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Upgrade

110: Never, Not Ever, Not Once

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 110. Today's show is brought to you by

00:00:14   Casper and Mac Weldon. My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined by

00:00:18   Mr. Jason Snell. Hi Myke, how you doing? I'm good Jason, how

00:00:22   are you? I'm doing just fine. Monday morning. So it is episode 110

00:00:27   Today.

00:00:28   That would be, in binary that means something.

00:00:31   Again, I don't know.

00:00:32   I really don't want to go through this again.

00:00:33   You have to go back on the talk show to find out the answer to your question.

00:00:37   I think that's how it works.

00:00:39   Aloha.

00:00:40   Five.

00:00:41   I think it means five.

00:00:43   Big news today.

00:00:44   2016 upgrade merchandise on sale.

00:00:49   We have a ton of links in the show notes and the reason there's a ton of links is because

00:00:52   we have a plethora of products distributed from different nations.

00:00:57   Yup, yup, we're back on the merchandise horse. People decided that they let us know

00:01:03   that they wanted the return of the upgrade merchandise, which we made available, what,

00:01:07   in the spring, I think, for a couple weeks. And it's getting chilly out there, so having

00:01:15   the hoodie come back when people might actually use the hoodie seemed to make sense too.

00:01:19   Yep, I've been getting a lot of use out of my hoodie actually.

00:01:24   Real time follow up, 110 is 6 in binary. Thank you to the chat room for that.

00:01:28   Thank you chat room.

00:01:29   It's super important.

00:01:30   Right, so please give me a moment dear listener to explain to you the merchandise options

00:01:35   that are available to you.

00:01:37   Now we have a couple of special things that we're doing that we've, one of them we brought

00:01:41   back which is the hoodie. So we have an upgrade hoodie, I have two of them, I absolutely love

00:01:45   the hoodie. It's no longer a secret that there is a special insignia on the inside, it is

00:01:50   a reprint of the original hoodie with the insignia on the inside and the patch on the

00:01:55   chest.

00:01:56   We decided, yeah it's an embroidered patch on the chest, we decided, we thought about

00:02:02   doing a different one on the inside, but we decided we didn't want to be like elitist,

00:02:07   I thought about having something on the inside that said I didn't get the first batch, something

00:02:11   like that, and we decided no, we were just going to keep it the same because our elitism

00:02:15   only extends to the secret society of Upgradians and does not continue inside the secret society.

00:02:21   Once you're in, you're in.

00:02:22   We don't want an arterial system of Upgradians.

00:02:23   No.

00:02:24   No, no, we're not like that.

00:02:25   Now, this hoodie can only be produced and sent and distributed from the US as we have

00:02:30   Cotton Bureau making this, because it's a special item, even for Cotton Bureau, because

00:02:33   of the insane demands that we had for them, for this hoodie.

00:02:38   The same goes for a special version of the Upgrade logo tee.

00:02:43   This is the first time we have done a t-shirt with just the upgrade logo on it.

00:02:46   So just the circle with the power button and the up arrow.

00:02:49   That's all it is.

00:02:50   It's just a circle, it's like an outline.

00:02:52   Now there is a gray version and a red version available from Cotton Bureau, but the real

00:02:56   one is the jet black one.

00:02:59   This is what you want.

00:03:00   We have a black t-shirt with a black foil logo printed on it.

00:03:06   I think the foil, I think all of them get the black foil, so it's super fancy shiny

00:03:10   black on all of them but the reason for it is that we have the black on black option.

00:03:15   How much blacker could it be? None more black.

00:03:16   No more black. Now these two items are only available from Cotton Bureau again because

00:03:22   of our crazy demands. We're also bringing back the Brain Ball t-shirt. Now the Brain

00:03:26   Ball t-shirt is available from Cotton Bureau and also from Teespring, distributing from

00:03:32   the European Union. So Cotton Bureau for the US, Teespring for the EU, you can get the

00:03:37   the Brain Ball shirt and there's also a version of the upgrade podcast logo t-shirt we have

00:03:42   red and we are working with Teespring to get a grey option added within the next couple

00:03:46   of days so we'll mention this again next week so if you miss it out because you don't want

00:03:51   a red one you want a grey one and you're in Europe you'll be able to get it.

00:03:54   Yeah they don't have a fancy foil or anything like that but they you know we we we hear

00:03:59   from people in Europe like you Myke that the Cotton Bureau shipping to Europe is expensive

00:04:04   which it is and they do, Teespring does a European fulfillment version and so we've

00:04:08   decided to sort of split it like, I think the definitive versions are the cotton bureau

00:04:12   versions, but if you're in the EU and you don't want to pay that very high shipping

00:04:18   cost, we've set up these Teespring campaigns.

00:04:20   So hopefully it will work.

00:04:22   This is an experiment.

00:04:23   Yup, you can do it.

00:04:24   Look, frankly, that black shirt, the black on black shirt, I'm going to pay the really

00:04:28   high cost because I want it, but you don't have to.

00:04:31   So there's going to be a bunch of links in the show notes.

00:04:33   It's all clearly labeled.

00:04:35   If you're in the European Union and you want to buy from Cotton Bureau, you want to get

00:04:38   the hoodie, you want to get the special shirt, you can.

00:04:40   But just be forewarned that the shipping will be high and there is also a chance that you'll

00:04:44   be hit with customs, right?

00:04:45   This is just a possibility because it's coming from the US, which is why we've done the best

00:04:48   we can to put some additions on Teespring as well.

00:04:52   So we'll talk about this again next week as a reminder in case you forget, but go and

00:04:57   clad yourself out in upgrade merchandise.

00:05:00   And remember that every time you buy a t-shirt, you're helping me buy my house.

00:05:05   Remember that.

00:05:07   Because believe it or not, buying a house is very expensive.

00:05:10   So you can not only, not only will you look good on the outside, you can feel good on

00:05:15   the inside by buying upgrade merchandise.

00:05:18   Beautiful.

00:05:19   Last week, we spent some time talking about the potential of a October event for the MAX,

00:05:26   Jason.

00:05:27   confident that there will be something in October this month. And just after we recorded,

00:05:33   as always, there was a pressure release from Apple stating that they are going to be moving

00:05:39   their fourth quarter results call because of a scheduling conflict. This doesn't necessarily

00:05:45   mean that something's coming, but it does mean that Apple has something going on in

00:05:49   October.

00:05:50   Yeah, Tim Cook has a dentist appointment that day.

00:05:52   He can't make it.

00:05:54   So he can't make it.

00:05:55   Yeah, they had to move it for that.

00:05:56   I've made that joke like three times on podcast now, but hey, there it is.

00:06:00   Yeah, and there's lots of speculation about what that means and if it means that there

00:06:02   might be an event earlier or later or something based on that, and we just don't know.

00:06:09   We don't know.

00:06:11   It sounds like it might be related, but I'm not sure I can look at that and say, "Oh,

00:06:17   this is what that means."

00:06:18   Mm-hmm. But it's more indication, right? It's just further indication of something

00:06:23   coming. Jason, you—we were talking last week about

00:06:28   all the purgeable storage. Was that last week, purgeable storage and iCloud stuff?

00:06:32   Probably. Last week or the week before, yeah. Yeah, so I wrote a couple of pieces on Six

00:06:36   Scholars last week. I sat down and wrote like 2,500 words about Sierra as a supplement to

00:06:41   my review. You know, why not? About purgeable storage and about iCloud Drive. And we'll

00:06:46   the links in the show notes. Purgeable storage, you know, the question I got that I never

00:06:51   got an answer to when I was writing the review, but that I've gotten some more information

00:06:56   about now is how FreeSpace is defined in Sierra. And the short version is, it's defined as

00:07:03   the amount of FreeSpace on disk as we used to know it, plus whatever you have that is

00:07:07   purgeable, which is basically files that the system knows exist in the cloud and can be

00:07:12   re-downloaded later and so they can delete them if they want and that's

00:07:16   there's a whole list of things that that can be it includes things like iCloud

00:07:22   photo library photos if you're syncing with the cloud and have managed storage

00:07:26   on its iCloud drive stuff dictionaries and fonts and some other stuff that the

00:07:32   system knows about you and and it it ideally it's transparent which is

00:07:39   basically if you if it says you have 60 gigs free and you actually have what we

00:07:43   used to think of as 40 gigs free plus 20 of purgeable and you try to copy

00:07:46   something that's 50 gigs it should just happen and you should notice no

00:07:50   difference and what it's doing in the background is it will purge not just 10

00:07:54   gigs but it'll purge more than 10 gigs because your Mac works best when it's

00:07:59   got some free space so it'll purge a little bit more than that but that's the

00:08:02   idea there the the problems are that there are bugs and I ran into them where

00:08:06   my system lost track of how much actual space I had and was also inconsistent in showing

00:08:12   me free space between various different places in the system where you can see it. So there

00:08:16   are bugs in Sierra that can affect this. My understanding is Apple is working on the bugs.

00:08:22   That's always good to hear. But if you're a Mac nerd, especially somebody who prides

00:08:27   yourself on knowing what's going on on Mac maybe helps other people with their Macs too,

00:08:32   should know that this is a complete change in how Sierra defines storage. It's just not

00:08:38   what it was. Free space doesn't mean what it used to be. It's a very different concept

00:08:43   now.

00:08:44   Yeah, the thing about this purgeable space thing is it's very confusing, right? About

00:08:50   showing you this, and you've got this, but it's this much. You know, like you have this

00:08:53   much total, but this much, and splitting it down is confusing. But I do agree with the

00:08:59   like if they know they have this amount of space that can be removed I can see

00:09:04   why you would show it in this way like it would be even better from a user

00:09:08   perspective if they just didn't split it up like they were just like you have 90

00:09:12   gigs available like and then rely on the system to deal with it but I think that

00:09:16   maybe it's too new and they can't give full reliance on the fact that it will

00:09:20   automatically do it right so they break it down a little bit but it's super

00:09:24   confusing and super buggy it seems, right? Because you've run into some pretty nasty

00:09:29   things that we've spoken about.

00:09:30   It's been buggy for me. I mean, I ran into some – I have not seen them all repeatedly,

00:09:36   but yeah, when I was writing my review, I ran into some pretty nasty bugs where it – at

00:09:41   one point it thought my drive was half the size that it was. And this is the thing, once

00:09:46   you start monkeying with the free space calculation, the problem is that bugs can get really weird

00:09:51   because now the system is making up its own number for free space and what if it gets

00:09:56   it wrong because there's a bug. And that definitely happened to me.

00:10:00   I still wonder to myself why they didn't wait for the new Apple File System to do something

00:10:06   like this, where it could be built to think about it more sensibly than bolting this stuff

00:10:11   on. It just seems strange to me, I don't know.

