PodSearch

Upgrade

90: Nobody Should be a Siri Power User

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   from relay FM this is upgrade episode number 90 today's show is brought to you

00:00:13   by text expander from smile and pingdom my name is Myke Curley I am joined by

00:00:18   the wonderful Mr Jason Snell hi Myke good to be back we are back it's another Monday

00:00:25   We're, uh, I think we're on the road to WWDC now.

00:00:28   I feel that, uh, kind of feeling constantly thinking about San Francisco

00:00:33   related things last week, my diary got jam packed with events and such.

00:00:39   We are on the path now.

00:00:41   Getting very close.

00:00:43   We're very close now.

00:00:44   Yep.

00:00:45   Yep.

00:00:46   So it's exciting stuff, but there's a, there's a few things that I think we want

00:00:49   to cover today, which are tangentially related to WWDC, I think most of the news

00:00:54   will be leading up to our event in the middle of June.

00:00:58   But first off, I just wanted to give a quick reflection

00:01:00   on last week's episode, 'cause we kind of came to an end

00:01:04   not too long after we let Lex go last week.

00:01:07   I just wanted to mention,

00:01:09   I thought it was a really great discussion.

00:01:11   I think Lex provided a useful and positive look

00:01:15   at the other side of the argument that we've been posing

00:01:17   for the last couple of weeks.

00:01:19   He hasn't changed my mind about anything,

00:01:21   but I know I haven't changed his either.

00:01:23   So, I'm sure there will be more for us to say on this topic in the future.

00:01:27   I think it's clearly something that people find interesting.

00:01:31   But we're not going to flog a dead horse.

00:01:32   Like, I don't have anything else to add, nothing else has changed.

00:01:36   But it's something to keep in mind as a point of discussion for the future.

00:01:39   Right.

00:01:40   I think Lex brought a—I think it was a good perspective to have.

00:01:44   I don't feel like a lot of those conversations happen anywhere, and although this is not

00:01:48   the ideal venue for those conversations. I'm glad that we could kind of like cannibalize

00:01:55   a little bit of the time in order to get some of that discussion out there because I think

00:01:59   it's really interesting and I think Lex's perspective is good because it's not just

00:02:02   his perspective that he's relaying, it's the perspective of the people he is dealing

00:02:06   with who are being interested in buying advertising and podcasts. And so he's got his perspective

00:02:12   as a sales guy, he's got his perspective as a creator of podcasts, and he's also

00:02:16   aware of the perspective of the people with the money and what their desires are. And that's a

00:02:21   really great combination of perspectives to have. And yeah, we can disagree about things, but I feel

00:02:29   like he brought a dose of sort of reality of like, this is what it's like out there. And some of it

00:02:34   is philosophical and some of it is, it doesn't make sense, but is the reality that, you know,

00:02:42   know, not everything that happens, not every bit of behavior is rational and there's

00:02:47   some irrationality going on in terms of the quest for some of these metrics too. So it

00:02:51   was good to hear that. I thought that was a great—his anecdote about people basically

00:02:55   saying, "Oh yeah, we'll have a pixel on your podcast to measure listenership."

00:02:59   It's like, wow, that's just amazing. So I was really glad to hear all of that. And

00:03:03   yeah, I think we'll cover it again. I wish—on one level, I wish that there was a place for

00:03:07   Inside Baseball podcast stuff to live. On another level, I'm not sure I want to listen

00:03:11   to a podcast that's just about that, so maybe revisiting it here every now and then

00:03:17   is a better idea while also being respectful of the fact that not everybody wants to hear

00:03:22   about podcasts inside baseball, which is why we brought him on at the end and, you know,

00:03:27   are trying to make it skippable for people who don't care.

00:03:30   So, but yeah, I thought it was really good and we got a lot of positive feedback about

00:03:34   it from people who were, you know, I've never heard that perspective before and it was good

00:03:38   to hear it from Lex, and Lex is a good communicator

00:03:41   of what the issues are.

00:03:42   - So let's get back to our regularly scheduled programming.

00:03:46   iOS 9.3.2 came out, I believe, last week,

00:03:51   and was brought with it another upgrade issue.

00:03:54   This is focused around the 9.3.2 update

00:03:59   on iPad Pro 9.7 inch, so the smaller iPad Pro.

00:04:04   It is bricking them with the Era 56 issue

00:04:07   that we've seen in the past.

00:04:09   Apple has actually pulled the update down.

00:04:12   I have not updated my 9.7 inch iPad.

00:04:17   Luckily the news started to come out

00:04:19   about bricked iPads just before I did it.

00:04:22   My iPad is very upset and is asking me to upgrade,

00:04:24   but I'm terrified that I'm going to destroy my device

00:04:29   by doing this.

00:04:30   I am continually perplexed at how this is still happening.

00:04:37   Like this, it feels like every update now,

00:04:40   there is some kind of issue where it's just

00:04:42   bricking devices.

00:04:43   It's becoming a trend which is concerning.

00:04:46   - I mean, it's not every update,

00:04:47   but it's happened a few times and--

00:04:49   - More often than not, I think in recent times,

00:04:51   there have been some kind of issue with updates.

00:04:54   - Yeah, I feel like I almost wanna do,

00:04:56   if only we had hyperlinks in podcasts,

00:04:58   don't get me started,

00:05:00   that we could literally do a ba-doop

00:05:03   and drop in a conversation we had a few weeks ago.

00:05:06   'cause it's a very similar thing, which is,

00:05:08   hard to understand why this is happening.

00:05:10   Is it the pace of software updates?

00:05:13   Is it a lack of proper testing, resources, time, people?

00:05:19   Is it that Apple's user base is so large,

00:05:23   although the 9.7-inch iPad Pro isn't a very large base,

00:05:26   that they're not able to test things properly,

00:05:28   and so things fall through the cracks?

00:05:30   It's a little unclear, but no software update

00:05:34   should brick even a small percentage of a particular product that's being sold, currently

00:05:40   especially. I mean, in terms of the hierarchy, it's like it's not that huge an install base,

00:05:46   it's a brand new product. How did it not get checked? And I don't have any answers for

00:05:51   that other than that it's something is wrong because it shouldn't be happening. And we

00:05:55   can have excuses and we can have explanations, but in the end I don't think anyone would

00:05:59   disagree with the idea that Apple shouldn't release software updates that make people

00:06:04   hesitate to update because they feel like there's a chance that it could completely

00:06:09   disable their hardware. But there have been enough of these stories now that that's

00:06:14   where we are. And that's something that whoever is in charge of this aspect of software

00:06:18   at Apple has to fix. They have to correct it.

00:06:21   Jared [laughing]

00:06:22   Jared Because I don't know what to do now.

00:06:23   Jared Just put it in airplane mode and run away.

00:06:28   Because this is a story for another time, but the 9.7 inch iPad Pro is my favorite computing

00:06:33   device now.

00:06:34   And...

00:06:35   Oh yeah, we should talk about that.

00:06:37   We should.

00:06:38   At some point, I'm formulating some thoughts on it.

00:06:40   You had that, we should put a link in the show notes to that tweet that you, I think

00:06:43   it was a tweet or maybe it was just in the, we did a live thing on the talk show app for,

00:06:48   that's by, you know, Myke Sippy and Greg Noss and some other people, this app called

00:06:52   Talk Show, and we embedded it on Six Colors and you were in there and you took a picture

00:06:56   of your setup and it was sort of like a 5K iMac and two iPads was how you covered the

00:07:04   Google I/O keynote. The big iPad Pro and the small iPad Pro were both being used by you

00:07:10   for different tasks, which was kind of hilarious. So I do want to talk more about why you love

00:07:15   it, but for now you love it but it can't be updated. It mustn't be looked at because

00:07:20   it could just turn into a brick overnight.

00:07:22   That's the thing, because I love to use it so much, I'm now too scared to update

00:07:27   it in case I then can't use it anymore. So when do I do it? Like I have no idea when.

00:07:33   My mom is frightened to update her iOS stuff now because of, I think mostly because of

00:07:38   iOS 7 where it was such a dramatic change, like the auto update happens and suddenly

00:07:45   the nothing looks the same and she doesn't quite know what everything is. And that one

00:07:50   traumatic experience two plus years ago has led her to basically not update her iOS devices.

00:07:57   Because you don't know what's on the other side.

00:08:02   You don't and she's not tied into it, right? So she's like, "Well, Jason will

00:08:05   tell me if it's okay." And that's how she does it. And it's not like she couldn't

00:08:09   do it and I'm not doing the old ploy of like, "Oh, moms just don't understand.

