Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:10 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 123.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by our friends at Encapsula, Freshbooks, and MacWeldon.

00:00:20 ◼   ► My name is Myke Hurley, I'm joined by Mr. Jason Snow. Aloha, Jason Snow.

00:00:24 ◼   ► Aloha, Myke Hurley. It's, uh, it's good to be back.

00:00:28 ◼   ► We, uh, listeners heard us a week ago, but we actually haven't talked for a couple of

00:00:33 ◼   ► weeks because we prerecorded the upgrade-ies.

00:00:36 ◼   ► So all good award shows.

00:00:37 ◼   ► Mm hmm.

00:00:38 ◼   ► Pre-taped.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Sure.

00:00:40 ◼   ► Yes.

00:00:41 ◼   ► Pre-taped.

00:00:42 ◼   ► In case of any run-ins, you know, as we said, um, I do want to note is there's just note

00:00:46 ◼   ► that this is episode 123.

00:00:48 ◼   ► Yes.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Easy as one, two, three.

00:00:51 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:00:52 ◼   ► Which means the upgrade has now caught up with connected.

00:00:55 ◼   ► Oh, interesting.

00:00:57 ◼   ► we just published episode 123 last week. So if trends continue, Upgrade will pass Connected

00:01:05 ◼   ► next year.

00:01:06 ◼   ► >> Well, it's just because we're consistent, Myke. That's the important thing, is where

00:01:12 ◼   ► we just post it every week. Have we missed a week? We've never missed a week.

00:01:15 ◼   ► >> I don't think we have. We may have missed one, but I don't think we have.

00:01:19 ◼   ► >> I've had a couple of guest hosts to fill in, but I don't think we've missed a week.

00:01:23 ◼   ► >> Nope.

00:01:24 ◼   ► >> So, good for us.

00:01:25 ◼   ► So the upgrade he does. Yes, gives us the ability to just to pass through that Christmas

00:01:31 ◼   ► week unscathed. Mm hmm. That's right. And that's good. That's good because I was I

00:01:36 ◼   ► was gone. We'll get to it. We have some follow up about where we were because neither of

00:01:40 ◼   ► us was was near our home in the last week. Talking about the upgrade is Johnny wrote

00:01:45 ◼   ► him with a pretty good suggestion. Shouldn't the worst gadget or screw up category get

00:01:50 ◼   ► downgrady at the Upgrady Awards. Do you know what? I really agree with this and

00:01:55 ◼   ► hope I can remember it. Yeah let's try to remember that for next year. So Johnny

00:02:00 ◼   ► set a reminder for December and let us know. You're talking to Johnny

00:02:06 ◼   ► like he's a voice assistant. Hey Johnny set a reminder to tell Myke to make it a

00:02:14 ◼   ► downgrady in December. Perfect. Something like that. Thank you Johnny. Johnny 5 is

00:02:19 ◼   ► alive. Yeah. It's a great suggestion. It did make me think, like, is there... you know

00:02:27 ◼   ► how, like, you get, like, those award shows that are just for making fun of things? Is

00:02:35 ◼   ► there, like, an April Fools edition of the Upgradies, which is the Downgradies? Oh my

00:02:42 ◼   ► Oh my god, I hope not. Who do we have to ask about that one? That sounds terrible.

00:02:48 ◼   ► Okay, well I asked the person who makes the decision, which is you.

00:02:52 ◼   ► Well, we'll see. Ask me. I like, um, April Fools' things.

00:02:59 ◼   ► So you never know, there could be a downgrade-ies coming your way in April, otherwise it would

00:03:05 ◼   ► just remain as a section of the upgrade-ies. Do we need more awards and drafts on this

00:03:11 ◼   ► show I don't know. I don't know. Somebody else, so do you want to mention that you did

00:03:16 ◼   ► a draft on one of your other podcasts that I've infest, I've ruined you and Stephen Hackett

00:03:20 ◼   ► now forever? Yeah, we did an Apple predictions draft on Connected last week in which I decided

00:03:26 ◼   ► to go big or go home and picked some truly outrageous predictions. That sounds familiar.

00:03:35 ◼   ► Sounds like your strategy for drafting things. Well, I don't know. I mean, you can look at

00:03:39 ◼   ► the previous event drafts and I think you've tended to be the most outrageous in hindsight.

00:03:44 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll see. Well, until I decided I wanted to win, but I think for entertainment purposes

00:03:49 ◼   ► being making outrageous predictions is great and if you get one right you're gonna be able

00:03:53 ◼   ► to point to it and say, "See? Look at that. Who would have guessed?"

00:03:55 ◼   ► Well, this is what I said on the show. This is the basis of Michael's right. He's picking

00:03:59 ◼   ► things that nobody else would believe in and then you're one of them and then you're, you

00:04:05 ◼   ► You know, you're really smart.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Like big phones.

00:04:08 ◼   ► Everyone thought I was crazy.

00:04:10 ◼   ► Some people still do.

00:04:11 ◼   ► Many people have come around to it.

00:04:13 ◼   ► Nose tapping.

00:04:14 ◼   ► All of these things.

00:04:15 ◼   ► Yeah, many people.

00:04:16 ◼   ► Nose tapping.

00:04:17 ◼   ► That's a real thing.

00:04:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:19 ◼   ► I do it every now and then and I think to myself, "Damn it, Myke."

00:04:22 ◼   ► On episode 121 of the show, so we're going...

00:04:27 ◼   ► Mild catalogue now.

00:04:29 ◼   ► We were talking about, and I think maybe an episode prior to that as well, we've been

00:04:33 ◼   ► talking a bunch about where Apple products have been made. And Meher wrote in to say

00:04:40 ◼   ► that his iMac, which was a 2013 pre-retina, was assembled in the USA. So my assumption

00:04:49 ◼   ► is parts made in China or sourced from China assembled in the USA. And he said, "What

00:04:57 ◼   ► about hours so we have done some searching. I don't know where it's printed on my iMac.

00:05:06 ◼   ► I took a look and couldn't find it but luckily I have my iMac box just sitting here in my

00:05:12 ◼   ► office which I kept for when we moved and I was able to find out that my iMac was actually

00:05:17 ◼   ► assembled in Ireland which I did not expect.

00:05:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's weird.

00:05:22 ◼   ► I mean, I guess Mac, I didn't understand this,

00:05:26 ◼   ► realize this, but yeah, I guess Mac products get assembled

00:05:30 ◼   ► in all sorts of different places.

00:05:31 ◼   ► If they're assembling in Ireland,

00:05:32 ◼   ► which must have something to do with like EU import

00:05:35 ◼   ► regulations or something,

00:05:36 ◼   ► that if the parts are assembled inside the EU,

00:05:40 ◼   ► that can be advantageous.

00:05:41 ◼   ► So a lot of products in the EU are assembled in Ireland.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I didn't know that, or if I did know it,

00:05:47 ◼   ► I totally forgot it.

00:05:48 ◼   ► I did get a bill to order, right?

00:05:51 ◼   ► Where I didn't just buy one of the stock ones.

00:05:55 ◼   ► Like I wanted a bigger SSD and more RAM

00:05:58 ◼   ► and that sort of stuff.

00:05:59 ◼   ► I have no idea if that plays into the decision.

00:06:03 ◼   ► You know, like I don't know if they have maybe like

00:06:06 ◼   ► regular ones in China and then if you want a bill to order,

00:06:09 ◼   ► like they have the parts in Ireland

00:06:10 ◼   ► and they put them together.

00:06:11 ◼   ► I don't know, but that might play into the decision.

00:06:14 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:06:15 ◼   ► But this is something I had no idea that any Macs

00:06:18 ◼   ► were assembled in Europe.

00:06:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's, by the way, all the FCC information,

00:06:23 ◼   ► all of your regulatory, that little printed fine print stuff

00:06:26 ◼   ► that has to be on the computer somewhere.

00:06:27 ◼   ► I believe on the iMac, it's under the foot.

00:06:29 ◼   ► - I'm pleased I had the box

00:06:32 ◼   ► 'cause I was not gonna lift up my iMac before the show today.

00:06:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, and my iMac doesn't have a foot,

00:06:37 ◼   ► but it's printed also on VESA mount iMacs.

00:06:41 ◼   ► It's printed on the inside of the block.

00:06:44 ◼   ► So I can actually see it if I look straight down

00:06:47 ◼   ► at my iMac, it's inside the mounting bracket block.

00:06:52 ◼   ► And mine was assembled in China.

00:06:54 ◼   ► - As we've learned with AirPods,

00:06:55 ◼   ► Apple love to hide that stuff.

00:06:57 ◼   ► - They do, they don't wanna, they don't want you,

00:06:59 ◼   ► you don't wanna see it and they don't want you to see it.

00:07:01 ◼   ► So they'll do like, what's the minimum contrast we can do?

00:07:04 ◼   ► What's the smallest type we're allowed?

00:07:06 ◼   ► And where can we put it that nobody will notice

00:07:08 ◼   ► that it's there?

00:07:09 ◼   ► - Didn't they get away with something recently

00:07:10 ◼   ► with the iPhone and that they're able to remove

00:07:12 ◼   ► a lot of that in the US?

00:07:14 ◼   ► That it's just not there anymore.

00:07:15 ◼   ► It's not the case outside like in Europe.

00:07:18 ◼   ► The stuff still printed on the back of the phone.

00:07:21 ◼   ► But I believe that it's that they're able to hide a bunch of it in the U.S.

00:07:25 ◼   ► now because I know that people were there, but I'm happy that made them.

00:07:28 ◼   ► Kyle is asking, where is it in the AirPods?

00:07:31 ◼   ► It's like printed in all of the places

00:07:33 ◼   ► that you would not be able to see easily.

00:07:36 ◼   ► Like if you open up your AirPods case, you're able to kind of like

00:07:39 ◼   ► peer inside of where the headphones rest.

00:07:43 ◼   ► and there's some tiny print on the inside of that.

00:07:46 ◼   ► - On the, yeah, it's on the inside of the cap, right?

00:07:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's on the inside of the cap,

00:07:51 ◼   ► and then there's some printing

00:07:54 ◼   ► on the underneath of the earbud.

00:07:57 ◼   ► So I'll put a link in the show notes

00:07:58 ◼   ► where a good friend of the show, Casey Liss,

00:08:00 ◼   ► was taking pictures, and there's a good photo

00:08:03 ◼   ► from Raphael back to him showing some additional print.

00:08:07 ◼   ► Like, Apple really wanted to hide that from the AirPods,

00:08:10 ◼   ► because they had some funny places they could put it,

00:08:12 ◼   ► which you can't do on the iPhone, right?

00:08:14 ◼   ► Like if you have to display this stuff on the iPhone,

00:08:16 ◼   ► there's nowhere to hide it.

00:08:18 ◼   ► But with the AirPods, you can hide it.

00:08:20 ◼   ► - And they try, or they try.

00:08:23 ◼   ► - They do their very best.

00:08:25 ◼   ► Elias has got in contact of us.

00:08:28 ◼   ► You may remember Elias is the person

00:08:30 ◼   ► who originally recommended that Jason try out

00:08:34 ◼   ► the Flash Air storage card, SD card,

00:08:38 ◼   ► for you to improve your iPad podcasting workflow.

00:08:43 ◼   ► - Right.

00:08:44 ◼   ► - Elias has written a whole blog post

00:08:45 ◼   ► about his iOS podcasting setup,

00:08:47 ◼   ► which is, it's tricky and a little convoluted,

00:08:52 ◼   ► but he makes it work for him,

00:08:54 ◼   ► and there are some tricks and tips in there

00:08:56 ◼   ► for people that are trying to do the same.

00:08:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's super tricky.

00:09:04 ◼   ► Basically, it's super tricky.

00:09:08 ◼   ► but you can do it if you,

00:09:11 ◼   ► he has a lot of different setups

00:09:14 ◼   ► and he made these flow charts, which are kind of amazing.

00:09:17 ◼   ► - And very useful.

00:09:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, and he put one of mine in there.

00:09:22 ◼   ► He was nice enough to send me an email about that.

00:09:25 ◼   ► He put the one where I double record,

00:09:27 ◼   ► or I'm recording using the XLR port

00:09:30 ◼   ► on that Audio-Technica mic,

00:09:33 ◼   ► and then using the USB to go into the iPhone or the iPad.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And so he put that in there, but his methods are fascinating

00:09:41 ◼   ► 'cause he has some pretty wacky adapters

00:09:45 ◼   ► that are like splitters and some of them are using

00:09:50 ◼   ► the headphone data, which is a different splitter

00:09:53 ◼   ► that's required for that than the microphone information.

00:09:58 ◼   ► So there's like a microphone plug splitter

00:10:01 ◼   ► and a headphones plug splitter.

00:10:02 ◼   ► And this is why he made all those charts.

00:10:05 ◼   ► but it works for him and this is the work around

00:10:10 ◼   ► for the fact that iOS just doesn't let you record

00:10:17 ◼   ► audio, device audio or app audio on device.

00:10:22 ◼   ► And so instead what you end up doing is

00:10:24 ◼   ► intercepting your microphone audio as it goes in,

00:10:27 ◼   ► intercepting the audio from Skype as it comes back out,

00:10:32 ◼   ► routing it to you, but also routing it to a recorder.

00:10:35 ◼   ► It's, you know, again, this is what happens.

