in there while you're doing that? Put some avocado on top.

01:30:43 ◼   ► 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.

01:30:48 ◼   ► If you're putting it on pizza, you're doing it wrong.

01:30:50 ◼   ► And mission style burritos. Those are those are our local foods that we can control.

01:30:53 ◼   ► 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.

01:30:59 ◼   ► I have a couple really quick Ask Upgrades that I wanted to get your thoughts about.

01:31:02 ◼   ► One is from Bobby who says, "What comes first? True family iCloud photo libraries, a new file system, ding, or a full iTunes rewrite?

01:31:12 ◼   ► What would be your prediction?

01:31:13 ◼   ► Which one of those will come first?

01:31:14 ◼   ► Oh, I'm going to predict the new file system first.

01:31:18 ◼   ► Not because I think it's imminent, but just because full iTunes rewrite just.

01:31:22 ◼   ► It just seems like it's not even a glimmer in anyone's eyes, but it's, it's hard to tell.

01:31:27 ◼   ► Like, and I follow libraries.

01:31:28 ◼   ► They've done so much with photos lately and they, they probably feel like that they've.

01:31:34 ◼   ► That that need doesn't exist anymore because of like the shared streams.

01:31:37 ◼   ► It does.

01:31:38 ◼   ► It still exists.

01:31:39 ◼   ► I agree.

01:31:40 ◼   ► I feel like that there's an iTunes family piece that's still going to keep dropping

01:31:43 ◼   ► of like all the other stuff getting integrated into into family iTunes accounts.

01:31:49 ◼   ► But all that stuff is like the photos one especially probably doesn't feel as pressing

01:31:54 ◼   ► to them because they just made such a massive improvement to photos that it's time to like

01:31:58 ◼   ► refine and build on that.

01:32:00 ◼   ► I asked them about it too.

01:32:02 ◼   ► I asked them about it and they brought up something that I thought was interesting which

01:32:05 ◼   ► was who's to say that everybody in a family wants to share photos?

01:32:09 ◼   ► Which I thought was like, okay, interesting take on that.

01:32:11 ◼   ► Like your kids, do your kids really want all their pictures dumped into your photo library?

01:32:15 ◼   ► You should have said to them, we're not talking about the whole family, although that does

01:32:18 ◼   ► happen for when the whole family goes on vacation, but surely in families that have more than

01:32:22 ◼   ► one parent, which I believe there are a lot of in the world, surely the parents want to

01:32:28 ◼   ► share the pictures they individually take of their children.

01:32:31 ◼   ► That is a common use case.

01:32:35 ◼   ► So you're going to say file system.

01:32:36 ◼   ► So anyway, yeah, so I'm going to say File System just because it's been so long in coming.

01:32:40 ◼   ► It hasn't arrived.

01:32:41 ◼   ► It hasn't improved, whereas iTunes has been improved many times over, and it seems like

01:32:47 ◼   ► I'm not even sure they know what they want to do with iTunes.

01:32:49 ◼   ► And the photo library, they just made such a huge, massive change to it.

01:32:51 ◼   ► I feel like it is conceivable, 2017, that you could introduce a new file system, and

01:32:56 ◼   ► it's conceivable that by 2017, neither of those other two things happen.

01:32:59 ◼   ► So I'm picking File System, but it could be wishful thinking.

01:33:02 ◼   ► I'm going to pick the family iCloud photo libraries, because I do feel like there's

01:33:05 ◼   ► another shoe that's going to drop, that they've been working to add more features.

01:33:08 ◼   ► Now that they've got the family feature out there, that we're going to see

01:33:12 ◼   ► additional stuff thrown into it, I'm hoping that we're going to get a shared pool of data

01:33:16 ◼   ► for iCloud and that we are going to be able to opt to have photo libraries go across accounts.

01:33:22 ◼   ► That it won't be mandatory because, you know, again, my daughter doesn't want to share her

01:33:26 ◼   ► pictures with us and that's fine, but my wife and I would like to be able to share our pictures.