00:10:13   I don't know. I mean, this is above the file system level, though. That's the thing, is

00:10:16   that here you need to have something in the system that designates what files are purged

00:10:21   and not. And I wonder if--I don't know a lot about the new Apple file system, but it's

00:10:27   possible that this is a file system level thing where the OS can define--you know, you

00:10:32   can mark a file as purgeable, and it does all that calculations itself, and it purges

00:10:37   the files automatically, but that's not--even then, I think that's an OS level thing, not

00:10:41   a file system level thing. So I think they had to do both. They have to do a new file

00:10:45   system, and they have to update how we handle all this stuff in the operating system. Anyway,

00:10:51   not, you know, with so many of these features, it's not fundamentally a bad idea. I think

00:10:57   it's actually fundamentally a good idea. I think it's all in how it's implemented and

00:11:01   if it's buggy. And it's buggy right now, or at least it has been buggy for me when I've

00:11:07   used it. So, yeah.

00:11:11   The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 debacle continues and continues to rage on into new and unforeseen

00:11:18   instances. So over the weekend there were multiple reports of replacement Note 7s catching

00:11:28   on fire. One caught fire on a plane before the plane took off, thankfully. Say they catch

00:11:34   fire, they start billowing smoke is a better way to put it. What I'm saying is the idea

00:11:42   of something catching on fire is the image that it conjures up I think is slightly different

00:11:47   in some instances, like especially the one on the plane, it got really hot and smoke started pouring out of it.

00:11:52   But hey, but it was it was so hot that it burnt through the carpet.

00:11:57   But I don't actually think it was a fire as such.

00:12:00   I know I'm being super picky,

00:12:02   but I just wanted to paint the story a little bit better because a fire on a plane means everybody is in like

00:12:07   horrific trouble and it wasn't so much that, if that makes sense.

00:12:11   However, there have been I think five

00:12:15   reports over the weekend of note sevens catching on fire. I'll put some links in the show notes.

00:12:20   There's been some great reporting from The Verge. Jordan Golsan at The Verge has done an incredible job with this story

00:12:26   and I love the way that he is

00:12:29   after maybe the second or third of these that went up, he's been ending all of these stories in the same way where he's just like

00:12:37   you just, if you own one of these phones, take it back immediately to the carrier.

00:12:43   like no joke this thing you cannot use it right and I really like his kind of

00:12:48   just like I'm being just upfront like I've done my reporting but now let me

00:12:52   tell you stop using this phone right which and I've really appreciated that

00:12:57   kind of reporting anyway as it stands right now there was breaking news last

00:13:03   night which broke during the presidential debate shocker that Samsung

00:13:08   is basically halting production currently on the Note 7 and a bunch of

00:13:16   carriers including AT&T I believe has said that it will not be selling them.

00:13:21   EE in the UK is not doing refunds now but they're saying they will do

00:13:25   exchanges for a S7 Edge which is a similar phone but just smaller I guess

00:13:32   and doesn't have the pen. So as it stands this phone has been an absolute disaster

00:13:38   Samsung have really done a terrible job with this from a you know from a

00:13:44   production standpoint and also from a

00:13:49   communication standpoint as well I think that they have done a terrible terrible

00:13:55   job of all of this and it seems like right now this phone is is is over it is

00:14:01   game over and I think that the repercussions for Samsung on this are

00:14:05   going to be long-reaching because it's gotten to the point where to keep messaging simple

00:14:10   like on airplanes and stuff they just say if you have a Samsung device turn it off.

00:14:14   Yeah, I got that one yesterday when I flew.

00:14:16   Did you?

00:14:17   Yeah, it was pretty funny.

00:14:18   It was a "If you have a Samsung Galaxy Note 7, turn it off, don't charge it."

00:14:24   That was the, I was flying on Southwest which is the airline that had the flight that had

00:14:28   to turn around on the tarmac because of the Galaxy Note that was billowing smoke.

00:14:33   So they're very sensitive to it. But yeah, it's um, I don't know, I mean, they could

00:14:38   go on selling Galaxy Notes and they could even relaunch the Galaxy Note 7 and I'm sure

00:14:41   they would sell some. I'm sure they could be, they could promise that it's fine now.

00:14:45   I mean, they already promised that once, I think, and that seems to not be the case.

00:14:50   But you're right, I think that the problem you get is that in the end it becomes part

00:14:55   of the mindset of everybody that this is a bad, you know, "Oh, is that the one that

00:15:00   burst into flames and that's a hard thing to live down no matter what.

00:15:06   And so you've got to ask yourself if you're Samsung, what's the best play here?

00:15:10   Do you kind of try to sell, you know, fix the battery problem, try to sell your stock,

00:15:15   dramatically decrease the number of them you're making, and plan a new brand strategy for

00:15:20   next year that calls the, you know, maybe re-brands the Note to something different

00:15:25   or re-brands the Galaxy line to something different?

00:15:28   just, you know, do you try to get through it and fix, rehab your existing brand value

00:15:35   or do you just not care and throw that away and figure we gotta start again with something

00:15:40   else?

00:15:42   Do your rehab on the Samsung brand and distance yourself from the Note brand.

00:15:48   I think at this point they need to move away from the Note branding.

00:15:53   I think that's the safest thing to do.

00:15:55   that device but give it a new name. I think they need to know that they're going to have

00:16:01   to set out this generation. I think they're done for this generation. They're going to

00:16:05   have to wait until the next one now I think. Because they're going to need some time between

00:16:09   these, you know, they can't come out with a new phone next week. If they do it won't

00:16:16   work right? Because everyone will just, what were you going to say? This one doesn't catch

00:16:19   fire right? You'll have to say that.

00:16:21   It's time for sure.

00:16:22   You can't do that, right? That's just not a good marketing message. We promise this

00:16:26   one won't catch on fire and kill you.

00:16:29   So here's my prediction. It's going to be the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus.

00:16:37   I'm sticking by my what some people think is a joke, but I'm being deadly serious, that

00:16:41   they call it something like the Galaxy Arctic 8. They're going to give it some name which

00:16:46   signifies cold.

00:16:47   Interesting. All right.

00:16:49   what I would do if I was in charge of Samsung, you know, like all the colors would be like

00:16:54   Arctic Blue and Frost White and Cold Steel. Yeah, it's been a real, a real… it's just

00:17:04   been bad. It's just bad. It's a bad story. And there have been people who have been asking

00:17:09   the people at The Verge, I saw a Twitter exchange between Michael Gartenberg from Mobile Nations

00:17:13   and Nielle Patel from The Verge basically saying, "Are you guys verifying these claims

00:17:19   of these people who say that their replacements are also exploding, and he said, "Yeah, we've

00:17:24   actually been trying to sift through a lot of these to get the ones that we can verify

00:17:28   and not the ones that are suspicious." So The Verge seems to be trying pretty hard to

00:17:33   have these be legitimate people.

00:17:35   With the one that was on the Southwest, they got the guy to take a photo of the box and

00:17:39   the phone and send it to them so they could verify it.

00:17:42   Yep.

00:17:43   So they're doing a good job of it, I think.

00:17:44   Yeah, I think they're trying to not get fished in by people who want to get their fake stories

00:17:51   on websites, which is always a challenge in a rush to judgment like this.

00:17:57   We got a tweet from somebody, I don't even have it here, who basically said, "Somebody

00:18:02   reported that an iPhone 7 had a discoloration battery problem.

00:18:06   Why is the press not going crazy over that?"

00:18:08   I didn't respond because, first off, it's not my job to investigate every report of

00:18:12   everything that somebody on Twitter asked me to investigate but second I

00:18:15   think the answer would be because one phone is not a trend and many phones and

00:18:22   a recall is a trend so I think that's the difference is that you you're gonna

00:18:26   have product failures here and there but these things have happened over history

00:18:29   to Apple products but in small batches at one it might happen to one of them

00:18:33   but that's what you over here but this is there's been a lot of these and then

00:18:36   there's been a lot of these again. It is a unique situation, I think. I can't recall

00:18:42   ever seeing something like this before to a major handset.

00:18:44   And I think Apple also has a team now devoted to very quickly making right the issues of

00:18:53   people who bring those things up. Like, very quickly they're like, "Oh, we'll get you a

00:18:57   replacement immediately and send you a gift card and all this," and basically they silence

00:19:01   those people. Now, what that does is, that's PR. That's not a cover-up, because these things

00:19:06   are going to happen when you mass produce anything, and if it's a trend, then they can't

00:19:11   do that. But it gets those "one person had a bad experience" stories maybe out of the

00:19:16   media faster. You know, not always. Stephen Hackett got a buzzing phone and got a replacement,

00:19:24   but that story still kind of went around for a couple of days. But I'm sure Apple does

00:19:29   Samsung, I mean, one of the things that The Verge reported from one of the people was

00:19:33   this mistaken text message that was basically, "Do we want to string this guy along or just

00:19:39   let him shut it down or just let him do what he's going to do?"

00:19:43   Which was very much, "That was your Samsung PR damage control thing."

00:19:46   And I think one of the offensive things about that is it came across that Samsung was more

00:19:50   concerned about this as a PR problem than it was maybe as a product safety problem.

00:19:54   I'm not sure that's actually true because it may be that that person's job was very

00:19:59   specifically to worry about the PR problem, but that was the person that was talking to

00:20:03   the customer.

00:20:04   And you know, the customer doesn't care about your PR problem.

00:20:08   That stuff is tough because this message came out, it was basically sent to the customer

00:20:14   incorrectly.

00:20:16   And it kind of makes it sound like they didn't care, but it was that person, the person who's

00:20:21   who's doing that job is removed, you know, kind of from this in a way, like emotionally.

00:20:25   They're just getting their job done.

00:20:27   But this is the stuff that even Apple, I'm sure, say to each other when they're dealing,

00:20:31   you know, when it's somebody's job to deal with the damage control, but it doesn't and

00:20:35   shouldn't usually go to the right person.

00:20:38   You know, it shouldn't go to the person that it's concerning.

00:20:43   I had one more iCloud Drive item, or a Sierra item, but it's about iCloud Drive.

00:20:49   We also talked about how in my review, and we talked about it, that I was doing a logic

00:20:53   project and my files got deleted by iCloud Drive out from under me.

00:20:58   Not good.

00:20:59   And I just wanted to follow up and say what I discovered is partly that was due to the

00:21:03   bug I talked about earlier, which is my drive thought that I had less free space than I

00:21:07   actually did, so it got really desperate about what it was deleting.

00:21:10   And part of it is that the way that the iCloud Drive managed storage system works is it's

00:21:16   kind of, it doesn't know about every file on your file system. It's not monitoring core

00:21:21   storage or anything like that. It's not monitoring the file system to check on file access. It's

00:21:25   doing sort of what the Finder does when it says "Last Opened," which basically means

00:21:29   you need to open something from the Finder to let the system know that it's been accessed

00:21:34   recently. Because although iCloud Drive says we won't delete files that have been accessed

00:21:38   recently, if you open an app and then it opens a file and doesn't update that it's, you know,

00:21:45   it's just opened a file, what happens? Like a secondary file, like a file that it's referenced in its document.

00:21:51   Nothing happens. That other document doesn't get referenced.

00:21:55   And this is kind of a hole in Apple's thinking, where Apple's really thinking about how it designs apps, which is

00:22:00   these keynote documents that are packages, and they're really folders that have a bunch of files in them,

00:22:05   but with a package, a project file, any access of it marks the whole thing as being accessed.

