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Connected

353: 88XX BANE

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   Hello and welcome to Connected, episode 353.

00:00:12   It's made possible this week by our sponsors, Squarespace, Smile, and Hello.

00:00:18   My name is Stephen Hackett and I'm joined by Mr Myke Hurley.

00:00:21   Ahoy there!

00:00:22   Greetings and salutations.

00:00:25   Football is either coming home or it isn't coming home, apparently.

00:00:29   I've decided to completely timestamp this episode.

00:00:34   We're recording before the England football game today,

00:00:38   where if England does win, which I don't know,

00:00:40   honestly, I don't know when it starts.

00:00:42   I think it starts as soon as we're done.

00:00:44   Then it will be England versus Italy in the final,

00:00:46   which I'm sure will be fun for everyone.

00:00:48   - Yeah, don't worry about it.

00:00:49   It's not coming home.

00:00:50   It's not going home, Myke.

00:00:51   Don't worry about it.

00:00:52   - This is funny.

00:00:52   You know, I knew he was gonna do this, right?

00:00:54   Like me and Federico don't care about football,

00:00:56   basically any sport at all,

00:00:58   But I don't want to say like, you know, I'm not that keen about England going to the final.

00:01:04   Sorry, English people, because Federico will become insufferable even though he doesn't

00:01:09   care. And I knew this was going to happen.

00:01:12   It's the national rivalry that matters. That's all it is. It's not about the sport.

00:01:17   Is there a national rivalry between Italy and England?

00:01:21   Well, there will be. If there's a final, there will be one.

00:01:24   So it would be England or Denmark will be joining you in the final.

00:01:28   That's a song like "It's coming home" what is it like?

00:01:32   Yeah, yeah that will go yeah yeah football's coming home.

00:01:36   We're also joined by Federico Vittigi.

00:01:38   Ciao.

00:01:39   Hello.

00:01:40   Hello.

00:01:40   The problem is I think we'll have two weeks of this if it does happen so

00:01:45   is football coming home for you at any point Stephen?

00:01:49   I'm in college football, American football starts pretty soon but I'm pretty soon like

00:01:54   like two months, follow up.

00:01:56   I wanna talk about Apple Watch backups.

00:01:58   - Okay. - Remember last time

00:01:59   I went through the whole song and dance

00:02:01   about going from a Series 6 back to a Series 5

00:02:04   after my Series 6 had a little accident.

00:02:07   And I had asked on the show, or complained on the show,

00:02:12   probably more likely,

00:02:14   how do you get rid of old Apple Watch backups?

00:02:21   Turns out it's in settings, iPhone storage,

00:02:25   and once that screen loads,

00:02:27   like why does that screen take so long?

00:02:28   - It takes a long time.

00:02:29   - Five minutes later.

00:02:30   - It takes such a long time.

00:02:31   - A long time, very long time.

00:02:34   And you scroll down to watch,

00:02:35   and then there's a list of them.

00:02:37   A couple things here.

00:02:38   One, it's only a couple of hundred kilobytes in size each.

00:02:43   They're not taking any space.

00:02:45   But the settings app is so janky,

00:02:50   When you swipe to delete one of these,

00:02:52   and instead of leaving you on the watch screen

00:02:55   of the list of backups,

00:02:58   it kicks you back out to the iPhone storage page,

00:03:01   the page above it.

00:03:03   So it'd be like if you were in mail

00:03:05   and you were just in one inbox and deleting messages,

00:03:08   but every time it'd take you back to the screen

00:03:10   where you could select your inbox.

00:03:11   I don't know why this is the case.

00:03:14   After you delete several of them,

00:03:15   the Settings app just crashes.

00:03:17   So I gave up and just moved on with my life.

00:03:20   I don't know why you cared about this really in the first place.

00:03:23   Because it's like a weight around my shoulders now.

00:03:28   Now I know they're there.

00:03:29   Do you care about old iPhone backups?

00:03:32   What do you mean like, oh like in iCloud and stuff?

00:03:34   Yeah, I mean yeah, I don't hold those around.

00:03:35   Keep those around?

00:03:37   I delete those.

00:03:38   Yeah.

00:03:39   I don't like seeing them.

00:03:40   It's more of like a thing that...

00:03:44   It's like digital craft that I don't want to have just laying around in my account.

00:03:48   I don't know why I do it.

00:03:49   Regularly I go in there and I delete those.

00:03:51   Now that you told me about the Apple Watch backups,

00:03:54   I think I'm going to do that as well,

00:03:56   because now it bothers me.

00:03:57   Like, I didn't know that before,

00:03:58   but now that I know, it bothers me.

00:04:00   - Oh, now I need to go see.

00:04:02   - Yep, I've got a screenshot in the show notes.

00:04:06   You can see all of mine.

00:04:08   - I actually can't view this image.

00:04:09   - Yeah, I fixed it.

00:04:10   - Okay. - I fixed it.

00:04:11   - All right.

00:04:12   Oh, that's a lot of, wow, see, that's a lot of backups.

00:04:17   - Yeah. - Okay, you got a lot

00:04:18   going on in there. What are you doing? Gotta wait a while because the screen's loading for me.

00:04:24   Why is that screen so slow? If you know, like actually know, why the iPhone storage or iPad

00:04:34   storage screen takes so dang long, like I would love to know. Like I thought APFS was supposed

00:04:41   to be fast and magical. Why can't you just keep this in the background at all times?

00:04:45   Yeah, like I would like to believe that the system is always aware of how much storage is being used

00:04:51   I mean, this is the same company that ships finder which disagrees with itself about how much free space you have. So

00:04:58   Hard to say

00:05:01   Who put the scribble thing in the notes?

00:05:03   I didn't know. Okay. Do you want to talk about it then scribble for the ipad now supports multiple new languages?

00:05:10   Which is cool, okay

00:05:13   including French... Well, it supported multiple languages before, but not these languages.

00:05:19   Yes. Improving Apple Pencil functionality, MacRumor says, for those who write in French, German, Italian,

00:05:27   Portuguese, and Spanish. Yeah, it was limited to English and Chinese before, I believe. I think

00:05:33   that's right. So, nice. I never... Well, I never used the pencil to handwrite, period. But also, I never

00:05:40   write in Italian, let alone with a pencil on my iPad. So, great news, I kind of want to know how

00:05:47   well it works. If you're writing one of these languages, I'm curious about the accuracy of it.

00:05:52   It's pretty good, I think, in English. I want to see, like, the... they're doing this on-device,

00:06:00   I believe, right? They must have been collecting data over the past few years, really, from

00:06:06   international users and now they are doing this on device with the with the

00:06:10   scribble technology so if you have been using these on your iPad with one of

00:06:15   these languages let us know how well it works and if you can compare between

00:06:19   English and your language of choice here even better I guess I'll have to try

00:06:24   this in Italian at some point just to see just out of curiosity you actually

00:06:29   like me there's no point me doing it it's not gonna get me very far

00:06:32   Federica, would you write like a note? Like maybe like in the house, right? Like you leave a note for Sylvia.

00:06:37   Ooh, good question.

00:06:38   Hey, I'm taking the dogs out. I'll be back in half an hour.

00:06:40   That never happens, but okay.

00:06:42   Do you write that in English or Italian?

00:06:44   In Italian.

00:06:45   Okay.

00:06:46   Why would I?

00:06:47   Okay, well maybe not in English. Like, do you write ever hand write in English?

00:06:51   No, no.

00:06:52   Do you dream in English?

00:06:54   I have. I have dreamed in English, yes. That happened a couple of times.

