Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:08 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 145. Today's show is brought to you by

00:00:14 ◼   ► Encapsula, Blue Apron and Mail Route. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined back

00:00:18 ◼   ► over the Skype waves by Mr Jason Snell.

00:00:22 ◼   ► Present.

00:00:23 ◼   ► Hi Mr Jason Snell.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Hi.

00:00:27 ◼   ► Jason, Kevin would like to know, did you drive to San Jose in your Nissan Leaf?

00:00:34 ◼   ► I did not.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I took a gasoline car, in fact I took the minivan to San Jose, because it's got all

00:00:42 ◼   ► the range in the world.

00:00:43 ◼   ► And San Jose was, again, I kind of wanted to drive the Leaf to San Jose just for the

00:00:48 ◼   ► challenge of it.

00:00:50 ◼   ► And one of these days I'm going to do it where I'm going to drive that car somewhere that

00:00:54 ◼   ► that I don't need to go just to see how far I can drive it.

00:00:57 ◼   ► But I decided there was too much else going on.

00:01:01 ◼   ► And then I was also giving Dan Morin a ride down

00:01:04 ◼   ► and I didn't wanna like, you know,

00:01:05 ◼   ► subject him to my insanity of the, you know,

00:01:09 ◼   ► eco mode of the Leaf to see if I could max out the range

00:01:12 ◼   ► and things like that.

00:01:13 ◼   ► So I just, I left that for my wife to commute in

00:01:16 ◼   ► and we took the gas car down.

00:01:18 ◼   ► - Pulling these on.

00:01:20 ◼   ► - That's fine.

00:01:22 ◼   ► it's, you know, it specializes on short trips.

00:01:26 ◼   ► - Okay, but Kevin did want to know, then,

00:01:28 ◼   ► what is the furthest you have driven it,

00:01:30 ◼   ► if not to San Jose?

00:01:31 ◼   ► - I looked it up.

00:01:32 ◼   ► I think the furthest that we've driven the car

00:01:35 ◼   ► is the 42 miles that I drove it from the dealership

00:01:39 ◼   ► in Santa Rosa to my house.

00:01:42 ◼   ► But I have driven it twice to Petaluma,

00:01:45 ◼   ► which is probably 35 miles away,

00:01:50 ◼   ► to Twit, which I was the guest host on Twit yesterday,

00:01:55 ◼   ► 'cause Leo Laporte is frolicking in the Galapagos

00:01:59 ◼   ► with turtles and things.

00:02:01 ◼   ► And there is a charger, a level two charger

00:02:06 ◼   ► across the street from the Twit offices in this office park.

00:02:09 ◼   ► So I drove up there, plugged in,

00:02:12 ◼   ► walked across the street to Twit,

00:02:13 ◼   ► and then plugged back, you know, unplugged,

00:02:16 ◼   ► and drove home with mileage to spare.

00:02:19 ◼   ► So I've done that a couple of times now

00:02:20 ◼   ► and that totally works.

00:02:21 ◼   ► 'Cause with these electric cars,

00:02:22 ◼   ► there's sort of two, there's two different ranges.

00:02:25 ◼   ► There's the range of what you can just drive

00:02:27 ◼   ► all the way out there and all the way back home

00:02:29 ◼   ► without plugging in.

00:02:30 ◼   ► And then there's the range where you drive somewhere,

00:02:32 ◼   ► find a charging station, plug in,

00:02:34 ◼   ► do what you're doing out there

00:02:35 ◼   ► and then are able to drive home.

00:02:37 ◼   ► And obviously that's a longer range.

00:02:39 ◼   ► If I went to San Jose, that's what it would have been.

00:02:41 ◼   ► - There you go.

00:02:43 ◼   ► Thank you, Kevin, for your #SNELtalk question.

00:02:46 ◼   ► If you have a question you would like to open

00:02:47 ◼   ► an episode of Upgrade, tweet it with the hashtag #snelltalk, and it will go into a spreadsheet

00:02:52 ◼   ► for my choosing.

00:02:53 ◼   ► Casey List was very upset with me, because I hadn't asked a Snell Talk question that

00:02:58 ◼   ► he had, but I didn't think that it was interesting enough, so it will never get asked. So I will

00:03:03 ◼   ► invite Casey to try again. He was talking about some kind of university thing. It really

00:03:09 ◼   ► wasn't a very interesting question.

00:03:11 ◼   ► The short version, I'm going to answer Casey's question, which is...

00:03:14 ◼   ► Oh, I forgot you were there. Otherwise, I wouldn't have brought it up.

00:03:17 ◼   ► am I, why am I, I think I answered it to him, but just for everybody, why am I a,

00:03:21 ◼   ► why do I have loyalty to the University of California at Berkeley? And the answer

00:03:25 ◼   ► is my dad went to the University of California at Berkeley. I went to

00:03:29 ◼   ► football games there from when I was a little kid. We still have the football

00:03:32 ◼   ► season tickets that used to be my parents. My wife and I now have those, and

00:03:36 ◼   ► I did go to graduate school there too. So it is a, it is a family thing from when I

00:03:41 ◼   ► was a kid, and that's why I'm a Cal fan, despite that it's like being the Cubs, a

00:03:46 ◼   ► a Cubs fan before they won the World Series. It's a, it's not a team to be a fan of, and

00:03:51 ◼   ► I am. And that's just how it is. That's part of the, part of life, part of a personality.

00:03:56 ◼   ► Casey is a Virginia Tech fan, so.

00:03:58 ◼   ► Because, I never trust Casey's questions, because I feel like he's trying to trick me

00:04:03 ◼   ► into goading you into something like that. You know, like, why are you a Cal fan, like,

00:04:07 ◼   ► with the implication of because Cal sucks, right? So I never, you know, I can't trust

00:04:12 ◼   ► him.

00:04:13 ◼   ► Well, he's not wrong.

00:04:15 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:04:17 ◼   ► Yeah, it's also the Cal logo is a script Cal, and I wear Cal apparel from time to time.

00:04:24 ◼   ► And I remember I was on the East Coast, I was visiting Boston, and I was having dinner with Rich Siegel, the author of BB Edit,

00:04:30 ◼   ► and he looked at my shirt, my Cal shirt, and said, "Who is Cal, and why did you steal his shirt?"

00:04:35 ◼   ► Which I thought was funny. Like, it's a little monogrammed, like, some guy named Cal.

00:04:39 ◼   ► Right, well this was part of the reason I never asked the question in the first place,

00:04:42 ◼   ► because I couldn't understand it. He just says, "Why does Jason like Cal?" I'm like,

00:04:47 ◼   ► "Who's Cal?" So I didn't ask the question.

00:04:49 ◼   ► Yeah, who is he and why is he so magnetic? Yeah. Anyway, so sometime in the fall,

00:04:54 ◼   ► he'll be in the Bay Area and I will subject you to American college football and you will see the

00:05:00 ◼   ► spectacle and then you will understand. Or you won't understand, I don't know. I took Anjé Tomich

00:05:04 ◼   ► to a college football game when he was out here. And I got to expose all of, all of,

00:05:11 ◼   ► essentially all of Slovenia's tech journalism to college football in America.

00:05:16 ◼   ► It's a service you provide. It is an occasional service I provide. And

00:05:21 ◼   ► that is Snell Talk. The lasers are way too soon this week. So we're

00:05:27 ◼   ► back from WWDC. We're a week removed from the keynote. And I just wanted to get a sense

00:05:32 ◼   ► from you, Jason, kind of what your feeling about San Jose WWDC was like, like what you

00:05:39 ◼   ► thought San Jose was like as a host of the conference.

00:05:43 ◼   ► I thought it was great. I really liked the vibe of it. I thought the... I mean, it's

00:05:51 ◼   ► different, so it takes some getting used to. But let's see, like, getting there wasn't

00:05:56 ◼   ► a problem. There was parking. One day I actually parked on the street. I mean, there was a

00:06:02 ◼   ► parking. There were lots of different venues, but it was all walkable. At one point, I was

00:06:10 ◼   ► with Dan Morin and David Sparks, and we were looking for someplace to have dinner. And

00:06:14 ◼   ► we found, you know, we were just sort of wandering, and we ended up walking for quite a ways.

00:06:18 ◼   ► But I looked on a map, and it looked like it was a million miles away to where we walked.

00:06:24 ◼   ► But it wasn't, because the scale of downtown San Jose is not particularly huge. Like, it's

00:06:31 ◼   ► It's all walkable. There's lots of restaurants. It is kind of one of those places that feels

00:06:35 ◼   ► like it's geared more for people during the day than it is in the evening. But the fact

00:06:41 ◼   ► was there were so many evening events that it was pretty lively, I think even in the

00:06:45 ◼   ► evening, and you just keep running into people. Like blocks away from the convention center,

00:06:49 ◼   ► you would see people you knew. So it was like, it really was like what we thought it might

00:06:52 ◼   ► be where you kind of took over the downtown for the week. And that felt good. And San

00:06:59 ◼   ► San Francisco never really felt like that. So, um, and personally for me, even though

00:07:03 ◼   ► it's inconvenient to drive all that way, um, it was much more kind of pleasant to be there

00:07:09 ◼   ► and to hang around there than it was in San Francisco where, you know, I don't know, it's

00:07:13 ◼   ► just so dense and so much else going on and kind of hard to get from place to place and

00:07:17 ◼   ► everything is packed and that was my take on it. What was your take?

00:07:21 ◼   ► I loved it. I hope they never go back to San Francisco. I hate downtown San Francisco.

00:07:27 ◼   ► The area around Moscone that we have been at for the last 4 or 5 years that I've been

00:07:33 ◼   ► going there, I've just come to really not enjoy it.

00:07:37 ◼   ► It's just not a very nice area.

00:07:38 ◼   ► There are very nice parts of San Francisco, the Moscone Center is not one of them.

00:07:45 ◼   ► The area around there is just not, it doesn't give me anything, I don't really enjoy it.

00:07:50 ◼   ► San Jose does have less food options and stuff like that, as you said, less bar options and

00:07:54 ◼   ► stuff but I got by Vine, everything I needed was there. Plus it was really nice and the

00:07:59 ◼   ► weather was fantastic, I could walk around in t-shirts and shorts every day. It was just

00:08:05 ◼   ► lovely, it was really really nice. It had more personality to it in its own little way

00:08:10 ◼   ► and as you say it felt much nicer as an attendee or as somebody coming into town for that time

00:08:16 ◼   ► because it just felt like WWDC had just taken over, like the Apple community just descended

00:08:23 ◼   ► upon the town because it feels like that area is not really used for very much other than

00:08:28 ◼   ► like people attending the convention center because there were like a couple of hotels

00:08:33 ◼   ► that were all clustered together and then a bunch of food places so it really felt like

00:08:38 ◼   ► the it really just felt like everything was ours and it was great I loved it and also

00:08:46 ◼   ► I have a voice which is great that is the benefit of there not being so many bars and

00:08:51 ◼   ► and stuff open at night meant that people were either hanging out in the hotel or like

00:08:56 ◼   ► what I did at view nights which is having a bunch of people in our hotel room and just

00:08:59 ◼   ► like we had like a living area sitting area in our hotel room. You could have like eight

00:09:03 ◼   ► or nine people in there and it was totally fine. So that was just a thing that I did

00:09:06 ◼   ► a couple of occasions as well. And that was really lovely because I got to spend all the

00:09:11 ◼   ► time with the people I wanted to spend time with and also keep my voice. It was great.

00:09:16 ◼   ► And there were more like meetups and stuff to go to this year so I could see a bunch

00:09:19 ◼   ► of people. It was great. I really, really, really loved it. And I hope that it is there

00:09:25 ◼   ► for the foreseeable future.

00:09:27 ◼   ► Yeah, and there were places like, talk about, I mean, there is definitely a WWDC bar culture

00:09:33 ◼   ► that I'm not really a part of, but I also found like, there are a lot of places like,

00:09:38 ◼   ► one night we hung out in the Fairmont Hotel lobby, basically, and there's a bar there,

00:09:43 ◼   ► and people were having drinks if they wanted to, but it was a large space with comfortable

00:09:49 ◼   ► seating and things like that. So it's different, but it is geared, that area has built up to

00:09:56 ◼   ► handle conventions that can fit in the convention center. It is made for that. And so it's got

00:10:02 ◼   ► enough to handle all of that. And yeah, it doesn't have the feel of like, wow, we're

00:10:09 ◼   ► in San Francisco, which I would argue feels a little bit like, wow, we're in Chicago or

00:10:13 ◼   ► while we're in New York where there's a real sense of place. In San Jose, it feels like we're in

00:10:20 ◼   ► a city that is a middle-sized city. It's not a super dense city. And so there's not that sense

00:10:29 ◼   ► of like, I can't believe we're in San Jose, right? But it doesn't matter. Who cares? It was a

00:10:36 ◼   ► pleasant place to do it. And I think that's more important. Ironically, is this irony? Okay,

00:10:43 ◼   ► I'm not gonna say ironically I withdraw my comment of irony. Is this like Alanis Morissette irony?

00:10:47 ◼   ► It could be. It did rain on Thursday

00:10:51 ◼   ► On the wedding day. In June in San Francisco, which I'm sure somebody was getting married and it was bad for them. Don't you think?

00:10:57 ◼   ► but

00:10:59 ◼   ► I think Steve Jobs moved

00:11:02 ◼   ► WWDC to San Francisco because he wanted he wanted Apple to appear more big time at a time when Apple wasn't being taken as

00:11:10 ◼   ► seriously as he wanted it to be, and he wanted it to be like, "No, we're not minor league.

00:11:14 ◼   ► We're going to take over San Francisco."

00:11:16 ◼   ► I think it helped, and I think it especially helped with all the iPhone stuff as well,

00:11:19 ◼   ► right?

