00:00:08 ◼ ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 334, and today's show is brought to you by ExpressVPN, Bombus, and HelloFresh.
00:00:23 ◼ ► I have a #SnellTalk question that requires context. The question comes from Steven, and it is,
00:00:34 ◼ ► The context is, I was streaming last Friday and Jason appeared in the Twitch chat whilst I was streaming,
00:00:41 ◼ ► and his username was letterama. And Jason tried to explain this to me in the Twitch chat and I didn't understand it.
00:00:48 ◼ ► So, Jason, what is your Twitch username is letterama? Why is that and where does it come from?
00:00:54 ◼ ► Letterama is a fallback username that I use when I can't get the normal usernames that I want for a service,
00:01:01 ◼ ► because nobody ever takes it. And the reason that it exists is because when I was in high school,
00:01:16 ◼ ► We made so many. We made Bond movies, we made a kung fu movie, we made a noir detective show,
00:01:32 ◼ ► And in that era, that was the era where I had an Apple II, and we wanted to do like credits for our movies,
00:01:40 ◼ ► like titles and credits and things like that. And in that era, there was no way to do that, essentially,
00:01:46 ◼ ► without expensive hardware. So, what I could do was attach my VCR to my Apple II and use a program called Fontrix,
00:01:57 ◼ ► I want to say, which allowed you to load fonts, basically, and generate a screen on the Apple II.
00:02:19 ◼ ► and you could get a credit. It wasn't credit rolling, because you couldn't make them roll,
00:02:23 ◼ ► but you could get them to sort of go from one credit to the next credit to the next credit.
00:02:27 ◼ ► And I ended up doing that for every single person in my high school video production class,
00:02:32 ◼ ► which we had, and all my friends and everybody. I was the guy for a while, until the very end,
00:02:41 ◼ ► who was still there after I went to college, he kind of picked it up from me. So, we did all of
00:02:45 ◼ ► that. And I decided I was amused by the idea that the title, as is true with regular productions,
00:02:55 ◼ ► that people who do the titles get a credit. And so I invented Letterama as the company that makes
00:03:02 ◼ ► credits, because it's just a bunch of letters, right? So, Letterama, it seemed like this would
00:03:08 ◼ ► be the name of it. It was just a joke, essentially. But I kept at it. And then by the end,
00:03:12 ◼ ► we kept joking about the Letterama credit. And I eventually created a titles by Letterama credit
00:03:19 ◼ ► that was the entire screen. And the letters were in different colors. And literally it was
00:03:23 ◼ ► the Letterama Egomaniac credit screen, because, again, I thought it was just funny. It was all
00:03:31 ◼ ► jokes within jokes within jokes. Anyway, so I had that name and it does not exist. I mean, there is
00:03:38 ◼ ► a company called Letterama that prints signs or something somewhere on the internet, but basically
00:03:47 ◼ ► my go-to ones that involve my name, I will just give up and do Letterama, because it's always
00:03:55 ◼ ► available. That's the story. So, Apple II credits. - Yeah, I need to get a little bit of
00:04:01 ◼ ► clarification, because there's something I don't understand, which is, so how did you get the
00:04:08 ◼ ► files you created on the Apple II onto the tape? - So, the Apple II had a composite video out
00:04:17 ◼ ► port. - Right. - So, you plug an RCA cable, composite video out cable, into the Apple II,
00:04:27 ◼ ► and you plug it into video in on the VCR, and then you press record. And instead of recording
00:04:34 ◼ ► what's on the TV, it's recording from the video input, and it's recording, essentially,
00:04:41 ◼ ► it's a screen recording of whatever is on the Apple II at that moment. And then you go into graphics
00:04:49 ◼ ► graphics. And you can still type on the Apple II in graphics mode. So, you can type in the background,
00:04:54 ◼ ► "load this file," and display it. And it goes, and it sort of fades in, kind of. It's not,
00:05:01 ◼ ► it's like interlaced lines, but it appears. And so, that's what I would do, is I would have a
00:05:05 ◼ ► stack of those on a floppy disk, and I'd start recording, and I'd run through the individual
00:05:10 ◼ ► things. And then that tape would go and be used in the editor. We had an editor at the high school,
00:05:18 ◼ ► so back in those days, editing videotape was literally like two VCRs attached to each other,
00:05:23 ◼ ► and you'd play on one and record on the other, and that's how you'd go from your source to your
00:05:28 ◼ ► final. It was very oldest of schools. But before that, we were just literally bringing two,
00:05:35 ◼ ► like my friend would bring their VCR over to my house, and we'd stick our two VCRs together. And
00:05:39 ◼ ► that's how we would edit our movies together, was just playing one VCR and recording on the other.
00:05:45 ◼ ► So, suffice it to say that I enjoy iMovie and Final Cut to this day, because I remember what
00:05:51 ◼ ► it was like before we had non-linear editors. >> Yeah, because I figured you, well, I knew
00:05:56 ◼ ► that you could connect VCRs together, and cassettes, like I used to do with audio cassettes,
00:06:02 ◼ ► I used to connect two things together to be able to transfer music from one to another. I just had
00:06:07 ◼ ► no idea that you could do this with the Apple II. >> Yeah, that was the standard way you connected.
00:06:14 ◼ ► If you wanted higher quality image, you could get, I had a video card, basically, that attached to the
00:06:20 ◼ ► pins on the motherboard, and I had a color monitor. But the stock kind of composite output was color,
00:06:32 ◼ ► monochrome monitor. So most of those Apple II monitors, like the green monitors that you see,
00:06:40 ◼ ► on the back. So that was the, before there was a VGA and things like that, there was just a composite
00:06:46 ◼ ► video output port on those computers. >> If you would like to send in a question to help us begin
00:06:52 ◼ ► an episode of Upgrade, you can send in a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk. You could use
00:06:57 ◼ ► question mark SnellTalk in the Relay FM members discord, or if you are Stephen Hackett, you can
00:07:01 ◼ ► write it into our show document yourself, which is what Stephen did. And that's how I knew that
00:07:05 ◼ ► this question existed. >> Yeah, somebody did send it in as a SnellTalk question after that.
00:07:10 ◼ ► >> Oh, really? >> I noticed. >> That's the more official way of doing it, rather than attempting
00:07:15 ◼ ► to hijack the show. >> It is, but this is the like, you're just, yeah, you're just sneaking in there
00:07:19 ◼ ► and we see that. But somebody did it. Somebody knows the right way to do it. And that was
00:07:24 ◼ ► listener Matt. So thank you, listener Matt. >> I have two very quick pieces of follow-up that
00:07:29 ◼ ► are both upstream related. We spoke about Roku potentially acquiring the rights to Quibi's content.
00:07:35 ◼ ► They did it and it cost them less than $100 million. >> Yes, substantially less than $100 million,
00:08:02 ◼ ► regardless of box office, and will quote, "Increase the odds of performance-based bonuses."
00:08:07 ◼ ► So if you remember, there was a lot of furor about the fact that Warner Brothers basically
00:08:18 ◼ ► when they took their movies that were supposed to be in cinemas and put them on HBO Max without any
00:08:23 ◼ ► warning to them. And there was a lot of upset about what was going to happen to all of the
00:08:28 ◼ ► people expected to be paid and what box offices was provided them. So they're going to be doing
00:08:34 ◼ ► a bunch of things. Bonuses for good performance in the box office are going to be paid out now
00:08:48 ◼ ► you'll get your bonus. It's now been cut in half, and they're going to be reducing it if movie
00:08:54 ◼ ► theaters close down more. So they'll keep reducing the point. So like, I guess it's, I don't really
00:09:00 ◼ ► know why they're doing it that way, but they are. And also, so this is one of those funny things
00:09:05 ◼ ► where like, companies paying themselves money. HBO Max will pay Warner Brothers a fee for the 31-day
00:09:11 ◼ ► exclusivity window, which is apparently they're saying going to be a lot of money, and that money
00:09:15 ◼ ► will be shared out with cast and crew. So that's how they're going to make it happen. And we'll see
00:09:21 ◼ ► if that'll all be in the various lawsuits. Yeah, yeah, we're going to see, we'll see how this is
00:09:27 ◼ ► taken to by people in the movie industry. Jason, last week, the Mac App Store turned 10 years old.
00:09:37 ◼ ► There wasn't a ton of coverage about this, which made me kind of want to touch on this a little
00:09:44 ◼ ► bit with you to kind of get your thoughts on 10 years at the Mac App Store. I mean, it's been
00:09:50 ◼ ► a bit of a bumpy ride, to say the least. And ultimately, maybe hasn't done what anybody
00:09:58 ◼ ► would have really expected it to do. So I kind of wanted to get your feelings like 10 years into
00:10:03 ◼ ► the Mac App Store. What do you think about it? I was very optimistic about it at the time,
00:10:11 ◼ ► because, right, we were dealing with the wild success of the iOS App Store, the iPhone App Store
00:10:18 ◼ ► from 2008 on. And so then we get to 2011 Mac App Store. And the thought was like, is the App Store
00:10:30 ◼ ► existence of an easy to use, easy to find bundled with the operating system App Store? The reason
00:10:36 ◼ ► that the App Store on the iPhone was so successful, that brought the idea of paying for and downloading
00:10:42 ◼ ► software out of the kind of nerd realm and into just a very easy mainstream understandable thing
00:10:50 ◼ ► and had the iPhone trained people to think about getting apps using an App Store. And so was this
00:10:57 ◼ ► going to be a revolution for Mac software? That was the thought. And, you know, I would say that
00:11:14 ◼ ► but it's also not been the best case scenario. And I think that there's a bunch of reasons for that.
00:11:19 ◼ ► Yeah, it's not the iMessage App Store, for example. Right, exactly. You know, the Mac App
00:11:24 ◼ ► Store exists and there's stuff in it and people do buy stuff in the Mac App Store. And I'm sure,
00:11:32 ◼ ► stats about the success of the Mac App Store and put those out there. But what I would say is that
00:11:40 ◼ ► first off, I think Apple shot itself in the foot. Apple decided that their policies... Apple thought
00:11:47 ◼ ► this was going to be such a wild success, that they decided that they could dictate policies to
00:11:50 ◼ ► Mac developers in the same way that they dictated policies to iOS developers. And there's so much
00:11:59 ◼ ► difference, right? Like first off, iOS developers only really came into existence in the context of
00:12:04 ◼ ► an App Store. Mac developers had been around forever. For ages, they'd been writing Mac
00:12:10 ◼ ► software and selling it themselves. And they had their own business models. They had their own...