00:07:00   Usually when I was not in Italy like I remember having dreams in English at WWDC for example

00:07:05   Which is a it's a really weird thing, but mostly I dream in like I have been dreaming for the past couple of years in Italian

00:07:13   I think it only happened on a couple of occasions that I was having like a dream in English like I think at some point

00:07:20   At WWDC I had this dream

00:07:22   That was before I interviewed Craig

00:07:25   and so I think I had a dream about the whole thing. It was more like a nightmare,

00:07:29   like that it went horribly and I didn't know what to ask, I didn't know what to

00:07:33   say and I got emotional during the interview. It sucked, it was horrible. But

00:07:36   that wasn't English, yeah. That sounds sad. That's a sad dream. It was a really sad dream.

00:07:42   Yeah, it was very sad. Why would you ask this question? Yeah, I don't know.

00:07:46   Myke, you have some follow-up about iPad multitasking. Yeah, so I was talking about

00:07:52   about this a bunch last week and I discovered something today.

00:07:55   I'm sure Federico knows this, like I'm not it's not a new discovery,

00:07:59   but I hadn't come across it yet, which is if you with the new multitasking,

00:08:04   you have the little three dot indicator.

00:08:06   Does that have a name Federico or have you named it?

00:08:08   I have been calling it the multitasking indicator.

00:08:11   OK, so we'll call it that.

00:08:13   So the little three dot multitasking indicator that's at the top of the screen,

00:08:16   which you can now click and say like, go over here, go over there.

00:08:20   you can pull this down, either when an app is in full screen or when you have two

00:08:27   on like a one side by side and it slides the app out to the side and lets you pick another

00:08:33   one from the home screen. So there's actually a touch gesture which does the same thing as the

00:08:39   keyboard shortcuts do and I don't know why but I didn't know that this existed and I like that it

00:08:46   exists because there was something where I was still frustrated if I was using touch I felt like

00:08:52   I still had to do the whole like drag up from the dock and press and swipe up to the side thing.

00:08:58   So I like that that's there I didn't know it was there maybe other people knew it was there

00:09:03   for some how it got lost on me so I like the gesture a lot and maybe like it makes the change

00:09:08   in keyboard shortcuts make more sense because it unifies them right because when there's one app

00:09:12   open you can slide the app off it basically slides the app off to the side

00:09:17   and you pick another but when you have two you have to choose between one of

00:09:21   them but I still want them to add the additional keyboard shortcuts back that

00:09:25   I was talking about last time where you can just with keyboard say change the

00:09:28   left one change the right one rather than just change the active one is this

00:09:32   is this is this touch thing been there the whole time I think so I should

00:09:36   imagine this, that you can also use this as a multi-touch gesture to operate multitasking.

00:09:44   I forgot about this because I never do it, because I'm mostly using the keyboard these

00:09:49   days, especially because I'm writing, and so I'm not really using the iPad Pro in touch

00:09:53   mode a lot of the time. But yeah, this is nice to have, I think. I still wish that there

00:10:00   was a better way. I'm struggling with the keyboard stuff because I really think it's

00:10:06   backwards. We talked about this last week, the way that you need to hide the app on screen

00:10:13   and then search, and I kind of wish that it was the other way around, that I could just

00:10:18   search and put one of the results in SplitViewerSlideOver. So I'm kind of still adjusting to that. We'll

00:10:26   see how that goes in the betas. But yeah, this is nice.

00:10:29   Yeah, I'm

00:10:31   I'm pretty I'm pretty into that one feature, but I still want the keyboard shortcuts. I discovered this today while I was using

00:10:39   Google Docs for preparing for the show and I was just once again struck by

00:10:44   The frustration that Google has still not implemented multiple windows and docs and sheets. I just can't believe it at this point

00:10:52   It's madness to me

00:10:54   It just feels like the perfect kind of application to be able to open multiple instances of.

00:10:58   I cannot fathom... I mean, they also haven't, and I don't think they ever will at this point,

00:11:06   fully support the trackpad text selection and stuff.

00:11:10   But I figured that would be more complicated than the multiple window thing, honestly.

00:11:14   But like, Google Docs is just sad on iPad. It's just a sad experience.

00:11:19   It's just sad.

00:11:20   somebody needs to to do what they're doing and nobody is before everybody

00:11:25   tries to tell me the thing that they're using there's nothing that has as

00:11:28   reliable an instant collaborative text editing as Google Docs does and it is

00:11:35   important for us to have that because while we may prepare solo like when we

00:11:40   actually come to the show we have the documents in front of us and things move

00:11:43   around a lot and so the the immediacy is important and it's just a shame that

00:11:49   that Google is still the best at that part but yet they seem to not really

00:11:54   care about the app itself. Yeah, rest in peace Google's docs, sheets, iOS team. I

00:12:01   just assumed they're all gone that no one is working on. Ah, you think they'll

00:12:04   get fired? I don't think there's anyone in the store man, I mean what are you

00:12:07   doing? It's been, how long has this stuff been around that they haven't

00:12:12   supported it? Yep. Anyways, let's take a break. This episode of Connected is

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00:14:28   We're happy now to be joined on Connected by Kickstarter Maven, Big Money Steven Hackett.

00:14:34   Hi, Big Money.

00:14:35   I'm sorry, can we do, are we allowed to do a podcast with you?

00:14:39   I know, but Mr. Success over here.

00:14:41   Should we check in with your assistant or like how does it go now?

00:14:46   Do we have permission?

00:14:48   You know people just don't give me the money, right?

00:14:50   I've got to print and ship a bunch of stuff.

00:14:53   That is actually a point that I wanted to make if you didn't.

00:14:56   And it's one of the things that's always given me pause when it comes to doing Kickstarters

00:15:00   and stuff, is it's really easy to look at the amount of money raised and be like, "Oh

00:15:05   man, Steven's gonna have $26,000 in his pocket!" and it just, it does not work like that, right?

00:15:11   Like at all, it does not work like that.

00:15:14   But you have been incredibly successful, so congratulations to you.

00:15:17   What are you, like, 600% funded at this point?

00:15:21   Let me look.

00:15:23   Getting there, yeah.

00:15:25   608 backers, raised 26 grand so far.

00:15:28   Yeah, it's been a wild few days.

00:15:30   It launched on July 1st.

00:15:31   We can talk about that launch if you want to.

00:15:33   We definitely should.

00:15:34   I want to talk about that part.

00:15:36   But yeah, it's been really cool to see people excited about this.

00:15:40   So if you didn't hear us speak about this before, you haven't seen it.

00:15:42   There's a link in the show notes.

00:15:43   I would love it if you'd go at least go check it out.

00:15:46   Watch the video.

00:15:47   I think it'll be for people who like podcasts like connected, but it is a, a

00:15:52   wall calendar, like you hang in your kitchen or your office and write dates on.

00:15:56   But instead of boring holidays, it has cool Apple hardware holidays,

00:16:01   like when a bunch of stuff was announced and shipped and got a bunch of product

00:16:05   photography that I'm, it's all my own photography that I've done.

00:16:09   And you can get the calendar, there's some prints of the same images.

00:16:13   You can do, you can just get them as wallpapers, lots of options,

00:16:17   lots of tiers over on the Kickstarter page.

00:16:19   Can you, can we please talk, can we please talk about how you launched this

00:16:24   campaign because you've been working on it right we spoke about it and we encouraged you to do it

00:16:29   and so you you ended up going away and like looking at how you would manufacture it and

00:16:34   like working out the design and coming up with the features and you know the more you went down that

00:16:38   like the more of a no-brainer it seemed and one of the things i was really pushing you on was sooner

00:16:43   rather than later right because you've got to make sure people can get it before the year's over

00:16:48   yeah i basically just came into my office for i don't know like a week and a half or two weeks and

00:16:53   just made a calendar and then came out like a bunch of stuff other things didn't get done so I could get this

00:16:59   uh far enough along to launch

00:17:01   Talk through tell people how you get a kickstarter campaign

00:17:04   uh ready

00:17:07   Like from a technical perspective and then talk about what you did

00:17:10   It's pretty easy to get started with kickstarter, you know, once you have your idea and you have all your pricing

00:17:16   So I have this giant google spreadsheet

00:17:18   With printing in particular, the cost vary depending on how many you print.

