Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:08 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 189 for April 16, 2018.

00:00:16 ◼   ► I am Jason Snell, and I am not usually the person who reads this part, but Myke Hurley is on assignment.

00:00:22 ◼   ► He's in the United States for the Atlanta Pen Show, and you can check out that special live episode of The Pen Addict.

00:00:28 ◼   ► This episode, by the way, brought to you by FreshBooks, Pingdom, and Peacalc.

00:00:32 ◼   ► And my special co-host for this episode, returning triumphantly, is Mr. Merlin Mann.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Hi, Merlin.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Hey, buddy. How's it going? Thanks for having me on.

00:00:41 ◼   ► It's pretty good. Pretty good. Thanks for joining me. I really appreciate you coming on my podcast,

00:00:46 ◼   ► because Myke abandoned me.

00:00:47 ◼   ► Having a pretty busy day today?

00:00:49 ◼   ► Nah.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, listen, nobody cares about any of that. It's important that we get to Snell Talk.

00:00:53 ◼   ► Oh, yes.

00:00:54 ◼   ► We have a question this week for Snell Talk. This is from listener Meher.

00:00:57 ◼   ► Listen to me here, we'd like to ask Jason, how's the weather today?

00:01:01 ◼   ► Good question, excellent question. I like this a lot. I'm so glad Myke's not here.

00:01:05 ◼   ► I picked this one up myself.

00:01:07 ◼   ► So it was a really nice sunny day, a really nice spring day yesterday.

00:01:14 ◼   ► Today, clouds are rolling in, wind's picking up, it's gonna rain later.

00:01:19 ◼   ► For you too, because we share the weather, you and I.

00:01:22 ◼   ► Well, thank you to listen to me here. This is a trick question because it also gives me the chance to say thank you

00:01:28 ◼   ► To Jason who gave me much help in picking out. I've been envious of your weather setup for a long time

00:01:35 ◼   ► Well, not your weather that you get but envious of your weather monitoring panopticon for a long time and you're right

00:01:41 ◼   ► Robot that floats around in my backyard measuring wet. I'm very wet again and

00:01:48 ◼   ► So you were very instrumental and it was actually a challenge on another show I do to do something about the weather and

00:01:53 ◼   ► And you really were very helpful and now I have a weather station and I can without looking outside

00:02:00 ◼   ► I can find out like how foggy it is. It's really nice. Yeah, it's cool. I like it, too

00:02:04 ◼   ► I'm always fascinated by the weather and I keep remembering

00:02:07 ◼   ► It's gonna be a sad day when my weather station finally dies

00:02:10 ◼   ► But like I installed it when my son it was my during my paternity leave when my son was born and you know

00:02:15 ◼   ► he's about to go into high school. So that thing's been out there a long time and it still works,

00:02:20 ◼   ► which is pretty great. And I'm glad, so welcome to the world of the weather stations. You got a,

00:02:29 ◼   ► it's come a long way since 2004. - It really has, the prices have come down. And I mean,

00:02:37 ◼   ► the thing that I always want to say to people, this is why I sought you out as my rabbi,

00:02:41 ◼   ► is that you do have to be careful, read very carefully.

00:02:44 ◼   ► And in my case, I had two bullets

00:02:45 ◼   ► that really I needed to hit.

00:02:47 ◼   ► One of them was that a lot of them that you get,

00:02:50 ◼   ► they're really a weather monitor,

00:02:52 ◼   ► where it just goes to an ugly screen in your house.

00:02:55 ◼   ► So A, I wanted one that would be able to connect

00:02:59 ◼   ► to the internet and would be compatible

00:03:02 ◼   ► with the Weather Underground network.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And it wasn't the easiest thing in the world to set up,

00:03:08 ◼   ► but you just set it up once and it goes.

00:03:10 ◼   ► And now I can see my weather from anywhere.

00:03:12 ◼   ► It's the best.

00:03:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, the weather underground is the big thing.

00:03:15 ◼   ► When I got mine, first off,

00:03:19 ◼   ► mine came with a really ugly console, which we still have.

00:03:22 ◼   ► The nice thing about it is that that's got

00:03:24 ◼   ► like a little interface plug that used to go

00:03:27 ◼   ► to your PC parallel port or whatever.

00:03:30 ◼   ► - That used to be the only way.

00:03:31 ◼   ► - Right, and then your PC would run the software.

00:03:33 ◼   ► And one of the nice things that's allowed me

00:03:35 ◼   ► to keep using this 2004 vintage weather station

00:03:38 ◼   ► is that they, that company, still uses that same technology for their console and everything,

00:03:44 ◼   ► and they released, a few years ago, they released an IP module that's basically like an Ethernet

00:03:50 ◼   ► port. And so now that's plugged into the console, and the console receives the data from the weather

00:03:55 ◼   ► station and just sends it down my home network to the internet. And that's great. Like, that solves

00:04:02 ◼   ► so many problems, because back in the day, it was all about just being on the computer. And now,

00:04:06 ◼   ► these lower-cost weather stations, and some of them are just monitors and they'll give you a

00:04:10 ◼   ► little screen that you can look at, but some of them, you know, if you get the ones that are kind

00:04:15 ◼   ► of Wi-Fi enabled or they've got a little smart home base station or something, they'll talk to

00:04:20 ◼   ► the internet and they'll either, you know, work with like software that you can install on your

00:04:25 ◼   ► Mac if you want to do it that way, but most of them will go to a cloud service and a lot of them

00:04:30 ◼   ► will go to Weather Underground, at which point, you know, you're in their little network of

00:04:36 ◼   ► of personal weather stations and they generate a page for your station that sits there and

00:04:40 ◼   ► you don't have to build your own page like I had to do back in the day. They've got a

00:04:45 ◼   ► personal weather station page.

00:04:47 ◼   ► And you're giving back to the community a little bit. It's nice. I mean, you're helping

00:04:50 ◼   ► people to... I mean, one nice thing, I just sent you the very ugly monitor that I bought

00:04:55 ◼   ► for this that I can't believe my wife lets me have in the house. But one thing that's

00:04:59 ◼   ► nice is you get this nice kind of like arsenal of tools like between general weather underground

00:05:05 ◼   ► plus dark sky, plus this, plus I got to say IFTTT.

00:05:10 ◼   ► It's really super handy.

00:05:11 ◼   ► So I can do stuff like say, hey, let

00:05:14 ◼   ► me know if the temperature tonight is going to drop--

00:05:16 ◼   ► my station's going to drop below,

00:05:18 ◼   ► like I think I said arbitrarily, something like 64 degrees.

00:05:21 ◼   ► But tell me if it's going to be cool enough

00:05:22 ◼   ► that I might want to turn the heat on before bed.

00:05:24 ◼   ► You know, and we'll just leave it on all the time.

00:05:26 ◼   ► But I realize this is weather nerd stuff.

00:05:29 ◼   ► But I did want the opportunity to publicly thank you for that.

00:05:32 ◼   ► I'm actually really, really enjoying it.

00:05:34 ◼   ► I'm glad you are, and of course I'm happy to help people with their weather station

00:05:38 ◼   ► needs because I'm apparently that guy.

00:05:40 ◼   ► I should also mention I have a thing called BitBar, which is this open source utility

00:05:45 ◼   ► you can search for.

00:05:46 ◼   ► I think it was designed by a guy who wanted to track Bitcoin prices, but it's actually

00:05:52 ◼   ► brilliant.

00:05:53 ◼   ► What's a little more power here?

00:05:54 ◼   ► And I think he realized that it had wider applications, so he revised it to be a little

00:05:58 ◼   ► more broad.

00:05:59 ◼   ► can I'll put a link in the show notes to it but bit bar is cool because it's it'll

00:06:05 ◼   ► put anything in your menu bar like literally it'll put anything in your menu

00:06:10 ◼   ► bar that you can tell it is a little bit like like like the late belated status

00:06:14 ◼   ► bar or status the piano the panic app that doesn't work that's killing me

00:06:18 ◼   ► right now well that was like pretty this is like it puts it in your Mac menu bar

00:06:23 ◼   ► so it's basically like but you can put anything there so he built he wrote it

00:06:26 ◼   ► for like Bitcoin prices but it's it just uses you can use like command line to

00:06:31 ◼   ► put anything in your menu bar and so I now have my current temperature for my

00:06:37 ◼   ► weather station in my Mac menu bar which is which is cool because it's literally

00:06:41 ◼   ► my weather station software has a I could probably query like the API for

00:06:46 ◼   ► weather underground but my weather station has a file it generates every

00:06:50 ◼   ► two minutes that's literally like just the temperature and all the script does

00:06:54 ◼   ► is say, "Hey, love that file. Put that in the menu bar." And that's all it does. There's

00:06:59 ◼   ► some emoji that pop up for, like, if it's raining or whatever. And it actually has a

00:07:03 ◼   ► little thing in parentheses that's like the temperature diff between now and this time

00:07:07 ◼   ► yesterday, which can be very useful where it's like, "Whoa, it's way colder today."

00:07:11 ◼   ► Like, I like that stuff.

00:07:13 ◼   ► You also market marketed me a little bit here because you put in one simple line of text

00:07:17 ◼   ► and I've already ordered something.

00:07:18 ◼   ► Oh, no.

00:07:19 ◼   ► Oh, my God. I need you so much.

00:07:20 ◼   ► Did you buy a metric time?

00:07:22 ◼   ► maybe. Tell people about this. This is so nerdy and cool. So I have for a long time,

00:07:29 ◼   ► we used to have those, first they were slim devices and then they were Logitech squeeze

00:07:33 ◼   ► boxes, the music players. And that was our before Sonos. That was kind of how we did

00:07:38 ◼   ► digital music in our house. And I love those things. And then Logitech bought them and

00:07:43 ◼   ► ruined them because that's what Logitech does. But I kept one around because it's got a plug-in

00:07:49 ◼   ► for a custom clock and so we had this place in the living room right above the TV that

00:07:54 ◼   ► showed the current time and the current temperature based on the weather station. It was really

00:07:58 ◼   ► cool. And it's gotten to the point now where those things are all kind of dying, but we

00:08:04 ◼   ► still have a couple that work. But I don't use them for music anymore. They're literally

00:08:10 ◼   ► they just sit there turned off with the clock showing because it's something that we use.

00:08:15 ◼   ► and I talked to my wife about it and she's like, "Oh yeah, I look at that all the time."

00:08:19 ◼   ► And I bought a little sensor to stick outside and a couple little plastic things that you

00:08:23 ◼   ► can just look at to see the outside temperature. It's not the same. They don't have the same

00:08:27 ◼   ► application. And it was big, like the text. You could sit on the couch and you could see

00:08:31 ◼   ► the time and the temperature. And then I was up at Twit the other week. Well, this actually,

00:08:36 ◼   ► a few months ago, I was up there doing screensavers with Leo Laporte. And right behind their set

00:08:41 ◼   ► for screensavers, they've got a whole bunch of junk like screens and little gadgets and

00:08:46 ◼   ► stuff and they had this little box that's showing the time and it's these little white

00:08:51 ◼   ► squares in a grid. If you're old enough, if you're as old as we are, you'll remember this.

00:08:56 ◼   ► It looks kind of like the display on the Goodyear blimp. Yeah, that's right because it's a grid.

00:09:00 ◼   ► I used to, I had a model Goodyear blimp when I was a kid and you could color in the things

00:09:06 ◼   ► and slide them in and then turn it on and it would make a little... I totally had that.

00:09:09 ◼   ► you know kids want to run the scoreboard on the side of a blimp.

00:09:12 ◼   ► We were just down in San Jose and we saw the Goodyear blimp. It was just there. It was just there hanging out.

00:09:15 ◼   ► It's very blocky but look at all the stuff that this thing does.

00:09:18 ◼   ► And it's super bright and part of it's capable of being in color.

00:09:21 ◼   ► And it seems to be designed as a desk clock and it's got buttons on it so you can have a bunch of different plugins that show different kinds of data.

00:09:29 ◼   ► And you can have them rotate or you can have an interface.

00:09:31 ◼   ► And I think there's a music player aspect and it'll connect to Bluetooth.

00:09:34 ◼   ► There's a bunch of other stuff that it does.

00:09:36 ◼   ► But I just saw it as a screen, and I was really worried when I was up at Twit that this was

00:09:41 ◼   ► some like Arduino or Raspberry Pi project that involved soldering, because let me tell

00:09:48 ◼   ► you, I'm not interested in projects that involve soldering. That's where I draw the

00:09:52 ◼   ► line. If hot metal, molten metal is involved, I am out. I'm out of there. I can't do

00:09:58 ◼   ► that. So I'm up there a couple weeks ago, and I say to Leo, "What is this thing?"

00:10:04 ◼   ► I finally remembered to ask, because I just had it in the back of my mind, like, "Oh,

00:10:07 ◼   ► I wonder if that is a solution to my problem." And I'm girding myself for the, "Well, there

00:10:13 ◼   ► will be soldering," kind of moment. And he says, "Oh, yeah, it's the thing, it's the

00:10:17 ◼   ► lometric time. It's, yeah, you can just buy it online." He said, "It's a little expensive,

00:10:22 ◼   ► though." And I thought to myself, "Oh, geez, I'm going to go there and I'm going to find

00:10:25 ◼   ► that it's the perfect solution. It's going to cost $700." And it's $200. It's not cheap.

00:10:31 ◼   ► right." But at the same time, I thought about it and I was like, "No, but this is the answer,

00:10:37 ◼   ► literally the answer to this thing. I have Google searched so many different things to

00:10:41 ◼   ► find something that will do what I need. I've looked at so many different things that say

00:10:46 ◼   ► they're connected displays that turned out to be something you put outside of Walmart."

00:10:51 ◼   ► Which is like, "No, no, that's overkill for my living room."

00:10:54 ◼   ► Like one of those Costco open-close signs. Yeah, it's a scoreboard for a baseball park.

00:10:59 ◼   ► That's too much. So I did what you may have just done, which is while I was standing there

00:11:05 ◼   ► prepping the show that we were about to record for Twit, I just bought it. And I had to build

00:11:13 ◼   ► an app, which like literally is just loading again another text file. It's like a little

00:11:19 ◼   ► JSON formatted file on my server that shows the temp and the time. It took me about half

00:11:25 ◼   ► an hour to figure that out. And that's it. The squeeze box got pulled out. The

00:11:29 ◼   ► lometric time is now where it used to be. It's brighter. The display is lower

00:11:33 ◼   ► resolution, but it's so big and bright. It's really easy to read. And all it is

00:11:39 ◼   ► doing is saying like 222, 61 degrees. That's all it's doing. And it

00:11:44 ◼   ► totally does it. So that was a fun little project and also weather-related. So

00:11:50 ◼   ► there you go. It's a fun gadget. If it was not sitting up above my TV, I might

00:11:54 ◼   ► actually play with some of the other plugins and stuff, but for now it's like

00:11:58 ◼   ► that's all I want is I want a really bright display that shows

00:12:02 ◼   ► the time and the current temperature from my own weather station.

00:12:05 ◼   ► I don't know any other product. But you could find out how your Bitcoin's doing probably.

00:12:08 ◼   ► I could. I certainly could. In fact, the Limetric website shows you all sorts

00:12:12 ◼   ► of interesting things you can do with the Limetric time, many of which are completely ludicrous.

00:12:17 ◼   ► I like the one with the big exclamation point that says "Gas leak!"

00:12:21 ◼   ► That's my favorite too. In case you don't notice that there's a gas leak, your clock will say "gas leak" on it.

00:12:28 ◼   ► So that's useful.

00:12:30 ◼   ► So we should probably thank listener Meher very much for the question.

00:12:33 ◼   ► And if people have questions for you, Jason, what do they do?