00:12:14 ◼ ► They could do whatever they wanted and they got to do that. Whereas the Mac App Store came in and had
00:12:19 ◼ ► all these rules that the iOS App Store had. But the iOS App Store had them from the start as like,
00:12:25 ◼ ► these are things you're not allowed to do, right? And we all have talked about many times how
00:12:30 ◼ ► Apple has set up a lot of rules and we'll probably talk about them later in the show too. A lot of
00:12:34 ◼ ► rules for apps that are in the App Store. You have to follow what Apple... For Apple to sell your app,
00:12:39 ◼ ► essentially, to resell your app, you need to follow a lot of rules. And I think Apple really
00:12:45 ◼ ► believed that there would be a gold rush. Mac developers would be like, "Oh man, we're going
00:12:49 ◼ ► to make money like the regular App Store if we're in the Mac App Store." So they were going to say,
00:12:53 ◼ ► "We're going to also set all these rules and sandboxing and all these things that are very
00:12:59 ◼ ► iOS-like and you're going to do that." And that was wrong on a huge number of levels, right? Because
00:13:14 ◼ ► developers were like, "Oh man, I'm really missing out by not being in the Mac App Store." It really
00:13:18 ◼ ► never happened. It really never got the ball rolling to that point. And all of these apps
00:13:23 ◼ ► for the Mac had been conceived of in an open software development ecosystem where you just
00:13:28 ◼ ► made your app work and then you sold it and then people bought it. So a lot of the apps that were
00:13:33 ◼ ► the best apps on the Mac couldn't be in the Mac App Store because Apple had set these incredibly
00:13:40 ◼ ► restrictive rules. And I would argue that if Apple had made the Mac App Store something that was
00:13:55 ◼ ► rather than it being a curated rule-based thing. And I know why they did that. They wanted it to
00:14:00 ◼ ► have the Apple stamp and all of that. But let's be honest, they also just were accustomed to the
00:14:06 ◼ ► level of control that Apple had over the iOS App Store. And if they had done something that was a
00:14:14 ◼ ► you follow these basic rules and we'll sell it and you get the money and we take our piece." And
00:14:21 ◼ ► I think it actually would have been way more successful. But they nipped that in the bud.
00:14:30 ◼ ► very difficult hoops that Mac apps had never needed to do before." And so there weren't that
00:14:36 ◼ ► many apps and therefore it was never a place that it needed to be, that everybody needed to be.
00:14:43 ◼ ► And by the time Phil Schiller took over app developer stuff and app store stuff and made
00:14:50 ◼ ► a bunch of changes, and you saw this a few years ago where they made that statement at WWDC where
00:14:55 ◼ ► they're like, "BB Edit's gonna come back in the store." Because BB Edit had tried to be in the
00:15:00 ◼ ► store and Rich Siegel had announced that Bare Bones was at the Singleton Conference, actually,
00:15:05 ◼ ► I think the last one, that they were getting out of the store. And he gave a whole presentation
00:15:09 ◼ ► about why the Mac App Store was just a failure for them because they couldn't make it work.
00:15:14 ◼ ► So Apple makes this big deal, "Oh, Bare Bones is gonna come back in and Panic is gonna come in and
00:15:21 ◼ ► Microsoft Office is in there and look at all the things that are happening." Well, I think that was
00:15:26 ◼ ► helpful. And I think in the last few years, what we've seen from Apple is an actual attempt to make
00:15:30 ◼ ► a whole bunch of new entitlements, as they call them, that basically allow an app developer to say,
00:15:35 ◼ ► "I need to do this in order to be in the Mac App Store." And for Apple to say, "We're gonna create
00:15:41 ◼ ► a special flag that is ability to do that thing." - We're letting you in the side door here,
00:15:47 ◼ ► basically. - Yeah, well, and it's like, we're gonna make another rule here that is you can do
00:15:51 ◼ ► this thing if we say it's okay. And then the developer says, "Is it okay?" And Apple says,
00:15:56 ◼ ► "For you, yes. For you, no." And it's good because they're trying to evolve it and expand it
00:16:03 ◼ ► and let apps, and really look at like what apps can't get in the Mac App Store and why,
00:16:09 ◼ ► and can we get them in the Mac App Store? And so that's all good. And I do buy apps on the
00:16:16 ◼ ► Mac App Store. Some apps are only on the Mac App Store, but I think the Mac App Store has had a
00:16:23 ◼ ► very difficult time ever really transcending the original sin of the Mac App Store, which is Apple
00:16:30 ◼ ► kind of arrogantly brought the iOS App Store model to the Mac and expected the software to just
00:16:35 ◼ ► shoehorn itself inside, but it wasn't exclusive. You could just not use the App Store, and that's
00:16:42 ◼ ► why the iOS App Store was successful is you couldn't not use the iOS App Store. And because
00:16:48 ◼ ► the vast number of pieces of software that were out there for the Mac were written for an
00:16:54 ◼ ► environment where they could do whatever they wanted and they didn't fit inside the rules.
00:16:58 ◼ ► So, that original sin I think has basically made the Mac App Store what it is today, which is it's
00:17:05 ◼ ► around and people use it and it's got stuff on it and you could be a Mac user and just use the Mac
00:17:13 ◼ ► App Store and be fine. But there is a huge amount of rich stuff that is outside of the Mac App Store
00:17:21 ◼ ► that is not gonna go in the Mac App Store. And that's, it never did that. I have not seen
00:17:31 ◼ ► an amazing get rich quick story where it's like, "Oh my God, you have to put your app in the Mac
00:17:35 ◼ ► App Store because then you get featured by Apple and the ball starts rolling and your app is worth
00:17:40 ◼ ► a fortune and you make a lot of money and now you've got a business or whatever." Those stories,
00:17:46 ◼ ► I haven't seen any. And if there is one, it's the exception that proves the rule for the Mac App
00:17:50 ◼ ► Store. So, I think it's unfortunate that it played out the way it did, but that's on Apple. It's
00:17:58 ◼ ► Apple's fault. Mac App Store is what it is because of the decisions Apple has made over the last
00:18:02 ◼ ► decade. Yeah, one of the ones that always sticks out to me is the sandboxing requirements, right?
00:18:08 ◼ ► Where it was like, they introduced the store, it was already not a great deal, but some people went
00:18:14 ◼ ► for it. And then they were like, "Oh yeah, starting from now, there's a bunch of stuff you can't do
00:18:18 ◼ ► anymore." It's like, "What? Now what?" Yeah, like read that part of the drive. And they've, again,
00:18:22 ◼ ► they've got like full disk access and stuff now that they didn't have right back then where it
00:18:25 ◼ ► was like, "No, you can only look in your sandbox." It's like, "But I'm a backup utility." Well,
00:18:31 ◼ ► you can't then, you can't do that there. I'm like, "Yeah, should SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner be
00:18:36 ◼ ► in the Mac App Store? Should they have been there from day one?" Heck yeah. Having a full disk
00:18:42 ◼ ► backup, that's a great Mac utility. No, sorry, we're not going to allow that because of security.
00:18:47 ◼ ► Well, no, that's a terrible thing. And the pricing part, which I didn't mention, but you put in our
00:18:57 ◼ ► show document. I mean, that's the reason that bare bones, one of the big reasons bare bones said that
00:19:00 ◼ ► they were out of it is that the difficulty with Apple's App Store model is the same one that we
00:19:06 ◼ ► had already known about on iOS, which is all these Mac developers, they do a milestone version.
00:19:11 ◼ ► Traditionally, they do a milestone version 3.0, and then you buy that. And then you get 3.1 and
00:19:18 ◼ ► 3.1.1 and 3.1.5 and 3.2 and 3.3 and 3.5. And then they say 4.0 is here. And if you buy it new,
00:19:28 ◼ ► it costs this much. But if you already have a license for 3.0, it costs this much. And you
00:19:34 ◼ ► can't do that on the Mac App Store. So like, if you look at what got bare bones back in the Mac
00:19:38 ◼ ► App Store, if you buy BbEdit on the Mac App Store, it's a subscription. You just pay them an annual
00:19:45 ◼ ► subscription. If you buy it from their website, you can just buy it. And then you get upgrade
00:19:49 ◼ ► pricing for the next version. So the business model of a lot of these apps doesn't fit. The
00:19:57 ◼ ► whole approach doesn't fit the way that the Mac App Store is built because the Mac App Store is
00:20:04 ◼ ► built on the iOS App Store, which is built on the iTunes Store, which was a model to sell you
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00:22:32 ◼ ► It's great, right? That's my promotion. Lots of selection. You can always find things you want
00:22:37 ◼ ► if you're a picky eater. It is wild. Just over the last, say like five years or whatever,
00:22:53 ◼ ► All right, so I've got a bunch more product rumors for you, Jason. There seems to have just
00:22:58 ◼ ► been an explosion over the last week and there's just so many things. We'll go through them. We'll
00:23:03 ◼ ► stop and talk about any that interests us along the way. But it's just, I like doing these earlier
00:23:09 ◼ ► in the year. So it sets up kind of where we're looking at, aiming at over the next 12 months.