00:08:13   They're proxies for people who don't understand about technology." No, this is like legitimately

00:08:16   she learned a lesson from an Apple software update which is never trust them again, which

00:08:21   is really bad.

00:08:22   It's like, I don't know, I think since it was one of the releases that was bad for everyone,

00:08:29   right? Like if you got it, it kind of killed everything and they were able to pull it and

00:08:33   I can't remember which one that was. But since then, people ask me, "Oh, should I update?"

00:08:39   And I'm hesitant to give a definitive answer to people now.

00:08:43   I had the update like a year before that, I had the update that turned off the cellular

00:08:49   radio on my iPhone.

00:08:50   That's the one.

00:08:51   That was the really bad one, right?

00:08:53   That was a good one.

00:08:55   So I don't know, I feel like it's got to be a QA thing, right?

00:08:58   You feel like it's got to be found there.

00:09:01   Ultimately.

00:09:02   So I don't really know what's going on.

00:09:05   And I think that's a good point, that it's whatever the reasons, right?

00:09:09   There are probably reasons, the reasons might involve the way the software is being developed,

00:09:14   the development pace, other issues, other things that they're trying to fix and they're

00:09:19   sliding in these fixes and they lead to other problems, but it doesn't really matter, right?

00:09:25   The net result is that whatever testing they're doing isn't finding these things and you should

00:09:30   never get to the point where you're pulling an update because it's killed a product for

00:09:36   a lot of people.

00:09:37   This is where one of the difficult lines of doing what we do is, because I understand

00:09:41   that there are people making these things, I understand that there's a lot of work

00:09:44   that goes into it, but on the other side of it I'm like, "I don't care, you shouldn't

00:09:47   be breaking my devices."

00:09:48   You know, again, that's where it's really hard to sit on the line that we sit on, I

00:09:52   think, when thinking about this stuff.

00:09:53   Yeah, just don't release it.

00:09:54   Just don't release it.

00:09:56   And if there are critical security fixes in along with this, then there's that question

00:10:00   of like, "Did you just release critical security fixes, or did you do other stuff?"

00:10:06   Because some fixes are critical and need to get pushed out.

00:10:09   Other things are bug fixes and they can wait for testing to see if there are any side effects.

00:10:15   And I'm just not convinced that the stuff that was in here was all critical, right?

00:10:22   I mean, I think that's a good question to ask is just don't release it.

00:10:27   If you haven't tested it, don't release it.

00:10:30   Just wait.

00:10:31   And I get the pressure and I get that there's probably pressure for iOS developers inside

00:10:35   Apple to be working on pushing for whatever they're going to show and release to developers

00:10:40   at WWDC in a few weeks. And that probably makes it an incredibly chaotic time to release

00:10:45   an update. But that comes back to, "Okay, what's in 9.3.2? What absolutely had to

00:10:52   get out immediately and what didn't?" And did you really make the right decision? Obviously

00:10:57   not, I guess. But did you really make the right decision in terms of what went in and

00:11:01   what went out? Because if you can't test it, then don't release it.

00:11:04   This wasn't the only release that Apple had this week. They also released their new Apple

00:11:09   Store design and the theory that goes into a lot of it. This isn't the first redesigned

00:11:15   Apple Store, it's the first one that's really kind of encompassing all of the new ideas.

00:11:21   The Memphis store has a lot of these elements and I remember Steven went and took a look

00:11:28   at those when they reopened it because it was just done recently. The Selfridges pop-up

00:11:33   store that sells Apple watches has a lot of like the foliage and stuff like that in it.

00:11:39   But this new store in Union Square which has been in construction for I think for as long

00:11:44   as I have been going to WWDC. I feel like there's always been something happening with

00:11:50   this Apple store. So this is the new space though. This is a completely, they shut down

00:11:54   the old space and they're in a brand new space that's right on Union Square. So it's a larger

00:11:59   space that they, because they built, when they opened that, like, I don't know what,

00:12:04   10 years ago right next to the BART station, that was a big deal. But this is a completely

00:12:09   different space. It's not just a remade store layout. It's a brand new building, basically.

00:12:17   Brand new location.

00:12:18   So I've included a couple links in the show notes. One to an article at The Loop, which

00:12:23   which has a lot of the kind of Apple's thinking in it in text.

00:12:27   But also I've put in a link to The Verge,

00:12:31   which I suggest everybody goes to look at

00:12:33   because it has tons of fantastic photography,

00:12:35   which really shows off a lot of what they're doing here.

00:12:38   And this was very interesting.

00:12:40   This event, Angela Ahrens and Johnny Ive were there,

00:12:44   I believe, either presenting and then the next day

00:12:47   kind of with the opening of the store to the public.

00:12:50   And it really kind of encompasses some new thinking

00:12:53   that Apple has around the way that their retail spaces

00:12:56   are gonna work.

00:12:57   And they kind of have three or four new big things

00:13:01   that are happening here.

00:13:02   So the Genius Bar has been renamed to Genius Grove.

00:13:05   And that's where you find the foliage

00:13:08   that will be in the stores in these beautiful planters.

00:13:12   These like white and wood planters,

00:13:14   or they're like cushy, no, no, wood, they're like leather.

00:13:17   They're very good looking.

00:13:19   And it's Genius Grove is gonna take some time

00:13:21   to settle in for me because it sounds strange,

00:13:24   but I think it just sounds strange

00:13:25   'cause I'm used to Genius Bar.

00:13:27   But that's one thing.

00:13:28   They have something called the Avenue.

00:13:30   The Avenue, this is all very high concept thinking,

00:13:33   but the Avenue is like a row of their products

00:13:36   that changes by season effectively.

00:13:38   That's where they put all their headphones

00:13:40   and all the stuff like that and they change them around.

00:13:42   Then they have something called the Forum,

00:13:44   which is this massive 6K screen.

00:13:47   They have one of these in the Memphis store as well.

00:13:49   I think I'm gonna bring all of them.

00:13:50   They're very, very expensive it looks like,

00:13:52   which will feature something that Apple is calling

00:13:54   Today at Apple, which demonstrates the community creators

00:13:59   and app developers and musicians.

00:14:02   It kind of highlights them and focuses on them.

00:14:04   It's things that Apple care about.

00:14:06   And then this store and some of the other key stores

00:14:09   that Apple owns will be getting something called the Plaza,

00:14:12   which is a 24-hour public space,

00:14:15   which features Wi-Fi, free public Wi-Fi,

00:14:18   and has the Today at Apple thing taken outside

00:14:21   with performances and stuff from the people

00:14:23   that are on the screens.

00:14:25   So this is a, I think, kind of natural evolution

00:14:29   for the Apple Store.

00:14:31   It is focusing a lot more on the overall thinking

00:14:35   of an Apple product, right?

00:14:37   There's a lot more focus on accessories,

00:14:39   there's a lot more focus on open space.

00:14:41   The actual store itself from the outside

00:14:43   looks like an Apple product.

00:14:45   It has the new mirrored Apple logo that they're using on their products.

00:14:50   And this one is just like all glass at the front.

00:14:52   It's a beautiful store.

00:14:54   And I think it's, you know, they're moving it forward.

00:14:58   And there's a few stores that are under construction.

00:14:59   The Regent Street store, which is one of the key stores in London, is currently majorly

00:15:05   closed.

00:15:06   They have a, you have to go to the basement where they have all the products crammed in

00:15:09   now.

00:15:10   And they're going to be reopening that store at some point and it will feature all of this

00:15:13   stuff in it.

00:15:14   expect that one will be spectacular because it's such a huge space. So yeah, that's

00:15:19   the new Apple Store. I'm looking forward to going to check it out in a couple of weeks.

00:15:24   Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing it. You get the sense that this is Angela Arendt's

00:15:30   big initiative, right? It feels like something with her and Ive together, right, working

00:15:34   on this. Ive designs, right, I mean, because all the tables and stuff, right, those are

00:15:37   all like Johnny Ive conceptual stuff that they've had. So it's more stuff from him,

00:15:44   But then for Angela Ahrens, it just seems like she did a lot of putting out fires when

00:15:48   she came back. But this was her sort of long-term, how do we kind of re-envision the modules

00:15:53   that we use in the various stores. And every store is different, and every store is going

00:15:56   to have a different mixture because this is not a virtual world, this is reality and they've

00:16:01   got to build these things and deal with building codes and deal with employees and figure out

00:16:05   if you have a 24-hour space, how do you handle security. And there's a lot of practical

00:16:10   considerations. But she wanted, I think, a set of new tools and to just refresh some

00:16:15   of the concepts. Because some of the concepts in the—it's hard to think about it, but

00:16:18   the Apple stores have been around a long time now. And a lot of them are not that different.