00:12:36 ◼   ► They go onto the Twitter and they use the hashtag SnellTalk.

00:12:39 ◼   ► Yeah, and it can be about anything, even the weather.

00:12:42 ◼   ► Even the weather.

00:12:43 ◼   ► It's true. We have much more to talk about, actually.

00:12:47 ◼   ► But we have a little bit of follow-up. But I made you blue 20 minutes on weather.

00:12:52 ◼   ► Yep, I love it. It's great. The cat's away, the mice are playing, that's just how it is.

00:12:57 ◼   ► Let's talk about some follow-up first, which is old speakers. We just put this in right before

00:13:02 ◼   ► the show started, old speakers, because I was telling you about this Verge story from

00:13:07 ◼   ► Heim-Gartenberg. That is, it's a funny story, which is my Airplay speakers have become obsolete

00:13:14 ◼   ► because their app hasn't been updated in four years, subhead mistakes were made. And the

00:13:19 ◼   ► idea is basically he's got these AirPlay speakers that are on his Wi-Fi network and he says,

00:13:23 ◼   ► "I can never change my Wi-Fi network's name or password ever again, or my speakers will

00:13:28 ◼   ► stop working because the only way to set their settings is to use an app and the app is 32

00:13:35 ◼   ► bit so it doesn't run anymore." Amazing, right?

00:13:37 ◼   ► It is, and I think this is a problem we're going to start seeing more and more of. I

00:13:41 ◼   ► I mean, I already feel this pain with IoT stuff.

00:13:44 ◼   ► I mean, just coming into the whole internet of things

00:13:46 ◼   ► environment, I mean, it's generous to call it the Wild

00:13:49 ◼   ► West.

00:13:50 ◼   ► When you get into things like-- is it Arduino?

00:13:51 ◼   ► Is that what it's called?

00:13:52 ◼   ► I think so.

00:13:53 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:13:54 ◼   ► Does it involve soldering?

00:13:55 ◼   ► Don't ask me.

00:13:55 ◼   ► No soldering.

00:13:56 ◼   ► No soldering allowed.

00:13:57 ◼   ► Hey, how comfortable are you with Linux?

00:13:59 ◼   ► You get that stuff, you get the Raspberry Pi.

00:14:01 ◼   ► It's the soldering of computers is what Linux is.

00:14:04 ◼   ► Computer equivalent of soldering, yeah.

00:14:06 ◼   ► I mean, I haven't gone that far, but it does kind of frustrate

00:14:09 ◼   ► me a little bit that some stuff, you know,

00:14:11 ◼   ► for various Apple reasons doesn't work with HomeKit.

00:14:15 ◼   ► HomeKit is not on the Mac yet.

00:14:17 ◼   ► There's frustrating things about that.

00:14:18 ◼   ► But there's also just this idea that I

00:14:20 ◼   ► suspect that one reason people are

00:14:23 ◼   ► reluctant to get into this, privacy stuff aside-- very

00:14:25 ◼   ► important, very much understand the privacy concerns.

00:14:28 ◼   ► But also just the fact that there's not--

00:14:30 ◼   ► it's sort of like--

00:14:31 ◼   ► I don't even remember what the other one's called anymore.

00:14:33 ◼   ► Blu-ray versus--

00:14:34 ◼   ► HD DVD.

00:14:35 ◼   ► Right, there has not been--

00:14:37 ◼   ► I found one of those the other day.

00:14:37 ◼   ► I was like, oh, look.

00:14:38 ◼   ► my HD DVD that I can't play anywhere.

00:14:41 ◼   ► BetaMax versus VHS, that really has not shaken out except in this case there's at least three

00:14:46 ◼   ► or four big players.

00:14:47 ◼   ► And in the case there was that one dingus that Google bought out that was like the be-all,

00:14:52 ◼   ► do-all meta hub and then they just kind of discontinued support for that.

00:14:56 ◼   ► And that can be real frustrating.

00:14:57 ◼   ► You're not going to, I mean, what if you went out and invested something along the lines

00:15:01 ◼   ► of a Sonos system and then all of a sudden they just lost interest in updating the app.

00:15:04 ◼   ► I mean, now you're kind of stuck.

00:15:06 ◼   ► and I have talked about this, but it's like I really don't like the idea that my purchase

00:15:10 ◼   ► of a thermostat two years ago suddenly will dictate all future like purchases I have to

00:15:18 ◼   ► make for my home because it turns out that I have fallen into a, you know, a Wald's garden

00:15:23 ◼   ► without my knowledge and now I'm stuck inside it. This case is interesting. Somebody pointed

00:15:28 ◼   ► out by the way and tweeted at Neely Patel from The Verge that the good news is that

00:15:34 ◼   ► these Knox speakers even though their app is 32-bit so you can't run it anymore. You

00:15:38 ◼   ► could maybe find an old phone somebody's got, but they also run an apparently un-passworded

00:15:45 ◼   ► web server in them. So if you can find their IP address on your local network, you can

00:15:48 ◼   ► just go there and change the settings there, which that's the good news. The bad news is,

00:15:53 ◼   ► yes, your speakers have been running an unsecured web server for the entire time that you've

00:15:57 ◼   ► had them. So, you know. But I'm the guy with the iPod Hi-Fi, so what do I know?

00:16:04 ◼   ► Yeah, I still got some old jam boxes kicking around that we actually don't use too much now that we listen on.

00:16:13 ◼   ► I mean, we do some Bluetooth speaker-ing, but most of it is with speakers that are capable of other things as well.

00:16:19 ◼   ► And I was really amazed. I just fired a couple of these up the other day and charged them and they still work.

00:16:23 ◼   ► I have not had luck running the Jawbone app to do the full update.

00:16:28 ◼   ► That's being a little bulky for me. And the truth is, you have to be a pretty canny Googler.

00:16:33 ◼   ► I don't think they make those speakers anymore.

00:16:36 ◼   ► They're all in on the-- what are they called?

00:16:39 ◼   ► Like little Fitbit-style dingus.

00:16:41 ◼   ► I forget what it's called.

00:16:42 ◼   ► But that's what Job Bonus is all in on now.

00:16:45 ◼   ► The up.

00:16:46 ◼   ► Yes, right.

00:16:47 ◼   ► So you do have to do a little bit of canny Googling

00:16:49 ◼   ► just to even find the app that you need.

00:16:50 ◼   ► And then once you run the app, it runs in your menu bar.

00:16:53 ◼   ► It wants to be on all the time.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And then when you click on My Devices,

00:16:56 ◼   ► it actually takes you to a web page on the web

00:17:00 ◼   ► that then I guess is handshaking somehow with the app on your Mac.

00:17:03 ◼   ► And of course, now I have, because I have a MacBook,

00:17:06 ◼   ► I have numerous dongles just to get to even that point.

00:17:09 ◼   ► So it becomes hard to trace exactly what you need to do to get your speakers up to date.

00:17:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, and this is the thing that smart tech is cool,

00:17:18 ◼   ► but you are putting yourself at risk of being obsolete for computer reasons instead.

00:17:25 ◼   ► Like, again, the iPod HiFi, yeah, it's got a dock connector on top,

00:17:28 ◼   ► and that's dead and it was charging by a fire wire so it was did actually even

00:17:32 ◼   ► before the dock connector was out it was really incompatible but it's got the

00:17:35 ◼   ► it's got the three and a half inch plug which is not yet incompatible with my

00:17:39 ◼   ► computer so that's good it's savage but it works I saw somebody over the weekend

00:17:43 ◼   ► saying something along the lines of oh this is my life now I just had to reboot

00:17:46 ◼   ► a light switch yeah oh I I did a I did a light bulb firmware update at one point

00:17:51 ◼   ► and that was like well this is so it's come to this you gotta make sure they're

00:17:55 ◼   ► all on make sure they're talking about my little metric time clock thingy i

00:17:59 ◼   ► mean the difference between that in the squeeze box is the squeeze box ran some

00:18:03 ◼   ► server software which while while branded by logitech it the way that slim

00:18:09 ◼   ► devices put it together originally it's an open source project and it runs in

00:18:12 ◼   ► pearl so theoretically if you maintain this squeeze box hardware you might have

00:18:18 ◼   ► to write some stuff yourself or you might like loose features they used to

00:18:21 ◼   ► support more streaming services and all of those api's died and there's nobody

00:18:24 ◼   ► there to update them from a corporation that can make a deal, so they all kind of died.

00:18:28 ◼   ► I mean, there's stuff that died, but the core server is in Perl. It just runs, and it runs

00:18:33 ◼   ► fine. And that's my fear with the Limetric Time stuff, is like, I have to kind of go

00:18:37 ◼   ► to their app, and although I can make an app on their website, and I can point it at--all

00:18:43 ◼   ► it's doing is calling my server, I do have this moment where I realize if that company

00:18:47 ◼   ► goes out of business, unless they're very, very nice in relocating the intellectual property

00:18:53 ◼   ► somewhere, that thing will just die and there's nothing I can do about it. And that's just--

00:18:59 ◼   ► it bugs me, but at the same time, that's the trade-off. It's like, so much of what we have

00:19:04 ◼   ► now, you are making a trade-off for privacy or you're making a trade-off of inconvenience

00:19:09 ◼   ► or being in a walled garden, or you're taking a risk, whether it's something like this or

00:19:13 ◼   ► it's a Kickstarter project, you're taking a risk like I hope they don't die and don't

00:19:17 ◼   ► get bought by somebody who kills all the products, which is what happened when Logitech bought

00:19:20 ◼   ► slim devices. So you know, you're making gambles all over the place. So obsolescence isn't

00:19:25 ◼   ► what it used to be. That's what I'm really saying here.

00:19:29 ◼   ► Obsolescence 2.0, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Now about to be replaced

00:19:33 ◼   ► with 3.0 beta of obsolescence. But I don't know, old speakers. Casey Alissa's dad's old

00:19:40 ◼   ► record player probably still is fine. That's all I'm saying.

00:19:44 ◼   ► All those records still sound so warm. Yeah, they do. It's the ritual, Marlon. It's

00:19:47 ◼   ► the warming ritual. We have a lot to talk about on this show and we're just getting started. So

00:19:53 ◼   ► let me tell you about our first sponsor. How do sponsors work on upgrade, Merlin? I don't know.

00:19:57 ◼   ► Jason, why don't you tell me about something you like? You know, I do a lot of freelance work. I

00:20:00 ◼   ► need people to pay me money for things and I'm always wondering, what do I do? I'm sitting here

00:20:03 ◼   ► with my invoice in my hand. What am I going to do? I'm going to Microsoft Word. I'm going to pull up

00:20:07 ◼   ► a template. Let me tell you what you do. What do I do? You use our friends at FreshBooks. FreshBooks.

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00:20:26 ◼   ► They're ridiculously easy to use.

00:20:28 ◼   ► I have people who use Fresh Books to invoice me, and I pay those invoices immediately,

00:20:34 ◼   ► basically, because it's so convenient.

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00:20:40 ◼   ► they know that I've seen it and they know that I paid it.

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00:20:50 ◼   ► More than 10 million people who deal with this stuff.

00:20:53 ◼   ► And it's not why you get into this business, whatever business you're in.

00:20:56 ◼   ► Like, nobody says, "You know, I'm going to quit my job and go out on my own as a freelancer

00:21:00 ◼   ► because I really like invoicing.

00:21:01 ◼   ► That's the thing that I want to do."

00:21:04 ◼   ► Nobody does that.

00:21:05 ◼   ► You don't say, "I don't like to bug.

00:21:07 ◼   ► I want to bug people who haven't paid me.

00:21:09 ◼   ► I want late payments. Like, I love late payments that I can bug people and try to

00:21:13 ◼   ► catch money out of them that they own.

00:21:14 ◼   ► I think there's a cat in one of the Richard Scarry books, and that's all it

00:21:17 ◼   ► aspires to be is to be someone who bugs people about getting paid.

00:21:21 ◼   ► But FreshBooks lets you, it automates the late payment reminder so you can

00:21:25 ◼   ► spend less time chasing those payments and more time doing your job, which is

00:21:28 ◼   ► the way to do it. And when you email a client an invoice, you do get to see

00:21:32 ◼   ► that they've seen it. So they're like, "Oh, I don't know. I must have missed

00:21:35 ◼   ► that one you could you can this is now a personal choice but you can say well

00:21:39 ◼   ► actually three days ago you open that email so give me my money but you know

00:21:44 ◼   ► it's a tool in the arsenal because in the end you can do what you love but

00:21:49 ◼   ► you got to get paid got to pay the rent you got to buy food and that is

00:21:52 ◼   ► something that FreshBooks helps you do if you're not using FreshBooks yet guess

00:21:56 ◼   ► what try it try it now you can try for 30 days for free because you're an

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00:22:05 ◼   ► go to freshbooks.com/upgrade. Enter "upgrade" in the "How did you hear about us" section.

00:22:11 ◼   ► That lets them know that you heard about it here. Thank you, FreshBooks, for supporting

00:22:15 ◼   ► Upgrade for up to 192 hours.

00:22:19 ◼   ► Just a great sponsor. In some ways, it's a shame that they frame it as invoicing, because

00:22:24 ◼   ► the invoicing part is, you know, just computers do that. But the way that they provide you

00:22:27 ◼   ► those payment gateways, that changes everything. You know, you're not out there waiting for

00:22:31 ◼   ► a check like a sucker. I mean, people can just pay it. They want to use a credit card,

00:22:34 ◼   ► could do that. It makes it so easy. Very nice. This is a segment we do, if you're not familiar

00:22:40 ◼   ► with the upgrade program, Merlin, called Upstream. Upstream. It's a new-ish segment where we

00:22:46 ◼   ► talk about the, you know, Apple is, we talk about Apple a lot and Apple is making this

00:22:53 ◼   ► foray into video streaming services. It's going to have its own service next year sometime,

00:22:58 ◼   ► probably. That's the story now. And there's a lot of action going on there. Now you know

00:23:03 ◼   ► I talk about this with Tim Goodman from The Hollywood Reporter on TV Talk Machine, a podcast

00:23:08 ◼   ► I do with him on Fridays.

00:23:10 ◼   ► But Myke and I try to talk about it from the kind of bringing it to the tech podcast world

00:23:15 ◼   ► and talking about it in that context and what Apple's up to.

00:23:19 ◼   ► And last week, Apple was up to something because they made a deal with, I guess, the estate

00:23:24 ◼   ► of Isaac Asimov to get the rights to a TV show based on the foundation books, which

00:23:32 ◼   ► have basically never been adapted. A bunch of people have tried and failed, but this

00:23:36 ◼   ► is now set up with a production company. And David Goyer and Josh Friedman are the creatives

00:23:43 ◼   ► behind it. And so Apple, I guess, didn't make the deal with Asimov Estate. Apple made the

00:23:47 ◼   ► deal with a production company that had already made that deal. But it's like a whole chain

00:23:50 ◼   ► of deals—I hope they use FreshBooks—that let them do this thing. And it's fascinating

00:23:56 ◼   ► because Foundation—I read this, and Foundation was a very important early science fiction

00:24:02 ◼   ► It's been incredibly influential. But if you go back and read them, and I did a couple years ago for The Incomparable,

00:24:08 ◼   ► what you find is it's not really written for, I would say, a modern audience. Asimov was an ideas guy, and he was brimming with ideas.