00:23:14 ◼ ► So DigiTimes is reporting that Apple is about to enter the quote second phase of development on AR
00:23:20 ◼ ► glasses. Second phase testing takes a couple of months. Then there's third phase. Then there's
00:23:24 ◼ ► about six to nine months of engineering validation. So it's about a year at least before they would be
00:23:30 ◼ ► happy to even think about a product. Apparently both weight and battery life are being focused
00:23:36 ◼ ► on most right now. But it is worth noting that these are AR glasses. While many rumors have
00:23:42 ◼ ► suggested that there would be an AR headset announced before glasses. So all of this is to say
00:23:48 ◼ ► if these supply chain rumors are true, something's happening. And the idea that we will hear about
00:23:55 ◼ ► something in 2021, which I think is what Mark Gurman originally predicted, like a headset in
00:24:06 ◼ ► Because unlike the Apple car rumors, which at some point we will get to, it's not today,
00:24:14 ◼ ► the timeline on these things seems much closer to where we are now and where it is in the process
00:24:28 ◼ ► saying that they would ship something in 2021, I'm just gonna throw out there again what I mentioned,
00:24:42 ◼ ► And then there are glasses that will come later, but that if you wanna like do a mixed reality AR
00:24:48 ◼ ► kind of thing, what if there's a headset? I have a hard time seeing Apple sell a headset as a
00:24:52 ◼ ► consumer product, although it's possible. Like I bought an Oculus Quest 2, so sure. But I could
00:25:00 ◼ ► definitely see it as a developer pitch device that they then follow up with a device that actually is
00:25:12 ◼ ► what would Apple's pitch for a headset be? Like sit in front of your computer with this on your face
00:25:19 ◼ ► and look at your computer? Like it seems weird because I can't really imagine gaming being the
00:25:27 ◼ ► thing unless they're hoping a lot of iOS developers will move to some VR gaming or AR gaming platform
00:25:36 ◼ ► that they've created. But I don't really imagine how it would translate over unless they, you know,
00:25:41 ◼ ► like the current AR games on your iPhone working. But it just doesn't feel like a compelling product.
00:25:48 ◼ ► Like this is a product that, you know, I think that they will probably try and pitch, like they
00:25:55 ◼ ► pitch the original Apple Watch, right? Which is like, this product does everything, right? Which
00:26:02 ◼ ► is not the pitch for the Apple Watch now. But I can imagine maybe something like glasses you wear
00:26:09 ◼ ► on your face being able to provide that experience more seamlessly than the original Apple Watch.
00:26:18 ◼ ► The Apple Watch is also the key for your hotel room, right? Like that was the kind of stuff
00:26:25 ◼ ► they were originally promoting. And they don't really focus on that anymore. But maybe this is
00:26:29 ◼ ► that kind of product. And a headset isn't that kind of product, but AR glasses more so.
00:26:37 ◼ ► - Yeah, I do wonder what, this was the clockwise question last week. One of them was, what's the
00:26:46 ◼ ► killer app for Apple's AR glasses? And that's why I keep talking about Developer Kit, because I feel
00:26:52 ◼ ► like Apple probably have some ideas of things that are extensions of Apple's existing structure,
00:26:57 ◼ ► whether it's fitness or maps or whatever. But I don't know, if you're Apple and you're going
00:27:03 ◼ ► into this space, you've been trying to prime the pump with ARKit and all sorts of iPhone and iPad
00:27:08 ◼ ► things. And I think one way to discover what the killer app is would be to lean on the developers
00:27:16 ◼ ► to, 'cause Apple's developers have a history of embracing new platforms and coming up with good
00:27:22 ◼ ► ideas. So if you can open it up to the developers so that when you launch a consumer product,
00:27:29 ◼ ► you've got a whole bunch of apps ready to go, if you think back to like the iPad launch when
00:27:34 ◼ ► there were so many iPad apps ready to go on day one, it might be a strategy that they would take
00:27:41 ◼ ► on to do something that's not quite a product. Just like HoloLens is not quite a product, right?
00:27:53 ◼ ► it's not a consumer product. They're not trying to convince consumers yet. This is just a run-up.
00:27:59 ◼ ► It's version zero, right? And then they go to version one. It's just an idea. They could,
00:28:06 ◼ ► like I've said about that Oculus Quest, Apple could make a VR headset that did gaming and some
00:28:14 ◼ ► other stuff easily if it wanted to. It's got all the technology to do it. It's just like,
00:28:19 ◼ ► it seems like a weird product for Apple to do. So I keep thinking that the AR stuff is better.
00:28:30 ◼ ► right? That's what it would be. And that's what the Oculus Quest is, is it's an Android phone that
00:28:35 ◼ ► you wear on your head and play games on. So they could totally do it. But I have a harder time
00:28:43 ◼ ► seeing that as an Apple product than an augmented reality product from them. And maybe that's just
00:28:47 ◼ ► a lack of imagination on my part or some skepticism about what's available on the iPhone as a platform
00:28:53 ◼ ► that would make you want to use, play iPhone games like you play Oculus Quest games or something.
00:29:00 ◼ ► I don't know. - And this does fit the idea of them pre-announcing a product in this way, right?
00:29:08 ◼ ► They've done this kind of stuff in the past. When there isn't an existing thing that Apple does that
00:29:14 ◼ ► will be cannibalized, they do talk about these things in advance. They did it with the Apple
00:29:26 ◼ ► didn't even give it their final name. They called it ITV. And then they shipped it in the spring,
00:29:31 ◼ ► or they shipped it in Macworld Expo in January. So when you're not cannibalizing an existing
00:29:38 ◼ ► product, you can pre-announce all you like. Or do developer kits like the Intel and Apple Silicon
00:29:45 ◼ ► developer kits that existed that were pre, you know, those products existing, they made special
00:29:51 ◼ ► hardware and got the developers really excited. So there's lots of ways they could do it.
00:29:54 ◼ ► - If they did create that hardware, they're announcing a product that they're doing, right?
00:29:58 ◼ ► Like, "Hey, we've created this AR headset. Don't worry about what it's for. Just make apps for it."
00:30:05 ◼ ► - Right. But I don't think that would stop them from saying, you know, "We've told you a lot about
00:30:10 ◼ ► the importance of augmented reality, and we're serious about it. And in 2022, we're gonna ship
00:30:14 ◼ ► an augmented reality headset, but we want you developers to get started today." And everybody's
00:30:18 ◼ ► like, "Oh my God, Apple, the thing we already have been talking about for two years, that is Apple
00:30:23 ◼ ► working on AR, they've confirmed the thing we already knew for a year from now." Like, I don't
00:30:28 ◼ ► know. I think Apple's game plan has changed enough that they recognize that they could do something
00:30:33 ◼ ► like that, and it literally wouldn't make any difference. - Mako Takara had this vast selection
00:30:40 ◼ ► of rumors and supply chain info. The first is that an iPad Mini refresh is in the works. So
00:30:49 ◼ ► this is half, I think, of what a lot of people wanted. So this is a big change to the iPad Mini,
00:31:05 ◼ ► shrinking the bezels down on the sides, resulting in an 8.4 inch display, but still with bezels on
00:31:12 ◼ ► the top and bottom. So there's still gonna be a home button, still gonna be a lightning port,
00:31:16 ◼ ► and looking at a March kind of timeframe for a release. So interesting, the iPad Mini's still
00:31:24 ◼ ► around, but kind of making really like classes of iPads now. You know, like if they do this,
00:31:30 ◼ ► you've got the iPad and the iPad Mini, and they look like older devices, and then you have iPad
00:31:36 ◼ ► Air and the iPad Pro as these more, they have their own design language. - And you can see how,
00:31:43 ◼ ► obviously, a year or two hence, two years maybe, then the iPad and the iPad Mini get the touch ID
00:31:51 ◼ ► button or something, and they get a little bit smaller, but they're always gonna be behind,
00:31:55 ◼ ► because they're the low-end models. Yeah, makes sense, makes sense to me. Fans of the iPad Mini,
00:32:00 ◼ ► probably. I don't know, happy that it still exists and that it's getting an update. Sad that it's not
00:32:05 ◼ ► getting like face ID or something, but you know. - Yeah, and like edge to edge screen would be
00:32:11 ◼ ► beautiful, but this is something, this is looking for a March timeframe. Makatokara is also reporting
00:32:19 ◼ ► a ninth generation iPad, so the brother of the iPad Mini. Now what's gonna happen here is some
00:32:26 ◼ ► dimension changes. It's basically looking exactly the same, but it's gonna get thinner. It's
00:32:30 ◼ ► currently 7.5 millimeters, it will go down to 6.3 millimeters. This is still not as thin as the
00:32:36 ◼ ► current iPad Pro. It will get lighter from 490 grams to 460 grams, but the biggest thing is this
00:32:42 ◼ ► will also apparently bring a price drop. Now this is the part that I'm less convinced over, right,
00:32:48 ◼ ► because pricing is not set in the supply chain if that's where this information is coming from,
00:32:53 ◼ ► but we don't know where it's coming from, but this would apparently drop the price from $329
00:32:59 ◼ ► to $299. A sub-$300 iPad is a cool thing to have. - You can see why they'd want to do that,
00:33:08 ◼ ► right? That's obviously one of the goals of the iPad, the just no name iPad is to have it be
00:33:16 ◼ ► relatively cheap compared to the rest of the line and get people to buy it. It's the entry iPad.
00:33:23 ◼ ► And also you could use it for education and getting the price down for education is also good.
00:33:33 ◼ ► - Could be. - That'd be wild. All right, and then, so that's March and then also in March,
00:33:38 ◼ ► so I think we're looking at an event in March, Jason, that we can kind of put our eyes to.
00:33:52 ◼ ► but they're going to be, it seems like they're going to be different. So the 12.9 inch iPad Pro
00:33:58 ◼ ► is going to get half a millimeter thicker. The 11 inch iPad Pro is going to be the same thickness.
00:34:06 ◼ ► So I guess what we're looking at here is the larger iPad Pro getting some kind of new display
00:34:14 ◼ ► technology. And we're expecting that to be mini LED, but the 11 inch, maybe not so much. And we've
00:34:21 ◼ ► seen this in the past, right? The bigger iPad Pro getting, or at least iPad Pros being on different
00:34:27 ◼ ► kind of release cycles for technology. And it looks like that might be what's happening here.
00:34:31 ◼ ► - Right, well, remember the larger iPad Pro came out first and then the smaller iPad Pro came out
00:34:37 ◼ ► later with some features that weren't in the larger, but the larger had features that weren't
00:34:41 ◼ ► in the smaller and then they synced them up. So this would be an interesting thing if a few years
00:34:45 ◼ ► later on they decide to make, are they going to call it the iPad Pro Max? Oh God, I hope not.