00:17:22   So the spreadsheet is ginormous for me to figure all that out and figure out,

00:17:26   you know, what makes money, how much money it makes, you know, that sort of

00:17:31   thing and how much shipping needs to cost.

00:17:32   So you have to get all of that stuff, right?

00:17:35   Which of course varies from Kickstarter to Kickstarter.

00:17:37   I'm shipping printed materials.

00:17:39   If you're shipping like a pen, like our friends at Studio Neat often do, it's a

00:17:42   different thing and I should thank Studio Neat and Brad Dowdy, uh, talking to those

00:17:47   folks answering what are probably some dumb questions, but it was very helpful to talk

00:17:52   to people who had done several successful Kickstarters.

00:17:56   Another thank you to them for being so helpful.

00:17:59   But once you have all of that data, you go into Kickstarter and you set up your items

00:18:03   and you set up your tiers.

00:18:05   They suggest to do a video, which I shot, and all of your language.

00:18:11   You got to have all the components of your page ready to go.

00:18:16   You plug all that into Kickstarter's website.

00:18:18   It's all very well laid out.

00:18:20   I really got to hand it to them.

00:18:21   Their backend is fantastic.

00:18:22   Like the dashboard, I can see a reporting

00:18:25   on how the campaign is going.

00:18:27   Also fantastic, really easy to use, lots of information.

00:18:31   And you do all of that,

00:18:32   and then you submit to Kickstarter for approval

00:18:36   because they have content rules

00:18:37   and they want to make sure that,

00:18:40   I guess that you are in those content rules,

00:18:41   that you're not doing something that is scammy,

00:18:44   like totally get it, totally approve of that.

00:18:46   So I hit the button to submit.

00:18:48   And the submit button said, it may take,

00:18:50   I forget what it was,

00:18:51   like up to three business days or something,

00:18:54   some amount of time.

00:18:55   So I figured I'll hit the submit button

00:18:58   and then I'll launch it next week,

00:19:01   which would have been the beginning of this week.

00:19:04   But it was approved basically instantly.

00:19:08   And I was like, oh, well that's cool.

00:19:10   And so I said, hey, you can agree to the final terms,

00:19:14   right, 'cause they take a fee and there's terms of service

00:19:18   and stuff, so I agreed all that.

00:19:20   And what I thought was going to happen was,

00:19:23   oh, you can schedule the launch.

00:19:27   And apparently that is a button,

00:19:29   but it's like further down the page.

00:19:32   And basically I launched it immediately on--

00:19:37   - Yeah, you didn't read properly.

00:19:38   You didn't read properly, right?

00:19:39   You need to admit this part.

00:19:41   And it was funny for me because I don't know why,

00:19:44   but I contributed to the campaign.

00:19:49   I think you wanted to just share it with me in advance.

00:19:52   But that means I get all of your statistics

00:19:54   and I can log into your dashboard and all that.

00:19:56   - Yeah, you are a collaborator.

00:19:58   You're VP of Calendars.

00:19:59   - Thank you so much.

00:20:00   - You're welcome.

00:20:02   - And so I got an email that said,

00:20:03   "Congratulations, your campaign has launched."

00:20:06   I was like, "Whoa, what's he doing?"

00:20:08   'Cause it was super late in the evening for me.

00:20:10   It was like one in the morning or something.

00:20:12   Yeah, it was pretty late here on, I guess, last Thursday,

00:20:17   which is like not a good time to launch things.

00:20:19   Like if you pay attention to what most of us do,

00:20:22   we generally launch 10 or 11 a.m. Eastern,

00:20:26   'cause you kinda hit the West Coast as they're waking up,

00:20:28   but it's not nighttime in Europe.

00:20:29   Yeah, you get a good swath.

00:20:31   I'm sorry, Asia.

00:20:32   There's no good time to reach you.

00:20:34   It's impossible.

00:20:35   Well, there is, there is, but that's time for Asia.

00:20:37   Like, it's bad for everybody else.

00:20:39   - It's bad for everybody else.

00:20:40   - It just tends to be where we live.

00:20:41   - And I was like, oh crap.

00:20:42   And so I just, it was out there, right?

00:20:44   I didn't want it to sit there with no attention

00:20:47   'cause I wanted it to like have some uptick

00:20:50   right from the start.

00:20:50   And so I just tweeted, hey, I'm gonna blog

00:20:53   about this tomorrow, but it's live.

00:20:56   And it got retweeted by a bunch of our friends,

00:20:58   a bunch of people started ordering it,

00:21:00   and I hit the goal in about an hour,

00:21:01   which was very exciting.

00:21:03   And it continues to climb,

00:21:05   and it's been a fun, wild ride ever since.

00:21:08   There's a terrible website. It's called ClickTrack.

00:21:13   Or KickTrack, I think it is. KickTrack with a Q.

00:21:18   KickTrack.

00:21:20   And it is a Kickstarter tracking thing.

00:21:23   And it's so bad, right? It gets people so excited, but it really is just a terrible thing.

00:21:30   Because it tries to do some trend analysis.

00:21:33   And it's basically saying, if you continued on the same trend that you'd have from the start where you'd be,

00:21:41   and it projects that you will meet $115,000 right now by the end of your campaign.

00:21:48   But what this always ignores is pretty much every single Kickstarter campaign, except the ones that do the biggest numbers ever,

00:21:57   the interest calms down in the middle until the end.

00:22:00   So the trend is just, they just shouldn't do this part.

00:22:05   I think it like, a lot of people find these tools

00:22:07   and they're like, oh my God,

00:22:09   I'm gonna make all the money in the world.

00:22:11   But like, it's just not how this stuff works.

00:22:13   But hey, if you make $116,000 in revenue

00:22:17   at 2,318% of your goal, that'd be great for you.

00:22:21   - It would be great.

00:22:24   I would not ship those myself at that point.

00:22:26   - Yeah, you are planning to do the shipping yourself, right?

00:22:29   like every calendar will touch Stephen Hackett's hands.

00:22:31   - Or, you know, someone who I'm friends with in Memphis,

00:22:34   who I bride with pizza or something.

00:22:36   Yeah, my plan is to do the fulfillment myself.

00:22:39   Both of the printers, so it's a different printer

00:22:41   for the calendar and the prints, they're both local,

00:22:45   and that was important to me.

00:22:46   I will say, on more power users this coming Sunday,

00:22:49   I'm gonna talk, I've, we already recorded it,

00:22:51   I talk a lot about the production side of it,

00:22:54   so I don't wanna get into that here,

00:22:55   but I will say that having it printed locally

00:22:58   was important to me.

00:23:00   And thankfully we have a lot of great companies here

00:23:02   that do that because FedEx is here at the Memphis airport.

00:23:07   You know, if you buy something

00:23:08   and it usually comes through Memphis,

00:23:10   and that means that a lot of printing companies

00:23:13   have print shops here because they can print stuff

00:23:15   for their customers and ship it really easily.

00:23:18   And so working with a couple of local companies

00:23:20   to get it made and super excited about that.

00:23:25   And, you know, I'll just go get them in my truck

00:23:27   and we'll bring it back here and we'll start shipping them out at some point.

00:23:30   It's super good. How do people get it?

00:23:33   Do you have like which link in the show notes, right?

00:23:36   There isn't like a URL for it, is there?

00:23:38   No, there's not.

00:23:39   But if you get or if you go to the top of if you go to five

00:23:41   little pixels, there's a banner at the top of the page.