00:16:24   They have had—definitely they've had updates as they've gone and they've made changes.

00:16:28   A lot of them—like the Union Square store, the old Union Square store used to have a

00:16:32   big theater and they, you know, then they de-emphasized that, the whole idea of having

00:16:37   a theater in the back of the store and the Genius Bar in a lot of places sort of vanished

00:16:41   and it was just sort of an area where people might come and help you and so this is kind

00:16:49   of defining how they want to use these pieces going forward. It will be interesting to see.

00:16:54   My local store, which is a mall store, changed from, it moved locations to a somewhat bigger

00:17:04   still in a mall. It's California so it's outside but it's still a shopping mall.

00:17:10   And I was struck by that because it definitely shows some changes in their approach from

00:17:16   before including a huge video wall at the back of the store.

00:17:19   Yeah, the video wall is a new key thing that I think they're putting in most of them.

00:17:24   Yeah, so I was struck by how it felt different and then they had a bunch of, also some ergonomic

00:17:32   like they had a bunch of benches and stuff at the back because I think they're aware that,

00:17:36   you know, in reality people are coming in and asking for their genius appointment and having

00:17:40   to sit and wait for five or ten minutes while they go back in the back and get a new iPhone or

00:17:45   whatever it is. And so I think that's interesting too of showing like, I chalked that one up to

00:17:50   Angela Ahrendts as well of like, why are people milling around here waiting? We should give them

00:17:55   a place to sit and, you know, we should handle this all better. So it's interesting to see

00:18:01   her take on it. We'll see how this rolls out to everybody. I mean not everybody is near a

00:18:04   flagship store so what elements of this go into the shopping malls around the

00:18:08   around the world and things like that. Yeah because the trees whilst you can maybe think

00:18:12   that trees are strange I'd say they're actually seats right so yeah when when was the last time

00:18:18   you had somewhere you could sit in an apple store it doesn't happen so yeah you're completely right.

00:18:22   She has a brand new vision for it which I like. There's a quote from the Virgin article I just

00:18:26   find this interesting. She says, uh, Angela says, "This is more than just a store. We want people to

00:18:31   say, 'Hey, meet me at Apple.'" They're trying to turn it into a thing and, whilst that is a bit of a,

00:18:37   I think, a slightly ludicrous statement, I get what she's trying to say.

00:18:41   Right, because no one's ever going to say that, right? You know?

00:18:45   Well, I think, okay, so on one level, I look at that and I'm like, "Yeah, sure." Right,

00:18:51   like every company says, "Oh, we think that our corporate structure is going to be part of

00:18:58   everybody's... They will incorporate it into their lifestyles and it will be, you know, happy

00:19:04   corporate lifestyle people will go there to live their lifestyles." And I roll my eyes, I'm like,

00:19:10   "Yeah, okay, dream on corporate people. People are going to live their lives. They're not going

00:19:14   to just attach to their brands." That said... No, this is Apple. And one, two, I'm not sure

00:19:21   this isn't more a reaction to the fact that this is already true, right? Like, a lot of these places,

00:19:27   this already happens. People go into the Apple stores, there's computers that they use there.

00:19:35   It just, I don't know, I think that there's some truth behind that already about how people use

00:19:41   Apple stores, and so maybe they're just kind of going with it and saying, "All right, we could

00:19:45   do that. Let's try that. Why not?" I mean, in New York, I think the New York store has always been

00:19:49   been open 24/7, and people go in there, the Fifth Avenue store, and people go in there

00:19:54   and use the computers and stuff like that. So, I don't know, yeah, I'm of two minds

00:19:59   about that, which is one, it seems kind of ridiculous, and on another level, I'm not

00:20:04   sure that people don't already do that with Apple stores, so maybe it's smart to turn

00:20:09   into the spin, be like, "Yep, okay, got it. We're going to be that then. Let's

00:20:14   just do it," instead of sort of having it happen in the background.

00:20:18   I am happy that, you know, that Angela Ahrens is there and she's speaking about it and it

00:20:24   shows that she has some kind of vision over this. I think that overall into the future

00:20:29   we're going to look back on her as being a nice positive kind of change for Apple because

00:20:35   the stores definitely look more high concept and luxury now than they did before and I

00:20:40   think that was why they brought her in, right? That's the world she came from.

00:20:44   - True, true with Burberry.

00:20:46   And they needed change.

00:20:48   Bottom line, like even if they're doing incredibly well,

00:20:51   the fact is it was getting to be an old concept

00:20:54   and you do need to always question and refresh.

00:20:56   And at the Apple Store was a bunch of variations

00:21:00   on Ron Johnson and Steve Jobs' original concept.

00:21:03   And now it's,

00:21:06   it's dumb to say things like this,

00:21:11   but here I am saying it.

00:21:12   It's kind of Apple Store 2.0, just in the sense that it seems like this is a new person

00:21:18   coming in and saying, "Let's reconceive this. Let's go back to basics and ask ourselves

00:21:23   a bunch of questions about what we should be doing instead of just iterating on what's

00:21:27   already there." And I do get the sense of that a little bit, which is good because even

00:21:32   the best idea gets old and stale.

00:21:34   You bet.

00:21:35   Alright, let's take a break and thank our friends over at Pingdom for sponsoring this

00:21:41   week's episode. You can start monitoring your own websites and servers today by going to

00:21:45   Pingdom.com/upgrade. When you go there you will find yourself with a lovely 14 day free

00:21:51   trial and then when you use the offer code upgrade at checkout you will get 20% off your

00:21:56   first invoice. Pingdom is focused on making the web faster and more reliable for everybody

00:22:03   who has a website. They do this by offering fantastic tools and services. For example,

00:22:09   if you're a Pingdom user, you'll be able to monitor the availability and performance of

00:22:12   your server, database or website so easily. They make it so simple and they make sure

00:22:18   that the use stay up and stay protected. Pingdom takes care of this with more than 70 global

00:22:24   test servers that emulate visits to your site, checking its availability as often as every

00:22:29   minute. So they are making sure that your site is staying up and they're checking that

00:22:34   people all over the world will be able to access it. But one of the things these days

00:22:37   which makes monitoring your website a little bit different is it's not just about, "Oh,

00:22:42   okay, it's just the page load." There are also tons of little elements within your site

00:22:46   that if they go down could be a problem. Contact forms, e-commerce checkouts, login functionality,

00:22:50   search functionality. Pingdom can monitor all of these things individually so you'll

00:22:55   know if the key interactions of your site go down. I mean, if your site's up and you're

00:22:58   a store but your checkout function is down, well there's no point in the site being

00:23:02   up. It's not just about the whole website anymore, Pingdom take care of all of it. Stuff

00:23:07   on the internet breaks all the time, Pingdom detect around 13 million outages a month.

00:23:13   That is more than 400,000 outages every single day. So regardless of whether you have a small

00:23:21   website or you're managing a complete infrastructure, it's super important to monitor the availability

00:23:27   performance of your website. All Pingdom needs is the URL you wish to monitor and they'll

00:23:31   take care of the rest. When they detect an outage you'll be immediately alerted so you

00:23:35   can fix that error before downtime affects you. Don't be caught out when someone's trying

00:23:39   to access your site. Get Pingdom. Check it out today and you'll be the first to know

00:23:43   when your site has a problem. Go to Pingdom.com/upgrade for a 14 day free trial and use the code 'upgrade

00:23:49   at checkout' to get 20% off. Thank you so much to Pingdom for their support of this show.

00:23:55   Alright, Mr. Snell, Google I/O happened last week.

00:24:00   What do you think?

00:24:01   Yes sir.

00:24:03   We talked about it on Clockwise last week, I recommend people check that out and you

00:24:06   can look at Six Colors for our live blog that we did of it, none of us being there.

00:24:13   Which you're in there and Dan's in there and we had a good time.

00:24:17   Casey Liss is in there for a little bit, he was next to a bunch of the Android developers

00:24:21   he works for, which is funny.

00:24:25   I wanted to mention it only because first off they announced a couple of things that

00:24:29   I think are fascinating and I get really tired of the whole one-upsmanship thing where Apple

00:24:36   announces a feature, you know it, everybody knows it, Apple announces a feature that Android's

00:24:40   had for a while and the Android people are like, "Oh yeah, congratulations Apple, you

00:24:45   got that new feature that we've had for two years, huh."

