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Upgrade

24: Because... Luxury

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:08   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode number 24.

00:00:13   Today's show is brought to you by Igloo, an internet you'll actually like,

00:00:16   MailRelt, a secure hosted email service for protection from viruses and spam,

00:00:21   and PDFPen Pro 7, take control of PDFs on your Mac.

00:00:26   My name is Myke Hurley, and I'm joined as always by my host and yours,

00:00:29   The one and only Mr. Jason Snell.

00:00:31   Hi, Myke.

00:00:32   How's it going?

00:00:33   Very well, sir.

00:00:34   How are you?

00:00:35   I'm doing well.

00:00:38   As always, I enjoy starting off the week with our conversations.

00:00:41   It's very nice.

00:00:43   Yes, I feel like we should say this every week.

00:00:47   It's a nice way to start.

00:00:48   It's a nice way to kick off with a good bit of upgrade.

00:00:52   Upgrade your week right at the start of your week.

00:00:53   How much better could it be?

00:00:55   Indeed.

00:00:56   Absolutely.

00:00:57   Should we talk about some topics that we've covered recently but would like to cover again

00:01:02   briefly with feedback from listeners woven in?

00:01:07   Most definitely.

00:01:08   All right.

00:01:09   It's not as catchy as pressing a button.

00:01:12   No.

00:01:13   Hearing the words "follow up."

00:01:14   We can work on that.

00:01:15   We can work on that.

00:01:16   I'm seriously integrating follow out into all of my shows now.

00:01:18   Oh, that's nice.

00:01:19   Yeah.

00:01:20   See, it all starts here.

00:01:22   We talked about the applecariot last week, which we'll talk about in a bit, but the one

00:01:27   bit of follow up that I wanted to get to is we had some people giving us feedback about

00:01:34   your comment and mine. My comment was about traveling and needing to copy my podcast files,

00:01:40   the large, you know, many, many megabytes, many, many gigabytes, in some cases, podcast

00:01:46   files in order to edit when I was on the road. And you were talking about how you've got

00:01:49   the Mac Pro and you've got the laptop and moving the files back and forth is problematic

00:01:54   for you too. And we definitely got some feedback. I'm looking right now at some podcasts that

00:01:59   are sitting on my, just for reference, the incomparable Star Wars Episode 3 episode.

00:02:05   That folder is 12 gigabytes. Total Party Kill is 13 gigabytes. So these are big, you know,

00:02:12   projects that we're talking about here. So we got some feedback. Listener Rob said, "Looks

00:02:18   like you guys need a remote desktop solution for working away from home. That's what I

00:02:21   do and listener TheHexagon on Twitter said "what about just using an external

00:02:28   drive for logic projects? Video pros do this all the time and it works very well."

00:02:31   We got a few people who talked to us about remote desktop and I like remote

00:02:37   desktop but what I said to them on Twitter when they mentioned this is I

00:02:40   am not... first off does remote desktop, do you know, does it stream audio streams

00:02:49   from the remote system? I thought it didn't do that. I have no idea. I can't

00:02:54   imagine if it does that it would do it very well. Well that's exactly it and the

00:02:59   point is when you're doing audio editing you need audio, you need

00:03:03   no latency, you need no lag. You need precision as well and I really don't think I could

00:03:08   get the precision that I needed. And also as well, like when you're doing something

00:03:13   I mean I'm not saying that anybody that suggested this doesn't do things like

00:03:17   like this, but at least for me, and I think it's the same for you, Jason.

00:03:20   When you're doing something that is so, like, it's really time-consuming and you

00:03:24   really kind of get into a rhythm with it, if something breaks your rhythm, it's so

00:03:30   frustrating, and I can imagine just stuttering that kind of thing in the

00:03:35   stream being an issue.

00:03:39   And keeping in mind, what we're talking about here is an alternative to copying the

00:03:46   files, and that's where it really breaks down. It's like, look, if copying -- if to copy

00:03:51   a file would waste a day of productivity for me, I would consider using remote desktop.

00:03:57   But the thing is, copying a file -- I have a Thunderbolt gigabit Ethernet adapter for

00:04:02   my laptop. I plug that in and copy the file over my gigabit network, and it takes a few

00:04:08   minutes. It's not a big deal to go back and forth. And to the hexagon's point, I could

00:04:13   have an external hard drive and bring that along with me too, but at that point I'm copying

00:04:17   the file regardless, and that might work better for you if you were constantly switching back

00:04:21   and forth, you could use an external hard drive to do it. But the point, the larger

00:04:25   point being, whatever you would lose in latency and the sluggishness of remote desktop stuff,

00:04:33   not to mention the idea of trying to react to audio that's streaming with latency, and

00:04:40   just there is I mean there is literally I think nothing I would I would rather

00:04:46   avoid than something like that I would I would rather use GarageBand I would

00:04:52   rather edit on a single track in a single track editor then then use remote

00:04:58   desktop so I don't think it's I don't I just don't think it's an issue an option

00:05:02   for heavy-duty media editing but what do you think about the idea of getting a

00:05:07   drive and using that for your projects so that you go back and forth between your Mac Pro and your

