29: Velcro Ball
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From Relay FM, this is Upgrade Episode number 29.
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This week's show, which is coming to you live from Ireland,
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is sponsored by lynda.com, where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts,
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MailRoute, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam, and Bushall,
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a cloud-based mobile device management solution for the Mac, iPhone, and the iPad.
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My name is Myke Hurley, and I'm joined, as always, by the king of the Emerald Isle, Mr.
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Jason Snell.
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We are here.
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This is a podcast that we do.
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It is indeed.
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And it's week two of Jason and Myke do a podcast on the road.
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Well, you're on the road now.
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I've been on the road a long time.
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But yeah, we're in Killarney, Ireland now.
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How about that?
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I don't know what my family looks like anymore.
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And we are safely ensconced in a beautiful hotel for the All Conference.
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Me and you are here this week.
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We're doing some exciting things.
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And All is a great little conference.
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And it's something that people should check out if they haven't already.
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And also keep your eye.
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There's some interesting stuff happening this week that people may be able to view no matter
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away you are.
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So that's fun.
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But yeah, so we are both now here.
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We took a lovely train yesterday which brought us down to Killarney from Dublin.
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That was the—they chartered an OOL train.
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It actually said on the board, "OOL, private charter."
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And it was the—if that train had wrecked, half of the podcasts in the Apple sphere would
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It would have been over.
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Because that was—I was, you know, sitting with Marco and Tiffany Arment and you were
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just down the aisle a bit, and it was all just Apple people.
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René and Serenity and Georgia from Imore were all there.
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I got to meet George's husband, who was exactly as awesome as I would have expected
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Yeah, it was a great trip down on the train.
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And although we were all sort of zombies, because we were all tired and traveling from
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far-off places, but…
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Yeah, some people were just like, they had arrived in Ireland and just went straight
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to the train.
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Like at least me and you, we'd stayed over, I guess, which made it a lot easier.
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Yeah, so it was good.
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I think that, not to do too much of our travelogue and make people feel bad for not traveling,
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but I think one of the themes that I've experienced the last week and a half is meeting people
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I think at this conference, we did our meetup last week.
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Which went fantastically.
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Thank you to everyone that came.
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only a week ago, though.
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I know, a week ago today.
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It's hard to believe.
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We recorded last week's episode, and then we went to the Big Chill House in London,
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and you do something like that, and you hope that we don't outnumber the people who come
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to see us, right?
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It's like us and our friends and then two people who are podcast listeners.
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And somebody told me, and I can't verify this, but somebody told me that at some point they
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They counted 65 people in that room.
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That's how many I guess I would have estimated.
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I picked a specific venue because I felt that it would fit people in.
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Because I've been there before and I knew that it had some rooms to it.
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So if we started to get a bit of an unruly group going on, which we did, we were able
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to go away and not bother the rest of the patrons.
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Yeah, we were blocking the entire bar and then we went upstairs and essentially it was
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just us up there.
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And there were a lot of us.
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So that was amazing.
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And it was great.
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It was just great to meet those people.
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And it says something about the value of meeting people face to face.
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It says something about the community that I think that something like podcasting can
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One of my good friends is Simon Jerry, who is the publisher at IDG UK.
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And I stayed with him and his family when I was in London.
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And he and Karen, who's the editor of Macworld UK, came to the meetup, and they were, I think,
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quite surprised by the numbers, because they're not podcast people.
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So it was good to see it through their eyes, too, and see just how amazing it is and how
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much people love listening to podcasts.
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And we have that same thing when we meet people who do podcasts that we love.
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to see them in person and get the enthusiasm and feel from other people how much they enjoy
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listening to what we do.
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But also it was like a meeting of the tribe.
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I felt like it's like these are our people.
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It was really nice to just chat with all of them.
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And for me, I was bouncing between people talking about Star Wars and Doctor Who and
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things from The Incomparable and then people talking about Apple stuff from Upgrade and
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Six Colors and Clockwise.
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So that was pretty – that was a lot of fun, too.
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interests were really diverse, so it was a great night.
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And they kept bringing us drinks, Myke.
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Yeah, I made the good mistake on analog talking about my favorite bourbons, and then they
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just kept appearing in my hands.
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People just kept bringing me glasses of Maker's Mark.
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I thought you were doing okay with the beer, and then I saw you with whiskey in your hand,
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and I thought, "Oh no."
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It was really...
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It's like this sort of thing, and the reason that I wanted us to talk about this today
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It was because one of the ongoing themes we've had in this show is that we're both going through like changes in our
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lives that are related to our work right one of the big things for me is the
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Detachment from people on a day-to-day basis like I don't when I used to work in an office
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Whether I wanted to speak to people or whatever there was always people around right and I'm learning now that the value in making sure
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I get out to meet people in these sort of environments
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So I think it's interesting for anybody that likes this stuff or works on their own or
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whatever to go to these types of things like meetups and conferences and stuff.
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Because it really helps just give you the human interaction that we all need.
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Yeah, and something like Slack and Skype, they can do a lot.
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It can go a long way, but there's that little extra part of it, that meeting, like me and
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you hanging out in person adds that little bit more that we can't get from just talking
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Last night, after dinner, we were hanging out with a bunch of other people in the bar
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talking and drinking various things.
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I was having some Guinness.
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We have an Ask upgrade about that later, I think.
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And it was just, I was sitting there thinking, "We haven't spent a lot of time together
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in person, and it's good.
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It's a different thing, and we haven't spent any time together since we started doing this
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And so it's been really good for that, that it's like a little host bonding time.
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And it's good, and it does remind me as well that even though I do get out of my house
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and see other parents when I'm picking my kids up from school and we try to have people
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over for dinner sometimes, it does remind me that I do need to make that extra effort
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to see people, because it's another thing and it can't entirely be replaced by a Slack
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chatroom or a Google Hangout.
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It's like one of those things where I'm working really hard on something and my girlfriend's
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like, "You haven't left the house for two days.
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Maybe you should just leave."
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I was like, "Ah, I'm working hard."
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It's like you're in a big plastic bubble with the inquisitive on the label.
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Yeah, that's why.
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Myke's inside the bubble.
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He's inside the bubble now.
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Let him out.
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He's inquiring.
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Leave him alone.
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Let him out.
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Before we lose all our listeners through to people just not wanting to hear about our
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Yes, #RelayYourFeels.
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Let's let Casey deal with it.
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That is actually one of the subjects of Analog this week was the meetup because Casey was
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That's actually, if you haven't listened to Analog before, I suggest this week's
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episode because there's also, I get really, really angry about something that I want to
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get off my chest and I think it's really interesting.
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All right, there's some follow out of a sort.
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Check that out.
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Actually, episode number 33, but it's in our show notes.
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Mr. J, it's now, "Why Can People Find the Show Notes for Upgrade?"
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It's at relay.fm/upgrade/twenty--I have to scroll up.
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Oh, no, my internet--29.
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Or in your podcast app that you're listening to right now.
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Because they're probably in there.
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Should we take a quick break?
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I think that's a good idea.
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This week's episode is brought to you by our friends over at lynda.com.
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Thank you so much to Linda for their continued support of Upgrade and Relay FM.
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Do you like it when you see me do the ads live?
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In fact, at one point, and I'm tempted to tweet that picture, at one point you punched
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the air with your fist while you were reading.
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I kept really excited.
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That was impressive.
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It is funny, because as we were going into that, and we had the little back and forth
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there, and that's something, that's actually something that we can't really do because
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of the distance between England and California, the latency in Skype, we can't do that quick.
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You kind of have to give everything a few seconds to land because of that.
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So that's another fun thing.
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The speed of light conspires against us there, Myke.
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That is the main problem Ian, you have with the show.
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The latency is really, really high.
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But we're getting there now.
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That's not the main problem.
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You have many more.
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So many more.
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Is Myke right?
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How do you feel about the 6+ now?
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Well, you've been very confident online about being right about the 6 Plus.
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And so when I was flying over here from Glasgow, because I went from London, I took the train
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up to Glasgow, stayed there for a few days, got to see all things Scottish, had a truly
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Scottish meal, which was a curry, which was actually great.
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It was my first curry.
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My wife is very excited that she can take me to Indian food now that I've approved of
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some Indian food, at least in the Scottish fashion. Can you get me some good Scottish
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Indian food? That's what I need now. And so we flew down from Glasgow, and I wanted to
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listen to music on the plane while I was reading, because I was reading that new Steve Jobs
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book. And I realized all my music was on my iPhone 6 that I brought with me, but it's
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just been turned off. So it's in airplane mode. I turned it on, and I was listening
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to music. The moment I pulled it out and I held it in my hand, I thought, "Oh, this
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is the moment of truth for 'Is Myke Right or Not?'" And I have to say, I felt this
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just sort of like sigh of relief about it, because I still feel more comfortable with
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the 6. I like the 6+. I don't think I ever hated it. I feel like maybe it's just not
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for me, that I like the smaller size. You can learn the tricks—you were talking about
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this last night, you can learn the tricks to sort of moving it around, but there is
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sort of a dexterity that you need to become practiced with to flip that, you know, hold
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it and flip it around in certain ways to reach other parts of the screen.
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And I can appreciate learning that, and I have been learning some of that, but I'm,
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you know, I don't think it's for me.
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I am seeing more of the benefits about it.
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So this is where I will say that Myke was right, is traveling, I brought it, one of
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reasons I brought it was the big battery. And I thought if I'm out and about somewhere
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traveling, I don't want to run out of my battery because then I'm not going to know where I
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am and not be able to get home. And that's been great. That battery is amazing. It is
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truly amazing. So I have positive feelings about it, but unless it changes in the next
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few days, my feeling is that I would not get a 6 Plus or its successor as my next phone.
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But my wife, I think, is intrigued by it, because she keeps her phone in her purse,
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and she doesn't do a lot of wandering around with the one-handed phone thing, and she likes
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the bigger screen.
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So, someone in my family may get a plus in the end, but I don't think that will be me.
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So I found it really interesting at dinner last night that 6+ became a topic of conversation.
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And that was, we should say, our dinner table.
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It was you and me and Georgia and Renee and Serenity and Marco and Tiff and James Thompson,
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and there were a couple other people there.
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Tiff's, Georgia's husband, and the other people were down at the other end of the table,
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and I'm not sure who they were, but it was a crazy table.
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Yeah, it was great.
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And the 6+ came up.
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Yeah, because Georgia has this incredible case, which has a little strap on the back.
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So she holds it, she's able to put her fingers into the strap so she can more confidently
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reach around the screen because it's not...
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It's an elastic strap that's basically like a sticker so you can put it on any case or
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even on the phone itself and it's this little elastic hand strap.