00:24:48   And I just don't get it that, isn't that a validation that you had a successful feature

00:24:54   or product and that they need to have it now because that's how competition works. I think

00:25:00   it's dumb, but what I'm saying is, Allo is iMessage and Duo is FaceTime and good for

00:25:06   Google, right? I'm not entirely sure I like the idea of Allo only because I feel like

00:25:10   what it's really trying to do is kill the momentum, and I don't think it will, but kill

00:25:15   the momentum of things like WhatsApp, that Google kind of wants to be the platform owner

00:25:20   and own all of those things. And there are also the issues like they've got this incognito

00:25:24   thing which is actually not quite incognito, it's just secure. It's a mode you can go into,

00:25:31   but by default your texts are not encrypted end to end, which means it's less secure than

00:25:38   a lot of these other services that encrypt everything. But still, I appreciate it from

00:25:42   the sense of Google saying, "Look, we need to do better on messaging." That we had Google

00:25:45   talk and they've got Google Hangouts and they've got a whole bunch of different things,

00:25:51   but they need to do better. So, Allo seems to be their take on WhatsApp and then Duo

00:25:56   is quite literally FaceTime. It's keyed off of phone numbers, it's one-to-one, video

00:26:02   chat, they've got a feature that they spent way too much time on which is that when somebody

00:26:07   calls you, you can see them before you pick up. It struck me as being a minor feature,

00:26:14   but it was the only thing that was different than FaceTime, so they overemphasized it.

00:26:18   But you know, should Android phones have FaceTime? Plus it's going to be available on iOS,

00:26:23   so shouldn't you be able to make a FaceTime call to an Android phone, a friend who's

00:26:27   got an Android phone? Well now you'll be able to do that, you just have to use Duo

00:26:30   instead of FaceTime. And I do wonder, since they made a big point also of saying this

00:26:35   is all based on public technologies, this is not proprietary in any way, I'm going

00:26:40   hold out a little bit of hope that maybe down the road FaceTime is interoperable with it,

00:26:44   because I think Apple's initial concept of FaceTime was that it would be using public

00:26:49   stuff and interoperable with other things. And for, you know, somewhat hazy reasons,

00:26:55   it never happened. And I don't think people like to make fun of Apple for that. I think Apple was,

00:27:00   you know, legitimately intending for it to be that. And then something like legally happened,

00:27:06   probably patent and royalty related that made them go "oh we can't do that".

00:27:10   They could have built and could still have built a FaceTime app for Android though.

00:27:15   They could, they could, but you know they don't want to do that apparently, although

00:27:19   maybe they should, but failing that I mean why not just make it interoperable if everybody

00:27:23   can use email addresses and phone numbers to video call each other and have it all be

00:27:28   interoperable wouldn't that be nice? And does that really need to be some sort of a wedge

00:27:33   feature between platforms. Google doesn't care and that's Google's game. Google's

00:27:37   going to run it on iOS and Android. Apple only is doing their stuff on iOS right now.

00:27:43   So one way or another, I think if you're Apple would you not rather have FaceTime be

00:27:49   compatible with other things rather than have everybody getting Google's app and using

00:27:54   it instead because they can talk to everybody in their family with that? I don't know.

00:27:59   But again, I'm not going to gloat and be like, "Oh, good job Google, you finally invented

00:28:03   FaceTime."

00:28:04   Because FaceTime is a great feature and Android phones should have it and it should be from

00:28:08   the platform vendor because more people will use it when it's more deeply integrated into

00:28:12   the operating system.

00:28:13   So good for them for doing it.

00:28:17   I'm not going to mock them for it.

00:28:19   If I mock them for anything, it's going to be, I'm not sure I like the platform vendor

00:28:23   coming in and trying to squash the successful chat apps that are on its platform but you

00:28:29   know I'm not surprised.

00:28:30   Well it's going to be a choice though I reckon.

00:28:33   I don't think Allo and Duo will be installed.

00:28:35   I think they'll need to be downloaded from the Play Store so you know they're not like

00:28:39   destroying for now.

00:28:41   Like Duo why would you not put that in Android eventually?

00:28:44   Why would you not just put it in there?

00:28:46   Because of the European Union.

00:28:48   Oh well.

00:28:50   That's why.

00:28:51   Maybe.

00:28:52   Maybe. We'll get it here in the US. You'll have to download it. It'll prompt you, would

00:29:01   you like to download Duo? In general though, I thought this was a really good IO keynote.

00:29:06   I did too.

00:29:11   Google keynotes have been really bad. They have been, it felt like in the talk show thread

00:29:18   that we had. I was saying how I thought past Google keynotes were kind of like Soviet Communist

00:29:26   Party meetings where like every Oblast must be heard from. Like every fiefdom inside of

00:29:33   Google had to make an appearance. And it was so obvious. There were I/O keynotes where

00:29:41   people would come up and they literally had nothing to show that was new.

00:29:44   Let's do a recap of what we did a while ago. And it was just very clear that there

00:29:51   was a lot of pride and political whatever in being on stage at a keynote and that these

00:29:57   people wanted to be there even if they had nothing to say. And that shows a tremendous

00:30:03   lack of discipline in whoever is supposed to put the event together. The leaders should

00:30:07   be like, "No, you don't get in if you don't have anything to say. This isn't

00:30:10   what we're trying to do here. This one felt like the right thing, which is their message

00:30:16   was clear, they prioritized, they were pretty snappy, and they left a lot of the really

00:30:25   esoteric developer stuff for the end, and that's when it started to drag. But again,

00:30:29   if you're going to make those decisions, this is how you do it, is you have the stuff that's

00:30:33   got the broad appeal up front, and then as you get into your second hour, then you're

00:30:39   losing people and the developers are all still there so you just keep going with the developer

00:30:45   stuff but I was struck by that, that Google's keynotes have generally not been disciplined

00:30:50   at all and this one was really on point. I was impressed.

00:30:54   Yeah, I agree. Should we talk about Siri? Sure, sure. What else would be appropriate

00:31:05   for Siri? What better than talking about Siri?

00:31:08   There was a rumor on MacRumors this week that Siri is coming to OS X.

00:31:15   Yeah, they had screenshots and stuff.

00:31:17   Some screenshots.

00:31:18   They had a screenshot of a dock icon and a screenshot of a menu bar icon.

00:31:23   Menu bar icon that says "Siri".

00:31:25   It's ugly as all hell.

00:31:27   I don't know why.

00:31:28   Yeah, that's probably, let's hope it's a placeholder.

00:31:29   Yeah, I feel like they have a super cool looking dock icon, but an ugly as all hell menu bar

00:31:36   icon.

00:31:37   - Yeah, I don't get it. - It's just the word Siri

00:31:38   in a box, which. - Yep.

00:31:40   (laughing)

00:31:41   - I don't even know why you would need a menu bar icon

00:31:44   unless you're entering text into it or something,

00:31:47   but we'll get to that in a little bit.

00:31:48   - All sorts of things have menu bar icons

00:31:51   that don't make any sense,

00:31:52   so why should this be anything different?

00:31:53   - Very good point.

00:31:55   Max will seem, from this MacRumors article,

00:31:57   Max will get the Ahoy! telephone feature, it would appear.

00:32:00   - Yeah, it seems like.

00:32:03   Although, I think MacRumors said that it would be,

00:32:05   In the current thinking is that it would be off by default and you would need to turn

00:32:09   it on, although that can change because we're talking about a product that wouldn't ship

00:32:15   until the fall, right?

00:32:17   Next version of OS X.

00:32:18   Well, it's always off by default, right?

00:32:20   You enable it during setup of an iPhone, so I guess it would be the same.

00:32:24   Yeah, I guess that's the question is would your Mac get in your way when you reboot it

00:32:28   after an update and say, "Alright, I need to ask you about Ahoy telephone," or probably

00:32:33   it would.

00:32:34   Yeah, I reckon it would.

00:32:35   It runs you through the setup process again and enables that sort of stuff.

00:32:39   Like whenever I update my iPad, it asks me if I want to enable it, because I don't have

00:32:45   a high telephone on my iPad, so I think it's pointless.

00:32:49   But it asks me every time I update if I want to set up Siri.

00:32:52   Like I actually on one of them, I don't even have Siri enabled, because I just never use

00:32:56   it.

00:32:57   Like I just said no, because it's like what's the point?