01:33:30 ◼   ► And right now you kind of can't because to be logged into some things on your iPhone,

01:33:34 ◼   ► you can't be logged into other things. You can't really use two IDs for everything.

01:33:38 ◼   ► So, you know, we can't do that right now. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna predict that also

01:33:42 ◼   ► because I feel like although it's work, it's, there's a lot of behind the scenes work that's

01:33:46 ◼   ► already been done. Whereas a new file system and a full iTunes rewriter, such huge projects that

01:33:51 ◼   ► I'm also gonna think that maybe this is a thing we're already watching it happen. And it'll just,

01:33:55 ◼   ► it'll, it'll tick that box as it moves forward with the iCloud family stuff. Cause they,

01:34:00 ◼   ► I hope on the file system is that they have been working on it for years already.

01:34:04 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

01:34:05 ◼   ► Many, many years.

01:34:06 ◼   ► Well, maybe so.

01:34:07 ◼   ► Maybe we'll get all of them at WWDC in June, right?

01:34:10 ◼   ► Sure.

01:34:11 ◼   ► No, not this year.

01:34:12 ◼   ► And I thought, like, iCloud Photo Library, like, I was saying, like, it is just a big

01:34:16 ◼   ► improvement.

01:34:17 ◼   ► It used to be that you had to designate which computer was the iPhoto computer.

01:34:21 ◼   ► Remember those days?

01:34:22 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:34:23 ◼   ► Like, oh, Mom's computer is the iPhoto computer?

01:34:24 ◼   ► Now we've made such an improvement, now you designate which Apple ID is the photo's Apple

01:34:29 ◼   ► ID.

01:34:30 ◼   ► is actually a really big improvement, because at least it's portable with the Apple ID and

01:34:34 ◼   ► not tied to a piece of hardware or anything like that.

01:34:37 ◼   ► But yeah, when I think about how it should work with families, it's not obvious what

01:34:42 ◼   ► is the best interface.

01:34:43 ◼   ► We all see the need.

01:34:45 ◼   ► I don't want to do the current dance that I do to try to somehow bring over the pictures

01:34:48 ◼   ► that I take on my phone to get them into the family photo library, which uses my wife's

01:34:52 ◼   ► Apple ID and everything.

01:34:54 ◼   ► But full sharing of everything is also the wrong answer.

01:34:59 ◼   ► And how do you present an interface that so people don't get confused about where the

01:35:01 ◼   ► heck their photos are?

01:35:02 ◼   ► It's actually, it's a pretty hard problem, but it is a very pressing need.

01:35:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I just, the iCloud family stuff was introduced only last year.

01:35:12 ◼   ► So I feel like there's going to be that year two of now we're going to do this, but you

01:35:18 ◼   ► know, that is also, I got to, I'm doing a lot of wish casting when I say that too, because

01:35:22 ◼   ► I really want those features to be there and they may not be there.

01:35:25 ◼   ► listener Mahir wrote in to say "What is your most played song in iTunes?" and

01:35:30 ◼   ► give us the reported play count. I will go first. Modern Love by Matt Nathanson

01:35:36 ◼   ► is the number one on my iTunes. It says I have 214 plays of that, but records are

01:35:42 ◼   ► spotty, you know, that doesn't cover... until iTunes match started syncing plays

01:35:46 ◼   ► across devices, you know, I would delete things and add things and listen on

01:35:50 ◼   ► different computers and none of it would stay in sync. Now it all stays in sync,

01:35:53 ◼   ► but that really is only so for the last year and a half. I did used to do audio

01:35:59 ◼   ► Scrobbler to last FM, so I went there and I haven't done that in two years, but

01:36:03 ◼   ► there were several years where everything I played on my Mac at work

01:36:05 ◼   ► especially got Scrobbled to last FM, and I looked it up and the most played

01:36:11 ◼   ► track there was "Let Go" by FruFru. Also 214 plays, which I find just kind of

01:36:17 ◼   ► peculiar. So those are mine.

01:36:19 ◼   ► What about you, Jon?

01:36:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I just want to reiterate my lack of faith in the play counts.

01:36:25 ◼   ► Because first of all, they all seem way too low.