00:11:20 ◼   ► And that's why they did all those events up there. They moved to WWDC up there. They did

00:11:23 ◼   ► the events in Moscone. They did the events in Yerba Buena. Then they did the last couple

00:11:28 ◼   ► of keynotes at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. But I think Apple in its current status doesn't

00:11:32 ◼   ► need to do that, right? Apple can go to San Jose, and it's going to take it over, and

00:11:36 ◼   ► people will still come because it's Apple and now it's more like it's at

00:11:39 ◼   ► their home court basically because it's a lot closer to go to San Jose than it

00:11:43 ◼   ► is to San Francisco. So now all their press events are gonna be on campus as

00:11:46 ◼   ► well right like they're just like we don't need this anymore. I would assume

00:11:50 ◼   ► that all the press events are gonna be in that new Steve Jobs theater so yeah

00:11:54 ◼   ► it's a I thought it was great I thought was successful I I hope they will

00:11:58 ◼   ► continue as far as I've not heard anything to dissuade me from the belief

00:12:01 ◼   ► that future WWDCs will be in San Jose. Sometimes people ask, "Well, if they have it in San

00:12:07 ◼   ► Jose, would they have it somewhere else?" The thing is, though, that WWDC Apple employees

00:12:11 ◼   ► really participate in it. They're all over that event, and so they're not going to do

00:12:15 ◼   ► a road show, I think. San Jose is close to the campus. It's the right place for them

00:12:19 ◼   ► to do it.

00:12:20 ◼   ► The movement to San Jose doesn't mean that it's about to go on tour. If they did it in

00:12:26 ◼   ► New York this year, you could be like, "Well, maybe they'll do it in London." No, they just

00:12:30 ◼   ► did it somewhere that was physically closer to their office.

00:12:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, for those who don't know Bay Area Geography,

00:12:36 ◼   ► it's quite a bit closer.

00:12:38 ◼   ► It's like, it's quite a bit closer to Apple.

00:12:41 ◼   ► - Great all around, big fan.

00:12:43 ◼   ► So I look forward to going back to San Jose next year.

00:12:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, and next year we'll have the benefit

00:12:48 ◼   ► of knowing more about the area.

00:12:50 ◼   ► That was one of those things.

00:12:51 ◼   ► Like we did the relay meetup and it was really lovely

00:12:54 ◼   ► at the Quilt and Textiles Museum.

00:12:57 ◼   ► - Yup.

00:12:58 ◼   ► But it was, that was, and we heard from a lot of people who wanted to be there and couldn't

00:13:03 ◼   ► because it was a fairly small venue. And, you know, our reasoning was in part just that we

00:13:08 ◼   ► hadn't seen the, we didn't know if people would come to WWDC. We hadn't seen any of the venues.

00:13:14 ◼   ► It was pretty risky to put on an event sight unseen at all. And everybody, you know, sort of

00:13:20 ◼   ► took that risk credit to John Gruber for getting the California theater and selling it out basically

00:13:25 ◼   ► for the talk show live. But next year everybody's going to have a much better idea about how

00:13:32 ◼   ► it works and I think it will be more of a well-oiled machine. I think with a couple

00:13:36 ◼   ► of years, WWDC in San Jose could actually become incredible because everybody, and that

00:13:43 ◼   ► doesn't just mean the people who go and the people who plan events, but it also means

00:13:47 ◼   ► the people in the services in San Jose, the hotels and all that, I think everybody's going

00:13:52 ◼   ► to get a better sense of like, "Oh, I see what this is now." And yes, they may raise

00:13:58 ◼   ► their prices, that may happen. But I think there's enough flexibility there that it'll

00:14:07 ◼   ► be a little bit harder for them to do what maybe the San Francisco hotels did. But I

00:14:12 ◼   ► think in general, everybody's going to get a better sense and it could actually become

00:14:15 ◼   ► pretty incredible as time goes on to take that place over for a week.

00:14:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that bars and restaurants will understand a little bit better, like, what

00:14:25 ◼   ► they're supposed to be doing, you know?

00:14:27 ◼   ► Right, who are the nerds? Why are they here?

00:14:29 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly, like, I don't know what this is all about, but I think it's gonna change.

00:14:33 ◼   ► There was this coffee shop called Social Policy, which was fantastic, but that place was just,

00:14:38 ◼   ► like, completely overrun. Yeah, it was really nice.

00:14:42 ◼   ► I spent some time in another café that was just sort of like a block away that was really

00:14:48 ◼   ► good that was a like a yeah I forget the name of it now but it was like an Italian name

00:14:53 ◼   ► it was very very nice to level cafe and I hung out there for a few hours that I more

00:14:59 ◼   ► people were basically taken over the upstairs and we're using it as their base of operations

00:15:04 ◼   ► but I think yeah I think people will get it there was also a perception from a lot of

00:15:07 ◼   ► people this is something that I know that some people ran into that that this was an

00:15:10 ◼   ► Apple event through and through and so there was some confusion among the people like running

00:15:15 ◼   ► the venues and all that. They're like, "Oh, you're with Apple. This is all part of Apple's

00:15:18 ◼   ► thing." It's like, "No, we're not with Apple. We're kind of like independent on the outside."

00:15:22 ◼   ► And so hopefully that education will happen too because, you know, that it gets a little

00:15:27 ◼   ► weird when they're like, "Oh, well, you're with Apple. You're with a billion dollar company.

00:15:30 ◼   ► You're worth, you know, you can billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars.

00:15:35 ◼   ► So this shouldn't be a problem." It's like, "No, no, we're a podcast network. We're tiny.

00:15:39 ◼   ► We're not Apple." And hopefully that education process will go on too. So they'll understand

00:15:43 ◼   ► that there's sort of like the main event and then there's all the ancillary events.

00:15:49 ◼   ► So WebRTC is coming to Safari. This is something that you've been excited about for a while.

00:15:56 ◼   ► Why is this important to you and kind of, is it coming to iOS as well as on the Mac?

00:16:02 ◼   ► It's funny, I have written about this. So WebRTC is this set of extensions for web browsers

00:16:08 ◼   ► and it's in Chrome and Firefox, and it's real-time communication. And the idea is you should

00:16:14 ◼   ► be able to do audio and video conferencing and other applications that use audio and

00:16:19 ◼   ► video streams primarily without a plugin. Like, you shouldn't need Flash, you shouldn't

00:16:25 ◼   ► need Silverlight, you should just be able to do this. So if you open a Google Hangout

00:16:29 ◼   ► in Chrome, it doesn't need a plugin. It does on Safari, but it doesn't need a plugin, I

00:16:36 ◼   ► believe on Chrome because it's using WebRTC. And the best example I can give is that there

00:16:44 ◼   ► are these two apps, Zencastr and Cast, that are podcasting apps. And they only work with

00:16:50 ◼   ► Chrome and Firefox because they're using the WebRTC protocols. But what it means is you

00:16:55 ◼   ► don't need a plug-in, you just use their site in the browser and you can hear other people

00:17:00 ◼   ► and record and it creates a whole podcast studio inside of web browser. Pretty cool.

00:17:06 ◼   ► So I've written about this a little bit, we've talked about it a little bit. I had somebody

00:17:10 ◼   ► come up to me as I was walking out of the talk show live out of the California theater

00:17:15 ◼   ► who was from Apple who said, "WebRTC! Did you hear? It's in the new Safari, it's in

00:17:22 ◼   ► the betas!" So I guess somebody was paying attention to these things I've been writing,

00:17:27 ◼   ► which is nice. So, enough to tell me, not enough to, like, it's not like I asked and

00:17:33 ◼   ► they did it, it's more like they knew I was complaining and they were like, "Okay, finally

00:17:37 ◼   ► you can stop complaining now." My understanding is that this is in Mac OS and iOS, and my

00:17:45 ◼   ► understanding from talking to some web developers is that Apple's, how is it phrased to me,

00:17:52 ◼   ► Google's interpretation of the WebRTC specification is slightly different from Google's interpretation

00:18:02 ◼   ► of WebRTC as implemented in Chrome. So my understanding is this isn't one of those

00:18:08 ◼   ► things where one of these web app developers like Cast or ZenCaster can just sort of turn

00:18:14 ◼   ► off the browser detection for Safari and say, "Safari, hooray, you can now use our tool."

00:18:21 ◼   ► I think they have to do some work.

00:18:24 ◼   ► I also saw a tweet from the Zencastr developers saying that their approach on iOS is probably

00:18:29 ◼   ► going to just be to build an app, because that's the other way to do it.

00:18:34 ◼   ► But in the long run, what this is going to probably mean is that apps that use WebRTC,

00:18:39 ◼   ► including my podcast apps that I'm excited about, but also all sorts of other applications

00:18:43 ◼   ► that currently only work on Chrome because they're using these features, will be supported

00:18:47 ◼   ► in Safari on the Mac, and I believe that's going to be for High Sierra, Sierra, and El

00:18:53 ◼   ► Capitan. I think they go three versions back when they do Safari updates. So I think it'll

00:18:59 ◼   ► actually roll back a couple of versions. And in iOS 11, it should be there. And if it's

00:19:05 ◼   ► in iOS 11 and these apps get updated to work with it, it's a big deal because that means,

00:19:10 ◼   ► say sometimes I have these incomparable podcasts where Dan Morin is like in a, they release

00:19:15 ◼   ► a new Star Wars trailer and Nana is at a convention somewhere and we want to do a Star Wars trailer

00:19:19 ◼   ► podcast. And he's on an iPhone and it's like he's just going to sound terrible because

00:19:23 ◼   ► we can't record him. We are going to be able to do that, right? We will be able to all

00:19:28 ◼   ► go to a link and he'll be able to go there on his phone and we'll record the podcast

00:19:32 ◼   ► and it'll record his microphone and upload that recording in the background to us so

00:19:38 ◼   ► that we can make a good sounding podcast. That's pretty awesome. And that's the promise

00:19:42 ◼   ► So this may be the first crack in the wall in terms of being able to really legitimately

00:19:48 ◼   ► do good sounding podcasts entirely on iOS that include multiple people and multiple

00:19:56 ◼   ► platforms and all of those caveats.

00:19:59 ◼   ► So it's great.

00:20:00 ◼   ► And plus it means that Safari is a more complete web citizen and you don't end up in these

00:20:04 ◼   ► situations which I hate when I get in there because I'm a Safari user where I get to a

00:20:08 ◼   ► site and they say, "Oh, you need to use Chrome for this."

00:20:10 ◼   ► I keep Chrome around for like three or four specific reasons, and I would prefer not to.

00:20:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I still use it as my web browser, right, Chrome? I do. But I would like to be

00:20:22 ◼   ► able to have the flexibility on iOS to eventually record podcasts in a pinch, right, with a

00:20:28 ◼   ► USB microphone and an adapter, right? That's what I find interesting about this, it's what

00:20:34 ◼   ► I hope it means it gets implemented at some point.

00:20:37 ◼   ► sounds like why was 11 may give us that even if even if it is not what we would

00:20:41 ◼   ► prefer to do right because there are other issues going on just the fact that

00:20:45 ◼   ► it will be if it's capable of doing it that means in a pinch or if you are on

00:20:51 ◼   ► like for me it's a lot of times it's like I'm taking this trip and I I have

00:20:54 ◼   ► one podcast to record so I have to bring a whole like laptop setup and it may be

00:20:59 ◼   ► enough to realize to make me realize like oh I don't need to that one I can

00:21:03 ◼   ► do just on my iPad and it'll be fine. That's great.

00:21:07 ◼   ► Talking about iPads, the iPad 10.5 inch Pro thing, need a good name for that, haven't

00:21:15 ◼   ► got it yet in my head. The reviews are out and I want to point everyone to Max Stories.

00:21:20 ◼   ► Federico had a review unit of the new iPad Pro and he wrote a lovely little review about

00:21:25 ◼   ► it so you should go and check it out. And I expect that before next week's episode we'll

00:21:30 ◼   ► both own new iPad Pros, so we'll be able to talk about them next week. They come out,

00:21:34 ◼   ► I think tomorrow?

00:21:35 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's right. And yes, I anticipate that we'll have new iPad Pros to talk about

00:21:41 ◼   ► next week. I liked Federico's review and how he, because he, like me, is a 12.9 inch iPad

00:21:49 ◼   ► Pro user. And it's funny because on Twit yesterday, Harry McCracken was there and his primary

00:21:56 ◼   ► computer is also a 12.9 inch iPad Pro. He's like Federico. He uses it more than he uses

00:22:03 ◼   ► a computer, a PC. It's iPad all the way. And I like how Federico, because I was curious,

00:22:11 ◼   ► was like, "It's pretty good, but the screen's not as good as the 12.9 because it's smaller

00:22:17 ◼   ► and everything's a little bit smaller." I like how he was really generous about how

00:22:22 ◼   ► impressive a product it is, while also kind of giving you the sense that if you're a fan

00:22:28 ◼   ► of the 12.9, he seems to not be convinced that people who like the 12.9, that this extra

00:22:36 ◼   ► space on the 10.5 is going to really be enough to make you go down from a 12.9 to a 10.5.

00:22:44 ◼   ► And I think the fact that the 12.9 still exists suggests that they had that conversation at

00:22:49 ◼   ► Apple and it was very clear that the answer was no there's still a place for the bigger

00:22:53 ◼   ► iPad. Yeah all that that math that we spoke about that Dan Provost did it didn't yeah

00:22:58 ◼   ► they didn't do it. True. No it's a it's a it's same same resolution in terms of pixels

00:23:04 ◼   ► per inch as the old 9.7 it's just got more screen space so it's it's a new resolution

00:23:12 ◼   ► in terms of pixel dimensions so it's a little bit bigger but still if you run two apps side

00:23:18 ◼   ► by side on a 10.5 iPad Pro, they're both using basically the phone layout, not the iPad layout.

00:23:25 ◼   ► And side by side on a 12.9, you get two basically vertical iPad apps, traditional iPad layout

00:23:32 ◼   ► size side by side. And so that changes the equation. It has positives in that if it was

00:23:40 ◼   ► an iPad Mini resolution, everything would be way smaller on the display and it would

00:23:45 ◼   ► make the touch targets harder. It would be a tricky decision to make for a mainstream

00:23:51 ◼   ► iPad to make that resolution that much higher. But this is the trade-off. The trade-off is

00:23:56 ◼   ► it's still not, you know, it's still a little cramped. It's not as cramped as the 9.7, but

00:24:02 ◼   ► it's still cramped.

00:24:04 ◼   ► So more next week, I think, on that.

00:24:06 ◼   ► Yes.

00:24:07 ◼   ► More next week.

00:24:08 ◼   ► Much, much more next week.