00:32:58   Yeah, I never use it on my iPad, and I too often accidentally trigger it by pressing

00:33:02   the button too long.

00:33:03   So I just want it to go away.

00:33:05   I wanted to ask you, now if we could box this part into considering Siri's current feature

00:33:15   set, why would you want Siri on OS X?

00:33:21   When it's very likely I think that you would have an iOS device close enough, I don't think

00:33:28   there are many people these days that would not have an iOS device close enough to them

00:33:33   when they're using a Mac that they could use it?

00:33:36   There are some, not every Mac user is an iOS user. And you could argue that, you know,

00:33:43   everybody's got different contexts of how they work, so why not provide it everywhere

00:33:46   and then you've got it, you know, whenever you're near anything, you've got it ready

00:33:51   to go right there. I guess not everybody has their phone on their person at all times when

00:33:56   they're sitting at their computer, let's say.

00:33:57   But to do what though? If you assume you have the series only available on your Mac,

00:34:04   what are you doing with it? Setting a timer?

00:34:08   It's a little bit like, they brought a lot of iOS features kind of halfway to the Mac. Like

00:34:15   the notification center stuff where there's the weather widget that doesn't really go any,

00:34:20   there's no app, it just sort of lives in there or find my friends, it's just sort of in the

00:34:24   the notification center and this strikes me as being maybe potentially like that where

00:34:31   it's sort of not really that integrated. I hope it is. I would imagine like the people

00:34:37   who work on automation at Apple would be beside themselves to have access to this. It's

00:34:44   not like there hasn't been triggerable voice control on the Mac before. In fact,

00:34:50   triggerable voice control on the Mac now, but it's not Siri, it's not branded that

00:34:55   way. So it might be interesting to see if they roll all that stuff in so you end up

00:35:00   with the ability to run scripts and things, which would give you a lot of power to write

00:35:07   your own kind of wired together app control and stuff like that. That might be kind of

00:35:11   fun, but I don't know. I mean, what Siri really is is it's data sources, right? So

00:35:18   So I guess the idea here is that you should be able to, without doing anything else on

00:35:24   your Mac, say, "I want to have a timer," or "Can you open this app," or whatever.

00:35:31   I'm not sure.

00:35:32   I do have a hard time picturing it.

00:35:34   It feels more like it would be useful in terms of consistency than in terms of being a huge

00:35:40   productivity tool.

00:35:43   How would you use it?

00:35:44   >> I don't think I would.

00:35:46   I can't think of any use case for me given, as I say, given its current feature set, I

00:35:52   can't think of any reason why I would want Siri on my Mac. I use it for so few things

00:35:58   on my iOS devices.

00:35:59   And a Mac is an engaged interface, right? I mean, that's the thing about the Mac is

00:36:03   that it's not true for every user, right? I can see that there are, for people who've

00:36:06   got mobility issues, anybody who has accessibility concerns, having more voice control on their

00:36:13   Mac might be good, although I have a hard time imagining that Siri for Mac would be

00:36:20   enough to be really satisfactory, but maybe. But it's such an engaged user interface.

00:36:28   It is something that your hands are on the keyboard and your fingers are on the trackpad

00:36:34   or the mouse, and I have a hard time seeing why suddenly also talking to the computer

00:36:42   is something that you would find particularly helpful. Because Siri in some ways is a solution

00:36:50   to problems that exist on touchscreen devices that are maybe not necessary on a device where

00:36:57   you've got that keyboard and mouse right in front of you.

00:37:00   So let's break this conversation up a little bit to take it to the place that people are

00:37:06   screaming at us about. Let's look at what Siri could be and think about it that way.

00:37:14   So do you think that having Siri on OS X, or Mac OS as I and you expect it to be called,

00:37:23   Mac OS 1.

00:37:24   Mac OS 11.

00:37:27   Spinal Tap will make an appearance at WWDC for Mac OS 11.

00:37:30   Turning it all the way up.

00:37:33   Do you think that finally having Siri on OS X signals a potential change for Siri?

00:37:37   Do you think that we're going to see something at WWDC that will push Siri further than what

00:37:42   we currently have?

00:37:43   Wouldn't that be nice?

00:37:45   It would make sense if they're going to do it because they haven't done it yet.

00:37:49   Yeah it's so frustrating, like it needs to be better.

00:37:51   It needs to be better in so many different dimensions.

00:37:53   It needs to be, apps need more access to it.

00:37:57   And on the Mac especially, it will be frustrating if there's no way to access other stuff

00:38:03   because the Mac has so much other stuff.

00:38:06   But even on iOS, the ability to do that, more data sources, more intelligence, there's

00:38:13   so much, you know, there's so much.

00:38:17   We've seen the demos of other assistant technology lately, and there's a difference

00:38:23   between a cooked-up demo and something that's shipping in tens of millions of phones. That's

00:38:28   absolutely true, but Google is planning on having their assistant be coming out soon

00:38:40   with a lot more sophistication than Google Now maybe currently has, and that's the

00:38:45   bar being set, right? And Siri has been, I would say, a letdown because I feel like it

00:38:53   is progressing very slowly from its initial release. And some of that is the uncanny valley

00:38:59   thing, which is when I talk to a robot, I expect it to behave like a human and it doesn't

00:39:05   because it's a robot. It's just a dumb piece of software. But it doesn't mean that

00:39:10   that it's any less frustrating to have it not be able to converse with me and understand

00:39:15   more of what I'm trying to get out of it.

00:39:20   So one thing that I would like quite a lot, and this is something that Google was showing

00:39:24   off was text entry for their assistant. I would like to be able to text Siri. I think

00:39:30   that that would be helpful in a lot of ways.

00:39:33   Yeah, that's actually a very clever idea. I thought about that every now and then too.

00:39:39   that I use quite frequently more recently which is great is you can enter some stuff

00:39:45   in the search box and it's like you're kind of testing with Siri. So like for example

00:39:48   I wanted to do some currency conversion and I thought I wonder if Siri will do this and

00:39:52   it will. Like if I type in 1000 USD it shows me the GPP like the pound sterling, it shows

00:39:58   me the amount right it just it knows what I'm looking for or if I type in 25C it knows

00:40:05   I'm looking for temperature, it shows me Fahrenheit.

00:40:07   Like, that's the stuff that I want it to do,

00:40:10   and I wanna be able to just really talk to it.

00:40:12   I wanna be able to, plain text entry,

00:40:14   like pull down from my phone,

00:40:18   so I bring up the search box, and just say,

00:40:21   book an appointment with Jason at four o'clock tomorrow.

00:40:24   Like I do for FantasticOwl,

00:40:25   but just to have it everywhere would be fantastic, right?

00:40:28   Or just type it in and say like, what do I have next?

00:40:32   Like, things like that that I don't have to talk,

00:40:34   because I don't always want to talk to these things because I feel silly. I think most

00:40:39   people just feel silly talking to it when it doesn't understand you. And part of the

00:40:43   reason it doesn't understand you is sometimes it doesn't get the words. I'm more likely

00:40:46   to get the words correctly if I can type it to the assistant, right? Because I can see

00:40:51   immediately what it's understanding.

00:40:54   It's true, although that goes back to being like, on ATP a couple weeks ago John Saracusa

00:40:58   said that it's like a command line, and he's exactly right. Like, you have to phrase things

00:41:01   a certain way with the Echo or with Siri in order to get it to be exactly what you want.

00:41:08   And the goal is that it should be more conversational and it should be able to pick up in your cues

00:41:11   and it should be able to figure it out. And what you're advocating is sort of like,

00:41:15   "Yes, it is a command line. Let me type it," which I also see, I totally see. But

00:41:20   I think the bigger problem is that not only are there all sorts of data that it doesn't

00:41:25   understand, but that you just, you can't have it do complex tasks, nor can you train

00:41:30   it to do those complex tasks if it doesn't know. So you said book a meeting with Jason

00:41:35   for four o'clock. That's something that really needs to happen at a high level where

00:41:41   it's, "Okay, do you mean Jason Snell? Yeah, I do. Alright, what's this meeting

00:41:47   about? Do you want to tell me what this meeting is about?" And you tell them and then they

00:41:50   send an email or a calendar invitation to me because I'm in your address book saying,

00:41:54   "Here's what this meeting is about," and that when I reply that it sends you a

00:41:59   a message or tells you, Jason's accepted that meeting, right? It needs to be like that

00:42:04   high level. And right now it's not. Right now you have to say things in a very specific

00:42:09   way if it's something that it can do, generally in one shot for it to do it, which is not

00:42:15   great.