00:24:20 ◼   ► He was not really a characters guy or a plot guy. So you read the books and you're like,

00:24:28 ◼   ► it's almost as if Gene Roddenberry dropped down like the Bible for Star Trek, but no

00:24:32 ◼   ► episodes and then walked away. Or like two episodes, like a couple pilot episodes, and

00:24:38 ◼   ► that was it. And so I actually think this Foundation thing might be a good idea because

00:24:44 ◼   ► it puts the responsibility of kind of creating the details of the story, the characters,

00:24:51 ◼   ► and the plot lines in the hands of the creative TV people using Asimov's work as kind of just

00:24:57 ◼   ► the base instead of having like a whole bunch of well-loved characters everybody

00:25:01 ◼   ► knows them they know what they look like they know what they're supposed to do

00:25:03 ◼   ► they know exactly what the plot is sort of like Game of Thrones was like up

00:25:07 ◼   ► until they ran out of books and so like I think this may be better like it's

00:25:12 ◼   ► it's still a gamble because everything is a gamble but I think this might be

00:25:16 ◼   ► better I don't know if you've read foundation or not but I haven't but I

00:25:20 ◼   ► read your article a very good article about on six colors and I I think I

00:25:24 ◼   ► I agree with you. First of all, if Tim, for whatever reason, can ever not make it onto

00:25:31 ◼   ► the podcast and you need somebody to sit in and have red wine, please have me because

00:25:34 ◼   ► I love that show. The Times of Confusion, Platinum TV.

00:25:36 ◼   ► So much television out there.

00:25:38 ◼   ► I'm so interested. I feel like you, me, and Joe Steele could just do a show about this

00:25:43 ◼   ► stuff because I am finding it increasingly very interesting, not specifically with regard

00:25:49 ◼   ► to Apple and Foundation, but just the way that stuff like Netflix--

00:25:53 ◼   ► I talked about this on some show.

00:25:56 ◼   ► I want to say back to work recently.

00:25:57 ◼   ► One of the many podcasts that you're on.

00:25:59 ◼   ► But I was talking about how, for one thing--

00:26:03 ◼   ► oh, no, it was Systematic with Bret Terpstra.

00:26:05 ◼   ► And I was thinking how it's in the same way

00:26:07 ◼   ► that I think people don't think of themselves as computer users and Apple

00:26:12 ◼   ► users as much as they used to.

00:26:13 ◼   ► We do still think about ourselves as consumers of content.

00:26:16 ◼   ► And in an age where you can get Netflix on almost any kind of device, like if it's got

00:26:21 ◼   ► a light-up screen, you can pretty much get Netflix on it.

00:26:24 ◼   ► And I feel like that's sneaking in.

00:26:26 ◼   ► Everybody gets that Netflix is a big deal.

00:26:29 ◼   ► We have that experience.

00:26:30 ◼   ► We had this experience yesterday.

00:26:31 ◼   ► We turned on Netflix.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Guess what?

00:26:33 ◼   ► Lost in Space.

00:26:34 ◼   ► Rated PG.

00:26:35 ◼   ► I can watch it with my kid.

00:26:36 ◼   ► I had no idea this was coming.

00:26:37 ◼   ► Here's this thing on there.

00:26:39 ◼   ► And I don't know.

00:26:40 ◼   ► I mean, I know this is just a quickie for Upstream, but can you update me?

00:26:45 ◼   ► I understand the TV landscape flawlessly, but I thought you might want to explain to

00:26:48 ◼   ► your listeners.

00:26:49 ◼   ► Where do you think Apple is going with the addition of stuff like this?

00:26:54 ◼   ► Do you think they're going to get more into...

00:26:57 ◼   ► I mean, this is interesting because there are people who've read these books and love

00:27:00 ◼   ► them, and I know they're very influential, but it's not the same kind of nostalgia reboot

00:27:06 ◼   ► update idea that you see with a lot of things.

00:27:08 ◼   ► And what you're describing here, this can be heavily modernized for a current world.

00:27:12 ◼   ► I mean, do you think--

00:27:14 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:27:14 ◼   ► I'm just curious what you think about how this fits in.

00:27:16 ◼   ► I consume a ton of Hulu, a ton of Netflix,

00:27:20 ◼   ► giant amounts of YouTube.

00:27:21 ◼   ► I'm still struggling to understand

00:27:24 ◼   ► where the Apple TV offering is going to fit into my world.

00:27:27 ◼   ► And I know you've talked about it,

00:27:29 ◼   ► but as you get more pieces to that puzzle,

00:27:31 ◼   ► where do you see it fitting into the, if not today's,

00:27:35 ◼   ► ecosystem, the emerging ecosystem

00:27:37 ◼   ► of streaming services?

00:27:38 ◼   ► I think the reason this is the platinum age,

00:27:39 ◼   ► and the reason there's too much TV,

00:27:40 ◼   ► because it's a land rush, because everybody's realizing that the digital revolution means

00:27:47 ◼   ► that you don't need access to a cable system in order to get your content out there and

00:27:52 ◼   ► to build a business. And actually Disney's really excited about it because they released

00:27:57 ◼   ► their new streaming service, ESPN Plus, which is like a $5 a month or $6 a month streaming

00:28:02 ◼   ► service. And they talked again, as they've talked for a while now about this idea that

00:28:07 ◼   ► They want to become increasingly direct-to-consumer company, eliminating the middleman and saying,

00:28:14 ◼   ► basically, "You pay Disney, and Disney gives you content."

00:28:17 ◼   ► And they like that, right?

00:28:18 ◼   ► They like just, "Yes, give us the cash, and we'll give you your Star Wars shows, and we'll

00:28:22 ◼   ► give you your Marvel shows, and we'll give you ESPN, we'll give you some hurling and

00:28:29 ◼   ► rugby and things, the second division soccer on ESPN Plus."

00:28:34 ◼   ► And they are able to do that now because they've got, you can just use the internet for streaming.

00:28:41 ◼   ► And Apple wants to be in that conversation.

00:28:43 ◼   ► I think that's a big part of this is, I think it's unrealistic to think that in five years

00:28:49 ◼   ► or ten years, there are going to be dozens and dozens of $10 a month video streaming

00:28:55 ◼   ► services, all of which are paying top shelf creators to do 20 shows a year of, 20 series

00:29:04 ◼   ► of 12 or 10 episodes a year for billions of dollars. It's not sustainable, I think.

00:29:09 ◼   ► It makes this feel a little bit like the Pets.com era, where we know it's a loss leader to deliver

00:29:15 ◼   ► this giant cat food for free or for $5 or whatever.

00:29:19 ◼   ► I think there's going to be a crash where the people who are working in television now,

00:29:24 ◼   ► I think a lot of the jobs will go away eventually because I think in the end it won't be sustainable

00:29:30 ◼   ► to the degree it is now. I don't know how brutal a crash it will be, but I think there

00:29:33 ◼   ► be one. And this is when I talk to people and they're like, "Another streaming service?

00:29:36 ◼   ► I don't want to spend another $10 a month for another streaming service." And I mean,

00:29:41 ◼   ► first off, they're not mandatory. It was just like if you heard about a great show on HBO

00:29:46 ◼   ► and you weren't paying for HBO, you could grouse about it. But there was a solution,

00:29:50 ◼   ► which is you could pay for HBO and get it, or you just don't and you don't. And those

00:29:53 ◼   ► are kind of your choices. But I do think that in the long run, we won't be paying for 15

00:30:00 ◼   ► streaming services, stuff's going to get bundled together, and you're going to be sort of cutting

00:30:06 ◼   ► the cord eventually. Everybody is going to not be thinking of television as like paying

00:30:11 ◼   ► for cable TV. It's all going to be streaming services. Amazon's aggressively bundling services

00:30:16 ◼   ► together inside of Prime Video already. Stuff like that's going to continue happening where

00:30:21 ◼   ► you can buy services inside of other services or you can buy bundles. And Apple wants in

00:30:26 ◼   ► on all that. Apple wants something exclusive, I think, that will probably only run on their

00:30:31 ◼   ► stuff. I think they want that.

00:30:32 ◼   ► Okay, that's key. That's key. So you feel like this will run probably on Apple TV? You

00:30:37 ◼   ► don't think this is something you'll get on Roku?

00:30:39 ◼   ► I don't think it is. I think that would be really interesting if that happened, but it

00:30:43 ◼   ► would be contrary to all of Apple's strategy up to now. I think the only reason Apple Music

00:30:47 ◼   ► is on Android is because Beats was on Android, and so they decided to keep it around. But

00:30:51 ◼   ► I think ultimately this is the reason Apple is spending this money is primarily to attach

00:30:55 ◼   ► people to Apple's platforms. And Apple wants to be in the game and Apple wants to be considered

00:31:01 ◼   ► and Apple wants to be one of those big players and help set the scene here. And they want

00:31:05 ◼   ► to be, ultimately, they want to be one of the last ones left standing when the music

00:31:10 ◼   ► stops, because there will be a reckoning. And Apple has the money to be a player. I

00:31:15 ◼   ► think that's what you see with a lot of this stuff is who's got the money to ante up for

00:31:20 ◼   ► this game because it's a high-stakes game and if you aren't paying top-notch creators

00:31:25 ◼   ► and getting great content and you know the story is that Jeff Bezos told the people at

00:31:29 ◼   ► Amazon he wants the next Game of Thrones. He doesn't want like little quirky comedies

00:31:35 ◼   ► that win Golden Globe Awards as much as I liked Mozart and the Jungle which just got

00:31:38 ◼   ► canceled. It was not going to be a worldwide phenomenon and that's the shifting to a blockbuster

00:31:47 ◼   ► to it, like I want that Game of Thrones, I want that Blockbuster, I think that's all

00:31:51 ◼   ► part of this, which is people want the huge hits, the must-watches, because they want

00:31:56 ◼   ► to be indispensable, because there will come a time when there are so many different services

00:32:01 ◼   ► that people are going to be forced to choose which ones they're going to stay with, and

00:32:05 ◼   ► that's going to probably kill, you know, not necessarily kill the niche players that are

00:32:09 ◼   ► kind of like, you know, like something like Acorn that's just like British TV and other

00:32:14 ◼   ► European TV and other Commonwealth TV. Or like, for people younger than us,

00:32:19 ◼   ► Crunchyroll. Exactly right. I see Crunchyroll show up on Roku or Apple TV or

00:32:24 ◼   ► whatever and I don't think about it but my daughter's friends watch tons of anime.

00:32:29 ◼   ► And those I think have a real chance to succeed although they might also get

00:32:33 ◼   ► kind of bought and sucked into a bigger player but like the big players who are

00:32:37 ◼   ► like the game they're playing is prestige television scripted. Like, how many of those

00:32:45 ◼   ► can make it? There was a time when there was literally just HBO and Showtime, and now we

00:32:50 ◼   ► have kind of this increasing number of people playing that game, and Netflix has taken it

00:32:54 ◼   ► to a whole, you know, even higher level. And you can do that for a while, but in the end

00:33:00 ◼   ► I don't think the world is going to accept ten of those or whatever. So I think there

00:33:08 ◼   ► will be a reckoning at some point. But Apple wants to be in the game. Apple wants to be

00:33:12 ◼   ► talked about. And I think Apple really does want something to break through where everybody's

00:33:15 ◼   ► like, "Oh my God, I need that Ron Moore sci-fi show," or "I need amazing stories," or "I

00:33:20 ◼   ► need the Jennifer Aniston Reese Witherspoon drama that is a buzz-worthy drama," or whatever

00:33:27 ◼   ► breaks through or shows breakthrough because that's good for them because then they're

00:33:31 ◼   ► like well yeah you can you can only watch that on your iPhone or your iPad or your Apple

00:33:35 ◼   ► TV. The only thing that, gosh I got a lot of thoughts about this and I know we're still

00:33:39 ◼   ► early in the show, but it feels like they're doing a play like with Amazon Prime in some

00:33:45 ◼   ► ways it seems like they're maybe skating where the puck was. It feels like they're doing

00:33:49 ◼   ► a little bit of an HBO play where they they want the the prestige. It's just that HBO

00:33:54 ◼   ► run on a lot of different things. The thing that I find concerning, again, we haven't

00:34:01 ◼   ► seen much, there's nothing to look at yet to evaluate this, but it just feels like that

00:34:06 ◼   ► Venn diagram gets pretty tight of people who have Apple products and would want this particular

00:34:10 ◼   ► thing. They're closing off a lot of the markets. It's a little bit like the days when Steve

00:34:15 ◼   ► initially didn't want iPods to work with Windows, that kind of thing.

00:34:20 ◼   ► I agree that the like, if they wanted the streaming service to be the most successful,

00:34:25 ◼   ► it could be as a streaming service you'd want it everywhere. I'm not sure that Apple as

00:34:31 ◼   ► a company is investing in a streaming service because they want to have a successful streaming

00:34:36 ◼   ► service business, right? Like maybe they do. Maybe they've completely changed their approach.

00:34:40 ◼   ► And the services line in their budget is about like anything. It could be literally anything

00:34:46 ◼   ► you could think of as a service. It doesn't have to be tied to Apple's hardware or platforms

00:34:50 ◼   ► in any other way. But I have a hard time believing that. I think in the end they see it as a

00:34:55 ◼   ► means to an end, which is getting people in their ecosystem and not just making whatever

00:35:01 ◼   ► $10 a month off of somebody who's using a Roku box. But I could be wrong. I mean, that

00:35:05 ◼   ► would be a very different thing for them. It contributes to developing and growing.

00:35:11 ◼   ► I hate when people use that verb that way, but basically trying to get more of a halo

00:35:15 ◼   ► effect. The idea is like you love your iPhone, now check out these other things.

00:35:18 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, and maybe a little bit of like, "Oh, that's a really buzz-worthy show, but

00:35:22 ◼   ► you got to have an Apple device to watch it, or you have to wait." And that they want that.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Kind of like the Star Trek show, sort of, with CBS a little bit?

00:35:29 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I mean, with CBS, they're really just trying to build a business. I think the

00:35:35 ◼   ► smart thing, because that makes Star Trek fans really angry about the fact that in the

00:35:38 ◼   ► US, it's Netflix everywhere else but the US and Canada, but Star Trek fans in the US are

00:35:43 ◼   ► really grumpy that that show got on CBS All Access and not on something else. It was basically

00:35:48 ◼   ► you need to pay for this one show.

00:35:50 ◼   ► That sounds like nobody particularly loves using that app.

00:35:53 ◼   ► Yeah, well, yeah. So the funny thing about it is, though, that was, I think from a business

00:35:58 ◼   ► perspective, as far as I can tell, a great success for them because they got a lot of

00:36:04 ◼   ► people to sign up for CBS All Access, their streaming service, and they're trying to build

00:36:09 ◼   ► that service. And they got names, and they got people to advertise to, and some of them

00:36:12 ◼   ► maybe stayed as subscribers and some of them will come back next time. And they did it

00:36:17 ◼   ► all with a show that the Netflix purchase basically paid for. So everything was about

00:36:22 ◼   ► building a future business and making a profit on it. And it was an investment for them.

00:36:28 ◼   ► And it would have been easier for them to take a bigger profit and be on Netflix everywhere

00:36:34 ◼   ► in the world. But in the US they're like, "Yeah, but we want to build our own. We want

00:36:37 ◼   ► to have our own thing." And CBS doesn't do it the way other companies do it, but they

00:36:41 ◼   ► They do have a strategy and they have been very successful as a business.

00:36:45 ◼   ► There are a lot of stories about how, you know, there's rumors about Viacom and CBS

00:36:49 ◼   ► coming back together because they used to be together and they got split apart.

00:36:53 ◼   ► And the funny thing about the story is that 10 years ago when they got split apart, CBS

00:36:58 ◼   ► was viewed as this legacy business that it was like, "Good luck Les Moonves, head of

00:37:02 ◼   ► CBS, with your legacy network business," whereas the cable TV business was viewed as this.

00:37:07 ◼   ► Like that was the shining growth opportunity.