00:24:09 ◼   ► Because there's so much to talk about about these devices that we really need to play

00:24:11 ◼   ► the more I sell first I think. Also I'm planning on putting 11 on mine.

00:24:16 ◼   ► Well that's the, a lot of the reviews that's unsaid, like I've spent about half an hour

00:24:23 ◼   ► using one of these 10.5 review units in demo area at WWDC but they were running 11 and

00:24:31 ◼   ► that says it all right. That Apple would rather you see these things with a developer beta

00:24:36 ◼   ► than the shipping OS because this is the fully realized version of this. And so quite rightly

00:24:41 ◼   ► a lot of the reviews basically say, "Well, this is good, but what really is going to

00:24:46 ◼   ► make it great?" A lot of the reviews are debates about can it replace your laptop, and some

00:24:52 ◼   ► say yes and some say no, which I think is silly because I think yes is the answer there,

00:24:58 ◼   ► but you know, reasonable people disagree, it's fine. But a lot of them say, "Well, maybe,

00:25:04 ◼   ► But when iOS 11 comes out, yes.

00:25:06 ◼   ► So that's part of the trick of writing a review of something

00:25:09 ◼   ► like this, and Federico definitely

00:25:10 ◼   ► had to deal with it, which is you want to talk about iOS 11,

00:25:14 ◼   ► but it's not out yet, and your review unit didn't come with it.

00:25:19 ◼   ► And so your perception of it is, what's here now,

00:25:23 ◼   ► and then what's the coupon in the box

00:25:26 ◼   ► for the promise of the real features in the fall?

00:25:30 ◼   ► So it's a weird situation.

00:25:32 ◼   ► But as we were last--

00:25:34 ◼   ► My enthusiasm, and I think this is true of you too, my enthusiasm about the future of

00:25:38 ◼   ► the iPad and how awesome it's going to be to use iOS 11 with these new iPads, my enthusiasm

00:25:45 ◼   ► has not dimmed even a little bit.

00:25:46 ◼   ► I am very excited about where this is going in terms of being a productivity person on

00:25:53 ◼   ► an iPad.

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00:27:35 ◼   ► a better way to cook.

00:27:38 ◼   ► So being at WWDC, we mentioned this on the show, I mention it a bunch, being at WWDC

00:27:43 ◼   ► recording as quickly as we do, by the way, three and a half hours from keynote end to

00:27:48 ◼   ► upgrade being published. I think that was pretty impressive.

00:27:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:51 ◼   ► Felt real good. Felt real good.

00:27:54 ◼   ► That's what we were going for, is to get it out there as quick as we could.

00:27:57 ◼   ► First and never worst. That is the mantra of the keynote upgrade. It is a thing that

00:28:04 ◼   ► we mean you like to do. We like to have the show out as soon as we can.

00:28:08 ◼   ► We're a Monday podcast. We're a Monday podcast and the keynote's on a Monday. We're going

00:28:12 ◼   ► to do that. Like, how could we not do that?

00:28:15 ◼   ► Exactly. And we want to get it out quickly because there are a lot of people that immediately

00:28:18 ◼   ► want to hear it, right? And so we can provide that. It's very important to us. But it does

00:28:22 ◼   ► mean that there's a bunch of stuff that we missed. So our friends over at MacStories

00:28:26 ◼   ► rounded up a bunch of little things, kind of the little details that maybe didn't get

00:28:31 ◼   ► any coverage from Apple on stage. And I wanted to run through a few of them, Jason, in case

00:28:35 ◼   ► our listeners don't know as well.

00:28:37 ◼   ► So I think we need to do it. Yeah, we didn't get the breakdown to -- we didn't get the

00:28:42 ◼   ► chance to break down things because we were in the bubble, right?

00:28:45 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:28:46 ◼   ► At that post keynote bubble.

00:28:47 ◼   ► So one of them is that, I guess something me and you have been talking about for a long

00:28:52 ◼   ► time but now it's here, I wonder what we think of it, which is that WatchOS 4, and WatchOS

00:28:59 ◼   ► 4, the beta of the next version of the operating system for the watch, the home screen can

00:29:04 ◼   ► be replaced by an alphabetical list of apps instead of the honeycomb.

00:29:11 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to trying it.

00:29:12 ◼   ► I'm not going to install WatchOS 4 beta for a while because I use my Apple Watch.

00:29:17 ◼   ► but I am intrigued by this.

00:29:21 ◼   ► I hope that it's good.

00:29:23 ◼   ► I think, yes, that list is potentially long.

00:29:25 ◼   ► You should probably,

00:29:27 ◼   ► everybody should probably better curate

00:29:28 ◼   ► what apps actually are on their watch.

00:29:31 ◼   ► But like the idea of just scrolling through with the crown

00:29:33 ◼   ► and finding an app alphabetically

00:29:35 ◼   ► instead of having to go like pick through that weird thing.

00:29:40 ◼   ► It doesn't work for me.

00:29:40 ◼   ► I don't love going to the honeycomb.

00:29:43 ◼   ► So I'm hoping this will be a better experience.

00:29:46 ◼   ► Here's my thinking on this. I don't like the idea of a scrolling list of stuff, right,

00:29:51 ◼   ► because it's kind of slow and inelegant, but with my Apple Watch, I can never remember

00:29:58 ◼   ► where the apps are on my home screen, because I very rarely go there. At least of an alphabetical

00:30:04 ◼   ► list, I will know where to go to find the one I'm looking for. So whilst it's kind of

00:30:11 ◼   ► like a band-aid over a gunshot wound as a situation as like a solution to a

00:30:17 ◼   ► problem I think it works because it's not elegant it's gonna take longer than

00:30:23 ◼   ► you'd want but at least you'll know where to go yeah I think that's about it

00:30:28 ◼   ► is I mean you can use Siri to launch apps on the Apple launch there's lots of

00:30:34 ◼   ► different ways to do it complications are a really good way to do it so but I

00:30:41 ◼   ► I think it's good to offer this option,

00:30:43 ◼   ► but in practice, that's the question.

00:30:44 ◼   ► It's like, is it really gonna be better

00:30:45 ◼   ► to scroll through a list alphabetically

00:30:47 ◼   ► than to kinda poke around and slide around

00:30:50 ◼   ► and try to find that icon?

00:30:52 ◼   ► It's like, which one is the timer

00:30:53 ◼   ► and which one is the alarm clock, right?

00:30:56 ◼   ► It may be better just to have that list, but we'll see.

00:30:59 ◼   ► And people get the choice, right?

00:31:00 ◼   ► It doesn't, if you don't like one, the other is still there.

00:31:02 ◼   ► - I think the doc solved the problem for me, honestly.

00:31:06 ◼   ► But just for that every now and then,

00:31:09 ◼   ► I think that this is a good idea.

00:31:11 ◼   ► - Docking complications really made that thing so unimportant.

00:31:14 ◼   ► It's rare that I go there, and mostly when I do go there,

00:31:17 ◼   ► it's sort of like, oh yeah, I need to set an alarm,

00:31:20 ◼   ► at which point I should probably just use Siri,

00:31:22 ◼   ► because it does that just fine, and sometimes I forget,

00:31:25 ◼   ► and then I'm in the honeycomb, and no, no,

00:31:30 ◼   ► I didn't want to do that, so yeah, we'll see.

00:31:32 ◼   ► But it's good that that option exists.

00:31:34 ◼   ► - There is a new accessibility option called Typed Siri,

00:31:37 ◼   ► which gives you a text box at the bottom of the screen

00:31:40 ◼   ► when you invoke Siri.

00:31:42 ◼   ► I've also seen that regular Siri questions

00:31:45 ◼   ► have an edit button on them.

00:31:46 ◼   ► So even without enabling the option,

00:31:49 ◼   ► you're able to correct what Siri heard you say.

00:31:52 ◼   ► So you can fix it and then it will re-answer the question.

00:31:56 ◼   ► So I think that this is, I think this is good.

00:31:58 ◼   ► This is good to have.

00:31:59 ◼   ► I think the ability to now, in some cases or all cases,

00:32:02 ◼   ► type to Siri instead of talking to Siri.

00:32:07 ◼   ► And as an aside, the new Siri voice is unbelievable.

00:32:11 ◼   ► - New Siri voice is very good, very good.

00:32:14 ◼   ► - Very good.

00:32:15 ◼   ► - I'll miss the old lady,

00:32:16 ◼   ► but the new lady is doing a great job.

00:32:19 ◼   ► - You could fool me with that, I think.

00:32:22 ◼   ► It's very impressive.

00:32:24 ◼   ► Jason, I'm sure you're very happy about the fact

00:32:27 ◼   ► that you can now share iCloud storage with family sharing.

00:32:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, this is something that has been a long time coming,

00:32:34 ◼   ► but I was telling my daughter about this,

00:32:36 ◼   ► that she'll actually be able to like back up her photos

00:32:38 ◼   ► and her phone because we've got,

00:32:41 ◼   ► they increased the terabyte option to two terabytes

00:32:43 ◼   ► and we're on the terabyte option

00:32:45 ◼   ► because I have more than 200 gigabytes of photos

00:32:48 ◼   ► and that's it.

00:32:49 ◼   ► You either pay for 200 gigabytes or you pay for two terabytes

00:32:53 ◼   ► there's nothing in between.

00:32:55 ◼   ► So yeah, now my family will be able to have access

00:33:00 ◼   ► to that two terabyte portion,

00:33:03 ◼   ► which means they'll all back up,

00:33:05 ◼   ► They'll all be able to have their photos stored.

00:33:07 ◼   ► We didn't get any announcements about sharing photos

00:33:10 ◼   ► in the photo library,

00:33:11 ◼   ► but at least the storage pool can be shared,

00:33:14 ◼   ► which means that like,

00:33:16 ◼   ► I won't have to have my wife paying for her amount

00:33:20 ◼   ► and then my daughter just having the five gigabyte amount

00:33:24 ◼   ► and all of that.

00:33:25 ◼   ► It'll all just be, we'll pay one bill

00:33:26 ◼   ► for the two terabytes I'm already paying for

00:33:28 ◼   ► and everybody will back up freely into it

00:33:31 ◼   ► with all their iOS devices.

00:33:32 ◼   ► It'll be a much better situation.

00:33:34 ◼   ► - And two terabytes for the price of one terabyte is good.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Like, right, like two terabytes is more than enough

00:33:40 ◼   ► for a family, I think.

00:33:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that this is a sign that Apple is,

00:33:46 ◼   ► like their prices are more competitive

00:33:47 ◼   ► and now their storage is getting even more competitive.

00:33:51 ◼   ► I, you know, I hesitate to say it

00:33:54 ◼   ► because everybody's got a reflexive horror story about it,

00:33:58 ◼   ► but I think Apple is making some serious strides

00:34:02 ◼   ► with their cloud stuff these days.

00:34:03 ◼   ► like the iCloud photo syncing works.

00:34:07 ◼   ► I am hoping that Hi Sierra.

00:34:10 ◼   ► - Hi Sierra.

00:34:11 ◼   ► - Be high, potentially feels like handles

00:34:16 ◼   ► the iCloud drive stuff syncing better

00:34:19 ◼   ► that that's settled down a little bit.

00:34:20 ◼   ► But with this two terabytes, I started to think,

00:34:22 ◼   ► you know, maybe I should start using iCloud drive

00:34:26 ◼   ► because Dropbox has still not brought Dropbox infinite

00:34:29 ◼   ► to regular users where you get to say like,

00:34:33 ◼   ► store this on the server.

00:34:35 ◼   ► I want to be able to see it on my computer,

00:34:37 ◼   ► but I don't want the file to actually reside on my computer

00:34:39 ◼   ► until I click on it.

00:34:40 ◼   ► That's a feature that they now offer.

00:34:41 ◼   ► So you can use that terabyte of data within Dropbox,

00:34:44 ◼   ► but it's only for business customers.

00:34:45 ◼   ► So I can't use it.

00:34:47 ◼   ► And with this two terabytes in iCloud,

00:34:49 ◼   ► I started to think, you know,

00:34:50 ◼   ► maybe I should actually try to store stuff in iCloud

00:34:53 ◼   ► because it will be able to dynamically like remove it

00:34:56 ◼   ► if it needs the storage space.

00:34:57 ◼   ► So I could store two terabytes worth,

00:35:00 ◼   ► even though I've got a 500 gigabyte SSD on my iMac,

00:35:03 ◼   ► I could store a couple of terabytes of data

00:35:07 ◼   ► and it wouldn't be a problem

00:35:08 ◼   ► 'cause it would all be dynamic.

00:35:09 ◼   ► And that's, I don't think the way Apple approaches it

00:35:12 ◼   ► really works for me, but I'm starting to think about it

00:35:15 ◼   ► just because this is, Apple keeps iterating

00:35:19 ◼   ► with its cloud stuff and making it more reliable

00:35:21 ◼   ► and making it more competitive.

00:35:23 ◼   ► And I think it's to be taken seriously.

00:35:28 ◼   ► I'm not saying they've leaped ahead of everybody,

00:35:30 ◼   ► but I am saying that I feel like Apple has been doing the right thing with their cloud

00:35:35 ◼   ► stuff for a little while now and it's really showing.

00:35:40 ◼   ► There is native screen recording coming to iOS 11 with a new control center action.

00:35:45 ◼   ► Yeah, I saw that. You can add a little record button. Talk about an esoteric feature that

00:35:49 ◼   ► nobody would expect. I mean, I think the original iPhone OS, you couldn't even take screenshots,

00:35:55 ◼   ► right? Because who would want that except for journalists. And it turns out everybody

00:35:58 ◼   ► who can't fit a tweet and writes it in notes and takes a screenshot of it and then tweets

00:36:03 ◼   ► the screenshot. It's actually this big thing. And there's a screenshot interface now where

00:36:07 ◼   ► you can immediately tap on, after you take a screenshot, and crop it and share it right

00:36:11 ◼   ► there. So Apple is embracing the fact that people want to do screen captures of maybe

00:36:17 ◼   ► of games they're playing or who knows what else and they want to take screenshots. And

00:36:22 ◼   ► it's cool. Yeah, it'll do it and record audio. And I actually started to wonder if, and I

00:36:27 ◼   ► haven't tried this because it's a beta and nothing works right yet, but I wonder, somebody

00:36:32 ◼   ► asked me and I had already thought of it, could you do a screen recording of a Skype

00:36:37 ◼   ► call and then take the recording and export the audio and have local audio of your podcast?