00:34:53 ◼ ► - The rumors don't seem to suggest that there will be multiple 12.9s, but there could be.
00:35:05 ◼ ► - Thumbs down, I don't want to own a Pro Max. Mini LED is this technology that's supposed to
00:35:17 ◼ ► probably, they could probably call it an HDR display, which they can't now. I don't know.
00:35:23 ◼ ► Interesting idea to bifurcate the line like that. I think that's been an open question,
00:35:28 ◼ ► especially when the iPad Air was updated. It's like, okay, how is the iPad Pro different?
00:35:45 ◼ ► Because I, at the moment, I'm using the 11 inch mostly. Like that's the iPad Pro that I'm using
00:35:54 ◼ ► - And I also, yeah, I also think it is the best one. So I think it would be a shame to not rev them
00:36:01 ◼ ► at the same time. There have been many other rumors citing like larger, sorry, like better
00:36:07 ◼ ► processors, all that kind of stuff. But this thickness rumor would seem to suggest something's
00:36:14 ◼ ► going on. I can't, I don't really imagine a scenario where they have to make one of them
00:36:19 ◼ ► thicker and one of them can stay the same, but they both get the same technology. That would be
00:36:24 ◼ ► weird to me. So it seems like that there is going to be some kind of split. A redesign of the AirPods
00:36:29 ◼ ► Pro case for a second generation model is apparently coming and also a second generation of
00:36:34 ◼ ► iPhone SE, both due for April. No more real detail shared than that. - I wonder what it means,
00:36:41 ◼ ► redesign of the AirPod Pro case for a second generation model. Does that mean that they're
00:36:46 ◼ ► going to redesign the case now for the first generation model so it will also fit the second
00:36:51 ◼ ► generation model? Does it mean that they're redesigning the case and there will be a second
00:36:56 ◼ ► generation model, but they don't know what the second generation model is only that they're
00:36:59 ◼ ► redesigning the case? I don't know. - So I have my theory, all right. So the case is getting
00:37:04 ◼ ► same thickness, but it's getting a little taller and wider. I think it's MagSafe. So it fits on
00:37:13 ◼ ► MagSafe, like in connects. - 'Cause you can lay one on a, you can lay the AirPods Pro case on a
00:37:19 ◼ ► MagSafe now and it works, but it doesn't connect. - So I'm wondering if it's that. They're making
00:37:23 ◼ ► the surface area like bigger, which is weird. - All right. I think it's, well, they did with
00:37:32 ◼ ► the AirPods original, they did update the case, and they updated the model later and it was the
00:37:39 ◼ ► same shape so that you can have the Qi charging case with the first ones or the second ones.
00:38:05 ◼ ► But it said that the design of the camera bump is going to change. So no longer having those
00:38:12 ◼ ► tiers, it would just be covered, the entire camera unit covered in one piece of Sapphire glass.
00:38:18 ◼ ► - Interesting. So the idea there is you'll just have a presumably like square camera bump instead
00:38:26 ◼ ► of what we have now, which is a bump with little bumps inside it. - Yeah. And that set of rumors
00:38:32 ◼ ► also predicted what you were saying, I think it was maybe last week or the week before,
00:38:36 ◼ ► that the iPhone 13 Pro is likely to get the sensor shift. - Yeah, there you go. - So that might be
00:38:44 ◼ ► part of the reason for thickness changes as well with the phones. It's going to be a busy year
00:38:50 ◼ ► again, I think. - I think so. I think we're going to spend the year waiting to see where the signs
00:38:57 ◼ ► of the sort of reduced work because of COVID have hit Apple's plans, but it's going to be hard to
00:39:03 ◼ ► see them. They seem to, you know, possibly because they work so far out in advance that
00:39:09 ◼ ► they're able to disguise that and ride it out a little bit better. - You can spread stuff maybe,
00:39:16 ◼ ► right? - We know the Mac is going to have a very interesting year, but the iPad Pro is really do a
00:39:22 ◼ ► proper update and then they don't leave the iPhones laying there for a year. That doesn't generally
00:39:29 ◼ ► happen. And so there you go. Now we're in a busy year. - So do you think, let's assume that we're,
00:39:36 ◼ ► I mean, I expect that even the AirPods and the iPhone, if they're for April, I expect that they
00:39:42 ◼ ► might be getting announced in March, kind of like all this stuff together potentially. And let's
00:39:48 ◼ ► say maybe do some press releases in April for those products. Do you think that they would do
00:39:59 ◼ ► iPad Pro especially, in March, but Macs and iPads in March. Like they've done Mac and iPad together
00:40:05 ◼ ► before. That was the Brooklyn event, was Mac and iPad. So they could totally do that. - I
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00:41:57 ◼ ► of Relay FM. Yeah, socks. Woo! Jason loves socks. We're going to talk about something that's super
00:42:06 ◼ ► delicate right now. Oh boy. With a lot of ramifications, but it's important to technology.
00:42:11 ◼ ► So we're going to discuss it, but I ask you to bear with us as we try and get through this.
00:42:15 ◼ ► Basic timeline. Last week, President Trump and his cohorts arranged a protest on the day of
00:42:24 ◼ ► President-elect Biden's confirmation, which incited violence and anger. Trump's followers
00:42:34 ◼ ► Trump did not firmly condemn these actions and in fact chose to tell these people that he loves
00:42:40 ◼ ► them and they're special. Twitter and Facebook use this as a reason to suspend Trump from their
00:42:45 ◼ ► platforms. Facebook then decided to permanently suspend him until at least after he leaves office.
00:42:56 ◼ ► platform in any guise. After this, many assumed that he and his followers would leave Twitter
00:43:06 ◼ ► Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores due to the content on Parler and its lack
00:43:12 ◼ ► of moderation or plan to change that. Then Amazon's AWS hosting service terminated their contract with
00:43:18 ◼ ► Parler, rendering it useless. And it's very likely now that Parler will not be able to recover from
00:43:23 ◼ ► this if in any reasonable timeframe. And then today when we were recording, some people basically
00:43:29 ◼ ► stripped a bunch of information and personal information out of Parler because of bad security
00:43:34 ◼ ► practices. And services like Shopify terminated agreements for fundraising. Reddit and Discord
00:43:41 ◼ ► and others closed down forums for discussion amongst the most extreme supporters of Donald Trump.
00:43:49 ◼ ► All of the cards fell. It took the attack on the Capitol to be the thing that would push at least
00:44:01 ◼ ► one company over the edge. And then once one company could do it, then the rest can follow
00:44:09 ◼ ► suit. I think this was maybe a thing that was always waiting. Everyone was waiting for somebody
00:44:17 ◼ ► to take the first step. And between Twitter and Facebook, they were basically egging each other on
00:44:25 ◼ ► to the point that then all of these other companies not just moved against Donald Trump
00:44:32 ◼ ► specifically, but also the most extreme of those who follow him. So I want to have a conversation
00:44:47 ◼ ► ramifications from this. And I think there are a lot of questions about it. Just at a very basic
00:44:53 ◼ ► level, is it okay to remove the President of the United States from social networks? Is that an
00:45:01 ◼ ► okay thing to do? It's a difficult thing, for sure. I wouldn't want to have to make that decision.
00:45:11 ◼ ► appreciate about Ben writing about this is that he makes a point that I think doesn't get -- lots
00:45:17 ◼ ► of dialogue does not get said enough, which is it's complicated and hard. And for people who are
00:45:25 ◼ ► like, "Oh, there's an easy answer here," I don't think there is an easy answer. And his argument
00:45:31 ◼ ► is -- and this is so complex -- but his argument is basically that in general, what you probably
00:45:39 ◼ ► don't want is big companies controlling what people can see. Because the more of that there is,
00:45:55 ◼ ► His point, especially about Facebook, is Facebook is structured in such a way that Mark
00:46:01 ◼ ► Zuckerberg can do -- I almost forgot his last name. Boy, what a world it would be if I could
00:46:25 ◼ ► >> He really is one of the most powerful founders of a company, because he's retained enough
00:46:35 ◼ ► >> Yeah, he controls the stock. Investors don't get to tell him what to do. He just does whatever
00:46:38 ◼ ► he wants, and they can't throw him out. And Ben's point is not that Trump is great, but that
00:46:44 ◼ ► do you want somebody who has nobody who can tell them what to do, an unelected person, control
00:46:55 ◼ ► discourse, because there's lots of bad ways that could go. And you could argue that the history of
00:47:04 ◼ ► Facebook is a history of all the bad ways that it could go, in fact. And so it makes it really scary
00:47:20 ◼ ► institutions. They are just profit-seeking private corporations. That said, I've been a community
00:47:29 ◼ ► moderator for a lot of years in a lot of different places, and I know for a fact that communities
00:47:40 ◼ ► >> Just, yeah, you need rules, or it descends into madness. And I'll put out there another thing,
00:47:46 ◼ ► which is, you know who can't, in the United States anyway, you know who can't set the rules?
00:47:58 ◼ ► cannot regulate speech. Now, there are exceptions to this, including things like inciting violence,
00:48:12 ◼ ► people seeking the government to, it's like, "Oh, these big companies aren't democratic,
00:48:17 ◼ ► and we must let the people decide." It's like, well, no, in the United States, at least,
00:48:23 ◼ ► you can't do that. You can't have the government do a moderation policy. It's not constitutional
00:48:30 ◼ ► to do that. So the problem I see here is largely that there is so much power invested in these
00:48:40 ◼ ► individual companies. The beauty of it is there are other places on the internet you can do stuff,
00:48:45 ◼ ► but I think you could argue, when you look at what happened with Parler or Parley or whatever it is,
00:48:50 ◼ ► that, and I would say corporations should be able to decide who their customers are. And if somebody
00:48:59 ◼ ► is radioactive, not because they have a political view, but because they've advocated for the violent
00:49:05 ◼ ► overthrow of the United States government and the invalidation of actual valid elections because
00:49:10 ◼ ► they didn't like the result, that's a really good reason for a company to say, "We're not interested
00:49:14 ◼ ► in doing business with you. We don't want your service, which allows people to plan insurrections,
00:49:18 ◼ ► to be on our platform. That's bad for business." That is something that should be allowed.