00:05:13   your MacBook Pro. When it comes to work stuff, so like the podcasts and the audio, I get very

00:05:21   not superstitious but like very nervous about it. I can't really explain it but there's just this

00:05:29   part of me that's like if you that I feel like if I add too many layers into the process then I'm

00:05:35   opening myself up to too many points of failure. Which is why I tried to

00:05:41   stay on, like with the previous Mac Mini, I tried to stay on Snow Leopard for as

00:05:44   long as possible. And then when I had to upgrade to Lion, to Logic Pro X, I did

00:05:49   that. But I stayed on Lion until I got the Mac Pro. And I really kind of

00:05:56   wished that the Mac Pro wasn't on Yosemite because I'm having some issues

00:06:00   with it that I think are hardware related but they're really difficult to

00:06:03   pin down. So adding anything into the system where I could make a mistake or I

00:06:10   could lose something or something could go wrong because of how important this

00:06:15   is, I like to try and avoid those. Where I know that a

00:06:19   rational person would say to me, "Well you have a problem, you've

00:06:24   identified a problem which is being chained to one machine but you're not

00:06:29   willing to take steps to fix it, and I know that, but I'm willing to accept that for the

00:06:35   peace of mind that everything's going to be okay.

00:06:38   Right.

00:06:39   This isn't just a problem to be solved.

00:06:40   A lot of times, and this happens, I think, when we talk about technology things on the

00:06:44   internet, whether it's on a podcast or on Twitter, is you get a lot of people who are

00:06:49   problem solvers.

00:06:50   That's what they do.

00:06:51   They're technical people.

00:06:52   They like to solve problems.

00:06:53   They say, "Here is a solution for you."

00:06:55   The challenge is in saying, "You know what?

00:06:57   not a good enough solution for me to change my behavior. It is a solution. You could do

00:07:01   it that way, but it's just not enough. Plus, there's the financial aspects too. Your Mac

00:07:09   Pro has super fast SSD storage, which for something like this show is not that big a

00:07:15   deal. For something like "Inquisitive" where you've got multiple tracks and just huge amounts

00:07:19   of stuff, it's a big deal. For me and my crazy seven person incomparables or "Total Party

00:07:24   kill. It's, you know, having that quick storage is important. So now if you

00:07:28   wanted to be on an external drive you're gonna need to buy a fast external drive.

00:07:33   A fast, like, fast connectivity, fast read/write, and then you could

00:07:39   move around with it. I don't know, I mean, my thought was if gigabit, transferring

00:07:44   your files over gigabit Ethernet, you could do that. You could just

00:07:47   connect the two devices together and transfer the files if you were really

00:07:50   like going somewhere for a week and needed to work on your projects but you

00:07:56   know I see it I think there's I see how what you're saying there are solutions

00:08:00   that will get you what you want but they won't make you they won't make your life

00:08:05   better because there will be it will bring up all these other issues that

00:08:08   concern you so you're better off sort of dealing with the problems you've got

00:08:12   rather than these other problems that you anticipate yeah that's not right

00:08:15   yeah cuz the problem I think you know to reiterate the problem that I have is

00:08:19   like we were talking about the fact that using different machines and

00:08:24   how you can kind of have files on one machine that you need and then not

00:08:27   having them if you want to leave the house, right? So I can't, I'm not going to

00:08:32   take my Mac Pro out of the house with me. I have my MacBook Pro for that kind of

00:08:37   thing. But I was saying like with inquisitive all of my files are

00:08:41   there because it's multiple, multiple gigabytes of stuff. And I have

00:08:47   a lot of the master stuff in Dropbox but the project files as we were mentioning

00:08:51   can be huge. So the thing is like my problem now that I see is just time

00:08:57   management. So my solution to this problem is effectively managing my diary

00:09:03   so I know I will be home on certain days at certain times to do this stuff. That's

00:09:08   kind of like my solution. Funnily enough my solution is not a hardware or

00:09:12   software one, it's just time management. It's a life hack. It's a life hack. I have to

00:09:17   - I'm gonna hack my life so I can produce the shows.

00:09:19   - Having those kinds of barriers is useful too.

00:09:22   I mean, for me, I love being,

00:09:25   the fact that my MacBook Air lets me,

00:09:29   has the fastest SSD, it's got an i7.

00:09:31   It lets me have the freedom to edit a podcast

00:09:36   wherever I want.

00:09:37   And if I'm traveling, that's what I do.

00:09:40   But to your point, I don't,

00:09:44   I like the fact that my iMac is here at my desk

00:09:47   and when I'm here, I'm working.

00:09:50   And when I'm somewhere else,

00:09:52   there's some part of my work that doesn't come with me.

00:09:55   And that's, I'm okay with that

00:09:56   because if everything was on my MacBook Air,

00:09:59   like it used to be, I could, you know,

00:10:01   taking that MacBook Air anywhere

00:10:04   also meant I could do that work anywhere.

00:10:06   And now there's an extra bump in the way.

00:10:09   And so I'm much less likely to be sitting outside

00:10:13   on a summer day editing a podcast under the tree, right?