00:36:45 ◼   ► I don't know. Maybe you could. I don't know. I'm not sure if it captures the audio from

00:36:51 ◼   ► applications? I think it might capture your microphone audio. I'm not sure. Or maybe it's

00:36:58 ◼   ► just the system audio. Anyway, these are features that I don't think I would ever have predicted.

00:37:03 ◼   ► I would never have predicted that Apple would build a screen recording system into iOS.

00:37:09 ◼   ► That just seems so outlandish. And there it is. Just pop it on the control center, you

00:37:13 ◼   ► get a little record button, and you're good to go. It's just like doing a movie capture

00:37:17 ◼   ► inside QuickTime on the Mac. You get a little, you know, little red recording icon and it

00:37:23 ◼   ► happens.

00:37:26 ◼   ► There is also now a limited edition Rainbow Pride band for the Apple Watch under the nylon

00:37:31 ◼   ► bands. This is a six color band. It's exactly what you wanted.

00:37:35 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's now available for, uh, for people and it's directly from Apple. It's,

00:37:43 ◼   ► in stores as well as online. You can get it.

00:37:48 ◼   ► And I already ordered mine.

00:37:52 ◼   ► - Cool, I'm gonna hopefully pick mine up tomorrow

00:37:54 ◼   ► when I go and stake out my Apple store for iPads.

00:37:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, good job.

00:38:00 ◼   ► - 'Cause I think it looks real great.

00:38:01 ◼   ► I saw a couple of people wearing it the end of last week.

00:38:04 ◼   ► It's a great, great, great watch band.

00:38:06 ◼   ► I think it looks a lot of fun and it's awesome.

00:38:08 ◼   ► And it's, you know, yeah, I really like it a lot.

00:38:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it is the classic six colored Apple rainbow,

00:38:15 ◼   ► which is beautiful.

00:38:16 ◼   ► - With iOS 11, AirPods gain the ability to skip tracks.

00:38:22 ◼   ► So not only can you do forward and back track skipping

00:38:26 ◼   ► on the AirPods, you can now set each left and right AirPod

00:38:30 ◼   ► to have a different function.

00:38:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's right.

00:38:33 ◼   ► - For example, you could tap left for Siri,

00:38:35 ◼   ► tap right for pause, or you could maybe have

00:38:37 ◼   ► tap right for pause, tap left for skip.

00:38:39 ◼   ► I think you can only do one function for each ear,

00:38:43 ◼   ► but there are more options that you can choose from as well.

00:38:45 ◼   ► - That's right.

00:38:46 ◼   ► - And once you, this is the crazy thing.

00:38:48 ◼   ► Once you make a change with an iOS 11,

00:38:51 ◼   ► this functionality stays set even when it's connected

00:38:55 ◼   ► to an iOS 10 device.

00:38:57 ◼   ► - Right, because what it's really doing

00:38:58 ◼   ► is it's programming the AirPods

00:39:00 ◼   ► to have what Bluetooth command they're sending,

00:39:03 ◼   ► which they can do from anywhere.

00:39:06 ◼   ► - 'Cause it's whatever the AirPod OS would be,

00:39:08 ◼   ► that's what it's updating like on the device you say rather than what the iPhone's connected

00:39:13 ◼   ► to so I'm really excited about pause and skip that's that's what I'm pleased about that

00:39:19 ◼   ► they're doing that's how I'm going to set them up although I maintained I still really

00:39:24 ◼   ► hate the feeling of tapping the AirPods in my ears I don't I don't like it.

00:39:28 ◼   ► I've gotten I've gotten used to it I avoid it whenever possible my favorite ways to control

00:39:34 ◼   ► the AirPods are to take one out of my ear

00:39:37 ◼   ► or to use my Apple Watch.

00:39:38 ◼   ► - I use my Apple Watch, that's how I do it.

00:39:40 ◼   ► - But I do sometimes do the double tap thing.

00:39:45 ◼   ► And I'm actually very excited about this

00:39:49 ◼   ► because this is what I asked for.

00:39:53 ◼   ► And it seemed like an obvious way

00:39:54 ◼   ► that if it was capable of doing it,

00:39:56 ◼   ► that they could do it with the AirPods

00:39:58 ◼   ► to have different gestures with left and right

00:40:01 ◼   ► and having the skipping be programmable too.

00:40:05 ◼   ► That's pretty awesome.

00:40:06 ◼   ► So that's kind of it.

00:40:07 ◼   ► I think they're reluctant to do like triple tap for this

00:40:11 ◼   ► and quadruple tap for that.

00:40:12 ◼   ► They don't wanna do that, but that's fine.

00:40:13 ◼   ► And I'm okay with that.

00:40:15 ◼   ► I think just letting you program left and right

00:40:18 ◼   ► for that double tap to be what you want it to be,

00:40:22 ◼   ► great news.

00:40:22 ◼   ► - And you went ears on with the HomePod.

00:40:28 ◼   ► - I did.

00:40:29 ◼   ► I listened to a HomePod.

00:40:31 ◼   ► you listened to a home pod. So you were given the ability somewhere in WWDC to listen to

00:40:38 ◼   ► a home pod compared to an Echo and a Sonos Play 3, right?

00:40:43 ◼   ► - Yep, that's exactly it. So I got to, yes, I was wandering lonely as a cloud when I happened

00:40:50 ◼   ► upon a Sylvan Glade, there were unicorns and rainbows and also a HomePod.

00:41:03 ◼   ► I want to know how, in your opinion, the HomePod stacked up against these other devices. Did

00:41:09 ◼   ► you have any chance to experience the room-filling sound that Apple was talking about?

00:41:15 ◼   ► I did. I experienced room-filling sound. So yeah, it's a... Look, it's unfair. I guess

00:41:25 ◼   ► you know people don't know, but it's totally unfair to put this thing next to an Amazon

00:41:28 ◼   ► Echo because the Amazon Echo doesn't sound very good.

00:41:31 ◼   ► And it was never built for music really. I mean it plays music, but it's not built for

00:41:34 ◼   ► that.

00:41:35 ◼   ► It plays music fine and my family uses it to play music all the time because it's so

00:41:40 ◼   ► easy to just call up a song and have it play it that they use it all the time. And we have

00:41:45 ◼   ► so many better speakers in the house but they use the Echo. The Echo is also a lot cheaper

00:41:50 ◼   ► than the HomePod, but the Sonos Play 3 is a good example. That is a product that is

00:41:55 ◼   ► about the cost of a HomePod and generally does not sound as good as the HomePod, I would

00:42:03 ◼   ► say, having heard them both in the same space, although again, the Sonos Play 3, I don't

00:42:08 ◼   ► know whether it was tuned properly or anything like that. I'm pretty sure the HomePod doesn't

00:42:12 ◼   ► sound as good as the Sonos Play 5, but the Play 5 is way more expensive than the HomePod.

00:42:15 ◼   ► pod, I believe. So, and the other thing I noticed about the Play 3 is that the Play

00:42:21 ◼   ► 3 is a, you know, it's a speaker box, right? So even though it's stereo and the HomePod

00:42:29 ◼   ► is not, technically it's a, it's got lots of speakers, but it's really just doing a

00:42:33 ◼   ► sort of single sound field. It's doing its own processing to shoot different parts to

00:42:38 ◼   ► different directions. But the Sonos Play 3, my point is, when you're sitting in front

00:42:44 ◼   ► of it, it sounds really great, and then you walk to the side of it and it sounds like

00:42:49 ◼   ► the noise is being pointed somewhere else, because it is, it's being pointed right in

00:42:53 ◼   ► front of it. And the HomePod doesn't sound like that. The HomePod is engineered to fill

00:42:57 ◼   ► the room in the sense that it doesn't feel like you're out of the sweet spot, it's trying

00:43:01 ◼   ► to make the entire room the sweet spot. And it sounds pretty good, the bass is good, the

00:43:06 ◼   ► treble separation is good, they're doing a lot of processing, like I said, they are trying

00:43:10 ◼   ► to fire different parts of the music off in different speakers in order to give you this

00:43:18 ◼   ► distinct sound and room-filling sound. And I think my question on the music side is,

00:43:24 ◼   ► what's Apple doing to process this stuff? And how's it going to sound in its final iteration?

00:43:29 ◼   ► Will there be settings? Will it intelligently detect what kind of music it is and alter

00:43:33 ◼   ► how it does it? Can you turn that sort of processing off? Because I know that there

00:43:37 ◼   ► going to be some music lovers who will, most people won't care, but there will be some

00:43:41 ◼   ► music lovers who will be freaked out by what it does to the music in terms of basically

00:43:47 ◼   ► remixing it on the fly in order to get what Apple's setting says is the best sound. I

00:43:54 ◼   ► do think it would be great if it was really intelligent and we don't have any details

00:43:58 ◼   ► of this now and said, "Oh, this is classical. I'm going to do something different. And this

00:44:02 ◼   ► is pop. I'm going to do something different." But we don't know whether it's got presets

00:44:06 ◼   ► or something that's dynamic that's just like so much of the HomePod, it's kind of a mystery.

00:44:12 ◼   ► All of it sounded pretty good except the one example I keep giving that I thought was an

00:44:17 ◼   ► interesting example of how the HomePod is manipulating the sound is Stevie Wonder's

00:44:25 ◼   ► Superstition which when I was standing right in front of the Sonos Play 3 and standing

00:44:29 ◼   ► in front of the HomePod, I felt like the Play 3 actually did a better job of representing

00:44:33 ◼   ► it than the HomePod because the HomePod sort of split it out and made it kind of more airy

00:44:39 ◼   ► almost like it's got different sounds kind of coming from different places because that's

00:44:43 ◼   ► what the HomePod does and that song it struck me like it didn't sound right that the kind

00:44:49 ◼   ► of crunchy compressed 70s Stevie Wonder sounded better crunchy and compressed rather than

00:44:57 ◼   ► kind of decompressed and flung out to various portions of the room via the HomePod. But

00:45:05 ◼   ► they got six months to work on the software that processes the audio. But again, Apple

00:45:11 ◼   ► owns Beats. Beats has an opinion about what makes music sound good, and people who are

00:45:20 ◼   ► like real audio aficionados can often hate that because they don't think that it's a

00:45:26 ◼   ► true like representative sound and that's just an argument that's going to happen. So

00:45:29 ◼   ► maybe the HomePod will be like that in that they're going to process that sound to something

00:45:34 ◼   ► that they think is a crowd pleaser and fair enough they probably should do that if most

00:45:39 ◼   ► people will enjoy it that way. I think the question is you know will it do that to what

00:45:43 ◼   ► degree does it do that and most of the songs I heard sounded fantastic on the HomePod.

00:45:49 ◼   ► It was just the Stevie Wonder song that I thought, although it sounded good, it didn't

00:45:52 ◼   ► sound right. And that was interesting to me to have that experience. And then there was

00:45:58 ◼   ► also in the glade over by one of the unicorns, there was a second home pod. And I did get

00:46:06 ◼   ► to hear one song in stereo pair mode where you can take two home pods and have one basically

00:46:11 ◼   ► handling left and one handling right. And that does fill the room with even more kind

00:46:16 ◼   ► of impressively directional sound where I felt like I was in a more like a surround

00:46:22 ◼   ► sound space where I could get a lot of stereo detail. Whereas my understanding is that the

00:46:28 ◼   ► HomePod doesn't actually try to do directional stereo kind of detail when it's just operating

00:46:35 ◼   ► by itself. It's basically treating it as a mono signal and then doing its own secret

00:46:38 ◼   ► sauce which seems a little weird to me but since I've got seven speakers that they couldn't

00:46:43 ◼   ► like process the stereo signal and try to give it a little bit of directionality, but

00:46:49 ◼   ► it seems not to.

00:46:50 ◼   ► What did you think of how the HomePod looked?

00:46:52 ◼   ► I don't know, I think it looks weird, but that would get used to it.

00:46:55 ◼   ► I guess they all kind of look weird, don't they?

00:46:58 ◼   ► The Amazon Echo looks weird too.

00:47:00 ◼   ► It's like, what's inside that canister that's sitting on your kitchen table?

00:47:04 ◼   ► It's this kind of computery pod with the perforations around it, and this one's got this kind of

00:47:09 ◼   ► fabric-y looking thing on it.

00:47:12 ◼   ► And I don't know, it is a pod that sits in your home.

00:47:17 ◼   ► I mean, it's not wrong, that's what it is.

00:47:21 ◼   ► And I think, yeah, I think, like the name,

00:47:25 ◼   ► I think people will get used to it.

00:47:26 ◼   ► It's a new sort of thing.

00:47:27 ◼   ► I think Apple's trying to make it not super obtrusive

00:47:30 ◼   ► and they make claims that that's all sort of sound

00:47:34 ◼   ► conducting goodness, 3D fabric, whatever, I don't know.

00:47:39 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm intrigued by it,

00:47:42 ◼   ► but I will also point out that it's priced

00:47:45 ◼   ► as a premium speaker, it's 349.

00:47:47 ◼   ► So it is not priced as an affordable digital assistant box

00:47:52 ◼   ► that will play sound, but not very well.

00:47:56 ◼   ► Like Apple seems, at least with this first product,

00:47:58 ◼   ► Apple did not choose to compete directly against the Echo.

00:48:01 ◼   ► Like they are creating a Sonos caliber speaker

00:48:06 ◼   ► with Siri embedded in it.

00:48:08 ◼   ► And that's a different market than the Google Home

00:48:10 ◼   ► and the Amazon Echo.

00:48:12 ◼   ► So that's important to keep in mind.

00:48:13 ◼   ► Also, we have never heard it respond to a Siri command.

00:48:17 ◼   ► That is a completely, like,

00:48:19 ◼   ► other than the slides they put up at the keynote,

00:48:22 ◼   ► we have to imagine that right now.

00:48:24 ◼   ► And I suspect that's in part

00:48:26 ◼   ► because of the marketing push they wanna do,

00:48:29 ◼   ► which is to make it about music.

00:48:30 ◼   ► It's in part because the Siri stuff

00:48:32 ◼   ► is still being worked on.