00:10:39 ◼   ► Mac users know this because back in the day,

00:10:41 ◼   ► and some people still do this,

00:10:44 ◼   ► but back in the day, that was a common way

00:10:46 ◼   ► that you did audio stuff on the Mac

00:10:48 ◼   ► is you'd have multiple Macs,

00:10:50 ◼   ► or you would have a Mac with plugs

00:10:52 ◼   ► that would run into like a mixer.

00:10:54 ◼   ► And there were, you know,

00:10:55 ◼   ► you can do almost all of that stuff in software now

00:10:58 ◼   ► with tools like AudioHijack and Loopback,

00:11:01 ◼   ► but you know the analog hole has always been there and and uh

00:11:08 ◼   ► it's just it's an amazing piece of work by Elias to to do this i love that he's

00:11:13 ◼   ► continuing to hammer on this i also know now that he will be the canary in the

00:11:16 ◼   ► coal mine um when there's another option for doing

00:11:20 ◼   ► any of this i suspect he will be on top of it so

00:11:24 ◼   ► that's good to know you are a reporter in the field elias

00:11:28 ◼   ► letting us know about any weird dongles and cards that you might uncover. So you mentioned that we've

00:11:35 ◼   ► been on some trips. You've been in uh Hawaii. Yes. Aloha. Where where were you? What what island were

00:11:43 ◼   ► you on? Uh we were in Kauai and uh we had a great time. We went, my family went um a couple days

00:11:51 ◼   ► before New Year's so we got to actually spend New Year's Eve in Hawaii and there were fireworks at

00:11:57 ◼   ► at Poipu Beach that we went to.

00:12:00 ◼   ► It was pretty great.

00:12:01 ◼   ► And then my wife's parents and her sister

00:12:07 ◼   ► and her sister's husband came on the first on New Year's Day

00:12:14 ◼   ► and then we rented a house in Princeville,

00:12:16 ◼   ► which is in the north part of the island.

00:12:19 ◼   ► And so that group, large group,

00:12:21 ◼   ► we spent the rest of the week together.

00:12:24 ◼   ► It was pretty great, pretty great.

00:12:25 ◼   ► - That sounds lovely.

00:12:26 ◼   ► Hawaii is so high on my list of places to go.

00:12:30 ◼   ► - And it's very far for you.

00:12:31 ◼   ► - It is very far, very far.

00:12:32 ◼   ► Like at this point, I'm saving it

00:12:35 ◼   ► for a hopeful honeymoon destination.

00:12:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's not a bad one.

00:12:39 ◼   ► - That we would split with a trip somewhere else

00:12:41 ◼   ► in the US, right?

00:12:42 ◼   ► So it's not too much in one go.

00:12:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause it's about five hours

00:12:46 ◼   ► from the West Coast to Hawaii.

00:12:48 ◼   ► It's a long way.

00:12:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, for many people that I know in the UK

00:12:53 ◼   ► that choose Hawaii as a honeymoon destination,

00:12:56 ◼   ► I know a few people that have done that.

00:12:57 ◼   ► They'll go to somewhere like Vegas or San Francisco, LA first,

00:13:01 ◼   ► spend a few days there and then go on to Hawaii

00:13:03 ◼   ► and that's what I hope that we'll do.

00:13:05 ◼   ► - Makes sense.

00:13:06 ◼   ► - Just because I wanna go there so bad

00:13:07 ◼   ► and it's so beautiful that I wanna couple it

00:13:09 ◼   ► with an occasion and I think that that might be

00:13:11 ◼   ► a good reason.

00:13:13 ◼   ► Or me and Adina both turn 30 in the same year

00:13:16 ◼   ► so we could do that but.

00:13:18 ◼   ► - We had a great moment flying.

00:13:22 ◼   ► So we flew through Honolulu on the way back

00:13:25 ◼   ► And as we're leaving Honolulu, there was a moment where--

00:13:29 ◼   ► so we were sort of moving.

00:13:31 ◼   ► So Kauai is kind of to the northwest.

00:13:34 ◼   ► And then we went to Oahu, because that's

00:13:36 ◼   ► where Honolulu is.

00:13:37 ◼   ► And then as we're leaving Oahu to fly back to San Francisco,

00:13:41 ◼   ► we had a great moment where we're flying between--

00:13:44 ◼   ► it's the channel between Oahu and the islands to the southeast.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And I could see from my airplane window,

00:13:54 ◼   ► I could see the islands of Molokai and Lanai right in front of me with Maui and the West

00:14:00 ◼   ► Maui Mountains behind that. And then I could see in the distance, I could see the two big

00:14:04 ◼   ► volcanic peaks on the Big Island. So I managed to see all the major islands in, you know,

00:14:10 ◼   ► on my trip back, which was kind of cool. So yeah, it was a lot of fun. And I was like

00:14:14 ◼   ► going there. I've been there several times in my life. And every time I go there, I think,

00:14:20 ◼   ► do I not come here every year? And the answer is because you got to fly five hours to get

00:14:25 ◼   ► there and it's expensive when you get there but it's beautiful. I love it.

00:14:30 ◼   ► I took a surprise trip for some people over to the US for New Year's. I previously said

00:14:37 ◼   ► that we were going to be traveling to Romania but we weren't and the reason I had been saying

00:14:40 ◼   ► this is that we knew. I knew. I just want to be clear, I knew all along.

00:14:46 ◼   ► You were one of the small handful of people that knew,

00:14:49 ◼   ► because we went out to New York,

00:14:51 ◼   ► we were there for a couple of days

00:14:53 ◼   ► staying with Marco and Tiffany Arment,

00:14:56 ◼   ► who we then drove with to Virginia

00:14:58 ◼   ► to the Underscores' home, David and Lauren.

00:15:02 ◼   ► And the reason this was all a secret

00:15:04 ◼   ► is that we were surprising Casey, Liss, and Aaron Liss,

00:15:07 ◼   ► me and Adina, by showing up.

00:15:09 ◼   ► And as I mentioned on analog this week,

00:15:13 ◼   ► John Siracusa was collateral damage in the surprise.

00:15:15 ◼   ► He also didn't know that we were going to be there,

00:15:17 ◼   ► but really we were going there to surprise Casey.

00:15:19 ◼   ► And the Syracuse's got a surprise as well,

00:15:23 ◼   ► but really this was just because everybody knew

00:15:25 ◼   ► how much it would break Casey's brain if we just appeared,

00:15:28 ◼   ► and it did, which was awesome.

00:15:31 ◼   ► - Beautiful. - And I have video footage

00:15:34 ◼   ► of this all unfolding, of course, on my vlog on YouTube,

00:15:39 ◼   ► which I will put in the show notes.

00:15:41 ◼   ► So you can see the moment at which Casey's brain

00:15:44 ◼   ► kind of gives out on him for a second, which is kind of incredible to see.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Do you have a good trip? Was it fun?

00:15:52 ◼   ► Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

00:15:53 ◼   ► So you were down in Virginia then after leaving New York.

00:15:58 ◼   ► It's a little East Coast New Year's trip for you.

00:16:01 ◼   ► Yeah, it was nice. It was really relaxed and it was nice to be able to spend some time

00:16:05 ◼   ► with a small selection of my close friends in regular environments, which I always enjoy

00:16:14 ◼   ► immensely because I see most of my friends as part of conferences and events.

00:16:21 ◼   ► So I really like it when we can be normal people together.

00:16:26 ◼   ► So getting to see everybody with their families is something that means a lot to me, you know,

00:16:32 ◼   ► because you get to see the whole families, you get to see their children, and you get

00:16:36 ◼   ► to see more of the person as opposed to it all just being centered around conference

00:16:42 ◼   ► stuff.

00:16:43 ◼   ► Yeah, well, no, it's a very different--that's something that people may not know about these

00:16:50 ◼   ► people who talk on podcasts and write articles on the internet and things like that is that

00:16:56 ◼   ► we are often--these are our friends and colleagues and we talk on the internet to them and all

00:17:02 ◼   ► that and we see them in person, but it is extremely rare that we have any kind of

00:17:10 ◼   ► normal personal interaction time, right? It's generally at a conference or

00:17:18 ◼   ► something where everybody's traveling and there are lots of things to go to or

00:17:21 ◼   ► parties to go to or you're in large groups and it is, it's weird, right?

00:17:26 ◼   ► because I think it misses a major portion of any kind of friendship to be sort of like,

00:17:36 ◼   ► you talk to people on the internet and then you occasionally see them in these super

00:17:40 ◼   ► hyped up kind of circumstances. And so it's cool. What I'm saying is, it's cool that you had the

00:17:46 ◼   ► opportunity to spend some much more kind of calm time with people you know. That's great.

00:17:52 ◼   ► And I, any opportunity I get to do things like that, I jump at. Like, for example, when

00:17:59 ◼   ► every year at WWDC when a bunch of us descend upon the Snell household.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Yeah. Right, it's a similar kind of thing. Like,

00:18:04 ◼   ► we're all just having a meal together in your home.

00:18:08 ◼   ► Although even then, it's like 18 people in a house. It's not quite the same as…

00:18:11 ◼   ► It's still a little bit more elevated than if it was just me popping over for tea.

00:18:15 ◼   ► Yeah. But that's tricky to do.

00:18:17 ◼   ► Right. Ooh, tea.

00:18:18 ◼   ► So yeah, I try and maximize these things and it was a really, really lovely trip and I'm

00:18:21 ◼   ► very pleased that we did it and that we were able to keep the secret from KC.

00:18:25 ◼   ► That's beautiful. Surprises. On my uncle's 50th birthday, we flew, and he lived in Florida

00:18:34 ◼   ► at the time. We flew to Florida, my parents and I, and neither he nor my grandmother,

00:18:43 ◼   ► also lived in Florida knew we were coming. And those are very special surprises. Although

00:18:52 ◼   ► I believe they let my grandmother in on it a little bit early only because they wanted

00:18:56 ◼   ► to be gentle with her and not frighten her to death or something like that. Well, we

00:19:02 ◼   ► just went full on out for my uncle and it was pretty funny. I love those surprises when

00:19:07 ◼   ► you can pull them off, which is hard because usually it's not worth it because there's

00:19:11 ◼   ► too much complication but you managed it.

00:19:14 ◼   ► It's great.

00:19:15 ◼   ► This week's episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Mack Weldon.

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00:21:43 ◼   ► and Relay FM. Let's go from MacWeldon to MacWeldon. It's 10 years since the introduction of the

00:21:52 ◼   ► iPhone today as we record on January the 9th and the reason that I am talking about Macworld

00:22:00 ◼   ► now is because 10 years ago when Steve Jobs took to the stage at Macworld Expo, you were

00:22:08 ◼   ► still working for Macworld magazine at that point.

00:22:11 ◼   ► 10 years ago, yes I was. So there's a lot of Macworld involved in this. Now what was

00:22:16 ◼   ► your position at Macworld 10 years ago?

00:22:19 ◼   ► I'm sure I was the editor-in-chief at that point.

00:22:23 ◼   ► - So you were still kind of working on the magazine

00:22:26 ◼   ► and the website. - Oh yeah,

00:22:27 ◼   ► it was only the very end that I was not, yeah.

00:22:29 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely, yeah.

00:22:31 ◼   ► - So this is not the day that the iPhone went on sale.

00:22:36 ◼   ► That is like in June sometime, I believe,

00:22:39 ◼   ► was when the first iPhone went on sale in the US.

00:22:42 ◼   ► - This is why everybody's going to see

00:22:46 ◼   ► 10th anniversary of the iPhone stories this week

00:22:49 ◼   ► and also in late June, I think it is.

00:22:53 ◼   ► - 'Cause there are two birthdays.

00:22:54 ◼   ► The iPhone's basically like the queen.

00:22:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, sure, okay.

00:22:58 ◼   ► How many birthdays does the queen have?

00:23:00 ◼   ► - Two.

00:23:01 ◼   ► - Her real birthday and her holiday birthday?

00:23:04 ◼   ► - She has a real birthday

00:23:05 ◼   ► and then I believe it's the birthday celebration

00:23:09 ◼   ► of the top member of the royal family

00:23:13 ◼   ► in which it is like the same time every year

00:23:16 ◼   ► and they have a parade for it.

00:23:17 ◼   ► - Oh.

00:23:18 ◼   ► I believe that day is reserved as a specific day, which is just the celebration of the

00:23:24 ◼   ► monarch's life.

00:23:26 ◼   ► The idea here is that everybody is able to schedule the public holiday for that day,

00:23:32 ◼   ► and if the queen got hit by a truck, or nibbled to death by corgis, whatever.

00:23:37 ◼   ► Don't savor those things, but yes, carry on.

00:23:40 ◼   ► Well I thought it's highly unlikely that she's going to get hit by a truck, because she would

00:23:43 ◼   ► have to be somewhere where there was a truck, and I think that's unlikely that they would

00:23:46 ◼   ► allow the queen to be someplace where there would be a truck. Also, it would be a lorry,

00:23:50 ◼   ► wouldn't it? And so what I'm saying is, if something bad happened to the queen, she's

00:23:54 ◼   ► getting up there now, and suddenly Charles is the king, and everybody's been planning

00:23:58 ◼   ► their holiday, do they--if it was just on the actual birthday, they would have to like

00:24:04 ◼   ► move the holiday, or what if they already had the holiday this year, and then the birthday

00:24:07 ◼   ► was later, would they have another one? And so I can sort of see how they would just say,

00:24:11 ◼   ► "All right, there's just one holiday."

00:24:12 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:24:14 ◼   ► - Okay, good.

00:24:14 ◼   ► I've learned a lot about royalty now.