00:10:17   And that's, if I really wanna do that,

00:10:19   I can get over that bump.

00:10:21   But I think what that makes me do is say,

00:10:23   nah, I'm gonna sit out here under this tree

00:10:26   and do something else.

00:10:27   I'm gonna write.

00:10:28   I'm gonna do something that is not that thing.

00:10:29   I'm just gonna put that thing back where it belongs.

00:10:31   And that is about making some choices to order your life.

00:10:34   We're getting very Merlin man now.

00:10:36   It's about making choices to order.

00:10:39   That's a good thing about, you know,

00:10:42   making choices about how you want to structure

00:10:43   and order your life and technology fits into that.

00:10:45   But sometimes the technology can be a useful tool

00:10:48   to actually construct those barriers,

00:10:51   that the technology forms the barrier.

00:10:53   And although we can solve the problem

00:10:55   of and tear down that technological barrier,

00:10:58   sometimes it's nice to have the barrier.

00:10:59   Sometimes it's nice to keep it up.

00:11:00   The speed bumps are annoying

00:11:03   if you're trying to get from point A to point B,

00:11:05   but they're really great if you live on the street

00:11:07   that leads from point A to point B

00:11:09   and you don't want your cat run over by a speeder.

00:11:14   And so sometimes speed bumps are good

00:11:16   and that's what it sounds like for you.

00:11:18   Wow, that was really deep.

00:11:20   - Yeah, man.

00:11:20   - Anyway, what's next on "Back to Work"?

00:11:22   - Well, I wanna talk to you about some comic books.

00:11:25   - Comic books, yeah.

00:11:26   (both laughing)

00:11:28   God, I wish I had a bell right now, ding.

00:11:31   No, I don't have a bell.

00:11:32   Ah, mail bagging, there it is.

00:11:34   (both laughing)

00:11:36   Anyway, I liked the feedback, I thought it was great.

00:11:38   That's one of the things that I noticed about it is,

00:11:41   I love that everybody was trying to solve the problem,

00:11:45   but it is interesting that in some ways,

00:11:46   sometimes you want the problem to not be solved,

00:11:48   or because of the way that you've got your life structure.

00:11:52   - I mean, ultimately, the remote desktop is a solution.

00:11:56   I just don't think it's a solution to my problem.

00:11:59   But to most people, remote desktop is the perfect solution

00:12:03   to getting the files that you need from another machine.

00:12:06   I mean, also, stuff like Backblaze, I can grab my files there, you know, that kind of

00:12:11   thing.

00:12:12   So there are ways around a lot of these things.

00:12:15   Absolutely.

00:12:16   But then there are other barriers that can kind of get in the way.

00:12:19   And at a certain point, at least I feel this way anyway, you've kind of just got to give

00:12:23   in, I think.

00:12:24   Because you can continue to try and fix this forever.

00:12:27   Sure.

00:12:28   And ultimately, you're never really going to be fully happy with the results.

00:12:31   So just accept it.

00:12:32   Well, if you realize that you needed to edit some of the time away from the Mac Pro, something

00:12:37   changes in your life, and you are away from where you live two days a week, staying with

00:12:44   a friend somewhere because of something, just a theoretical life change.

00:12:50   At that point you might say, "Okay, I need the ability to travel and work on this stuff."

00:12:55   And then you would come up with something that would work.

00:12:57   But in your life as it currently is being left, lived, it's fine.

00:13:02   Yep.

00:13:03   Yeah.

00:13:04   That's, I get it.

00:13:05   I get it.

00:13:06   I'm traveling a lot in a couple of weeks' time.

00:13:08   Right.

00:13:09   So I will be loading up a USB 3.0 hard drive with a bunch of files.

00:13:14   And I'll be bringing that with me.

00:13:15   You know.

00:13:16   There you go.

00:13:17   But that's not something that I want to do every couple of days.

00:13:20   Sure.

00:13:21   Yeah, that makes sense.

00:13:22   when I go to Europe I'm gonna load up the SSD on my MacBook Air with projects

00:13:29   of all these different things that I'm working on and I love nothing more than

00:13:33   editing podcasts on an airplane it is just supremely focused but yeah but I'm

00:13:39   not I don't do that every day anyway I thought that was good that's the that's

00:13:43   the follow-up that's that's it I've got some stuff in ask upgrade at the end of

00:13:48   the show and a couple notes on some of the topics in the meantime but if

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00:16:25   Thank you so much to Igloo for their support of this show and all of Relay FM.

00:16:30   I think the guy who invented igloos owns igloo.com so don't go there.

00:16:36   Unless you need to buy an igloo.

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00:16:49   So what do we have next, Mr. Jason Snell?

00:16:51   Oh, topics! You want to talk about the Apple car some more, Myke?

00:16:56   I do, actually.

00:16:57   Oh, right. I'm glad I brought it up then.

00:17:00   I listened to ATP and I thought to myself, "This is just what they've waited for." Like,

00:17:08   Everything has led up to this for them, you know?

00:17:11   They started out with neutral.