00:48:33 ◼   ► I mean, there were no Siri demos

00:48:36 ◼   ► of the HomePod at WWDC that you couldn't touch it, couldn't speak to it. You could look at

00:48:43 ◼   ► it and you could, if you were lucky, and you wandered into the unicorn grove, listen to

00:48:48 ◼   ► it. But that's it.

00:48:49 ◼   ► Do you know if there is a touchscreen on the top of the HomePod? It seems like this is

00:48:55 ◼   ► something that people are in disagreement over on the internet.

00:49:01 ◼   ► So it looked like the demo units that I was seeing, it looked like there was some sort

00:49:06 ◼   ► of Siri animation thing happening on the top of it.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Keeping in mind these are canned, like it's not a real product yet, right?

00:49:14 ◼   ► So they were playing that.

00:49:16 ◼   ► I was told that you can get volume up and down buttons on there, although I didn't see

00:49:21 ◼   ► them.

00:49:22 ◼   ► So it sounds like there is a display and it does have some touch sensitivity on it, but

00:49:27 ◼   ► it's on this, on the top of this device.

00:49:31 ◼   ► So to call it a touchscreen in the way

00:49:35 ◼   ► that we think of touchscreens,

00:49:37 ◼   ► I think is probably inaccurate.

00:49:39 ◼   ► It does seem to have some sort of a display

00:49:41 ◼   ► with some sort of touch on it,

00:49:43 ◼   ► but it's not really meant to be an interface

00:49:45 ◼   ► other than for the most basic things

00:49:48 ◼   ► like changing the volume or maybe pausing

00:49:51 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:49:52 ◼   ► But I got no details about it

00:49:55 ◼   ► other than that you could touch for volume up and down

00:49:59 ◼   ► and there would be volume up and down buttons on the top.

00:50:01 ◼   ► And since there don't seem to be physical buttons,

00:50:03 ◼   ► as far as I could tell,

00:50:04 ◼   ► that suggests that there is touch sensitivity

00:50:07 ◼   ► on some part of the panel.

00:50:08 ◼   ► It's also possible that there's touch sensitivity

00:50:10 ◼   ► on certain parts of the panel

00:50:12 ◼   ► and that it's not a touch screen,

00:50:13 ◼   ► but there are a couple of touch areas

00:50:16 ◼   ► that light up when they're activated

00:50:20 ◼   ► and that it's not,

00:50:22 ◼   ► it depends on the engineering of it.

00:50:23 ◼   ► Like, it may not be that you could program any sort of button to be on there.

00:50:27 ◼   ► It may be there's a certain area where there's a button that can light up that you can touch.

00:50:32 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:50:33 ◼   ► But there's something going on up there.

00:50:34 ◼   ► If I was going to place my bat, it would be that this is not a touch screen.

00:50:38 ◼   ► Like it's not, it's not a screen that's going to have content and information displayed

00:50:43 ◼   ► on it.

00:50:44 ◼   ► I think that's what people are still kind of hoping that this is what it's going to

00:50:46 ◼   ► be.

00:50:47 ◼   ► I think it certainly won't, because it's not, it's not even something that you could literally

00:50:51 ◼   ► look at conveniently.

00:50:52 ◼   ► It's in the wrong place.

00:50:53 ◼   ► basically on the top on a flat surface it's on a horizontal plane parallel to the table

00:50:59 ◼   ► it's sitting on. It's not a place to read things. So I think it'll be like used for

00:51:05 ◼   ► feedback like color maybe like the ring. Think of the ring on an Amazon Echo like that ring

00:51:12 ◼   ► is animating and showing you color to indicate things.

00:51:15 ◼   ► Yeah that is more easily seen though because it's around the edge and not the top exactly

00:51:20 ◼   ► you know.

00:51:21 ◼   ► the way that it's structured, you can still see that,

00:51:24 ◼   ► again, if all you're looking for is like a little

00:51:26 ◼   ► color feedback, you can see that on the HomePod too,

00:51:29 ◼   ► but that's about all.

00:51:31 ◼   ► And then yeah, maybe if you touch it,

00:51:32 ◼   ► it presents you with a couple of touch buttons.

00:51:35 ◼   ► I think it may be a touch surface, maybe not multi-touch,

00:51:39 ◼   ► but like a touch surface that will give you kind of basic,

00:51:41 ◼   ► like tap here to increase the volume

00:51:44 ◼   ► when you put your hand on it,

00:51:46 ◼   ► like it'll let you physically interact a little bit with it.

00:51:48 ◼   ► but it's not, I would not call it a display.

00:51:53 ◼   ► It's more like an ambient interface kind of thing.

00:51:56 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:51:58 ◼   ► - It's my guess.

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00:55:00 ◼   ► There was a session at the end of WWDC this week about podcasting.

00:55:05 ◼   ► There was.

00:55:06 ◼   ► It was full of some expected and unexpected things that have been added to Apple podcasts.

00:55:14 ◼   ► One of them is, I want to say a welcome change, but then I think it kind of colors the rest of

00:55:24 ◼   ► my discussion in a way that I'm not expecting it to sound like, which is RSS enhancements.

00:55:31 ◼   ► So this is something that I have been expecting Apple to do for a while to find ways to enhance

00:55:36 ◼   ► the RSS spec for podcasts, which Apple kind of created in its current form, hence why

00:55:42 ◼   ► there are so many tags that say iTunes something and everything else looks for those tags.

00:55:47 ◼   ► All other podcast apps are built around these tags that Apple created for their iTunes feedback.

00:55:54 ◼   ► It's kind of how all podcast feeds are built using these tags.

00:55:58 ◼   ► Yeah, for people who don't know, it's RSS and podcasting, you know, yeah, it's a standard,

00:56:03 ◼   ► but Apple has been in it so long and they created a whole bunch of these custom tags

00:56:08 ◼   ► that are all precluded or preceded by iTunes to enhance the data that iTunes displayed

00:56:15 ◼   ► on a Mac in 2005, basically.

00:56:19 ◼   ► And if you're running your own podcast app now, you would be silly to not take advantage

00:56:25 ◼   ► of that metadata, and so everybody reads it. And so it's not standard standard, but it's

00:56:30 ◼   ► basically a standard. And it means that Apple, because it's so popular as a podcast platform

00:56:37 ◼   ► — I think podcast app on iOS is the number one by far podcast listening app in existence

00:56:42 ◼   ► on any platform. It is able to put in new tags for its use that everybody's going to

00:56:52 ◼   ► do and then everybody, every other app can pick those up because it's totally open. It's

00:56:56 ◼   ► not like Apple has secret sauce here. And so they did. They made a lot of enhancements,

00:57:02 ◼   ► some of which they already had in some other form. But I think this is a kind of a big

00:57:07 ◼   ► batch trying to see what podcasts are doing today and how the current set of tags in a

00:57:13 ◼   ► podcast feed aren't good enough. So they added a whole slew of them.

00:57:17 ◼   ► So, as a, as a owner of a company that creates its own CMS for podcasts, therefore its own

00:57:27 ◼   ► feeds, I would like to extend my thanks to Apple for not changing the names of the tags

00:57:34 ◼   ► from iTunes to Apple because in theory they should, right? Because it's not iTunes anymore,

00:57:40 ◼   ► it's Apple podcast. So I would just like to thank Apple for not doing that, right? So

00:57:46 ◼   ► I don't now have to rewrite everything. But what because what they've given are additional

00:57:51 ◼   ► pieces of functionality on top of what is existing. And these are really all focused

00:57:57 ◼   ► around seasons because there have been lots of podcasts, plus a very popular podcasts.

00:58:03 ◼   ► the clue is in the name for how some of these tags are written, uh, that are for seasons.

00:58:09 ◼   ► And I think Apple are referring to these as, uh, standard and serial. Um, and I don't think

00:58:14 ◼   ► it's like just for serial, just that these shows are serialized, hence where the name

00:58:19 ◼   ► serial came from in the first place, but it is funny.

00:58:22 ◼   ► There was already a sort order tag, which they are replacing basically with this, that

00:58:26 ◼   ► let you say, 'cause Steven Wilson from Apple told me about it at one point, um, and I used

00:58:31 ◼   ► it on Total Party Kill and Incomparable Radio Theater. And the idea that some podcasts should

00:58:37 ◼   ► be listened to from the start and not from the most recent. Like Upgrade, you should

00:58:41 ◼   ► listen to the most recent episode because we're very topical. But something like Total

00:58:45 ◼   ► Party Kill, which is a Dungeons and Dragons podcast that I do and it's storytelling and

00:58:49 ◼   ► you start at the start of the story. The latest episode will make no sense. You should start

00:58:53 ◼   ► at the beginning. So now there's a new version of that called the iTunes Type and that lets

00:58:59 ◼   ► you choose episodic or serial. And so yeah, if you want people to start at the beginning,

00:59:03 ◼   ► you say serial, this podcast is meant to be serial, and then people will, it'll be sorted

00:59:07 ◼   ► properly with the first episode at the top.

00:59:10 ◼   ► I assume there will be use UI that will allow for like collapsing and stuff like that inside

00:59:14 ◼   ► of applications.

00:59:15 ◼   ► Exactly. So, so the, the, they also didn't break like the standard title of an episode

00:59:20 ◼   ► because a lot of times I think really does this and comparable does this. Um, and a lot

00:59:24 ◼   ► of podcasts do your episode title would be like the episode number colon the name of

00:59:28 ◼   ► the show or maybe season 2 episode 2 colon the name of the episode that is

00:59:34 ◼   ► that that kind of catch-all title tag is still there but Apple has introduced a

00:59:40 ◼   ► pure title tag which just as the name of the episode an episode tag which is just

00:59:46 ◼   ► the number of the episode and a season tag which is the season number of the

00:59:53 ◼   ► that the episode lives inside now have some questions about this in terms of

00:59:57 ◼   ► how it's interpreted in the podcast app in iTunes and then how will be

01:00:03 ◼   ► interpreted by other apps that don't follow those things because I'm not

01:00:07 ◼   ► quite sure if you say that it's season 2 episode 1 and you're in a regular

01:00:11 ◼   ► podcast app does it display that is just another episode 1 and is that weird

01:00:16 ◼   ► I don't I don't know all of the all of those details but it's it's clever and

01:00:23 ◼   ► it's one of the things that it will make for a way better interface for podcast

01:00:26 ◼   ► listeners because now the apps won't have to do any funny business to try and extrapolate

01:00:31 ◼   ► episode numbers from titles or things like that. They'll just have the metadata. They'll

01:00:35 ◼   ► have a raw, clear title with no junk in it. They'll have an episode number. They'll have

01:00:40 ◼   ► a season number if available and a summary field that's a single descriptive sentence

01:00:46 ◼   ► in plain text. And that's good. That is going to make cleaner interfaces with a lot less

01:00:52 ◼   ► junk in them for everybody who listens to podcasts in the long run.

01:00:56 ◼   ► Yeah, there are also the ability to add trailers and bonus episodes too, as denoted in the

01:01:01 ◼   ► feeds. This is the one, I think, of all of them that I could see us using at Relay FM.

01:01:05 ◼   ► We don't do currently any shows that are seasonal in nature, I can think of. There might be

01:01:11 ◼   ► some shows that might want to take advantage of this, I don't know, but...

01:01:15 ◼   ► Well, your, uh, your inquisitive did a couple of seasons, right?

01:01:20 ◼   ► That was what I was thinking of, yeah.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Total Particle and the Incomparable Radio Theater and not playing three shows on the

01:01:27 ◼   ► Incomparable Network all do seasonal stuff and it would be pretty good for that. But

01:01:33 ◼   ► you're right, a lot of podcasts do trailers for a few reasons, not only to hype up a show

01:01:39 ◼   ► but to get it in iTunes because you can't publish a podcast with nothing in it. So you

01:01:45 ◼   ► have to have like either your first episode but you kind of want people to know that it's

01:01:50 ◼   ► coming so you post like a zero episode that is this podcast is coming subscribe

01:01:56 ◼   ► now and you'll get it when it starts and that's a teaser or a trailer and now

01:02:00 ◼   ► there's an episode type called trailer that you can mark that treats it

01:02:04 ◼   ► differently for if it's seasonal it'll actually say here's the trailer for the

01:02:08 ◼   ► season if it's for the whole podcast will say here's the trailer it it'll be

01:02:12 ◼   ► separate in the interface and again any podcast app can read that and and

01:02:16 ◼   ► display it in an appropriate way and then bonus like that's a great example

01:02:19 ◼   ► example of like 5x5 did After Dark, The Incomparable did Bonus Track, we occasionally have these

01:02:24 ◼   ► that relay does B-sides, we occasionally do this thing where we've got not, it's not in

01:02:30 ◼   ► the episode, but it's like additional material. And what this would allow you to do if you

01:02:36 ◼   ► chose to do it, and I was thinking to myself, I'm not sure whether I would choose this,

01:02:40 ◼   ► but if this was widely implemented, I might, which is rather than have like a separate

01:02:43 ◼   ► feed for your bonus stuff, what this does is let you put it in the in the feed and just

01:02:48 ◼   ► say, here's the episode, here's the bonus, mark it as bonus.

01:02:52 ◼   ► And then in the podcast app,

01:02:55 ◼   ► it looks like it will be like shown that way

01:02:57 ◼   ► where you'll see the episode and then you'll also see,

01:02:59 ◼   ► oh, and there's also bonus material you can listen to,

01:03:02 ◼   ► which depending on how that's done

01:03:04 ◼   ► could actually be really clever and cool.

01:03:07 ◼   ► So we'll see, but these are all things

01:03:09 ◼   ► that podcasts really do and that the podcast spec

01:03:13 ◼   ► didn't really know how to handle and it made it all messy.

01:03:15 ◼   ► So I'm very happy that Apple has stepped up here

01:03:18 ◼   ► because who, if not them, then who?

01:03:20 ◼   ► Like, I think it had to be Apple to do this.

01:03:22 ◼   ► - So I'm keen to see how all of this is implemented

01:03:26 ◼   ► across the board from just technically

01:03:30 ◼   ► and from a user interface perspective.

01:03:32 ◼   ► 'Cause there could be some things here

01:03:33 ◼   ► that we might wanna take advantage of.