00:42:16   Matt F: One of the big things that I found very impressive from what Google was showing

00:42:20   and it's stuff that they have now in some instances is context. So understanding the

00:42:25   context of the questions that you're asking, but also understanding the context of you

00:42:29   as a person. So, you know, they showed this off and I was playing around with this on

00:42:34   Connected and we did it with my Google device. You ask a question, then you ask the Google

00:42:40   Assistant another question, and it knows that that second question was related to the first

00:42:44   one.

00:42:45   Right. And there are a couple places where I think Siri does that, but it's few and

00:42:48   far between.

00:42:50   But part of the problem with Siri, though, with these types of things is the inconsistency,

00:42:53   is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

00:42:55   And it gets back to the command line thing where you're essentially like you have to

00:42:58   have a very prescribed way of talking to it and know the context and it becomes its own

00:43:05   little language and that's not how this is supposed to work. I mentioned, Mrs. Hoop in

00:43:10   the chat room just talked about the car a little bit and nothing frustrates me about Siri more than

00:43:15   being in the car because I feel like I want, and there are in-car features, but I want a much more

00:43:24   intelligent active assistant when I'm driving. Like, when I get a text in the car, I would

00:43:31   really like at least the option of having Siri say that you just got a text from so-and-so,

00:43:37   would you like me to read it? And be able, and it just, it doesn't do that. It just doesn't.

00:43:44   I mean, I think I can say, ahoy telephone, read me my texts or something like that. But again,

00:43:51   I'm not being assisted then. I have to be the driver of it. And I'm not exactly sure

00:43:57   what I need to say because there's probably a very specific way to say it. And I have

00:44:02   no doubt somebody out there is listening and being like, "Oh, sure, you can do that. Here's

00:44:05   exactly what you have to say." It's like Siri power users are a thing and bless them,

00:44:10   but the bigger point is nobody should be a Siri power user. Nobody should have to be

00:44:15   because it should be able to figure this stuff out. And having an intelligent agent who can

00:44:19   tell me what's happening on my phone while I'm driving. I would love that. I would

00:44:23   love to be able to, I was driving to, I spoke at the NACNEXIS, the Sacramento Mac user group

00:44:28   last week and Sacramento is an hour and a half or so from here. And so I had a, I was

00:44:34   in the car for a long time and I was listening to podcasts and I listened to some music and

00:44:37   I was thinking on that drive, this is the kind of thing where I'm in a bubble for

00:44:42   an hour and a half, two hours sitting in traffic driving to Sacramento where I can't look

00:44:46   at my phone and it's just me in the car. And at several points I really wanted to say,

00:44:52   "Ahoy telephone, what's going on in Slack?" "Ahoy telephone, what's going on on Twitter?"

00:45:00   "Ahoy telephone, do I have any new text messages?" Which, like I said, I think that

00:45:05   one will do. But, you know, it's just, I want it to be better. I want it to understand

00:45:11   context, I want it to read into other apps, I want it to do better summaries of what's

00:45:14   going on and then let me dive deep if I want to. And I have no doubt we'll get there, but

00:45:19   with Siri I feel like the progress is so slow that we might as well never get there. And

00:45:24   then when Google demos something like Google Assistant, and yeah it's a tech demo, I get

00:45:28   it, it's the best possible look for that tech. And when it comes to reality it will not be

00:45:34   as good. But still you get the nagging suspicion that Google is really putting a lot of thought

00:45:40   into this and Apple, you know, I'm sure they're trying but I don't see a lot of momentum with

00:45:47   Siri improvements.

00:45:48   So I think part of this problem is around data collection. Leading Apple blogger Marco

00:45:54   Arment wrote a good post about this that I tend to agree with over the weekend. Kind

00:46:01   of comparing, you know, it's kind of a thing you have to just go along with and I think

00:46:06   he makes a very good point but when you try and break it down simply it doesn't, it sounds

00:46:10   bit outlandish that comparing Apple to Blackberry in so much as Blackberry did not see coming

00:46:16   the smartphone and then when it happened they couldn't compete with it and I think that

00:46:21   this is a great analogy for data what is happening with data right now because as Marco puts

00:46:28   if Google and Amazon and companies like that are right about collecting data to make their

00:46:33   assistant products better, Apple kind of culturally doesn't and won't do this and this could come

00:46:43   back to bite them. If AI and like assistants are going to be the next big thing for our

00:46:49   devices I really don't think that unless they've got some kind of magical technology Apple

00:46:56   can do this without changing some of their core beliefs about the data that they collect

00:47:01   about us all individually?

00:47:03   Pete: Yeah, I think it can be overstated a little bit. I think there's a lot that Apple can do,

00:47:08   but I do think the larger question is perfectly valid, which is, you know, companies with wild

00:47:15   successes don't fall because suddenly the wild success is hated and goes away. It happens because

00:47:23   some other thing becomes important than the thing that they're good at and that they have control

00:47:28   over and then they can't adjust. And so that's the fear I think that comes through about like,

00:47:33   well, what's Apple's future? Does Apple really get this stuff? And again, who knows? Maybe there

00:47:41   are some amazing tech people inside Apple who are building voice and assistant technology that is

00:47:49   going to be great. And it might not even be great this year, but they're working on it and they're

00:47:53   waiting for their right moment. Maybe so, we can't see them, we don't know. All we've got

00:47:58   is the evidence. And the evidence is that Siri was an interesting idea in beta with

00:48:05   the iPhone 4S, right? And it's come some distance, but not really—if you had asked

00:48:12   me what I envisioned Siri of being capable of in 2016, when it launched, I would be grotesquely,

00:48:20   crushingly, just spectacularly disappointed with what the reality is. And that's just

00:48:28   it. And some of that is optimism and some of that is not fair because it's like, well,

00:48:31   I dream that it'll be this thing. But I think even a fair appraiser would say it doesn't

00:48:36   seem like it's gone very far. And does it require quantum leap? I mean, the people at

00:48:42   SRI who left to found this new company, they feel like they just basically needed to do

00:48:46   another agent. It was time for a completely different take on it. Google's got a lot

00:48:51   of people doing machine learning and all this stuff because that's Google, that's what

00:48:56   they do. And that's the thought here is like if Apple's really good at making polished

00:49:02   objects and integrated with software that runs on them, what happens to Apple when the

00:49:07   most important feature is the super intelligent brain that lives in the cloud and can help

00:49:14   you with everything that you want to do. Can Apple do that? Because right now the evidence

00:49:19   is that that's not a thing that Apple's good at.

00:49:23   Proactive Siri was introduced at last year's WWDC as a kind of a step into this, you know,

00:49:29   because companies were starting to move that way. You know, Google has a lot more of this

00:49:33   smarts built into it. And if I didn't know that this feature existed because they told

00:49:40   me, I would never know that anything was happening. Because it doesn't feel like it's being smart

00:49:44   in any way. I think the only thing that I've ever gotten any use out of is in Spotlight

00:49:49   when it seems to predict what applications I'm going to be using. That's great, but

00:49:54   that's outside of that. That's not incredibly smart, right? You're not really blowing

00:49:59   my mind with that functionality. Did I download something recently? Yes, no. Did I just open

00:50:06   an application and close it? Yeah, maybe put it in there. Or does Myke seem to open this

00:50:12   application at 12 o'clock on a Monday morning yeah he does" like that's cool but I'm not

00:50:16   really getting a massive amount from that and I'm really feeling like and I'm very much

00:50:23   hoping that I'll be surprised that at WWDC we're not going to see anything that is going

00:50:27   to be able to compete in this realm. Whether Apple will be able to at some point in the

00:50:32   future I am kind of unconvinced that they will be able to do it right now and I think

00:50:37   that might end up being a problem for them. You know a lot of these things we can kind

00:50:41   of sit in our little world and take a look at what we think the next trends are going

00:50:45   to be, but ultimately one of them will break out and this could be the next one that breaks

00:50:51   out and it feels like Apple are not going to be ready for it.

00:50:55   Right, and we don't know for sure, it's just this feeling like, well if they had this game

00:51:01   down then we would see it in Siri, more than what we've seen in Siri, like that simple.

00:51:09   And you know, I am prepared to be surprised. I do wonder sometimes if this is just one

00:51:15   of those areas where Apple's strategy is acquisition, is what they say on the analyst

00:51:22   call is M&A strategy, which is they'll buy it when they think they need it. But can you

00:51:28   imagine that like, we'll buy another Siri company and integrate it and make a new Siri.