00:17:12   You could tell they were all so happy that they were able to have the car discussion

00:17:16   without...

00:17:17   Well, maybe not Marco.

00:17:22   I really enjoyed it though.

00:17:24   I was a fan of neutral, so I was happy to hear it back.

00:17:29   The only episode of neutral that I liked was the one where they talked about car interfaces,

00:17:33   because that's something I care about.

00:17:35   I don't care about cars.

00:17:37   Car interface is yes.

00:17:39   Like cars as a hobby, as a thing you enjoy thinking about and reading about.

00:17:47   I'm not a car person, but I did love their thing about, which they cited on ATP, their

00:17:51   episode about car UI where Marco says quite rightly that relying entirely on a touchscreen

00:17:57   for everything in a car is madness.

00:17:59   And I think some car makers are now backing away from that.

00:18:02   Like having a dial that you know where it is and you can turn it and you get the feedback

00:18:06   and you know exactly how much you need to turn it or flip a switch or slide a

00:18:10   slider when you're driving is really good because you can't look to see if

00:18:16   the thing you did got you know accepted and you know when I turn on the the air

00:18:22   conditioner in my car I turn up a knob and it turns on and I don't need to look

00:18:27   because I know where the knob is and I know how to turn it on even you know

00:18:31   skipping ahead on my radio is a button and I know where the button is and I can

00:18:36   press it. So I love that episode and the follow-up that they did in ATP this

00:18:41   week. Although I thought that was interesting Marco, you know Marco

00:18:45   expressed a lot of skepticism and we talked about this last week a lot that

00:18:48   I'm not sure whether there's an Apple car that is going to ever come out. They

00:18:55   talked a lot about like what it could be if it's not an Apple car which I thought

00:19:00   was interesting. I think part of this is, like we said last week, investigatory. Should

00:19:05   we do this? Can we do this? Jean-Louis Gasset on the Monday note had a piece today about

00:19:12   that, since it's Monday, that was about his skepticism of the Apple car and how hard it

00:19:21   is to get into the car industry, which I'll grant you, but Apple's got a lot of money

00:19:25   and can recruit a lot of people. But they might end up in a place that is not all the

00:19:29   way at a car, right? I mean, they might, they might not. Marco's point was, or I think it

00:19:35   was John's point was, if you if, if all you have to differentiate your car is the experience,

00:19:43   you don't want to hand that over to Apple and then become just kind of the dumb pipe

00:19:46   that provides the tires and things like that. Why would a carmaker do that? And you'd almost

00:19:52   need a carmaker that was down on their luck at that point. I don't know, it's I'm fascinated

00:19:58   I do think that Apple could do something that would be interesting, whether it would succeed or not is an open question.

00:20:05   But I think I'm interested to see what Apple might try, and I would think that Apple would get something out of it even if they didn't end up making a car ultimately.

00:20:16   But the bottom line, I mean, even in that ATP episode, you know, you could hear them almost convincing themselves during the episode that it would be a good idea.

00:20:27   a good idea. And the moment for me that that came across was when they were talking about

00:20:32   the current state of affairs in cars and how car makers aren't very good at doing this

00:20:40   stuff at user interface and at software. And are they going to get better? I mean, these

00:20:49   are companies that generally punt everything to their OEMs. They punt entertainment systems

00:20:55   to someone else and they're lousy. So if that's the case, Marco's argument was, "Oh, well,

00:21:05   they're lousy and we still drive them." Like, okay, but what if there was something that

00:21:09   was non-lousy? And I think that would be Apple's take on it, is if you're an Apple executive

00:21:18   and you're driving down the 280 interstate in your fancy car and you're frustrated by

00:21:24   by how lousy the user experience is on the inside.

00:21:27   Would you not ask yourself the question,

00:21:29   why can't this be better

00:21:30   and could we do something to do this?

00:21:32   - Just developing an interior or like, you know,

00:21:37   and when they were talking about interior,

00:21:39   this is turning to follow out now,

00:21:41   they were talking about like the entertainment system

00:21:44   and just the way the car looks and feels on the inside.

00:21:48   That feels like such a non-profitable business.

00:21:53   Like if that's all Apple was doing,

00:21:56   it doesn't seem like there could be enough money in that

00:21:58   to really make it worthwhile.

00:22:00   Like cars are sold to an individual maybe

00:22:04   like a couple of times in their lives.

00:22:06   And I can't imagine that a huge piece of the markup

00:22:11   that's involved in a car, you know, that belongs to,

00:22:15   so of the price that you pay on a car,

00:22:18   I can't imagine that a large amount of the price

00:22:20   the markup belongs to the interface or the user experience inside or the level that's

00:22:27   used, right?

00:22:28   A lot of the expense is going to come from the actual manufacturing of the motors and

00:22:33   etc.

00:22:34   I would assume.

00:22:35   So I can't imagine that people are going to pay a huge amount of money for an Apple design

00:22:40   thing when they're already laying out an incredible amount of money already.

00:22:47   tend to be like the second big purchase in your life, I suppose.