01:03:35 ◼   ► Maybe, I don't know, there might have been some ideas

01:03:37 ◼   ► that we have not pursued

01:03:38 ◼   ► because it would have been tricky to do.

01:03:41 ◼   ► So I'm keen to see how a lot of this stuff shakes out.

01:03:44 ◼   ► The other story, which got like just a couple of minutes

01:03:46 ◼   ► the end of this presentation is that in December, I think they said, towards the end of the

01:03:52 ◼   ► year, Apple is going to be opening up some new analytics for podcasts. And if Apple is

01:04:00 ◼   ► going to do any analytics, this is the right way to do it. So it's all anonymized data

01:04:06 ◼   ► and using aggregate listener behavior. And this will be statistics and analytics for

01:04:11 ◼   ► what the Apple Podcasts app can work out from you listening on any of their platforms.

01:04:21 ◼   ► There are listener numbers. Now obviously these are just listeners that have just listened

01:04:25 ◼   ► inside of the Apple Podcasts app. And the big thing is that Apple is going to show podcasters

01:04:33 ◼   ► how many people are listening in Apple podcasts where they start, stop, and skip in the episodes.

01:04:43 ◼   ► So this is really interesting. So people are going to be able to find out where their listeners

01:04:53 ◼   ► are skipping ahead.

01:04:54 ◼   ► BRIAN KENNY Yeah, we've talked about this in the past

01:04:57 ◼   ► where we don't actually know generally if you play an episode. We only really know that

01:05:02 ◼   ► downloaded it. That's it. Like, that's that's it.

01:05:05 ◼   ► >> Well saw it stream in it. >> Yeah, exactly. So to have the actual play

01:05:12 ◼   ► number is huge, and then we're going to be able to know how long do people listen, and

01:05:18 ◼   ► where do they skip, and and how many of those things. And that's I think that's really valuable

01:05:23 ◼   ► because we're gonna just being on the positive side here, like, I think I think knowing when

01:05:32 ◼   ► people tune out on a long podcast is really useful.

01:05:36 ◼   ► And if you do ads, knowing that you should probably

01:05:39 ◼   ► put your ads when people are listening

01:05:41 ◼   ► and not when they've tuned out.

01:05:42 ◼   ► 'Cause I've been on long podcasts

01:05:44 ◼   ► where the ads are in the first hour.

01:05:46 ◼   ► And I've been on long podcasts where the ads

01:05:48 ◼   ► are spread across two and a half hours.

01:05:51 ◼   ► And if I were the advertiser,

01:05:52 ◼   ► I'd probably prefer to be in the first hour

01:05:54 ◼   ► and not in, you know, at two hours and 10 minutes, right?

01:05:57 ◼   ► And so we'll have numbers that'll say,

01:05:59 ◼   ► "Oh, geez, yeah, we should not,

01:06:02 ◼   ► all the ads should be earlier on."

01:06:04 ◼   ► And it does mean that if those advertisers

01:06:05 ◼   ► get those numbers, they're gonna be able to say,

01:06:07 ◼   ► "I don't wanna be in the last half hour,

01:06:09 ◼   ► I wanna be in the first hour."

01:06:10 ◼   ► And that's fair.

01:06:12 ◼   ► It also lets us as podcasters know,

01:06:14 ◼   ► "Oh, you know what?

01:06:15 ◼   ► Doing those two hour shows, nobody likes it.

01:06:17 ◼   ► They never get to the end.

01:06:18 ◼   ► They run out of, their patience ends

01:06:20 ◼   ► after an hour and 15 minutes.

01:06:21 ◼   ► Maybe we should shoot for that."

01:06:23 ◼   ► And I think that's really valuable too.

01:06:24 ◼   ► And we don't know that.

01:06:26 ◼   ► And then, yeah, we're gonna find out

01:06:27 ◼   ► what percentage of people skip podcast ads.

01:06:31 ◼   ► And you could argue that that will be bad

01:06:34 ◼   ► because the advertisers will get mad

01:06:36 ◼   ► because they'll know that.

01:06:37 ◼   ► But I don't know, in most,

01:06:39 ◼   ► there's a lot of complexity here, right, Myke?

01:06:41 ◼   ► Because like, if you're a brand advertiser,

01:06:44 ◼   ► who's like Coke, it's great.

01:06:45 ◼   ► Ford, you should buy a Ford truck.

01:06:47 ◼   ► It's different than if you're a direct response advertiser

01:06:49 ◼   ► who's paying for people to put in a code

01:06:54 ◼   ► or visit a URL where they know it came

01:06:57 ◼   ► from a particular podcast. It's a different kind of business and I'm not sure one of those

01:07:01 ◼   ► is as affected by it as the other is.

01:07:04 ◼   ► My take on this is that the reason that this is happening is because the New York-based

01:07:12 ◼   ► media of the world want to get companies like Coke to advertise on their shows, but can't

01:07:23 ◼   ► because Coke want to know exactly how many people are listening to their ad, which is

01:07:30 ◼   ► something we can't provide.

01:07:32 ◼   ► So these companies have been asking Apple to do this for a while and I'm happy that

01:07:37 ◼   ► what it seems that Apple is doing or at least beginning with is basic and it's anonymized

01:07:41 ◼   ► because the whole of the thing that we were talking about before is how it could get really

01:07:45 ◼   ► bad. So I'm pleased that they're going down this route, at least if this is just the beginning,

01:07:51 ◼   ► at least showing good intentions with how they want to track it all. So the thing is,

01:07:57 ◼   ► how it's going to affect the medium as a whole is unknown. But if I was going to put money

01:08:04 ◼   ► on it, I don't think it's going to have a big effect. I think a lot of people are thinking

01:08:08 ◼   ► now, ah, well this means there's going to be no more advertising because no one listens

01:08:14 ◼   ► to the ads? Well I can tell you that people do. Because in case you hadn't noticed, basically

01:08:23 ◼   ► all of our advertisement ends in one of two things. Go to this URL, use this code. And

01:08:30 ◼   ► it is the redemption of visits of these two things combined with whatever the advertiser

01:08:36 ◼   ► wants to track plus any other measurements that they have for their own analytics and

01:08:42 ◼   ► their own performance, right? So like all they'll see is visits or redemptions. Now

01:08:46 ◼   ► they have their own internal metrics as to whether that's good for them or not,

01:08:50 ◼   ► right? They'll know what they're trying to meet target wise. The fact that these

01:08:54 ◼   ► are still happening and those advertisers keep coming back shows you

01:08:59 ◼   ► that this is working. Now I will tell you, Squarespace, they're still tracking all

01:09:05 ◼   ► this stuff, right? They are an advertiser that you might think by this point has maybe

01:09:12 ◼   ► got enough but I can tell you that they still track it. They track those

01:09:17 ◼   ► redemptions like every other advertiser that I know that uses this stuff and we

01:09:21 ◼   ► have some advertisers that all they're doing is just trying to get their name

01:09:24 ◼   ► out to the world and they may be the ones that become the most interested in

01:09:27 ◼   ► how many people are actually listening. That's what I was going to say is I

01:09:31 ◼   ► actually think this is going to be really great for brand advertising and

01:09:33 ◼   ► Squarespace I think is an interesting example where because of the nature of

01:09:36 ◼   ► the medium Squarespace has been doing direct response in their advertising and

01:09:40 ◼   ► and measuring it because how else do you measure podcast advertising effectiveness?

01:09:45 ◼   ► It's either that or how many jokes are made about Squarespace because everybody hears their ads on

01:09:50 ◼   ► podcasts. But like how do you do it? Direct response is the only way, which is funny because what I

01:09:54 ◼   ► would argue Squarespace has been doing all along is running a branding campaign. Ultimately what

01:09:58 ◼   ► they want is not, they don't expect you're necessarily going to start a website now,

01:10:02 ◼   ► but they are expecting that when you think of starting a website, you'll think, "Oh,

01:10:06 ◼   ► I could do that on Squarespace and then sign up maybe with a code or maybe just on your own.

01:10:11 ◼   ► But if you're Coke, if you're Ford, if you're somebody like that, that's a pure brand advertiser,

01:10:15 ◼   ► like they can't, they could say visit ford.com/podcast123, right? But they don't want to do

01:10:23 ◼   ► that. So for them, they're going to be able to go to a, and it's not going to be us, right? It's going

01:10:28 ◼   ► to be a giant ad sales network like Midroll maybe and say, we want to buy these podcasts and get

01:10:36 ◼   ► feedback back of like how many listens we got and maybe they will be able to do that.

01:10:42 ◼   ► What I expect what will happen is they will go, it will basically be the way that newspaper

01:10:49 ◼   ► advertising and TV advertising and billboards work.

01:10:53 ◼   ► Where what will most likely happen is they will go to an ad buying agency, either someone

01:10:58 ◼   ► like a mid-roll or someone like a just a traditional media buyer, like CBS or someone like that

01:11:07 ◼   ► who put things into billboards and stuff like that. And they will say we want to reach 10

01:11:13 ◼   ► million podcast listeners. And these are the types of shows we want and these are the types

01:11:20 ◼   ► of shows we don't want. We want comedy, we don't want technology. And then a company

01:11:25 ◼   ► like the Mid-Royal will go, "Okay, we will get you those listens," and then they will

01:11:29 ◼   ► just spread it all out, right? And I think that some of the direct response stuff I believe

01:11:34 ◼   ► is actually done this way. So some of the companies that are doing this, the current

01:11:40 ◼   ► advertising that you're hearing, they go to an agency and say, "We want this on these

01:11:44 ◼   ► types of shows," and then those agencies will pitch to them, "These are the shows

01:11:48 ◼   ► that we think will fit for you." So there's a bit of that done right now.

01:11:52 ◼   ► That's what happens with the ads on the incomparable. Those are all part of bulk buys,

01:11:57 ◼   ► mineral cells.

01:11:59 ◼   ► So for me, I'm not worried about this more than I am any other change and honestly I'm

01:12:05 ◼   ► worried about this less just because over the time that we've been running this company,

01:12:12 ◼   ► lots of things have changed and there have been lots of things I've been worried about

01:12:15 ◼   ► but nothing has affected it in the grand scheme of things.

01:12:19 ◼   ► So really, I'm assuming there is a percentage

01:12:23 ◼   ► of our audience that are skipping, but it's still fine.

01:12:27 ◼   ► Right, like the advertising that we're doing,

01:12:30 ◼   ► which I am managing still, and have been mostly

01:12:35 ◼   ► since the beginning of the company.

01:12:37 ◼   ► I know the relationships are good,

01:12:38 ◼   ► I know that the redemptions are good,

01:12:40 ◼   ► so I'm comfortable with it.

01:12:41 ◼   ► I don't think it's gonna change.

01:12:43 ◼   ► Maybe people will want numbers differently

01:12:45 ◼   ► and there will be some stuff that we'll be able

01:12:47 ◼   ► to give people and some stuff that we want.

01:12:48 ◼   ► And that could change some prices,

01:12:50 ◼   ► but honestly I don't think it's gonna be a lot, if anything.

01:12:54 ◼   ► But what it might do is open us up to some companies

01:12:56 ◼   ► that wouldn't have taken us before.

01:12:58 ◼   ► So I think that could be really interesting.

01:13:00 ◼   ► We could get companies like Ford.

01:13:03 ◼   ► It has been a long-term dream of mine to get a car company.

01:13:06 ◼   ► I don't know why, it's just something I thought

01:13:07 ◼   ► would be kind of funny ever since I've watched like Mad Men.

01:13:10 ◼   ► Because for advertising agencies, they all want a car,

01:13:13 ◼   ► So I'm like, well, I work on a car advertise, you know?

01:13:15 ◼   ► So that could happen now because it's a different type

01:13:18 ◼   ► of reporting that we're able to give,

01:13:20 ◼   ► where we can give more numbers than the company themselves

01:13:24 ◼   ► can work out, right, 'cause there's no code redemptions

01:13:26 ◼   ► and stuff, but the problem that we're gonna have

01:13:30 ◼   ► is that Apple podcasts are in the inverse,

01:13:34 ◼   ► percentage-wise, I believe, to most of the shows

01:13:38 ◼   ► that you may know of in the bigger space.

01:13:41 ◼   ► So like, I will say like for this show,

01:13:45 ◼   ► I expect that Apple Podcasts app

01:13:48 ◼   ► is less than 30% of our downloads.

01:13:50 ◼   ► Because it's difficult to tell,

01:13:53 ◼   ► because currently anything listened to

01:13:55 ◼   ► on any Apple platform is reported as one thing,

01:13:59 ◼   ► which is like this core media thing that Apple have.

01:14:03 ◼   ► So like it could be people listening in Safari,

01:14:05 ◼   ► it could be people listening in iTunes, like whatever.

01:14:09 ◼   ► but it's probably around a third.

01:14:11 ◼   ► Now that means that our numbers will be very different

01:14:15 ◼   ► to some other companies.

01:14:16 ◼   ► So we will have to extrapolate.

01:14:18 ◼   ► And also they may not be proportional

01:14:21 ◼   ► to our entire audience, either negatively or positively.

01:14:25 ◼   ► So unless other applications start doing this,

01:14:29 ◼   ► which some may, some may not,

01:14:30 ◼   ► I know lots of people that make them

01:14:32 ◼   ► and I haven't asked anyone.

01:14:34 ◼   ► Honestly, I've not spoken to anyone about this.

01:14:36 ◼   ► I haven't spoken to Russell about this.

01:14:37 ◼   ► I haven't spoken to the Cashflow team about this.

01:14:39 ◼   ► I haven't spoken to Marco about this.

01:14:40 ◼   ► Like I know these people

01:14:41 ◼   ► and I'm not talking to them about it yet because whatever,

01:14:44 ◼   ► maybe we will at some point.

01:14:46 ◼   ► But I think that everyone will be waiting to see

01:14:49 ◼   ► how this goes with Apple

01:14:50 ◼   ► before considering to do it themselves.

01:14:52 ◼   ► This is something that any podcast app can do by the way.

01:14:56 ◼   ► - So I don't, my gut feeling is that nobody else

01:14:58 ◼   ► is going to feel the need to do it

01:15:01 ◼   ► or really any reason to do it.