00:51:35   I'm not sure, I'm not sure, I get that sometimes that's what you need to do, but,

00:51:41   you know, Google, it's a part of Google's core being doing this sort of thing in a way

00:51:47   that it isn't for Apple. And I don't know how you get it to be part of the core for

00:51:51   Apple.

00:51:52   Chris: Google have been collecting data about us before they even know that they needed

00:51:55   to create an intelligent system, right?

00:51:58   You know, but I think I gotta say I think that Google's collecting of data is

00:52:03   as an advantage is overstated a little bit that

00:52:06   Google

00:52:08   You know, there are ways for Apple

00:52:10   There are ways for Apple to do a lot of that Apple can collect data on the devices Apple could encrypt data

00:52:16   Based on your Apple ID and share it among your devices. Now the devices might need to do some of the intelligent processing

00:52:23   It's possible if Apple really doesn't want to ever see any of that data for you or Apple could come up with a strategy

00:52:29   where there's some of that data that Apple holds on to but you know that

00:52:33   Although that can give Google a leg up. I don't think that's the the biggest advantage

00:52:38   I think the biggest advantage is that Google has cloud services as a real core part of what they are that

00:52:44   having intelligence in the cloud and doing machine learning because like

00:52:48   Personalization is harder without personalized data, but you can still have data and machine

00:52:53   learning and and and make the products better and I'm just not convinced that Apple as it's

00:52:58   been structured it goes back to that Ben Thompson article about the the the about paint and

00:53:04   Gunpowder that Apple is a Apple is a polished hardware company with integrated software

00:53:10   And then the services stuff has sort of been floating around and they've made some steps to maybe realign how they do that

00:53:17   But so maybe they're headed in a good direction. I don't know but

00:53:21   But that's still the open question is if that becomes the most important thing the single most important thing in

00:53:28   being a platform vendor for for a smartphone then

00:53:33   Apple's gonna have a challenge because right now Apple is getting by with

00:53:37   middling services because their hardware and the software on the device is

00:53:41   Good, but at some point it won't matter and that's that and that's the blackberry analogy

00:53:47   the Marco made and I think it's right, which is at some point all the things you're good

00:53:50   at won't be the things that you need to succeed. And what happens then?

00:53:56   What happens is you're either ready for the change or you miss it. And this is Facebook

00:54:02   as well. Facebook are a recent example of this and this is something that Zuckerberg

00:54:06   has spoken about quite openly and I bring this up a lot because I really love the candidness

00:54:12   of a statement like this, which was when they bought Oculus. Zuckerberg basically said,

00:54:16   we missed mobile, we were late, I want to let it happen again." And it's like, I

00:54:21   love that, right? Like, we're just going to take a bet on VR because we think that

00:54:26   that's going to be the next big thing. We didn't take the right bet on mobile and

00:54:30   we were behind where we should have been. I think that is a great attitude to have.

00:54:34   Yeah, it's, yeah, we'll see what happens. It's hard because you make forecasts about

00:54:43   what is going to be important, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're right. It's also

00:54:47   interesting because Google wants to be everywhere, right? And iOS is an incredibly valuable platform.

00:54:53   So one of the advantages in some ways of being, especially if you're an iOS user, is that

00:55:00   you can use Google stuff and it will work. It won't work as well because it's not

00:55:06   as integrated into the platform, but it will work. So iOS users will be able to try all

00:55:11   this stuff out. But in the long run, the stuff just needs to be in the platform. It needs

00:55:18   to be integrated deeply, especially if the platform is so locked down like iOS is. So,

00:55:25   I don't know. I hope, and Apple's pride will never let them talk about this stuff publicly,

00:55:32   right? But I hope that in the background, Apple is well aware that one of their greatest

00:55:38   sort of existential threats is their lack of good cloud services and investment in things

00:55:49   like this assistant technology. I hope that they know that Siri has kind of been a disappointment

00:55:56   and that they need to do a lot better with it and not that they figure they can just

00:55:59   sort of like, "It's fine. It's not that important. We'll just keep patching over

00:56:02   it, which is sort of what it feels like has been happening with it. So, yeah, I don't

00:56:08   know. We'll see what happens. But you make a good point with Facebook. Remember how Facebook

00:56:14   was just totally missed? Missed mobile? They just totally like, whoop. Just, by the way,

00:56:22   Instagram still doesn't work on the iPad except in iPhone mode. So they're not all

00:56:27   the way there yet.

00:56:28   I just, I can't understand that.

00:56:29   I will never understand that.

00:56:30   Just, if you don't want me to take photos on my iPad

00:56:33   and post it on Instagram, that's fine.

00:56:35   Give me just an app where I can view them,

00:56:37   especially after they pulled the API function

00:56:40   for people, for apps that were doing that.

00:56:42   There were third-party apps that you could look

00:56:44   at Instagram photos on, and now they're gone.

00:56:46   It's like, what are you doing?

00:56:48   Ah, this week's episode is brought to you

00:56:51   by Smile and the new TextExpander,

00:56:53   which is simply indispensable.

00:56:55   Imagine for a moment dear listener,

00:56:58   you having the ability to never need

00:57:01   to type the same email address, chunk of code,

00:57:03   slogan, marketing copy, directions,

00:57:05   or any kind of data more than once.

00:57:07   Because with TextExpander,

00:57:09   you just type it in that one time,

00:57:10   you assign a snippet to it,

00:57:12   which is it'd be a couple of characters of text,

00:57:14   and then every time you need that piece of data again,

00:57:17   you just type in that character of text

00:57:19   and automatically it just expands for you

00:57:22   and fills the text in magically.

00:57:25   It's fantastic. TextExpander at its core helps you save one of your most precious resources.

00:57:31   Time.

00:57:32   So, I use TextExpander every day and one of my favourite features is the fill in the blank

00:57:38   snippets that they have. So you can create snippets with certain areas in them which

00:57:42   allow you to choose from drop downs or you can just enter in text or you can have your

00:57:47   cursor placed in specific areas so you can paste stuff in. I love all of this. If you

00:57:51   send the emails frequently that have pretty much the same content but you need to change

00:57:55   a few parts of it. Super super easy with TextExpander. And now something you're able to do with TextExpander

00:58:01   is also share groups of snippets with others. So let's say you work in a team, maybe you

00:58:05   do customer support or something and there are frequent responses that you want to standardise

00:58:09   across everybody. This is super simple to do with the new TextExpander and if something

00:58:13   changes in a snippet it just needs to be updated once and it's updated for everyone. TextExpander

00:58:18   now includes apps for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows which is currently in beta so no matter

00:58:23   where you are all of your snippets will be right with you at all times. Live hacker subscriptions

00:58:28   to TextExpander cost $40 per year and include all of those apps and the TextExpander sharing

00:58:33   service and there are discounts available for registered and previous TextExpander users

00:58:38   as well. You can also get team subscriptions, these include organisation focused snippet

00:58:42   management, detailed access control, consolidated billing and so much more. You want to boost

00:58:48   your productivity and learn more at smile software dot com slash upgrade. Thank you

00:58:52   so much to smile for their continued support of this very program.

00:58:57   It is ask upgrade time Jason Snell. We didn't do any last week so there were some extra

00:59:03   lasers because they've been kind of waiting in the wings. They're overpowered now those

00:59:07   lasers. The first question comes from C Ficket and C Ficket asks is there a way to always

00:59:14   get the desktop version of websites by default on my iPad Pro. Now I know that both Safari

00:59:22   and Chrome have an option so you can go to a page and you can click the options, whether

00:59:28   it's the three little lines in Chrome or the weird square arrow button in Safari and you

00:59:34   can bring up the extensions view and say I want to view the desktop version and it will

00:59:38   then force the desktop version to show. Now with those applications there is no way that

00:59:44   I am aware of to force the browser into that mode.

00:59:49   Yeah, in those applications you can't. However you want to check out an app like

00:59:53   iCab which is another third party browser which has a gajillion settings in it and one

00:59:59   of the things that you can do with iCab is force the, what do they call it, is it user

01:00:04   agent? Is that what it's called? Yeah, yeah, user agent string.

01:00:08   you can force the user agent to present to the website that it's something that it's not. So you

01:00:13   can say that you're a Mac rather than an iOS device. So if this is something that's really

01:00:17   important to you for some reason, that is a way that you can force the websites to change.