00:22:53   You gotta wonder if maybe what they end up with is they experiment with this and they

00:22:59   realize they'd rather not build a car, and at that point they take what they've built

00:23:04   to a carmaker and say, you know, "Let's make a deal." And maybe it's not, "We're going

00:23:10   to license this to whoever wants it." Maybe it's, "Let's make a deal with Ford or Nissan

00:23:16   or Honda or whoever, and maybe it's as much as let's make a deal and create a new line

00:23:22   of car that's a joint venture between you and us. And, you know, it'll have our technology

00:23:29   and it'll be a new brand name so you can still have your other products and other brand names.

00:23:33   There's lots of different permutations that could happen, especially since I can imagine

00:23:36   anything because I don't know anything about the car industry. But right, I mean, just

00:23:40   applying those thoughts, there's lots of ways this could go that isn't just Apple is going

00:23:45   to entirely make a car itself. Lots of different ways it could go.

00:23:49   Let's make the rocker car, right? Yeah, well, right! I mean, well, you could

00:23:54   argue that CarPlay is kind of the rocker car, right? I think I might have said that last

00:23:58   week, where it's not quite all the way there, and it's really compromised because Apple

00:24:04   only controls one tiny little part of that product. And, I don't know. I keep trying

00:24:13   to put myself in the mind of Apple executives and thinking, "We got to be able to do better

00:24:20   than what's out there." And I think they think like that, like, "We can disrupt this. We

00:24:26   can do better. We can push these guys. And if they won't come with us, maybe we'll do

00:24:31   something ourselves." Oh, I wanted to point out too, a bunch of people have said, "Well,

00:24:35   why don't they just buy Tesla?" It's like, "Well, how does that work? Does that work?

00:24:40   that get them what they wanted? I mean, Tesla's a public company, so could they do a takeover?

00:24:46   Have they talked to Tesla and discovered that Tesla would fight it or people would quit?

00:24:52   Or have they not talked to Tesla? Is Tesla what they want? Is what Tesla's doing what

00:24:59   Apple's vision of a car is, or is it not? Are they compatible or not? I don't think

00:25:06   it's just as easy as saying, "If Apple wants to do cars, they should just buy Tesla," because

00:25:10   than what you're gonna get as Tesla.

00:25:12   Maybe Apple doesn't want Tesla.

00:25:13   Maybe Apple doesn't wanna be Tesla.

00:25:14   Maybe Apple wants something different.

00:25:16   We don't, you know, we're left to speculate,

00:25:19   as we will be doing for the next five years probably.

00:25:22   - What is buying Tesla?

00:25:24   Like, what is that?

00:25:26   Because you don't just, like, in these scenarios,

00:25:29   you can't just like, I mean, I know you kind of can,

00:25:33   but you don't just walk up to a company and just be like,

00:25:36   we will take everything exactly that you're doing,

00:25:39   change nothing but we have it.

00:25:41   It doesn't work like that.

00:25:42   - No, well look at what's happening with Beats,

00:25:45   where they're gonna end up with a completely different

00:25:47   music service, the reports say,

00:25:48   that's not even maybe gonna be branded as Beats,

00:25:51   that is gonna be their subscription service,

00:25:52   because it went inside Apple and they're like,

00:25:54   "Oh no, we're not gonna do it that way."

00:25:55   And it immediately started taking it apart

00:25:58   and putting it back together again.

00:26:00   - Yeah, but my point is that Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine

00:26:05   were happy for that to happen, clearly,

00:26:08   because they went with it.

00:26:10   And I would expect that Elon Musk

00:26:13   doesn't want to work at Apple.

00:26:14   A man like him, not because there's anything wrong

00:26:19   with Apple, but just like why would he not be the man?

00:26:24   Because Beats is kind of, over time,

00:26:29   is gonna start to get more and more hidden,

00:26:31   especially as Beats music will disappear, et cetera.

00:26:34   And I wonder if eventually,

00:26:38   I don't think they have yet if they drop the bydray in Beats.

00:26:43   I don't know if they will, but it would be interesting to see what they do with that.

00:26:50   Because they kind of don't really acknowledge, like all of the marketing currently is still

00:26:54   weird Beats marketing.

00:26:58   I don't know if Apple have a hand in it, but it seems to follow the exact same path that

00:27:02   it did before.

00:27:03   just be a case of like inertia still carrying some of that stuff along. But

00:27:08   anyway like you know so much to say that I don't expect that you could just walk

00:27:15   up to Tesla and make Tesla as awesome as it is there. Like things are gonna happen

00:27:20   and you could end up like back to square one again if after the two-year

00:27:24   agreements literally everybody that's important leaves. Well as Joe Steele

00:27:29   pointed out in the chat room you know Elon Musk might just take the money and

00:27:32   and use it for SpaceX so he can go to Mars.

00:27:36   And my thought there is just, what if somebody like Apple

00:27:39   looks at Tesla and says, Elon Musk

00:27:42   is the guy who's made all of this stuff happen.

00:27:44   And without him there and his expertise,

00:27:49   the company loses a lot of its value.

00:27:51   You risk-- in a scenario like that,

00:27:53   it's not like a poison pill.