00:23:43   You can do that, too.

00:23:45   That in Safari 15, because it's bad, it makes the whole UI bright orange.

00:23:50   It's very fun.

00:23:53   But yeah, I'm really excited about it.

00:23:54   Thank you for those who have backed it.

00:23:57   we would love to see more people do it.

00:24:01   So, you know, go buy some calendars.

00:24:03   - You can also go to applehardwarecalendar.com.

00:24:07   - Wow, okay.

00:24:08   - Which I'm registering right now,

00:24:09   which will be set up by the time,

00:24:12   or Steven, you can get it if you want,

00:24:14   or otherwise I have it in my cart.

00:24:16   - Yeah, just do it, do it.

00:24:17   You've already said it, so you gotta do it.

00:24:19   - applehardwarecalendar.com is where you can go

00:24:23   to back Steven's Kickstarter campaign.

00:24:26   There you go. Thank you.

00:24:27   Domains are good.

00:24:29   They are good.

00:24:31   I'm letting some go.

00:24:32   Some ones of old jokes on the show.

00:24:34   I'm not going to say which ones, because then some will get up.

00:24:36   [Laughter]

00:24:38   So now it's up to everyone to go and find every single show.

00:24:41   Just try all the URLs we've ever bought on the show.

00:24:44   And then maybe you'll be able to get a great domain of your own.

00:24:48   Maybe.

00:24:49   What is this? Ceramic Apple Watch thing?

00:24:51   I assume, Steven, you found this because it's some kind of, like,

00:24:55   prototype thing so I know that you probably keep all these in your what is

00:25:00   it your Devon think I think it's just looking for a stronger material for its

00:25:05   nest next Apple watch what is strongest material what my Apple watch keeps

00:25:15   breaking yeah I just I brought this up because I think often we talk about like

00:25:22   oh, they're putting the finishing touches on the new Apple Silicon MacBook Pro that

00:25:26   we're going to see in a couple months.

00:25:28   And so what the story is, is that the ceramic Apple Watch Edition, which first came out

00:25:33   in 2016 as a series two, and then it went away and then it came back.

00:25:38   They just kind of sometimes make ceramic Apple Watches is that it dated back to 2014.

00:25:45   So sort of the original version of the Apple Watch, there was a ceramic version floating

00:25:51   around as a prototype. And so yeah, it's just kind of cool to see prototype hardware anyways.

00:25:58   And if you look at the back of it, this is called 88XX Bane. That is some text on the

00:26:06   back of it. I don't know what that means.

00:26:07   "Buy the Apple Watch."

00:26:09   Like the Batman?

00:26:10   Yeah, that's what I'm doing. "The Apple Watch buys you..." I don't know.

00:26:14   Oh, there's also some Lorem Ipsum text.

00:26:16   Is there?

00:26:17   Yeah, it's Lorem Ipsum.

00:26:18   That's incredible. Laura Mipsum Dolo. Iam Grazie. That's incredible. Why would they

00:26:29   not know what was... That's so weird to Laura Mipsum it.

00:26:34   I love it. I love it. They're using Laura Mipsum in the back of a prototype of an Apple

00:26:38   Watch. That's perfect. Why Bain?

00:26:40   Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, Bain, I don't understand.

00:26:45   You can also go to 512pixels.net/calendar now.

00:26:48   I fixed that.

00:26:49   Okay.

00:26:50   Applehardwaycalendar.com is a better URL.

00:26:52   So this is the Bain Watch.

00:26:53   Yeah.

00:26:54   It's pretty awesome.

00:26:55   Have you seen the app on the Bain Watch, GrapeCal?

00:26:59   Which is something that I want.

00:27:01   Like what's a grape cal?

00:27:02   Like if you work in a vineyard, you have a grape cal?

00:27:06   Like with a schedule?

00:27:07   Like what's a grape cal?

00:27:09   Grape cal.

00:27:11   It's grape calculating.

00:27:13   like the giant battery indicator at the top. I told you how much of a problem that was.

00:27:18   50%. No, 64%. What is the 52? I'm not sure. That's how many grapes they've calculated.

00:27:25   I don't know. The UI's a mess. I also like how destroyed it is,

00:27:30   too, right? Like it's absolutely ruined, this thing. I'm fascinated by this entire niche,

00:27:38   like this subculture of people amassing this Apple prototypes. I believe one of the most popular

00:27:46   people that do this is an Italian person, and they have this incredible collection of Apple

00:27:53   prototypes. I'm sure someone will find the Twitter account I'm thinking of, and they post pictures of

00:28:00   all kinds of Apple prototypes, including like minor things like cables that were never released, or

00:28:06   USB adapters or colors that were never shipped. How do people get these things? I don't know,

00:28:13   I don't know. I think there's like an aftermarket, they must come from China, right, where they

00:28:18   actually get produced as, what's the proper terminology, EVT devices, like the engineering

00:28:26   testing prototypes? It would surprise me if prototypes weren't made at Apple Park. Maybe

00:28:33   Maybe they are now.

00:28:34   Right.

00:28:35   Maybe.

00:28:36   I mean, I follow several of these accounts, including this one that shared this as donglebookpro

00:28:40   on Twitter.

00:28:43   You know, a lot of it is older stuff, but I'm sure at some point you've got to do it

00:28:47   in the manufacturing plant to make sure the machines are all ready to go.

00:28:52   I don't know.

00:28:53   It is very fascinating to me.

00:28:56   But this is, I mean, this does not look like that kind of prototype, right?

00:29:02   I know what you're talking about, like at a certain point you have to make sure the

00:29:05   machines that we think that can make these things can actually make these things, but

00:29:08   at that point they would surely have a lot of this stuff nailed down, right?

00:29:12   Like what would be printed?

00:29:13   Because plus, part of the prototype, you need to make sure that the print's gonna look right,

00:29:17   you know, like what you can put on the back.

00:29:18   It is kind of fascinating, like the little logos that are on the side of it, like there's

00:29:22   that little fox followed by a bunch of X's.

00:29:25   Really?

00:29:26   Uh, we have some real time follow up from friend of the show, Steve Trottonsmith.

00:29:32   Grapecal is a touch screen calibration tool.

00:29:36   Applications seemingly used to calibrate the touch screen of a device.

00:29:40   It is known to have consistently appeared on a vast majority of prototypes to these

00:29:44   days with various different versions.

00:29:46   However, the icon has stayed the same throughout the different firmwares and devices it's

00:29:51   been on.

00:29:52   Superb.

00:29:53   A good follow up.

00:29:54   I think if I'm remembering rightly, like maybe a lot of Apple's stuff is named after

00:29:58   wine.

00:30:00   So maybe this is related to that?

00:30:03   I don't know.

00:30:04   Yeah, I think they used that for Mac OS X releases.

00:30:06   There's been a lot of wine named.

00:30:09   This donglebook pro account has my favorite all-time Apple hardware rumor, and they have

00:30:15   a prototype of it.

00:30:16   The rumor was that there was going to be a Mac Mini with an iPod dock in the top of it.

00:30:23   Ooh!

00:30:24   Well, wait, I kind of want it.

00:30:27   This is supposedly one of those things, there's a first-gen iPod Nano.

00:30:31   Steven, this is the Mac Mini dock.

00:30:32   This is a Mac Mini dock.

00:30:35   Yes, that's right.

00:30:37   So here's the question.

00:30:38   You remember back in the iPod days, you would get dock inserts because the iPods would change

00:30:43   thickness and shape and stuff?

00:30:46   What happens if you have an iPod Nano and you have a Mac Mini and they fit together,

00:30:50   and then for Christmas you get an iPod photo?

00:30:52   Do you have to replace your computer?

00:30:53   Do you remember they used to ship all of those adapters?