00:49:25 ◼ ► If you're worried about the power that Twitter or Facebook has, I would say the problem lies with
00:49:30 ◼ ► allowing, with the regulators allowing them to be so powerful. Because that's what has gotten us
00:49:38 ◼ ► where we are, is that we've allowed these giant companies to have so much power that there aren't
00:49:44 ◼ ► necessarily that many alternatives, although I suspect, just like 4chan, Parler will find someone
00:49:57 ◼ ► Yeah, but I've seen a lot of people who seem very smart say, "Even if the kind of resources required
00:50:07 ◼ ► to change a hosting platform on a moment's notice is not an easy thing to do." So it could take them
00:50:15 ◼ ► a long time before they're able to come back, if ever, because they may run out of money during
00:50:20 ◼ ► this period of time. And that's what happened with 4chan and all of its successors, is that they're
00:50:25 ◼ ► like, you squash them here and they end up popping up somewhere else, but it can take time. And it's
00:50:31 ◼ ► like BitTorrent sites, it's the same thing, right? It's just like, well, they get squished here,
00:50:35 ◼ ► "Oh, look, they're back," but they have a slightly different domain name and a different host. Well,
00:50:38 ◼ ► now that host has shut them down, and now they've moved to somewhere else. And that's things that
00:50:42 ◼ ► are kind of renegade things on the internet, can find places to go. But, you know, and I would say
00:50:48 ◼ ► this as a larger thing too, is a society has got to have its standards. And there is a place that
00:50:58 ◼ ► you have to draw the line between political viewpoint and something that goes beyond that,
00:51:04 ◼ ► something that is a view that is not considered valid in a polite, legitimate society. And I would
00:51:13 ◼ ► say advocating violence, I would say racism, white supremacy, those are on the list of things that
00:51:22 ◼ ► businesses should look at and be like, "No, we don't want to be involved with those people at
00:51:26 ◼ ► all. We're not interested." But also inciting violence is a pretty simple one. And that was,
00:51:31 ◼ ► I thought, the most interesting thing of the whole event last week of the tech part, I'm not going to
00:51:37 ◼ ► talk about the rest of it right now, but of the tech part, was the end of Twitter statement,
00:51:42 ◼ ► because they banned Trump for 12 hours and then said, "He can come back, but if we see any more
00:51:51 ◼ ► we're going to turn off his account." And then they did. And what they said in their statement was,
00:51:56 ◼ ► the tweets he sent out not could be interpreted, but we can see them being interpreted by people
00:52:19 ◼ ► if you're Twitter and you're saying, "The tweet that says I'm not going to the inauguration,
00:52:24 ◼ ► but I love you and you people should keep up what you're doing," not only could be interpreted as,
00:52:30 ◼ ► "It's okay to commit violence at the inauguration because I, your leader, will not be there,"
00:52:35 ◼ ► but that they were seeing on Twitter and elsewhere people absolutely taking it to mean that.
00:52:41 ◼ ► And I have very little sympathy for the people who say, "Oh, woe is me. I no longer have a platform,"
00:52:48 ◼ ► whether it's the President of the United States or the junior senator from the state of Missouri,
00:52:57 ◼ ► I think it's fascinating that Trump hasn't done more since getting kicked off Twitter to
00:53:04 ◼ ► communicate to people. I think maybe that says something about the nature of how he used Twitter
00:53:17 ◼ ► throw lobs and bombs into the public discussion and send messages that his supporters could read
00:53:24 ◼ ► how they wanted to. And, you know, going to a podium and giving a statement while the press
00:53:29 ◼ ► yells questions at him is not something that he wants to do, but he can do it. He can get his
00:53:34 ◼ ► message out in lots of different ways. There are plenty of ways for him to get his message out.
00:53:49 ◼ ► So it's a difficult situation. It's a very complex situation. But I do think that if you want to talk
00:53:56 ◼ ► about the big -- and there's a lot of Republicans who are talking about, like, "Oh, we got to change
00:54:01 ◼ ► the laws about what platforms are responsible for." Anybody who knows anything about platforms will
00:54:08 ◼ ► tell you what will happen if you change the laws like that, which is the platforms will disappear,
00:54:12 ◼ ► or they will be so moderated that nothing will get through. It won't become a parlor-like free
00:54:19 ◼ ► forum where people can say anything, including advocate for assassinations, because they're not
00:54:27 ◼ ► going to be able to withstand the legal scrutiny of that. So instead, you'll get less speech,
00:54:31 ◼ ► not more speech. But that's not really what they care about. You know, that's not really what they
00:54:35 ◼ ► care about. They're mad because a lot of politicians have made hay stoking up fear and anger,
00:54:41 ◼ ► a bunch of group of people feeding them lies, making them believe things that are just not true
00:54:46 ◼ ► and act on them because it benefits them politically, not thinking that the consequences
00:54:52 ◼ ► might rain down on them. And what we saw last week is that a violent mob approached the Capitol
00:55:01 ◼ ► and went inside, including a lot of those politicians who did that. It turns out that the
00:55:06 ◼ ► mob was turned back on them, the mob, the monster that they created, the vampire that they invited
00:55:11 ◼ ► in. So there are a lot of politicians running for cover now because they stoked all of these flames
00:55:19 ◼ ► and don't want to deal with the consequences. And then there are also, you know, like you're
00:55:25 ◼ ► saying, like a lot of the complaints from people about thinking that these social networks either
00:55:32 ◼ ► have kicked them off or will kick them off for something like this is they've made a business
00:55:39 ◼ ► over the last few years of creating this type of anger and upset and it's performed very well for
00:55:45 ◼ ► them. And I assume that they don't want to think that they're going to be in a situation where
00:55:50 ◼ ► they're not allowed to do that anymore. If I have one hope of what will come out of this, and I have
00:55:54 ◼ ► more than that, but I'll throw this one out there, which is I would hope it might teach some
00:56:08 ◼ ► our democracy has died and the only response is going to be an armed uprising is not just
00:56:18 ◼ ► that has direct ramifications. And if what you're truly advocating is the dissolution of democracy
00:56:26 ◼ ► in the United States, then I guess you'd nailed it. But if you were just mealy-mouthed, you know,
00:56:34 ◼ ► lying about it in order to make your, throw some red meat to your constituents, you bear
00:56:41 ◼ ► responsibility. I mean, you do either way, but that way you bear it as a fraud. So, yeah.
00:56:51 ◼ ► And that was the sea change in the last week is that Trump has been saying he didn't lose the
00:56:56 ◼ ► election and saying lies about how he won by a lot of votes for ages now. And everybody's just rolled
00:57:01 ◼ ► their eyes because, let's be honest, he's been doing it for four years. The last election, which
00:57:06 ◼ ► he won in the Electoral College, even then he lied about how many popular votes were cast because he
00:57:14 ◼ ► was embarrassed that Hillary Clinton beat him in the popular vote. So he just said, "Oh, those
00:57:18 ◼ ► votes don't count. Those were illegal votes." So he's questioned the voting, democratic voting
00:57:24 ◼ ► in America for four years now, more than four years now. So this is not new, but people went
00:57:32 ◼ ► along with it saying, "Well, this guy, yeah, he's a liar and an egomaniac, but he's our liar and
00:57:37 ◼ ► egomaniac, so we're just gonna go along and he'll go away." And it all came to roost last week,
00:57:43 ◼ ► all of those things, because he's been speaking to people and lying about this being some sort of
00:57:50 ◼ ► stolen election in order to basically make himself feel better. But it's had the net result
00:57:57 ◼ ► of energizing a whole cross-section of people, including racists and conspiracy theorists and
00:58:13 ◼ ► if you believe, let me put it this way, if I believed that the election had been stolen
00:58:21 ◼ ► and that Trump had not won, you know, but he had gotten, let's say it, like he had gotten
00:58:30 ◼ ► all of the places where he lost to be invalidated and declared himself the president, when we all
00:58:35 ◼ ► knew that it wasn't true, would I be outraged? Would I say now is the time where we as people
00:58:42 ◼ ► have to go into the streets and stand up because we can't allow this travesty of democracy to
00:58:48 ◼ ► happen, this undemocratic thing that's going to destroy our country? You're damn right I would.
00:58:52 ◼ ► The difference is not subtle, though, which is it didn't happen. It's not true. Every single court
00:59:00 ◼ ► case, every single attempt to ask them to provide evidence, they don't have any. It's all sophistry.
00:59:06 ◼ ► It's all lies. There is no evidence. The people who are angry are angry about lies. I would say
00:59:13 ◼ ► that people who commit violence are responsible for their actions, but also the people who lied
00:59:17 ◼ ► to them to make them angry are responsible for their actions. So that is, and last week it all
00:59:23 ◼ ► came home to roost, and last week it was very hard for the social media companies to deny
00:59:28 ◼ ► their participation, not only in the promulgation of those lies over the course of years,
00:59:34 ◼ ► but in very specific planning of these people, radicalized by their services, planning violence.
00:59:41 ◼ ► And they should have drawn the line sooner? Yeah, yeah, I think so. But at least they drew the line
00:59:50 ◼ ► finally. And I think, honestly, I think the biggest thing Twitter and Facebook are doing
00:59:55 ◼ ► now is trying to make it harder for people to plan more attacks, not about looking back,
01:00:01 ◼ ► about looking forward, that more attacks are being planned by these radical people, and
01:00:09 ◼ ► they need to deplatform the people who are coordinating or inspiring and planning those
01:00:16 ◼ ► attacks. The question about, like, should Trump have been removed sooner is one that I've seen
01:00:24 ◼ ► a lot, and it's quite a complicated one, really. Because there are many arguments you could make
01:00:31 ◼ ► for why, you know, he should have been taken off of social media a long time ago, but this also
01:00:37 ◼ ► does feel like a really good time to have done it. So Ben, Ben Thompson's argument that he got a lot
01:00:45 ◼ ► of pushback from, including from John Gruber on their podcast, is this idea of dust in the light.