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Have you ever played, there is like a game, like a garden game where you have like a big
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circle of Velcro.
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Yeah, oh yeah.
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It reminded me of that and you throw the ball and you catch it.
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I can't remember what it's called.
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But that's what it reminded me of,
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'cause you can just, you have it attached to your hand,
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and everyone on the table is like,
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"Whoa, all of this is magic!"
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But I find it so interesting that this is coming up now.
00:15:44
◼
►
Like the 6+ is back into all the podcasts
00:15:47
◼
►
that we listen to, everyone's talking about it again.
00:15:48
◼
►
It's because people are traveling.
00:15:50
◼
►
So it's, the reason that the 6+ always made sense for me
00:15:55
◼
►
is was the amount of commuting that I did.
00:15:57
◼
►
And it still makes sense to me,
00:15:58
◼
►
'cause when I do leave the house,
00:16:01
◼
►
which you know i'm not all you go a long time when i'm almost today
00:16:05
◼
►
so the good enough and i like to be able to use my phone for the whole day
00:16:09
◼
►
and i'm really heavy i've been used
00:16:12
◼
►
i'm very very frequently doing more than one thing like i'm listening to a
00:16:16
◼
►
podcast playing game or listen to music reading twitter and flying around and
00:16:20
◼
►
doing this is like i'd really push it
00:16:23
◼
►
so that's why i like the battery makes so much sense in the screen makes so
00:16:26
◼
►
much sense of you during reading on it
00:16:28
◼
►
you said you were reading on the Kindle.
00:16:30
◼
►
Yeah, I was just reading on the Kindle.
00:16:31
◼
►
I mean, I've done a lot of using Twitter, just reading web articles and Nuzzle and using
00:16:36
◼
►
things that Nuzzle finds for me.
00:16:40
◼
►
So I'm reading articles, just not like a book.
00:16:42
◼
►
I'm not using it for that.
00:16:45
◼
►
I think the other part of it, what will be interesting to see is when the Apple Watch
00:16:49
◼
►
comes out, then will it change even more opinions on how people use the 6 Plus?
00:16:55
◼
►
less and it's staying in your pocket more, then the Apple Watch is an interesting justification
00:17:01
◼
►
for the 6 Plus because you've got your quick interactions on the small device and then
00:17:05
◼
►
when you really want to go, "Oh, here it comes!
00:17:08
◼
►
Here comes the big device!" because now you're serious about something.
00:17:12
◼
►
Because it makes sense to me from a logical perspective.
00:17:15
◼
►
If you're using your phone in your hand less, you may as well have, when you do have it,
00:17:22
◼
►
you have the maximum amount of everything you can have.
00:17:25
◼
►
That's what makes sense to me, because if I'm using my watch to do a lot of interaction,
00:17:30
◼
►
because that's how I expect, in theory, it would be, the majority of quick interactions
00:17:35
◼
►
pulling out, checking something, responding to a message, should all be going on here
00:17:39
◼
►
now on the watch.
00:17:42
◼
►
So then in that case, it won't be such a problem that this isn't really a one-handed device.
00:17:45
◼
►
Although somebody-
00:17:46
◼
►
He said "here," by the way, and tapped his wrist.
00:17:49
◼
►
And then tapped my pocket.
00:17:50
◼
►
And then tapped his pocket, which is really good for me, because I'm here, but bad for
00:17:54
◼
►
But that's what happens.
00:17:55
◼
►
>> This is why I don't like to do videos.
00:17:57
◼
►
People say, "Why do you do video when you record?"
00:18:00
◼
►
Because it changes things.
00:18:01
◼
►
>> Because then, oh, this happens to me when I'm on Leo Laporte's shows all the time, is
00:18:04
◼
►
that I'm very well aware that they have an audio component and people can just listen
00:18:08
◼
►
to the audio.
00:18:09
◼
►
But they will always, and you find yourself doing it too, reference things that are visual.
00:18:14
◼
►
Like, oh, you know, that's what it looks like.
00:18:17
◼
►
And people listening to audio have no idea what you're talking about.
00:18:19
◼
►
>> I'm like, "Yeah, Jason, look."
00:18:20
◼
►
>> Yeah, right there.
00:18:22
◼
►
That's your pocket.
00:18:23
◼
►
I also thought it was funny that Georgia's thing was,
00:18:28
◼
►
it's all in the eye of the beholder,
00:18:31
◼
►
because a lot of people were like, "Oh, that's so cool."
00:18:33
◼
►
And I sat there thinking, "See, that's the problem
00:18:36
◼
►
"with the 6 Plus, is people are excited about sticking
00:18:40
◼
►
"an elastic hand strap on the back like you can use it
00:18:44
◼
►
"to catch a ball with Velcro."
00:18:47
◼
►
I think that points out its flaw, but it also shows you
00:18:53
◼
►
the enthusiasm people have for using it despite the fact that it's so huge because they get
00:18:58
◼
►
so much else out of it.
00:18:59
◼
►
So it's both of those things at once.
00:19:01
◼
►
Someone did say something to me recently on Twitter which I found really interesting,
00:19:04
◼
►
is that using the Apple Watch is a two-handed device.
00:19:09
◼
►
Yeah because it's on your wrist and then you have to touch it with your other hand.
00:19:12
◼
►
So it's like the convenience is you can look at things but interaction will always be two-handed.
00:19:18
◼
►
Right although you're not holding it, anything in either hand, but yeah you always have to
00:19:22
◼
►
to have the pointer and the… unless you are a contortionist.
00:19:26
◼
►
I don't know, like you strap it to your shoulder or something, so you can just poke
00:19:30
◼
►
your shoulder.
00:19:31
◼
►
But like, that was an interesting thing to me.
00:19:34
◼
►
But I think the majority of the benefit is just knowing what that vibration in my pocket
00:19:39
◼
►
was about, which is why I love the pepper and I think it's why you love the pepper
00:19:44
◼
►
And that's why for some people…
00:19:45
◼
►
Or missing the vibration because it's not in your pocket.
00:19:48
◼
►
Yeah, exactly.
00:19:49
◼
►
So I mean, as we're getting closer and closer, I am becoming more and more excited for the
00:19:55
◼
►
Apple Watch.
00:19:56
◼
►
And I've found that the more that we talk about it, the more people talk about it, the
00:19:59
◼
►
more excited we all get with the possibility of it.
00:20:03
◼
►
I think it's got the chance, it's got the possibility to be really great.
00:20:10
◼
►
Well, I mean, it's going to be a first generation product and early software.
00:20:16
◼
►
So I suspect that Apple will learn a lot.
00:20:20
◼
►
So it'll be interesting to see how fully formed it is in the first go and what it changes
00:20:25
◼
►
But it's got the potential to be really great, I think.
00:20:27
◼
►
It's so interesting to me that we could be in a situation where these devices that we're
00:20:32
◼
►
so used to using, we're now going to use it in a completely different way.
00:20:37
◼
►
Like, I am so tied to this and this screen doing things on it all the time.
00:20:41
◼
►
You touched his pocket again.
00:20:42
◼
►
Yeah, I did it.
00:20:43
◼
►
I can't help it.
00:20:45
◼
►
I'm just really interested to think that that's going to shift.
00:20:49
◼
►
Well, right now it's 100% of our walking around connecting to the internet.
00:20:54
◼
►
It's a little bit like when we said phones and tablets are going to change how we use computers
00:21:00
◼
►
because we won't need the computers for everything anymore.
00:21:03
◼
►
This has the potential to do that with our smartphones where they're not going to go away,
00:21:07
◼
►
but they become the hub of other devices that are using its internet connection even,
00:21:12
◼
►
even, but are how we interact.
00:21:15
◼
►
If you could shave off a third of your interactions with your phone and put them on the watch,
00:21:20
◼
►
and that made them faster and simpler, that could be great.
00:21:24
◼
►
But that is changing how you use your phone, because now you're not using your phone for
00:21:29
◼
►
those purposes.
00:21:30
◼
►
And that's really interesting.
00:21:31
◼
►
Before the original iPhone came out, and when we knew what it could do and leading up to
00:21:35
◼
►
it, I spent a lot of time thinking about, in my life, what are the things that I'm doing
00:21:40
◼
►
I'm doing, like the things that I'm doing that I could do with the iPhone.
00:21:46
◼
►
I see you sit and think, "Oh, this is good, but imagine if I had the iPhone for this."
00:21:50
◼
►
And I'm now doing that with the watch.
00:21:52
◼
►
We went to dinner and I was walking from my hotel and it was about a half hour walk.
00:21:57
◼
►
I didn't know the route, so I was keeping my phone in my jacket pocket so I could take
00:22:01
◼
►
it out and look, keep taking it out and looking.
00:22:03
◼
►
And I was thinking if I had it on the watch for the location, for the walking stuff, it's
00:22:08
◼
►
so much easier.
00:22:09
◼
►
And plus I was in a, it was a perfectly nice area,
00:22:12
◼
►
but it was an area I didn't know.
00:22:13
◼
►
So I didn't want to keep taking my phone on my pocket.
00:22:15
◼
►
- I know, yeah me too.
00:22:16
◼
►
- Because I don't, I just don't know where I'm walking.
00:22:20
◼
►
I don't know if I'm walking through a good part of Dublin
00:22:22
◼
►
or a bad part of Dublin.
00:22:24
◼
►
- And I didn't want to keep having to do that.
00:22:25
◼
►
So able to look at my watch would be nice.
00:22:27
◼
►
And I have seen people like,
00:22:28
◼
►
well you're now wearing this product, showing the world.
00:22:31
◼
►
That is a definite thing. - That's true.
00:22:33
◼
►
- And I wonder what that will be like.
00:22:34
◼
►
'Cause I know whenever I've got,
00:22:36
◼
►
like when I got the iPhone for the first time,
00:22:37
◼
►
or got an iPad for the first time,
00:22:39
◼
►
there is that like self, like I'm very conscious about the fact that I have this device that
00:22:47
◼
►
when people see it they'll be like "oh he's got the new Apple thing" but now it's like
00:22:52
◼
►
you won't be able to miss the watch because it'll be in front of everyone because it's
00:22:55
◼
►
attached to your body.
00:22:56
◼
►
Yeah then again it's a watch and people wear watches so there's that which is it's not
00:23:01
◼
►
a new, it's a new product but it's in an old class so you'll have to pay closer attention
00:23:08
◼
►
to what it is.
00:23:12
◼
►
And so at that point it's like, yes, if a watch thief is looking for the expensive
00:23:17
◼
►
watches and then trying to rip them off your wrist, they'll notice that you have an Apple
00:23:23
◼
►
But a lot of people may just not even notice because it's just a watch.