00:30:56   Do you remember those?

00:30:58   Yeah, but this prototype is like custom size to the Nano.

00:31:02   Yeah, but they would make adapters that go the other way.

00:31:06   So you get like an adapter that fits the Nano and then it goes bigger and you can put your

00:31:11   big iPod in it.

00:31:12   You know that that style Mac Mini, if you look at this picture, the plastic top and

00:31:16   the aluminum sides all come off as one piece.

00:31:18   I actually use one of these in my office to hold my keys and wallet and stuff.

00:31:22   So maybe instead of like a little iPod dock adapter, you get a whole top of the Mac Mini

00:31:28   and you just replace the top of your computer.

00:31:30   That has reminded me that Apple used to put so much stuff in the boxes, like of iPods

00:31:35   especially, right?

00:31:36   Like you get an iPod and it would come with like, here's your remote that you can plug

00:31:41   in, right, if you want to.

00:31:42   And here's the 20 adapters that you might need to try and...

00:31:45   Like you used to get loads of stuff, because the boxes used to be huge as well, right?

00:31:50   even like the iPod nano box if I remember right there's like these big

00:31:53   cubes and have two sides right and you'd get all the stuff in one side and then

00:31:58   man it was so good it was a good times I will say this ceramic Apple watch it has

00:32:03   reminded me like that they've done them every two years so two four and six came

00:32:09   with ceramic one three five and seven there was no ceramic one three one three

00:32:15   three and five no you know what I'm saying wait what's what series are we on

00:32:22   now what watch it six all right so it was two and four that had ceramic one

00:32:29   wait is it no your series five a ceramic yeah whatever it is they've done them a

00:32:35   few times really messes like it my point is they skip years right for the

00:32:40   ceramics maybe it's two four and six have ceramics and one three

00:32:47   what is stronger so ceramic is it stronger than titanium stronger yes but

00:32:58   I think more brittle like you could shatter ceramic but you're not gonna

00:33:01   shatter titanium I don't so it's not stronger the end the the cover glass is

00:33:06   the same too. All the nice Apple watches use the the sapphire where the aluminum

00:33:10   watches use the ionic glass. So between ceramic and titanium which one would survive the

00:33:15   waterfall test? Probably titanium. Probably titanium. So why didn't you get titanium

00:33:21   Steven? Well that's what my old watch was and that's what I'm wearing again now.

00:33:25   The problem wasn't the case it was the glass. He didn't break the case. Yeah. But

00:33:30   nevertheless... But the glass is also harder. I did have a point before my brain leaked out of my

00:33:34   years which I love my white ceramic Apple watch and I really hope that the

00:33:41   next Apple watch has a ceramic option I think I've always thought that the

00:33:45   ceramic Apple watches were the best looking ones like from my personal taste

00:33:49   and I hope that they have another one next time I've actually also been

00:33:53   wearing my Apple watch for like the last week and a half because I'm on a bit of

00:33:57   a health and fitness kick at the moment and it really just is so good at that

00:34:02   like I you know I know this is obviously one of the biggest selling points for

00:34:06   these things it's so good at that kind of stuff so I've been wearing it okay I

00:34:12   have I have come up with the list of ceramic Apple watches. Thank you. Okay first

00:34:17   generation did not have one they did have gold had that going for it series

00:34:24   Series 1 was just aluminum.

00:34:28   Series 2 brought white ceramic, so that was the first one.

00:34:33   Series 3 also had white ceramic or gray ceramic.

00:34:39   Remember that one?

00:34:40   Yeah.

00:34:41   The gray ceramic?

00:34:42   No.

00:34:43   No.

00:34:44   What was it?

00:34:45   It was like shiny gray.

00:34:46   I don't know.

00:34:47   I never saw...

00:34:48   I mean, I've seen a white ceramic in person.

00:34:49   I've never seen the gray ceramic ever.

00:34:52   Series 4, no ceramic.

00:34:56   Series 5, white ceramic, but not gray.

00:34:59   And then series 6, the current one, no ceramic whatsoever, but it also, um, but it carries

00:35:07   on the titanium and space black, or, and the space black titanium.

00:35:13   So they just kind of mess around at the top of the line.

00:35:16   And sometimes there's ceramic and sometimes there's not.

00:35:18   I hope that does come back, but also really hope they keep the titanium because I really

00:35:22   like the look of it. I feel like grey ceramic is stronger than white ceramic. Just visually or

00:35:27   structurally? Structurally, that's my theory. I know nothing about science but that's what I can tell.

00:35:33   I know nothing about minerals. Are the titanium ones edition? I think I'm wearing mine, let's see.

00:35:42   Apple watch series 5 titanium ceramic case sapphire crystal. It doesn't say it on the back but

00:35:49   Yes, they are on the website. In the Apple Watch Edition now it's just the titanium ones.

00:35:55   I have it on a Nike sport band so it stays humble.

00:35:58   Right. What I love about the one that I have is the white sport band that mine shipped with has

00:36:07   a ceramic pin, like a white ceramic pin instead of the aluminium. I am titanium. That was a song,

00:36:15   right? It was yeah I don't like that song very much but... No? Why? It's fun. When I was still

00:36:25   working my day job like back in the bad day job before the marketing day job we're talking like

00:36:30   in the bank branches day job the place that I liked the least of all of the places that I'd

00:36:37   worked at all the branches I'd worked at they used to keep a like the radio station on there

00:36:43   it was like a not great radio station that I'm pretty sure only had like 25

00:36:46   songs that it played and that song used to play multiple times a day there are

00:36:50   many songs like this it's also I think a Starship by Nicki Minaj which I also

00:36:55   have really bad like like it just makes me feel angry when I hear it because it

00:37:00   reminds me of a bad time in my life so titanium and that song by Nicki Minaj I

00:37:04   just have very bad reactions to them anyway let's move on

00:37:08   Nothing to lose. Fire away. Yeah, okay.

00:37:12   This episode of Connected is brought to you by TextExpander from our friends over at Smile.

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00:38:48   Federico, how is the review going?

00:38:51   It's going really well.

00:38:54   It's July, so let's say July 7th and I'm almost halfway through.

00:39:01   Which is...

00:39:02   Can I, we just, one that's fantastic, I want to just pause you there just to, like just

00:39:07   to really drink in that moment because I remember last year when we asked that question, your

00:39:12   mood was very different.

00:39:15   So I'm very happy for you.

00:39:17   Yes, yes, it's, I feel very good about it.

00:39:20   I feel very good about writing in general this year.

00:39:24   I mentioned this before, like, I feel like this huge weight has been lifted off my brain

00:39:30   in general, and I just feel very inspired to work and write and do all kinds of work

00:39:37   at the moment.

00:39:38   But for the review specifically, there's a couple of things that contribute to me feeling

00:39:43   good about this right now.

00:39:46   The style.

00:39:47   So we talked about this before.

00:39:51   The overall style of the review is going to be a lot different from previous years.

00:39:56   I see it as being able to learn from my experiences in the past few years, take what worked, get

00:40:07   rid of the stuff that I don't want to do anymore, and the kind of things in the review that

00:40:14   I feel like readers have not really been responding to.

00:40:17   So the overall style is a lot lighter, there's less philosophical, sort of this meta-review-type

00:40:28   discussion throughout the entire story.

00:40:32   To give you a practical example, one of the many things that I used to do in previous

00:40:36   years was, each chapter would have its own mini-conclusion, right?

00:40:42   each chapter would have its own intro and its own conclusion where I would try

00:40:48   to find all of these high-level concepts that belong to that chapter. And

00:40:55   that caused me a lot of trouble because I needed to develop all these thoughts,

00:40:59   sort of this, like, "Oh, what does it mean? What could it be like?" All of these

00:41:07   structures on top of the feature itself, and then when I reached the actual

00:41:12   conclusion of the review, I would have to pull those threads in again and

00:41:17   repeat myself, essentially, but finding another way to do so. I got rid of all of that.