01:00:50 ◼ ► It's the idea that when your public officials say things, there's value in having them be
01:00:58 ◼ ► out there because it allows it to be criticized, and you end up with people on Facebook and Twitter
01:01:07 ◼ ► and places like that saying, you know, "Trump said this," and then people quote it and they say,
01:01:11 ◼ ► "This is a lie. This isn't true." They do it in newspaper websites. They do it on the services
01:01:16 ◼ ► themselves. And that public officials should be given a little bit of leeway to say those things
01:01:24 ◼ ► publicly and not suppressed by corporations, because in the end what you really want is not
01:01:30 ◼ ► the corporations making that decision, but the, forgive me, marketplace of ideas to be able to say
01:01:36 ◼ ► that he said this thing, it's dumb, here's why, right? And I get that argument to the point,
01:01:43 ◼ ► but I think the big problem with Donald Trump is he was being treated, the weight given to him was
01:01:49 ◼ ► that he was the President of the United States, which does bear weight, but there wasn't enough
01:01:55 ◼ ► weight being given to the fact that he's a troll and a liar and was using social media in a way
01:02:04 ◼ ► that no previous senior government person has ever had. He is, because, okay, I'm going to insult
01:02:09 ◼ ► Donald Trump a lot, but let me give him a little credit here. He knows exactly what he's doing. He
01:02:14 ◼ ► is a master social media troll. I've kicked these people off of so many message boards in my years.
01:02:21 ◼ ► He is a master social media user and troll. He absolutely is. And that's the part that didn't
01:02:27 ◼ ► get enough weight, I think. I think that in the end they're like, "Well, what do you want us to
01:02:31 ◼ ► do? He's the President of the United States." It's like, yeah, but this President of the United
01:02:35 ◼ ► States is not doing president things all the time. He's doing bad stuff using your network as an
01:02:42 ◼ ► engine. But there's no easy answer here. Again, come back to it. I think there's no easy answer
01:02:47 ◼ ► here. However, I will say incitement to violence pretty starkly changes things. And private
01:02:56 ◼ ► corporations should be able to always decide who gets to use their platforms, use their services.
01:03:03 ◼ ► And if you have a problem with that, I would say look within yourself and say, "What are you willing
01:03:10 ◼ ► to give the government power to do?" Because I suspect a lot of the conservatives who are very
01:03:16 ◼ ► upset about Twitter and Facebook and Amazon aren't big fans of the idea that government can just
01:03:25 ◼ ► take what any private corporation does and stop them from doing it. There was a tweet that went
01:03:30 ◼ ► out last week from a conservative politician who said getting, you know, kicking them off of these
01:03:36 ◼ ► services is like something that happens in China. I think it was Nikki Haley who said that. And
01:03:40 ◼ ► somebody else said, "Well, no, actually the government demanding that a private corporation
01:03:49 ◼ ► - It's like this time, all of this stuff happening at this time is a good time for it to happen, as
01:04:12 ◼ ► - Yeah. Well, I think that that is another calculation here, right? Is it turns out that
01:04:17 ◼ ► the real danger that they see is a president who's about to lose power increasingly encouraging
01:04:28 ◼ ► violence and unrest for him to steal back his power. And constitutionally, his power ends in
01:04:37 ◼ ► nine days. And so there's definitely an idea of sort of like, we got to get through this part.
01:04:44 ◼ ► - And then also stopping him from being able to sow doubt in who has power after those nine days.
01:04:51 ◼ ► - Yeah, I mean, I'm sure what he wants to do is to continue to call himself the president.
01:04:58 ◼ ► - And honestly, if it was just Donald Trump bleeding about how the life is unfair and he
01:05:16 ◼ ► has amplified. They're deathly terrified of going against him. I saw one report that said that a
01:05:22 ◼ ► reporter talked to Republican members of Congress who had voted in Trump's favor on all this
01:05:27 ◼ ► election stuff and said, "Of course, it's not true, but I'm afraid that if I vote the other way,
01:05:31 ◼ ► my family will be in danger." That's tyranny. That's tyranny. And that's the difference here,
01:05:36 ◼ ► right? Is him having his lie about him losing because he feels bad because he's an egomaniac
01:05:44 ◼ ► and a narcissist is one thing, but it's the whole rest of it, which is convincing millions of people
01:05:52 ◼ ► that there's been some sort of shenanigans and he really did win, and not just win, win by a lot.
01:06:00 ◼ ► It didn't happen. It didn't happen. And then having them react with violence. And even if
01:06:13 ◼ ► millions and millions of people who believe that the government is illegitimate, and what is that
01:06:18 ◼ ► going to spawn in terms of future behavior? So, you know, yeah, it sucks. It's a bad situation.
01:06:25 ◼ ► And I would say, again, I think it does point out that some of these tech companies do have
01:06:33 ◼ ► too much power and don't answer to anybody. But in this case, they did do the right thing.
01:06:41 ◼ ► in a bunch and you worked at a bank, you know this too. It's like, they don't do stuff unless
01:06:46 ◼ ► they really, really have to, unless they're really put on the spot. And guess what? Last week,
01:06:50 ◼ ► we put a lot of corporations on the spot. And maybe it's good in the end that there was a little
01:06:55 ◼ ► bit of a refresher about the difference between we support politicians from both parties in the
01:06:59 ◼ ► US to the people we won't support or the people who are lying to their constituents and advocating
01:07:06 ◼ ► the abandonment of democratic norms. Those people are not part of the conversation anymore.
01:07:12 ◼ ► - There is another side to it though, right, where, like the events of maybe even the last,
01:07:28 ◼ ► like watching all of these companies use this as their excuse to act, right? You end up with this,
01:07:36 ◼ ► like, the domino effect, right? This company shuts this down. This company shuts this down.
01:07:43 ◼ ► This one does. This one does. This one does. Like, you could argue AWS would not have shut Parler
01:07:49 ◼ ► down if Google and Apple hadn't kicked it off the store, right? That, like, there's a domino effect.
01:08:00 ◼ ► and Google, they're so bad and they've closed the door." Well, first off, there's the web. There's
01:08:03 ◼ ► always the web. But secondly, how many times have we talked about Apple having exacting standards
01:08:09 ◼ ► and kicking apps off for no good reason, right? Well, you look at Parler and you're like,
01:08:15 ◼ ► "How did they stay on so long?" And I think the answer is they were trying to not be seen
01:08:19 ◼ ► as being biased, even though Parler was probably in violation of a lot of its rules that would
01:08:29 ◼ ► - If Apple would have done this on their own, right, it would have looked... It would have been
01:08:34 ◼ ► covered very differently. And, you know, all of these tech companies are all trying to skirt
01:08:39 ◼ ► around these antitrust lawsuits that come in their way. And so, like, they would have been...
01:08:45 ◼ ► They would have seen it as politically difficult to do it, right? But this kind of domino effect,
01:08:51 ◼ ► I wonder if it makes the situation worse in some ways? Because to people that feel affronted,
01:09:07 ◼ ► they're all like... Now they're exacting their control over us, right? And I'm not saying that
01:09:14 ◼ ► it is... It was the right... I mean, as I say, right, like, a lot of this stuff should have been
01:09:18 ◼ ► done a long time ago. It is the right thing for these companies to take this time as the time to
01:09:24 ◼ ► make these changes, because it really has gone too far now. Like, it's been too far for a lot
01:09:31 ◼ ► of time. Now it's like really too far. But there is this concern I can see of, like, does this
01:09:40 ◼ ► make some stuff worse in the short term? Well, and I think the way I would phrase what you just said
01:09:47 ◼ ► is, I think a lot of these hosts and services gave them latitude and said, "Okay, it's politics. We're
01:09:53 ◼ ► gonna let it go because it's politics." And I think what has happened in the last week...
01:09:59 ◼ ► That is super important, is you gotta draw a line and say, "Beyond this point, it's not
01:10:05 ◼ ► politics anymore. Beyond this point, it's trying to conspire to commit violence to overthrow an
01:10:14 ◼ ► election. That's not politics anymore. That's not acceptable." That is, you lost an election,
01:10:21 ◼ ► and now you're going to attack the people whose job it is to go on with government because you're
01:10:27 ◼ ► unhappy with the results. That is a line that I think a lot of people didn't wanna draw.
01:10:34 ◼ ► Or, and I guess I think there's cowardice here too, right? It's like, "I just don't want the bad PR,
01:10:38 ◼ ► and I don't want them making speeches about me, and so I'm gonna let this one go." And they let
01:10:43 ◼ ► a lot, they let too much go. And now they have to redraw that line. It's just like I saw a,
01:10:47 ◼ ► was it Teespring this morning put out a press release saying, because they found out that the
01:10:52 ◼ ► anti-Semitic pro-Holocaust t-shirt being worn by at least one person and photographed in the riots
01:10:58 ◼ ► was a Teespring shirt, I believe. And they were very apologetic and were like, "We've shut this
01:11:04 ◼ ► person down and we've deleted all the things and we feel really bad and we do have a lot of
01:11:07 ◼ ► moderation, but stuff gets through and we're sorry and we're gonna make donations and all of that."
01:11:12 ◼ ► That's probably true, but it's also probably true that they let a lot of stuff slide because they
01:11:18 ◼ ► copyrighted stuff there. It's just terrible. - Yeah, right. So they make money and they let
01:11:24 ◼ ► it slide until there's bad publicity and then they have to tighten it up. And there was a lot
01:11:28 ◼ ► of that in the last week too, make no mistake. There was a lot of, "We let this stuff go."
01:11:33 ◼ ► And I think it was the boiling frog a little bit. You could ratchet it up more and more and
01:11:37 ◼ ► everybody just let it go because they knew that they were gonna get screamed at for suppressing
01:11:43 ◼ ► speech on their own platforms until, and it took a violent mob trying to get into the, succeeding,
01:11:52 ◼ ► to get into the Capitol of the United States during the Congress trying to do their constitutional
01:11:57 ◼ ► rights to verify a free and fair election for them to all realize, "Oh yeah, that's too much."