00:22:14   and iCloud Drive's not going to delete things inside a package file. The problem

00:22:18   when I had my logic files deleted was that the logic project that I use

00:22:25   doesn't have the... doesn't keep the audio files in the project, it just keeps them in

00:22:29   a folder next to the project. You can do both, you can do either one, but I... for

00:22:34   workflow reasons, basically, I keep it outside of the package, because otherwise

00:22:37   I'd be digging into the package all the time to move files in and out, and it's

00:22:40   not worth it. But then it runs into this where those files seemed like they hadn't been accessed

00:22:46   in only a couple of weeks, which again, I think is really to the bug. But if they had

00:22:51   been inside the package in a normal kind of package format, which is the other way to

00:22:55   do logic projects, it would have honored it and it wouldn't have removed those. It turns

00:23:02   out that there's an API for developers that Apple has provided for a while now that lets

00:23:09   apps mark all of the files they use in their project as being accessed

00:23:16   and it was put in, I believe, specifically for iCloud Drive

00:23:20   so that if you open a project file

00:23:23   and one of the files you needed for that project was on iCloud Drive, it would say

00:23:27   basically "I need that file" and iCloud Drive would download it and it would keep it there

00:23:31   and then you would have it. So the APIs exist.

00:23:34   If only third-party apps like Logic supported it.

00:23:38   Oh wait, logic is written by Apple.

00:23:40   Mmm, that's embarrassing.

00:23:42   Anyway, Apple released a tech note last week that I--

00:23:46   I very rarely take credit for this stuff,

00:23:48   because I'm sure they hear from a lot of people.

00:23:49   But this tech note, I suspect, was caused by me.

00:23:52   And the tech note basically says,

00:23:54   if you are using a pro app with iCloud Drive,

00:24:00   here are your two options for optimized storage.

00:24:03   One, move all your stuff out of the folders that

00:24:06   are synced with iCloud or two turn off optimized storage those are your options so yeah.

00:24:15   So don't use this feature if you if you're using some apps don't use this productivity

00:24:22   feature with your Mac oh well oh well.

00:24:26   Alright so just before we we wrap up our follow up slash follow out segment I wanted to get

00:24:32   your opinions on the PlayStation VR as you are on the new screensavers on

00:24:38   Twitter this weekend and there is a picture of you right on the page with

00:24:42   the PSVR on your face and it is PSVR week this week mine arrives a little

00:24:46   later on this week which I'm very excited about so I wanted to kind of get

00:24:50   from you your opinions on the hardware and the titles that you played.

00:24:54   Well I only played Job Simulator. Which is amazing right I've played it on the Vive

00:24:58   I freaking love that game. It's so much fun.

00:25:02   It was like I was in the Quickie Mart in the Simpsons.

00:25:05   Yeah, that's what it looks like.

00:25:06   Yeah, yeah, it was pretty cool. So I've only, my VR experience is really limited.

00:25:11   I've spent, you know, 20 minutes with the PSVR and I spent, you know, 10 or 15 minutes with the Oculus Rift.

00:25:17   And I guess what I'd say is the PSVR seemed, I mean in terms of the head tracking stuff,

00:25:24   the fact that I could move around, I didn't feel any lag. I think I did a good job there.

00:25:28   I think the graphics looked better on the Oculus Rift, but I thought the PSVR looked fine. It was almost like a Wii versus Xbox 360 kind of comparison.

00:25:44   It's not quite as high resolution, but it was perfectly fine. You used the PlayStation Move controllers as your hands.

00:25:53   It was, I thought it was good, I thought it worked really well. As somebody who's never going to buy a gaming PC,

00:26:03   if I get any of these it will be the PSVR, and I don't have a PlayStation 4, so I'm definitely considering buying the bundle

00:26:11   where you get the PlayStation 4 and the PSVR together, but I'm interested to see what other people say.

00:26:18   in the end it's going to come down to what the apps are, what the games are, because

00:26:23   something like Job Simulator is fun from a novelty perspective, but I'm not sure developers

00:26:31   really have figured out entirely what a good VR title is and what makes it worth playing

00:26:37   in VR versus just playing it on a screen.

00:26:39   I've played some stuff on various systems that I think work well with it, but they tend

00:26:47   to be in development. You know, all of the stuff that I've played where I'm like, this

00:26:53   isn't just fun, like VR really makes this a worthwhile experience tend to be games that

00:26:58   are being developed, right? Like I've played pre-release versions or alpha versions of

00:27:03   stuff. I'm super excited about this. We're recording a remaster this weekend after me

00:27:09   and Federico have had some time to play because Shaheed has had one for a little while because

00:27:12   he's a developer. So yeah, I'm super super excited and it's all about PSVR for me this

00:27:19   week.

00:27:20   Yeah, I, it was good. My concern was that it was going to feel like a really substandard

00:27:27   version of like the Oculus Rift and it didn't feel that way at all. It felt pretty good.

00:27:33   And I'm not, I'm, it's funny because I think in the long run VR gaming is something that's

00:27:39   going to be of appeal to everybody who's got a console and I understand why a lot

00:27:43   of these initial things are based on PCs because you want the power of the PC

00:27:48   driving it but it feels like a console gaming experience to me especially since

00:27:53   you have to have a controller you can't have your keyboard and your mouse it

00:27:56   doesn't really because you can't see them it doesn't really work that way so

00:27:59   I think having a console VR game is that that sort of makes more sense to me and

00:28:06   And uh... but I'm biased there because I'm not ever gonna... I'm not a PC gamer really

00:28:10   and I'm never gonna buy a gaming PC that's compatible with this stuff.

00:28:11   I agree with you completely. Because even the, you know, the ones that work on PC, they

00:28:16   have controllers that they use, right? Like, this is... they only use PCs in my opinion

00:28:22   because PCs are the only things that can drive them right now. You know, like, Microsoft

00:28:29   are working on a super powerful version of their console to do... to run something akin

00:28:35   to Oculus if not Oculus. So, you know, I'm interested to see what happens there.

00:28:40   Yep.

00:28:41   All right, this week's episode is brought to you by Mack Weldon. Now, Mack Weldon, I'm

00:28:48   just going to say this because I know it to be true, is better than whatever you're wearing

00:28:52   right now. The products that they make are so comfortable. Like, they make amazing underwear,

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00:29:04   the fantastic socks

00:29:06   i have to tell you jay-san i'm very sad right now because

00:29:09   i'm i'm wearing some kind of i will call them lounge trousers for home

00:29:15   rather than pajamas right i want to sound like i'm not just recording in my

00:29:19   pajamas

00:29:21   i will call them lounge trousers

00:29:22   that's not better mike because my mac wolden sweatpants are in the wash and it's

00:29:27   making me very sad because they're nowhere near as comfortable and i have

00:29:31   gotten very used to these things. If you remember, I was originally buying those for flying,

00:29:36   but now I wear them all the time at home as well. So I need more pairs of these Macworld

00:29:40   and sweatpants.

00:29:41   Clearly.

00:29:42   I have some of their underwear and I have some of their socks, and I really love their

00:29:45   stuff. Flat out, I'm not going to say to you I really love something unless I do, and I

00:29:52   really do love Macworld and its products.

00:29:54   No, they're really good. I noticed the, because I only have, you know, it's a small percentage

00:29:59   of my sock and under underwear drawers, Mac Weldon stuff, and when I pull one out, because

00:30:03   I tend to do that randomly, when I pull one out and it's a Mac Weldon, I'm like, "Oh,

00:30:07   yeah.

00:30:08   That's a good one."

00:30:09   It's going to be good today.

00:30:10   Yeah.

00:30:11   Now, you know, as well as their stuff feeling good, the buying experience is really good.

00:30:15   They have -- it's really easy to buy everything.

00:30:18   It's super simple.

00:30:19   The more you buy, the more you save.

00:30:20   They have this great savings bar at the top of the site, which I think is really fun.

00:30:24   And they believe in just making stuff that you're going to like.

00:30:27   They want you to be comfortable at Mac Weldon.

00:30:29   So if you don't like, if you buy something and you don't like it, they'll refund you

00:30:33   and you can keep it.

00:30:34   No questions asked and also I don't think they want your worn undergarments sent back

00:30:38   to them.

00:30:39   No, they don't want those back.

00:30:40   Nobody wants those back.

00:30:41   You can give that to them.

00:30:42   If you don't like it, don't keep it.

00:30:43   You'll get your money back and then give it to a friend who might like it.

00:30:45   But wash it first.

00:30:46   Wash it first.

00:30:47   They have a line of silver underwear and undershirts that are naturally antimicrobial because they

00:30:53   eliminate odor.

00:30:54   That's what they do.

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00:30:59   very true. Not only do Mac Weldon's underwear, socks and shirts look good, they perform well.

00:31:03   You're going to look good, you're going to feel good no matter what it is you're doing.

00:31:07   You just need to wear Mac Weldon. Trust me on this. Listeners of this show can get 20%

00:31:12   off at Mac Weldon dot com. That's Mack. W-e-l-d-o-n dot com. So you can get 20% off with the code

00:31:20   upgrade at checkout. Thank you so much to Mac Weldon for their support of this show

00:31:25   and relay FM. So Jason I wanted to get your opinion on something.

00:31:30   So there was a lot of news about Google last week. They did a lot of stuff and I just wanted

00:31:39   to get your opinion on one element of what Google is doing with their Pixel phones which

00:31:44   is the inclusion of a quick switching adapter in the box. Now what this allows you to do

00:31:52   is to plug a lightning cable into your iPhone. You can plug the USB end into the quickswitcher

00:31:57   and then the quickswitcher into the USB-C port of your Pixel. And it will then do a

00:32:03   transfer of your contacts, calendars, music, iMessage, messages, and a bunch of other elements

00:32:11   to kind of make the switch from iOS to Android easy. So I should say iPhone to the Pixel

00:32:18   easy. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this, especially compared to something like

00:32:24   the Switch campaigns that Apple did many years ago.

00:32:27   Yeah, I think it's something that they need to do. It's essentially a cable, it's like

00:32:34   a USB-C to USB female connector cable so that you can plug whatever sync cable you've got

00:32:44   into it and it will then attach to an iPhone. I think it will also work with other Android

00:32:49   phones. And, you know, I think saying that they've got a switching story for the iPhone

00:32:57   and they're coming after the iPhone is a good thing for them to do. I assume, like I said,

00:33:03   that this will also work with your Android phone and if that's the case, then my guess

00:33:06   is that it will be much more functional.

00:33:08   Well, with the Android phone, you'll just switch it via Google syncing. It's all done

00:33:13   in the cloud? I guess, I guess, but then you have to do it all in the cloud instead of

00:33:18   just transferring it over. I think it's fine, I mean again I think it's a nice strategic

00:33:22   thing. All of Apple's stats suggest that the flow is not to Android from iPhone, but the

00:33:30   other way around. But you know, it's a good, they're making the case, right? They're saying

00:33:35   look, we're targeting iPhone users, this is an iPhone level product, iPhone price, and

00:33:42   we're gonna make it easy because we want to bear... one of Apple's big advantages is that

00:33:47   they built up a wall between their services and Android so that people can't go across

00:33:54   that wall. Now, it's only going to transfer the stuff that it can transfer. So, if you've

00:34:01   got stuff that's in Apple's ecosystem like your Apple Music stuff, although there is

00:34:08   Apple Music for Android or a video you bought on iTunes or things like that. Those aren't

00:34:12   going to transfer folks. That's not going to happen. But it's trying to ease the burden.