00:41:24   I cut all of that. So each chapter, it's gonna have a mini intro,

00:41:29   but it doesn't have this sort of philosophical conclusion anymore. I'm

00:41:35   going straight to the point I'm talking about features and I'm talking about my

00:41:39   opinions of them, how I'm using things, but more concise and more directly about

00:41:45   the feature itself. I can imagine that that makes it... will make it... obviously I

00:41:49   can't imagine you're there, but will make it easier to write the actual

00:41:53   conclusion because you won't feel like you're repeating yourself, or that

00:41:58   you wouldn't, if you say, wouldn't have had to have forced it earlier on.

00:42:02   I bet you're really gonna feel that as you reach towards the end.

00:42:06   I think so. I think so. And just in general, it's like this different mood that I have right now,

00:42:13   which in previous years I used to overthink a lot, and I used to second-guess myself a lot

00:42:20   when I was writing the review. Sort of like, "Oh, I'm writing this official document. It needs to be

00:42:26   perfect. It needs to be the ultimate thing that I've ever done. Sort of like,

00:42:31   "I'm never gonna publish another thing again. My life depends on this story." I'm

00:42:35   not doing that anymore. I'm just writing what's on my mind, and I have a lot of

00:42:39   notes, right? I have a lot of research done. I don't mean to say that I'm gonna

00:42:43   have fewer details in the review. In fact, it's quite the opposite. But I'm going

00:42:49   straight to the point, and I'm going straight to talking about the features

00:42:52   and my opinion of them, and I'm not scared to just say "Here's what I think,"

00:42:57   without having to justify myself with these philosophical thoughts.

00:43:01   I'm just gonna say "I like this for this and this reason, I don't like this because..."

00:43:06   And also, what I'm doing is I'm trying to optimize for people and what they want

00:43:13   to see from these articles. So one of the things that I shared with you guys today,

00:43:17   I am going to rebalance my style of using footnotes in my review. It used to

00:43:31   be that I would hide all of these interesting details, like these hidden

00:43:35   features, these tips and tricks, right? In footnotes within the story. And over the

00:43:43   years I noticed, you know, I put a lot of thought and care into these footnotes

00:43:48   and people don't notice them. People don't find these details that I'm

00:43:52   referring to. And so this year, every chapter is gonna have, right before the

00:43:59   end, a mini section called "The Details," where I'm just listing all of the hidden

00:44:05   features up front with screenshots, and I'm just gonna say, "Here's the features

00:44:10   you might miss for shortcuts or focus or whatever.

00:44:16   And I'm just going to put that right there on the page

00:44:19   without having to use footnotes.

00:44:21   That will be a really helpful resource, I think,

00:44:23   for checking stuff out later on. That's really good.

00:44:26   I think so, and also because it's going to be linkable,

00:44:29   so you can link directly to that mini section.

00:44:32   And lastly, I think what's also helping me right now

00:44:36   is the different setup that I have,

00:44:38   so the different workflow that I have.

00:44:40   We talked about Obsidian before, and I'm gonna say a few things about that in a few minutes, but

00:44:46   one thing that I have not done this year, and for context I need to say like a disclaimer,

00:44:52   Sylvia was right, she's been telling me to do this for the past few years, and I finally listened to

00:44:58   her and she had a really good point here. Now this may come as a shock, I did not make a mind map

00:45:08   of the review this year. So my entire setup this year is based on notes and Obsidian.

00:45:17   I have two different kinds of notes, I would say. The things that I personally discover,

00:45:24   thoughts that I have, features that I come across, opinions, all kinds of things I save in Obsidian,

00:45:33   and then I organize in each chapter. I just move text around and I save these things in a chapter

00:45:40   at the bottom of the page, because I'm a sort of a "note at the bottom of the page" person,

00:45:44   so that when I start working on a chapter it's basically already like an outline waiting for me.

00:45:50   And also I have notes from WWDC sessions, and those notes I have one note for each session,

00:46:01   And each session is linked to the--

00:46:04   it's called-- there's like a line of text that says

00:46:07   Related Review Chapter.

00:46:09   And there's a link to that chapter.

00:46:11   So that when I open the chapter that I'm working on-- like,

00:46:13   for example, yesterday, I was working on the Design Chapter.

00:46:17   And when I opened that in Obsidian, all I need to do is

00:46:19   show the backlinks sidebar.

00:46:22   And in the sidebar, I see all of the session notes that

00:46:25   link to the Design Chapter, so that I have a reference right

00:46:28   there for all the design-related features that I want to cover. And by doing this, I

00:46:35   find that I keep all these notes in a much better context because of the links that,

00:46:42   you know, they point me to the specific chapter of the review. But also, I did not waste a

00:46:48   week essentially cutting and pasting my notes from a note-taking app into the mind map,

00:46:58   was essentially doing the work twice, just to give it this visual structure that I thought

00:47:03   was essential for me, and turns out it's not. I can just work with notes, and I can just

00:47:09   work with Obsidian thanks to backlinks, which I, you know, maybe I could have done this

00:47:15   before, maybe not though, because Obsidian was not around. I simplified my workflow for

00:47:21   this. And obviously what's also helping me right now is the plugin system, like the custom plugins

00:47:29   that Finn Borges made for me, especially two of them. The first one is the custom Markdown compile

00:47:39   plugin that we have. And now, again, we're probably going to share this eventually. Right now this is

00:47:46   very specific to MacStories and very specific to me. But it's a plugin that gives me a single

00:47:51   command that takes my table of contents and exports a markdown version of it, that does

00:47:57   a lot of max stories-specific things. Like, for example, it puts in page breaks between each chapter

00:48:04   automatically. It uses the right indentation for section headers. All that kind of stuff, it does

00:48:11   it for me automatically. So it also means it's less error-prone, because I'm not doing

00:48:16   that stuff manually. And the second plugin, which we talked about before, is the Todoist plugin,

00:48:22   so that I'm able to leave little tasks for me inside the review, and those are lines of text,

00:48:30   basically, but they are linked to Todoist, and in Todoist they are linked to Obsidian, so that I can

00:48:37   tap a link and it takes me to my text editor, and in my text editor I can tap a link and it takes me

00:48:42   me to Todoist. And that's really helping me structure these tasks so that, for example,

00:48:49   I have writing tasks, like "This thing is not finished. I'm going to make a task for

00:48:54   myself that I need to write about it eventually." Or "This is a bug, and so I have these tasks

00:49:00   that have a specific issues tag, and those go into issues section in Todoist." And I'm

00:49:07   doing the same for screenshots and videos that I wanted to. So this entire setup, I

00:49:13   feel like it's a lot more customized for me, and I was also able to remove the

00:49:20   overhead of the mind map and cutting and pasting those notes. It was like a bunch

00:49:26   of extra work that I was doing, and now instead what I'm doing is just I'm gonna

00:49:31   sit down and write, and it's going really well. And I'm gonna be done with

00:49:36   chapter four of nine tomorrow which means tomorrow I start working on chapter five and uh and I'm

00:49:44   halfway done with it yeah that's awesome that is fantastic I'm curious what was Sylvia's insight

00:49:52   into no mind map because obviously you thought they were important you've been doing them for

00:49:56   years and it seemed like a huge part of the process so I'm curious to know what her insight

00:50:02   was that you couldn't say, and then why she was right.