00:24:17 ◼   ► But anyway, so this is the point is the iPhone was announced

00:24:20 ◼   ► and then there was this huge gap where it didn't exist.

00:24:24 ◼   ► And a few of us, and it's fun to talk about this,

00:24:29 ◼   ► a few of us got to hold an iPhone prototype in a briefing

00:24:36 ◼   ► at Macworld Expo that week, including me, I got to do that.

00:24:41 ◼   ► And I got to Lord that over everybody for like six months

00:24:44 ◼   ► because I was one of the very small number of people

00:24:46 ◼   ► who had actually like held it in his or her hands

00:24:49 ◼   ► and been able to tap around

00:24:51 ◼   ► and get a little bit of a sense of how it worked.

00:24:53 ◼   ► And there were so many challenges with this,

00:24:57 ◼   ► including the fact that the, like we did,

00:25:02 ◼   ► we had to do, obviously did a big cover story

00:25:05 ◼   ► about the iPhone and all of that.

00:25:08 ◼   ► Here's the problem.

00:25:09 ◼   ► There was no photography available

00:25:12 ◼   ► other than like one shot from Apple

00:25:15 ◼   ► because nobody had the phone.

00:25:17 ◼   ► So for Macworld's cover about the iPhone,

00:25:20 ◼   ► we actually hired a 3D artist

00:25:25 ◼   ► to build a 3D model of the iPhone

00:25:29 ◼   ► based on photography, based on imagery,

00:25:32 ◼   ► and then render it photo realistically

00:25:35 ◼   ► so that we could have our own product shot of a product that we didn't have.

00:25:39 ◼   ► Wow.

00:25:41 ◼   ► And if you look at the first or second iPhone cover, we did an iPhone cover in that picture,

00:25:48 ◼   ► and it's got the clownfish on it and all those, the imagery from Apple, but it's not a real

00:25:52 ◼   ► product shot because there wasn't a real product.

00:25:56 ◼   ► That's kind of cool.

00:25:58 ◼   ► You got to do what you got to do. Yeah, it was cool. But yeah, we had a guy named

00:26:02 ◼   ► Joseph do it and it looks great. I mean you couldn't tell. You couldn't tell it was fake.

00:26:06 ◼   ► I think. You have to look very closely. Yeah, I'll look for it. Sure.

00:26:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I would like to see that. Google is not providing me with much use here in my image

00:26:15 ◼   ► searching that I'm doing right now. Partly because the problem is Macworld and Macworld, right?

00:26:20 ◼   ► Yeah. Oh, there it is. I got it.

00:26:22 ◼   ► Oh, look at you. You got all the skills to pay the bills.

00:26:25 ◼   ► I got some serious Google-fu.

00:26:28 ◼   ► Wow. Yeah, look at that. That looks really good. It isn't the clownfish though, it's

00:26:34 ◼   ► a home screen. Oh, you're right. Well, I think we have the clownfish inside.

00:26:37 ◼   ► Ah. Apple's new calling. That's smart. Did you come up with that?

00:26:43 ◼   ► Uh-huh. Were you fantastic back in the day?

00:26:45 ◼   ► Certainly, but I don't want to, you know, it could have been someone else.

00:26:50 ◼   ► So I wanted to talk about this with you a little bit because you, unlike many of the,

00:26:58 ◼   ► I guess the people that are in this Apple podcasting community, you were actually working

00:27:06 ◼   ► in reporting on this stuff seriously for your living then.

00:27:11 ◼   ► Yeah, you know, many of us were appreciating this stuff then, were fans of this stuff,

00:27:16 ◼   ► and you're actually like this was your day to day job like it is now, you know, I know

00:27:20 ◼   ► it's different circumstances, but you were doing this for a living then.

00:27:24 ◼   ► you were reporting on this stuff, you were going to events, you were at this event, right?

00:27:29 ◼   ► Yeah. Oh yeah. So like, you know, and again, like you got a briefing and all that. So I

00:27:34 ◼   ► want to talk about some of that. And I'm taking a page out of the book of one of my favorite

00:27:38 ◼   ► podcasts which is Control Walk Delete from The Verge. And on that episode, on the shows

00:27:44 ◼   ► like every episode, Neil I. Patel will dig into Walt Mossberg's archives to pull out

00:27:51 ◼   ► articles that are relevant based upon the topic at hand. And one of the things that

00:28:00 ◼   ► I found today was an article that you wrote five years ago about looking back at the iPhone

00:28:08 ◼   ► five years later. And that was from a Macua magazine, a Macua web article, I guess.

00:28:15 ◼   ► I just, it's funny, I just did that, um, I just did that, uh, not too long ago for the

00:28:21 ◼   ► OS X anniversary where I found a, I found an article I wrote after 10 years of OS X

00:28:28 ◼   ► that was looking back on my article that I wrote after five years of OS X. It was like,

00:28:33 ◼   ► wow, how, how, how many layers down can I go here? But really once you've, once you've

00:28:37 ◼   ► written the reminiscence article, do you need to write it again or do you need to say, Hey,

00:28:42 ◼   ► I reminisced about this. There it is. But yeah, I did that too with the iPhone. I wrote

00:28:47 ◼   ► a piece five years ago about it.

00:28:49 ◼   ► So I want to read a couple of quotes from this and we can talk about it. This is from

00:28:54 ◼   ► a younger Jason Snell. "As far as I'm concerned, the 2007 introduction of the iPhone is the

00:28:59 ◼   ► definitive Steve Jobs presentation. It's the one that people will reference for as long

00:29:04 ◼   ► as Steve Jobs is remembered.

00:29:07 ◼   ► So I did what I assume many people did today in which I went back and watched the key moment,

00:29:16 ◼   ► you know like the three things moment.

00:29:19 ◼   ► And I just want to read the quote and I'll put a link in the show notes to the video

00:29:25 ◼   ► so you can go watch it for yourself.

00:29:26 ◼   ► But like this is the thing that everybody remembers.

00:29:29 ◼   ► A widescreen iPod with touchscreen controls.

00:29:32 ◼   ► A revolutionary mobile phone.

00:29:34 ◼   ► A breakthrough internet communications device.

00:29:37 ◼   ► Are you getting it?

00:29:38 ◼   ► This is one device and we're calling it iPhone.

00:29:40 ◼   ► Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

00:29:43 ◼   ► Like that was kind of like,

00:29:44 ◼   ► I've trimmed it down a little bit,

00:29:45 ◼   ► but like they are the key parts of it.

00:29:47 ◼   ► You know, the idea of them saying we have these three things

00:29:50 ◼   ► and this, I really urge people to go and watch it.

00:29:53 ◼   ► I was thinking about putting an audio clip in,

00:29:55 ◼   ► but really like just go watch the YouTube link

00:29:59 ◼   ► because it's the whole build up to that point which makes this hit even stronger.

00:30:04 ◼   ► And then listen to that episode of Connected, right?

00:30:08 ◼   ► That one of the best things any of us, the three of us have made. We're gonna, we have

00:30:14 ◼   ► like a different take on this, the three of us on Connected want to talk about this week

00:30:19 ◼   ► where like the effect of-- It's the prompt number 30.

00:30:22 ◼   ► Yeah. That's what it was. It was back in the prompt

00:30:24 ◼   ► days. So you can go and check it out. So I'll put

00:30:26 ◼   ► in there but we want to talk on connected this week and we're going to about like how

00:30:30 ◼   ► with all of us where none of us were working in this stuff then and the effect the iPhone has had

00:30:36 ◼   ► on our lives because of that like the path that it's let us take but as I said like what's

00:30:41 ◼   ► interesting for me is that you were there and I kind of wonder for as much as you are able to

00:30:46 ◼   ► really remember like you know rather than just kind of how it's felt over time what it was like

00:30:51 ◼   ► like to sit in the audience and kind of feel the pure building. Because I mean, what we

00:30:56 ◼   ► had then in the way of rumors is very different to what we had now. Everyone believed that

00:31:00 ◼   ► Apple was working on a phone, but nobody knew anything.

00:31:04 ◼   ► Yeah, and in fact, the phone rumor, the phone rumor had been going so long that it was exhausting.

00:31:14 ◼   ► Like they had been talking about Apple making a cell phone for years, like a decade.

00:31:24 ◼   ► I mean, it had gone on a very, very long time.

00:31:29 ◼   ► And I'm sure there were real projects that were started and killed over years, many years.

00:31:36 ◼   ► And so there was a boy who cried wolf aspect to it.

00:31:40 ◼   ► But as it heated up, I think everybody, including the name iPhone, which was sort of leaked

00:31:46 ◼   ► in the last few days, that we started to get an idea of what might be in there.

00:31:53 ◼   ► But it was very much the three blind men and an elephant parable kind of thing, where we

00:32:01 ◼   ► had details, but nobody could actually extrapolate from the details what the real product was

00:32:07 ◼   ► going to be.

00:32:08 ◼   ► Not really.

00:32:09 ◼   ► just no way, right? Because the iPhone, nothing was like it. It was so unique. It couldn't

00:32:19 ◼   ► have been imagined, I don't think, like in its entirety. I don't think anybody could

00:32:24 ◼   ► have sat down and given as much time as possible come up with what was shown because so much

00:32:32 ◼   ► of it was new, right?

00:32:34 ◼   ► Yeah, and it wouldn't have felt realistic, nor would the price. As much as the price, in hindsight, very rapidly in hindsight, was too high,

00:32:43 ◼   ► I think that in reality, what was shown and what was described, I think a lot of the rumors were kind of squelched by this idea that

00:32:56 ◼   ► there's no way that could be a product that they could sell because that would

00:33:00 ◼   ► be you know a thousand plus dollars of technology in that in that phone.

00:33:07 ◼   ► What did it start at? 600 on contract? Something like that? Something like that.

00:33:12 ◼   ► It was and it was rapidly cut by what 200? I mean they did they did cut it

00:33:18 ◼   ► pretty rapidly when I think they saw the the demand for it and the early adopters

00:33:23 ◼   ► got refunds or they got credit, Apple credit, store credit, so they changed direction on

00:33:31 ◼   ► that. That's something that people forget now, but it actually did go out probably,

00:33:35 ◼   ► you know, 100 or 200 dollars more than even Apple realized it needed to be, especially

00:33:40 ◼   ► given. They were learning how to make it and all that. I think they very rapidly realized

00:33:44 ◼   ► that they could move a lot of these and they just needed to lower the price, and so they

00:33:47 ◼   ► did, but I think the concept of making this thing touchscreen, you know, with

00:33:53 ◼   ► this, for the time, kind of high-resolution display and it's all

00:33:57 ◼   ► touch and it's got an advanced processor in it that makes it capable of running

00:34:01 ◼   ► and no compromises kind of computer interface and not something that was

00:34:05 ◼   ► like a lightweight phone interface and people be like, "Well, you know, we got to

00:34:09 ◼   ► scale it back." It can't have all these features because it would cost too much.

00:34:12 ◼   ► It would cost $1,000 and there's no way they're going to make a

00:34:15 ◼   ► thousand-dollar phone. And so I think that reduced the expectations a

00:34:20 ◼   ► little bit strangely, so that was part of it. And then when you're

00:34:24 ◼   ► in the room, the funny thing about that is having been in the room for this one

00:34:27 ◼   ► and for the iPod launch too, you know, in hindsight it looks like one of the most

00:34:35 ◼   ► important technology moments in our lifetimes, maybe the most. But at the time,

00:34:41 ◼   ► you know, you're evaluating it as Apple doing something new and everybody brings

00:34:47 ◼   ► some skepticism with them when Apple does something new, they're entering a

00:34:51 ◼   ► market that they don't know about, and you know, the downside

00:34:58 ◼   ► of the reality distortion field is that when Steve Jobs shows you something, part

00:35:05 ◼   ► of you is like, "Well, we'll see. We'll see if it really can do that." And that is, you

00:35:13 ◼   ► try to, because you try to counter it. And so at the time it was like, it was a very

00:35:18 ◼   ► impressive thing. I was like, wow, this is way more than anybody thought. It was very

00:35:22 ◼   ► clear, I think, that this was a huge deal. But, you know, it wasn't, I mean, he went

00:35:30 ◼   ► on with the, I mean, there was a whole presentation around it, right? I mean, that's the thing

00:35:35 ◼   ► that's kind of amazing. And you had Stan Stigman from Singular, who was really boring.

00:35:42 ◼   ► And then Schmidt, right? Eric Schmidt came along.

00:35:45 ◼   ► Eric Schmidt, yeah. So there was some other stuff in there that is not so great. But the

00:35:50 ◼   ► core of it was incredibly impressive, and you could definitely tell in the room, my

00:35:56 ◼   ► My memory is that after he went on to the second thing, he was like, "Oh, we're going

00:36:01 ◼   ► to announce three things," that he started to cycle through it and I was like, "Oh, I

00:36:06 ◼   ► see what you're doing here."

00:36:07 ◼   ► And then having twigged to it, I got to enjoy, as he repeated it, the kind of rumble in the

00:36:16 ◼   ► audience of people who were getting it, like he said, "You're getting it?"

00:36:22 ◼   ► you gotta remember too that this is a Macworld Expo audience, so it's not WWDC.

00:36:27 ◼   ► It's press and VIPs, and it's members of the public. This is, we've

00:36:37 ◼   ► talked about it on a previous show, this is not an audience that can get to an

00:36:42 ◼   ► Apple event anymore, right? Apple doesn't do public events. Apple does invite-only

00:36:46 ◼   ► events. But for Macworld Expo, some portion of that crowd was people who

00:36:51 ◼   ► probably had like the fancy badges for Macworld Expo and got to stand in the priority line.