00:34:18   And we talk about the upgrade experience here all the time, right? Every fall when the new

00:34:22   iPhone comes out about having this sort of delight of upgrading that is not as delightful

00:34:27   as it probably should be. And I think this is a way for Google to give some of that to

00:34:34   the Pixel. Like if you're an iPhone person and you've decided to make the move, how do

00:34:37   we make that easier and instead of having to like search on the web for all the different

00:34:43   ways to do workarounds to transfer all your stuff or you know whatever that this is a

00:34:48   you know it's a physical thing in the box that says yes we can get your stuff over through

00:34:53   our software.

00:34:55   If you haven't seen it, dear listener, I've put Google's ad for the Pixel in the show

00:34:59   notes because I love this ad. So good. It's just a really well done ad. I love the music

00:35:04   in it and I think it's got a good attitude. I'm excited for this phone, I have one on

00:35:08   the way. It should be arriving in a couple of weeks. I'm excited to check it out.

00:35:14   Alright so there was a story over at Bloomberg from good friend Mark Gurman about Campus

00:35:23   2 and some teams moving around inside of Apple. This is an interesting story. So Apple is

00:35:31   is going to be unifying all of the separate internet service divisions into one campus.

00:35:37   This includes Siri, Maps, iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple News, iTunes, and Apple Music. These

00:35:43   are currently, all of these teams are spread out across separate rented office spaces in

00:35:48   Cupertino and Sunnyvale. These are all of the teams that are currently headed up by

00:35:53   EdiQ and they're going to be taking all of these different teams and moving them into

00:35:58   the old Infinite Loop campus.

00:36:00   Right, so first what they're going to do is they're going to move everybody who's going

00:36:04   into Campus 2.

00:36:06   And then they're going to have, Infinite Loop presumably will be largely empty at that point,

00:36:09   because Campus 2 is much larger, and I assume everybody who's in Infinite Loop is basically

00:36:14   highest priority.

00:36:15   Not necessarily, but let's just assume for simplicity's sake that the most important

00:36:20   teams are already at Infinite Loop, that's why they're there on the main campus.

00:36:24   So they'll all move to Campus 2.

00:36:25   And there will still be room at Campus 2 at that point for more people, but there will

00:36:28   also be this whole Infinite Loop team. And so the idea here is that they're going to

00:36:33   put people in Infinite Loop. They're still going to have other stuff too. I mean, Apple's

00:36:35   got so many employees. And if you've never been to that part of the world, you can drive

00:36:40   down the streets in Cupertino and see these office buildings. And there are office buildings

00:36:44   everywhere and almost all of them have an Apple logo on the sign outside. Because Apple

00:36:49   has taken up a huge amount of space in Cupertino and Sunnyvale and into San Jose. They are

00:36:55   over the place. So one of the nice things about Campus 2 is that they're going to

00:36:59   be able to get more of their employees together on an official Ample campus instead of just

00:37:05   in an office building down the street from Ample.

00:37:07   And it was definitely questioned what they were going to be doing with Infinite Loop

00:37:11   and this is your answer, they're keeping it.

00:37:14   Yeah, oh of course, they're absolutely keeping it. I mean I think they would, the sum of

00:37:20   to an infinite loop is farm is they're not going to be able to put everybody in there

00:37:25   they're still going to have stuff in Cupertino and Sunnyvale probably for a while because

00:37:30   that's there's you know they have a lot of people but they're going to get they were

00:37:35   going to get a higher percentage of their employees into these campuses so you know

00:37:39   it was funny I was thinking about this the other day like what a colossal bit of logistics

00:37:44   this is going to be because you have to move all those people and you have to decide where

00:37:49   they're going to go and then you have the other space because like I said I

00:37:53   don't think it's a one-to-one it's a much larger campus so who else gets to

00:37:57   go to campus to who's currently not in infinite loop so who are those people

00:38:01   and then you fill that up and then and then there's the next question which is

00:38:04   who goes into infinite loop because you've got this other great campus

00:38:08   that's right there and it's got the internal courtyard and it's got the it's

00:38:11   not the shiny new thing but it's way better than being in some you know third

00:38:15   floor of some office building five blocks down the street from Apple and so

00:38:21   that's then you get to go to Cafe Max which again is probably not anything

00:38:26   like the awesome whatever it will be

00:38:28   cafeteria at campus too but it's maybe better than what you had so just I've

00:38:35   been fascinated by that like what the no matter the company but in this case it's

00:38:40   Apple like who goes where and how do you set that up and what are the facilities

00:38:44   like. And so this is an interesting story because this says one of those things, which

00:38:48   is that they're going to take the cloud teams and they're going to put them together, and

00:38:52   where they're going to go is in an infinite loop. That will be one, you know, maybe it's

00:38:57   a building or two in an infinite loop. I don't know. I doubt they're going to fill up the

00:39:00   whole thing, but I don't know. I don't know the capacity and I don't know the size of

00:39:03   those groups. But that gets them all together in one place, and they're not now, which German

00:39:09   says in his story sort of like, one of the feelings maybe that this is why Apple's services

00:39:16   feel so disparate is that they are. The people working on those services are completely separate.

00:39:23   I kind of feel a little bit bad for the Internet Services teams, right? I'm sure some of them

00:39:29   thought that we were going to be going to the fancy new campus. Like, "We're moving

00:39:32   you guys to infinite loop the old place you know I kind of like oh man you know

00:39:39   I wanted to go to the big donut you know that's where I wanted to go so yeah

00:39:44   you're right German sources are saying that is believed that the location

00:39:48   difficulties is what is relating in the poorish product quality in places and it

00:39:54   is felt internally that doing this bringing all of these people together

00:39:57   having all of these teams work together will help them compete with Amazon and

00:40:01   and Alphabet as they continue to stride forward

00:40:05   into internet services.

00:40:07   And considering how important Apple considers

00:40:09   this part of their business,

00:40:10   they're making some structural changes

00:40:11   to try and increase collaboration between these teams.

00:40:15   And you know you were saying about

00:40:16   the amount of people going into Campus Two,

00:40:18   when it was originally planned,

00:40:21   they said we're gonna put 13,000 people there

00:40:23   and Apple believed that this would be good for them,

00:40:25   but before it's even open,

00:40:26   they know that they need even more space

00:40:28   than what they've got,

00:40:29   which shows the scale at which the company is growing.

00:40:31   Campus 2 is set to open early next year.

00:40:34   And there is some, again, this is all coming

00:40:38   from German sources, but the idea is that Campus 2

00:40:42   is a modern, mainly open office space.

00:40:46   And there is some talk about, it is believed

00:40:49   that you would have to be a vice president or above

00:40:51   to get your own dedicated office space.

00:40:52   Everybody else is gonna be working in big teams.

00:40:55   And Apple are doing this because they think

00:40:57   will enhance collaboration between the people working in their company.

00:41:01   Which is very interesting, I bet that will be a big change for them.

00:41:04   I think App, even within the company, is very secretive of each other and I'm wondering

00:41:09   like are they going to be mixing teams together or are they still going to be having these

00:41:13   little fiefdoms within the open office space?

00:41:15   This is the kind of internal stuff which is very interesting I think.

00:41:20   My guess is that these open spaces will be for teams, but you know, depending on the

00:41:28   space crunch, they may stick people in there.

00:41:31   But I think that's the idea, is that it's open space for a team, for collaboration.

00:41:35   I laughed at this whole section, ruefully, really, because open offices, I mean, we did

00:41:41   that at IDG.

00:41:42   went from a high, lots of offices and high cube walls for the cubicle space to a almost

00:41:51   no offices and sort of like VP only level offices and low cube wall collaborative space

00:41:59   and some people liked it and lots of people hated it and Gurman's story kind of nods at

00:42:03   that that they're gonna be people who had offices who are gonna lose them and they're

00:42:06   not gonna be happy and they're gonna be people who feel like they're kind of out in the open.

00:42:10   going to be a cultural change. I think it's an interesting idea. A lot of people at executive

00:42:15   levels and a lot of people who are involved in space planning like to get really excited

00:42:19   about, "Oh, we're going to make it a modern collaborative space." And it will feel much

00:42:23   more like a lot of other Silicon Valley operations probably by doing that, but they are not often

00:42:29   the ones who have to live with it, and the people who work in the space will have to

00:42:33   live with it. And what we found at IDG was that, yeah, it could be collaborative, but

00:42:39   depending on what job you're doing, if you're coding or something like that or

00:42:43   writing articles in our case, what ends up happening is a lot of people put

00:42:46   their headphones on and are staring at their monitor and they can't hear you

00:42:50   anyway if you try to collaborate with them from across the cube wall because

00:42:53   they have to focus and they can't focus in that in that environment as well. So

00:42:58   you know, different people have a different reaction to it but it'll be

00:43:01   interesting to see how they react and that will be a facilities and

00:43:06   HR challenge for them just in they will get the shiny new space right but then

00:43:12   reality sets in and you end up having to deal with how do I do my job in this

00:43:16   space and that'll be it'll be interesting it's also going to be a

00:43:18   productivity hit for them there's no doubt about it like I hope they're

00:43:21   planning really hard for you know losing several weeks of productivity at Apple

00:43:26   because that's what's going to happen when they move the whole company to a

00:43:28   new campus and then move more of the company to the old campus they're gonna

00:43:33   it's hard it's hard when you gotta pack up your stuff and you've been you've

00:43:37   gotta unpack your stuff and you gotta get used to new circumstances you

00:43:40   definitely lose productivity and the hope is just that the new space is so

00:43:43   much better that you gain more than you lost. I expect there'll be quite a lot of

00:43:48   work done during Apple's holiday shutdown for this. Well that would be a

00:43:52   great time to do it right that would be a great time but even then what you're

00:43:55   doing is what you're doing is taking the like the last week before the shutdown

00:43:59   down and packing all your stuff up and labeling your boxes and all of that. And then when

00:44:04   you come back after the shutdown, your boxes have magically arrived in the new location,

00:44:07   but then you spend the first week unpacking your boxes and asking why the Ethernet doesn't

00:44:11   work and figuring out why the bathroom down the hall has a problem and one of the urinals

00:44:17   doesn't work or the sink has exploded and is spewing warm water everywhere.

00:44:20   It sounds like you've done this, Jason.

00:44:23   I have done this thing, right? I mean, I have moved buildings and I have moved floors in

00:44:29   office buildings half a dozen times at least, probably more than that. So, yeah, it's--and

00:44:37   that was moving small groups, and this is moving tens of thousands of people? It's gonna

00:44:42   be--and it'll be phased in over time, but it's still--everybody is gonna have to go

00:44:47   through that period, so it's gonna be--I'm fascinated by it on the outside. I wonder

00:44:52   if we'll hear people, there will probably be like leaks of people complaining that the

00:44:56   new space is bad or that there's… Just wait, I'm going to predict it now that there's

00:45:01   going to be a "bathrooms don't work at Campus 2" or "elevators don't work at

00:45:07   Campus 2" or "food failure at Campus 2." We're going to get all of those stories

00:45:11   from people who are grousing about the fact that it's different because nobody likes

00:45:16   change. Even if you're moving to the super spaceship campus, that means that you're

00:45:20   going to survive the apocalypse when it launches into space, still, if the bathroom doesn't

00:45:25   work quite right, you'll complain about it.