00:50:08   She's been telling me ever since we were in high school that, so for context that would

00:50:13   mean for 14 years, that all those mind maps that I was doing, including when I was at

00:50:20   school, were useless because I was just making something visually pretty that was nice to

00:50:28   look at, but had no real practical application. And I told her, "No, no, no, these are essential

00:50:34   for me because this is how my brain likes to look at these things." And she was like,

00:50:39   "I think you're just doing the work twice, because if you already have some notes, why

00:50:44   do you feel like you need to turn those notes into another type of notes?" And I was like,

00:50:51   "No, you don't understand. These are different because they are on a mind map." And she had

00:50:57   point which makes me realize how much time have I wasted? I don't want to think about that.

00:51:01   So she was right. Obsidian did not exist before, so that's my excuse for now.

00:51:08   Because I've always felt for you that the the visual part helped you at least with some structure,

00:51:13   but I guess now Obsidian just does it automatically, right? Because you can see that

00:51:20   kind of structured view out of everything. Yeah, and what's really helpful is really

00:51:26   being able to create these relationships between the notes, so the research, and the actual chapter.

00:51:35   So that when I'm in the chapter, I see, "Oh, I actually left a note in these research notes that I had

00:51:45   about this particular feature." So for example, in a note for a session from WWDC,

00:51:52   it links to the design chapter. But toward the bottom of the note, there's a feature,

00:51:56   and in that line of text I wrote "This belongs to the iPadOS chapter." And that iPadOS word

00:52:04   is a link to my actual iPadOS chapter of the review. So I can have all these links going back

00:52:11   and forth between my research and my writing, and so I don't need to see the map visually as a tree,

00:52:20   of all these notes and thoughts, everything lives together in my text editor, which basically does double the work as holding the research material, but also being the place where I write.

00:52:33   Okay, that seems like it makes a lot of sense.

00:52:35   Yeah, I for one have never been a big mind mapper, and I know a lot of people are, but really for the reason that Sylvia had is that for me it always felt like just another layer of work,

00:52:48   work and I could do that structuring just in the document as I went or across

00:52:53   multiple documents and then stitch them together so I think she was right on and

00:52:57   I'm glad that it seems to have boosted your efficiency and not slowed you down

00:53:03   right because I guess there was a world where you could have decided not to do

00:53:06   the mind map and then like really struggled with how to put it together

00:53:09   but it sounds like that's not the case at all. Yeah or that there would have

00:53:13   needed to be an adjustment period but you don't need that adjustment period

00:53:17   because it just so happens that the text tool that you use allows you to keep at least some

00:53:21   of the basic structure of what a land map would have been.

00:53:24   Yeah, and it's just really, it's just very fast how you can open multiple panes for different

00:53:30   notes, how you can just hit command O and you jump to another file. It's just very,

00:53:36   like this is the kind of app that was made for this kind of writing task, this kind of

00:53:41   writing project, right? You have these massive essays that you're putting together and you

00:53:46   have research split across multiple notes and you want to create links and you want

00:53:50   to jump between them and you want to open multiple documents at the same time, it's

00:53:55   perfect for that.

00:53:56   Very cool.

00:53:57   Yeah, we'll see how it goes in the second half, but I'm optimistic so far.

00:54:02   Have you left the hard chapters?

00:54:05   Actually, design, like I was really concerned with the design one because that's the difficult

00:54:11   one for me.

00:54:12   iPad shortcuts and apps, those are the easy ones.

00:54:16   So I'm shooting for being done, if possible, by the end of July, which would be incredible.

00:54:24   Like being done in two months, that would be fantastic.

00:54:29   So we'll see.

00:54:32   Just to clarify though, done is not done, right?

00:54:35   Because stuff still changes.

00:54:37   Editing, well, sure, sure.

00:54:40   But the bulk of stuff is taken care of by that point.

00:54:44   Yeah, okay. Yeah, very cool. Let's take our last break and then there's a

00:54:49   Mystery Federico topic we have to deal with it's a mystery for you

00:54:53   I won't know but I woke up this morning and the first thing I saw and I message was

00:54:58   Myke

00:55:01   Having a surprise reaction after you wrote I put some stuff in the notes for y'all I was like, oh this is gonna be good

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00:57:27   Our thanks to Hello for their support of the show and Real AFM. I'm just gonna

00:57:33   rip the band-aid off, I think. I'm back on Apple Music. Now the context. Okay. So I

00:57:42   said this months ago at the beginning of this experiment with Spotify, I am gonna

00:57:47   try and use Spotify for a year, but, and we can go back and find where I actually

00:57:54   say this, I purchased credit for a Spotify Premium account until June, so for six months.

00:58:01   And then at the six-month mark, I can re-value it, if I want to continue this experiment,

00:58:05   or if I want to go back to Apple Music. And my Premium subscription was up as of a few

00:58:12   weeks ago, and I made the decision to return to Apple Music.

00:58:16   Now, there's a few things I want to say, and I should say up front, I'm really happy I

00:58:22   I did this, because this whole experiment, it gave me a lot more knowledge about where

00:58:27   Spotify is today, what it does well, what it doesn't do so well, and how it compares

00:58:33   to Apple Music. So, I would say there were four key factors that brought me back to Apple

00:58:41   Music. The most important one, by far, is the real-time lyrics, being able to follow

00:58:46   along to the lyrics of a song when I'm listening. Second one is the recent

00:58:52   launch of Lossless Playback. Now, this is important for me because I used to...

00:58:57   I mentioned this before, I used to have like a secondary streaming service

00:59:02   where I use a DAC with my phone and my wired headphones to evaluate Lossless

00:59:09   albums before I purchased them for my proper offline music library. With Apple

00:59:16   music, I can just do it all in one service. It can be my casual service for

00:59:20   when I'm listening to music using AirPods or my iPhone speakers, whatever,

00:59:25   and it can also be my lossless service when I want to plug in an external USB

00:59:29   DAC and listen via my wired headphones. Third reason, being able to share songs

00:59:36   with other Apple music users, especially I would say Sylvia and you guys and John

00:59:42   as well. We share a lot of music links and I was the odd one out using

00:59:48   Spotify, so I would say peer pressure maybe was also a contributing factor.

00:59:53   Reverse peer pressure? No one was... you felt bad about sending the links rather

00:59:59   than people saying what are you sending those links for? And the fourth factor is

01:00:02   the integration with third-party apps on iOS and shortcuts. There's all kinds of

01:00:10   utilities that are Apple Music only on iOS, such as the excellent Music Smart, for example, which is

01:00:17   this extension that you can use in Apple Music to view the credits, like in-depth credits for each

01:00:24   song. Like who's the mixing engineer, who's playing the, you know, who's playing the cello in the

01:00:32   background, like that kind of stuff that I really care about. And obviously, shortcuts, right?

01:00:37   Shortcuts is deeply integrated with music. My own MusicBot shortcut is Apple Music only,

01:00:43   because it's not possible to make that kind of shortcut on iOS and iPadOS for Spotify.

01:00:47   Now, these were the four, I would say, major factors that made me re-evaluate Apple Music,

01:00:54   and after six months, I would say I was especially missing real-time lyrics, right? I'm a lyrics

01:01:02   person. I like to know what I'm listening to, I like to read lyrics, I like to

01:01:06   understand the songs. Spotify has promised real-time lyrics for a long

01:01:11   time, just like they promised Spotify HiFi, their lossless tier coming at some

01:01:16   point, but it's been a few months and neither of those features have launched

01:01:20   yet, and once again I needed to make a decision, because my six months were up.

01:01:25   Now, I do miss Spotify. There's a few things that I want to call out about

01:01:30   Spotify. I think Spotify does a much better job than Apple Music at making it easy for you to

01:01:37   start listening to something with very little friction in the homepage of the Spotify app.

01:01:44   You have this incredible mix of recent activity, suggestions, new releases. I prefer the way that

01:01:53   it's laid out on screen. I think it takes better advantage of a large iPhone's display,

01:01:59   And I love how you can see this timeline of all the things you've recently played over the past three months.