00:23:27
◼
►
So before we move on, because I want to talk about Steve Gill's book, because you mentioned
00:23:30
◼
►
that there was one thing, you said you listen to music when you read.
00:23:33
◼
►
Do you listen to music with lyrics?
00:23:36
◼
►
Interesting.
00:23:37
◼
►
when I work, too, when I write. And we were talking about this, you get a bunch of writers
00:23:41
◼
►
and programmers together, and this always comes up. Marco and I were talking about listening
00:23:49
◼
►
to music versus listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and how Tiff can listen to audiobooks
00:23:58
◼
►
and podcasts while she's working because she's editing photos. And I think there's truth
00:24:06
◼
►
in saying that they're using visual parts of your brain, and your speech centers and
00:24:12
◼
►
your language centers are a different part of your brain, and that's when things get
00:24:15
◼
►
complicated is when you have a collision.
00:24:18
◼
►
And so everybody—I know people who can't listen to music when they're writing or
00:24:24
◼
►
I know people who can't listen to music with lyrics.
00:24:25
◼
►
For me—and I'm sure I've said this before somewhere—what I need is to listen to things
00:24:34
◼
►
I know by heart.
00:24:35
◼
►
So, or things without lyrics is fine too, but what I can't do is download the new
00:24:43
◼
►
Death Cab for Cutie album.
00:24:45
◼
►
See, I'm being timely with the kids.
00:24:47
◼
►
Federico will be happy.
00:24:50
◼
►
I can't download that album and just start listening to it as I'm writing because I
00:24:56
◼
►
will be distracted by the songs.
00:25:00
◼
►
But once I know them, they fade into the background and it's just good energy and I know what
00:25:04
◼
►
all the songs are and I know how they feel, but I'm not tuned into the detail anymore,
00:25:12
◼
►
and that makes the difference for me.
00:25:13
◼
►
So yes, I put on a playlist, and if it's not working for me, I'll put on a different
00:25:18
◼
►
playlist because it needs to sort of fit my mood too.
00:25:21
◼
►
But I have no problem with the words thing, and I know some people that bothers them,
00:25:25
◼
►
but I can write with music.
00:25:26
◼
►
In fact, I mean, I wrote my first NaNoWriMo novel that I did.
00:25:32
◼
►
I wrote 100,000 words with nothing but "image and heap" and "say anything" on repeat.
00:25:39
◼
►
So if I was feeling in one mood, it would be the "image and heap" electronic stuff,
00:25:44
◼
►
and if I was feeling in another mood, it was the punk rock.
00:25:47
◼
►
And I wrote the whole book that way.
00:25:50
◼
►
And that's all music with lyrics, but I knew it by heart, and it was more about the
00:25:55
◼
►
What about you?
00:25:57
◼
►
I can listen to music with lyrics when I write.
00:26:01
◼
►
So when I write scripts and stuff, but I tend to listen to things that pump me up to keep
00:26:07
◼
►
the energy going.
00:26:08
◼
►
So that tends to be like Chiptune music.
00:26:11
◼
►
So they are a sponsor, but Bravewave are a great little record label that they've created
00:26:16
◼
►
a few albums that are like this.
00:26:17
◼
►
They work with video game composers.
00:26:20
◼
►
And that's the "you're behind the app" theme.
00:26:24
◼
►
They created the music as well, but their stuff is really fast-paced and upbeat, and
00:26:29
◼
►
that helps me go through stuff.
00:26:31
◼
►
But that goes to what I was saying about the mood, too, is that I can't just put on anything.
00:26:36
◼
►
Sometimes a morning will come and I'll have some nice, friendly, smooth, easy pop stuff,
00:26:46
◼
►
and I'll think to myself, "No, I'm in a blacker mood than that," and I'll put on my "Who
00:26:52
◼
►
Husker Du, Bob Mould, Playlist, which is all just sort of like loud guitars and shouting.
00:26:56
◼
►
It's like, "Yes, that's what I need now.
00:26:58
◼
►
I need the loud guitars and the shouting this morning."
00:27:01
◼
►
There's a song called "Something I Learned Today" by Husker Du, which is a – yeah,
00:27:09
◼
►
if I want to get up in the morning and be energetic and also angry, the catharsis that
00:27:15
◼
►
that song and songs like that provide is – I mean, music is kind of a drug in that way.
00:27:21
◼
►
It's a mood enhancer, and I definitely use it that way.
00:27:27
◼
►
I did get to the point when I was in my old job that I could listen to podcasts whilst
00:27:31
◼
►
writing a little bit.
00:27:34
◼
►
Because it was out of necessity.
00:27:35
◼
►
I really wanted to listen to podcasts so I could do basic copywriting and just responding
00:27:40
◼
►
to emails and stuff when listening.
00:27:43
◼
►
Thus proving that marketing does not activate any of the language centers of your brain.
00:27:48
◼
►
On that note…
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This week's episode is also brought to you by Bushall.
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it doesn't get rid of their personal stuff as well. So Bushaw, it's really
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Like this sounds like magic. I don't really know how you're doing it. There's things
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thank you so much to push over supporting this show don't check them
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that you are uh... time of your favorite feature bush one i nodded
00:30:16
◼
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that was also really funny 'cause no one can see that
00:30:19
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i was agreeing with you yeah i like that's a little easier to get the
00:30:22
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reinforcement yeah punch the air
00:30:26
◼
►
so still with the drug book how far
00:30:29
◼
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so this is the coming steve jobs yep which is this new book
00:30:32
◼
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written by branch lender and rick too
00:30:35
◼
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telly something that's lee i'd not only telly there is a lot of uh... business
00:30:40
◼
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writers and people who work at the four bs and fast companies com
00:31:04
◼
►
the podcast that John Gruber moderated with them at the Apple Store.
00:31:08
◼
►
Yeah, in the style of your podcast at the Apple Store, Apple is doing this more where
00:31:13
◼
►
they're creating these podcasts for Apple in-store events, and there's a video and audio
00:31:18
◼
►
version of John Gruber interviewing the authors on stage at the Apple Store.
00:31:22
◼
►
Which is really good, and it adds a little bit of insight into the book.
00:31:26
◼
►
And our friend John, who can't be here with us because of his medical reasons, he can
00:31:30
◼
►
take the train to New York.
00:31:32
◼
►
to see it was good to see him and we miss him here. So you're about halfway through? Yeah, I would say
00:31:37
◼
►
that. I'm almost at 50%. I'm listening to the audiobook and I'm about halfway through as well.
00:31:42
◼
►
Yeah. Yay, half read books, yay. But I still feel like there's enough in this point to talk about.
00:31:50
◼
►
Well, we've got him through Next and the release of Toy Story. Yeah, that's where I'm at. And it's
00:31:59
◼
►
just to the... you know, we're at the point now where Apple...
00:32:04
◼
►
I'm reading the part where Apple is looking for a replacement operating
00:32:09
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because Copeland and all their other attempts have failed and
00:32:12
◼
►
the way they portray it is that Windows 95 has upped the game and Apple is
00:32:18
◼
►
I think that maybe overstates it a little bit,
00:32:21
◼
►
but I remember that era. We've reached the point where I was
00:32:24
◼
►
working at a Mac magazine, so I remember this era
00:32:29
◼
►
really well so it's kind of fun it's like oh now we're up to now we're up to
00:32:32
◼
►
the point where i was there for this stuff
00:32:35
◼
►
uh... when apple was desperately looking for a new operating system
00:32:40
◼
►
we're going to talk a little bit about the book and our opinions and feelings
00:32:43
◼
►
on it like you just mentioned if you haven't read it it's fine
00:32:46
◼
►
like we're just talking about what
00:32:48
◼
►
there's no spoiler alert yes the job sells next to apple comes back to apple
00:32:53
◼
►
and becomes the c_e_o_ home because i know that i i i i was thinking oh i
00:32:56
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►
I don't want to have any of anything spoiled.
00:32:59
◼
►
But I think, I mean, without knowing,
00:33:01
◼
►
I think a lot of the maybe more interesting tidbits
00:33:03
◼
►
like this will be later in the book, if there are any.
00:33:07
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►
- Because this stuff, it's like,
00:33:09
◼
►
it's effectively ancient well-known history.
00:33:11
◼
►
Like everything that's in here so far that I've read,
00:33:14
◼
►
it's just a retelling of a story that I know.
00:33:17
◼
►
But the difference is,
00:33:18
◼
►
'cause I kind of, with the Isaacson book,
00:33:20
◼
►
I only got about two thirds through
00:33:22
◼
►
and I couldn't continue.
00:33:24
◼
►
So it's effectively the same amount of story.
00:33:26
◼
►
But this book tells the story in an interesting and compelling way, I find.
00:33:32
◼
►
I think the Isaacson book gets weighted down.
00:33:34
◼
►
It's bloated.
00:33:35
◼
►
I think he felt like he had to get everything out there because he felt like he was writing
00:33:39
◼
►
the definitive book.
00:33:42
◼
►
And I think, ironically, that it is one of the reasons why it's not the definitive book.
00:33:49
◼
►
And, you know, famously, of course, John Siracusa wrote about this a lot, or spoke about it
00:33:55
◼
►
a lot on the hypercritical, but yeah, my takeaway for the Steve Jobs book was, the Isaacson
00:34:07
◼
►
book was that it was a good book to be used as reference for the definitive Steve Jobs
00:34:11
◼
►
book that will be written in 20 years, not the definitive Steve Jobs book.
00:34:17
◼
►
But I think Isaacson was weighted down by that.
00:34:19
◼
►
And these guys are freed by the fact that the Isaacson book exists to be able to know
00:34:25
◼
►
that that's out in the world and that they don't have to do everything, but they can
00:34:29
◼
►
tell the story the way they want to tell it.
00:34:31
◼
►
Because the benefit that they have, that they seem to have that maybe other people don't,
00:34:35
◼
►
is I think it's Brent, I believe that it's Brent Schindler, Schlender, who has all the
00:34:44
◼
►
tapes, right?
00:34:45
◼
►
Yeah, well, he's got the history of interviews, and that's why it's written in English.
00:34:49
◼
►
first person with him as the eye is because he had the relationship with Steve Jobs.