00:45:28   I do have a question about the thinking behind the collaboration.

00:45:33   Yeah.

00:45:34   It seems strange to me that Apple are taking their people and moving them into a space

00:45:39   because open offices and collaboration from Infinite Loop to Campus 2 will enable teams

00:45:43   to work better together, but then they're taking all of the disparate teams on the internet

00:45:48   services that they want to work better together and putting them into the old secluded building.

00:45:51   Tim Cynova Okay, so if I had to guess, and this is just

00:45:54   a guess, if I had to guess, what they're going to do is when they move a group out of Infinite Loop,

00:45:58   they're going to then tear those buildings apart and redo them. Yeah, I think that's what's going

00:46:06   to happen. Will Barron That would be the only way that would make sense, right?

00:46:08   Tim Cynova That's what I would do. This is the first time since Infinite Loop was built where

00:46:10   they're really going to be able, I mean, I'm sure they've done it place by place, like to build

00:46:14   Jonny Ive's group and stuff like that, they would take a space and they'd gut it and then they'd put it back together, but they're going to be able to do that with every space.

00:46:20   And if I were at Apple and thinking about their facilities, that's what I would do. It's like, what can I do with this opportunity to have this space empty for the first time in years?

00:46:33   And the answer would be, "I want to replace stuff. I want to upgrade the furniture."

00:46:37   And that's what we did at IDG at one point was we vacated the sixth floor on Second Street, and they gutted it.

00:46:45   And then they rebuilt it. And when they rebuilt it, it didn't have offices anymore.

00:46:49   And my guess is they will do some of that at Infinite Loop.

00:46:53   That those offices that the new groups will move into will be newly refurbished and probably in the same vein as what they're building at Campus 2,

00:47:02   so that the campus, the Infinite Loop campus offices feel similar, are meeting the same

00:47:10   kind of philosophical workplace goals as Campus 2. That's my guess. I don't know that, I have

00:47:16   no facts to, I'm just making that up, but based on my past, I would think that they

00:47:22   would do that. And that way they say, "Well, we're going to rip out these offices because

00:47:26   our belief now is that we do want collaborative environments and only vice presidents and

00:47:30   senior managers will be will have offices and everybody else will be out

00:47:34   in bullpens and so this office right now has eight offices and a small bullpen

00:47:38   and we're going to make it so it has two offices and a huge bullpen and that's

00:47:41   how we're going to do it so that's my guess.

00:47:43   Yeah I hope that's the case honestly.

00:47:48   Yeah and I mean at the very least they should be I would be shocked if they

00:47:51   didn't do some of that just I mean leaving the goal of an open office aside

00:47:55   just because some of those spaces have probably not been renovated in a while

00:47:59   and the end people moving into them probably don't want to feel like they're

00:48:04   moving into the battered leftovers of the the the most favored Apple employees

00:48:10   who have gone off to their spaceship and left you with the remains right

00:48:14   they probably want to make it like a good new experience for the people

00:48:18   moving in there too and you know unless they're so overwhelmed with moving to

00:48:22   campus to that they decided not to do that but that would be my guess given

00:48:25   Apple's resources and that this is a unique opportunity to do some rebuilds at Infinite

00:48:31   Loop.

00:48:32   And in true Goermann style, the report ends with a little tidbit.

00:48:36   Extra three paragraphs. It's like, why make a second story when you can just drop this

00:48:40   in here?

00:48:41   A little tidbit that we've never heard of before and is just completely put under the

00:48:45   rug. I don't know why he does this, but I love that he does.

00:48:49   I don't know. Yep.

00:48:50   Goermann is stating that Apple are moving their services infrastructure to their own

00:48:55   which Apple is building and is codenamed Pi,

00:48:58   which is a great name.

00:48:59   - Apple Pi.

00:49:00   - Yep, the platform will give Apple more control

00:49:03   over the way that their online services expand and grow

00:49:07   and is also said to reduce load times.

00:49:10   Apparently parts of Siri, Apple News, and the iTunes store

00:49:13   have begun this migration and Apple is also building

00:49:16   their own photo sharing system so they don't have

00:49:18   to keep relying on Google storage and Amazon storage

00:49:21   for all this sort of stuff.

00:49:22   So I feel like we did know some of this because I've seen reports in the past about how

00:49:27   Apple's goal is to build more of its own infrastructure and because there was a

00:49:33   story a while ago that was about like Apple spends huge amounts of money paying

00:49:36   Amazon and Google for parts of their infrastructure, their cloud

00:49:40   infrastructure, which kind of makes sense, right? And Microsoft at one point,

00:49:44   although maybe they're not using Microsoft now, they did some switches too.

00:49:47   I think that was what the story was, is like Microsoft was giving a lot of money

00:49:50   to, or Apple was giving money to Microsoft and then they ended up giving it to Amazon

00:49:53   and they moved some of their servers. I don't remember the details, but the point is that

00:49:57   story suggested that Apple was working on stuff that would allow them to deploy on their

00:50:02   own stuff instead of using third parties for this infrastructure, because a lot of these

00:50:08   services, I mean it goes back to the story about the groups being separate. A lot of

00:50:14   these services were built separately, and we've seen it. Any time you use an Apple

00:50:19   ID. It's better now, but like five years ago, and Google dealt with this too, it used to

00:50:22   be if you logged in with a Google ID, in different places different things happened. And with

00:50:26   an Apple ID, still to a certain degree you'll get that like, "I just put in my password,

00:50:31   but now it's asking for my password again." And that's often because it's asking from

00:50:35   somewhere else and the left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing, and they're working

00:50:39   on that and it's a lot better than it used to be. But when you build these services up

00:50:42   separately, in large part, then at some point, if you're Apple, you're like, "Can we get

00:50:48   this all integrated on one platform and they all grew naturally on their own and that's

00:50:53   great because we need to get them up and running. But at this point, they would work better

00:50:56   together and work better on our platform that we control instead of having to rely on AWS

00:51:02   or on Azure or whatever.

00:51:04   I think this is, if Apple truly believes in Internet services as part of their business,

00:51:10   they need to have their own platform because what they're doing is using the platform of

00:51:15   their competitors. Not that this is necessarily a problem, but it highlights a gap, doesn't

00:51:21   it? Right?

00:51:22   Well, I would say it highlights differences in what those businesses are doing. I don't

00:51:28   think if Apple decided that its expertise, that it was being served well, let's put

00:51:34   it that way, by AWS or Azure, then, you know, Apple is not in that game. Apple is never

00:51:41   gonna be, I think, a major player in providing cloud services for other businesses and huge

00:51:53   online storage. Amazon's got that business.

00:51:58   I'm not saying that they're gonna make it for other people, but I basically mean that

00:52:03   it's just telling to me that Google has mastered it for themselves at such a level, same as

00:52:09   that they're able to give that technology out to other people, like they're so confident

00:52:13   in it. And I don't think Apple will ever have Apple brand storage, but I believe that

00:52:19   it is prudent for them to make their own system that they run their own services on, because

00:52:25   I think it will help them make them better over time.

00:52:27   I think what I would say is that Amazon and Google started on the web, so they had to

00:52:34   build their own services, because what they did was the web, and so that was their business.

00:52:39   And so you have to do that, you have to control that, and you have to build that over time,

00:52:42   and Microsoft and Facebook, and you know, you have to do that over time.

00:52:45   And Apple starts as a hardware company, and a software company, and they're not a web

00:52:49   company, and then they start adding web services.

00:52:51   But when you're building those web services and it's an ancillary part of your business,

00:52:55   what do you do?

00:52:56   You use the tools that you can off the shelf, including web services and bandwidth from

00:53:02   other providers, because why would you reinvent the wheel there?

00:53:06   And then you get, and so I don't think it's a problem that Apple relies on them.

00:53:11   I think though what you're saying, let me see if I get this right, because I think I

00:53:15   agree with what you're saying ultimately is at some point it's such an important

00:53:19   part of Apple's business like so many other things in the history of Apple where they

00:53:24   realize we can't be reliant on anyone else for this.

00:53:27   We have to control this.

00:53:28   Our products will always be limited by the limitations of our, whether they're competitors

00:53:33   or not by our providers because there's only so much that we can get out of it. It's like

00:53:39   using a stock processor in the iPhone versus using an Apple custom-built processor. At

00:53:43   some point, they may want to do things with their cloud services that they can't do unless

00:53:49   they get new features. At that point, it's like, "Why don't we just do this ourselves?"

00:53:52   I think it took a long time for them to get there. I think you'd be surprised, I think

00:53:57   most people would be surprised at how many businesses do use AWS for stuff. Use Amazon's

00:54:03   bandwidth and Amazon's servers or use…

00:54:05   You can tell when AWS goes down and none of the websites that you use work anymore.

00:54:10   Lots of sites just die, right? So I think that's not a black mark on anyone for using

00:54:15   that but I do think, yeah, you're right. At some point, services, when Apple's talking

00:54:19   about the growth of their services industry, their services line and their budget, that's

00:54:24   you look at it and say, "We need to take complete control over this because we're

00:54:29   Apple and we can do things that we probably should do on our own." And honestly, I mean,

00:54:34   there are a lot of people who roll their eyes at Apple and online services and they think

00:54:37   Apple's really bad at it, but this is one of those signs of maybe Apple growing up in

00:54:42   terms of online services. Saying, "Yes, they spent years cobbling things together."

00:54:48   And it was cobbled together because they weren't an online services first company. They were

00:54:52   or online services third maybe.

00:54:55   And this is the point where they're like,

00:54:57   we're gonna move in to this building together,

00:54:59   and we've got everybody working together,

00:55:00   and we've got a new, we've got this pie thing,

00:55:02   which is our new thing that we're building

00:55:03   that everything's gonna go on top of.

00:55:05   And it's like, this is them graduating.

00:55:06   This is them growing up and saying,

00:55:08   yeah, we're gonna take control of this,

00:55:10   and we're gonna make these decisions.

00:55:11   Now, product could be good, product could be bad,

00:55:13   I don't know, but it is a sign

00:55:15   that they are taking it seriously,

00:55:16   which I think was always the biggest knock on Apple

00:55:18   and online services was that they didn't,

00:55:20   it was all scattershot,

00:55:21   and they didn't take it as seriously as they maybe should have.

00:55:24   Bringing up the system on a chip for the iOS devices I think is the perfect

00:55:29   comparison for this, right?

00:55:31   They knew they needed their own stuff that they made, or that they designed at least,

00:55:35   so they could build their products out right.

00:55:37   And we can't finish this segment without bringing up the Mac.

00:55:42   Right? This is the problem. They are beholden to Intel.

00:55:45   Intel's release cycles and their schedules,

00:55:48   which is why we have no new computers.