01:15:03 ◼   ► For the reason that you just described,

01:15:05 ◼   ► which is, I think, Apple's--

01:15:08 ◼   ► although for certain markets like ours,

01:15:11 ◼   ► Apple's stats may not be a great proxy,

01:15:16 ◼   ► because it may be that if it's only 30% of relay listeners,

01:15:20 ◼   ► I just looked, it only seems to be about 25%

01:15:27 ◼   ► of incomparable listeners.

01:15:29 ◼   ► I would say that that relay--

01:15:30 ◼   ► I meant upgrade, by the way.

01:15:32 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, OK.

01:15:33 ◼   ► It's different across the entire network.

01:15:34 ◼   ► different on every show, right? But for these tech-skewed ones, like half of the Incomparable's

01:15:39 ◼   ► listeners are on Overcast, right? I mean, that's not normal in the industry, but it's

01:15:45 ◼   ► sort of fitting for where we are. So the argument would be, well, the people who tend to listen

01:15:51 ◼   ► in Overcast are a different kind of person with different behavior than the person who

01:15:56 ◼   ► listens in the Apple podcast app, and therefore the Apple stats are not applicable necessarily

01:16:01 ◼   ► as applicable as to the, you know, something like cereal where it's probably a much larger

01:16:05 ◼   ► percentage. But I think the argument would be that the Apple stuff is going to be the

01:16:10 ◼   ► best proxy for the market as a whole, for the larger market, and that the smaller markets

01:16:15 ◼   ► aren't going to be worth the podcast ad, podcast advertisers, or I mean podcast app developers

01:16:22 ◼   ► adding in stats because they're going to be such small numbers that they're not going

01:16:25 ◼   ► to really be particularly applicable either. And one of the ways you differentiate yourself

01:16:30 ◼   ► from Apple is by saying we don't track you.

01:16:33 ◼   ► Which is probably what Overcast will do, is my guess.

01:16:36 ◼   ► It's just like, that's great.

01:16:38 ◼   ► We won't track you.

01:16:40 ◼   ► So if you don't like Apple tracking every pause and play

01:16:42 ◼   ► and ad skip in your podcast app,

01:16:45 ◼   ► 'cause that's gonna happen now,

01:16:46 ◼   ► then use a third party instead.

01:16:48 ◼   ► - They are doing that, right?

01:16:50 ◼   ► Like I say it's anonymized,

01:16:52 ◼   ► but they are anonymizing the data

01:16:54 ◼   ► that they're providing to people.

01:16:56 ◼   ► They are tracking in some way.

01:16:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, just like many apps do,

01:16:59 ◼   ► But yeah.

01:17:00 ◼   ► What they're probably doing here is, I say any app can do this, what they're probably

01:17:06 ◼   ► doing is just tracking the play pause for their syncing between devices, which any app

01:17:12 ◼   ► can do.

01:17:13 ◼   ► But they are choosing to actually take that data and do something with it, as opposed

01:17:19 ◼   ► to it just being a syncing system.

01:17:21 ◼   ► That's what I assume is going on, right?

01:17:23 ◼   ► But they're taking that information and making that data available, even though it's anonymized.

01:17:28 ◼   ► So there is an element of them keeping data about you, which I don't believe any other

01:17:36 ◼   ► application is doing, past the point where it would just override it for wherever you

01:17:40 ◼   ► are in that show.

01:17:42 ◼   ► If I'm making sense here, my assumption would be that for other applications, they're just

01:17:46 ◼   ► like wherever you are in that current episode, that's kind of the information that's been

01:17:50 ◼   ► synced to the cloud.

01:17:51 ◼   ► But Apple is now storing that information because they are like, you skip to here, okay,

01:17:56 ◼   ► we'll store that, store that.

01:17:57 ◼   ► storing each of these data points that they're keeping, which I don't believe other applications

01:18:02 ◼   ► are doing, right? They would probably just override the information for their syncing

01:18:06 ◼   ► system.

01:18:07 ◼   ► I wouldn't surprise—I mean, like, my guess is that all of the company-owned apps are

01:18:16 ◼   ► tracking—like Stitcher. I would imagine Stitcher is—since Midroll bought Stitcher,

01:18:20 ◼   ► I'd imagine Stitcher is tracking everything, and Midroll is probably using that as a proxy

01:18:25 ◼   ► to get some ideas about user behavior. And that this will be a much better proxy because

01:18:32 ◼   ► it's a huge sample size. Although, something else we should talk about, how Apple's going

01:18:36 ◼   ► to make this available. It sounds like it's going to be available to the owner of the

01:18:39 ◼   ► podcast in iTunes.

01:18:40 ◼   ► David: Yeah, in Podcast Connect.

01:18:42 ◼   ► Tim: Yeah, so the logistics issue is going to be like, if you're the owner, you have

01:18:48 ◼   ► to get it out of there. If you're somebody who has an ad network you're working with,

01:18:52 ◼   ► going to have to like export the data and provide it to them. There's going to be some

01:18:56 ◼   ► challenges with how that is structured. That'll have to come up. I realize this is inside

01:19:00 ◼   ► baseball, but it's like, you know, it, this is the start of a process that may lead to

01:19:03 ◼   ► way better data and may change the way that this all works, but it is just a step along

01:19:08 ◼   ► the way and there's way more that has to happen and it won't be a catch all. But I do think

01:19:12 ◼   ► that in the end for most people, this will be a proxy for all podcast behavior because

01:19:20 ◼   ► because Apple owns so much of this market.

01:19:23 ◼   ► I'm interested to see how it will affect shows like ours.

01:19:27 ◼   ► I expect honestly not massively because the companies that we're working with

01:19:31 ◼   ► we've been working with already

01:19:33 ◼   ► so they know how it works and how it doesn't and we may provide this

01:19:36 ◼   ► information

01:19:37 ◼   ► we may not. I mean

01:19:40 ◼   ► I haven't decided how we're gonna work with this yet honestly like we're gonna

01:19:44 ◼   ► have this information

01:19:45 ◼   ► we don't have to give anybody anything like I'll tell you now like I don't even

01:19:49 ◼   ► I give total download numbers to sponsors when they ask it, but I give no proof of it

01:19:54 ◼   ► other than what I'm telling them.

01:19:57 ◼   ► They don't get screenshots from me or anything like that.

01:19:59 ◼   ► I give the information and there is an expectation that the honesty is maintained.

01:20:04 ◼   ► And it is.

01:20:05 ◼   ► I give people the numbers that they need, but that's all anybody gets right now.

01:20:09 ◼   ► There's no other information provided.

01:20:11 ◼   ► So I'm interested to see how that goes as well.

01:20:14 ◼   ► Like will we just provide this information?

01:20:16 ◼   ► Will people want proof of this information?

01:20:17 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:20:18 ◼   ► That's why I don't know how we will deal with it yet.

01:20:21 ◼   ► Because as well, I don't even know

01:20:22 ◼   ► if I'm ever gonna be asked for it.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Because if we continue working with companies

01:20:26 ◼   ► in the same way that we have now,

01:20:27 ◼   ► then it doesn't make a difference.

01:20:28 ◼   ► And I do believe, honestly, that if the industry,

01:20:32 ◼   ► outside of the industry remains as it is right now,

01:20:35 ◼   ► companies getting their own data

01:20:37 ◼   ► is way better than the data that I give them.

01:20:40 ◼   ► Like a company knowing how many code redemptions they've had

01:20:43 ◼   ► is better, and honestly as well,

01:20:45 ◼   ► Ads with discount codes work better than ads without,

01:20:49 ◼   ► because people are getting something.

01:20:52 ◼   ► So I'm keen to see how it all unfolds,

01:20:55 ◼   ► and I guess there's gonna be a lot more as the year goes on,

01:20:58 ◼   ► and then more to say once it actually happens.

01:21:00 ◼   ► But I will tell you honestly,

01:21:02 ◼   ► I am not worried about this at all.

01:21:04 ◼   ► Uncertainty is concerning,

01:21:07 ◼   ► but I honestly don't believe

01:21:09 ◼   ► there's gonna be any major changes,

01:21:10 ◼   ► because I also don't think it's a large percentage

01:21:13 ◼   ► of our audience that do skip.

01:21:14 ◼   ► I don't because otherwise my business

01:21:16 ◼   ► would have failed before now.

01:21:18 ◼   ► Right, if there were not enough people

01:21:21 ◼   ► to justify the ad spend buying the products,

01:21:23 ◼   ► our business would have folded a long time ago.

01:21:26 ◼   ► And I don't think that this is the case, right?

01:21:29 ◼   ► I just don't, I think that we're fine.

01:21:33 ◼   ► I think that the, well I know the advertisers are happy.

01:21:36 ◼   ► So any extra data will be nice,

01:21:38 ◼   ► but I don't see it making massive changes to our business.

01:21:41 ◼   ► So that is your Inside Baseball for this week's episode.

01:21:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I think we will learn more about podcast behavior and that will be interesting.

01:21:48 ◼   ► There could be some stuff that we will want to change. I mean, I'll tell you right now,

01:21:53 ◼   ► I'm not going to pay episode to episode focus on this, right? Like, "Oh no, people didn't

01:22:00 ◼   ► like that ten minutes in that last episode. We can never talk about that again." Because

01:22:04 ◼   ► I don't think that's healthy and I don't think that it will be completely accurate, so I

01:22:08 ◼   ► don't want to be a slave to those numbers. But if I can look at a specific show and be

01:22:12 ◼   ► like every single episode nobody listens to specific 15 minutes and maybe we'll want to

01:22:18 ◼   ► change it but honestly I feel like that's the sort of information if it was like widespread

01:22:24 ◼   ► that we would have heard by now.

01:22:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:22:27 ◼   ► That people would have told us "oh I hate Ask Upgrade don't ever do that again."

01:22:30 ◼   ► I think we would have and no one's ever said that so.

01:22:32 ◼   ► Right but I still feel like if you're doing a podcast that's regularly two hours long

01:22:38 ◼   ► and you get feedback that the last half hour you have like 15% of the people listening.

01:22:43 ◼   ► Maybe your podcast is too long.

01:22:44 ◼   ► That's what I mean. That's what I'm saying. Like, if there is data that is clear for every

01:22:48 ◼   ► single episode, then maybe we would want to change something. But what I'm saying is that

01:22:52 ◼   ► I don't want to check every episode and like look specifically when did people tune out.

01:22:56 ◼   ► Oh God, what did we say? Oh, they hated when we talked about, you know, yeah.

01:22:59 ◼   ► I don't think it's healthy because you don't get any context around it, right? And there

01:23:03 ◼   ► could be some just wide-scale thing that happened which meant nobody listened, right? But it

01:23:08 ◼   ► doesn't… yeah, so I just think that I personally find it unhealthy to track statistics that

01:23:15 ◼   ► closely and so I won't be, but I will use it the way that I use any numbers in that

01:23:19 ◼   ► I will look at them every now and then and then maybe make some changes.

01:23:24 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, that's… I think we talked about this when we talked about ads the last

01:23:28 ◼   ► time that I never, I try very hard not to look at web stats and it's for the same reason

01:23:33 ◼   ► is that it gets in your head and you start to chase the statistics and the statistics

01:23:37 ◼   ► are not what that chasing statistics does not make for good material. That's you can't

01:23:42 ◼   ► have that be the thing that's in your head. So for that, yeah, I don't want to, I'm not

01:23:47 ◼   ► going to, I'm not going to care, but a very broad aggregate that could be really useful

01:23:51 ◼   ► and let's, what we're talking about here in the end is that the thing we do for a living

01:23:56 ◼   ► has provided almost no information about how people actually use it, so we all just have

01:24:01 ◼   ► to extrapolate. And this is going to give us some idea, and we'll learn some things

01:24:06 ◼   ► from it, and that's great in general. And I'm open to learning from the broad swath

01:24:13 ◼   ► of data, right? I think that'll be really interesting and could be good and could help

01:24:17 ◼   ► us make podcasts that make the audience happier, and that's great.

01:24:23 ◼   ► the

01:24:37 ◼   ► If it's not, then maybe we can have some guests on again to talk about this at some point in the future.

01:24:42 ◼   ► Maybe so.

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01:25:55 ◼   ► upgrade time. Today's first question comes from Robin. What is your take on using the

01:26:00 ◼   ► iOS public beta on a secondary device with primary accounts like iCloud? Is it too risky?

01:26:08 ◼   ► So at the stage that we're at right now, I recommend that people only use secondary devices

01:26:14 ◼   ► with the iOS public beta. Jason, would you like to tell people what happened to you a

01:26:18 ◼   ► couple of days ago?

01:26:19 ◼   ► I installed the developer beta on a 9.7 inch iPad Pro,

01:26:24 ◼   ► which is a test system that I have.

01:26:26 ◼   ► It's not the system that I use.

01:26:28 ◼   ► I use a 12.9, but I do have a 9.7.

01:26:30 ◼   ► I use it to review accessories and all that.

01:26:33 ◼   ► Not anymore, right?

01:26:34 ◼   ► Now it's a goner,

01:26:36 ◼   ► but I installed it on there as an iOS 11 test.

01:26:40 ◼   ► It was great.

01:26:41 ◼   ► And then I tried to set a desktop wallpaper

01:26:43 ◼   ► and it died and wouldn't reboot.

01:26:48 ◼   ► and I had to reset it, put it into reset mode

01:26:52 ◼   ► and attach it to a Mac running iTunes

01:26:55 ◼   ► and reset it to get it to work again.

01:26:57 ◼   ► And that was in the first like hour that I used it.

01:26:59 ◼   ► So what I'm saying is definitely don't install this

01:27:03 ◼   ► on anything but a secondary device,

01:27:05 ◼   ► not a device you care about.

01:27:06 ◼   ► And in terms of iCloud stuff,

01:27:08 ◼   ► I've never had a problem with that.

01:27:09 ◼   ► I've never had an experience where,

01:27:11 ◼   ► I think iOS knows what to keep separate

01:27:15 ◼   ► in terms of devices and I don't think it's risky.

01:27:19 ◼   ► I've never seen an issue with it.

01:27:20 ◼   ► - There was one release, I think it was iOS 7,

01:27:25 ◼   ► it was either iOS 7 or iOS 8,

01:27:26 ◼   ► where if you signed in to iCloud,

01:27:30 ◼   ► it would destroy your iCloud,

01:27:33 ◼   ► like some functions of iCloud syncing

01:27:35 ◼   ► across all of your devices, right?