00:34:55
◼
►
Yeah. So there is like this... It's interesting to hear them talk about the process of the book
00:35:02
◼
►
in the podcast that they did, because it seems like it was just a case of,
00:35:06
◼
►
we started writing an article and then it was like, I want to just keep going because there's
00:35:12
◼
►
so much here. Because he had all these tapes that hadn't been used. And there's one thing that I
00:35:16
◼
►
talk about which I found was interesting. I think Gruber asked him, "Do you feel comfortable about
00:35:22
◼
►
publishing things that are off the record now? Is there a statute of limitations?" And Schlender
00:35:29
◼
►
was like... He's like a German slender. It's like he said, "I don't feel like I have published
00:35:36
◼
►
anything that is wrong now." There are things that we spoke about that I wouldn't have published then,
00:35:44
◼
►
But it's been so long, and it doesn't affect anything, but now it's interesting information
00:35:49
◼
►
Yeah, and I think there's a sense when you're talking about Steve Jobs and Apple that this
00:35:53
◼
►
is history, and you don't want the information you've got to be lost.
00:35:59
◼
►
At some point people should talk about what happened, because we should know what happened,
00:36:03
◼
►
and not just let the muddy accounts of the day be the thing that stands forever about
00:36:11
◼
►
Who did what and how did this period of technology history happen?
00:36:15
◼
►
So one of the things I'm taking away from the book, and I don't know if this is a good
00:36:18
◼
►
thing or a bad thing for the book existing in history, compared to the Isaacson book
00:36:23
◼
►
there is an emotional connection that I feel when reading this book that these guys had
00:36:29
◼
►
And it might be partly because it's in the first person, which is a really interesting
00:36:32
◼
►
way of telling the story.
00:36:34
◼
►
But the Isaacson book feels more like he had an opinion that you could feel, but he was
00:36:39
◼
►
at least attempting to be like this is what happened, these are the facts, but I feel
00:36:43
◼
►
like in this book, the voice in the book, because it's like a combination of the two
00:36:48
◼
►
of them, has an emotional connection because they try to explain away some of Steve's
00:36:55
◼
►
Right, this is a book with a strong point of view about the character arc, if you will,
00:37:03
◼
►
of Steve Jobs' life.
00:37:05
◼
►
This is a book that believes, not like, "Well, here are the facts.
00:37:09
◼
►
Isn't he an interesting set of contradictions?"
00:37:11
◼
►
But he was a genius, but he was a jerk.
00:37:15
◼
►
That's very much what the Isaacson book does.
00:37:18
◼
►
This book is like, "No, here's what we think this is," which is, he was a very young executive.
00:37:26
◼
►
He never had a good mentor and believed, and was too full of himself, and didn't have anybody
00:37:33
◼
►
to mentor him.
00:37:34
◼
►
Therefore, all his worst qualities were enhanced, were magnified.
00:37:41
◼
►
And then through chance with Pixar, he finally found people whose behavior he could model,
00:37:48
◼
►
who were so talented that he couldn't discount them as not being as great as he was, and
00:37:54
◼
►
those were Ed Catmull and John Lasseter.
00:37:57
◼
►
And that by going through the failure at Next, by learning about management and creativity
00:38:03
◼
►
from the way that Lasseter and Catmull worked at Pixar, where he was more hands-off, because
00:38:09
◼
►
he wasn't in the creative process, he was just the owner of the company, that when he
00:38:14
◼
►
returned to Apple, he had spent--and by dealing with Disney, I suppose, too, when they started
00:38:21
◼
►
working there, although with Jeffrey Kansenberg that was kind of a fraught relationship--but
00:38:26
◼
►
these are the lessons that led Steve Jobs to be a different guy when he came back to
00:38:30
◼
►
to Apple, and although he had a lot of the same questionable attributes, they were muted,
00:38:36
◼
►
they were mellowed.
00:38:38
◼
►
He had finally learned the things that, you know, imagine if he had learned them back,
00:38:45
◼
►
imagine if instead of Scully they had hired a CEO at Apple who truly could have been more
00:38:49
◼
►
of a mentor for jobs and said, "Look, I know you're going to be the CEO eventually.
00:38:55
◼
►
Let me help you get there and show you the way," and that wasn't Scully.
00:38:59
◼
►
And so there's a sense of that lost opportunity, but the sense that in the end we got the Steve
00:39:04
◼
►
Jobs we got at the end because of this journey that he went on, and that he completed it.
00:39:08
◼
►
And that all the stories that we hear now about the bad behavior of Steve Jobs, the
00:39:12
◼
►
really bad stuff, that narrative is from when he was first at Apple.
00:39:17
◼
►
And that Steve, in the latter days at Apple, was the same guy, but had learned a lot and
00:39:24
◼
►
And, you know, is that true or not?
00:39:26
◼
►
I don't know.
00:39:27
◼
►
to be their claim here. That's the story that they're telling of a guy who learned and grew,
00:39:33
◼
►
but it took him a while to find somebody to help him grow.
00:39:36
◼
►
How do you feel about Apple's kind of blessing? Like reading this book, like, because it's not,
00:39:46
◼
►
I mean, on the whole, it is so far positive about Steve, but it doesn't hide his problems.
00:39:52
◼
►
No, the, I mean, like I said, the story they're trying to tell is that Steve was somebody who has,
00:39:56
◼
►
You know, he had personality issues.
00:39:59
◼
►
He yells at people and is… they said he's a spoiled kid who was never told no.
00:40:05
◼
►
And his talent let him go a long way without ever hearing anybody say no.
00:40:11
◼
►
And that's one of the reasons they sort of created a monster with this guy.
00:40:15
◼
►
And it took him a long time to kind of turn that around and be more productive.
00:40:21
◼
►
So I can see how from the perspective of Apple and from Steve's friends that they like this
00:40:28
◼
►
because it shows that he progressed as a human and was not that.
00:40:35
◼
►
They talk a little bit about the fact that he denied the parentage of Lisa, his daughter,
00:40:42
◼
►
from a prior relationship to his marriage.
00:40:47
◼
►
And it's true.
00:40:49
◼
►
And it was baffling.
00:40:51
◼
►
thinks of it as, including I think his friends, as like the worst thing he ever did in his life.
00:40:57
◼
►
But this book does point out, and they're not apologizing for it, but that was a piece of
00:41:03
◼
►
terrible behavior that he made as a 23-year-old man. I've heard my other book that I really enjoy,
00:41:12
◼
►
it's called The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. Have you read this? Yeah. By Alan Deutschman. I've
00:41:16
◼
►
listened to it a few times. It's fantastic, but it only goes up to a certain point,
00:41:19
◼
►
but they focus on this. Obviously the movie, the Pirates of the Confounding, everyone focuses
00:41:25
◼
►
on this. And they say, everybody points to this and says, "This is why he is a nasty man."
00:41:32
◼
►
But he was like in his early 20s, he didn't know what to do.
00:41:35
◼
►
Can we all, are all of us going to be held to our worst behavior when we were 23?
00:41:41
◼
►
That's, I mean, again, sure, if you kill somebody or something like that,
00:41:48
◼
►
And there's nobody denying that it was ridiculous behavior.
00:41:50
◼
►
No, I'm not excusing it in any way.
00:41:52
◼
►
But, you know, for the full picture of a man, he lived a lot longer.
00:41:56
◼
►
And his relationship with Lisa changed dramatically.
00:42:00
◼
►
And she lived with him and his young kids and his wife.
00:42:04
◼
►
And they had a difficult relationship. But...
00:42:10
◼
►
The wolves are coming for us, Myke.
00:42:12
◼
►
That was a weird noise.
00:42:14
◼
►
Is that the wind? It must just be the wind. Winter is coming. It does look like the out there.
00:42:21
◼
►
I think the reason that Apple authorized this in their own way, authorized that people talk on the record about it,
00:42:31
◼
►
Apple employees who knew Steve, is that they felt like it painted a fuller picture of the whole man and his journey.
00:42:39
◼
►
And I can see why that was important to them, that they don't like the narrative that Jobs
00:42:44
◼
►
was always that guy, that awful guy.
00:42:49
◼
►
And this book wants to say, "Yes, he was that awful guy, but he grew."
00:42:55
◼
►
And I don't know whether that's a true story or whether that's a whitewash.
00:42:59
◼
►
My feeling is that everybody's more complicated than the simplicity of a story in a book.
00:43:08
◼
►
I can see why Apple would like this portrayal because it's more human,
00:43:14
◼
►
whereas even the Isaacson book, there's sort of like a lot of late detail from late conversations with Steve,
00:43:22
◼
►
and then there's the kind of typical story arc of Steve Jobs.
00:43:25
◼
►
And the thesis of this book really makes it different.
00:43:29
◼
►
He did grow and progress and was somebody who was kind of broken
00:43:33
◼
►
because he never had a mentor who could really like, say, "Steve, this is how you perform
00:43:42
◼
►
as an adult in business," and he never had that.
00:43:45
◼
►
I think the title of the book kind of says it all.
00:43:48
◼
►
We're in the phase at the moment, the becoming part.
00:43:52
◼
►
Everything leading up to creating the man who could understand what he needed to do
00:43:56
◼
►
and how he needed to run things.
00:43:58
◼
►
And how can you reconcile that childish guy who worked on the Mac project and started
00:44:07
◼
►
Next and has these legendary blowups, how do you reconcile that man to the sainted,
00:44:14
◼
►
turtleneck guy who brings out all these products?
00:44:17
◼
►
And a lot of the coverage of Steve Jobs is like the strange contradictions of Steve Jobs.
00:44:22
◼
►
And what this book says is it's not a contradiction, it's a progression of his life.
00:44:27
◼
►
He started as that guy and became this guy, and that wasn't just good PR, that was his
00:44:35
◼
►
So it's interesting, I find little bits that are wrong here and there.
00:44:43
◼
►
Most troubling to me as the creator of SixColors.com is their reference to Apple's five-color
00:44:51
◼
►
One of the ones that Stephen pointed out was like they were saying about the the iBooks came in
00:44:56
◼
►
White plastic or black. Yeah, and that was that was the man
00:45:00
◼
►
I look like I don't know that it's little the little things but they drive us crazy
00:45:05
◼
►
Yeah, because they're these little details. You said something really interesting when we talked about this about
00:45:10
◼
►
Where these guys come from? Yeah, they're business. They're business journalists and
00:45:17
◼
►
So there's a line about the early 90s where they say Apple had become completely irrelevant.
00:45:22
◼
►
And they bring this up a few times.
00:45:24
◼
►
Yeah, and it made me furious because that's when I became a Mac user and started working in this business, was in the early 90s.
00:45:33
◼
►
And I will grant you, not the best time for Apple, and it led them to a cliff, but I think they're, one, I think they're guilty of the same compression that so many people are,
00:45:42
◼
►
You really want to fast forward to the end of the Apple story where Steve Jobs comes back.