00:36:57 ◼   ► And they were definitely super enthusiastic because they had to stand in a line and pay

00:37:00 ◼   ► money to get the badge and all of that, all those things. But it was a, it was a crowd

00:37:05 ◼   ► of, of fans. So that was that, that adds, I would say a little more electricity to the

00:37:12 ◼   ► event than even the developer crowd at WWDC.

00:37:16 ◼   ► I think even as good as, you know, as good as this event was, you know, going back to

00:37:22 ◼   ► what you were saying about like the trepidation of Apple entering a new market and nobody

00:37:27 ◼   ► knows how it's going to be, I have no doubt that there were people at the time that were

00:37:31 ◼   ► like "this is changing technology forever" but I don't think that you would get many

00:37:36 ◼   ► of those people willing to put like a money back down on that, right? Like you could look

00:37:40 ◼   ► at it and be like "oh this is going to be incredible" but...

00:37:43 ◼   ► Steve Jobs thought that the what's-it, the segue was going to transform how people lived

00:37:49 ◼   ► in urban cores.

00:37:50 ◼   ► I mean, I mean.

00:37:51 ◼   ► - You don't know that.

00:37:52 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, that was one of the money quotes when Dean Kamen came out with the segue.

00:37:59 ◼   ► And nope, it didn't happen, right?

00:38:01 ◼   ► You can look really bad.

00:38:02 ◼   ► The other thing is you can look at something and think, wow, this is really good, but do

00:38:06 ◼   ► I wanna go all in on it because you can look really bad if you're wrong.

00:38:08 ◼   ► And I think that that restrains people too.

00:38:10 ◼   ► Because the thing that we could have just frankly never predicted is that within 10 years that product

00:38:16 ◼   ► Apple would have sold a billion of them

00:38:19 ◼   ► And

00:38:22 ◼   ► It would make Apple the most valuable company in the world by a country mile

00:38:26 ◼   ► I don't think anyone would have made that prediction

00:38:29 ◼   ► No, it's too much, right? It's too much because like on stage they were talking about capturing

00:38:35 ◼   ► What was it like 10 percent of the phone market?

00:38:38 ◼   ► may have been less than that. It was maybe a single digit percentage point and what that

00:38:42 ◼   ► would mean for them. They spoke about like, you know, we just need this much and it will be huge.

00:38:49 ◼   ► One percent of the smartphone market and one something like that and like a tenth of a percent

00:38:55 ◼   ► of the cell phone market or so. Their sites were seemed sort of ambitious and were incredibly low.

00:39:01 ◼   ► Yeah. Yeah. Like at the time it was like people were like, really? You're gonna think you're

00:39:06 ◼   ► going to get this much? Like, that's a lot, you know, it's a big business, but now they

00:39:11 ◼   ► own it to an extent.

00:39:13 ◼   ► Well, now they've got 25% of the phone market and 100% of the profits in the phone market,

00:39:19 ◼   ► essentially. Yeah. For this most recent quarter.

00:39:22 ◼   ► And it really is mind-boggling to look back on that, right? And there were so many things,

00:39:30 ◼   ► which really hinted at Jobs' feeling about this. The way that the event is set up, the way he sets

00:39:38 ◼   ► the event up, you know it's important to him in like a different way to maybe some other devices.

00:39:44 ◼   ► That whole build up to that moment. And then even, you know, what was also announced at this event,

00:39:49 ◼   ► Apple changed its name. They changed the company name at this event from Apple Computer Incorporated

00:39:56 ◼   ► to Apple Incorporated. I think that this was a point where the company and Steve really

00:40:02 ◼   ► believed that they were onto something new. But again, they didn't know how big it was

00:40:07 ◼   ► going to be.

00:40:08 ◼   ► What are the two products on that Macworld cover? The iPhone and the Apple TV, which

00:40:14 ◼   ► had been previewed that fall as the ITV, which is the name of a TV network in your fine country

00:40:19 ◼   ► and or a TV channel in your fine country and they didn't bother with that one. They got

00:40:25 ◼   ► iPhone from Cisco, right? They got that, they licensed that name or took that name or whatever

00:40:29 ◼   ► they did.

00:40:30 ◼   ► David B

00:40:32 ◼   ► Yeah, but Apple TV, they're like, you know, but the point being, their two major products

00:40:40 ◼   ► are not computers per se, right? And so yeah, Apple Incorporated makes sense.

00:40:46 ◼   ► Geoff - Yeah.

00:40:47 ◼   ► David - Makes sense.

00:40:48 ◼   ► point is the iPod. I said this on that episode of The Prompt, but the thing that always makes me

00:40:56 ◼   ► smile about the introduction is everyone went crazy for the phone, everyone went crazy for the

00:41:02 ◼   ► touchscreen video iPod. Nobody gave a hoot about breakthrough internet communications device,

00:41:10 ◼   ► which is frankly all anybody cares about with their iPhones anymore. What this device ended

00:41:16 ◼   ► up being was an internet communications device but in 2007 nobody knew why that was important.

00:41:22 ◼   ► I was struck, I read my review of it today because Stephen Hackett linked to it

00:41:28 ◼   ► from his post on 512 pixels about about the anniversary. I haven't written anything about

00:41:35 ◼   ► the anniversary yet although I suspect I will today because you know I just got off a plane but

00:41:40 ◼   ► The thing that struck me about my review,

00:41:45 ◼   ► which I wrote in a tent in the mountains

00:41:49 ◼   ► on my vacation 10 years ago,

00:41:52 ◼   ► what struck me about it was I spent a lot of time

00:41:56 ◼   ► on the phone features, 'cause it's a phone,

00:41:58 ◼   ► so you care about the phone features.

00:42:00 ◼   ► And I gotta be honest, when I review,

00:42:04 ◼   ► like I wrote my review of the iPhone 7

00:42:06 ◼   ► and I had a couple people ask me afterward like,

00:42:10 ◼   ► It's easy to get lost in the hype about touchscreens and web browsers and forget

00:42:37 ◼   ► that the phone is, like its name says, a phone, and it works pretty well as one. When an incoming

00:42:42 ◼   ► call arrives, the iPhone gently interrupts what you're doing to display carrier ID information

00:42:47 ◼   ► about who's calling.

00:42:48 ◼   ► I had to explain how the iPhone worked, right? I mean, that was part of it too, is like,

00:42:52 ◼   ► "Okay, let me tell you, you're using your computer phone thing, and then somebody calls

00:42:56 ◼   ► you. What happens? Do you miss it because you're too busy in a web browser?" No.

00:43:02 ◼   ► But we didn't know, like I remember having a real worry about if the iPhone had a vibrate

00:43:10 ◼   ► motor because they weren't very clear in the announcement as to whether it had one.

00:43:17 ◼   ► And that was such a big thing for me whilst I was at school at the time, like I was in

00:43:21 ◼   ► my last years at school when the iPhone was announced.

00:43:26 ◼   ► And I was thinking like if I'm in class, I don't want my phone to go off.

00:43:31 ◼   ► And if I have it on the silent mode with the switch, will I still get a notification?

00:43:36 ◼   ► Like will it still buzz in my pocket?

00:43:37 ◼   ► You know, there are all these things we had no idea about.

00:43:41 ◼   ► It really was, it's really such a funny thing to look back on.

00:43:45 ◼   ► But I want to go back to your five years later post.

00:43:51 ◼   ► And you talk about seeing the iPhone for the first time.

00:43:54 ◼   ► You say, "Sometime during that Expo week, I finally got my hands on the iPhone.

00:43:58 ◼   ► I remember it well.

00:43:59 ◼   ► I got to hold it in my hands for a few minutes

00:44:01 ◼   ► during a briefing, and for about six months,

00:44:04 ◼   ► I was one of the very small number of people

00:44:05 ◼   ► outside of Apple's cone of silence who could say that.

00:44:08 ◼   ► You also said, like this was something that you quoted

00:44:13 ◼   ► in this five year article of your original,

00:44:15 ◼   ► kind of, at the time.

00:44:16 ◼   ► You said, "I can admit that I found it quite difficult

00:44:19 ◼   ► "to form complete sentences when I was holding the iPhone

00:44:22 ◼   ► "in terms of sheer gadget magnetism.

00:44:24 ◼   ► "Its power cannot be overstated."

00:44:27 ◼   ► - Oh, it was terrible, Myke, let me tell you.

00:44:29 ◼   ► I'm in a room with, I think Greg Joswiak was there.

00:44:32 ◼   ► I think Phil Schiller was there.

00:44:35 ◼   ► It was not the B list of product briefers.

00:44:39 ◼   ► It was the, and this was back when,

00:44:42 ◼   ► now what Apple does is they do all their briefings

00:44:44 ◼   ► in a short period of time,

00:44:45 ◼   ► right after they announce a product.

00:44:46 ◼   ► And there are a couple of different teams

00:44:48 ◼   ► and they move you through.

00:44:49 ◼   ► And if you're really liked, you get the A list.

00:44:52 ◼   ► And if you're not quite as well liked,

00:44:53 ◼   ► but liked enough to give a briefing,

00:44:54 ◼   ► you get the B list of like the, you know, you don't get the,

00:44:57 ◼   ► I don't talk to Phil Schiller so much anymore

00:44:59 ◼   ► is what I'm saying.

00:45:00 ◼   ► But back in those days, they did like two days of briefings

00:45:05 ◼   ► and they just kept rolling.

00:45:06 ◼   ► I think partially because they maybe didn't have enough

00:45:08 ◼   ► iPhones to do two sets of briefings at once

00:45:10 ◼   ► that were functional at all.

00:45:13 ◼   ► So I'm sitting there with the high powered Apple executives

00:45:17 ◼   ► and this is my 15 minutes or whatever, 30 minutes with them

00:45:21 ◼   ► to ask them a huge number of questions that we've got

00:45:24 ◼   ► 'cause I think I did it the second day.

00:45:26 ◼   ► Which is a great time to do it, right? You want second day, not first day.

00:45:30 ◼   ► Yeah, right. I mean, I can't have first day reactions to having touched it, but I did get to see it that week.

00:45:36 ◼   ► And so I've got all these questions and I've got all these details everybody on the staff has asked me and readers have asked me.

00:45:43 ◼   ► It's like, what if we ask them these questions?

00:45:45 ◼   ► Well, the reason I said a second day is good, because you've got that time to get the questions.

00:45:49 ◼   ► Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

00:45:50 ◼   ► Correct me if I'm wrong, but immediate first look impressions weren't as important 10 years ago.

00:45:56 ◼   ► - Right, right, true.

00:45:57 ◼   ► I mean, they were important, but--

00:45:58 ◼   ► - 'Cause you were writing for a magazine.

00:45:59 ◼   ► - Well, no, I mean, we were writing on the website.

00:46:03 ◼   ► You know, this hands and fingers on the iPhone story

00:46:05 ◼   ► that I wrote back then was a, you know,

00:46:09 ◼   ► that was a website story.

00:46:10 ◼   ► But here's the thing.

00:46:12 ◼   ► I'm ready with my questions.

00:46:15 ◼   ► I've got my notepad, all that,

00:46:16 ◼   ► and they slide the iPhone over to me and say, pick it up.

00:46:21 ◼   ► And I pick it up and it's like, I, seriously,

00:46:24 ◼   ► I can't form complete sentences.

00:46:27 ◼   ► I'm trying to have a conversation

00:46:28 ◼   ► with these Apple executives

00:46:30 ◼   ► while I'm touching an iPhone for the first time.

00:46:34 ◼   ► And I'm like,

00:46:34 ◼   ► like, I just can't even get words out

00:46:42 ◼   ► because it was such a sensory experience

00:46:47 ◼   ► of like just, it was warm,

00:46:52 ◼   ► It was probably because it was a prototype. I don't even want to know.

00:46:58 ◼   ► And the screen was a shockingly high resolution and we laugh at it now if you look at the original iPhone screen.

00:47:05 ◼   ► But it was 160 pixels per inch and the MacBook Pro at that point was like 110.

00:47:15 ◼   ► It was a much higher resolution screen. Everything looked very pretty on it.

00:47:20 ◼   ► It was unlike any kind of product, and I had a palm trio, I think, at the time.

00:47:27 ◼   ► It was unlike any other product I had ever held in my hand.

00:47:31 ◼   ► And so, it was tough, because I would have liked to have asked them questions for 30 minutes and then spent another 30 minutes with the phone,

00:47:38 ◼   ► and I couldn't. I had to do both at the same time. It was very, very difficult.

00:47:41 ◼   ► What I also remember about that briefing is that, I mean, everything seems smooth.

00:47:48 ◼   ► I could press the button, I could do things I saw in the demo, I could open the mail app, I could open the web browser, they had me do a few things with it.

00:47:58 ◼   ► I did open the Notes app, and that's the one that I really remember. I think maybe also the Contacts app, but the Notes app for sure. And it was a screenshot.

00:48:10 ◼   ► like literally the notes app was a screenshot of what the notes app would look like but it wasn't

00:48:18 ◼   ► there did they say anything do you remember when you did that i don't remember oh the calculator

00:48:25 ◼   ► also was a calculator was also a screenshot i think they said something like you know

00:48:30 ◼   ► we're shipping in june it's not all it's not already yet that one's not ready yet

00:48:35 ◼   ► something like that they probably said something that was just a yeah that one's not there

00:48:39 ◼   ► But I just, I remember that too.