00:37:10 ◼   ► now when the owner or like majority shareholder of both is trying to get

00:37:15 ◼   ► them both together again, Sherry Redstone, the perception is like CBS doesn't want

00:37:19 ◼   ► to touch Viacom because CBS has actually been very profitable and successful and

00:37:24 ◼   ► Viacom is seen as being troubled. That's one of my favorite running observations from Tim

00:37:28 ◼   ► on TV Talk Machine is just that idea of like, "Hey, CBS, you know, you may not make

00:37:33 ◼   ► it into the power rankings too often but like keep doing what you're doing." It's

00:37:36 ◼   ► not for me but like it's working. It's a successful business and that's the thing about

00:37:39 ◼   ► Star Trek is like Star Trek fans are grumpy about it being on that show being on CBS All

00:37:43 ◼   ► Access but it was a good business move like it was a really smart business move I think

00:37:47 ◼   ► the real question is do they have the budget and do they have I know they've got some ambition

00:37:51 ◼   ► but do they have the budget to build that thing into something that people keep as a

00:37:55 ◼   ► subscription year round and they have like three or four original shows on it now so

00:38:00 ◼   ► I keep thinking and as a Star Trek fan I will admit that this is also some some wish casting

00:38:05 ◼   ► happening here, but I keep thinking you own Star Trek, you have a streaming service, why

00:38:11 ◼   ► are you not developing multiple Star Trek shows now? You launched one, you got a second

00:38:16 ◼   ► season of that coming, like, put your money in here, because this is a franchise you could

00:38:20 ◼   ► run with and get people to subscribe, but instead they've got like the Star Trek thing

00:38:26 ◼   ► and they've got like the Good Wife spinoff and they've got a comedy show and I think

00:38:31 ◼   ► there's another drama that's coming and it's just kind of scattershot now. So that's the

00:38:35 ◼   ► question for CBS is not that it wasn't a bad move it's that like what's your big

00:38:39 ◼   ► plan here is it to just are they are they hoping to get a lot of I mean isn't

00:38:44 ◼   ► there isn't it fair to say that their demo tends to skew a little older on

00:38:48 ◼   ► network but I think I'm on stop on streaming there there it's a much

00:38:53 ◼   ► younger audience they said but times of confusion it is a wacky time I have one

00:38:59 ◼   ► other upstream thing I wanted to mention which is something that also came up on

00:39:02 ◼   ► on TV Talk Machine, which is FanTV, which is a really great app. It used to be FanHatton.

00:39:07 ◼   ► It's a place where you could go and like find out like where's that movie? Where's that

00:39:10 ◼   ► TV show? Where's it available? What streaming services is it on? Is it for rent or for sale

00:39:14 ◼   ► at iTunes or Amazon? Is it on cable? Where is it? And it died. It's already well and

00:39:22 ◼   ► truly dead. I think it died today. I think today is the death of FanTV. And it got bought

00:39:29 ◼   ► by TiVo or maybe Rovio, which became TiVo, and it just got sucked into the maw of that

00:39:34 ◼   ► intellectual property whirlwind and is gone. So a lot of people were asking like, "Well,

00:39:41 ◼   ► what app should I use or web service should I use to track my shows?" Whether it's like,

00:39:45 ◼   ► "What shows should I watch now?" or whether it's, "Can I stream this in this place or

00:39:50 ◼   ► in that place?" And I have a few recommendations for people. Like, I heard from a bunch of

00:39:55 ◼   ► people last week about this that just watch dot-com is great that there's

00:40:00 ◼   ► tracked dot TV TR a k t dot TV TV time dot-com and their apps for most of these

00:40:06 ◼   ► things to somebody recommended can I stream it which is literally can I

00:40:10 ◼   ► stream dot it

00:40:12 ◼   ► although last time I used it it was not reliable for me it was saying things

00:40:16 ◼   ► were not streamable that were can I stream it use was the first one I knew

00:40:19 ◼   ► of for doing that, but it's been pretty undependable.

00:40:23 ◼   ► The Just Watch has something I like a lot,

00:40:26 ◼   ► which is once you go in and get your account set up,

00:40:28 ◼   ► you get to basically pick which of the streaming services

00:40:31 ◼   ► you want, which makes it a lot easier to go in and find stuff.

00:40:34 ◼   ► So you could say, well, I'd be willing to buy it from here,

00:40:37 ◼   ► but not from there.

00:40:37 ◼   ► And then when you bring in something like-- what's

00:40:39 ◼   ► it called?

00:40:39 ◼   ► Movie-- I know this is movies, not TV, but movies anywhere.

00:40:42 ◼   ► Have you talked about that much here?

00:40:44 ◼   ► We talked about it a little bit.

00:40:45 ◼   ► I mean, boy, such a fascinating time right now.

00:40:49 ◼   ► when you get your stuff like where where does that exist where can you get it

00:40:52 ◼   ► where does it live you know Siri on Apple TV helps with that an okay amount

00:40:57 ◼   ► it doesn't gobble up all of the apps but that's that's the trick right is like

00:41:00 ◼   ► who are the apps willing to put themselves in the search my Tivo

00:41:03 ◼   ► honestly and this is why they bought fan TV I think my Tivo does a great job my

00:41:08 ◼   ► Tivo actually has a pretty good job of knowing what streaming based on the

00:41:11 ◼   ► streaming services it supports anyway it can say so I could get I could get

00:41:15 ◼   ► Seinfeld reruns from any of these places and it'll say this show's current season

00:41:18 ◼   ► is on CBS but the past season's on Hulu and it'll show you all the episodes and

00:41:22 ◼   ► the ones that are on Hulu will play on Hulu and the ones that are on CBS you

00:41:26 ◼   ► can record on CBS and it does it that way for everything which is pretty clever.

00:41:29 ◼   ► TV Times cool too. I don't use the website much but I do use it on my phone.

00:41:34 ◼   ► That really wants to be like I guess like all of these it really wants to be

00:41:38 ◼   ► kind of a maybe along the lines of letterbox for movies it wants to be a

00:41:42 ◼   ► social network it wants to be something where you're sharing it with people and

00:41:45 ◼   ► And they're seeing your reviews and stuff.

00:41:48 ◼   ► But TV time's pretty good.

00:41:49 ◼   ► I just loaded up with all the shows, especially ones

00:41:51 ◼   ► that aren't-- like, like, when's Doctor Who come back on,

00:41:53 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:41:54 ◼   ► All the shows, Marlin?

00:41:55 ◼   ► All the great shows.

00:41:57 ◼   ► They're all in there.

00:41:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:42:00 ◼   ► I also just want to mention, this is not strictly germane,

00:42:03 ◼   ► but if you don't know about this, listeners,

00:42:05 ◼   ► Flixable is very, very good.

00:42:08 ◼   ► It's not for tracking, but it does one thing very well.

00:42:12 ◼   ► And that is, it is a website that shows you, basically,

00:42:15 ◼   ► sorted by date when stuff got added to Netflix. So if like me you've ever struggled to figure

00:42:20 ◼   ► out what's new, you know there is new stuff, but in their infinite scrolling interface,

00:42:24 ◼   ► the infinite carousel of hell, Flixable is really great. They have a tab for movies,

00:42:29 ◼   ► a tab for TV, and it's a great way to just pop in every week or two and say, "Oh, did

00:42:32 ◼   ► I miss anything?" Like here's this spate of Indian subcontinent sitcoms that they've added

00:42:38 ◼   ► or whatever. But you'll also see there's Wild Wild Country, here's stuff that was recently

00:42:41 ◼   ► added to keep you from losing your mind as a Netflix user try flexible f l i x a b l e

00:42:47 ◼   ► dot com I have some other topics for us to talk about but let me say some words about

00:42:53 ◼   ► our next sponsor this is Pingdom Pingdom awesome people at Pingdom and why are they awesome

00:43:00 ◼   ► because they keep websites online they keep the sites you love and your sites from crashing

00:43:07 ◼   ► or from crashing too long. Get somebody on it immediately. Pingdom monitors sites so

00:43:13 ◼   ► you don't have to. They will check and alert you immediately if something is going wrong.

00:43:20 ◼   ► And there's stuff going wrong on the internet all the time, and I don't just mean the human

00:43:23 ◼   ► beings. I also mean the computers. 13 million outages every month are detected by Pingdom.

00:43:31 ◼   ► more than 400,000 a day. So whether you've got a little website like mine or a huge infrastructure

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00:43:50 ◼   ► have something that's running but it's bogged down in some way and Pingdong can check that

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00:43:58 ◼   ► who emails you or tweets at you and says, "You're sight's down?" I had this happen with

00:44:05 ◼   ► The Incomparable the other week where Greg Noss was doing a software update and the server

00:44:08 ◼   ► went down and I got this and I was at, where was I? I was like at a baseball game or I

00:44:13 ◼   ► was at a movie or something like that and I emerged and it was like, "Oh, what is wrong?"

00:44:18 ◼   ► I had this whole thing. Greg had already taken care of it and I'd already gotten a Pingdom

00:44:21 ◼   ► warning. I got a Pingdom warning and I got Greg saying, "Yeah, I broke the site but it's

00:44:24 ◼   ► about to go back up and then it was fine again but you got to know that because yeah the

00:44:29 ◼   ► last thing you want the best move the best move is you hear about it it gets fixed and

00:44:35 ◼   ► nobody noticed like nobody had time to send you that email saying I think your website

00:44:41 ◼   ► is down is it just me or is it down you're like nope we got a backup it's not even down

00:44:46 ◼   ► you were just seeing things that's that is great I have done that every now and then

00:44:49 ◼   ► where it's like, "Is your site down?" and I'll reply, "No, it's up. Just go. It's fine.

00:44:54 ◼   ► What are you talking about? I don't have any idea what you mean because we've got to back

00:44:59 ◼   ► up as quickly as possible." All you have to do with Pingdom is just give them your URL

00:45:03 ◼   ► and that's it. They take care of the rest. And you can get a 14-day free trial and don't

00:45:08 ◼   ► have to give them a credit card by going to pingdom.com/relayfm. That's P-I-N-G-D-O-M.com/relayfm

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00:45:21 ◼   ► Whew, that's a lot of percents.

00:45:22 ◼   ► Thank you, Pingdom, for supporting this show in Real AFM and presumably making it so that

00:45:27 ◼   ► if Steven breaks the Real AFM website, we hear about it before you do.

00:45:31 ◼   ► Because that could happen.

00:45:33 ◼   ► It's happened before is all I'm saying.

00:45:35 ◼   ► Steven: It happens.

00:45:36 ◼   ► Jared: Uh, some news we should talk about.

00:45:38 ◼   ► I wrote a, I did a dumb thing just because I thought it would be funny and it kind of

00:45:43 ◼   ► turned into a bigger thing.

00:45:46 ◼   ► It starts with this story, though. Apple put a time bomb in the latest version of Mac OS.

00:45:52 ◼   ► It's kind of weird. 1013.4 came out a couple weeks ago, but they put a time bomb in for

00:45:57 ◼   ► like Thursday the 12th at midnight local time. And after that point, if you launched an app

00:46:04 ◼   ► that was a 32-bit app—

00:46:05 ◼   ► This is in High Sierra.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Yeah, so High Sierra only, the latest version of High Sierra. 1013.4. So, such a catchy

00:46:13 ◼   ► set of numbers that is. It will put up a little box that says basically this is an old app,

00:46:22 ◼   ► email the developer, shame them, which you shouldn't do. You should check on your developer's

00:46:29 ◼   ► website and see if they've already made a statement about it. And then if they haven't,

00:46:34 ◼   ► you could send them a very nice email. I imagine that's what most people do. They probably

00:46:37 ◼   ► go and check. They probably do, yeah. It says this app is not optimized for your Mac. It

00:46:41 ◼   ► to be updated by its developer—again, it's not you, it's them—to improve compatibility.

00:46:47 ◼   ► Also, by the way, 32-bit Apple apps don't get this warning, because Apple does not want

00:46:53 ◼   ► you to contact them about their apps that are not being updated. And this is—now,

00:46:58 ◼   ► there's a lot of panic that could happen here, and it doesn't need to happen. In fact,

00:47:01 ◼   ► I was kind of talking Marco down via sending text messages to Casey when they were doing

00:47:06 ◼   ► ATP last week about this, because it had just sort of broken right before, and I'd written

00:47:09 ◼   ► my article about it, that even though—so Apple has said in the past, this is not news,

00:47:16 ◼   ► that in a future version of Mac OS, 32-bit apps won't run anymore. They have said that.

00:47:22 ◼   ► But a key thing—

00:47:24 ◼   ► On the infinite timescale.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Exactly right. On an infinite timescale. Well, no software is going to run on an infinite

00:47:30 ◼   ► timescale, except for Unix. It will be around forever. But what they said at WWDC last year was,

00:47:36 ◼   ► in the next version of macOS, so the one that comes out this fall, 32-bit apps—well, let's see,

00:47:45 ◼   ► High Sierra, they said the one that's out now will be the last version of macOS to run 32-bit apps

00:47:52 ◼   ► without compromise. And I checked on this, because there's some nuance here,

00:47:57 ◼   ► because the implication from that is they will run, but there will be an unstated compromise.

00:48:03 ◼   ► And I asked around and I can say that I was told yes, that interpretation is exactly right.

00:48:12 ◼   ► This fall's macOS updates not going to not run them, but there will be an unstated compromise.

00:48:18 ◼   ► Who knows what that is? It could be an annoying dialog box, even more annoying than this one.

00:48:22 ◼   ► It could be that you have to, by default, they don't run and you have to reboot and do something

00:48:26 ◼   ► and set something in order for it to run. And then Apple can say, "Haha, you don't get this

00:48:30 ◼   ► awesome feature at 100% or at all because you're in the wrong mode. There's lots of

00:48:34 ◼   ► complexity there that might make you not want to run them, but they're not going to be completely

00:48:40 ◼   ► shut out this fall. But, you know, next fall, probably is my guess, right? Maybe not, maybe

00:48:46 ◼   ► not, but probably, which means this is like an 18 month warning. This is a gentle transition.

00:48:52 ◼   ► But it's definitely one of the, it's a classic, it's a classic warning shot from Apple. I

00:48:57 ◼   ► I mean, Apple watchers will over time realize that when Apple issues this kind of, I guess

00:49:04 ◼   ► you could call it a warning, but definitely a heads up.

00:49:06 ◼   ► Make your way toward the exits.

00:49:09 ◼   ► Make your way toward the exits.

00:49:10 ◼   ► We're not saying that you have to run.

00:49:12 ◼   ► There's plenty of time, but you will need to make your way toward the exits.

00:49:16 ◼   ► I don't know if it's because of this particular computer I'm on because I'm an old man and

00:49:19 ◼   ► I am very reluctant to update.

00:49:21 ◼   ► My MacBook, adorable, has High Sierra, but I'm just running Sierra.

00:49:25 ◼   ► So when you look at, so you can do this by going to system information and then going

00:49:32 ◼   ► to the application section, subsection in hardware and see which ones are available.

00:49:36 ◼   ► I'm seeing a lot, a whole lot of stuff, including a lot of surprising Apple apps.

00:49:43 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:49:44 ◼   ► There's a lot of that's, that's why Apple, I mean, and to be fair, Apple's got the home

00:49:47 ◼   ► field advantage here.

00:49:48 ◼   ► App Apple can keep those 32 bit apps around as long as they want and keep them running

00:49:53 ◼   ► or they can only update them to 64-bit when they release the version that only runs 64-bit.

00:50:03 ◼   ► They're their own time table, right?

00:50:06 ◼   ► But for example, do you feel confident that we'll still be able to, for example, run firmware

00:50:12 ◼   ► password utility?

00:50:13 ◼   ► They'll probably give that a little...

00:50:15 ◼   ► I think not.

00:50:16 ◼   ► I think not.

00:50:18 ◼   ► Well that brings to...