01:02:06   Like, literally, every single song or EP or album or playlist you've listened to.

01:02:11   It's incredibly well done.

01:02:13   I also miss Spotify's search.

01:02:16   I don't know why, I don't know how, but Spotify's search is so much faster than Apple Music, it's kind of ridiculous.

01:02:22   Like, as you type, you get results.

01:02:24   In Apple Music, sometimes you get results as you type, but not all the time.

01:02:28   Most of the time you gotta press search.

01:02:30   It just, it feels faster in Spotify.

01:02:33   And once again, that reduces the friction, right?

01:02:36   You can just search and click listen and you're done.

01:02:40   And then I would say Spotify,

01:02:42   because of their approach to data collection

01:02:46   or the algorithms that they have, whatever it is,

01:02:50   but the suggestions from Spotify,

01:02:52   the intelligent recommendations,

01:02:55   are so much more accurate and timely than Apple Music. Sometimes it's kind of eerie,

01:03:01   actually. Like, I would open Music Harbor, right, which is an excellent utility to track

01:03:08   new music releases. And I would see, oh, there's a new song from this artist. And then I would

01:03:12   open Spotify. And that song was already on the front page for me. It's like, yeah, well,

01:03:17   Spotify, you do know me. And it was kind of incredible. And this happened every single

01:03:21   Friday when new music comes out. And also, both Spotify and Apple Music now have a "Made

01:03:28   for You" hub. In Apple Music, it's a page that collects the four, five playlists that Apple

01:03:39   Music makes for you, like the Favorites mix, the New Music mix, all that kind of stuff.

01:03:45   In Spotify, it's this entire gallery of Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and these daily mixes

01:03:54   that are just incredible.

01:03:55   They have mixes for specific decades that you can listen to.

01:03:59   They have artist mixes.

01:04:01   They have mixes based on your current mood.

01:04:06   There's all kinds of intelligent suggestions there that, once again, they are personalized

01:04:11   for me, and they just cut the friction.

01:04:14   Like you just open, you want to listen to something, and you're done.

01:04:17   It's right there.

01:04:18   So I feel like Apple Music, in terms of intelligence, is way beyond Spotify at the moment, especially

01:04:24   for new releases.

01:04:26   So this is the sort of the, I would say, the high-level overview between the two.

01:04:31   Obviously, the big advantage of Apple Music, of the Music app, is that it's native to Apple

01:04:37   platforms.

01:04:39   And so you get those nice features, like the Siri integration is nicer, ShortCast integration

01:04:44   is great. It uses native UI elements, right? So that when I'm using Apple Music and I long

01:04:50   press, I get the same context menu that I get in files or Safari, which in iPadOS 15,

01:04:59   it can also be navigated with a keyboard. So it's got excellent keyboard integration.

01:05:03   It uses a native sidebar. So all this native UI, like it feels more native to the platform,

01:05:09   Which is not a surprise, it's made by Apple.

01:05:11   Spatial audio, I want to mention.

01:05:14   I tried to give spatial audio a good try.

01:05:18   As of a few days ago, I permanently disabled spatial audio in settings.

01:05:24   Purest.

01:05:25   I can, yeah.

01:05:27   I cannot live with the knowledge that what I'm listening to is an altered version of

01:05:35   the original authentic song.

01:05:38   And man, stuff sounds weird, alright?

01:05:42   It just sounds different and muffled, and I don't care about it.

01:05:48   Too many songs are weird.

01:05:50   It makes me...

01:05:51   I read an interview recently, I think it was somewhere on Chorus FM, really excellent music

01:05:57   website, saying how...

01:05:59   Oh yeah, Jason from Chorus FM interviewed...

01:06:03   What's his name?

01:06:06   the former singer of Yellowcard. And Jason asked about—what's his name?—William

01:06:12   Ryan Key, I think. So Jason asked, "Are you aware that some of the Yellowcard songs are

01:06:18   in special audio on Apple Music?" And he said, "Yeah, we had no idea about that, because

01:06:23   we didn't mix those songs." And the idea that the artist is not aware of stuff being

01:06:33   done, like this magical software being sprinkled on top of their songs,

01:06:38   it makes me uncomfortable. I just want to listen to the original song

01:06:41   as the artist knows it, as the artist intended

01:06:45   the song to sound like. So Special Audio,

01:06:49   I feel like right now it's a gimmick and I disabled the feature.

01:06:52   Once again, I'm super happy I did this.

01:06:56   I feel like I have a much better understanding of Spotify

01:06:59   and the different places that Spotify and Apple Music are at at the moment,

01:07:04   I miss Spotify.

01:07:06   And if they add lyrics and a high resolution tier for lossless playback,

01:07:14   I may reconsider.

01:07:16   But I feel like despite the things that I like about Spotify,

01:07:21   the features that I got from Apple Music right now are more important.

01:07:26   So that's why I'm using Apple Music again.

01:07:29   Also, it's good for me because I'm not paying

01:07:31   for two music streaming services anymore.

01:07:34   Actually, I'm not paying for three music streaming services

01:07:37   anymore because I was using Apple Music, Spotify,

01:07:39   and Amazon.

01:07:40   Now it's down to just one.

01:07:43   - I kind of assumed this was gonna happen

01:07:45   when the lossless stuff showed up in Apple Music.

01:07:48   So I'm glad it meets your high standards.

01:07:50   - The music app could be a lot better.

01:07:54   But, yeah, I'm curious to see... I was kind of hoping to get a redesign of the ListenNow

01:08:01   page in the Music app this year. I fundamentally dislike that design. I wrote about this last

01:08:08   year. Those giant tiles at the top of the page, I really don't like them, and I miss

01:08:17   the design and the speed of the Spotify homepage and Spotify search, but I'm also really happy

01:08:24   that now I'm using a single service that gives me both the casual sort of "I'm wearing my

01:08:30   AirPods Pro and I just want to listen to something" but also gives me the "oh, I can plug in my

01:08:35   DAC and I can listen to lossless music experience at the same time."

01:08:39   What if they had redesigned that with tabs and the background color picked up a color

01:08:44   from the album you were listening to?

01:08:46   doesn't do that. Oh that's a... But it could. It's a Safari joke. It's a joke. It's a joke.

01:08:54   Alright, yeah, no, please, please don't do that. Oh my god, why did you mention that?

01:09:00   So Apple music, yay. Alright, anything else guys? I don't think so. No, I don't think so

01:09:08   either. If you want to find links to stuff we spoke about, head on over to the

01:09:12   website relay.fm/connected/353. While you're there you can get in touch via

01:09:20   email with feedback or follow up. When you're on the relay website check out

01:09:24   Focused, it's another podcast here on the network. If you're struggling with focus

01:09:29   you're not alone. With all the distractions we have it seems like a

01:09:32   superpower but David and Myke could show you how to do it. Go to relay.fm/focused

01:09:37   or search for Focused wherever you get your podcasts.

01:09:42   You can find all of us online.

01:09:45   You can find Federico on Twitter, Viti, V-I-T-I-C-C-I.

01:09:50   He's the editor-in-chief of MacStories.net.

01:09:54   You can find Myke online as well, I-M-Y-K-E, and Myke builds keyboards on a lot of Fridays

01:10:00   over at Myke.live.

01:10:02   You're live this Friday, right?

01:10:04   Yep, I sure am. Not sure what I'm going to be doing yet, but it will be a fun time,

01:10:09   have buy all. You can find me on Twitter as ismh in my writing over at 512pixels.net.

01:10:15   I'd like to thank our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Smile, and Hello.

01:10:22   And until next time, gentlemen, say goodbye. Adios,

01:10:25   Arrivederci!

01:10:26   Cheerio!