00:48:42 ◼   ► And years later, you know,

00:48:43 ◼   ► you get the behind the scenes stories

00:48:44 ◼   ► about how this product came together and how they were.

00:48:49 ◼   ► It's very rare that Apple announces a product six months.

00:48:53 ◼   ► I mean, the Apple Watch is another good example

00:48:55 ◼   ► where they, that was the one that struck me the most

00:48:58 ◼   ► as being like the iPhone where they announced it

00:49:00 ◼   ► and then they didn't have it.

00:49:01 ◼   ► And they had some units that you could look at,

00:49:03 ◼   ► but at the Apple Watch event, it was like,

00:49:05 ◼   ► you don't touch them or you could touch it

00:49:09 ◼   ► on the wrist of an Apple employee,

00:49:11 ◼   ► but only the things they let you touch.

00:49:15 ◼   ► And I touched something I wasn't supposed to,

00:49:16 ◼   ► and they're like, "Oh boy, oh no."

00:49:19 ◼   ► Right, 'cause it's not really done.

00:49:20 ◼   ► - Heart's on fire.

00:49:22 ◼   ► - And the iPhone was like that too,

00:49:24 ◼   ► where it wasn't like it was gonna blow up.

00:49:26 ◼   ► Although I'm sure if I had tapped the right thing,

00:49:28 ◼   ► it would have crashed.

00:49:29 ◼   ► But there were placeholders and stuff too.

00:49:32 ◼   ► But still it didn't matter.

00:49:33 ◼   ► I mean, that magnetism, that's absolutely right.

00:49:37 ◼   ► What I said, what I wrote 10 years ago,

00:49:38 ◼   ► it was this amazing slab that felt like it.

00:49:43 ◼   ► I know this is kind of a cliche,

00:49:46 ◼   ► but really if there was any moment in my life

00:49:48 ◼   ► where I felt like I was holding technology

00:49:49 ◼   ► that had come back in time, it was that iPhone.

00:49:52 ◼   ► It's like, how is this possible?

00:49:54 ◼   ► - I wonder if we'll see anything like this again.

00:49:57 ◼   ► Like the closest I have felt to this,

00:50:00 ◼   ► and I've said this before,

00:50:01 ◼   ► is when I got to try the Oculus Rift for the first time.

00:50:05 ◼   ► - Yeah. - With the touch controllers

00:50:07 ◼   ► which are now shipping, and I got to play with them in June.

00:50:11 ◼   ► And it was the closest that I've been to that

00:50:13 ◼   ► because it was, the quality of the experience

00:50:18 ◼   ► and the other worldliness of the experience

00:50:22 ◼   ► was similar in the way that it was like,

00:50:24 ◼   ► I feel like I've felt the future of something, right?

00:50:28 ◼   ► Because the quality of the Oculus is so good.

00:50:31 ◼   ► And it's not necessarily the,

00:50:32 ◼   ► that it's your first experience with a technology,

00:50:35 ◼   ► because the first experiences with a lot of technologies

00:50:37 ◼   ► aren't very good.

00:50:38 ◼   ► It's that first experience where it all comes together.

00:50:41 ◼   ► 'Cause I had a Palm Trio,

00:50:42 ◼   ► I had a phone that was on a 2G network or whatever,

00:50:46 ◼   ► and could do email and all of that.

00:50:48 ◼   ► I had that.

00:50:49 ◼   ► I had phones with apps before.

00:50:51 ◼   ► I had a, what, the Sony Ericsson one with iSync and all that.

00:50:55 ◼   ► I had these phones, right?

00:50:56 ◼   ► But then you get the iPhone and you're like, oh,

00:50:58 ◼   ► like it all came together.

00:51:00 ◼   ► I think VR, maybe something like the Oculus Rift with the touch controller is that maybe it is a product as yet to

00:51:05 ◼   ► as yet to exist

00:51:08 ◼   ► where the VR stuff or AR stuff comes together and you have that same moment of like, oh

00:51:13 ◼   ► This is they got it. Like this is no longer creeping toward what we think is there

00:51:20 ◼   ► This is that leap where it's like no, this is it

00:51:23 ◼   ► I mean see my argument on that would be that they did it right because I've been playing video games

00:51:28 ◼   ► my entire life and I've had very immersive video game experiences but how

00:51:33 ◼   ► about you now are in the game and I've played many VR games especially with the

00:51:40 ◼   ► high-powered Vive and Rift stuff where it's like yeah this is just your life

00:51:46 ◼   ► now you are in this train car shooting these people like you know and it's it

00:51:51 ◼   ► it's an incredibly real feeling that that stays with you if you know if you

00:51:56 ◼   ► get the opportunity to try out like the best of the best of this hardware and so it's similar.

00:52:02 ◼   ► Yeah happy birthday iPhone. Yeah seriously it's a uh I've said it before and I'll say it again I

00:52:09 ◼   ► think in our lifetimes this has a very good chance of being the most important technology product

00:52:16 ◼   ► ever released. Yep. Because the smartphone is probably again there may be something in the next

00:52:24 ◼   ► 30 years. And I hate to say never, you know, I don't want to say it's the end of history. I mean,

00:52:28 ◼   ► in 20 years, who knows what they'll be, but that leap that started with the iPhone,

00:52:34 ◼   ► so that so many people all over the world have access to a powerful computer attached to a fast

00:52:43 ◼   ► connection to a global data network, like that pretty soon, essentially everybody is going to

00:52:50 ◼   ► have. That is a transformative moment for global civilization, and I think you can draw

00:53:00 ◼   ► a line from the moment that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I think that's where it started.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Maybe there'll be something else. Again, maybe VR technology is going to get to the point

00:53:09 ◼   ► where we are all just in VR all the time, and that'll be a bigger deal. We'll see. We'll

00:53:16 ◼   ► But this is certainly, if not the biggest, it has got to be one of the biggest technology

00:53:22 ◼   ► things in this era.

00:53:25 ◼   ► I think ultimately VR changes video games.

00:53:28 ◼   ► I don't think it's going to have the wide overarching change of technology that the

00:53:34 ◼   ► iPhone did.

00:53:35 ◼   ► You look at the word "app" and what that has done.

00:53:41 ◼   ► The iPhone has retconned PCs.

00:53:45 ◼   ► Well this is what I was going to say is that we, you know, there was a time when we were

00:53:48 ◼   ► talking about what about the introduction of the Macintosh and what about that. It feels

00:53:51 ◼   ► to me now like the entire PC industry was a prelude. It was like we, for a long time

00:53:57 ◼   ► we had computers the size of rooms and then finally we got computers on desks but it really

00:54:01 ◼   ► didn't take off until we could put them in our pockets and that the whole PC era was

00:54:08 ◼   ► just a prelude. I'm not saying PCs aren't great, computers are great, it's great, but

00:54:12 ◼   ► in terms of the biggest impact, it seems now like that was just the beginning of the story

00:54:17 ◼   ► of the smartphone.

00:54:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it is. I don't think that we will see anything like this for a long time. I agree

00:54:29 ◼   ► with you that it's like at some point there is going to be another huge product.

00:54:34 ◼   ► There has to be, right?

00:54:36 ◼   ► But it's nothing that we currently see.

00:54:37 ◼   ► Direct brain interface.

00:54:38 ◼   ► Like, it's nothing we have today is this, you know?

00:54:42 ◼   ► And prior to that, like, we got this in 2007, we had it 20 years prior in the 80s, right?

00:54:49 ◼   ► Like, with the advent of the PC as a thing.

00:54:52 ◼   ► And it will probably be another 10 years from now, yeah?

00:54:56 ◼   ► And that's my intuition about VR and AR and voice interfaces like Siri and Amazon Echo

00:55:05 ◼   ► and all of those is that my feeling is there's something there that is going to be a sort

00:55:11 ◼   ► of transformative thing in terms of seeing the world differently and interacting with

00:55:19 ◼   ► it and tying into our senses even more directly than the smartphones do. When smartphones

00:55:24 ◼   ► take a leap because now we're touching the screen instead of moving devices that move

00:55:29 ◼   ► pointers on a screen, right? Well, the next step would be to get even closer to our senses.

00:55:33 ◼   ► I imagine that all of these things that we're doing now in 10 or 20 years will lead to that

00:55:40 ◼   ► moment of convergence where somebody takes the synthesis of all those things and there's

00:55:45 ◼   ► something that just blows everybody away.

00:55:47 ◼   ► But what is that and when is that?

00:55:49 ◼   ► Who knows?

00:55:50 ◼   ► >> Yeah, it's like laptops really changed computing, but it wasn't a revolution.

00:55:56 ◼   ► And I think a lot of the technology that we see right now in front of us, like wearable

00:56:00 ◼   ► devices they're like they're changing technology but it's not an overhaul you

00:56:04 ◼   ► know VR it's changing gaming it's maybe changing technology you know what

00:56:07 ◼   ► Microsoft's doing with HoloLens may change the PC industry but it's not

00:56:12 ◼   ► something completely new that we've never seen before and that's really what

00:56:17 ◼   ► the iPhone was because there weren't any compelling touchscreen computers and

00:56:23 ◼   ► really this wasn't a phone like anything we'd used you know there were devices

00:56:28 ◼   ► devices that had touch screens on them which needed styluses.

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00:59:19 ◼   ► me on this one. We have used FreshBooks since the day we started Relay FM. I think we have

00:59:25 ◼   ► just crossed 850 invoices with FreshBooks. I have no feeling of going anywhere else.

00:59:31 ◼   ► It gives me all of the tools that I need and we love it. Thank you so much to FreshBooks

00:59:36 ◼   ► for their support of this show and Relay FM. Let's talk about, we want to talk about the

00:59:43 ◼   ► the Amazon echo. Yes. We are not going to use the trigger trigger word. You know, many

00:59:50 ◼   ► people will be aware of Ahoy telephone, which was a movement that we spearheaded many, many

00:59:56 ◼   ► episodes ago, years ago even, because we got in trouble for uttering the iPhone assistant's

01:00:03 ◼   ► name. So we came up with Ahoy telephone. What should we go? Ahoy canister? What do you want

01:00:09 ◼   ► to go with for the rest of us?

01:00:10 ◼   ► - I don't know. Hello, lady in the canister. I don't know. I don't know. So there was a

01:00:18 ◼   ► new story where what we're discovering is that things that came up to us two years ago

01:00:25 ◼   ► are, as these products become more prevalent and are covered more in the press, other people

01:00:36 ◼   ► have to deal with the issues that we were dealing with with our technically savvy crowd

01:00:40 ◼   ► two years ago.

01:00:41 ◼   ► So there's a little bit of backstory with this.

01:00:44 ◼   ► So I think it's kind of like last week there was a story about a young girl who ordered

01:00:50 ◼   ► a doll's house via the Amazon Echo.

01:00:54 ◼   ► She kind of beckoned with a hoy canister.

01:00:58 ◼   ► Yeah, well she was playing, she was like doing make believe like playing and talking to her

01:01:04 ◼   ► little friend in the canister and they were talking about dollhouses and you know, would

01:01:11 ◼   ► you play dolls with me and we're gonna take these kids to the dollhouse and they're gonna

01:01:16 ◼   ► have cookies and all of these little, you can imagine it, stories that a little kid

01:01:21 ◼   ► would tell to this device that talks but she doesn't understand the details of how it works

01:01:27 ◼   ► but she knows that she can say things to it and it says things back and then uses her

01:01:31 ◼   ► imagination. It's adorable. And somehow in there she triggered, among the things she

01:01:37 ◼   ► did, she triggered a purchase because a hundred dollar dollhouse and a box of sugar cookies

01:01:45 ◼   ► showed up at their house two days later.

01:01:47 ◼   ► Yup. Amazon responded to this story by basically saying you can turn off the ordering, the

01:01:53 ◼   ► kind of voice ordering if you want to. They did also say like the device speaks to confirm

01:01:58 ◼   ► because there was like one of these like storm in a teacup attempts of a story of like horror as

01:02:04 ◼   ► people can buy like you know and and amazon just did their best they just provided some statements

01:02:08 ◼   ► they said look you can create a confirmation code if you want if you're worried about your children

01:02:12 ◼   ► ordering stuff and ultimately you'll get emails and things have ordered when they're shipped and

01:02:18 ◼   ► you can return any unwanted item for free right it was a dumb story like whatever well i mean what's

01:02:24 ◼   ► what's funny about it is that the you know what what happens is you know you're a little kid who

01:02:28 ◼   ► who doesn't understand when the little friend,

01:02:30 ◼   ► she's doing make-believe stuff,

01:02:32 ◼   ► and her little friend in the canister says,

01:02:35 ◼   ► "Would you like a dollhouse?"

01:02:37 ◼   ► There's a voice confirmation and she's like, "Yes!"

01:02:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, of course, of course.

01:02:42 ◼   ► - Who would have?

01:02:43 ◼   ► Exactly right.

01:02:44 ◼   ► And you can make a code that has to be there.

01:02:47 ◼   ► And there's an email goes out,

01:02:51 ◼   ► which I believe you can then say,

01:02:52 ◼   ► "No, no, I actually didn't want that, cancel that order."

01:02:55 ◼   ► And you can also return the item.

01:02:56 ◼   ► So it's not that big a deal, although it's funny, right?

01:03:00 ◼   ► It's a funny story, it's huge.

01:03:01 ◼   ► - It's a funny story, but it's not a problem story.