00:27:55   But it is, sort of, which is if you've

00:27:57   got a founder who is not going to stick around

00:27:59   and you view the founder as having

00:28:00   a huge part of the value of the company,

00:28:02   then you kind of can't buy the company

00:28:04   because by buying the company,

00:28:05   you're sending a huge chunk of the value of the company out.

00:28:09   - And if there's one company on the planet

00:28:12   that understands the value of the vision of a founder,

00:28:15   it's Apple.

00:28:16   - It would probably be Apple.

00:28:18   - So.

00:28:19   - But like I said, it may not just be as simple as Apple.

00:28:21   Apple's doing all of this

00:28:22   because they very specifically think there's something that,

00:28:25   they think Tesla needs competition.

00:28:27   They have a different take on what the car should be.

00:28:29   They wanna do it themselves

00:28:31   and not just buy Tesla,

00:28:33   they wanna do what they wanna do and it's different.

00:28:36   And that's another reason that you do it separately.

00:28:39   It is a fair question to ask

00:28:43   that if Apple looked at Tesla and said,

00:28:46   "Man, that is exactly what we wanna do,

00:28:49   "but they're doing it."

00:28:51   What's the right thing to do there?

00:28:53   The right thing to do there might be to do nothing.

00:28:56   It might be, if you feel like it's vitally important

00:28:58   that Apple have a car strategy, you buy Tesla.

00:29:01   it would be a shame if the strategy was,

00:29:03   well, let's do that too.

00:29:04   We'll just hire a bunch of people from Tesla

00:29:06   and we'll make our own Tesla and it'll be Apple.

00:29:10   That could be the case.

00:29:11   My hope, the optimist in me says,

00:29:14   that it's probably not that and that it's,

00:29:17   I hope anyway, it's not that.

00:29:19   And that it's, they wanna do something different.

00:29:21   Or they can't get Tesla for some reason.

00:29:24   They're like, we don't know, we can't do that.

00:29:25   We're gonna do this ourselves.

00:29:27   It'll be interesting to see.

00:29:29   It'll be interesting to see.

00:29:30   I love, I was thinking about this the other day.

00:29:32   Do you remember the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

00:29:35   - Yes.

00:29:36   - Great documentary about the first round of electric cars,

00:29:39   which were basically taken off the road and junked,

00:29:43   even though the people who drove them loved them.

00:29:46   They weren't allowed to buy them.

00:29:47   They were all rentals and they were all taken away.

00:29:50   And it's funny now because now,

00:29:55   Now that documentary is like a, from a blip in time,

00:30:00   because enough changed that now electric cars

00:30:04   are a thing again.

00:30:05   But that was, it's funny that we've come that far,

00:30:09   is sort of my point there, is that we were at a point

00:30:12   where it looked like with despair,

00:30:14   the electric car was an idea that was,

00:30:17   their time was right, but the car makers

00:30:20   just were playing a game on us,

00:30:24   the scam to say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're working on it."

00:30:27   And then they swept it under the rug.

00:30:29   But what happened is a few years later, they came back.

00:30:34   So now we're talking about it a lot.

00:30:35   And I think it's very clear to see that electric cars

00:30:39   and smart cars are going to be a huge part of the future,

00:30:42   whether Apple's making them or not.

00:30:44   - The oil situation changed.

00:30:45   Like fundamentally, I think car companies

00:30:48   have come to the realization that it's going to run out.

00:30:51   So if you want to continue to exist, you need to find different ways to power your vehicles.

00:30:58   Anything.

00:31:01   Yeah.

00:31:02   I am at least, I mean I know this room is discussion is maybe getting played out a bit now,

00:31:08   but I'm happy that we have something interesting like this to talk about.

00:31:15   That is not just us making up what we would like to see.

00:31:20   You know, like, this is an interesting thing to discuss, I think.

00:31:26   Well, like, listener Nick Foster wrote in to suggest that if there was an Apple car,

00:31:30   would it have Apple Pay?

00:31:32   And could you pay a drive-through with your footprint on the gas pedal?

00:31:37   See?

00:31:38   Making things up.

00:31:40   Thank you, listener Nick.

00:31:41   Yeah, sure.

00:31:42   Apple Pay, you just drive over something and it buys something for you.

00:31:46   Sure.

00:31:47   Bare feet driving.

00:31:48   Why not?

00:31:50   But there are also... it is good that we have this to talk about because although it may

00:31:55   be outlandish and far off and meaty, it sure beats the alternative which is tiny snippets

00:32:02   of non-information leading to people pondering secret plans of apples that don't exist.

00:32:10   Which is my way of saying my old colleague Chris Breen left Macworld last week and has

00:32:18   taking a job at Apple. And I suddenly started seeing all these things

00:32:25   that were speculating of like, "Why is Apple hiring journalists? What is their

00:32:30   plan? Is Apple going to launch its own website?" Well, besides apple.com?

00:32:38   You didn't seriously hear people saying that.

00:32:40   Yeah.

00:32:41   Oh, but why? What would you do on it?

00:32:44   - Yeah, well, no.