00:45:46
◼
►
But, you know, under Scully, Apple motored along for quite a while, doing a pretty good job,
00:45:54
◼
►
and built a huge culture of Mac users. Yes, we were the 7%ers.
00:46:00
◼
►
But that was a great market to be in, the magazines were flourishing, people loved the Mac.
00:46:05
◼
►
It was an alternative platform, but it was a great time.
00:46:08
◼
►
And only in the mid-90s did things start to fall apart.
00:46:12
◼
►
And if you ignore the ten years before that,
00:46:16
◼
►
I think you misstate Apple, misunderstand that story.
00:46:20
◼
►
But these guys are financial, they're business journalists.
00:46:24
◼
►
And so, you know, we talk about things like what the McElope writes about these days,
00:46:28
◼
►
about people covering Apple and totally missing what Apple's about. I gotta say it,
00:46:32
◼
►
I think these guys were those guys in the 90s. They considered Apple
00:46:36
◼
►
irrelevant because Apple didn't have enough market share, because big business didn't
00:46:42
◼
►
use Apple computers.
00:46:43
◼
►
They would have the Macs in the art department.
00:46:46
◼
►
The designers would use them, but every other PC that was being sold was a Windows PC.
00:46:51
◼
►
And so from their perspective, Apple lost, because the only way Apple could win that
00:46:55
◼
►
is by having every computer in business be a Mac.
00:46:59
◼
►
And that was totally not what happened.
00:47:02
◼
►
I would argue that I think that was never a possibility, at least not since the early
00:47:07
◼
►
And in fact, you would say, "Oh, okay, so what you're really saying, if we extract
00:47:11
◼
►
this argument even further, what you're really saying is Apple should have licensed
00:47:14
◼
►
Mac OS like Microsoft did, and then they could have been Microsoft, but then they would have
00:47:20
◼
►
been Microsoft and they wouldn't have been Apple."
00:47:22
◼
►
So I think it's not an argument that really is very strong.
00:47:27
◼
►
And the fact that they just assume it, that Apple was irrelevant, is what they're really
00:47:31
◼
►
saying is Apple wasn't Windows. Apple didn't do what Microsoft did. And from a business
00:47:35
◼
►
standpoint it's totally true. Microsoft grew and was huge and Apple didn't. But I don't
00:47:40
◼
►
think that's irrelevant, see? I think it's irrelevant if you write for Fortune magazine.
00:47:44
◼
►
There's one point where after saying that Apple was irrelevant, because they're talking
00:47:49
◼
►
about gates, and then Shlender says that he took a job in Tokyo because there was nothing
00:47:55
◼
►
happening in Silicon Valley anymore because it was just Microsoft and Intel just trundling
00:48:02
◼
►
Right, and if that's all you're looking for is change in the big global PC industry, I
00:48:08
◼
►
guess you could say that was boring.
00:48:11
◼
►
But I think that misstates it.
00:48:15
◼
►
You jump over things like the PowerBooks.
00:48:16
◼
►
The first PowerBooks, that was all under Scully, the PowerBooks, and people loved those.
00:48:20
◼
►
Those were the talk of, those were the first laptops that people really loved.
00:48:25
◼
►
That Apple, again, they weren't the first laptops at all, but they were the ones that
00:48:29
◼
►
became like, I remember there was stories about movie executives being seen at Los Angeles
00:48:37
◼
►
area restaurants with their power books doing work, and it was this, "Ooh, it's so fancy."
00:48:43
◼
►
I mean, there was a lot in there that is glossed over, so I think that's a missing piece of
00:48:48
◼
►
Apple story here is that it's really easy to throw Scully under the bus and
00:48:53
◼
►
say his whole reign was a disaster, but you know there was a lot of success
00:48:57
◼
►
there of a sort. It was not the Microsoft success, but the Mac... I thought, you know,
00:49:04
◼
►
it's weird to think that these guys consider the time that I became a Mac
00:49:08
◼
►
user, loved the Mac, bought a bunch of Macs, became a person who wrote about the
00:49:13
◼
►
Mac, and have them just say it was irrelevant. That whole period was just a
00:49:18
◼
►
period of irrelevancy because it sure didn't feel like that to me.
00:49:21
◼
►
Does that hurt you a little bit?
00:49:23
◼
►
Well, what it brings back is it brings back the time when people would say, "Come on,
00:49:28
◼
►
Mac only has 10% of the market, so you are irrelevant."
00:49:32
◼
►
And the answer is, "But the 10% are the people who know better."
00:49:35
◼
►
It's the best 10%.
00:49:37
◼
►
Yeah, it's the best 10%.
00:49:40
◼
►
And we loved it.
00:49:41
◼
►
And it was a minority platform, and we were the ones who wanted something that wasn't
00:49:47
◼
►
the usual computer and we loved the Mac.
00:49:51
◼
►
It's actually a really nice tidbit that the book has about how Fred Anderson, the CFO,
00:49:55
◼
►
who was brought back right as the company's about to go out of business, one of the reasons
00:49:59
◼
►
he took the job is that he and his wife were huge Mac heads.
00:50:02
◼
►
They just loved the Mac.
00:50:04
◼
►
And they thought, "We can get to go back to California where they were from," and they
00:50:08
◼
►
loved Apple.
00:50:09
◼
►
And it's like, there was a lot of passion for Apple.
00:50:11
◼
►
They make it seem like Apple's passion was like in '85 and then it was over and they
00:50:16
◼
►
were a failure and they just hung on for the next 12 years, which is just wrong.
00:50:22
◼
►
But I understand their perspective, because they're business guys.
00:50:25
◼
►
They're business journalists.
00:50:26
◼
►
And for them, there was no story there, because Bill Gates won and Steve Jobs didn't.
00:50:32
◼
►
But in general, I do like their perspective.
00:50:35
◼
►
You know, they were there, and that helps a lot, because like I said, they have a level
00:50:40
◼
►
of understanding of some of this material that Isaacson doesn't.
00:50:45
◼
►
This is not the story of like from a Mac user's perspective, but it is understanding the industry
00:50:51
◼
►
at that time in a way that Walter Isaacson doesn't because he was not interested in this
00:50:54
◼
►
industry at that time.
00:50:56
◼
►
You may be biased, but do you think there's still space for the third book?
00:50:59
◼
►
Like the book from someone from your perspective?
00:51:01
◼
►
Oh, there's –
00:51:02
◼
►
Your book, for example.
00:51:03
◼
►
Yes, my book.
00:51:05
◼
►
I'd like to announce I'm writing a book.
00:51:08
◼
►
There is space for a lot of books, although I admit that like a lot of people, I'm kind
00:51:12
◼
►
of giving Steve Jobs fatigue.
00:51:14
◼
►
need another one for like five years. I and I want what I think I want is yeah in in 10 years
00:51:23
◼
►
I want a good book that synthesizes the reporting from these other books and tries to with the
00:51:30
◼
►
perspective of 10 more years or 20 more years understand this era and and what Apple meant in it
00:51:38
◼
►
and I suspect you know of course we'll get that at some point yeah I do think there's more to say
00:51:44
◼
►
about Apple's history, and in fact the irony of the Steve Jobs, the Ashton
00:51:51
◼
►
Kutcher movie is that the part that I thought was the most interesting was not
00:51:57
◼
►
about Steve Jobs, but was about Apple. It was the story of Apple. And I
00:52:02
◼
►
feel like, strangely, Steve Jobs has eclipsed the Apple story, and it goes to
00:52:08
◼
►
things like compressing his time when he was gone. There are some really great
00:52:12
◼
►
great stories about the story arc of Apple, and instead of the founding and then you peel
00:52:18
◼
►
away with Steve to next and then he comes back and saves the company, I'd kind of like
00:52:24
◼
►
more biographies, and there's some, but I kind of like more of the story arc of Apple,
00:52:30
◼
►
where it meanders and then it finally catastrophically loses its way and then Steve comes back.
00:52:37
◼
►
What if we stick with that character?
00:52:38
◼
►
I don't know a lot of what happened when Steve went away, because all of the books
00:52:42
◼
►
go with him.
00:52:43
◼
►
Nobody wants to talk about Scully and Spindler and Emilio.
00:52:47
◼
►
And again, Scully was most of that time.
00:52:51
◼
►
When I started as an intern at MacUser was when the Newton came out.
00:52:55
◼
►
Newton was Scully's baby.
00:52:56
◼
►
So I started in this business with Scully as the CEO, and I became a MacUser with Scully
00:53:02
◼
►
running Apple.
00:53:03
◼
►
So I'm not a John Sculley defender by any stretch of the imagination, but the fact that
00:53:08
◼
►
you cannot pretend that that era wasn't relevant in some way.
00:53:13
◼
►
And so I'd like to hear more about that.
00:53:16
◼
►
I think we've let Steve Jobs kind of overshadow this other interesting story, which is this
00:53:21
◼
►
company that did some great things and then lost its way and then was reborn.
00:53:28
◼
►
I'm becoming more and more interested in the Tim Cook story, because he—
00:53:32
◼
►
It's going to be another great chapter, isn't it?
00:53:34
◼
►
It's fascinating.
00:53:35
◼
►
Did you see, he's giving his fortune away?
00:53:37
◼
►
Did you see this?
00:53:39
◼
►
Other than he's going to put his nephew through college.
00:53:40
◼
►
I want to know more about Tim Cook.
00:53:43
◼
►
Well, that's why I said about 20 years from now or 10 years from now that we're going
00:53:46
◼
►
to be able to get the story of Apple, and it's going to be a much broader story.
00:53:49
◼
►
It's not just going to be Apple coming up and losing its way and Steve Jobs coming back
00:53:53
◼
►
and having this amazing run, but it's going to have things that haven't happened yet.
00:53:58
◼
►
It's going to tell us the story of Tim Cook.
00:54:00
◼
►
And depending on how things go and the way of all things, it's probably going to tell
00:54:04
◼
►
us how Apple's incredibly successful period ended and what were the things that made it
00:54:09
◼
►
end or change into becoming the great car manufacturer that we all know it as today
00:54:15
◼
►
in the year 2030.
00:54:16
◼
►
They used to make smart phones.
00:54:17
◼
►
They used to make watches.
00:54:19
◼
►
And before that, music players and jukeboxes.
00:54:22
◼
►
And now they make cars.
00:54:24
◼
►
And now they make cars and hoverboards.
00:54:27
◼
►
But I think Tim Cook's story will be like the unbelievable rise and then the stop.
00:54:37
◼
►
Because it has to stop.
00:54:39
◼
►
Either that or it will just continue to transform into other things and be a different company,
00:54:46
◼
►
which is fine.
00:54:49
◼
►
It's inevitable, right?