01:03:04 ◼   ► I tried it out myself today, by the way.

01:03:07 ◼   ► You can ask, you say like, "Oh, hey, Canister.

01:03:12 ◼   ► "I would like to order me a dollhouse."

01:03:14 ◼   ► And for me, what it does is it just lists off

01:03:17 ◼   ► the top searches on Amazon and asks me if I wanna buy it.

01:03:19 ◼   ► It's kind of as you'd expect it to be.

01:03:23 ◼   ► It's like, yes, you can imagine a world

01:03:26 ◼   ► in which a child could order something by accident,

01:03:28 ◼   ► but Amazon has built in the tools to stop this.

01:03:31 ◼   ► And I agree with the idea of Amazon,

01:03:35 ◼   ► including this functionality is on by default

01:03:37 ◼   ► because they're a company that sells stuff.

01:03:40 ◼   ► It would be-- - Sure.

01:03:41 ◼   ► - It would be mind boggling. - And they have the tools

01:03:43 ◼   ► for you to turn it off, but yes,

01:03:45 ◼   ► Amazon's whole-- - Or to protect it,

01:03:46 ◼   ► and you know, so you can leave it on.

01:03:47 ◼   ► - Shopping is what Amazon's about.

01:03:48 ◼   ► - Exactly.

01:03:49 ◼   ► So, as this kind of proliferated around the news agencies,

01:03:54 ◼   ► there was a San Diego news station

01:03:55 ◼   ► that ran a story about this in which the reporter says, and we have a quote, "I love the little

01:04:00 ◼   ► girl saying, blank, order me a dollhouse." At that point, Echo Devices all over San Diego

01:04:07 ◼   ► picked it up and tried to order the item. This is now another story based upon the same

01:04:13 ◼   ► thing because this is a new story talking about the little girl and then it lit up over

01:04:19 ◼   ► San Diego.

01:04:20 ◼   ► about this.

01:04:21 ◼   ► - And they Ahoy Telephone San Diego by inadvertently saying a command phrase just conversationally.

01:04:32 ◼   ► - So at most, this is kind of just a funny thing. Nothing's ordered because the devices

01:04:38 ◼   ► will start speaking backwards, like back to the people, asking them to confirm the order.

01:04:43 ◼   ► - Wow.

01:04:44 ◼   ► - They speak backwards.

01:04:45 ◼   ► - And remember, unless you do the whole thing, which we did in one of our Ahoy Telephone

01:04:50 ◼   ► things. Yeah, I mean, you can pause things out and say, "Hey lady, send a text message

01:04:58 ◼   ► to so-and-so saying this," and then pause and know that it's responding to you and then

01:05:05 ◼   ► say yes. I mean, you could force things if you know exactly the right order and are being

01:05:09 ◼   ► a jerk, but in this case, it's a multi-step process and this person made a mistaken use

01:05:14 ◼   ► of step one. And people noticed and probably called the station and said, "Hey, what are

01:05:19 ◼   ► doing but it seems that it's not that dollhouses were suddenly ordered by a hundred houses

01:05:24 ◼   ► in San Diego, right? Apparently.

01:05:27 ◼   ► So here's the question because now this became a news story because this happened so we have

01:05:32 ◼   ► layers, there's layers upon layers here. So here is the question, should people on television,

01:05:39 ◼   ► news broadcasters, you know writers in TV shows, should they be able to knowingly speak

01:05:44 ◼   ► the wake phrases of these devices?

01:05:48 ◼   ► I mean, the way I put it is if I was working at the CW station in San Diego or really any

01:05:55 ◼   ► news, any broadcaster, really, I would probably send a memo to my staff saying, "Take a look

01:06:03 ◼   ► at the story. There's a lot of our listeners who have these devices in their homes and

01:06:09 ◼   ► they've got them in their cars, the phones that are set to this." And the backstory here

01:06:15 ◼   ► is my news readers may not be the most technically adept people, some of them are, some of them

01:06:21 ◼   ► don't know anything about it. It's like, here are some activation phrases that you should

01:06:26 ◼   ► be aware of, and if you can steer clear of using these phrases in this specific way,

01:06:32 ◼   ► you won't be upsetting our listeners, and we won't get complaints, and we won't be intruding

01:06:38 ◼   ► on this stuff. And I think that pragmatically that is probably a smart thing to do, as a

01:06:45 ◼   ► professional broadcaster kind of person to make the decision we made which is

01:06:50 ◼   ► let's let's not screw around with our audience and use that phrase even if

01:06:55 ◼   ► even if we're not trying to mess with them we're using it to specifically

01:06:58 ◼   ► refer to the key phrase let's maybe not mention the phrase because we know it's

01:07:02 ◼   ► going to set off their devices and and inconvenience them so I would say my

01:07:09 ◼   ► feeling on this is that if it's a genuine accident then fine right which

01:07:15 ◼   ► it was in San Diego, right? Nobody's gonna get, nobody should get punished because they

01:07:19 ◼   ► said it and it was an accident. Also, I have to say, although we're often very diligent

01:07:23 ◼   ► about it here, it happens. We trigger it, we get emails, we trigger it, I mean we get

01:07:29 ◼   ► tweets especially, when we say things that are not quite what the trigger phrase is but

01:07:35 ◼   ► close enough, the syllables, something about it, the sounds are close enough that we trigger

01:07:40 ◼   ► it anyway, even though we're not even saying those words. It happens. Which, you know,

01:07:46 ◼   ► which is why we cannot put aside that all of this stuff needs to be better, right? All

01:07:53 ◼   ► of this technology needs to be better. It needs to be better at recognizing when I'm

01:07:58 ◼   ► not saying the key phrase, but something that sounds like it. It needs to recognize that

01:08:02 ◼   ► I am a voice on a speaker and not a human being in the environment, and therefore it

01:08:06 ◼   ► should ignore me, and probably it needs to get to the point where it recognizes that

01:08:12 ◼   ► I'm not a voice that it knows, and therefore it should ignore everything I say.

01:08:17 ◼   ► There should be like voice training, you know, you should be able to tie these things to

01:08:20 ◼   ► you, which there is an element of that in a lot of these devices, but it's not like,

01:08:23 ◼   ► it doesn't then exclude other people, but it can do a good job of picking you out.

01:08:28 ◼   ► And that would also allow the little girl to have a conversation with it and not have

01:08:32 ◼   ► access to the buying tools, for example, if it was smart enough to do that.

01:08:37 ◼   ► But I would say that in the modern day, if a story like this is being reported, they

01:08:42 ◼   ► should know not to say it. Someone should be telling, like in this instance, this exact

01:08:46 ◼   ► case, this shouldn't have happened. They were reporting on a story in which something was

01:08:53 ◼   ► accidentally ordered by this device.

01:08:56 ◼   ► And then they give the trigger word, right?

01:08:57 ◼   ► have been common sense by a producer to say, "Do not say that word."

01:09:02 ◼   ► Well, and I think this, it's just, uh, first off, it looks like this was very much a, an

01:09:07 ◼   ► in the moment comment about the story by the...

01:09:10 ◼   ► Yeah, oh, it was, it was.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Hey, I, I was a, I was an intern at a TV news station in San Diego. Uh, I, you know, I know

01:09:19 ◼   ► how this works. They've got their script, they've got, they run the package, the anchors

01:09:22 ◼   ► come back, they make a little comment and they move on. And this was the little comment

01:09:25 ◼   ► because this is kind of a cute story. And, you know, the challenge is to learn from it,

01:09:30 ◼   ► right? And to say, as a, if you're somebody who's speaking to hundreds or thousands or

01:09:35 ◼   ► millions of people, do I want to inconvenience them? They tune to me. Do I want to inconvenience

01:09:42 ◼   ► them? Yes, this technology is dumb. It shouldn't do this. They all need to get better at it.

01:09:48 ◼   ► But that aside, there's idealism right there.

01:09:51 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, that aside,

01:09:53 ◼   ► do I want to arm my people with the knowledge

01:09:57 ◼   ► of how these things work so that they can just think like,

01:10:00 ◼   ► oh, I should try to not say that if I can avoid it,

01:10:04 ◼   ► because it's going to inconvenience the people

01:10:06 ◼   ► who are listening to me.

01:10:07 ◼   ► - And your feeling on this is that yes, they should, right?

01:10:10 ◼   ► People should know this and they should steer away from it

01:10:13 ◼   ► in the same way that me and you try our level best

01:10:15 ◼   ► to not say these words.

01:10:16 ◼   ► - I think it's basic professionalism.

01:10:18 ◼   ► And I'm not saying that you should end up

01:10:20 ◼   ► sounding like you're speaking in code.

01:10:22 ◼   ► I mean, if you need to say it, you need to say it.

01:10:25 ◼   ► But in most cases, it's you don't need to say it,

01:10:28 ◼   ► you're saying it and don't mean to.

01:10:30 ◼   ► And if you just file away,

01:10:31 ◼   ► oh, I shouldn't use that particular phrasing.

01:10:33 ◼   ► I can talk about Siri all I like.

01:10:35 ◼   ► I can say things about what Apple's doing with Siri

01:10:38 ◼   ► and we do it here.

01:10:39 ◼   ► But I'm not going to say the first part of that phrase

01:10:43 ◼   ► if I can help it.

01:10:44 ◼   ► The problem with what Amazon has done is they,

01:10:46 ◼   ► And also we can talk about Google and what Google does

01:10:49 ◼   ► because Google is a two word phrase

01:10:51 ◼   ► that includes the word Google,

01:10:52 ◼   ► but there's a thing before it that you can say.

01:10:55 ◼   ► The problem with the Amazon stuff

01:10:57 ◼   ► is that it's a one word trigger

01:10:59 ◼   ► and that makes it so much easier to accidentally trigger,

01:11:03 ◼   ► especially if you happen to have a name that is

01:11:06 ◼   ► or very similar to.

01:11:07 ◼   ► So again, there are lots of issues here.

01:11:10 ◼   ► I think Amazon needs to consider complicating

01:11:14 ◼   ► their command phrase a little bit so that it's less, you know, or they need to make

01:11:19 ◼   ► their tech better. But I do think fundamentally from a professionalism side, those of us who

01:11:24 ◼   ► are communicating to people who have these devices should basically take it easy on them

01:11:31 ◼   ► and give them a break and not... Look, if we were constantly prank Ahoy telephoning

01:11:36 ◼   ► our audience, would they get mad at Siri or would they get mad at us? I think they would

01:11:43 ◼   ► get mad at us.

01:11:47 ◼   ► I do think that Amazon do a decent enough job in that they have given a name for their

01:11:53 ◼   ► assistant which is not the name of the product.

01:11:56 ◼   ► The product is the Amazon Echo.

01:11:59 ◼   ► We are able to refer to, you can say "and she asked the Echo to order the thing".

01:12:05 ◼   ► Now I know that I have maybe triggered some people because some people whose name is the

01:12:09 ◼   ► the A-L-E-X-A name, you can change it to say Echo,

01:12:14 ◼   ► but like you've got to stop somewhere.

01:12:16 ◼   ► Like you can actually change the trigger word

01:12:18 ◼   ► and you can, and I also think you can trigger

01:12:20 ◼   ► by saying Amazon as well.

01:12:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

01:12:22 ◼   ► - So it has the option. - Sorry to those people

01:12:23 ◼   ► who've done that.

01:12:24 ◼   ► - Which is bad, and that's the thing that Amazon have,

01:12:27 ◼   ► that you can change it.

01:12:28 ◼   ► All of the other assistants-- - You can change it,

01:12:29 ◼   ► that's true. - As far as I'm aware,

01:12:30 ◼   ► there is no way to change it.

01:12:31 ◼   ► I actually think that Amazon do a much better job

01:12:35 ◼   ► than anybody else.

01:12:37 ◼   ► But what I like is that Microsoft, they have their name,

01:12:41 ◼   ► C-O-R-T-A-N-A, right?

01:12:43 ◼   ► Like that is a name which is not Windows.

01:12:46 ◼   ► iPhone, you know, you've got S-I-R-I, right?

01:12:49 ◼   ► That's good.

01:12:50 ◼   ► Google's is-- - You can say it.

01:12:53 ◼   ► - I'm scared to say it.

01:12:54 ◼   ► Google's is the worst, I think, in this

01:12:58 ◼   ► because it is just okay and then followed by

01:13:01 ◼   ► the name of the company, right?

01:13:04 ◼   ► - Yeah. - It's a bit much.

01:13:05 ◼   ► And I know that they've kind of,

01:13:07 ◼   ► way that you can kind of get around it now is by calling it the Google Assistant when

01:13:11 ◼   ► you're referring to it. But I think it's a lot easier, I think, to trigger that one than

01:13:15 ◼   ► maybe some of the others. Accidentally, even.