00:50:20 ◼   ► hardware and stuff like that is part of this story, right? Because it's not just old software,

00:50:24 ◼   ► it's old hardware. Like I did, so the dumb thing that I did, because I thought it would

00:50:28 ◼   ► be funny, is when I realized that Apple's apps didn't generate the warning, I filed

00:50:33 ◼   ► a bug, because they always say file a radar. I filed a radar for QuickTime Player 7 saying,

00:50:40 ◼   ► "Oh, QuickTime Player 7 isn't 64-bit, so you should do that." And that was closed with

00:50:47 ◼   ► prejudice as we're not going to do that." It's like, "All right, fair." So then I wrote

00:50:52 ◼   ► another bug report, which was, "Oh, QuickTime Player 10 doesn't have all these features

00:50:57 ◼   ► that are in QuickTime Player 7, and since QuickTime Player 7 is going away, you should

00:51:01 ◼   ► probably put them in QuickTime Player 10. Check and mate." Right? I'm waiting for that

00:51:06 ◼   ► to be closed. It hasn't been closed yet, I'm sure it will. Or closed as a duplicate, because

00:51:10 ◼   ► people have been complaining about this. It's the reason QuickTime Player 7, which is ancient,

00:51:15 ◼   ► runs and is still kicking around is because just this weekend I used it to

00:51:20 ◼   ► put an audio soundtrack on top of a video that I had that was a different

00:51:26 ◼   ► soundtrack and then we did an incomparable like commentary track about

00:51:31 ◼   ► Star Wars and I have a Star Wars mp4 and I have this wave file of our commentary

00:51:37 ◼   ► you did two versions and I did yeah because there's a special editions which

00:51:41 ◼   ► we didn't watch and I you know basically in QuickTime I just like add the audio

00:51:44 ◼   ► track in and then export it out as an MP4 and boom I've got an MP4 with the

00:51:49 ◼   ► new audio track in it was you know this is why we we keep it around but Apple's

00:51:54 ◼   ► QuickTime API's never really got updated for 64-bit QuickTime Player 10 doesn't

00:51:58 ◼   ► apparently really use the old QuickTime at all it's just kind of QuickTime in

00:52:02 ◼   ► name only or for the most part Greg Pak the comic book writer and also

00:52:07 ◼   ► sometimes filmmaker tweeted at me like oh does this mean Final Cut 7 is finally

00:52:13 ◼   ► gonna die and I was like yeah actually yeah it does that's for all the people

00:52:17 ◼   ► who are holding out and doesn't mean it's gonna stop working but it means

00:52:20 ◼   ► that if you update to the version after the version that comes this fall it may

00:52:24 ◼   ► not run anymore at all what about the old garage band you think the old garage

00:52:27 ◼   ► band is garage band 6 or whatever that's 32 bed that'll stop running but so here's

00:52:33 ◼   ► the thing it's not like if you're really committed to old software you can keep

00:52:36 ◼   ► your old computer with your old software and not update and you can still use it

00:52:40 ◼   ► and it's okay. The problem is that if you are fully dedicated to the Final Cut Pro 7

00:52:45 ◼   ► lifestyle and you still edit all your movies on it and you don't care, you can keep buying

00:52:52 ◼   ► computers that run it up to the point where Apple releases an OS that doesn't support

00:52:57 ◼   ► it, at which point you have to just keep using your old computer forever. And that's where

00:53:03 ◼   ► the incompatibility really hurts you is, "Oh, I can use Final Cut 7 and you use it for several

00:53:11 ◼   ► years and you're like, 'Oh, it's fine,' and then your computer breaks and you're like,

00:53:14 ◼   ► 'Oh, I guess I need a new Mac.'" Uh-oh. Because it won't. And that's, I mean, this is life,

00:53:21 ◼   ► right? I mean, software doesn't last forever. OSes always get updated and break old software.

00:53:25 ◼   ► This is just a more dramatic kind of large-scale example of it. But this stuff happens. It's

00:53:32 ◼   ► just if it's something that you love that is going away, it's hard. So it's not, again,

00:53:39 ◼   ► you can make your way to the exit slowly, but this is Apple just continuing to push

00:53:45 ◼   ► things along. I do wonder about that without compromise, though. I do wonder if by default

00:53:49 ◼   ► they won't run and there'll be some whizzy new feature that they introduced this fall

00:53:55 ◼   ► that will just not work in that mode. So that's the question, how painful will that compromise

00:54:02 ◼   ► if you're still running 32-bit apps. Oh, the DVD player, by the way. DVD player is

00:54:06 ◼   ► 32-bit. Unclear whether Apple's gonna update that or just say, you know, run a

00:54:12 ◼   ► virtual machine of Lion to get that. So many groupers title case

00:54:17 ◼   ► service that I run. So many of the old Ecamm utilities. Yeah, well, they're all

00:54:22 ◼   ► QuickTime. They can't go to 64-bit as long as they're based on QuickTime.

00:54:25 ◼   ► What's gonna really suck, though, is this is also another pretty good

00:54:31 ◼   ► example of as many warnings as they give to people. If there is a day where they just

00:54:36 ◼   ► cut the cord, think about the terrible mixture of, let's say you're somebody who is using

00:54:42 ◼   ► a Mac with these old apps and maybe you're not reading the trades, it's just going to

00:54:46 ◼   ► be one day they're going to open it up and be like, "What happened to my Mac?"

00:54:49 ◼   ► Right, right. Because that moment where it's, well, I think this is part of the compromises

00:54:54 ◼   ► story though, is like this fall that'll happen is my theory. I think that's maybe the most

00:54:59 ◼   ► likely thing is this fall you remember when they introduced gatekeeper and suddenly that

00:55:04 ◼   ► app you downloaded from some shady place on the internet and you double clicked it and

00:55:07 ◼   ► goes whoa you downloaded this from some weird place and by default I won't let you run it

00:55:11 ◼   ► but you can go to the system preferences and change it so that I'll let you run it fine

00:55:16 ◼   ► live dangerously right well I think I think maybe it'll be something like that where you

00:55:19 ◼   ► open it up and be like okay I can't run 32-bit apps in this mode because this is super awesome

00:55:24 ◼   ► mode of Mac OS, you know, Monterey Bay Otter. And then you're--but you can go in and turn

00:55:32 ◼   ► it to less awesome mode and reboot, and everything will be kind of drab and gray, but you can

00:55:38 ◼   ► run your old apps. And as a user, you're like, "Oh, hmm, okay, I'll do that." And so if you

00:55:44 ◼   ► do that, then maybe the next year when you update again and it says, "Sorry, super awesome

00:55:49 ◼   ► mode is the only mode now and you can't run 32-bit apps," you'll be a little less surprised.

00:55:53 ◼   ► I think you still might be grumpy about it and you may be surprised, but I feel like

00:55:57 ◼   ► this that actually is one of the values in doing the with compromises step.

00:56:03 ◼   ► Is it like it's like, no, no, no, no, we're serious.

00:56:05 ◼   ► This is going to go away.

00:56:07 ◼   ► Like puts it in your fit.

00:56:08 ◼   ► This is like, this is it puts it in your face.

00:56:10 ◼   ► Once the next step will be to get it like where you're going to have to start changing

00:56:14 ◼   ► settings to run it.

00:56:15 ◼   ► And then the final step is it doesn't run.

00:56:17 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:56:19 ◼   ► It's going to frustrate people.

00:56:20 ◼   ► It's a performance issue.

00:56:22 ◼   ► Is that the idea?

00:56:22 ◼   ► I think that's part of it. Metal is a 64-bit thing. It's performance to a degree, but I

00:56:29 ◼   ► think it's also just maintenance. It will be easier when they can just say, "Everything

00:56:35 ◼   ► in the system runs 64-bit clean. We don't have to translate. There's nothing we have

00:56:41 ◼   ► to do. All the old crud goes away. All that 32-bit code." And that includes QuickTime.

00:56:46 ◼   ► like it's gone, right? 32-bit QuickTime, gone. I imagine that that's less maintenance work

00:56:52 ◼   ► and that the system will be better for it as a, you know, as a gestalt, as an overall

00:56:58 ◼   ► system, right? You're ripping out the legacy stuff. The problem is when you rip out the

00:57:02 ◼   ► legacy stuff, you take stuff people are using with it. And I mean, you could argue that

00:57:07 ◼   ► that's one of the reasons Windows was so bad for so long is that Microsoft's customers

00:57:11 ◼   ► did not let them rip anything out ever. I mean, it was very hard, much harder than Apple.

00:57:17 ◼   ► Right, this might need to run on a set-top box in Vietnam, like, "We need to keep this."

00:57:22 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly right. And so, you know, Apple's good at transitions, and this is actually

00:57:28 ◼   ► kind of a long and kind one. I'm not saying that people who are angry about it can be

00:57:32 ◼   ► angry about it, because if you're losing your favorite app, it makes sense. I will point

00:57:36 ◼   ► out for a while now it's been legal to run Mac OS in a virtual machine and as ridiculous

00:57:44 ◼   ► as it is if you have an app that you absolutely have to run and it's a 32-bit app you could

00:57:49 ◼   ► probably make a virtual machine of High Sierra or Sierra or El Capitan or Yosemite or you

00:57:55 ◼   ► know or anything that's covered by that license in VMware or Parallels and keep it around

00:58:02 ◼   ► and it will run and it's legal to do that with old operating system versions.

00:58:06 ◼   ► And that may be one way that people keep some of this stuff alive.

00:58:08 ◼   ► I wouldn't recommend using Final Cut Pro 7 in emulation, right?

00:58:13 ◼   ► Auntie Sue is not going to do that to keep her favorite Solitaire game going.

00:58:17 ◼   ► Well, that's where the real bummer is going to happen.

00:58:20 ◼   ► Now Auntie Sue may just keep her old computer.

00:58:24 ◼   ► But until they put out that Mac Pro, she's been waiting for it.

00:58:27 ◼   ► Exactly right.

00:58:28 ◼   ► Finally, she says, "I've been using this G5 for 15 years,

00:58:32 ◼   ► and now I'm going to upgrade to the Turbo Charger Solitaire. And then there's the thing that Myke

00:58:36 ◼   ► and I have been talking about for a while now, which is there's also the rumors it's the elephant,

00:58:40 ◼   ► because last week was all of the parables. Like the elephant in the room here is what's the future

00:58:46 ◼   ► of the Mac, because there's like going to 64-bit and there's the rumors about leaving Intel behind

00:58:51 ◼   ► and there's this question of like what do they do with, are they going to do something like the

00:58:56 ◼   ► rumor about Marzipan where it's like iOS apps that also run on the Mac. All these things are swirling

00:59:01 ◼   ► around because I have those moments where I think, I don't know, if 32-bit, old 32-bit

00:59:08 ◼   ► Mac software maybe may not be the only thing we're going to be asked to leave

00:59:12 ◼   ► behind on this platform in the next few years. I don't know. At some point if

00:59:17 ◼   ► you leave everything behind there's nothing left. It's a platform

00:59:21 ◼   ► transition and not just a software transition inside a platform, but Apple

00:59:25 ◼   ► may test us on that one. Yeah, so anyway 32-bit apps, check it out. You can find

00:59:29 ◼   ► out what apps you're running that are 32-bit. First off, if you're running

00:59:32 ◼   ► 1013.4, it will tell you now that we're past April 12th. It will tell you the first time

00:59:38 ◼   ► you launch it, only the first time. I dropped in a little link to this. I mean,

00:59:42 ◼   ► most people might not probably know how to do this, but OS X daily has a real quick little

00:59:46 ◼   ► how-to on using your little Apple menu and finding where you can locate these.

00:59:49 ◼   ► Yeah, about this Mac, click on System Report, click on Applications, and one of the columns

00:59:53 ◼   ► is Intel 64-bit and it says yes or no. You can even sort it, sort it and then look at

00:59:59 ◼   ► all the nos. All the Adobe apps. My Adobe Air updater, oh no. I know, I found some files

01:00:06 ◼   ► that I had a welcome to Lion, or getting started with Lion app. Oh wow. Deep down in a really

01:00:15 ◼   ► weird folder somewhere. I sent Stephen Hackett because I know he likes really old Mac things,

01:00:20 ◼   ► a link to that. It was just, um, yeah, I had welcomed to know it was welcome to leopard.

01:00:26 ◼   ► Wow. Welcome to tiger. And also a MacBook pro user's guide for a MacBook pro that included

01:00:32 ◼   ► an apple remote, a DVI to VGA adapter and a CD drive. So that's like, great. How long has that

01:00:38 ◼   ► been in my mini migrations of my, my Mac? Nobody needs those ports anymore. No, no, it's not that,

01:00:46 ◼   ► not that important. I wanted to talk to you because you're on this podcast and I want you

01:00:53 ◼   ► to explain something because there was news about how a new version of the app Drafts is coming out.

01:00:58 ◼   ► There's Drafts 5 and they've got a Drafts Pro and you know I love drafts.

01:01:03 ◼   ► That's funny. That's a good one. You get a ding for that.

01:01:07 ◼   ► First pick in the draft, I'll pick the app Drafts. So I want to ask you about this because I have

01:01:13 ◼   ► heard people extol the virtues of drafts, and I have to admit I think I've never

01:01:17 ◼   ► really gotten it. And I'm somebody who writes things on my iPad and my

01:01:22 ◼   ► iPhone, I write articles on my iPad, I do all sorts of stuff on iOS, and I know

01:01:27 ◼   ► people rave about this, and now with this new version coming out, I thought I'm

01:01:31 ◼   ► going to have somebody on who can probably talk to me about like why, you

01:01:36 ◼   ► know, why this app works and, you know, does it change your approach to putting

01:01:40 ◼   ► text into an iOS device?

01:01:42 ◼   ► Yeah, I just dropped in a link to a podcast I did with Greg Pierce and visiting with Rene

01:01:50 ◼   ► Ritchie to talk about drafts.

01:01:51 ◼   ► But you know, everybody has such a different approach and a different mindset for how we

01:01:55 ◼   ► use our various devices.

01:01:57 ◼   ► And there's a pattern that I fell into on starting obviously with my phone that's been

01:02:02 ◼   ► a very interesting pattern for me.

01:02:03 ◼   ► So first of all, I mean, one of the things that's a little bit perplexing about drafts

01:02:07 ◼   ► is that when you open it up, it's just kind of like a big text

01:02:12 ◼   ► field.

01:02:12 ◼   ► It's blank.

01:02:13 ◼   ► You're like, hmm.

01:02:13 ◼   ► It's very blank.

01:02:14 ◼   ► And there aren't a lot of buttons to click.

01:02:16 ◼   ► It's not really clear what you're supposed to do next.

01:02:18 ◼   ► And I think someone could be forgiven for thinking it's just

01:02:21 ◼   ► like a little-- that it really stops at being

01:02:25 ◼   ► a diminished version of notes.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Like, you just type stuff in, and I

01:02:28 ◼   ► guess that goes somewhere.

01:02:30 ◼   ► The quick version is that under the hood,

01:02:34 ◼   ► drafts can do a lot of stuff to your text.

01:02:37 ◼   ► That could be text transformations.

01:02:38 ◼   ► That could be sending it to someplace else.

01:02:41 ◼   ► In the current version, it's not at the level of something

01:02:44 ◼   ► like workflow.

01:02:45 ◼   ► So the new version will do a lot of really, really interesting

01:02:52 ◼   ► stuff.

01:02:53 ◼   ► But rather than get too deep into that,

01:02:54 ◼   ► listen to that podcast if you want to hear more.

01:02:56 ◼   ► And I think Greg's going to be talking

01:02:57 ◼   ► about this a lot in the coming week as the app comes out.

01:02:59 ◼   ► But I can just tell you why it works for me.