01:27:37 ◼   ► They were upgrading something or changing something

01:27:40 ◼   ► and if you did it, it was like, well now,

01:27:42 ◼   ► iCloud app syncing, or whatever it's called,

01:27:45 ◼   ► won't work on any device, right?

01:27:47 ◼   ► Like it just hosed it.

01:27:48 ◼   ► They did say that that was gonna happen though

01:27:52 ◼   ► in the release notes.

01:27:53 ◼   ► So I think by now it's known.

01:27:55 ◼   ► What I will say makes a big difference now

01:27:56 ◼   ► is that there is a public beta.

01:27:58 ◼   ► Apple would not do that for public beta, right?

01:28:01 ◼   ► The Your iCloud is not going to be intended

01:28:04 ◼   ► to be reset or killed if you're using the iOS public beta.

01:28:08 ◼   ► So I would say use the public beta

01:28:11 ◼   ► if you want to put it on any device that's important to you,

01:28:15 ◼   ► but still with caution, because for example,

01:28:19 ◼   ► your battery life may become atrocious, right?

01:28:22 ◼   ► Like these are some of the things that you have to accept.

01:28:25 ◼   ► But I recommend that you put it on a secondary device

01:28:28 ◼   ► and I will say, I use my own iCloud information.

01:28:32 ◼   ► I don't have a test iCloud account.

01:28:33 ◼   ► But it has happened in the past,

01:28:35 ◼   ► so just pay attention to the release notes

01:28:37 ◼   ► and the known issues before installing.

01:28:40 ◼   ► Tim asked, is it worth buying the 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar for the better processor

01:28:46 ◼   ► if I don't care about the Touch Bar?

01:28:49 ◼   ► I will say, unless you intend to use the Touch Bar, I wouldn't get this machine. I used the

01:28:57 ◼   ► Touch Bar MacBook Pro for editing connected last week and I hated it. I found it really

01:29:04 ◼   ► distracting that the screen kept changing and in its current form which is that maybe a lot of apps

01:29:12 ◼   ► like there's still not still doesn't tend to be like a lot of really amazing functions for it

01:29:17 ◼   ► i don't know if i would enjoy using it on a daily basis like the fact that every time i switched app

01:29:21 ◼   ► the screen changed my peripheral vision was triggered and i would look down no i don't know

01:29:28 ◼   ► if this if people that use this every day all day still suffer with this issue but i think for me

01:29:34 ◼   ► personally it's not great. Also I would put my hands down on the keyboard and I

01:29:39 ◼   ► would accidentally trigger expose and stuff like that. I found it I found it

01:29:45 ◼   ► frustrating. If it was me I would go for the non Touch Bar MacBook Pro right now.

01:29:50 ◼   ► You've had you've had more time with a MacBook Pro. Does the distraction stop?

01:29:55 ◼   ► I I couldn't say I have I wouldn't say that I've spent enough time deep down in

01:30:00 ◼   ► on a Touch Bar MacBook Pro to make a decision about that.

01:30:04 ◼   ► Did you find it distracting like I did though?

01:30:06 ◼   ► I didn't find it distracting, no.

01:30:08 ◼   ► Okay, so maybe this is just a personal preference thing, so try and use it in a store maybe

01:30:11 ◼   ► first.

01:30:12 ◼   ► No, I think if you don't, well, because the premise of this question is the processor,

01:30:18 ◼   ► even if you don't care about the Touch Bar, and my answer to that is no, don't get the

01:30:22 ◼   ► Touch Bar if all you care about is the processor, because you can get the MacBook Escape, the

01:30:26 ◼   ► 13-inch without Touch Bar, and you can add $300 to it, which is bill to order, it brings

01:30:30 ◼   ► it up to $1799 which is the cost of the base Touch Bar configuration and that is

01:30:35 ◼   ► a I know the gigahertz looks lower than on the base of the of the Touch Bar

01:30:40 ◼   ► because it's a 2.5 but it's a 2.5 gigahertz i7 that turbo boosts up to 4

01:30:46 ◼   ► gigahertz that is probably going to be a faster processor than the processor in

01:30:50 ◼   ► the Touch Bar the base Touch Bar so unless you unless you're planning on

01:30:55 ◼   ► buying a Touch Bar you don't want and having it be a high-end one with a

01:30:58 ◼   ► high-end build-to-order processor. I think if you don't care about the Touch Bar

01:31:01 ◼   ► you're better off just buying the MacBook escape and maybe spending that

01:31:07 ◼   ► extra $300 on the faster on the i7 processor. But that depends on how you're

01:31:12 ◼   ► going to use it for. Just bear in mind you will lose Touch ID and you will

01:31:18 ◼   ► certainly have two Thunderbolt 3 ports so it's just something to bear in mind.

01:31:22 ◼   ► Right. If I was making that choice right now I think I would go without the

01:31:27 ◼   ► touch bar on this model personally.

01:31:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, me too.

01:31:31 ◼   ► - Chris wants to know, do you use a screen protector

01:31:34 ◼   ► on your iPad with the Apple Pencil?

01:31:35 ◼   ► I'm worried that it might scratch,

01:31:37 ◼   ► but I don't want to lose screen sensitivity.

01:31:40 ◼   ► So no, I have never,

01:31:41 ◼   ► and this is absolutely nothing to worry about.

01:31:43 ◼   ► These devices are made to work together.

01:31:46 ◼   ► The Apple Pencil does not scratch the iPad screen.

01:31:49 ◼   ► I have used an Apple Pencil on an iPad for 18 months,

01:31:53 ◼   ► and there has never been a scratch given

01:31:55 ◼   ► to the screen from the Pencil.

01:31:57 ◼   ► Like I would not worry about this at all.

01:31:59 ◼   ► Would you agree? - Yeah, agreed.

01:32:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like if it scratched that screen,

01:32:04 ◼   ► Apple would be the worst company ever, right?

01:32:06 ◼   ► Like that would be such a bad decision,

01:32:09 ◼   ► like just to not bother testing it well enough

01:32:11 ◼   ► that you wouldn't know that.

01:32:13 ◼   ► It does not scratch it.

01:32:14 ◼   ► You don't need to worry about it.

01:32:16 ◼   ► Paul asked if I will upgrade to High Sierra.

01:32:19 ◼   ► Slowly, I mean, I just upgraded my iMac to Sierra

01:32:25 ◼   ► and I'm having some slight issues regarding audio which I didn't have before Sierra

01:32:30 ◼   ► and I upgraded it to Sierra because there was some software that I needed to use that had to have Sierra

01:32:34 ◼   ► I would still not be using Sierra if I didn't need that software

01:32:38 ◼   ► and this is because

01:32:40 ◼   ► for the exact reason that I'm having some weird audio bugs right now

01:32:44 ◼   ► I don't like to upgrade the machine that I record the shows on

01:32:47 ◼   ► because if it's working fine

01:32:50 ◼   ► don't jeopardise that

01:32:52 ◼   ► because I don't care about the Mac enough that I have to be on the latest and greatest.

01:32:56 ◼   ► I'm not using it for fun, right? Like, I'm using it to sit down, record and edit and publish a show,

01:33:02 ◼   ► and then I go back to my iPad again. So having just the most stable machine is all I care about.

01:33:08 ◼   ► I do security updates, but I'm not fussed about macOS feature updates now. So I'm frustrated that

01:33:15 ◼   ► Sierra has introduced some bugs that Yosemite didn't have. Wait, was I using Yosemite? What

01:33:21 ◼   ► what was I using before this, Jason?

01:33:22 ◼   ► I can never remember the names now.

01:33:24 ◼   ► - El Capitan. - El Capitan.

01:33:25 ◼   ► El Capitan had no problems for me,

01:33:28 ◼   ► and Sierra has some problems.

01:33:29 ◼   ► So, hey, this is why I don't upgrade.

01:33:33 ◼   ► - Sorry, and yet you do upgrade every week?

01:33:37 ◼   ► - I know, but I will upgrade everything else

01:33:40 ◼   ► as quickly as I can, just not this machine.

01:33:42 ◼   ► - I will almost certainly upgrade to Hi Sierra,

01:33:45 ◼   ► because I'll be using the betas over the summer,

01:33:47 ◼   ► 'cause, hi, because that's the,

01:33:50 ◼   ► I need to know about it, right?

01:33:53 ◼   ► But I did, you know, for a while with Yosemite, I think,

01:33:58 ◼   ► I had to like reboot into the previous version

01:34:02 ◼   ► in order to record podcasts

01:34:05 ◼   ► because there were horrible USB audio bugs.

01:34:07 ◼   ► And so that's the thing that remains.

01:34:09 ◼   ► A question is, can I use this for my day-to-day system

01:34:14 ◼   ► or do I have to sequester it?

01:34:15 ◼   ► And that, you know, there's no way to tell now.

01:34:18 ◼   ► Like literally I'll find that out by trying it out and discovering whether it's a disaster or not.

01:34:23 ◼   ► And there's no way to tell because it'll be some bug somewhere that might get introduced that

01:34:27 ◼   ► if it doesn't get fixed precludes me from using it.

01:34:30 ◼   ► Mickey wants to know, "Is it possible to use the iPad Pro's smart connector for docking

01:34:37 ◼   ► an iPad Pro like the Nintendo Switch?" Jason?

01:34:42 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a thing called the Logitech Base that's a hundred bucks.

01:34:48 ◼   ► Which did not get a great review from you.

01:34:51 ◼   ► I don't understand quite why you'd want it, but it is a piece of metal with a smart connector on it.

01:34:57 ◼   ► And so you put it somewhere and then you drop an iPad onto it and it's connected and that means that it's charging.

01:35:05 ◼   ► Unfortunately, you know, it doesn't really offer other things.

01:35:07 ◼   ► It's not like there's a full featured dock

01:35:10 ◼   ► that will improve your connectivity in some way.

01:35:15 ◼   ► It doesn't attach to a keyboard or anything like that.

01:35:20 ◼   ► It's literally just a sort of slow,

01:35:23 ◼   ► because it's via the smart connector,

01:35:24 ◼   ► charger for your iPad.

01:35:27 ◼   ► I don't, yeah, I don't see the point, but it does exist.

01:35:33 ◼   ► - If you need that.

01:35:33 ◼   ► And it's one angle.

01:35:38 ◼   ► So it's not like it's an adjustable angle,

01:35:40 ◼   ► it's just a piece of metal in a curve.

01:35:42 ◼   ► So it's an interesting idea.

01:35:45 ◼   ► I don't really, it does not appeal to me at all,

01:35:48 ◼   ► but, and it's not like they make,

01:35:50 ◼   ► there's nothing that is, you drop in to the smart connector

01:35:53 ◼   ► and you get video out or something like that.

01:35:55 ◼   ► I don't think a smart connector can do

01:35:57 ◼   ► the high transfer of data anyway.

01:36:00 ◼   ► There may be, somebody may have made some dock,

01:36:02 ◼   ► I don't know that uses lightning to like you pop it in somewhere and things happen but

01:36:07 ◼   ► basically no. So no.

01:36:09 ◼   ► Yeah the docking like the Nintendo Switch I think what Mykey or Mickey is relating to

01:36:13 ◼   ► is just the easy put input out because it doesn't click in you just drop it into the

01:36:18 ◼   ► dock so that's what the Logitech base would provide you that there isn't like a lightning

01:36:23 ◼   ► port that you need to find it just finds its way in itself.

01:36:27 ◼   ► And will charge from that very slowly.

01:36:29 ◼   ► Gary wants to know what are your favourite iOS games for long plane rides?

01:36:34 ◼   ► So obviously I can speak to this. I like games that I can play for long stretches that are

01:36:38 ◼   ► simple whilst listening to podcasts is typical for me. So my kind of long term games for

01:36:44 ◼   ► this are Threes, Altos Adventure and Mini Metro. They are games that you can play kind

01:36:50 ◼   ► of without a lot of thought for long periods of time. I was playing some Monument Valley

01:36:56 ◼   ► 2 on the plane, but that's not necessarily something that I would recommend for the way

01:37:01 ◼   ► that I usually play stuff because Monument Valley 2 usually listens to the audio and

01:37:04 ◼   ► I like to listen to podcasts when I'm on the plane.

01:37:07 ◼   ► I am taking my time with Monument Valley 2, which by the way I am so excited is available.

01:37:15 ◼   ► What a great surprise and I'm very excited to play more of it.

01:37:18 ◼   ► But they are the games that I play on planes.

01:37:20 ◼   ► Do you play any games on planes, Jason?

01:37:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what I was going to say is I don't... games is not a thing I do on planes

01:37:25 ◼   ► generally.

01:37:26 ◼   ► I get that. On a plane, I am editing a podcast, I am reading a book, or I'm watching a movie

01:37:32 ◼   ► or a TV show, but playing games on planes? Nah. Not for me.

01:37:36 ◼   ► That's not the Snell way. No.

01:37:40 ◼   ► Alright that is it for this week's episode. As always you can send in your questions for

01:37:44 ◼   ► us to answer at the end of the show with #askupgrade and our beginning of the show question, which

01:37:48 ◼   ► is #snelltalk. Remember Snell Talk is for just esoteric questions. If you're looking

01:37:53 ◼   ► for more in detail questions about technology. Keep those for Ask Upgrade. I know we have

01:37:59 ◼   ► lots of hashtags and lots of questions and I appreciate every single one of you that

01:38:03 ◼   ► sends in one every week or whenever you do them. I really appreciate it. Please continue

01:38:08 ◼   ► to send those in because it helps us make the show. So thank you for that. And also

01:38:13 ◼   ► thank you for listening. If you listen to all of the show or part of the show or you

01:38:17 ◼   ► skip certain parts of the show, we'll know soon. But I still want to thank you for doing

01:38:21 ◼   ► it anyway. If you want to find Jason online you can find him at SixColors.com and he is

01:38:26 ◼   ► @JSnell on Twitter and of course at TheIncomparable as well. TheIncomparable.com. I am @imike,

01:38:32 ◼   ► I M Y K E. Thanks to Encapsular, MailRoute and Blue Apron for supporting this week's

01:38:38 ◼   ► show and thank you as always for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say

01:38:43 ◼   ► goodbye Jason Snell. Goodbye everybody.

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