00:54:50
◼
►
We talked about this before.
00:54:51
◼
►
I actually think that's one of the reasons why the car thing is happening and why Google
00:54:54
◼
►
Google does the crazy things it does.
00:54:59
◼
►
People are mortal, but businesses are potentially immortal.
00:55:05
◼
►
The reason businesses are mortal is because they don't change and they have this natural
00:55:09
◼
►
kind of progression.
00:55:11
◼
►
The way that you become immortal as a business or at least extend your lifespan is by changing
00:55:16
◼
►
into something different and businesses can do that.
00:55:19
◼
►
The people at Apple and Google are very smart, and they spend a lot of time thinking about
00:55:25
◼
►
what are other things we can do to extend the life of this business by adding new business.
00:55:29
◼
►
Instead of stopping where we are and taking all this money, and then we'll all retire,
00:55:33
◼
►
and the new people will come in and not know what the hell they're doing, and that'll be
00:55:36
◼
►
the end of it.
00:55:38
◼
►
Let's look out 20 years and say, "Should we be making cars?
00:55:41
◼
►
In 20 years, could we be one of the leading car manufacturers in a world of smart electric
00:55:45
◼
►
cars that drive themselves and fly, maybe, and are submarines that you can – whatever
00:55:51
◼
►
And I believe they are doing that.
00:55:53
◼
►
So that's the thing.
00:55:54
◼
►
Apple's era of now will end, and that'll happen whether or not there's another era
00:56:01
◼
►
Should take a break, do some awesome upgrades.
00:56:03
◼
►
Yeah, let's do it.
00:56:04
◼
►
Let's do an Ask to Upgrade, as almost always, brought to you by MailRoute, my pals.
00:56:10
◼
►
Now Myke can watch me punch the air as I read about MailRoute.
00:56:14
◼
►
I told you about them before, so let me explain it to you again.
00:56:18
◼
►
If you don't know how it works, it's really clever.
00:56:20
◼
►
MailRoute is a service that lives in the cloud.
00:56:23
◼
►
You don't have to install any hardware and software on your servers.
00:56:26
◼
►
What you do is you point what are called MX records, which is basically in the domain
00:56:30
◼
►
name system, that's the thing that says, "Here's where all the email for my domain
00:56:34
◼
►
You point those at MailRoute instead of your server.
00:56:36
◼
►
So all of the stuff that's coming in that's inbound from spammers, inbound from people
00:56:40
◼
►
who are trying to spread viruses, and also bounced email, a lot of times spammers will
00:56:44
◼
►
harvest your email address and use it as the "from" address on their spam and you get suddenly
00:56:48
◼
►
you're like, "Why am I getting all this bounced email that I didn't send and it all looks
00:56:53
◼
►
Well, all that stuff goes to MailRoute instead of your server.
00:56:56
◼
►
Your server isn't burdened by it.
00:56:58
◼
►
MailRoute has intelligent software that looks at it, analyzes it.
00:57:01
◼
►
It gets all the spam, right?
00:57:03
◼
►
From all the different people.
00:57:04
◼
►
So it knows what spam looks like.
00:57:06
◼
►
It pulls it all out.
00:57:07
◼
►
And then it basically just turns around and passes that mail on.
00:57:11
◼
►
I'm gesturing with my hands and Myke is laughing.
00:57:13
◼
►
It turns that around and passes that mail on to your mail server.
00:57:17
◼
►
Your mail server never sees the junk.
00:57:20
◼
►
They just get the good stuff.
00:57:21
◼
►
It's good for your server because your server doesn't have to see the bad stuff, and it's
00:57:25
◼
►
good for you because that junk is not in your inbox.
00:57:29
◼
►
It's easy to set up large universities and corporations.
00:57:34
◼
►
As a desktop user, the interface is super simple.
00:57:36
◼
►
I get a little spam digest that tells me what spam I've received and has been filtered out.
00:57:41
◼
►
With one click, I can automatically deliver it.
00:57:43
◼
►
If it is good, that rarely happens, but it does happen sometimes, and it will automatically
00:57:47
◼
►
whitelist that person.
00:57:48
◼
►
So their mail will always get through after that point.
00:57:52
◼
►
So it's super easy.
00:57:53
◼
►
And if you're an email administrator or an IT professional, they've got all the tools
00:57:57
◼
►
for you in mind.
00:57:58
◼
►
Let's say it with me.
00:57:59
◼
►
There is an API for account management, support for LDAP and active relay.
00:58:03
◼
►
They have TLS, outbound relay, and mail bagging.
00:58:07
◼
►
Mail bagging.
00:58:09
◼
►
High five for mail bagging.
00:58:10
◼
►
This is the stuff you want if you're an admin from the people who handle your mail.
00:58:17
◼
►
So you can remove spam from your life for good by going to mailroute.net/upgrade.
00:58:23
◼
►
That will get you a free trial, and if you decide to keep MailRoute, you'll get 10% off
00:58:28
◼
►
of your bill for the lifetime of your account just by being one of our pals and going to
00:58:33
◼
►
mailroute.net/upgrade.
00:58:36
◼
►
So thank you once again to MailRoute for keeping my inbox clear of spam and for being a good
00:58:41
◼
►
friend and sponsor and supporter of what we do here at Upgrade.
00:58:44
◼
►
And introducing me to mailbagging.
00:58:47
◼
►
Which I love dearly.
00:58:49
◼
►
Maybe the Upgrade t-shirt should just say "Mailbagging."
00:58:54
◼
►
That's interesting.
00:58:55
◼
►
I wonder if MailRoute would sponsor the Upgrade t-shirt and we could just practically give
00:59:00
◼
►
them away at that point.
00:59:01
◼
►
Brought to you by...
00:59:02
◼
►
So let's do some Ask Upgrades.
00:59:06
◼
►
So we have @the3storiessofar on Twitter.
00:59:10
◼
►
I keep hearing podcasts that say definitively that no adapters come with the MacBook.
00:59:14
◼
►
Is that confirmed for sure?
00:59:16
◼
►
Jason, please break some hearts.
00:59:17
◼
►
Yes, if you look on the MacBook page, it's actually in there.
00:59:21
◼
►
They say "What's in the box?"
00:59:23
◼
►
And it's the power block that goes to the wall, a USB-C cable, and a MacBook.
00:59:32
◼
►
You have to buy them yourselves and unfortunately they will set you back a pretty penny.
00:59:37
◼
►
It does mean that the cable is attached to the little block.
00:59:43
◼
►
That's a USB-C cable.
00:59:45
◼
►
So it's detachable on either end, which is different from how they work now.
00:59:51
◼
►
So right now when you buy a MacBook Power cable you've got the block and the block runs
00:59:56
◼
►
to your MagSafe.
00:59:57
◼
►
And it's just part of it.
00:59:59
◼
►
this they're connected on both ends like with your iPad it's got a plug on both
01:00:04
◼
►
ends so you could pull it off and plug that into a battery or plug that into a
01:00:10
◼
►
USB charger which would probably not really charge it because it wouldn't
01:00:13
◼
►
have enough if it was a USB C connector so it's a little more versatile that way
01:00:18
◼
►
see the thing I find interesting in that way is eventually all of our wall
01:00:23
◼
►
adapters will be USB C right in theory like even the iPhone ones in theory it
01:00:28
◼
►
USB-C to Lightning. So you could just have those plugged in your house and just put the
01:00:33
◼
►
cable in that you need. That makes it very different. And also, if it detaches, that
01:00:38
◼
►
could be a... I don't know, maybe you know how firm that connection is.
01:00:44
◼
►
I don't know.
01:00:45
◼
►
Because that could be the MagSafe problem.
01:00:46
◼
►
That could be another place where you could have it break away.
01:00:50
◼
►
But if it just comes out of the wall, it might come out relatively easily. I have to say
01:00:54
◼
►
The idea of the MagSafe on the power brick seems like a disaster to me.
01:00:58
◼
►
Because I would knock that out all the time, and then you'd get on the desk, I wouldn't
01:01:02
◼
►
But we'll see.
01:01:03
◼
►
I'm still interested to see what happens with the MagSafe stuff.
01:01:06
◼
►
I didn't know that was a cable that went into the...
01:01:09
◼
►
We're going into a weird place with this, but we will come out the other side eventually.
01:01:12
◼
►
But it's going to be weird.
01:01:14
◼
►
Another one of the questions that we had was about...
01:01:17
◼
►
It was somebody we actually asked last week.
01:01:19
◼
►
He was asking about iOS devices, including a standard USB cable.
01:01:22
◼
►
He said, "I was thinking about charging more than syncing," because we said, "Well,
01:01:25
◼
►
why do you even sync anymore?"
01:01:27
◼
►
I think this is a really weird thing that right now, if you buy a MacBook and you want
01:01:33
◼
►
to charge from a device, you'll need to buy an adapter.
01:01:38
◼
►
What I would say is Apple's argument would be, "Don't charge from a device."
01:01:43
◼
►
Charge from the wall.
01:01:44
◼
►
Just charge from the wall.
01:01:45
◼
►
I know people do charge their iPhones from their Macs, and that's fine, but I think
01:01:50
◼
►
And what Apple is saying is, "Look, if you're somewhere where your Mac is plugged in, your
01:01:55
◼
►
phone can be plugged in."
01:01:56
◼
►
I do get the fact that if your Mac has a battery and your phone is about to die, you can actually
01:02:02
◼
►
steal power from your Mac's battery.
01:02:05
◼
►
That seems like an edge case, and at that point, you pack an adapter.
01:02:09
◼
►
You know what I think it would say is, "The battery will last you all day on both devices."
01:02:13
◼
►
Like that's, you know.
01:02:14
◼
►
That would be nice.
01:02:15
◼
►
That's the idea.
01:02:16
◼
►
their message is, well, you don't need to do it because that lasts for ten hours, and
01:02:20
◼
►
that lasts for ten hours, so you're done.
01:02:21
◼
►
Right, and they feel the primary use case for charging is charging from the wall, not
01:02:26
◼
►
plugging it into a device to charge.
01:02:28
◼
►
But I agree, if Apple has this mixed set of USB-C and not USB-C, at some point they're
01:02:35
◼
►
going to need to put a USB-C to Lightning cable in the box of the iPhone, at which point
01:02:41
◼
►
everybody who doesn't have a USB-C Mac is going to freak out, or they're going to have
01:02:45
◼
►
to offer some sort of swap program where you can come in and trade it in for one, but it's
01:02:51
◼
►
going to be a mess.
01:02:53
◼
►
It's going to be a mess for a little while because they can't switch without...