01:03:04 ◼   ► Not that it should work for everybody,

01:03:05 ◼   ► but there's a funny thing I discovered about myself once I started using this app.

01:03:11 ◼   ► Ordinarily in the past, if I wanted to send somebody a text message, I'd go to the message app and start typing.

01:03:18 ◼   ► If I wanted to type an email, I'd hit C and compose a new message in Gmail.

01:03:24 ◼   ► There are other kinds of things you'd think to put on the calendar.

01:03:27 ◼   ► The first powerful thing that Drafts does is it can be a starting point for pretty much any kind of text.

01:03:32 ◼   ► So I keep that in my little dock, click it, start typing.

01:03:36 ◼   ► And then a common usage for me in the early days was,

01:03:39 ◼   ► I've always had a particular fetish

01:03:41 ◼   ► for being able to send email without seeing the incoming

01:03:45 ◼   ► email.

01:03:45 ◼   ► So for a long time for me, it's been a holy grail

01:03:48 ◼   ► to not have to open an email app just to send an email.

01:03:50 ◼   ► Because if I'm not in the-- well,

01:03:53 ◼   ► I'm perhaps well known or notorious for this idea

01:03:56 ◼   ► that you shouldn't be doing email all the time.

01:03:58 ◼   ► You should be checking your email at times

01:04:00 ◼   ► when you make time to do something about it.

01:04:02 ◼   ► I still really believe that.

01:04:04 ◼   ► I don't have any email notifications on.

01:04:06 ◼   ► But I do need to send email sometimes.

01:04:07 ◼   ► So just as one example, I have a little functionality in there

01:04:11 ◼   ► where I type something.

01:04:13 ◼   ► I type, you know, lunch downtown next week.

01:04:18 ◼   ► I type two spaces.

01:04:19 ◼   ► I type a little bit of text, hey Jason,

01:04:21 ◼   ► do you want to have lunch at da-da-da-da next week?

01:04:23 ◼   ► Love, Merlin.

01:04:24 ◼   ► And this candy little script knows

01:04:26 ◼   ► that in this context for this command,

01:04:29 ◼   ► take that first line of text in drafts.

01:04:32 ◼   ► that's gonna be the subject line of an email.

01:04:34 ◼   ► Anything after that line is the body of the email.

01:04:37 ◼   ► And so basically I can take my time

01:04:39 ◼   ► to type in this little window,

01:04:40 ◼   ► type the things I need to say, hit a button,

01:04:42 ◼   ► and that then basically pops open a new mail

01:04:44 ◼   ► where I can drop in the person's name,

01:04:47 ◼   ► et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01:04:48 ◼   ► So the first thing was that became very useful to me

01:04:51 ◼   ► 'cause there's lots of times where I want a quick way,

01:04:54 ◼   ► like something I've seen Dan Morin suffer from

01:04:57 ◼   ► that you suffered from.

01:04:58 ◼   ► Any time you do stuff in a CMS, back in the day,

01:05:01 ◼   ► You would learn not to type long things in a text area

01:05:04 ◼   ► because you just couldn't trust it.

01:05:06 ◼   ► The browser might crash, you lose your work.

01:05:08 ◼   ► I imagine you ran into that in the past trying to be a cowboy.

01:05:11 ◼   ► Don't write it in the CMS.

01:05:13 ◼   ► Don't write it in the CMS.

01:05:14 ◼   ► So the simple way that I found it very useful

01:05:17 ◼   ► is that was a real neat way for me to know that whenever

01:05:20 ◼   ► I needed-- even if I knew exactly where it needed to go,

01:05:24 ◼   ► I would often start there.

01:05:26 ◼   ► I had the same interface every time I was dealing with text.

01:05:29 ◼   ► This is not for everybody, but this is for me.

01:05:31 ◼   ► I didn't want to necessarily open the email app.

01:05:33 ◼   ► I didn't want to open the message app.

01:05:34 ◼   ► If it's an important thing, I want to look at it.

01:05:36 ◼   ► I want to see if there's any red lines under it

01:05:37 ◼   ► telling me it's misspelled.

01:05:38 ◼   ► I'm going to look at it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01:05:40 ◼   ► So I did that for a pretty good long time.

01:05:42 ◼   ► A lot of times what I would just do is one of my scripts

01:05:44 ◼   ► takes the first line of the drafts file and anything

01:05:50 ◼   ► after it.

01:05:50 ◼   ► And so basically it takes the first line

01:05:52 ◼   ► and creates a new text file on Dropbox with a date stamp

01:05:56 ◼   ► on it.

01:05:57 ◼   ► This becomes a great way for things

01:05:59 ◼   ► to get from the ephemeral world.

01:06:01 ◼   ► I use draft fairly ephemerally.

01:06:03 ◼   ► Many people use it for much more than that.

01:06:04 ◼   ► I use it as a place to start text,

01:06:06 ◼   ► and then I often send it somewhere else.

01:06:08 ◼   ► And then I can go into NV alt, TextMate, or editorial on iOS

01:06:13 ◼   ► and do other stuff with it.

01:06:16 ◼   ► OK, so that in itself is pretty useful.

01:06:17 ◼   ► I don't know if that's enough to make people want to buy it,

01:06:20 ◼   ► but just that first pattern of always starting your text

01:06:23 ◼   ► in this similar kind of area, it makes

01:06:26 ◼   ► you careful about what you're doing and prevents mistakes.

01:06:28 ◼   ► But then I noticed a fascinating thing start to happen

01:06:33 ◼   ► that I would not have noticed if I always

01:06:34 ◼   ► went to the supposed destination app to do it.

01:06:37 ◼   ► So I discovered that a lot of times,

01:06:41 ◼   ► something started as an idea.

01:06:42 ◼   ► And then I started moving my fingers,

01:06:44 ◼   ► and something happened.

01:06:45 ◼   ► And once I was open to the idea that the text could

01:06:48 ◼   ► go anywhere, and I had to think about where it went next,

01:06:51 ◼   ► a funny thing happened.

01:06:52 ◼   ► I realized that a lot of times, I'd

01:06:54 ◼   ► start to write something that I thought

01:06:55 ◼   ► was going to be a text message--

01:06:57 ◼   ► yes-- in drafts.

01:06:58 ◼   ► And I go, you know what?

01:06:59 ◼   ► This is probably better as an email.

01:07:01 ◼   ► I changed my mode of thinking.

01:07:02 ◼   ► And now I'm writing an email in there instead of a text message.

01:07:05 ◼   ► Other times, you're about to write somebody a really snarky email.

01:07:08 ◼   ► And you go, oh, you know what?

01:07:09 ◼   ► This would be better to just be a mean subtweet.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Maybe I should do that instead.

01:07:13 ◼   ► This should really be an angry blog post denouncing this person.

01:07:16 ◼   ► But then there's other ones, too, where how often have you

01:07:19 ◼   ► started to basically complain to somebody about something

01:07:23 ◼   ► or request something from them?

01:07:25 ◼   ► And you end up rubber ducking a little bit.

01:07:27 ◼   ► And by typing, you start to realize the answer

01:07:29 ◼   ► to your own problem.

01:07:30 ◼   ► So you could go into drafts and start

01:07:32 ◼   ► writing a long, mean email about this problem

01:07:35 ◼   ► that somebody's caused for you.

01:07:36 ◼   ► And as you're typing and rubber ducking, you suddenly go, oh,

01:07:39 ◼   ► you know what?

01:07:39 ◼   ► This actually could just be something

01:07:41 ◼   ► that goes to a to-do list, something

01:07:42 ◼   ► I can take care of myself.

01:07:44 ◼   ► And then maybe sometimes-- how about this?

01:07:47 ◼   ► Let's really pop the stack.

01:07:48 ◼   ► Maybe you realize as you're about to communicate

01:07:50 ◼   ► with somebody, you realize, you know what?

01:07:52 ◼   ► I'm really talking to myself, and that's OK.

01:07:54 ◼   ► This actually needs to go into a diary,

01:07:56 ◼   ► or this needs to go into some kind of a running file.

01:07:58 ◼   ► You see where I'm going with this.

01:07:59 ◼   ► Once you open yourself up to that idea,

01:08:01 ◼   ► I think an interesting kind of philosophical change

01:08:03 ◼   ► in writing can happen, which is that you say,

01:08:06 ◼   ► it doesn't matter where this will end up,

01:08:08 ◼   ► really, it can start, it always should start in drafts.

01:08:12 ◼   ► And once I'm done typing the thing that I like,

01:08:14 ◼   ► then I decide what to do with it and where it goes.

01:08:17 ◼   ► And so that's been really powerful for me.

01:08:19 ◼   ► And it's not even getting into the redonkulous number

01:08:22 ◼   ► of things that you can do with this.

01:08:23 ◼   ► You can send it to Fantastical,

01:08:25 ◼   ► or it'll be parsed for natural language.

01:08:27 ◼   ► You could, as I say, send it to Dropbox.

01:08:29 ◼   ► You could append or prepend to a list somewhere.

01:08:32 ◼   ► And that's all available.

01:08:33 ◼   ► You just kind of slide over to this little menu.

01:08:35 ◼   ► And you can send stuff anywhere you want it to be.

01:08:36 ◼   ► And yes, you can send it straight to an email app.

01:08:39 ◼   ► You can send it to Messages.

01:08:41 ◼   ► You could send it to wherever you want it to go.

01:08:43 ◼   ► There's a rich collection of these things

01:08:45 ◼   ► that people put together in a directory where

01:08:47 ◼   ► you can find stuff that'll work for you,

01:08:49 ◼   ► all the way down to things like markdown transformations, HTML

01:08:52 ◼   ► previews. All that kind of stuff is in there and the language is too sophisticated for

01:08:58 ◼   ► me to do from scratch but easy enough for me to change to do the kinds of things I want

01:09:02 ◼   ► to do. So for me, Drafts is where all text starts.

01:09:05 ◼   ► I like the idea, this is the part that I really get, which is instead it's a real shift, right,

01:09:12 ◼   ► because we think in terms, at least, okay, we, I think, and I think a lot of us have

01:09:16 ◼   ► been trained to think in terms of apps on our Macs and especially on our iOS devices,

01:09:21 ◼   ► which is not "I need to write something." It's "I need to open notes for this kind of

01:09:26 ◼   ► -- what kind of text is this?" Then I'll put it in notes. What kind of text is this? I'll

01:09:29 ◼   ► put it in reminders. What kind of text is this? Gmail. This one goes to Fantastical.

01:09:34 ◼   ► This one goes to Google Docs. This one goes to BB Edit, right? Like, in the end, I have

01:09:39 ◼   ► all this overhead that is classifying what I think I'm going to do and pick the right

01:09:46 ◼   ► tool for the job.

01:09:47 ◼   ► It's almost like what app wants me to use it right now.

01:09:50 ◼   ► - Right, right.

01:09:51 ◼   ► And what you're saying is, if you kind of let go of that

01:09:53 ◼   ► and just say, "I'm gonna start it in drafts,"

01:09:56 ◼   ► that doesn't preclude you from finishing it somewhere else,

01:10:01 ◼   ► but it means that you don't actually have to do

01:10:03 ◼   ► that overhead before you start typey typing.

01:10:06 ◼   ► - You put it very well.

01:10:07 ◼   ► And I guess one part I should mention,

01:10:09 ◼   ► 'cause it's so important, is that it kind of wants

01:10:12 ◼   ► to be ephemeral, but have a good memory.

01:10:16 ◼   ► So you start typing in one of these.

01:10:18 ◼   ► And first of all, these can all be synced.

01:10:21 ◼   ► I think I was doing it through Dropbox.

01:10:23 ◼   ► I don't even remember.

01:10:24 ◼   ► But now, I mean, in the latest version,

01:10:25 ◼   ► it just works great with iCloud.

01:10:27 ◼   ► So on all of my devices, all my iOS devices,

01:10:30 ◼   ► Drafts is running, as soon as I start typing,

01:10:33 ◼   ► it's basically creating a new file, a new buffer.

01:10:35 ◼   ► It just goes into the cloud.

01:10:36 ◼   ► And at any time, you can go back.

01:10:38 ◼   ► You can do a search for any string

01:10:39 ◼   ► to find what you're looking for.

01:10:40 ◼   ► The new version includes stuff like tags and flagging,

01:10:43 ◼   ► if you like that sort of stuff.

01:10:44 ◼   ► But what you're describing here is,

01:10:46 ◼   ► let's say I get distracted and go somewhere else,

01:10:47 ◼   ► but I don't have to go save it out of a browser window.

01:10:50 ◼   ► It's already saved in there, and I can search all that stuff

01:10:52 ◼   ► very easily.

01:10:53 ◼   ► Another nice new thing-- not new thing, but a nice feature--

01:10:55 ◼   ► is you can select the amount of time

01:10:59 ◼   ► before it automatically creates a new blank page saving

01:11:02 ◼   ► your old one.

01:11:04 ◼   ► So you might want to set that to five minutes.

01:11:06 ◼   ► You might want to set that to one minute, where you're like,

01:11:08 ◼   ► I'll be working on this, move around on the phone,

01:11:10 ◼   ► come back, copy, paste, do whatever.

01:11:11 ◼   ► It's got a great extension where you can create a new file

01:11:15 ◼   ► or append and prepend using iOS extensions, which

01:11:17 ◼   ► is hugely useful when you're making show notes

01:11:19 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:11:21 ◼   ► But then there's a new thing he's added called,

01:11:23 ◼   ► I think it's called Focus Mode, which

01:11:24 ◼   ► is just always leave my last note up until I say otherwise.

01:11:28 ◼   ► So yeah, it really can be adjusted

01:11:31 ◼   ► to however you like to work.

01:11:33 ◼   ► But all it really requires is-- all it requires

01:11:36 ◼   ► is the vast change in thinking that

01:11:38 ◼   ► says I'm not going to think about the app

01:11:40 ◼   ► until I'm done figuring out what I have to say.

01:11:42 ◼   ► - All right, thank you for that.

01:11:43 ◼   ► - You know, and the guy works hard and it's a good app

01:11:46 ◼   ► and I want to support him.

01:11:47 ◼   ► These are the kinds of apps that have made my life good.

01:11:49 ◼   ► And again, I'm not trying, I don't mean this as a sales job

01:11:53 ◼   ► so much as to say like, you know, philosophically,

01:11:55 ◼   ► if there are apps that mean the world to you, you know,

01:11:58 ◼   ► get out there and support them

01:11:59 ◼   ► because that's what it takes for them to stay alive.

01:12:01 ◼   ► - That's true.

01:12:02 ◼   ► - I'm all for people, you know, charging for their work

01:12:04 ◼   ► and I would pay for this every year, no sweat.

01:12:07 ◼   ► - All right, I will check out version five.

01:12:09 ◼   ► I'll put links in the show notes to their blog posts about what they're doing.

01:12:12 ◼   ► Uh, you ready for some ask upgrade?

01:12:15 ◼   ► Oh, I certainly am.

01:12:16 ◼   ► Wait, what's the sound for that?

01:12:18 ◼   ► Is that choo choo choo?

01:12:19 ◼   ► There's some lasers that happened, but they're warming up now because we have a

01:12:21 ◼   ► sponsor before that.

01:12:22 ◼   ► And I have to admit this is a breaking news in what may be a first for upgrade.

01:12:28 ◼   ► We have a followup from a sponsor, James Thompson, the maker of Peacock.

01:12:34 ◼   ► He wrote down here, the makers of Peacock.

01:12:36 ◼   ► Well, James and Saskia are our TLA systems and they make Peacock.

01:12:39 ◼   ► The scientific calculator, I doubt she approved this.

01:12:41 ◼   ► - It's the Scottish "we."

01:12:42 ◼   ► - I doubt that Saskia approved this text.