01:13:19 ◼   ► So all of these need to be better, you know, and have more customizable trigger words,

01:13:27 ◼   ► or even let you pick your trigger from a long list. I mean, there are lots of things that

01:13:34 ◼   ► could be better here. So the reason that we even brought this up is that I wrote

01:13:37 ◼   ► a really brief piece on six colors about it just because I thought it was a funny

01:13:42 ◼   ► story and also how it was another group of people dealing with the Ahoy

01:13:46 ◼   ► telephone problem and what surprised me was I got pushback from some people who

01:13:50 ◼   ► said basically no none of us should ever change how we talk it's on it's on the

01:13:56 ◼   ► manufacturers to fix this problem and I found these people's reaction bizarre

01:14:01 ◼   ► and unpleasant because it sounds to me like what they're really saying is

01:14:06 ◼   ► nobody's going to tell me what to do I'm going to do whatever and I'm going to

01:14:10 ◼   ► let the technology people fix the problem which is like okay you we do

01:14:14 ◼   ► need to have the technology people fix the problem but in the meantime is there

01:14:18 ◼   ► not some kind of consideration we should give our fellow human beings to not mess

01:14:24 ◼   ► up their devices if we can avoid it isn't that a basic bit of courtesy and I

01:14:29 ◼   ► I was a little surprised that for some people,

01:14:31 ◼   ► they don't care about courtesy

01:14:33 ◼   ► because if it's a bad piece of technology, all bets are off.

01:14:37 ◼   ► I find that kind of disappointing.

01:14:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think we both agree on this one.

01:14:43 ◼   ► As professional broadcasters,

01:14:45 ◼   ► we try our level best to stay away from it.

01:14:48 ◼   ► And I know that we have obviously been thinking about it

01:14:51 ◼   ► for longer because our audience

01:14:53 ◼   ► and the things that we talk about,

01:14:54 ◼   ► we have a much higher likelihood of triggering these things.

01:14:58 ◼   ► But I think now as this stuff is becoming more and more,

01:15:01 ◼   ► and what I only think increasingly become more and more

01:15:03 ◼   ► prevalent in our daily lives,

01:15:05 ◼   ► I think this is something that more people need to consider

01:15:08 ◼   ► about the way that these things are done.

01:15:10 ◼   ► - And I want to make it clear,

01:15:11 ◼   ► yeah, this stuff needs to be a lot better.

01:15:13 ◼   ► And I hope that all of these companies are working on it

01:15:14 ◼   ► 'cause it's not good enough now.

01:15:16 ◼   ► But as people who talk to large groups of people

01:15:20 ◼   ► for a living, which we do,

01:15:21 ◼   ► I think having respect for your audience

01:15:24 ◼   ► and not trying to mess with their technology

01:15:26 ◼   ► just because you know you can,

01:15:28 ◼   ► showing that basic level of respect and professionalism is probably the right move.

01:15:33 ◼   ► Which is why, like I said, if I was the editorial director of a broadcast news

01:15:38 ◼   ► organization at a TV station somewhere, I would send a memo around, or a radio

01:15:45 ◼   ► station, let's say. I'd send a memo around saying, "Hey, this stuff happens. It happened

01:15:49 ◼   ► in San Diego. Here are the phrases that are out there now. We'll try to keep this

01:15:53 ◼   ► list updated, but just be aware that if you can avoid the actual triggers you

01:15:58 ◼   ► will be avoiding complications for our audience. This goes back to,

01:16:03 ◼   ► by the way, the classic moment, I should mention it, right? The classic moment

01:16:07 ◼   ► where there was a commercial for the Xbox that showed how great it was that

01:16:13 ◼   ► you could use these commands to control the Xbox, including to turn it off, and

01:16:16 ◼   ► it uttered the phrase that you could use to turn off the Xbox, and if you happen

01:16:20 ◼   ► to be someone who had the Xbox playing that video because it was created to run

01:16:26 ◼   ► TV through it this way exactly mm-hmm it would turn off that commercial would

01:16:31 ◼   ► turn off the actual device that you were using to watch the commercial stupid

01:16:36 ◼   ► staring stupid and my understanding and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong on

01:16:43 ◼   ► this is that some of Amazon's commercials where they do this they play

01:16:47 ◼   ► like a tone that the echo picks up so it doesn't trigger.

01:16:53 ◼   ► I've heard that somewhere that like or that it knows like just the sounds that it's hearing

01:17:00 ◼   ► at that point like it knows the ad so it doesn't trigger when the ad is on TV.

01:17:06 ◼   ► Which I think is genius.

01:17:08 ◼   ► But it all needs to get better.

01:17:10 ◼   ► I just want to underline that that all of this stuff needs to get better right?

01:17:13 ◼   ► We need—voice-activated interfaces are so great for so many things, but accidental triggers

01:17:19 ◼   ► are a problem.

01:17:20 ◼   ► Triggers from people who are not people in the room, but voices on the speaker.

01:17:24 ◼   ► It's a problem.

01:17:26 ◼   ► Making sure the trigger words don't get triggered accidentally.

01:17:28 ◼   ► We do have it.

01:17:29 ◼   ► You know, we will watch TV, and there will just be dialogue.

01:17:32 ◼   ► It will not be a commercial, it will not be trying to trigger anything, and it will go—and

01:17:36 ◼   ► the echo will go off.

01:17:37 ◼   ► Yeah, every now and then you hear it go "ba-dunk," or it's like "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba."

01:17:40 ◼   ► I'm sorry, I didn't understand what this meant.

01:17:42 ◼   ► Shut up over there.

01:17:44 ◼   ► Shut up. Yeah, exactly.

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01:19:01 ◼   ► It is Ask Upgrade Time.

01:19:04 ◼   ► The first of the year.

01:19:07 ◼   ► Some extra lasers there for the first of the year.

01:19:10 ◼   ► Those are fireworks maybe.

01:19:12 ◼   ► Yep.

01:19:13 ◼   ► Slaton asked, "wondering how charging cycles work in regards to the air pods.

01:19:17 ◼   ► Every time they're placed in the case, they start charging.

01:19:20 ◼   ► Are they going to burn through their cycles quickly?"

01:19:22 ◼   ► Now I don't know enough about this stuff, but I'm sure that Apple engineers do and that

01:19:26 ◼   ► they considered this.

01:19:27 ◼   ► My expectation is that all of this power management stuff is built into the AirPods.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Maybe they don't charge all the way to 100% even if they say so.

01:19:36 ◼   ► You know, I'm sure that it's very careful about the way that this stuff is done.

01:19:40 ◼   ► I have a couple of things here.

01:19:41 ◼   ► One is I've talked to people on the iPhone power management team and I know for a fact

01:19:46 ◼   ► that what you see isn't always the truth because it's doing stuff in the background to make

01:19:52 ◼   ► you feel comfortable.

01:19:53 ◼   ► like on an iPhone, your phone will go off of,

01:19:57 ◼   ► it isn't constantly trying to charge it at 100%

01:20:00 ◼   ► 'cause that's bad for the battery.

01:20:01 ◼   ► So it will let it drop down to 90%

01:20:04 ◼   ► and then it'll push it back up to 100%.

01:20:06 ◼   ► But in that area, it just shows us full

01:20:09 ◼   ► because otherwise people freak out

01:20:11 ◼   ► and start saying, "Why is it?

01:20:13 ◼   ► Oh no, I unplugged my iPhone.

01:20:14 ◼   ► It's only 93%.

01:20:15 ◼   ► What's wrong with it?"

01:20:16 ◼   ► So they just say it's 100% even though it's not quite.

01:20:18 ◼   ► And this is just, it's people what you're gonna do.

01:20:21 ◼   ► You gotta, you wanna give them reassurance

01:20:26 ◼   ► that it's behaving properly,

01:20:28 ◼   ► even if the information that you're imparting

01:20:31 ◼   ► is not actually accurate, which is a challenge.

01:20:34 ◼   ► That's a real user interface thing

01:20:36 ◼   ► that people don't often know about.

01:20:39 ◼   ► The other thing I wanted to say is,

01:20:41 ◼   ► my understanding about how these,

01:20:42 ◼   ► about how modern batteries work

01:20:44 ◼   ► is we think about battery cycles,

01:20:46 ◼   ► like the idea that it'll,

01:20:48 ◼   ► the recharges are good for this cycle.

01:20:49 ◼   ► And so if you charge it, you know,

01:20:52 ◼   ► use it down to 70% and then back up to a hundred,

01:20:55 ◼   ► it's a cycle.

01:20:56 ◼   ► That's not a cycle.

01:20:57 ◼   ► A cycle is using it all the way down

01:20:58 ◼   ► and all the way back up.

01:21:00 ◼   ► And it's not like, oh, well,

01:21:02 ◼   ► what I need to do every time I unplug them

01:21:04 ◼   ► is to charge them, is to put them down to zero

01:21:06 ◼   ► and then put them back up again.

01:21:08 ◼   ► There used to be batteries that were like that.

01:21:10 ◼   ► And that if I only went down halfway,

01:21:12 ◼   ► then the, you know, I'd be shortening their lives

01:21:16 ◼   ► unnecessarily, it doesn't really work like that anymore,

01:21:18 ◼   ► is my understanding.

01:21:19 ◼   ► My understanding is that you could take that battery and discharge it halfway a hundred

01:21:25 ◼   ► times or all the way 50 times and it's basically the same.

01:21:30 ◼   ► So I think what Apple would say is don't worry about it.

01:21:34 ◼   ► Rajeev asked, "I started playing with NFC tags with Android.

01:21:39 ◼   ► Do you think Apple will allow native NFC tag reading in the iOS ecosystem?"

01:21:44 ◼   ► I don't.

01:21:45 ◼   ► I don't.

01:21:46 ◼   ► No.

01:21:47 ◼   ► now if they had any desire to do this. I don't imagine that they will ever do this. I do

01:21:53 ◼   ► have to say I slightly edited this question. Rajeev asked, "When will?"

01:21:59 ◼   ► Yes, my original answer was never. Yeah, and I'm sorry to break this to you, Rajeev.

01:22:05 ◼   ► I would say the same time that Apple lets you pull out the camera app and scan a 2D

01:22:11 ◼   ► barcode and have it automatically do whatever, because that's been something that Android's

01:22:15 ◼   ► been able to do forever and you can't do that on an iPhone. Or puts an SD card reader or

01:22:21 ◼   ► replaceable batteries. None of these things are bad ideas. They're just things that I

01:22:26 ◼   ► don't think Apple is ever gonna really do. I think Apple looks at the NFC tag. The NFC

01:22:32 ◼   ► tag stuff is fun and I know people who've got them and you can do things like scan a

01:22:36 ◼   ► scan a tag when you're at a at some location and it gives you the Wi-Fi information and

01:22:40 ◼   ► and all of that, and that's all fun.

01:22:42 ◼   ► But most of the NFC stuff,

01:22:45 ◼   ► that like third party NFC stuff beyond transit passes

01:22:48 ◼   ► and Apple Pay and things like that,

01:22:50 ◼   ► they're kind of nerdy and not used super frequently

01:22:54 ◼   ► and therefore not a priority for Apple.

01:22:56 ◼   ► Like for them to then have to deal with

01:22:59 ◼   ► how do, what's the UI for that

01:23:01 ◼   ► and what are the security implications and all that.

01:23:03 ◼   ► I think Apple is much happier

01:23:04 ◼   ► to just leave it at completely locked down.

01:23:06 ◼   ► - Two quick tales on this.

01:23:07 ◼   ► So one, I was in a department store yesterday

01:23:09 ◼   ► and they were encouraging people to download their app

01:23:12 ◼   ► and they had like, you know, download it in the app store

01:23:15 ◼   ► and it said, or tap.

01:23:16 ◼   ► And I thought that was kind of cool.

01:23:18 ◼   ► You know, you could see an ad and just kind of download it.

01:23:20 ◼   ► So that's nice, but I don't really need it.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Like I can just go to the app store, I know how to search.

01:23:24 ◼   ► But I do like that idea.

01:23:26 ◼   ► Like I can see why people enjoy that convenience, right?

01:23:28 ◼   ► You see an ad, you just tap it and it goes, it's fine.

01:23:31 ◼   ► The other was, I used to work for a big bank

01:23:33 ◼   ► and there was a trial, I believe,

01:23:36 ◼   ► of putting QR codes on the ads.

01:23:40 ◼   ► The numbers were just hilarious, like so low.

01:23:45 ◼   ► You wouldn't even believe nobody was using these things to scan like QR codes

01:23:51 ◼   ► as in my opinion, very, very silly.

01:23:53 ◼   ► The NSC stuff, I can see a little bit more why people might want to use that.

01:23:57 ◼   ► But I still think nobody would use it.

01:23:59 ◼   ► Like in the grand scheme of things, nobody would use it.

01:24:03 ◼   ► Brent asked, "After you release an episode of a podcast, how long do you keep the production files?"

01:24:08 ◼   ► It's like until I start to get warnings of disk space for most shows, like most weekly shows, you know, I just don't keep them.

01:24:18 ◼   ► For some shows that are more evergreen in nature, I keep them a little bit longer.

01:24:23 ◼   ► Like for example, I still have all of the inquisitive ones.

01:24:27 ◼   ► and me and Grey keep all of the Cortex stuff and Selective Sync from Dropbox,

01:24:34 ◼   ► but for most of my shows I kind of just keep them around for a couple of months

01:24:39 ◼   ► and then and then just trash them. Because really the likelihood of me

01:24:43 ◼   ► needing the entire Logic project again, it's I've in the last six years that

01:24:49 ◼   ► I've been doing this, past a week it's not been needed.

01:24:53 ◼   ► For me, I delete after a few months anything that is a timely podcast.

01:25:02 ◼   ► So like I've got the last 40 episodes of Clockwise or 30 episodes of Clockwise.

01:25:07 ◼   ► I don't even know why I have those other than I figure I basically I keep them around

01:25:12 ◼   ► because if somebody finds a horrible mistake a week or two later, I can fix it.

01:25:17 ◼   ► Yep.