01:36:28 ◼   ► Second of all, I'm not even sure—I do subscribe to iTunes Match, and I have since the beginning—but

01:36:31 ◼   ► I'm not even sure that they're really syncing the way that they should be.

01:36:36 ◼   ► And third of all, like I said, the numbers just look weird and inexplicable, and just

01:36:40 ◼   ► all way too low.

01:36:41 ◼   ► So I've been listening to iTunes since iTunes existed, since it was on, you know, classic

01:36:45 ◼   ► Mac OS, but surely these play counts don't account for that.

01:36:48 ◼   ► So I have no idea what range these play counts are in.

01:36:51 ◼   ► But anyway, my number one is REM's Perfect Circle for Murmur.

01:36:55 ◼   ► Play count is 321.

01:36:57 ◼   ► All right.

01:36:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I love play counts, actually.

01:37:03 ◼   ► And it's funny, I don't pay attention to them much anymore, because for so long they were

01:37:06 ◼   ► irrelevant, because they didn't cover my iPod plays, and they didn't cover the different

01:37:11 ◼   ► Macs and they wouldn't sync, and then I'd remove something from my library for some

01:37:14 ◼   ► reason, and then bring it back and the play counts would be gone.

01:37:17 ◼   ► But since they did iTunes Match, Apple has actually synced play counts with all your

01:37:24 ◼   ► devices, apparently.

01:37:25 ◼   ► So yeah, I mean, my number three is down to double digits already.

01:37:30 ◼   ► So these can't be right.

01:37:31 ◼   ► Wow.

01:37:32 ◼   ► Yeah, that can't be right.

01:37:33 ◼   ► I have a whole bunch of things in the upper 100s.

01:37:39 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't know.

01:37:43 ◼   ► It turns out there's a song that I play—this is something I have in common with Merlin,

01:37:46 ◼   ► A song I play when I'm in a certain mood, especially at the beginning of the day.

01:37:51 ◼   ► It's kind of a dark or angry mood.

01:37:54 ◼   ► I play "Something I Learned Today" by Husker Du, and it's got 113 plays.

01:37:59 ◼   ► So that's how many times I've been in that mood lately.

01:38:04 ◼   ► It's in the top 20, anyway.

01:38:05 ◼   ► It's not in the top 10, but it's in the top 20.

01:38:08 ◼   ► Yeah, the other complication is playing songs in the car for kids, because my number two

01:38:13 ◼   ► is "Let It Go From Frozen."

01:38:14 ◼   ► Of course it is!

01:38:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:38:16 ◼   ► Of course, I also listen to it myself. I'm not going to put all those plays on my kids.

01:38:20 ◼   ► I like that song. I do listen to it in the car, but a lot of those are job-related.

01:38:24 ◼   ► Sure. A listener, Rob, wrote in to say, "Do you think Amazon is working on an Amazon video

01:38:31 ◼   ► app for the Apple TV?" And Rob would like to watch Doctor Who again, which is, Doctor

01:38:35 ◼   ► Who is moving to Amazon as an exclusive, the new series of Doctor Who. Myke and I talked

01:38:41 ◼   ► about this a lot. What do you think? What's Amazon's strategy here? Do they want their

01:38:46 ◼   ► They're on iOS.

01:38:47 ◼   ► Do they want to be on Apple TV?

01:38:48 ◼   ► Do they want to sabotage Apple TV?

01:38:51 ◼   ► What's going on?

01:38:52 ◼   ► >> I try to handicap this.

01:38:55 ◼   ► I try to think about how many people are like us and how many people are more like a single

01:39:01 ◼   ► box household.

01:39:02 ◼   ► Because my experience of television for the past many years has been, "Let's see all of

01:39:08 ◼   ► the various applications on my various boxes compete against each other."

01:39:12 ◼   ► Who has the best Netflix client?

01:39:13 ◼   ► who has the best Amazon Video client, right?

01:39:16 ◼   ► I mean, because down to my TV, my TV can play Netflix, my TV can play Amazon Video, so can

01:39:22 ◼   ► my TiVo, so can my Apple TV, so can my PlayStation, so can my Wii.