01:12:12 ◼ ► be interesting to see where this goes from here because you are in a place where a lot of
01:12:17 ◼ ► different people's political takes are torn up and thrown into different places. So like I said,
01:12:23 ◼ ► now you've got conservatives complaining about private companies exercising their rights about
01:12:29 ◼ ► what happens on their platform by complaining that it's a violation of free speech, which of course,
01:12:34 ◼ ► the First Amendment doesn't guarantee speech on private platforms, only that the government
01:12:37 ◼ ► doesn't regulate it. So now you've got people who are theoretically sort of no government control
01:12:42 ◼ ► over business as people saying, "Oh, we gotta stop Twitter and Facebook," right? And then you've got
01:12:48 ◼ ► Democrats who have taken a different tack to big tech who applaud these moves. And so I think in
01:12:55 ◼ ► the going forward, all of us expect big tech under the Biden administration to get looked at
01:13:02 ◼ ► for new regulation. The Democrats are gonna control Congress. He's ultimately gonna be able to
01:13:11 ◼ ► nominate people to the various commissions. What happens in the next four years and beyond in terms
01:13:17 ◼ ► of what that big tech regulation looks like? Because I would argue it's a place where right
01:13:23 ◼ ► now it seems a lot of the old standard lines have been put in a blender. And I don't know what's
01:13:30 ◼ ► gonna come out of there because it would be very interesting as it's been the last few months to
01:13:35 ◼ ► see senators and representatives advocating for governments to tell private companies what to do
01:13:41 ◼ ► on the Republican side because that's supposed to be their thing not to do that, but they want to do
01:13:45 ◼ ► it in this instance. So I don't know where that's gonna go in the long run, but I do hope that this
01:13:51 ◼ ► gives a little more of a backbone. You know, we had this... MacWorld had message boards for almost
01:13:58 ◼ ► the whole time I was there. And we had... Chris Breen was tweeting about this this weekend because
01:14:04 ◼ ► some of the people involved in this remind us of the people we had to deal with back then. It's
01:14:08 ◼ ► very much like, "Oh, they're at the Capitol now. Okay." And you learn that you have to have
01:14:16 ◼ ► standards for your communities and you have to have rules and that people are gonna break it
01:14:20 ◼ ► and they're gonna try to avoid your rules. And I think this last week has reminded a lot of these
01:14:28 ◼ ► companies that have public platforms and that profit off of having platforms where the public
01:14:33 ◼ ► can come in and do things. That their line of what is acceptable and their methods of determining
01:14:43 ◼ ► who's violating their rules is not in the right... They're not in the right place. And that they are
01:14:50 ◼ ► responsible for things that happen on their platforms. And let's just say it. If... There's
01:14:55 ◼ ► a lot of responsibility to go around, but if Twitter, for example, or a Facebook group,
01:15:01 ◼ ► was responsible for coordination that led to, I was gonna say, the murder of a member of Congress,
01:15:08 ◼ ► but let's say the murder of a couple of police officers. Does that social media platform that
01:15:15 ◼ ► hosted the conversation bear responsibility morally for that conversation being allowed to happen?
01:15:24 ◼ ► I'd say yes. I'd say yes. And I think the solution is they need to look at their standards.
01:15:32 ◼ ► They need to look at their standards. And they're not gonna say... You're not gonna stop everything.
01:15:37 ◼ ► You're not gonna stop everything. And I'm not saying they should be held responsible by
01:15:40 ◼ ► government for it as much as that they need to look within themselves and say, "We can't be a
01:15:44 ◼ ► party to this level of planning, of violence." That we need to... We gave them... I hope the
01:15:55 ◼ ► lesson from the last week is we gave these people a little bit of slack, and they took it,
01:16:00 ◼ ► and they pushed it, and they went to very bad places. However, let me give you the converse
01:16:08 ◼ ► now, which is none of these companies have proven that their moderation policies can be consistent
01:16:25 ◼ ► - Yeah, it's different though. It's just as different as Trump not being able to tweet.
01:16:30 ◼ ► Creating end-to-end encrypted message groups that... Or messages that are secret, that are
01:16:39 ◼ ► doing bad things. It is a realm for law enforcement, but it's also not public anymore. It's not public.
01:16:45 ◼ ► Just like, you know, Klan meetings aren't public either, right? Which makes it less likely to
01:16:53 ◼ ► spread. It doesn't mean it's not a problem. It doesn't mean law enforcement doesn't have to be
01:17:01 ◼ ► But it does make it harder for it to just be out in the open for people to find and for it to be
01:17:07 ◼ ► recommended to your grandma on her Facebook feed. - Right, yeah, because you have to know or get
01:17:12 ◼ ► invited by the person to join it. It's not like this is just spread out into your social graph
01:17:18 ◼ ► because your friend liked it and retweeted it or reshared it. And now you can join it because
01:17:24 ◼ ► you're a little bit annoyed too. And then you end up getting radicalized from seeing this group and
01:17:31 ◼ ► everything that's in it shared to you all the time. You already have to have gone over a certain level
01:17:36 ◼ ► to walk into a closed door kind of thing, right? As you say, I imagine probably very rare for
01:17:46 ◼ ► somebody to stumble their way into a Klan meeting, right? And then sit down and join in.
01:17:51 ◼ ► - I'm reminded of Buck O'Neill, the legendary Negro Leagues star, told the story about how
01:18:04 ◼ ► he was a scout after his playing days for the Cubs, I want to say. And he was scouting a player. He
01:18:09 ◼ ► was trying to find where a player was playing in this little town in the south. And they said
01:18:14 ◼ ► they're out at the baseball diamond. And he got the directions to the wrong baseball diamond. And
01:18:18 ◼ ► it was this baseball diamond that was down a country road. So they drive down the country road
01:18:22 ◼ ► and they pull into the parking lot. And the baseball diamond was being used for a Klan rally.
01:18:29 ◼ ► So these two black guys drive their car into the parking lot for the Klan rally. And one of the
01:18:34 ◼ ► guys who's sort of at the entrance of the parking lot was like, "Probably not what you're looking
01:18:40 ◼ ► for." And they're like, "Indeed, it's not. Thank you very much." And they drove the other way. So
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01:21:15 ◼ ► All right, let's do some #askupgrade questions to finish out today's episode of the show.
01:21:32 ◼ ► now that this is becoming more of a possibility or do you think that developers will stick
01:21:41 ◼ ► I think that newer apps, yes, especially companies that or individuals that maybe grew up in from
01:21:49 ◼ ► either age wise or in their business through the iOS model, that they may just be like,
01:21:55 ◼ ► this is a known entity for me. I know how to do with Apple's platforms. I know how to deal
01:22:00 ◼ ► with the App Store and all of the business stuff. I know. And also my app is a subscription app
01:22:06 ◼ ► because this is the easiest way maybe for me to make money on iOS. So I'll just have my Mac app
01:22:12 ◼ ► be a universal app built with these same underlying technologies, put it through the App Store. It's
01:22:18 ◼ ► a subscription anyway. Easy peasy, right? I can imagine that. And I'm seeing that. I see that
01:22:24 ◼ ► more and more now. Like you see applications that are new and they're on every platform and they're
01:22:30 ◼ ► using maybe Mac Catalyst or they're using SwiftUI or a combination of all of them. And they have a
01:22:36 ◼ ► subscription that underpins the whole thing. So they can be on all these platforms and it's easy
01:22:41 ◼ ► for them. I do not think this is going to push companies that have separate iOS and Mac versions
01:22:48 ◼ ► towards this model unless they've already decided that they want to go the subscription route.
01:23:00 ◼ ► Yeah, I agree with everything you said there. I think going forward, people are going to look at
01:23:05 ◼ ► this and new apps will be more likely to be built this way. And there are probably some developers
01:23:13 ◼ ► who have a Mac app that's kind of obligatory, but they really, their focus is on iOS where they're
01:23:20 ◼ ► going to be able to over time drop the Mac app and just base their code base. They'll still have
01:23:25 ◼ ► a Mac app, but now it will be based on the iOS code base. I think that's absolutely going to
01:23:28 ◼ ► start happening where why should we develop two in the long run when we can develop one?
01:23:33 ◼ ► I think there are some places where you're going to say, we should also say you can actually keep
01:23:39 ◼ ► them separate if you want to. You could develop a Mac app based on iOS and just not connect it to
01:23:48 ◼ ► the iOS app if your business model doesn't work that way. So there are ways to do it that way if
01:23:54 ◼ ► you really wanted to. But yeah, I think in the long run, this is going to be a more likely path.
01:23:59 ◼ ► And then as we see Swift UI come along and all of that, I think it's going to just continue happening.
01:24:03 ◼ ► The end goal is that Apple will have one software platform across all its devices, but it's going to
01:24:11 ◼ ► be, I think, for maybe forever almost that the Mac is running all sorts of different kinds of apps,
01:24:18 ◼ ► native Mac apps and Mac apps brought over with catalyst and some iOS apps with, you know,
01:24:25 ◼ ► iPad flavoring and other stuff. I think that's just going to be how it is going forward and the
01:24:31 ◼ ► stuff that's incredibly complex and based on AppKit, the original Mac stuff is not going to,
01:24:35 ◼ ► it's just going to continue kicking around as it is until it can't anymore. And that may never happen.
01:24:43 ◼ ► Tuna asks, "When Jason reviewed the upgraded 27-inch iMac, he recommended that if you had
01:24:49 ◼ ► to have a new Mac, then it was a goodbye. Now that you've had a chance to try to use the M1 Macs
01:24:55 ◼ ► thoroughly, would you still recommend this Intel iMac or should I wait?" I had a friend ask me this,
01:25:03 ◼ ► not named Tuna, this week because her iMac is dying. And what I said was, "Can you wait?"
01:25:15 ◼ ► And she said, "I might not be able to wait." I said, "All right, well, first off," I said,
01:25:20 ◼ ► "I'll look at your Mac if you want, bring it over and we'll decontaminate it. And then I'll look at
01:25:24 ◼ ► it and I'll see if I can figure out if it's the drive or if we can just wipe it and it'll be
01:25:29 ◼ ► better or what is going on with this Mac. Is it something physically wrong with it or is it
01:25:33 ◼ ► just that you've got a slow old drive that's dying?" But when she was saying, "I don't think
01:25:40 ◼ ► it's going to make it," I'm like, "Well, you could get an iMac, but you really shouldn't
01:25:43 ◼ ► because we're in this transition now." And what I actually told her is, "If you can't wait,
01:25:48 ◼ ► I don't think you should buy an iMac. I think you should buy a monitor and a Mac Mini."