01:25:17 ◼   ► And then they just sort of sit there and then once every six months or so,

01:25:20 ◼   ► I'll go in and delete all but the last 10 or 15 and then they queue up again. For stuff

01:25:27 ◼   ► that I feel like isn't timely particularly, I will keep it around forever if I can. And

01:25:33 ◼   ► that is largely because of two things. One is I do retrospectives every year and then

01:25:38 ◼   ► for various anniversary numbers for shows like The Incomparable where people will say

01:25:44 ◼   ► "oh let's play a clip from that one" and sometimes I'll go back to the original and pull the

01:25:48 ◼   ► the clip out, sometimes I can actually clear out some of the noise around it because we're

01:25:52 ◼   ► trying to call out a very specific thing. And so once a year I will often do that. I

01:25:56 ◼   ► will go back to the original file and make some new clips and do that. And the other

01:26:00 ◼   ► thing is every now and then there's some episode that becomes wildly popular and I'm surprised

01:26:06 ◼   ► by it and technology has advanced, time has moved along, and I just recently did that

01:26:11 ◼   ► with our holiday music episode of The Incomparable. I went back to the original Logic Files and

01:26:16 ◼   ► two years old or something like that, I actually pulled out the ads, the old ads, and I put

01:26:24 ◼   ► the bonus stuff on at the end of the regular episode, and I actually stereo panned the

01:26:30 ◼   ► tracks a little bit, and I made a new high bitrate stereo MP3 mix of that episode and

01:26:36 ◼   ► dropped it, because people say they listen to it every year. And I thought, you know

01:26:40 ◼   ► what, I'm gonna dress that one up, and I'm gonna do that. And I've done that with some

01:26:43 ◼   ► of the total party kill episodes I'll do that where I will go back to the master file and

01:26:50 ◼   ► put all the heads and ends of them together so that they are just continuous and there's

01:26:56 ◼   ► like a big audiobook file of like 18 hours of that entire story and I'll do that too.

01:27:01 ◼   ► So there are times when I go back but it's for those, it's for something where people

01:27:06 ◼   ► are like "oh I really like that episode from two years ago where this thing happened" and

01:27:11 ◼   ► like oh really like I did that with the Star Wars episodes we did too where you

01:27:15 ◼   ► know time had moved along the bit rates that I had I had saved out the mp3s were

01:27:18 ◼   ► really low and and I split them into you know into two parts but now I can

01:27:22 ◼   ► release a full version of it with all the breaks taken out so I do I do

01:27:27 ◼   ► actually do it enough that I want to keep those around as long as I can.

01:27:31 ◼   ► Craig asked Myke are you installing a smart thermostat in your new home I am

01:27:36 ◼   ► not. My house is powered completely by electricity. We do not have any gas heating of any kind.

01:27:46 ◼   ► So all of my radiators, you just turn them on on the wall. And there we have no central

01:27:52 ◼   ► heating system. So you just turn on the radiators that you want. We actually do have this really

01:27:57 ◼   ► cool Dyson hot cool fan thing, which we've been using a lot because it's just really

01:28:04 ◼   ► awesome. Yeah, so I don't think that there are any systems that we could use or there

01:28:12 ◼   ► might be one where like, I don't know, you get all new radiators and they're all kind

01:28:16 ◼   ► of connected or something.

01:28:17 ◼   ► - We're gonna hear about how there are smart radiator things where you put on the things

01:28:22 ◼   ► and they can control them all and all that.

01:28:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's true. But we don't have radiators like that.

01:28:27 ◼   ► - You have to adjust the heat individually in every single room.

01:28:30 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:28:31 ◼   ► - Huh.

01:28:32 ◼   ► Interesting. But like we don't have the radiators that have those things that you twist. It's

01:28:39 ◼   ► like a little knob that you turn. We could probably get new radiators that maybe have

01:28:42 ◼   ► some school central control unit by Wi-Fi. I'm sure that they exist. Maybe. Actually,

01:28:47 ◼   ► I'm not sure. Maybe they exist. I don't know. We might look for those at some point. But

01:28:52 ◼   ► frankly, this house is super well insulated. Like, it's cold now in London. Not super cold,

01:28:58 ◼   ► but it's cold enough. Cold enough where you'd want heating. I've not had any heating on

01:29:02 ◼   ► today and totally fine. They totally make smart radiator things that replace the

01:29:06 ◼   ► that replace your little knob and it turns the knob automatically and it

01:29:10 ◼   ► senses the temperature. No no no I know that but we don't have radiators like

01:29:14 ◼   ► that. Like what do you okay so what do you have? I know what you mean about the

01:29:18 ◼   ► knob like the thing that you twist it's like a big dial thing the radiators that

01:29:22 ◼   ► we have have this tiny little thing that you turn on the on the side that they're

01:29:27 ◼   ► not like the radiators that you're used to seeing. It's not a twist it's a turn

01:29:30 ◼   ► I'm not used to seeing radiators at all. I don't understand radiators at all.

01:29:33 ◼   ► I know what you're talking about.

01:29:35 ◼   ► So it's a turn and not a twist? I don't know what the difference is there.

01:29:38 ◼   ► Right, I know, but what I'm saying is what you're telling me I know exists,

01:29:43 ◼   ► it does not work on my radiator.

01:29:44 ◼   ► Okay.

01:29:45 ◼   ► Right, like the thing that you're referencing, that is what goes on gas,

01:29:49 ◼   ► like central heating stuff, like where you have this big dial that you turn like left and right.

01:29:55 ◼   ► That is not like how ours work.

01:29:57 ◼   ► And I wish I could give you some kind of thing right now.

01:30:01 ◼   ► I can't, there's no picture.

01:30:02 ◼   ► But trust me, I've looked into some of this from a base level,

01:30:06 ◼   ► and those things tend to work with gas radiators.

01:30:09 ◼   ► But we don't have that type of radiator.

01:30:11 ◼   ► Anyway, so no.

01:30:14 ◼   ► Wow, that's a radiator tragedy.

01:30:16 ◼   ► Again, but it would be a concern if I felt like we needed it.

01:30:21 ◼   ► Okay.

01:30:22 ◼   ► And frankly, we don't like we turn the big radiator on in the in the in the in the living room

01:30:29 ◼   ► Um, and that will heat the living room the kitchen and pretty much the hallway

01:30:34 ◼   ► If it's on and then we have our little dyson thing in the bedroom, which is way more advanced

01:30:40 ◼   ► Than any radiator would be uh, and we put that on when we sleep and we're all good

01:30:45 ◼   ► So okay, maybe at one point one day we might change it all but we have no intention of doing that right now

01:30:51 ◼   ► And yeah, I know the products that you're referring to, like I think, is it Elgato or

01:30:57 ◼   ► someone like that? There's a company that makes the Eve thermostat.

01:31:02 ◼   ► Yeah, there's Todo, which is the smart radiator thermostat, and there's a Netatmo

01:31:09 ◼   ► smart radiator valve.

01:31:11 ◼   ► Netatmo, right? That's the thing I'm thinking of. That's not what our things look like. So

01:31:16 ◼   ► like you turn it left to right, that's not what our temperature control looks like on our radiators.

01:31:21 ◼   ► Because I think that's what they're doing is it's just allowing the hot air to flow in or not,

01:31:25 ◼   ► or the hot water to flow in or not flow in from the central boiler.

01:31:29 ◼   ► Yeah, but we don't have water going to us, right?

01:31:32 ◼   ► Okay, yours are just electric heaters on the wall.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Yeah, yes, that is the best way to blow it.

01:31:36 ◼   ► Like the one that I've got, I've got an oil radiator here on the floor that is my

01:31:42 ◼   ► space heater for this room, and it's electric. So that's what it is. You don't have water

01:31:50 ◼   ► from a central boiler moving to all your radiators.

01:31:53 ◼   ► Yeah, and we don't fill it up with oil either.

01:31:55 ◼   ► It's like they're just basically two electric heaters.

01:31:58 ◼   ► So like they heat up filaments inside.

01:32:00 ◼   ► I don't fill this up with oil.

01:32:01 ◼   ► It's filled with oil.

01:32:02 ◼   ► It comes filled with oil and stays filled with oil.

01:32:04 ◼   ► The oil is just the transfer medium.

01:32:05 ◼   ► It's not the...

01:32:06 ◼   ► It doesn't burn.

01:32:07 ◼   ► It just gets hot and stays warm.

01:32:09 ◼   ► I think they're kind of just like toasters for us.

01:32:12 ◼   ► Yeah, basically.

01:32:13 ◼   ► You've got a wall toaster.

01:32:14 ◼   ► Okay.

01:32:15 ◼   ► So yeah, that's it, right?

01:32:16 ◼   ► like the the the existing stuff that I've seen doesn't control what we have. I have not looked

01:32:22 ◼   ► into electric radiator technology enough to know if there's like a radiator system you could replace

01:32:28 ◼   ► but we just don't really have the desire to go down that route right now because it's going to

01:32:33 ◼   ► be expensive and frankly we're good. So that's a really long answer to that question and uh finally

01:32:41 ◼   ► today this is a long question and I don't know how long the answer will be but Jmush asked

01:32:45 ◼   ► Jason, you have mentioned how your mother now uses her iPad as her main computer.

01:32:51 ◼   ► In a transition from taking her from a Mac to an iPod, how did you manage documents,

01:32:57 ◼   ► iTunes library, photo library, etc? My retired aunt has a 9.7 inch iPad Pro and a dying 2006 Mac,

01:33:04 ◼   ► which we want to get out the door and not replace, so I'm trying to figure how to

01:33:07 ◼   ► advise her towards an iPad only life. This is a work in progress for me. My mother

01:33:13 ◼   ► doesn't have documents. She also doesn't have an iTunes library. So the photos are an issue.

01:33:18 ◼   ► So there you go. You want to get rid of those. So photo library, she has, she's taken a lot of

01:33:24 ◼   ► photos. I did a couple of things there. She is paying 99 cents a month or something for more

01:33:29 ◼   ► iCloud storage. And the idea there is that I've got her iPad and her iPhone syncing to iCloud photo

01:33:35 ◼   ► library. So she's getting to, you know, those photos are backed up somewhere. That is, that's

01:33:42 ◼   ► part of it. She had a large-ish photo library on her Mac, and what I did was I synced that--I kept a backup myself, I've got it somewhere here--but I synced that with Google Photos and put Google Photos on her computer.

01:34:06 ◼   ► So she can look at old pictures on Google Photos

01:34:10 ◼   ► on her phone or her iPad.

01:34:14 ◼   ► And I did that mostly because it was free

01:34:19 ◼   ► to upload those photos to Google Photos,

01:34:21 ◼   ► and it was gonna cost to increase her storage at iCloud.

01:34:25 ◼   ► If I had to do it over again,

01:34:28 ◼   ► I'd probably do the same thing, I might not.

01:34:29 ◼   ► I might put them all in iCloud,

01:34:31 ◼   ► but that's basically been my solution right now.

01:34:34 ◼   ► So there you go. First delete all the documents. I guess Apple Music, iTunes in the cloud,

01:34:45 ◼   ► does that iTunes in the cloud, iTunes match?

01:34:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, if she's got a large iTunes library and it's not just stuff bought from

01:34:54 ◼   ► iTunes but it's other things, Apple Music does include iTunes match. You can also just

01:34:58 ◼   ► pay for iTunes match if she's not buying new stuff so much.

01:35:01 ◼   ► - Well, C++ match is cheaper, right?

01:35:02 ◼   ► It's like $25 a year.

01:35:04 ◼   ► - Right, and I think you could do it with,

01:35:07 ◼   ► I think you could do that with Amazon too,

01:35:08 ◼   ► 'cause Amazon does have a matching service as well,

01:35:11 ◼   ► 'cause I pay for that just, you know,

01:35:13 ◼   ► it's like $25 a year just to get my entire music library

01:35:16 ◼   ► available on Holy Echo. - And/or,

01:35:18 ◼   ► buy another iPad at some point in the future

01:35:21 ◼   ► of 256 gigabytes of storage.

01:35:23 ◼   ► Just put all the music on it.

01:35:25 ◼   ► How much music should you have?

01:35:27 ◼   ► - Well, that's true, you just have to get it

01:35:29 ◼   ► to there from somewhere.

01:35:30 ◼   ► the Mac still exists, it's dying but it's still there right?

01:35:34 ◼   ► yeah but if it dies then you're out of luck so you can't, I think you need to have a cloud

01:35:38 ◼   ► backup solution but I think that's the way to do it.

01:35:42 ◼   ► If you want to find out show notes for this week's episode go to relay.fm/upgrades/123

01:35:48 ◼   ► I want to take a moment to thank our sponsors again Encapsula, Freshbooks and Macworld and

01:35:52 ◼   ► thank you for supporting this week's show and thank you as well not only for listening

01:35:56 ◼   ► Thank you to everybody who is a member of relay FM and help support us there as well. We truly appreciate that

01:36:02 ◼   ► So thank you for doing so when I find Jason online. He's over at six colors calm

01:36:07 ◼   ► Jason also hosts free agents liftoff and

01:36:10 ◼   ► Clockwise on relay FM as well as his incredible shows over at the incomparable

01:36:16 ◼   ► calm where you can find many all the pop culture shows all the great shows all the great pop culture shows for your

01:36:23 ◼   ► Delight over there Jason is on Twitter is at Jason LJ s and e double L. I am at I Myke I am y ke

01:36:29 ◼   ► There's again. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time until then say goodbye mr. Snow. Bye everybody

01:36:35 ◼   ► [MUSIC]