00:55:50   And I see there being a world in which if they don't build their own online services

00:55:54   infrastructure, they will be in that point with trying to use Azure or AWS if they're

00:56:00   not already.

00:56:01   You know?

00:56:02   Right.

00:56:03   That there is something that they want to do that these systems won't allow and frankly,

00:56:09   neither Microsoft or Amazon or Google are that incentivized to help Apple.

00:56:15   You know, not that they wouldn't, right?

00:56:17   Because these are separate parts of the business.

00:56:19   business partners want to make money and have an Apple use their platform probably makes

00:56:22   them a lot of money.

00:56:23   A lot of money, yeah.

00:56:24   But I'm sure there's some kind of internal politics which might mean that Apple's requests

00:56:28   get dragged ever so slightly slower.

00:56:30   I don't know about that.

00:56:32   I think it's more likely that they're just treated as a, not even a generic client, but

00:56:36   as a good client, but still a client, right?

00:56:38   And they don't dictate how the product moves, right?

00:56:41   Even if Apple is using 4% or 2% of Amazon's web services bandwidth or whatever, it's dropping

00:56:48   in the bucket and it's probably not that much.

00:56:50   And so are you really gonna prioritize their services?

00:56:54   Especially yes, when they're a competitor,

00:56:56   but are you gonna prioritize anyway,

00:56:57   even if they're not a competitor?

00:56:59   Their job is to make all of their clients happy

00:57:04   and grow their business and things like that.

00:57:05   So it's not the same as being the number one

00:57:09   and we'll do everything you want.

00:57:11   For that, you really need to own it.

00:57:13   And it could go as far, I doubt it will,

00:57:16   but it could go as far as what Facebook does, right?

00:57:18   Facebook's building their own servers and their own reference platform for servers,

00:57:23   and Google I think is doing that too. In the chat room, we've got the suggestion from

00:57:27   all that they could make their own chips for data centers too. I doubt they would, but

00:57:32   they could if they wanted to. One of the calculations here is literally for Apple, what's important?

00:57:39   Like the Mac, is it important enough for them to go down this route of building their own,

00:57:44   a chip transition or building their own x86 reference system or is it not worth it? And

00:57:51   I think probably it's not worth it for them. For the iPhone, totally worth it.

00:57:54   I think at this point in the Mac's life, it's not worth it.

00:57:57   I think that's probably true. I could see, again, I think the most it would be is something

00:58:05   like a deal with Intel where it's like, can we do a custom thing that we do, or Intel

00:58:09   or AMD, where they say, "We want to work with you to do this variation that's in Apple."

00:58:14   variation on an Intel processor and Intel might be up for that, might not be, I don't

00:58:19   know, but I don't think they would necessarily take it beyond that because of where the Mac

00:58:23   is in terms of its growth potential and all that. It's just a good business but they

00:58:28   gotta pick their spots. I was gonna say...

00:58:30   Yeah, a good way to think about it is like if you think, "Oh, well, they definitely should

00:58:33   do that." Do you think, dear listener, that Apple should make a completely different chip

00:58:38   for the iPad? Because they're comparable markets by sale volume these days, you know?

00:58:44   And they're not going to do that either. Like, that's just where they are.

00:58:47   They've got their custom chip for the iPad.

00:58:49   But it's the same one they use for the iPhone, right?

00:58:51   More or less. More or less. I just wanted to mention the classic example, the rude example

00:58:56   here, of Apple's independence is Internet Explorer, where the Mac—why does the Mac

00:59:02   have Safari and iWork really is because there was a time in the pre-iPod days where the

00:59:11   Mac was the only product Apple did and it was being judged by people as being too slow

00:59:16   and the number one reason it was being judged as being too slow was in web browser tests.

00:59:21   And Apple was furious because they felt like the only reason that their computer was being

00:59:25   judged badly against Windows was because Microsoft's web browser, which was the default browser

00:59:30   at the time on the Mac, believe it or not, was slow, and it was, i.e., was way better

00:59:34   on Windows than on the Mac. And that's why Safari exists. Safari exists because Apple

00:59:40   wanted the Mac to look good on web browser tests, and they realized Microsoft was never

00:59:46   going to prioritize that, because what did they care? And Apple cared a lot, and that's

00:59:51   why WebKit and Safari came to be. So this is just, I mean, it goes back a long way.

00:59:57   It goes back 15+ years, 16+ years where Apple has been trying very hard to pick the most

01:00:05   important things and gain as much control over those things as it possibly can.

01:00:09   So in the cloud, I mean, this story makes sense, right?

01:00:13   This is, it's time.

01:00:14   It's maybe past time, but it's definitely time.

01:00:17   All right, so, should I take a break?

01:00:21   Yep.

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01:02:24   hot and uncomfortable and yeah it's a very comfortable mattress like I've said on podcast

01:02:28   before our old mattress felt kind of like a trampoline it was like you sit on it and

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01:02:36   you sat down on one side of the bed and then the Casper you know again you got the sink

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01:03:16   of this very program and relay FM.

01:03:20   So Mr. Snell, we didn't have many Ask Upgrade questions

01:03:24   in the document this week, which is very rare.

01:03:26   There's always many, many, many to choose from.

01:03:28   But for whatever reason, we didn't have many.

01:03:29   So I asked our dear listeners on Twitter

01:03:31   if they would share some.

01:03:32   And I was inundated with fantastic questions.

01:03:36   So we're gonna do a bumper Ask Upgrade this week

01:03:38   because there were just too many to not pick.

01:03:42   So we'll start off easy, okay?

01:03:45   We're going to start off with Elizabeth's question.

01:03:47   She said that she noticed that I used Trello

01:03:48   on my iPhone home screen and wanted to know

01:03:50   what I use it for.

01:03:52   Trello is a very interesting product.

01:03:53   I believe that it kind of at its core,

01:03:57   it's made for software development, right?

01:03:59   It's called Kanban, I think, the system,

01:04:02   where you have these boards and you move these cards

01:04:04   between them.

01:04:05   It's a very interesting system and there is a methodology

01:04:09   of software development that I can't remember

01:04:12   the name of right now that is--

01:04:14   Agile, agile, nailed it.

01:04:16   Look at you, you just got it.

01:04:18   I can always rely on you, Snell.

01:04:19   - Yeah.

01:04:20   - And people use it for this, but we do use it,

01:04:23   me and Steven use it at Real AFM to keep track

01:04:26   of our sales funnel for advertisement, to sponsorship.

01:04:29   So like when a company contacts us

01:04:31   and then we kind of move them along the process

01:04:34   as to like if we're contacting them,

01:04:35   if we send them information, if we send them documents,

01:04:38   and then are they sold,

01:04:39   and then do we need to contact them later.

01:04:40   So we use it for that, just as a way

01:04:42   to kind of track our sales funnel, if you will,

01:04:45   which is a very important thing for us to check

01:04:47   to make sure that we're keeping on track of everything.

01:04:50   And Trello has really been a boon to our productivity there.

01:04:54   So it's a great way for me and Steven to collaborate on this

01:04:58   as well as just keeping track in our minds

01:05:00   as to where these companies are in our system.

01:05:02   Do you use Trello?

01:05:05   - A little bit.

01:05:06   You know me in organizational systems, Myke.

01:05:08   - It's all in your calendar, right?

01:05:09   - It's all in the calendar.

01:05:10   Yeah, it's a reminder's list. So, yeah, I have used it and I use it for some things,

01:05:19   but it's very limited. Like, I use it sometimes as a to-do list or a checklist if we're working

01:05:24   on a project. When we were doing the incomparable and Six Scholars memberships, I used it as

01:05:30   a place to list sort of like everything that needed to happen before we got to the end

01:05:34   and we could leave notes and all that. But I've never really kind of fully embraced it.

01:05:37   However, I will say, tidbits and take control, ebooks, they use Trello a lot.

01:05:44   So when I was going through the process of writing my ebook this summer and the last two summers

01:05:49   when we were doing the original and the updates, all of the milestones for that are handled in Trello.

01:05:54   So we'll end up moving the cards along in their process.

01:05:57   And that's very much like what we used to do with physical cards for a long time at the magazines that I worked at,

01:06:03   where we used to have a tracking system that was literally just

01:06:06   three by five cards that would move from left to right across the process

01:06:10   until they reached final and Trello works just like that if you wanted to so

01:06:14   it's kind of a digital version of that same kind of card stack for workflow

01:06:19   it's very good, it's a very good piece of software and the iOS apps are fantastic

01:06:23   you can drag and drop little cards around, they're really really great

01:06:27   Rajeev asks is there a bug in iOS 10 where you can't send messages with the

01:06:30   effects from the lock screen

01:06:32   I don't know if I would class this as a bug, it feels more like a decision or a limitation,

01:06:38   because you also can't send the effects or stickers or anything from notifications.

01:06:42   So if you answer a message in a notifications window, all of those stuff require you to

01:06:46   open the messages app.

01:06:48   I think this might just be a decision for the time being, because I suppose that these

01:06:53   aren't the full applications, they're not using the full memory, and these things require

01:06:58   probably quite a lot of access to the system, to memory, so they need to be in the full

01:07:02   application to use.

01:07:05   I want to mention something super quick.

01:07:07   Do you remember we were talking a couple of weeks ago about lasers and the Taptic that

01:07:11   the lasers gives you?

01:07:12   >> Yeah.

01:07:13   >> And there were a bunch of people that said that it wasn't the Taptic, it was sound.

01:07:17   Now I have a little thing about this.

01:07:20   So on ATP a couple of weeks ago they were talking about there being this like third

01:07:25   DAC or something in the phone and that's part of the Taptic.

01:07:29   So I did a little bit of investigation.

01:07:31   you have if you send somebody lasers and have the sound on it makes a sound that

01:07:35   you can hear like a sort of a type sound if you put your phone on if you put your

01:07:41   lasers in ask upgrade so thank you for doing that do what I can if you put your

01:07:45   seven I can only attest to this on the seven plus but I'm sure the seven is the

01:07:49   same put your phone on silent yep hold your phone to your ear and you can hear

01:07:56   the same sound that the tactic engine is making it is making the same audio sound

01:08:01   sound as the sound actually plays.

01:08:05   Wow.

01:08:06   Because basically it seemed that what the ATP guys had discovered was that the little

01:08:12   taptic engine is actually a speaker and it's just playing it like very loudly and very

01:08:15   fast.

01:08:16   So if you hold it to your ear you can hear the sound.

01:08:19   There you go.

01:08:20   There's a little...

01:08:21   But it is, it is, that's definitely true that if it's in silent and you get lasers your

01:08:24   phone vibrates.

01:08:25   Mm-hmm.

01:08:26   It totally does.

01:08:27   Absolutely, 100%.

01:08:28   But if you put your phone to your ear you can hear the sound that it makes.

01:08:30   Also you can hear the sound of the sea. You can. It's just your own ear, Jason. That's

01:08:36   all it is. Oh, okay. Nick wanted to know, because, well, he wrote

01:08:40   in to say, "It's even weirder in messages," something he finds very strange, because we

01:08:42   were talking about the strangers in messages last week, "that recent ink drawings show

01:08:46   up in recent stickers." Right, so you got the recent thing. If you do the little hand

01:08:49   drawing thing, and I mean, yeah, it's just a strange thing. But again, I wanted to mention

01:08:53   something else that I find super strange. "Recently used stickers also sync from device

01:08:59   the device whether you had the pack installed or not.