00:32:45   And what they said was, well, you know,

00:32:48   whether smoke is fire, they hired Anand Lal Shimpi

00:32:51   and they hired Chris Breen.

00:32:53   And one person pointed out that my old colleague, John Seth,

00:32:56   is working at Apple right now.

00:32:58   And that's true.

00:32:59   And there's at least one other former Mac world person

00:33:02   who left last year who is working at Apple.

00:33:05   So, you know, I can report that exclusively here.

00:33:09   So people are like, oh, what are they doing?

00:33:11   Well, the answer is, okay, first off,

00:33:13   A whole bunch of people lost their jobs

00:33:15   and are looking for new jobs.

00:33:18   So that's step one.

00:33:19   And those are people who actually understand things

00:33:20   about Apple and know people at Apple and all of that.

00:33:23   So that's part two.

00:33:25   In Chris's case, he didn't lose his job.

00:33:27   Although, you know, with a staff the size

00:33:29   that Macworld size is now, you gotta figure

00:33:31   he lost all of his former colleagues.

00:33:33   He was probably being called on to do a whole bunch

00:33:35   of stuff that, you know, he wasn't doing before, you know.

00:33:39   And also something traumatic like that happens

00:33:41   and you reevaluate.

00:33:42   If you read his blog post, he says very much like,

00:33:44   I wanted to take this opportunity to do something else,

00:33:47   which really resonated with me

00:33:48   'cause that was what was going through my mind too,

00:33:50   is like, I need to take this opportunity.

00:33:52   I will regret it if I don't try something else

00:33:54   before as he put it, you know,

00:33:55   you put on the long shorts and sit out in the deck chair

00:34:00   and are an old man playing checkers at the park.

00:34:04   So the fact is, I mean, I got recruited

00:34:09   by an Apple recruiter like two or three years ago

00:34:13   for a job doing like,

00:34:15   I think it was App Store curation of some kind.

00:34:20   And that is considered an editorial job.

00:34:25   Apple has lots of what you'd call editorial jobs,

00:34:27   things that a skillset of being a writer and editor

00:34:30   for a place like Macworld would come in handy.

00:34:33   And that's like not PR jobs,

00:34:35   that's a different set of jobs.

00:34:37   And most of the journalists I know

00:34:39   are ill-suited for PR, let me put it that way.

00:34:42   They're ill-suited for PR, I don't think they could do it.

00:34:45   But there are lots of other jobs.

00:34:46   So there's App Store curation,

00:34:48   there's documentation on the inside,

00:34:51   there's Apple University on the inside,

00:34:54   there's documentation on the outside,

00:34:55   there's writing content for Apple's website.

00:34:58   I mean, the list, I mean, literally goes on.

00:35:03   You can go to Apple's career website

00:35:05   and see all the jobs that Apple has

00:35:07   and see that there is some chunk of them that are kind of like content producer jobs.

00:35:12   I literally saw somebody tweet today about a job in London working on... I'm just bringing

00:35:21   it up now. It's an editorial job. It's taking forever to load. But it's like they have many

00:35:29   roles like this which are editorial, and this is for an editorial producer of experience

00:35:33   across pop culture and specific expertise in music journalism.

00:35:36   So this kind of ties into what we were talking about last week with Zane Lowe moving across.

00:35:43   But what I thought of this would be interesting for this topic is because it shows that there

00:35:51   are just a ton of people that work in editorial.

00:35:56   That is a thing there.

00:35:57   Like, I mean, you know, do you remember we were talking,

00:36:00   I think it was last week about Apple

00:36:02   and the idea of them being in control of podcasts,

00:36:05   and I was saying that I know that there are people

00:36:07   that work on podcast editorial.

00:36:09   Like, it's a thing,

00:36:09   'cause somebody has to put stuff in the stores.

00:36:12   Like, it has to go in there somehow.

00:36:15   And I guess it makes sense if you've got someone

00:36:17   who you know is a good eye for this stuff,

00:36:20   like a journalist who's written about apps

00:36:22   for years and years.

00:36:23   It kind of makes sense.

00:36:25   - Yeah, exactly.

00:36:25   And so there are so many different jobs.

00:36:28   So what I would say is, is there a conspiracy at Apple?

00:36:31   Maybe, but not to my knowledge.

00:36:34   To my knowledge, no.

00:36:35   These are the people I know who are working at Apple

00:36:37   are all working in different places for different teams

00:36:40   and doing different things that take advantage

00:36:43   of the skills that they've had in the media,

00:36:47   on the outside, in a different way that serves Apple.

00:36:50   And so people just get very literal minded and say,

00:36:53   "Oh, well, this person does X,

00:36:54   so they must be doing X at Apple.

00:36:56   And that's just not, that's not how it works generally.

00:36:59   That's not what happens.

00:37:02   Now, nobody knows what Anand Lal Shimpi is doing,

00:37:05   but even there, just because he comes,

00:37:08   his background is so very specific

00:37:10   in that he's an incredibly technical person

00:37:11   and a communicator.

00:37:13   I have some ideas of where he might be,

00:37:15   but really there are a lot of places they could plug him.