01:39:27 ◼   ► And I'm just picking among them, and they change, like who's got a good app this week

01:39:30 ◼   ► or whatever, but at no point am I like, "I really wish I could watch Amazon Video, but

01:39:34 ◼   ► unfortunately I don't have a box that can play it.

01:39:37 ◼   ► I have like seven boxes that can play it."

01:39:38 ◼   ► And am I the aberration?

01:39:40 ◼   ► Because I have a million boxes connected to my TV, and most people can't support that

01:39:42 ◼   ► because it's ridiculous and most people just have like one thing like they just have their

01:39:46 ◼   ► cable box maybe and then maybe one other thing and that they're somehow being stopped from

01:39:51 ◼   ► watching Amazon I guess that I mean maybe that's more common than what I have but it

01:39:55 ◼   ► just seems ridiculous to me that Amazon would withhold their application from Apple TV for

01:40:01 ◼   ► any reason other than spite because it seems like yeah it's pointless you're not I don't

01:40:06 ◼   ► think they're selling more fire TVs because of it people because those people who have

01:40:10 ◼   ► only one box? They have only one box because they don't want to have a million boxes. And

01:40:14 ◼   ► you know, they're just going to live without it then. And it's stupid. Amazon, if they're

01:40:18 ◼   ► going to be a content company, if they're going to pay to have Man in the High Castle

01:40:22 ◼   ► made and pay all this money for the new Top Gear, the show from the old people that did

01:40:25 ◼   ► Top Gear or whatever, you got to get your show out to as many people as possible. I

01:40:28 ◼   ► mean, even Apple made iTunes for Windows. You can't be like that. If you're going to

01:40:33 ◼   ► produce content, you need to get it everywhere, like Netflix. Netflix was like, "Do you have

01:40:37 ◼   ► a box that an electric cable goes into, we want a Netflix client on it. They want it

01:40:42 ◼   ► everywhere. That's the right strategy, and I think eventually Amazon will see that. So

01:40:46 ◼   ► I would predict that Amazon will eventually be on Apple TV.

01:40:49 ◼   ► Steven: I think they're working on it. They're on iOS. Of course they'll be there eventually.

01:40:54 ◼   ► Maybe there's some politics around when they go, but I think it's going to happen. I think

01:40:58 ◼   ► it's inevitable.

01:40:59 ◼   ► Steven, off-screen Yeah, if it is spite, it's stupid.

01:41:01 ◼   ► Yeah, oh, agreed completely.

01:41:03 ◼   ► That's a terrible reason.

01:41:04 ◼   ► Uh, listener Lucas has our final question today, which is what topics can you

01:41:10 ◼   ► only discuss when Myke is not around?

01:41:13 ◼   ► Pizza, please.

01:41:14 ◼   ► Pizza.

01:41:15 ◼   ► Definitely.

01:41:16 ◼   ► Um, let's see what else pens are dumb.

01:41:19 ◼   ► I don't like pens and, uh, Myke was wrong.

01:41:23 ◼   ► Uh, big phones, the iPhone six plus is no good.

01:41:26 ◼   ► The iPhone six asks forever until the next iPhone.

01:41:30 ◼   ► That's not huge.

01:41:31 ◼   ► Any other terrible things we could say? Well, USA. USA. We can do that.

01:41:37 ◼   ► Well, Myke is not around. I don't know. I feel like you could talk about most of these things with him.

01:41:43 ◼   ► It's true.

01:41:44 ◼   ► I don't know if there's anything you can't-- It would probably be something that he's not interested in.

01:41:47 ◼   ► Is there anything that you're interested in that he would just roll his eyes and be bored and have nothing to say about?

01:41:52 ◼   ► Well, we talked about boxes that you attach to a television to watch things. He's totally not interested in that.

01:41:57 ◼   ► What about baseball?