01:09:01   >> Yup. You can also not use sticker packs on the Apple Watch, right?

01:09:04   >> That's true. >> But your recently used stickers also appear

01:09:10   on the Apple Watch. >> Ah, that's crazy. So close, right? So close

01:09:14   to syncing them. >> It's similar. And then somebody else wrote

01:09:18   in, I don't have who this is, but somebody else pointed out when I was complaining about

01:09:22   the fact that you've got your ink drawing interface and you've also got the digital

01:09:25   touch interface that you can draw on, that there's a third interface you can draw on,

01:09:30   which is if you use markup on a photo, that's another place that you can draw.

01:09:35   You can markup a photo and send that too.

01:09:38   Yeah.

01:09:39   I think at this point we definitely need the Apple Pencil for the iPhone, right?

01:09:42   If you draw everything.

01:09:43   Yeah.

01:09:44   Yeah.

01:09:45   I talked to somebody who suggested that the reason digital touch is so big on iOS 10 is

01:09:48   like literally when the Apple Watch shipped with digital touch, the SomeMessages team

01:09:52   was like really excited about digital touch and they were in encouraged you

01:09:55   know you gotta start building the I iOS you know version of digital touch

01:09:59   because we got it's gonna it's gonna be big it's gonna be big and then they

01:10:03   finished it or got close to finishing it and meanwhile everybody had rethought

01:10:07   digital touch and they're like but we have we built this whole thing like I

01:10:10   write put it in there whatever I don't know if that's true or not but that has

01:10:14   a truth about it right that they they get all revved up it's like we know

01:10:17   we're good the next release is gonna have digital touch in it so let's go

01:10:20   "Oh, let's do that!" Oh. Oh well.

01:10:24   Kim wrote in to ask, "What smart home technology do I expect to be adding to my new house?"

01:10:30   So I have the Amazon Echo, I have some Wiimote switches that I've bought but not set up,

01:10:36   and we're going to be putting Hue lights in the house as well to begin with. Now, I

01:10:40   just wanted to mention this to answer the question, but we're going to be discussing

01:10:43   this and upgrade in the near future once I've actually bought and used some of these devices.

01:10:48   So we have a big home automation topic that we've been planning to talk about for some

01:10:52   time.

01:10:53   But I'm so close, hopefully, to actually buying and installing this stuff that I think it

01:10:57   might be best to wait until I actually do have it.

01:10:59   But that's what I'm looking to get.

01:11:03   There isn't really a lot of home kit stuff, so I'm basically just trying to find things

01:11:06   that work with at least the Echo.

01:11:08   Yeah.

01:11:09   Yeah, I mean, I would be interested at some point when you are done with the house business

01:11:15   and you're starting to shop for home tech, there might be a little preview that we could

01:11:20   do of talking about what more stuff you're considering. But yeah, when do you think that

01:11:27   might happen? How's the house looking? House update.

01:11:32   With how it stands right now, and I feel like I've said this over and over and over again,

01:11:37   we should own the home within about two weeks.

01:11:39   All right.

01:11:40   And yeah.

01:11:41   Okay.

01:11:42   Good luck.

01:11:43   Speaking of the Echo, Blake wanted to know, do you think that Apple will really release

01:11:48   a Google Home or Echo competitor? What do you think, Jason? Is Siri in a box?

01:11:53   I do. I think they will.

01:11:54   Do you think they're going to?

01:11:56   I think they will. I mean, I don't think it's guaranteed. I think that there are now reports

01:12:00   that they are building it. I wrote a story like six months ago saying they should build

01:12:03   one because I had been using my Echo and really liking it. The idea of a better sounding speaker

01:12:08   that has access to Apple Music and Siri kind of interests me. It would certainly have things

01:12:14   that would do better and certainly things that would do worse than these others, but

01:12:17   I would like to see it. The rumors are there's a story that they are actually building one.

01:12:22   Doesn't mean they'll ship it, but that they have a team working on it. I feel like given

01:12:26   Apple's affinity for music and the fact that they have Beats and they have Apple Music,

01:12:32   that this is a natural for them and they have Siri, right? And it's not like 100%, like

01:12:38   said, but I feel like they've got so many of the parts here that it would fit in their

01:12:41   ecosystem pretty well. And that feels like that's enough. And then you add in HomeKit,

01:12:46   right? Like, there is enough in Apple's ecosystem right now, and my time with the Echo has convinced

01:12:52   me that just saying, "Well, talk to your phone," instead of having one of these things in your

01:12:57   house is not a good answer, that these things fill a niche that is not filled by having

01:13:02   devices you can talk to that are in your pocket, that it makes too much sense for them to do

01:13:07   it. So I think because of that, not just because of my own wish for this product, I'd say that

01:13:13   there's a better chance than not that it will eventually be released. Now when? Next year

01:13:18   maybe. But I think there's a chance. Better than not.

01:13:26   And Lachlan wants to know if we use Apple News. Absolutely not. Never, not, ever, not

01:13:31   once. I just don't, I have no interest for a product like Apple News to be honest, because

01:13:36   just not the type of content that I consume. And if I wanted to do this sort of stuff,

01:13:41   then I would go with RSS because I know it works and I can choose everything that I want

01:13:45   to get and I know there won't be any issues with the formatting or whatever.

01:13:48   Yeah, I don't use it either. Do you use it as a publisher?

01:13:51   Yes. Six Colors is in there, although I'm not using the Apple News format, but the Apple

01:13:55   News rendering is very good at taking my RSS, which contains full text of six colors, and

01:14:00   rendering it quite nicely and that's all I really need. So I was going to say I use it

01:14:07   largely to check and make sure that Six Colors is displaying properly in Apple News. That's

01:14:11   about it.

01:14:12   >> This is the first of two, three questions actually submitted by Relay FM hosts.

01:14:18   >> Yes.

01:14:19   >> Micah of Disruption wanted to know, "What killer feature would it take for Jason to

01:14:24   join the Plus Club despite his reservations? Is there something that Apple could seriously

01:14:30   add to this phone that would be a real kind of just like a deal breaker like you have

01:14:34   to get it?

01:14:35   Do you think?

01:14:36   You know, I'm going to answer this in an unexpected way, which is I'm going to say the killer

01:14:39   feature would be cellular connectivity on the Apple Watch.

01:14:44   Oh, that's really, you're so smart.

01:14:48   That's such a great answer.

01:14:50   Because you know, the fact is I walk the dog and I run and I am not going to bring a plus

01:14:56   with me when I'm doing those things.

01:14:58   It's huge.

01:14:59   So if I could leave it at home, and so that my phone didn't need to come with me in those

01:15:04   circumstances, and then also maybe some podcast support from Overcast or something on the

01:15:11   watch as well, that would be nice.

01:15:13   But as long as I'm running and I have my phone with me, then I'm not going to get a bigger

01:15:20   phone.

01:15:21   Bottom line.

01:15:22   Okay, I get that.

01:15:24   So it's actually a really good answer for it, right?

01:15:27   then you wouldn't need to carry it around and then you'd get all the benefits of the

01:15:30   big phone when you actually wanted to use the phone.

01:15:31   I like the big phone. I mean, I still have my review unit of the big phone and I use

01:15:35   it every now and then. I'm impressed with how I like the screen size. There's so much

01:15:40   about it I like, but I'm not going to put that in my shorts pocket and go for a run.

01:15:45   It's not going to happen.

01:15:46   I think the feature that could also move you and will move a lot of people is removing

01:15:51   the chin and the forehead and the bezels.

01:15:53   Well, if the big phone got smaller, that would help, sure, absolutely.

01:15:58   Honestly, I think that will move a lot of people, but we're going to have to wait

01:16:01   and see if and when that will happen.

01:16:03   Right.

01:16:04   I believe it will.

01:16:05   I'm really not sure what I think about this idea of the unicorn phone or glass or screen

01:16:09   or blah blah blah blah blah.

01:16:10   Like, I don't know how I feel about that, but I do think that the next version, the

01:16:15   next full version of the new phones will remove a lot of the bezels around the screen at least,

01:16:21   many other phone makers are doing this. For some reason Google didn't with the Pixel.

01:16:26   They added them back, which is really weird because a lot of Android phones have been

01:16:30   getting rid of them, but it brings the size of the phone down and keeps the screen, which

01:16:35   is a really interesting proposition.

01:16:38   Katie Flight of MacPowerUsers wanted to know, Jason, that Katie needs to demo WatchOS 3

01:16:45   to her Mac user group. Any ideas of the best way to do this?

01:16:49   How can you show what's on an Apple watch to a group of people?

01:16:53   So I think there are two options here.

01:16:55   And one is if you can get one of those overhead cameras that they do make,

01:17:00   where you, uh, you, you know, you've got a little table and it's got a little

01:17:04   camera, they do these a lot in schools.

01:17:06   Um, but the other way to do it is take a lot of screenshots and put them in

01:17:13   keynote.

01:17:13   And I hate to, I hate to say that those are the two options, but that's basically

01:17:17   there's no tethered... you know, I guess, can you run WatchOS in Xcode?

01:17:25   I guess that might be the other way to go, but I'm not sure how functional it is in the simulator.

01:17:29   I'm not sure it's particularly functional for regular features.

01:17:34   So it's pretty limited to that. I think the best thing would be if there's a thing you could rent

01:17:40   or borrow from someone that's one of those little overhead projector things,

01:17:45   where you, you know, overhead cameras, where you lay something down and people can see

01:17:50   what you've got beneath it and basically it's taking the camera input and then you could

01:17:54   like put the watch down and zoom in on it.

01:17:57   Cus then you could also show the buttons that you're pressing as well.

01:18:00   Exactly.

01:18:01   So it might be even better if you can actually find a way to do that.

01:18:03   This is what Apple does, right, in their own little way.

01:18:05   They just have somebody standing over the shoulder of somebody during the demos, you

01:18:10   know.

01:18:11   Yeah, but that's almost what you have to do is just get a camera and do it.

01:18:14   like i said take a lot of screenshots and that's a lot of work but there's no

01:18:18   video capture

01:18:20   that we know of for

01:18:22   so i'm gonna ask i'm gonna combine this question the next question into a

01:18:26   potential answer for Katie as well

01:18:28   Dan wanted to know what tripod i'm using on my iphone for my youtube videos

01:18:33   now i'm using two products right now one of them

01:18:36   is the

01:18:37   Joby

01:18:38   GorillaPod and they make one for the phone which has magnetic feet which is

01:18:42   really cool and it has this little grip thing on it but you can take that off

01:18:45   and add something like a glyph to it because it's just a mount. What Katie

01:18:49   could do is get one of these and film herself over her iPhone and then stream

01:18:54   the view of her iPhone camera right because there's a bunch of ways that you

01:18:57   can do that you could plug it into a Mac or whatever so instead of getting an

01:19:01   overhead projector you could use your iPhone as a camera and then you could

01:19:05   kind of film yourself demoing it. Plus I really love this Joby thing because it

01:19:10   has the magnetic feet so I can just stick it to things.