01:12:44 ◼   ► Anyway, the makers of PCALC, the scientific calculator

01:12:47 ◼   ► you didn't even know you needed, would like us to point out

01:12:50 ◼   ► that the reverse Polish notation does not, in fact,

01:12:52 ◼   ► involve any form of sausages,

01:12:54 ◼   ► despite what I said two weeks ago.

01:12:55 ◼   ► So just putting it out there.

01:12:57 ◼   ► It does not, you don't actually turn around

01:12:59 ◼   ► and eat a sausage,

01:13:00 ◼   ► and that's not what reverse Polish notation is.

01:13:03 ◼   ► I still don't know what it is.

01:13:04 ◼   ► - It seems very misleading.

01:13:05 ◼   ► - Let me go on, because this is basically,

01:13:07 ◼   ► this ad is going to explain why I'm wrong.

01:13:09 ◼   ► RPN is actually an alternative way of calculating where you enter the numbers

01:13:12 ◼   ► first followed by the operator. So 6 enter 7 multiply would give you the

01:13:19 ◼   ► ultimate answer of 42. It was popularized by Hewlett-Packard with their desktop

01:13:24 ◼   ► calculators in the 70s and 80s and caught on especially with scientists and

01:13:27 ◼   ► engineers, so now you know. But you don't have to use RPN with PCALC. Of course

01:13:32 ◼   ► that's just one of the many options that let you customize it exactly as you wish.

01:13:36 ◼   ► Our friend Dr. Drang has a nice post about how he built his own, like, you can build your own interface.

01:13:43 ◼   ► There's an editing mode where you can move and resize the buttons, replace the ones you don't use.

01:13:48 ◼   ► So you can literally, like, make PCALC's calculator.

01:13:51 ◼   ► It doesn't—it's got a bunch of layouts built in, but you can customize all of them.

01:13:56 ◼   ► You can change all of them. It's crazy.

01:13:59 ◼   ► And if you bought a new iPad, you may be shocked to know the iPad doesn't come with a calculator at all.

01:14:04 ◼   ► Seems like the kind of thing they'd want to include.

01:14:07 ◼   ► Seems weird, yeah, but you can get Peacock.

01:14:09 ◼   ► There's a light version that's free, contains no invasive adverts as they say in Scotland,

01:14:15 ◼   ► or analytics as they also say in Scotland, whatsoever.

01:14:19 ◼   ► And if you like it, you can upgrade to the full version and unlock all of the other features.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Peacock is available on every single Apple platform.

01:14:27 ◼   ► Not kidding. Not kidding.

01:14:29 ◼   ► Although, James, it's not yet capable.

01:14:31 ◼   ► Okay, let me phrase it this way.

01:14:33 ◼   ► - We got it on HomePod, you can get it on Apple TV.

01:14:36 ◼   ► - At WWDC, when they announce that you can do HomePod apps,

01:14:39 ◼   ► I am telling you the first HomePod app that will exist

01:14:42 ◼   ► will be, why don't you tell me that math problem

01:14:45 ◼   ► by James Thompson.

01:14:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:14:47 ◼   ► But it is on Apple Watch, it is on Apple TV

01:14:50 ◼   ► if you need to do some calculations on your television,

01:14:52 ◼   ► and if they ever release those AR glasses,

01:14:55 ◼   ► Peacock will certainly be there

01:14:56 ◼   ► with a giant augmented calculator in your face on day one.

01:15:00 ◼   ► search the app store for pcalc or go to pcalc.com/upgrade for more details

01:15:05 ◼   ► and if you're going to WWDC find James he has sweet pcalc pins that he will be

01:15:12 ◼   ► giving away

01:15:13 ◼   ► he's a very nice man and I will also say sunday sunday at the sunburn monster

01:15:18 ◼   ► trucks driving around in the about screen

01:15:21 ◼   ► golden bananas

01:15:25 ◼   ► I use pcalc this is they didn't tell us to say this I use pcalc every weekday

01:15:30 ◼   ► afternoon because my daughter is 10 and she's learning some kind of monkey balls banana

01:15:33 ◼   ► pants math that I don't understand. She does factor rainbows, she does all these things

01:15:37 ◼   ► I don't understand what the hell she's doing. I don't know how to quote unquote help her

01:15:41 ◼   ► but what I do know is when it is time to figure out some wackadoo division thing where she

01:15:45 ◼   ► draws a rainbow and a grid I will open Peacock and I will check the math for myself in my

01:15:49 ◼   ► head to make sure that I did it right. So thank you to James. Is it the new math? Oh

01:15:54 ◼   ► God. It's so confusing. I don't understand it either. There was a whole thing that my

01:16:00 ◼   ► both my kids did, whereas like now, you know, cluster the numbers or something.

01:16:03 ◼   ► I'm like, what? Is that a new thing? Oh, yeah. You could make a part of the

01:16:07 ◼   ► number family or the number story. You're like, well, you're just saying

01:16:09 ◼   ► nouns. Like, that doesn't mean anything. What does that mean? They all nestle together and they

01:16:12 ◼   ► love each other. When I was your age, when I was your age, we just had to

01:16:16 ◼   ► memorize things. Watch out, Merlin. Lasers. Lasers time.

01:16:22 ◼   ► Lister Matt says, "In the context of Marzipan and Apple leaving Intel, could

01:16:28 ◼   ► apps contain both ARM and x86 instructions? Could apps that contain both be feasible?

01:16:35 ◼   ► x86 instructions run by emulation on ARM, but an iMac/Mac Pro, you know, contain both

01:16:42 ◼   ► ARM and x86 for native performance? He says we could call them Fusion apps. And what I'll say

01:16:46 ◼   ► to Matt is we had these, actually, the last time. They're called fat binaries. We had them for the

01:16:52 ◼   ► Intel PowerPC transition. And yes, I would imagine if we're going through a processor transition,

01:16:58 ◼   ► one of the things that Apple will let people do is compile their apps for

01:17:05 ◼   ► both processor architectures inside the bundle. Now that said, they have done some

01:17:11 ◼   ► interesting things with app thinning on the App Store, so it's possible that on

01:17:14 ◼   ► the App Store what you'll do is you'll upload both the binaries and based on

01:17:18 ◼   ► what architecture your computer is running, only that one will download,

01:17:23 ◼   ► right? That may be the modern version of the fat binaries that you upload all the

01:17:27 ◼   ► binaries to the App Store and then only the right one comes down. But Fusion

01:17:32 ◼   ► Apps, we called it "fat binaries" back in the day and it worked fine. Like, they were

01:17:37 ◼   ► a little bit bigger, they were fat, not to shame them, but they were

01:17:40 ◼   ► larger because they contain two executables inside. But the bottom line

01:17:43 ◼   ► was, you just double-click. When I was younger, I was often

01:17:47 ◼   ► criticized for my love of curvy apps.

01:17:49 ◼   ► Yeah, well, you know, I love my curvy apps. Back in the day, when we were kids, you

01:17:53 ◼   ► could have the like the regular app or the husky app. That was your other choice.

01:17:58 ◼   ► They had a whole section for us at Sears. Absolutely, with the tough skins and the agar animals.

01:18:03 ◼   ► I'm glad you explained that to listener Matt because I recognize those all as English

01:18:08 ◼   ► strings. Remember fat binaries? That was the thing. Oh that I remember. Oh sure. Yeah but

01:18:12 ◼   ► this is an x86 arm. There's a lot of confusion going on. It's times of confusion. That's

01:18:17 ◼   ► what made me, oh it's absolutely platinum age. That's why when you were talking about

01:18:19 ◼   ► the 32-bit stuff I was remembering back when was it not Rosetta what was it

01:18:25 ◼   ► called where you could have an old version that would run not an emulation

01:18:29 ◼   ► but like all the Microsoft apps hadn't been updated do you remember these times

01:18:32 ◼   ► well so there were a couple there's Rosetta which was the code translation

01:18:35 ◼   ► where it took a power PC app that didn't have an Intel version and ran it on an

01:18:39 ◼   ► Intel processor there was the blue box or whatever they call a classic which is

01:18:44 ◼   ► when they were you were running an OS 9 app inside OS 10 and basically in the

01:18:47 ◼   ► background hidden away there was a copy of OS 9 running but it would unless you

01:18:54 ◼   ► made it it wouldn't show it to you it would just show the app and that app

01:18:58 ◼   ► behaves completely differently from all the other apps because it was running in

01:19:01 ◼   ► in OS 9 in this emul- not an emulation layer but it was like a virtual machine

01:19:06 ◼   ► kind of layer where was running a virtual copy of OS 9 inside OS 10 it was

01:19:10 ◼   ► super weird. On the computer power of that time that's mental.

01:19:14 ◼   ► Yeah, it worked okay, but again, I think it shows you that Apple's track record of sort

01:19:18 ◼   ► of bending over backwards to smooth a transition as much as possible while not being afraid

01:19:23 ◼   ► to make them. Like, if they follow that rulebook, then we could probably guess about how they're

01:19:28 ◼   ► going to do it for any future transitions they're going to do. They're pretty good at

01:19:31 ◼   ► it, historically, but not afraid to make them, but pretty good at taking all the steps and

01:19:37 ◼   ► building in compatibility.

01:19:38 ◼   ► And they took Kaleidoscope away.

01:19:40 ◼   ► - That's true. I was thinking about how Microsoft's doing their ARM version of Windows 10,

01:19:45 ◼   ► and it's the same thing. They've got a code translation engine for x86 apps.

01:19:49 ◼   ► They run slow, but they run. And it's like, yeah, that's how you have to do that,

01:19:52 ◼   ► as opposed to the old version of Windows RT that they tried, where it was like, yeah,

01:19:56 ◼   ► it doesn't even try. Now they actually try. It's good. Lister Matthew wrote in to say,

01:20:04 ◼   ► "Do you think if Apple do decide to use their A-series chips in the MacBook,

01:20:09 ◼   ► they would enable cellular connectivity for Mac, something like an Apple SIM

01:20:13 ◼   ► built in and LTE bands. So the idea that maybe one of the things you could pick

01:20:17 ◼   ► up if you leave Intel behind is cellular Macs. And I don't think these

01:20:25 ◼   ► things are particularly connected. I felt for a while now, like, the big

01:20:30 ◼   ► problem to doing cellular connectivity on the Mac is that the Mac OS needs to

01:20:33 ◼   ► be updated, to be smart enough to like control who uses the network connection when you're

01:20:39 ◼   ► in a cellular mode, like add in a thing. Like I use Trip Mode and they could do something

01:20:44 ◼   ► like Trip Mode, although it's a little bit fiddly where like literally you say, "When

01:20:48 ◼   ► I'm on cellular, this app doesn't get to use the network because it's photos and it's going

01:20:51 ◼   ► to kill my..." That's what's kept me from getting all in on it is it's a little bit

01:20:55 ◼   ► like Little Snitch where there's a lot of breaking in time and configuring time. Yeah,

01:21:01 ◼   ► in your face for a while when you're when you're configuring it. So now if Apple could

01:21:04 ◼   ► do that, I think that's I think that's more likely the thing is Apple really evangelizing

01:21:09 ◼   ► developers and saying we're going to do cellular max. And by default, your your apps aren't

01:21:14 ◼   ► going to aren't going to be able to use the cell network. And you're going to have to

01:21:17 ◼   ► opt in with these very particular things in order for us not to kill the data allowances

01:21:23 ◼   ► of all of our users. I think that's what they need to do. Like listener Marco, I it seems

01:21:27 ◼   ► it does seem on the one hand crazy to me that they can't do that, especially after you've

01:21:31 ◼   ► had a cellular iPad. You know, it's hard to look back. It seems crazy. They can do it.

01:21:34 ◼   ► They just have not ever prioritized it for whatever reason. I think it's strange, but

01:21:39 ◼   ► they just haven't done it. Do you think part of its battery concerns? Uh, it could be.

01:21:43 ◼   ► It could be the battery is part of it. Um, although the, you know, Mac batteries are

01:21:46 ◼   ► way bigger than, than like phone batteries. Um, they, cause they use, they use more power.

01:21:51 ◼   ► Um, I don't know. I it's, it's, I've heard people say that they thought it was licensing

01:21:56 ◼   ► Well, I mean, just because it seems to stand to reason from a logical standpoint that you're

01:22:01 ◼   ► most likely to use LTE when you're not plugged in.

01:22:04 ◼   ► It's when you're somewhere that's not your house or somewhere that has Wi-Fi.

01:22:07 ◼   ► It's true.

01:22:08 ◼   ► Although sometimes, I mean, I use, now that I've got LTE in my iPad, I use it in my Starbucks

01:22:11 ◼   ► and they've got Wi-Fi, but it's terrible and I just don't bother anymore.

01:22:14 ◼   ► I just...

01:22:15 ◼   ► I think what blows me away is going and staying at a hotel or going anywhere with that terrible,

01:22:21 ◼   ► you know, free Wi-Fi, unprotected Wi-Fi.

01:22:24 ◼   ► And the first thing I do and when I'm doing the cost benefit of it, even if it's free

01:22:28 ◼   ► is is just do a speed test.

01:22:31 ◼   ► And last time we did that when we were in Los Angeles, it was mind boggling.

01:22:35 ◼   ► I mean, it was something like 10 times faster to use LTE over the Wi Fi.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Yeah, it was crazy.

01:22:42 ◼   ► Listener Wayne wrote in to say, couldn't the the creatives that Apple has hired so that

01:22:48 ◼   ► can observe them building products for the pro team be the ones who edit all of their

01:22:54 ◼   ► TV shows. I don't think that's a good idea. Yeah, I think that's I think there's like

01:23:00 ◼   ► in the lab. I think maybe Yeah, could Apple ask for access full access to the professionals

01:23:05 ◼   ► who are editing their shows but the way it works is Apple is giving money to a production

01:23:09 ◼   ► company and the production companies handing them a finished show that's happening in Korea.

01:23:13 ◼   ► It's not a thing where there's in the middle there's some people over at Apple who are

01:23:19 ◼   ► editing those shows for them. And I think that that, you know, maybe they could get

01:23:22 ◼   ► access to those things, those people. Of all the things where we get frustrated with Apple,

01:23:26 ◼   ► one of the ones that I find, and I'm not, I am not pining for a Mac Pro like as much

01:23:31 ◼   ► as some of my friends are. I'd love to see it just to know that Apple's still in the

01:23:34 ◼   ► game. But of all of the things, that's the one that sticks out the most to me of like,

01:23:39 ◼   ► Like, you can't see how people would want a really, really tricked-out desktop machine

01:23:45 ◼   ► and a really, really tricked-out laptop.

01:23:48 ◼   ► That's the one where, like, that just—there's got to be something strategic behind why they

01:23:52 ◼   ► are not doing—especially the kind of MacBook Pro that I'd like to have.

01:23:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

01:23:57 ◼   ► Strange.

01:23:58 ◼   ► Strange.

01:23:59 ◼   ► I think they're doing—you know, I don't know.

01:24:01 ◼   ► They have—I've had a couple people ask—this is not technically an ask upgrade question,

01:24:05 ◼   ► I've had a bunch of people say it's sort of like the bigger conspiracy theory, which is

01:24:10 ◼   ► that, could it be that the reason that the Mac development has been so sluggish for the

01:24:15 ◼   ► last few years is that everything Apple is doing is for this transitional platform where

01:24:19 ◼   ► they're going to switch everybody over and it's like we don't even want to make a new

01:24:23 ◼   ► Mac over here because in three years you're going to be buying this new thing that's not

01:24:27 ◼   ► quite a Mac and that's...

01:24:28 ◼   ► This has become the Apple version of QAnon where there's this one thing that explains

01:24:33 ◼   ► everything except it doesn't really make any sense.