01:00:23   Now, iCab, there are some others I believe that will do this, but iCab is the one off the top of

01:00:27   my head that I know can. It is an incredibly feature rich and complex application, which you

01:00:32   will either love or hate, but it does some stuff that no other app will do. I think iCab on the

01:00:38   iPad will allow you to have two web pages open side by side so you could have in

01:00:47   split screen two web pages on the left and something else on the right so it is

01:00:51   an incredibly powerful web browser and for iPad power users I think it is a

01:00:57   good tool to have I've heard Federico and Fraser on canvas speak very highly

01:01:03   of this and I think there is an episode where they go into detail about web

01:01:07   browsers I will find that and put it in the show notes for you if they do do that. I'm

01:01:14   pretty sure they did do that at some point but I can't make it.

01:01:16   It sounds familiar yeah and I would say I would love it if Safari and Chrome would provide

01:01:25   a desktop browsing mode. You do give some things up when you do that. Some websites

01:01:30   will try to put flash video and stuff in the desktop version that they don't bother with

01:01:36   the mobile version. Sometimes I find myself switching to the mobile version on my Mac

01:01:40   in order to see video without having flash. But yeah, one of my frustrations about having

01:01:48   especially the 12.9 inch iPad Pro is there are a lot of websites that are aggressively

01:01:52   like "You're on a mobile device! I'll give you this weird phone view on your 13 inch

01:01:58   screen and it's terrible." And so I find myself hitting that request desktop site button a

01:02:05   a lot and a lot more than I used to in fact. So, iCab is a good, if you want to just sort

01:02:12   of have an icon that you can open that will give you the desktop browsing experience and

01:02:16   then keep Safari and Chrome around for other uses, that would work too.

01:02:22   Steve McLaughlin Blake asked, "Should I get the 9.7 or 12.9

01:02:25   inch iPad Pro mostly going to be used for movies, music and email?"

01:02:29   Easy question.

01:02:30   No, this is incredibly difficult.

01:02:33   I know.

01:02:35   Because you've given two separate uses.

01:02:38   So if you're going to be mainly watching movies and consuming entertainment, I would say go

01:02:42   12.9 because it's a better screen, a bigger screen, louder speakers, you know, it's a

01:02:47   better music and media consumption device.

01:02:51   But if you're going to be doing like email and web browsing, then maybe you want the

01:02:54   portability of a 9.7 inch.

01:02:56   I think this is a really difficult question to answer.

01:03:01   If you are mainly going to be using this as an entertainment device, I would say go 12.9.

01:03:07   If you're mainly going to be using this as a reading device, whether that be reading

01:03:13   articles, reading Twitter, reading email, I would suggest 9.7.

01:03:18   So I think you've kind of got to boil it down a little bit more.

01:03:21   I think the default should be 9.7 and then you should consider do I really want the extra

01:03:26   weight and size and cost of the 12.9 because I want to do X. And if it really is like,

01:03:32   "Well, I just want to have the biggest screen possible for watching movies and the loudest

01:03:35   speakers," then okay. But I think most people will prefer the 9.7.

01:03:41   I agree. But the 12.9 is a marvelous machine for what it does.

01:03:47   Oh, I love it. Yeah.

01:03:48   All right. And then Fred asks, this one's definitely for you, Jason, "Does the Kindle

01:03:52   Oasis allow you to tweet quotes like earlier models?

01:03:56   So as far as I don't tweet quotes from my Kindle generally, occasionally I do but very

01:04:01   rarely, I haven't tested this but as far as I can tell the software is exactly the

01:04:06   same.

01:04:07   It's basically always the same.

01:04:09   Amazon doesn't tend to remove features, they just keep on kind of adding features as they

01:04:14   go to the existing, you know, to the new models and occasionally it will be an update for

01:04:19   old models. So I think it hasn't changed substantially so I don't see why that feature

01:04:24   wouldn't still be there. You can still link your Twitter account and your Facebook account

01:04:27   and I believe you can do all of those social sharing features that they used to offer.

01:04:31   Ben Deorey And finally Jim asks, "Hamilton the musical

01:04:34   is taking America by storm. What does Myke think of it?" This is a very good question.

01:04:40   I have never listened to Hamilton. It is on my list of things to do. I wonder for my own

01:04:47   self and you know I'm sure that many people probably feel this if just listening to a

01:04:51   musical is going to give me the effect that I really want you know like am I really going

01:04:56   to learn to love it but the thing is everybody that I know has only pretty much just listened

01:05:02   to it right and that's how they fell in love with it um this was funny to me because a

01:05:07   couple maybe like a week or so ago uh adena kind of came across hamilton for the first time um

01:05:13   I think she saw some links to something and she was showing me some YouTube videos like of the

01:05:18   trailer and the promo of the Broadway show. And literally as soon as it is possible for tickets

01:05:26   to be purchased for the West End show, which will happen eventually, I will be buying them

01:05:31   because I know how much of a hot ticket this show is. So I'll be trying my level best to get tickets.

01:05:38   I also did, we're watching House right now, we're going through all of House,

01:05:42   and we just got to the few sequence of episodes with, is it Lin-Manuel?

01:05:47   What's his name?

01:05:48   Lin-Manuel Miranda.

01:05:49   That's it. He's in some episodes of House and he's fantastic in them. I'm very excited to see

01:05:56   Hamilton at some point. I plan to listen to it at some point. I am excited by the thought of it

01:06:02   because so many of my friends love it. I am fascinated by a few things. So, it sounds like

01:06:07   like Cameron Mackintosh is going to bring it to the West End in London in 2017, so next

01:06:12   year sometime, I'm fascinated to see how you in particular as an English person and

01:06:18   the English people in general who love theater but also are the other side of the war being

01:06:24   told in the story of Hamilton, the perspective, not how they will react to, "Oh, they're

01:06:31   laughing at the king, oh," you know, but how they will react just because it's not

01:06:36   a part of their story that they're told as a child like it is in America, and so I'm

01:06:43   going to be fascinated by the kind of international reactions to this American musical. It'll

01:06:50   be interesting.

01:06:51   I think it might work, and the reason I think it might work very well is the Book of Mormon.

01:06:55   The Book of Mormon was incredibly popular here, like it has been everywhere else it's

01:07:00   gone in. The average British person knows nothing about Mormonism.

01:07:05   And it's also a very American-focused musical, but we love it for that because we laugh at

01:07:11   that.

01:07:12   [laughs]

01:07:13   - Yeah, sure.

01:07:14   Well, I mean Les Miserables is about the French Revolution and it has played successfully

01:07:18   everywhere.

01:07:19   - Forever.

01:07:20   - And I'm sure the French have a different perspective on it, but it's fine.

01:07:27   And there's definitely some Les Mis moments in Hamilton.

01:07:30   Anyway, cross-promotion.

01:07:32   should check out Pod4Ham which is at the incomparable.com/pod4ham or you can just go to the incomparable.com

01:07:38   and you'll see it there and it's a weekly podcast about the musical Hamilton taking

01:07:43   it one track at a time from the cast recording. So it's different panels every week but

01:07:48   we've been doing that in the incomparable world. We're getting close to the end of

01:07:50   Act 1 now and if we do one track a week we'll be done before the end of the year with the

01:07:55   entire like 40 some tracks on the on the cast recording.

01:08:01   So, that will also be on our show notes, which you can find at relay.fm/upgrades/90.

01:08:05   Big 9-0 today.

01:08:07   We've been doing this show for a long time.

01:08:09   We're approaching episode 100 before you know it.

01:08:11   Imagine if we were John Siracusa or Marco Arment, we would be ten episodes away from retirement.

01:08:16   Uh-oh. Don't leave me, Jason.

01:08:18   We're not. We're not.

01:08:20   Thank you so much to TextExpander and Pingdom for sponsoring this week's show.

01:08:25   If you want to find Jason online, head on over to the incomparable.com and sixcolors.com for Jason's other work.

01:08:30   other work. He does also host Clockwise and Liftoff on relay FM. Very embedded here and

01:08:36   we love that very much. If you want to find Jason on Twitter he is @jsnelljsnellll. I

01:08:41   am @imike. We don't say stuff like this very often, recommend the show if you enjoy it

01:08:47   to people. We would love that if you just tell a friend, maybe you could leave a review

01:08:51   for us in iTunes or even recommend the show in Overcast. I don't think I've ever said

01:08:56   those words on this show before like all of that stuff so it's only one time go and do it or go

01:09:01   sign up to be a member reload.fm slash membership just go check all that sort of stuff out we'd love

01:09:06   you forever thank you so much for listening as always and we'll be back next week until then

01:09:12   say goodbye mrs now aloha hello goodbye