01:02:58
◼
►
I think they will be late to switch because every existing computer is going to suddenly
01:03:03
◼
►
not connect to it.
01:03:06
◼
►
But maybe it doesn't matter if they say, "Look, get an adapter or just plug it into the wall
01:03:10
◼
►
and don't worry about attaching it to a computer."
01:03:12
◼
►
when the iPod went from Firewire to USB, can you remember if you got both cables in the box?
01:03:19
◼
►
Po. I mean probably because they used to include a lot in the box. They did, they did.
01:03:24
◼
►
The first iPod had a case. The remote, the remote that you get, you can clip on.
01:03:28
◼
►
I love the clip on remote. That was great. They used to get a dock as well. Yeah, a dock, a case.
01:03:32
◼
►
Loads of stuff in the box. Yeah, that got all thrown out. Over time it got
01:03:36
◼
►
just a little smaller and smaller. Yeah.
01:03:39
◼
►
I have an old Mac Mini that has a VGA adapter. It came in the box.
01:03:44
◼
►
You won't get that anymore. Okay, let's move on.
01:03:47
◼
►
This comes from J.S. Carlton. There's something about the space black Apple Watch.
01:03:51
◼
►
It's like, how much more black could this be?
01:03:54
◼
►
And the answer is none more black.
01:03:57
◼
►
By the way, this is a reference to the film This Is Spinal Tap.
01:04:01
◼
►
Which will be the next... The next Myke watches a movie. It's on this laptop.
01:04:06
◼
►
I will watch it. I think it's in a couple weeks time, because next week I'm away.
01:04:10
◼
►
So if you have a special guest next week... We do have a special guest host joining me
01:04:16
◼
►
on next week's show. I know it's going to be a good one, so my plea to all the listeners is
01:04:20
◼
►
please allow me to come back the week after. I don't think our special guest is available to co-host
01:04:26
◼
►
with me every week anyway.
01:04:27
◼
►
I bet it will still upset people. Jacob Holt wants... because we were talking about iPod last week, right?
01:04:32
◼
►
And we were laughing about the iPod lineup. And Jacob has asked,
01:04:36
◼
►
do we think that iPods will ever be updated again? I don't think so.
01:04:40
◼
►
I think that they are a legacy product now that sits
01:04:44
◼
►
a very very low part of the line. I think that existing Nano and Shuffle
01:04:48
◼
►
can continue for a long time as what they are, but it's
01:04:52
◼
►
hard to imagine, other than for component reasons
01:04:56
◼
►
they need to upgrade the storage or something like that, but it's hard to imagine them
01:05:00
◼
►
ever being updated beyond that. And Apple knows how many they make and how
01:05:04
◼
►
it's worth keeping them on the product list, and they'll keep them on the product list as long as it's profitable for them to do so.
01:05:09
◼
►
But that doesn't cost them anything. Rethinking a product costs them.
01:05:14
◼
►
And I just don't think they're ever going to do it. I'm skeptical that the iPod Touch will ever be updated again.
01:05:21
◼
►
I don't think it will be.
01:05:22
◼
►
Let alone the other iPods. Because the iPod Touch, we said this before, if you want a low-cost
01:05:29
◼
►
iOS, small iOS device, there's the Mac Mini, I mean the iPad Mini 1, the original iPad
01:05:36
◼
►
Mini, which is still an iPad 2 essentially.
01:05:38
◼
►
It's better than the iPod Touch in every way, I mean unless you want a small device, then
01:05:41
◼
►
of course it's not.
01:05:43
◼
►
But you know.
01:05:45
◼
►
I can see, again, and I can see people's argument, like "but, but, but, but, but I use it for
01:05:49
◼
►
this" and I totally get that, but from Apple's perspective it's like it's not worth their
01:05:55
◼
►
It's like, okay, you might use it for that, we'll buy it then.
01:05:57
◼
►
It's not going to be powerful, but it's there, and that's probably why they keep it there.
01:06:02
◼
►
And the shuffle is there because people like to just clip it to themselves and go running.
01:06:08
◼
►
So it exists, but I cannot see any more resources going into that line unless there is some
01:06:13
◼
►
breakthrough.
01:06:15
◼
►
I don't even know what that is.
01:06:17
◼
►
No, because we're living in a world where you've got wireless headphones and everybody
01:06:23
◼
►
wants to have their smartphone with them and it's harder and harder and now you
01:06:28
◼
►
could have your watch with music on it. So I don't think so and not because
01:06:33
◼
►
there aren't people who have uses for them but because Apple doesn't want to
01:06:35
◼
►
spend the time to update them versus do new products. On that note @BakeryMe on
01:06:43
◼
►
Twitter has asked if the watch leads to leaving like your iPhone in the bag
01:06:48
◼
►
wireless headphones will become more important do you think that Apple are
01:06:52
◼
►
are going to do their own set of wireless headphones.
01:06:55
◼
►
I would have expected them to have announced it already.
01:06:57
◼
►
Well Apple has Beats and Beats makes headphones so I think we're going to see those things
01:07:01
◼
►
come closer together and I think maybe not now but in the fall certainly when they're
01:07:07
◼
►
ramping up for the holiday season I would be shocked if Apple's product announcements
01:07:13
◼
►
don't include how Beats headphones can be used with Apple's products.
01:07:18
◼
►
Because they mentioned them with the MacBook, and they were like "and you use Bluetooth
01:07:22
◼
►
to listen with your Beats headphones?"
01:07:26
◼
►
I think, was it Schiller or was it Eddie Keeler?
01:07:28
◼
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Make a joke about it.
01:07:29
◼
►
Yeah, I remember.
01:07:30
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But it was serious, and they had a product shop of Beats headphones.
01:07:33
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►
Gold MacBooks and a young girl wearing gold Beats headphones.
01:07:37
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►
That is the link.
01:07:38
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►
But I really expected a "when the watch came out, here are some sport headphones."
01:07:43
◼
►
Yeah, I think they're not quite there yet.
01:07:46
◼
►
But I think that's coming.
01:07:48
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►
I think that that is just a case of they probably wanted to have it, but it's not ready.
01:07:53
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►
But I think at this point it's less likely that it will be Apple's matched headphones.
01:08:00
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►
Apple's headphone brand now is Beats.
01:08:03
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►
It may be that the EarPods, the next version, is a set of small Beats headphones.
01:08:07
◼
►
Yeah, it's entirely possible.
01:08:10
◼
►
They'll brand them and say, "Now we include the...
01:08:14
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►
You get the Beats EarPods."
01:08:15
◼
►
Hey, maybe that's where the iPod goes.
01:08:19
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►
They give the Beats brand to all music products.
01:08:22
◼
►
Well, they want the service.
01:08:24
◼
►
Anyway, so, listen to Christian, would you say that the MacBook Pro 13-inch non-retina
01:08:29
◼
►
is worthy of the Pro moniker these days?
01:08:31
◼
►
What is the purpose in the lineup?
01:08:33
◼
►
The purpose is education, I guess, right?
01:08:36
◼
►
And it's the having it.
01:08:37
◼
►
Yeah, I'm not even sure it is so much education since you've also got the MacBook Air, but
01:08:42
◼
►
it's, they already have it.
01:08:44
◼
►
It's like what we said about these iPods.
01:08:46
◼
►
It already exists, it's cheaper, and they can make it very cheaply.
01:08:53
◼
►
And there is obviously some demand for it in education or business or something where
01:08:57
◼
►
they keep it around.
01:08:58
◼
►
It has an optical drive.
01:08:59
◼
►
And it has the optical drive, so if everybody wants a laptop with an optical drive, they
01:09:05
◼
►
can say, "All right, we can sell that to you."
01:09:06
◼
►
And you see this, I mean, this is why the iPod 2 stuck around for a while, is because
01:09:11
◼
►
they were selling it to education and they needed to keep making it.
01:09:17
◼
►
This is part of Apple's strategy today, is these ghost products that just fade away very
01:09:23
◼
►
Why does Apple sell the iPad mini 3, 2, and 1?
01:09:29
◼
►
That's weird.
01:09:30
◼
►
The old iPhones that are still in the line, this is one of those.
01:09:33
◼
►
This is a ghost product.
01:09:34
◼
►
In three or four years, the MacBook Air, there will probably still be a 13-inch MacBook Air
01:09:39
◼
►
in the product line and we'll all say the same thing which is why is it still there
01:09:43
◼
►
and the answer is well they can sell that for $7.99 and it's non-retina and all these
01:09:48
◼
►
things but it's cheap and it's old but it's fine.
01:09:54
◼
►
This is part of Apple's strategy now and this is one of the ways that they take advantage
01:09:57
◼
►
of their manufacturing is these products as they age they get really low margins and they
01:10:02
◼
►
have particular sales channels that want them and so why not keep making them and it's
01:10:08
◼
►
No more effort for them at that point.
01:10:10
◼
►
And what happens then is that something breaks, like if they run out of a part or something
01:10:16
◼
►
else complicates things, then they have to make that moment of like, "Well, do we update
01:10:19
◼
►
this or do we kill it?"
01:10:20
◼
►
And in most cases, I think they just kill it at that point.
01:10:23
◼
►
So they were talking about, say, ATP a couple of weeks ago, about the thought that they're
01:10:28
◼
►
saying, "We believed that the jobs here had got rid of these."
01:10:32
◼
►
But the thing is, it's like those products, when they get to that point, the margins are
01:10:37
◼
►
so huge because you've been making them for so long, the process is down, all of the stuff
01:10:43
◼
►
All of the stuff is cheap to make, all the parts are cheap.
01:10:45
◼
►
So from a business standpoint, it sits there, it doesn't hurt anyone, it's just in the line-up.
01:10:52
◼
►
Sometimes it makes the product line-up more confusing, it maybe makes things more difficult
01:10:55
◼
►
for developers because they're still supporting the iPad 2.
01:10:58
◼
►
I have a brand new iPad 2, ugg.
01:11:01
◼
►
But from a business standpoint, that helps that $75 billion in revenue.
01:11:07
◼
►
And if you're Apple, you are more comfortable keeping an old product around than creating
01:11:15
◼
►
a new product that is just cheap, cheap, cheap.
01:11:19
◼
►
Plus you can't really create a new product.
01:11:21
◼
►
And 5C is the only example, the iPhone 5C, where they wrapped an old product in a new
01:11:28
◼
►
case and claimed that it was a new product.
01:11:31
◼
►
The 5C did fine, but it didn't set the world on fire.
01:11:34
◼
►
I think it reinforced their standard strategy, which is just let old tech float around and
01:11:40
◼
►
just keep cutting the price.