01:24:35 ◼   ► Yeah, and my answer is yes, it is possible. In fact, we know it is certain that there

01:24:41 ◼   ► are people, I mean, I don't even have to go as far as secret. Like, I think that I think

01:24:45 ◼   ► the answer is yes, Apple has retasked it a lot of its people to work on an ARM based

01:24:51 ◼   ► platform. It's iOS, and the iPad and the iPhone. And that's what and that's what is happening

01:24:59 ◼   ► there. You don't need a big conspiracy. Could there be people pulled off who are working

01:25:03 ◼   ► on getting Mac OS on ARM ready to go or building kind of a proof of concept of future Mac hardware

01:25:10 ◼   ► that is kind of hybridized or is running on ARM laptop but running a version of Mac OS

01:25:18 ◼   ► or a hybrid of Mac OS and iOS. Yeah, I think it's entirely possible. I don't know if that

01:25:22 ◼   ► is, you know, those people getting pulled off is the reason why your particular bugaboo

01:25:29 ◼   ► about what Apple is doing is actually happening. That seems less likely, but it's possible.

01:25:36 ◼   ► I'm sure they're working on Skunk Works projects, some of which we will never see, and some

01:25:40 ◼   ► of which will be the Mac we're using in two years. I'm sure of both of those things.

01:25:46 ◼   ► listener Cory wrote in to say, "I want to ask upgrade when we might hear more from a

01:25:51 ◼   ► podcast tutorial segment. I would love your input." And my answer there is keep watching

01:25:57 ◼   ► the skies, Cory. Myke and I are currently planning, I'm going to pre-promote it now,

01:26:02 ◼   ► it's springtime. Myke and I are currently planning the Summer of Fun. The Summer of

01:26:08 ◼   ► Fun is returning, the upgrade Summer of Fun. It is returning for a new season of fun in

01:26:14 ◼   ► the summer. Fun takes planning. There's a bunch of things going on. So Myke's getting

01:26:17 ◼   ► married this summer and going on his honeymoon. And that means that there are huge gaps in

01:26:23 ◼   ► the upgrade schedule while he's getting married and on his honeymoon. And then not to mention

01:26:27 ◼   ► the fact that I'm going to Europe with my family for a family vacation that ends the

01:26:32 ◼   ► culminates in us going to London and being at Myke's wedding. So we have we have a whole

01:26:37 ◼   ► mess of a summer schedule. The summer schedule being a mess is what causes the upgrade summer

01:26:41 ◼   ► of fun because it forces us to pre record some stuff and come up with some evergreen

01:26:46 ◼   ► topics and some special episodes like when we drafted old max that one time that was

01:26:50 ◼   ► part of the Summer of Fun. So podcast tutorials right in your wheelhouse. So I think we're

01:26:54 ◼   ► going to do a podcasting episode as part of the Summer of Fun. So, you know, I can't tell

01:26:59 ◼   ► you when, but I think it will be during the Summer of Fun, so stay tuned for that, Cory.

01:27:04 ◼   ► This is a great question. Listener Richard asked, "What's your ratio of compliments to

01:27:10 ◼   ► moners for upgrade? Do you get a lot of haters?" And I'm going to say the same thing that I

01:27:16 ◼   ► I think Marco talks about on ATP a lot, which is, you know, podcasts, it's a lot harder

01:27:22 ◼   ► to be a hater of a podcast because you have to put in a huge time investment and it's

01:27:27 ◼   ► harder to just drive by. You get them because it's the internet, but it's a lot harder.

01:27:33 ◼   ► And I would say most of the feedback we get is very nice. People are helpful. They tell

01:27:37 ◼   ► us things that we don't know. They tell us things that we do know. They give us nice

01:27:42 ◼   ► compliments, they have a criticism about something, but I'd say they all, not all, mostly seem

01:27:47 ◼   ► so invested in the podcast that they're trying to help or they're trying to provide constructive

01:27:53 ◼   ► criticism and I don't mind the constructive stuff. And you know, people are people and

01:27:59 ◼   ► they have, everybody's got their weird take on it, but what I really don't like is the

01:28:03 ◼   ► people who are not invested, they don't know who you are, they don't know why you're doing

01:28:06 ◼   ► what you're doing, there's no context. Like the guy who was complaining to me about my

01:28:12 ◼   ► silly post about QuickTime Player 7, where it was like, "You don't understand the context

01:28:19 ◼   ► of this, but why not just do a drive-by unloading on somebody else on the internet?" And podcasts,

01:28:25 ◼   ► it's harder to do that, and that is one of the things that makes podcasts great.

01:28:29 ◼   ► One thing I try to always keep in mind, and I'm not just saying this for clapping, but

01:28:34 ◼   ► It's really nice that people listen and there's something special about podcasts and that

01:28:37 ◼   ► people get a very strong relationship.

01:28:40 ◼   ► If they end up liking it and listening often, you feel like you have a relationship with

01:28:43 ◼   ► that person.

01:28:44 ◼   ► And sometimes what one might say to somebody else, it feels like you know them well enough

01:28:49 ◼   ► that they would know the tone that you mean to strike.

01:28:53 ◼   ► So I think a lot of times it's just because people are very, very involved and they feel

01:28:55 ◼   ► strongly about the topics that you're talking about.

01:28:59 ◼   ► I mean, the only request that I would make is like, let's at least try and misunderstand

01:29:03 ◼   ► each other in thoughtful ways. Let's try and assume that neither of us is deliberately

01:29:08 ◼   ► trying to be a bad human being. And if we both agree to that, then you can have a dialogue

01:29:12 ◼   ► with people. But you know, it's just people, I'm the same way. There's all kinds of times

01:29:16 ◼   ► where I almost say kind of silly things to people because I assume they'll know who I

01:29:21 ◼   ► am and will get my tone based on the fact that I've listened to hundreds of hours of

01:29:24 ◼   ► their podcast when in fact I would just come off as a loon.

01:29:27 ◼   ► Yeah, that is, we talked about that after Myke went to PodCon and I went to see the

01:29:31 ◼   ► the Flop House Live where, and you were there too,

01:29:36 ◼   ► at the Flop House and it was,

01:29:40 ◼   ► that is something that is hard to do.

01:29:41 ◼   ► - That was a really good conversation you guys had.

01:29:43 ◼   ► - Thank you. - That was very good.

01:29:45 ◼   ► - The asymmetry of the relationship between an audience

01:29:48 ◼   ► and somebody who's making the thing.

01:29:50 ◼   ► And it does lead to some weird moments where it's like,

01:29:53 ◼   ► I know your voice, I know your anecdotes.

01:29:55 ◼   ► Sometimes people know the anecdotes way better than I do.

01:29:58 ◼   ► They're like, oh, it's like that time.

01:29:58 ◼   ► - Usually, usually. - It's like that time

01:30:01 ◼   ► in January of 2016 when you had a problem with your car.

01:30:04 ◼   ► - I can't believe you didn't mention that summer job you had.

01:30:06 ◼   ► - I'm like, "How do you even know that?"

01:30:09 ◼   ► And he's like, "Well, you mentioned on Upgrade episode 28."

01:30:12 ◼   ► And I'm like, "Oh my God," right?

01:30:13 ◼   ► So that's the challenges, but I've seen it from both sides.

01:30:17 ◼   ► So it's the example I gave the other day

01:30:19 ◼   ► in Slack somewhere was, you know, I could meet Dan McCoy

01:30:23 ◼   ► and I could say, "Hi, Dan.

01:30:25 ◼   ► I like your cat, Archie, who I've never met,

01:30:26 ◼   ► but I've seen you post your pictures

01:30:28 ◼   ► on the Instagram of Archie, and he's great,

01:30:30 ◼   ► and I'm sorry about your old cat who died. That was very sad. We were all very sad for

01:30:33 ◼   ► you and it's like, yeah, I could do that. That's super weird. But the fact is I do know

01:30:37 ◼   ► the name of Dan's cat and I have seen this cat.

01:30:40 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely. My daughter and I were hanging out this morning and I got a notification

01:30:45 ◼   ► at 9am on my phone that Griffin McElroy's birthday is in two days. And I experienced

01:30:52 ◼   ► that on so many levels because my first thought was, oh, and my daughter and I were like,

01:30:57 ◼   ► we should send him something with clowns or a mobile phone and like some kind of in-joke.

01:31:00 ◼   ► We should send him a birthday present." And then I was like, "You know, we probably shouldn't send

01:31:03 ◼   ► him a birthday present. And I probably should not have his birthday on my phone. What is wrong with

01:31:08 ◼   ► me? Why do I need to know his birthday?" Now I feel like a creep. - Well, and that's the thing.

01:31:13 ◼   ► I think that's, if you're a listener, you have to kind of strike that, that like they don't know you,

01:31:18 ◼   ► but you know them and be, you know, walk, walk softly and be, you know, be careful.

01:31:26 ◼   ► And then if you are on the other side of it, which I occasionally am, and it blows me away that I am

01:31:31 ◼   ► that fortunate enough to have people who like come up to you and tell you they like the stuff

01:31:35 ◼   ► that you do, because that is a super special, wonderful thing, right? It's incumbent on us

01:31:41 ◼   ► and responsible for us to understand that there's asymmetry and that we are in their ears and that

01:31:46 ◼   ► and that they know all these things about us. And that it isn't, it's unusual in terms

01:31:53 ◼   ► of like how our brains are wired, but it's nice and normal. And that, and, and, um, I'm

01:31:59 ◼   ► really bad at taking compliments. I'm terrible at it. It makes me want to go hide. It makes

01:32:04 ◼   ► me want to run away. And I have gotten much better at being able to say it because the

01:32:09 ◼   ► truth is I, it is very kind when people say nice things about you, but you have to remember

01:32:14 ◼   ► like you don't know them but they know you and I feel like if all of us just know understand

01:32:20 ◼   ► what the what the what the relationship is and that like you said these are people who

01:32:25 ◼   ► are everybody here is a good person and we're having a good time then then it all works

01:32:30 ◼   ► out fine but it is it is a little bit strange let's let's be excellent to each other and

01:32:34 ◼   ► that but that's why I also like like being on the other side of it because that was like

01:32:37 ◼   ► in short succession I got both sides of that of being you know going up to the people who

01:32:43 ◼   ► are on a podcast that I listen to all the time and know all the details about and can

01:32:48 ◼   ► say, "Oh, it's like that time," like I had that moment where Elliott Kaelin tweeted about

01:32:51 ◼   ► how he was with his kid at Train Town in Sonoma. And I replied back and I was like, "Hey,"

01:32:55 ◼   ► and all he did was show a picture of an object at Train Town. And I was like, "Hey, it's

01:33:01 ◼   ► Train Town." And I wrote him again and I said, "I'm sorry, I am now Twitter stalking you.

01:33:06 ◼   ► It's just that we used to take our kids to Train Town. I didn't mean to like out your

01:33:10 ◼   ► location where the helicopters are coming now to get you. That's not what I was trying

01:33:15 ◼   ► to do there. But I had that moment where I did cross the line. He was very nice. He was

01:33:18 ◼   ► like, "No, no, no. It's a great place for kids. We're up here visiting my wife's family."

01:33:22 ◼   ► And I didn't respond, "I know. Your wife's name is Danielle and her parents are from

01:33:26 ◼   ► Sonoma County." A little too creepy.

01:33:30 ◼   ► So you brought Sammy there?

01:33:32 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right. You brought your son? His name is Sammy? Yeah. So anyway, it's a

01:33:37 ◼   ► Funny world we live in. I got one more Ask Upgrade. We're going to go out on this one.

01:33:41 ◼   ► It's listener Andy who said, "Hey, Myke," who's not here, "Are you planning on covering

01:33:46 ◼   ► the Facebook testimony anywhere within the quiver of your podcast? It would be interesting

01:33:51 ◼   ► to hear yours and/or Snell's," that's me. He used my last name, "extended take." And

01:33:57 ◼   ► Andy, we haven't covered it here. I don't know if we will, given the timing of all of

01:34:01 ◼   ► this, but I recommend the download podcast to you, which I do every week, and it posts

01:34:06 ◼   ► on Thursday afternoon specific time and we recorded on Thursday morning specific time.

01:34:10 ◼   ► It's at relay FM slash download and it's covering the news of the week across all sorts of tech

01:34:15 ◼   ► topics and we have covered Facebook there like three out of the last four weeks because

01:34:19 ◼   ► it's all Facebook all the time. So if you want to hear and I'm in there, I will endorse

01:34:22 ◼   ► that podcast because first of all, the format for it is great. I mean you do a medium deep

01:34:26 ◼   ► dive on two topics with really, really good guests. You get such smart. There's the one

01:34:32 ◼   ► industry analyst woman you have on, I forget her name.

01:34:36 ◼   ► Right, Natalie Jarvey from the Hollywood Report. That's what I'm thinking of.

01:34:39 ◼   ► Streaming analyst, right?

01:34:40 ◼   ► And of course you get Lisa. Lisa Schmeiser is on there all the time, yeah.

01:34:44 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a really good show. Highly recommend it. Thank you, Marlon. All the great shows.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Well, Marlon, thank you so much for being on Upgrade. Oh, thanks for having me on.

01:34:51 ◼   ► It's always a pleasure.

01:34:53 ◼   ► It was so fun, and we have like, there's so much more we could have talked about.

01:34:56 ◼   ► I know. We could have gone on and on and on. We didn't talk about Apple leaks. We'll have to do that next time.

01:35:01 ◼   ► Dark Sky says it's gonna start drizzling soon at my house.

01:35:03 ◼   ► Yeah, that's right. That's right. See, we brought it all the way back around to the weather.

01:35:06 ◼   ► It's, yeah, it's looking rainy out there.

01:35:08 ◼   ► Thanks to listener Mihir again for having us talk about the weather.

01:35:11 ◼   ► Now that we're, now that our cruel anti-weather overlord Myke Hurley is out of the, out of the room,

01:35:16 ◼   ► we can talk about the weather on a podcast. This is what people tune in for.

01:35:20 ◼   ► That's right.

01:35:21 ◼   ► Thank you also to our sponsors FreshBooks, Pingdom, and Peacock.

01:35:26 ◼   ► And of course, you can find me on Twitter @JSnell.

01:35:30 ◼   ► You can find Merlin on Twitter @HotDogsLadies.

01:35:34 ◼   ► And of course, Merlin is the host of Reconcilable Differences

01:35:38 ◼   ► on this very podcast network.

01:35:40 ◼   ► And I'm the host of a lot of podcasts

01:35:42 ◼   ► on this very podcast network too.

01:35:44 ◼   ► - It's John Syracuse's show, but he lets me come on.

01:35:46 ◼   ► - That's nice.

01:35:47 ◼   ► Which one of us was the bad cop today, Merlin?

01:35:49 ◼   ► Was it me? Was it you?

01:35:50 ◼   ► Am I in the barrel?

01:35:51 ◼   ► - See, on this show, I think we're both the good cop.

01:35:53 ◼   ► - I think we are, because as we just said

01:35:55 ◼   ► about five minutes ago, the important thing is that just to act like everybody is the

01:35:59 ◼   ► good cop.

01:36:00 ◼   ► Yeah, man, we're all just people.

01:36:01 ◼   ► Everybody's a good cop.

01:36:02 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly right.

01:36:03 ◼   ► Well, thanks to everybody out there for listening to this episode of Upgrade.

01:36:05 ◼   ► Myke will be back next week to chastise me about all the ways that I ruined Upgrade this

01:36:09 ◼   ► week, but I don't care.

01:36:11 ◼   ► It's foggy out.

01:36:13 ◼   ► Say goodbye, Merlin Man.

01:36:15 ◼   ► Goodbye, Myke.

01:36:16 ◼   ► What?

01:36:17 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:36:17 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:36:19 ◼   ► (upbeat music)