01:19:13   So I've been like sticking it to things in my kitchen

01:19:15   and stuff and taking time lapses and things like that

01:19:17   which is real fun.

01:19:18   There is also one other product which I just got

01:19:23   and put in a video.

01:19:24   I kind of dedicated half of a YouTube video to it

01:19:27   which is called the Osmo Mobile by DJI.

01:19:31   They're the company that makes a lot of the drone stuff

01:19:33   and they make a lot of these things.

01:19:35   And basically it is a gimbal for the iPhone

01:19:39   which allows me to take super smooth footage

01:19:41   and to have really good control of the phone

01:19:44   and move it around like a little camera

01:19:45   and I absolutely love this little thing, Jason.

01:19:48   It is a very, very nice piece of technology.

01:19:51   But yeah, it ain't cheap.

01:19:54   It ain't cheap.

01:19:56   But it's allowing me to get a lot of the quality

01:19:59   that I'm looking for without needing to buy a big camera

01:20:04   and I have this little thing that I can attach to my phone

01:20:06   I'm good to go. So I really like it. David wanted to also know what camera app do you

01:20:14   recommend to take advantage of the iPhone 7 plus features and cameras. I've been using

01:20:20   an app called ProCam for some stuff recently, which is really good. ProCam allows you to

01:20:26   choose which camera you want to take things with. It does raw footage. It's really it

01:20:31   It really is a very cool piece of kit, or app I should say.

01:20:36   So I really do like ProCam.

01:20:38   I don't know if you've tried anything or have any suggestions for any products.

01:20:42   No, no I think Lightroom just got another update that added some more features in its

01:20:48   compatibility with the new camera, where you can switch between the cameras and things

01:20:52   like that in Lightroom.

01:20:54   But I have not gone down in there.

01:20:57   That's a #askmikeonupgrade question.

01:21:00   question. Yeah, so that's the one I would recommend. It's the one that I've tried and

01:21:05   I and I think it's really cool because it has way more controls than I could probably

01:21:10   ever understand and that's probably that probably means that it's pretty good. Yeah, I seriously

01:21:18   don't understand a lot of what's going on there but I think it's really cool. That's

01:21:22   it. Confusion is a feature. Confusion is a feature. It definitely is. And we have a question

01:21:28   from I'm gonna say stay

01:21:30   Stay asks. Can you remember the first time you thought the internet might be a big deal or what was your first memory of using?

01:21:37   The internet you go first. I

01:21:39   Remember as a kid. I don't know how old I was. We used to go to my uncle's house and

01:21:46   My uncle had the internet right? So this is probably in the early 90s

01:21:53   and because he had it at home but for work because he worked at British Telecom and

01:21:59   He had the internet at home and we used to have to ask him for the code because he had one of the secure ID

01:22:04   two-factor thing image eggs at the time to log on to the the the connection that he had at home because it was provided by

01:22:12   the company and I remember going online and

01:22:15   Going to the BBC website to play these very primitive games that they had on their website

01:22:23   and that was when like I fell in love with using the internet then and

01:22:27   Every time I used to go to his house. We I used to just bug him constantly for him to connect me to the internet

01:22:33   Wow, so that's my thing because I mean that's it

01:22:37   Like basically the internet has been around for the majority of my memories. Mm-hmm

01:22:41   But that's the earliest memory that I have of using it. That's good. So for me, it's the fall of 1988. I

01:22:48   went to college and

01:22:52   The story is actually that I was working, I volunteered to work on my college, the college

01:22:59   newspaper, which is not the university-wide, but one of the small colleges at UC San Diego.

01:23:06   And they, being a college of gigantic nerds, they did their college newspaper on the VAX

01:23:18   and UNIX systems at UCSD.

01:23:21   So I had to go to the Applied Physics and Math building where the computer resources

01:23:27   thing was and get an account on the backs of VMS, whatever.

01:23:32   And it was an account without a name, it was like PA 1033 where the PA stood for personal

01:23:38   account.

01:23:39   They didn't let you choose your name, nothing like that, and a password.

01:23:43   And then I was taught by one of the editors of this little college paper how to use VI

01:23:51   to edit text, which I still use to this day, which blows my mind that the stupid

01:23:55   thing that I thought I learned for one ridiculous and arcane reason I still use

01:23:59   because I need to edit a file in the terminal, I will just use VI because I

01:24:03   know how to use VI. I learned it in 1988, so that gave me a computer account and

01:24:09   I learned how to use VI and they would use like PostScript to print out pages

01:24:13   and lay them out. I wasn't involved with that, I was sort of writing

01:24:16   and copy editing. But now I have the account. And friends of mine from high school discovered

01:24:22   that, you know, we discovered that we all had these internet accounts, and then we discovered

01:24:28   we could send email back and forth, and that this was a revelation, because instead of

01:24:32   – literally we were writing letters to each other. And with email, it just was instantaneous.

01:24:39   It was free and instantaneous. We weren't calling them, we weren't writing them letters,

01:24:44   were sending them emails and I remember going to the computer lab and having like conversations

01:24:48   with people in email where I would say, "Oh, how's it going? This is going on," and send

01:24:53   it and then just sit there and wait. And then a few minutes later you have mail and I would

01:24:58   read the mail and it would be the response from that person. And in some places you could

01:25:02   use the talk protocol which was like a direct chat, live chat, but UCSD turned that off

01:25:09   because I think everybody was using it to talk to their friends and so we just used

01:25:13   email for that. That was my first memory of the internet and then from that email I also

01:25:18   discovered, I don't know who told me about it, I discovered Usenet News Groups and all

01:25:22   of a sudden they were a huge community of people on message boards basically talking

01:25:26   about everything that you could think of. So that was all in the fall of '88 and the

01:25:32   spring of '89 and that's my story. And the first time I used the web was in, I'm going

01:25:38   say like the fall of 92, spring of 93 right when the web started and I remember the first

01:25:47   time I connected on my Mac to the internet directly instead of through a command line

01:25:51   and I got to load a web browser and use Eudora for my email and suddenly my Mac was on the

01:25:56   internet and that was a revelation too because up to that point using your computer to be

01:26:00   on the internet was dialing in somewhere to a Unix system. It was basically if you've

01:26:05   ever opened the terminal, that's what the internet was for the first five years that

01:26:09   I used it, was a terminal window. That's my story.

01:26:13   It's a nice story. Old times. At the time we were on the cutting

01:26:18   edge it was super amazing and now it's just a story about the olden days. Amazing how

01:26:22   that happens. Finally today, Stephen Hackett wants to know,

01:26:25   "How does Jason feel about fruit in other places rather than just pizza? What about

01:26:29   in a salad on top of a dessert? Wow. Well? I don't put fruit other than pineapple on

01:26:39   pizzas unless you consider sun-dried tomatoes. They're kind of fruity, but they're not.

01:26:43   The tomato is a fruit, so I would consider it a fruit.

01:26:47   I guess. How do I feel about fruit? It's so complicated. Stephen Hackett, listener Stephen.

01:26:54   I like some fruit. My favorite fruit is the miniola, which is a tangelo. I like it a lot.

01:27:02   Other places than pizza, there's some nice fruit that can be used in desserts. I like

01:27:07   a good pear crisp or something like that. Those are good. I make jam out of fruit and

01:27:14   will put those on things and those are really tasty. Fruit and a salad? I guess. I've had

01:27:21   Salads like with dried cherries and things in them and they're fine, but I don't know I most of my fruit consumption is

01:27:28   is probably just directly the eating the fruit and not using it as toppings in other places, but

01:27:34   you know, I recommend people listen to that members episode of

01:27:38   Clockwise and top four where I talk about salad in my clock general dislike general dislike of it, but there it is. I

01:27:47   had some pineapple pepperoni pizza

01:27:50   last night and finished it for lunch today

01:27:53   I

01:27:54   Made pizza the other night and I took a picture of it and everybody freaked out on Twitter because it didn't have pineapple on it

01:27:59   my answer to that is

01:28:01   pineapple pizza for me is like when I having somebody make a pizza for me and they've got all the ingredients because

01:28:06   Keeping a can of pineapple around just to top part of a pizza

01:28:10   occasionally is not

01:28:12   It ends up being that we use a tiny bit of the pineapple and the rest of it goes to waste,

01:28:17   which is a shame. So at home, I generally don't put pineapple on pizza because I don't

01:28:21   have pineapple chunks just at the ready at the drop of a hat. So I don't do it there.

01:28:28   That's my story.

01:28:29   Awesome. Right, that wraps it up. We would obviously love for you to continue sending

01:28:35   your #AskUpgrade questions. You can tweet them to me, you can tweet them to Jason. You

01:28:39   You don't have to tweet them to anyone but you must include the #askupgrace that will

01:28:42   go into our sheet and that way we'll be able to answer them on other shows.

01:28:46   We love doing this.

01:28:47   It's actually one of my very, very favourite things and I'm always very surprised at just

01:28:51   how many come through every week.

01:28:53   Like the fact that I had to ask for more this week is a rarity.

01:28:57   There's always more than we can do.

01:28:59   So please continue sending them in.

01:29:00   We had some great ones this week so we just had to spend a little bit more time than usual

01:29:05   to answer them.

01:29:07   I want to mention one more time in our show notes this week which you can find at relay.fm/upgrades/110

01:29:14   is where you will find the links for all of our amazing merchandise.

01:29:17   I should have mentioned that earlier.

01:29:18   That's where you can go relay.fm/upgrades/110 or it should be in your podcast app of choice.

01:29:24   It should be right there.

01:29:25   You can see a lovely picture of our t-shirts so you can see what they look like and then

01:29:29   you can find all of the links to Cotton Bureau and Teespring to go and buy as much of that

01:29:34   merchandise as your lovely frame can handle. We would very much appreciate that. If you

01:29:40   want to find us online, there's a couple of ways you can do that. You can go to sixcolors.com

01:29:44   or the incomparable.com for Jason's work online. And of course, at relay.fm because Jason's

01:29:51   host of all the great shows at relay.fm.

01:29:52   All the great shows.

01:29:53   Four now, right?

01:29:54   Yeah, I think that's right.

01:29:57   You're catching up on me.

01:29:58   Mm-hmm. I'm coming for you. Watch out. I'm right behind you.

01:30:01   And also @JSNLJSNE00 on Twitter. I am @IMyke, I am Y-K-E. Of course you can find this show

01:30:07   and many more at Relay.fm. I host many. And I'm also at YouTube.com/MykeHurley as well

01:30:13   for my new little video project that I've been working on. I am on Twitter, I don't

01:30:18   know if I said this, I am @IMyke, I am Y-K-E. Thanks again to our lovely sponsors, Mac Walden

01:30:23   and Casper for sponsoring this week's episode. And thank you for listening. Thank you if

01:30:28   buying your merchandise. If you don't it's okay we still love you and you'll be able

01:30:31   to listen to us again next week as always. Until then, say goodbye Mr. Snow.

01:30:36   A scent with balloons. Why not lasers?

01:30:40   I went the other way!

01:30:41   [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:30:44   [ Music ]