01:25:53 ◼ ► And everybody knows their own use cases, but at this point, I don't think I would recommend
01:26:00 ◼ ► anybody buying an iMac, an Intel iMac, unless they had absolute reason for having Intel features
01:26:07 ◼ ► or they're deathly afraid of first-generation hardware, which are fine. If you've got those
01:26:17 ◼ ► issues, then fine. But for a regular person, I don't think I can do it. I don't think I can
01:26:23 ◼ ► recommend it. If I had to buy a replacement for my iMac today because it exploded, I would get a
01:26:33 ◼ ► monitor and a Mac Mini or I would just attach my MacBook Air to it. But that's just a question,
01:26:37 ◼ ► "Do you want a laptop attached or do you just want a desktop?" But that's what I would do.
01:26:51 ◼ ► >> Yeah, I mean, I have an iMac Pro, but she's not going to buy a high-end iMac. She's going to buy
01:26:57 ◼ ► a mid-range iMac. It's going to be so much slower than getting an M1 Mac Mini and a monitor.
01:27:05 ◼ ► So much slower. So I can't. I just can't. So that's what I told her is don't buy an iMac.
01:27:12 ◼ ► So Tina, if you're listening, she's not listening. You can bring your iMac over. I can see if it's
01:27:19 ◼ ► broken or not. >> Maybe it was. I mean, this person's called Tuna. >> Oh, maybe Tuna is Tuna.
01:27:29 ◼ ► And Tuna, if you're not Tina, you're keeping great company, I guess. Yeah. >> Doug asks,
01:27:39 ◼ ► "What do you use to track your list of what you want to watch, read, play, etc.?" >> I don't.
01:27:48 ◼ ► I don't. >> You don't? >> I don't. >> What, really? How do you keep track of all of the things? >> I've
01:27:55 ◼ ► tried. I've tried all the apps to track TV and I never stick with them. Books, generally,
01:28:03 ◼ ► I either put them on my library queue list or my Amazon queue list or I just buy them and send them
01:28:10 ◼ ► to my Kindle. If somebody recommends a book to me, I will generally just buy it or check it out from
01:28:17 ◼ ► the library. >> If you're a writer, now you know how to get your numbers up. Just recommend your
01:28:23 ◼ ► book to Jason. >> Well, I'm not going to, like a random writer saying, "Buy my book," I'm not going
01:28:29 ◼ ► to buy their book. I'm sorry. >> You have to, as a random writer, convince someone who's a friend of
01:28:34 ◼ ► Jason's. >> Yes, exactly. That's the trick. >> I'm surprised about this. >> I don't. I've tried.
01:28:42 ◼ ► I've tried. I've tried. And I'm at a point now where I'm like, "Wow, what are we going to watch
01:28:45 ◼ ► next on streaming?" And I think, well, if I had been compiling a list, I would know. But the fact
01:28:51 ◼ ► is, I've tried all of those things. None of them have worked for me. Mostly, I've tried the ones
01:28:58 ◼ ► that are a lot of work where you have to log what episode you've watched. It's too much work. I get
01:29:04 ◼ ► behind and then it's like, "Oh, you have 19 episodes of this show to watch." I watch them all.
01:29:07 ◼ ► >> Yeah, I've had that problem with this stuff too. >> And I've tried the make a note in Apple
01:29:13 ◼ ► Notes with a list of shows you want to watch. And then I never go back there and I find it
01:29:17 ◼ ► like weeks later and I'm like, "Oh, right, here are all these old shows." So I don't know. I have
01:29:24 ◼ ► yet to do it. The right way to do it is to use an interface for it. But as we know, and I will,
01:29:31 ◼ ► I will add things as favorites or to my list in various streaming service apps. The problem is
01:29:37 ◼ ► that they're not unified because on Apple TV, Netflix stuff doesn't show up. I have done that
01:29:43 ◼ ► more often now with Apple TV stuff and other stuff where I can see it in the Apple TV interface,
01:29:48 ◼ ► and I do add things to my list on Netflix and they show up there and that's a reminder to watch them.
01:29:53 ◼ ► Like we were watching Taskmaster and realized that one of the comedians had a Netflix special
01:29:57 ◼ ► and added that to the list. And then it was like, three weeks later, we're like, "Oh, yeah,
01:30:01 ◼ ► there's the comedian from Taskmaster. Let's watch her Netflix special." So that will happen too. So
01:30:06 ◼ ► I guess that's my answer really is that I will favorite things that are recommended to me
01:30:24 ◼ ► but realistically, most of the time we don't look at that note when we want something new.
01:30:34 ◼ ► Because for me, I am very like, probably annoying when it comes to like new TV shows and movies,
01:30:43 ◼ ► because I really feel like I have to be in a mood for something. Like whether I want like comedy or
01:30:51 ◼ ► drama or whatever. And I tend to most of the time, and especially over the last year, veer lighter on
01:30:58 ◼ ► my entertainment choices are like just nice things, simple things, things that don't have a lot of
01:31:05 ◼ ► stakes to them. And so having that list isn't necessarily useful because it's a list of just
01:31:14 ◼ ► everything and I don't necessarily know what I'm feeling. So for me, when it comes to content,
01:31:33 ◼ ► I think it's called Pretend It's a City on Netflix, which I'm not surprised was recommended to me
01:31:44 ◼ ► because I've watched probably everything that Martin Scorsese has been involved in on Netflix.
01:31:53 ◼ ► And this is like a series that he directed, which is Fran Lebowitz, who I was only like,
01:32:03 ◼ ► - She was on David Letterman's old late night show a lot back when he was on his 1230 at night.
01:32:19 ◼ ► - Yeah, back when that was a second tier talk show, they would have authors on, which talk
01:32:25 ◼ ► shows don't have authors on much, but they would. And she's in New York, so I think she's probably
01:32:30 ◼ ► also available. But yeah, I remember Fran Lebowitz from that, from the old Letterman show. So
01:32:40 ◼ ► - I wish maybe that should be a new thing that we do sometimes in upstream is mention things
01:32:46 ◼ ► that we've seen that we've liked, because people are always looking for recommendations.
01:32:56 ◼ ► television in the garage." I mean, I assume this is just as like a den situation. Joel didn't really
01:33:04 ◼ ► expound on that. I assume it's probably not for the car to watch TV or whatever. And Joel said,
01:33:10 ◼ ► "Should I buy a Roku stick now that comes with AirPlay 2 and HomeKit and wait for a new Apple TV,
01:33:17 ◼ ► or just spend the money on the current Apple TV?" - Joel, I have a great answer for you, because
01:33:22 ◼ ► I was setting up a TV in my bedroom because I have an Amazon Fire Stick, and my daughter came home
01:33:31 ◼ ► for about a month, just left. And she wanted to watch stuff in her bedroom where we put a TV
01:33:39 ◼ ► for my son to play video games when she's not here, but then she comes home and is like,
01:33:44 ◼ ► So I got her, I had an Amazon Fire Stick on my TV, so I plugged it into that TV. And then I thought,
01:33:50 ◼ ► "Well, what I want is something that does AirPlay. I should just get a Roku, a little Roku box,
01:34:07 ◼ ► is don't wait for a new Apple TV. Buy one of these $30 Roku boxes that does AirPlay and HomeKit,
01:34:13 ◼ ► and also has all of the apps that Roku has, and just stick that on there, because that's the
01:34:18 ◼ ► cheapest solution. It'll get you almost everything you want. And unless there's a very, very specific
01:34:22 ◼ ► Apple TV-only feature that you need for this old TV in the garage, I wouldn't bother. I think the
01:34:27 ◼ ► Roku is a very good deal, and it's a better deal than the Amazon Fire Stick, mostly because of the
01:34:32 ◼ ► support for AirPlay. The AirPlay thing made a difference for me. That's what always frustrates
01:34:37 ◼ ► me when I encounter a Fire TV stick, is you can't AirPlay to it, but the Roku stuff you can AirPlay
01:34:45 ◼ ► to. I've got a Roku TV in our living room, and it also has AirPlay, and it's great. So that's what
01:34:50 ◼ ► I would recommend. And then go into the settings and turn off all of their ad options, I would
01:34:56 ◼ ► recommend also. But I think unless you're really worried about Roku or you're really committed to
01:35:03 ◼ ► something on the Apple TV, I would just buy a Roku box for a crappy garage TV to get all the features
01:35:10 ◼ ► you want. Just do it. That's the way to go. Seems like a good deal right now, especially because
01:35:14 ◼ ► it's kind of unknown what a new Apple TV could realistically be that would make it that much
01:35:21 ◼ ► better than this anyway. Because the content, it's all about the content ultimately, and all of the
01:35:29 ◼ ► content that you can get on an Apple TV, you can get on a Roku TV, and it has all the additional
01:35:36 ◼ ► functionality you want like AirPlay, HomeKit. So go for that. If you would like to send in a question
01:35:43 ◼ ► to help us close out the show, you've got something you want to know, something you want to hear us
01:35:47 ◼ ► expound on, maybe a topic that you would like to hear us discuss, the best way to get it to us is
01:35:52 ◼ ► to tweet with the hashtag #AskUpgrade or use question mark #AskUpgrade in the Relay FM members
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01:36:20 ◼ ► getupgradeplus.com. I would like to thank everybody that does support us already. Thank you so much for
01:36:27 ◼ ► helping us produce the show every week and ExpressVPN, Bombas and HelloFresh for their support
01:36:38 ◼ ► incomparable.com and Jason hosts many shows here at Relay FM as do I. You can go to relay.fm/
01:36:44 ◼ ► shows not only to see the shows that we produce but we have shows from many talented individuals
01:36:50 ◼ ► here at Relay FM and I invite you to peruse them and pick one out at your leisure. I guarantee there
01:36:55 ◼ ► is at least one more show for you in that list that you're not listening to already. Jason is