01:11:43
◼
►
It may be yesterday's model, but it's still yesterday's premium model and not yesterday's
01:11:48
◼
►
cra-- or today's crappy model.
01:11:51
◼
►
And so I think it's better for Apple to do it this way.
01:11:54
◼
►
CloudGabo on Twitter is saying about how Spotify could actually be the company to help bring
01:12:01
◼
►
podcasts to the masses.
01:12:05
◼
►
But it depends on their agreement.
01:12:07
◼
►
Well, yeah, I have the same trepidation, and I know you do, that any big player who comes
01:12:11
◼
►
and says, "We want to revolutionize podcasting," you worry that they're going to—they're
01:12:17
◼
►
trying to be the gatekeeper.
01:12:18
◼
►
and then they're going to want to put their own ads in or take the ads out or pay us a
01:12:24
◼
►
penny instead of having our ads in there and we're not going to be able to say no and then
01:12:31
◼
►
they control podcasting.
01:12:32
◼
►
So that's the fear of all of these, but I would love for Spotify to bring their intelligence
01:12:39
◼
►
about music to podcasts.
01:12:41
◼
►
I think there's, and that's what a bunch of other companies are trying to do too, I would
01:12:46
◼
►
love to get there.
01:12:47
◼
►
I do think there's an opportunity to do that.
01:12:49
◼
►
The problem is that podcasts like this one run for an hour or an hour and a half and
01:12:53
◼
►
not for ten minutes.
01:12:54
◼
►
And so the fun of having Spotify and being able to have it pick music for you or Pandora
01:12:59
◼
►
or whatever is more difficult when you've got--when you're shuffling through things
01:13:04
◼
►
that are an hour and a half long, you're really only listening to one anyway.
01:13:09
◼
►
So it's not as good.
01:13:11
◼
►
You know, I've mused before about what would be interesting is setting up a podcast network
01:13:16
◼
►
where all of your shows were like 10 minutes long and then offering them as like just chopped up
01:13:23
◼
►
and remixed and you can pick your favorites. And I think that would be an interesting attempt.
01:13:28
◼
►
I'm not sure where it would… It might end up just sounding like radio.
01:13:31
◼
►
And I'm not sure people would like it. But it would be really interesting if you tried something
01:13:36
◼
►
like that to chop things up and have a 10-minute segment every day instead of an hour a week
01:13:44
◼
►
and chopped in with other things and all mixed up, would that be good or would that just be radio?
01:13:49
◼
►
And I think it goes against the appeal of podcasting, but it does feed the appeal of
01:13:55
◼
►
people wanting to discover new voices and program their own entertainment. It wouldn't be
01:14:02
◼
►
podcasting, it would be something else. But I'd be waiting for somebody to try something like that,
01:14:06
◼
►
I think it could be interesting. It would just be very different from what we do.
01:14:10
◼
►
A couple of last quick questions from Angus.
01:14:14
◼
►
Do you think the watch with the sports band would be suitable for running or would it
01:14:17
◼
►
be too heavy and attract sweat?
01:14:19
◼
►
Yeah, I don't think the…
01:14:20
◼
►
Well, I don't think it'd be heavy.
01:14:22
◼
►
I don't think it'll be heavy.
01:14:23
◼
►
It's heavier than the other one, but I don't think it would be heavy.
01:14:25
◼
►
You're going to feel a weight because it's a watch, but watches are made to just get
01:14:31
◼
►
used to them.
01:14:33
◼
►
You're not going to fall over.
01:14:34
◼
►
And as for sweat, I mean, the metal's not going to attract sweat.
01:14:38
◼
►
band, I had this conversation on the train yesterday, I really like a leather
01:14:43
◼
►
band, and you know, because you do sweat, and I like a leather band, although
01:14:48
◼
►
it can damage the band over time, that's true, but I like it because it absorbs
01:14:53
◼
►
and then it will release the moisture. I hate the sports bands, the plastic bands,
01:14:57
◼
►
because they are impervious to the moisture, and that means your arm just
01:15:02
◼
►
gets wetter and wetter, and I hate it, but that's a personal preference thing.
01:15:07
◼
►
I think sports band on a suffix-less, adjective-less watch is probably fine.
01:15:13
◼
►
I don't think, you know, I think it's fine.
01:15:15
◼
►
You're going to get the sapphire instead of the ionics glass, so it's going to be more
01:15:21
◼
►
scratch-resistant but less shatter-resistant.
01:15:26
◼
►
But I don't know.
01:15:27
◼
►
I don't think it's a no for that.
01:15:31
◼
►
I think you could totally do that.
01:15:33
◼
►
Last question today from @AlwaysBreaking.
01:15:35
◼
►
Is the Guinness in Ireland better than the Guinness in the US?
01:15:40
◼
►
I would love, it would be very hard to do, I would love somebody to actually prove or
01:15:45
◼
►
disprove this because people say, even in the UK, they say it's better in Ireland than
01:15:49
◼
►
it is in the UK.
01:15:51
◼
►
I like stout, we talked about that on our wine and cheese and beer vertical last week.
01:15:59
◼
►
We had dinner in Dublin and I went to the Porter House, so it was a local microbrew
01:16:06
◼
►
of a porter and an oyster stout.
01:16:09
◼
►
And then we went to a steamy, crowded Irish pub after, which was really fun, and I had
01:16:14
◼
►
Guinness there.
01:16:15
◼
►
And what it reminded me of is I think Guinness is not objectionable.
01:16:19
◼
►
I think it's...
01:16:22
◼
►
It feels like it tastes better in Ireland, but honestly, you're in Ireland.
01:16:26
◼
►
So I think...
01:16:27
◼
►
>> Because the challenge is fresh.
01:16:28
◼
►
It's going to be fresher, although I'm skeptical of how much of that is marketing
01:16:34
◼
►
versus reality.
01:16:35
◼
►
I think when you're in the environment, it tastes better.
01:16:38
◼
►
But having a pint poured properly by somebody who's been trained in how you pour Guinness,
01:16:45
◼
►
it's all part of the experience.
01:16:47
◼
►
If you isolated it and you were in a white room somewhere and you were just doing a taste
01:16:52
◼
►
test, I'm not sure it would taste any different, but then you're in this steamy pub with
01:16:57
◼
►
Irish people all around you, and it's one in the morning, and you've got a Guinness
01:17:03
◼
►
and you're sitting at a kind of battered wooden bar on a stool talking to a couple of friends,
01:17:09
◼
►
of course it tastes better.
01:17:10
◼
►
That said, and again, I'm going to get drummed out of Ireland for saying this, Guinness is
01:17:15
◼
►
It is a mass-produced stout.
01:17:17
◼
►
Having those microbrews at the Porterhouse, those were so good.
01:17:22
◼
►
I feel like there are better stouts available even in Ireland than Guinness, but Guinness
01:17:28
◼
►
It reminds me of drinking milk.
01:17:30
◼
►
It's like slightly alcoholic milk.
01:17:31
◼
►
It's just smooth and nice and you're in Ireland, so it's good.
01:17:36
◼
►
And it is better in Ireland, always breaking.
01:17:39
◼
►
It's just I'm unclear whether the taste is not being affected by all the other atmosphere
01:17:44
◼
►
that goes with it.
01:17:45
◼
►
It's nicer to enjoy in Ireland.
01:17:47
◼
►
Yeah, and they do train the barman to pour it properly.
01:17:52
◼
►
They let the bubbles go out of it, they give it a wait, they sit there and they pour out
01:17:56
◼
►
a bunch of them as the orders are coming in and then they go back and they do a second
01:17:59
◼
►
pour to get the head right on the top.
01:18:03
◼
►
And in other places, people, there are a lot of bartenders who have no idea how to do stout.
01:18:09
◼
►
So what I found really interesting in that pub that we were in is it didn't take us long
01:18:13
◼
►
to have the Guinness because he had just had glasses on the go.
01:18:17
◼
►
He was in the Guinness assembly line.
01:18:20
◼
►
They were just ready and just settling.
01:18:21
◼
►
Because usually you go to a bar, and even if they do it, they let it settle for a bit
01:18:24
◼
►
and they finish it off, but it's still not the right time, I assume.
01:18:27
◼
►
But yeah, because the whole time we were at the bar, there was always like four or five
01:18:31
◼
►
glasses, like three quarters full.
01:18:33
◼
►
Yeah, just letting the bubbles come out, and then they would add it on top and hand it
01:18:40
◼
►
And there's a proper amount and everything.
01:18:41
◼
►
So that's part of it, I think, is they know how to pour Guinness in Ireland, so that's
01:18:45
◼
►
part of the charm, too.
01:18:47
◼
►
So that's about it for this week's episode.
01:18:50
◼
►
It's been a pleasure doing podcasts right across the way from you.
01:18:53
◼
►
Hopefully we'll do this maybe at WWDC.
01:18:56
◼
►
Yeah, I'm gonna miss, not only will I miss the show next week, I'll miss not doing it
01:19:02
◼
►
It's nice, I like it.
01:19:03
◼
►
And I hope that it's enjoyable to listen to.
01:19:05
◼
►
I think it does bring a difference in the show that I hope people have enjoyed for these
01:19:08
◼
►
couple of weeks.
01:19:09
◼
►
So if you've hated these last couple of weeks, rest assured we'll be back.
01:19:12
◼
►
Next week we'll have a guest and then we'll be back to the long-distance Skype conversations
01:19:16
◼
►
of Jason and Myke.
01:19:17
◼
►
Maybe then I'm away again for one more week.
01:19:20
◼
►
We've got another special guest hosting with me that week too.
01:19:23
◼
►
Yeah, exciting stuff over the next couple of weeks.
01:19:26
◼
►
Lots of interesting things happening.
01:19:28
◼
►
I think you'll enjoy.
01:19:29
◼
►
If you want to find our show notes for this week, you can go to relay.fm/upgrade/29.
01:19:35
◼
►
Thanks again to our sponsors this week, Linda, Bushell and Mail Route.
01:19:39
◼
►
If you want to find us online, there's a couple of ways you can do that.
01:19:41
◼
►
Mr. Jason Snell is @jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter and he is the editor-in-chief of SixColors.com
01:19:49
◼
►
And I am @imike, I-M-Y-K-E on Twitter and this show is part of the glorious Relay FM
01:19:55
◼
►
and you can find all of our shows over at relay.fm.
01:19:59
◼
►
Until next week, well, for you, thanks so much for listening. Bye bye.
01:20:05
◼
►
Hello mate, this is a podcast!
01:20:09
◼
►
I think Steven pointed this out to us where it's like...
01:20:25
◼
►
Winter is coming.
01:20:34
◼
►
(door creaking)