01:41:58 ◼   ► baseball. Oh yeah, yeah, but you're not that interested in baseball either. I know, but

01:42:02 ◼   ► for you, what could you talk about? If you had someone on who was really into baseball,

01:42:06 ◼   ► you're not going to have these deep conversations with baseball with Myke. Honestly, the iPhone

01:42:10 ◼   ► 6 and 6S Plus, that's a thing that I can't really have when he's around, because he just

01:42:15 ◼   ► won't stop talking about how he's right. And I just don't agree, I don't like that big

01:42:21 ◼   ► phone. I mean, it's not a right or wrong, as you pointed out, it's personal preference.

01:42:25 ◼   ► personal preference does not match his. But yes, baseball—we had a great question last

01:42:29 ◼   ► week about sports, or as they say in England, "sport."

01:42:33 ◼   ► They only have one there. They have lots of maths, though. Lots of maths, only one sport.

01:42:39 ◼   ► It's an interesting dynamic.

01:42:40 ◼   ► They have a real cardinality problem over there.

01:42:43 ◼   ► Yeah, they have priorities. They've got more math and less sports, and we went the other

01:42:47 ◼   ► way, so that's sort of our cross to bear, I think. But he didn't even have a point when

01:42:53 ◼   ► he was 10 where he had a David Beckham poster on the wall. He's just never been interested

01:42:57 ◼   ► in it, which is fine. Lots of computer nerds, lots of people in our culture are like that.

01:43:04 ◼   ► I'm not one of them, but there are a lot of people out there who just didn't ever do.

01:43:07 ◼   ► He said, "Don't play it, not interested in it." And I said, "Well, I don't play it."

01:43:10 ◼   ► I played basketball in the eighth grade. I was on our team, seventh and eighth grade

01:43:15 ◼   ► basketball. That was my last venture into organized sports, but I still like sports,

01:43:20 ◼   ► even though I can't play them. I don't know. Things about how England--well, even insulting

01:43:26 ◼   ► England I could probably do around Myke, because his accent keeps drifting closer and closer

01:43:30 ◼   ► to the United States.

01:43:31 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. We'll change him yet.

01:43:34 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll reform him. He did refer to sports last week, and not sport, which I felt was

01:43:41 ◼   ► an ultimate betrayal to all of our British listeners who should find him.

01:43:45 ◼   ► He can't help it. I was trying to say, it's like when you have a conversation with somebody

01:43:49 ◼   ► who, you know, you say "gif" and they say "jif," and it's like a battle of wills to

01:43:53 ◼   ► see during the conversation. The conversation is not about that. You're just talking like

01:43:57 ◼   ► at work about something. This happened more when we actually used to use gifs on the internet,

01:44:01 ◼   ► right? But you were just discussing something, and it is almost impossible to have an ongoing

01:44:06 ◼   ► conversation over the course of a week with two people who say it differently. One will

01:44:09 ◼   ► break, and when talking to the other person, conform to their way of saying things. And

01:44:15 ◼   ► So it's your job to hold strong with the American pronunciations and everything, and eventually

01:44:19 ◼   ► he'll break.

01:44:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it's Jeff, by the way.

01:44:23 ◼   ► This episode of Upgrade, brought to you by Casper, Squarespace, and MailRoute.

01:44:28 ◼   ► Thank you to our sponsors.

01:44:29 ◼   ► You can reach me at Jason L. Myke is imike on Twitter.

01:44:31 ◼   ► Of course, our guest John Siracusa is Siracusa on Twitter, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Siracusa.

01:44:38 ◼   ► And you can reach him at ATP.fm for Accidental Tech Podcast.

01:44:41 ◼   ► and of course at Real FM he has "Reconsidable Differences" with Merlin Mann. And at TheIncomparable.com,

01:44:47 ◼   ► not only can you find many episodes with Jon, but of course Jon and I do "Robot or Not"

01:44:51 ◼   ► there. Every week we talk about why something is not a robot, usually. Jon, thanks for being

01:44:58 ◼   ► on Upgrade. I appreciate it.

01:44:59 ◼   ► Jon Sorrentino No problem, Jason. Anytime.

01:45:00 ◼   ► Thanks everybody out there for listening. We will see you next week and Myke will be back in the UK. Bye!

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