00:37:18   That's not, you know, but you don't hire him

00:37:21   to write articles for apple.com about processor performance.

00:37:25   I think that there's more to it than that.

00:37:27   Otherwise I don't think he would even want that job.

00:37:30   So I don't know, it's just funny.

00:37:32   People like to see patterns

00:37:34   and sometimes you see patterns out of noise.

00:37:38   And I think that's what's happening here.

00:37:40   That said, it is a fascinating thing.

00:37:41   I had a good conversation.

00:37:43   I mean, we talked about the podcast stuff

00:37:45   and we talked about the music curation last week.

00:37:47   And I think it's interesting when you look at this,

00:37:51   I had a nice conversation on Twitter with,

00:37:52   I wanna say David Barnard about how Apple handles curation.

00:37:57   And one of the issues I have with it is that it's anonymous.

00:38:03   And I think that maybe that will start to change.

00:38:08   But if you look at what Beats does,

00:38:10   they have editors who are experts

00:38:12   and you can see their names and they curate stuff

00:38:15   and they write stuff and it's great.

00:38:18   And I would like to see that in Apple's other stuff.

00:38:20   Apple's attitude up to now seems to have been,

00:38:24   and again, maybe this is one of those ways

00:38:25   Apple is gonna change.

00:38:26   We talked a lot about Apple changing.

00:38:28   Apple's attitude up to now has been,

00:38:30   all the people who pick, they're curating apps,

00:38:34   Mac apps, store apps, iOS apps, games, podcasts,

00:38:39   all of that stuff, they're essentially anonymous.

00:38:43   There's no names on the site, it's all just from Apple.

00:38:50   And when I talk to them about the app curation,

00:38:53   I can tell you that the philosophy was very much like,

00:38:57   you don't know anybody, you don't talk to anybody,

00:39:01   nobody knows that you're an app curator,

00:39:03   nobody knows anything, there's no communication.

00:39:05   If you need art from them,

00:39:07   'cause you wanna promote it on the app store,

00:39:08   you go to somebody else at Apple,

00:39:10   and then they go to the developer and get the art.

00:39:13   It's just like this totally weird black box.

00:39:16   And that's a very old school Apple way of approaching it.

00:39:19   In my opinion, it's totally wrong.

00:39:23   That Beats has it right and Apple has it wrong.

00:39:26   Which is, first off, this is something I learned

00:39:30   at Macworld and MacUser before that,

00:39:33   which is the idea that there's this voice of God

00:39:36   that comes from a brand and tells you what's good

00:39:37   or what's bad, and that is, it's a lie.

00:39:42   Because somebody wrote that review,

00:39:45   somebody made a decision, a writer, an editor,

00:39:47   somebody made a decision.

00:39:49   it's coming from some source.

00:39:51   It's not coming from the mountaintop,

00:39:53   from Macworld's secret lab

00:39:57   determined that this product is good.

00:39:59   That's not what happened.

00:40:00   It was a writer with an opinion

00:40:01   or an editor and a writer who collaborated

00:40:03   and they had an opinion about a product.

00:40:05   And I feel that with Apple.

00:40:06   And it's a very actually old media way of thinking,

00:40:10   an old brand way of thinking,

00:40:11   which is the way we show our authority

00:40:14   is by pretending that no human beings are involved

00:40:16   and that it's all just a black box

00:40:18   and nobody knows where it comes from.

00:40:20   And it's through, and putting this in 21st century terms,

00:40:24   it's through a lack of transparency

00:40:26   that we are trustworthy.

00:40:29   And that's crap, that's ridiculous,

00:40:32   that's completely backward.

00:40:34   You get trustworthiness through transparency,

00:40:38   through disclosure.

00:40:39   If you look on Beats,

00:40:42   the curated playlists are curated by a person

00:40:44   and you can say, "Oh, that guy likes this stuff.

00:40:46   "I like that stuff."

00:40:48   or that guy likes this stuff, I don't like that stuff.

00:40:50   But to say it's like, nope, our musical robots

00:40:52   have assembled a playlist for you that you might like.

00:40:56   Come on, there are no musical robots back there.

00:40:58   There are human beings back there.

00:40:59   And I think you could actually make your content better

00:41:04   if people could see the human beings.

00:41:06   If we knew that there was like this person who wrote about,

00:41:10   who curated game, you know, best game lists at Apple.

00:41:13   I actually, and the argument is, oh, well,

00:41:16   Apple needs to be impartial about,

00:41:19   because the app developers are their partners.

00:41:21   They're not impartial, they're featuring apps.

00:41:24   They're picking apps and promoting them.

00:41:26   They're doing best of lists at the end of the year.

00:41:28   They're not impartial.

00:41:30   So why pretend that you are when you're not?

00:41:33   It's just, it's funny.

00:41:35   This is one of those areas where I look at Apple

00:41:37   and I think Apple is behaving like a magazine

00:41:42   I worked for behaved 15 years ago, 20 years ago.

00:41:46   And we learned, whatever, 10 or 15 years ago,

00:41:49   that that was completely wrong.

00:41:52   But Apple, I think, still does that.

00:41:54   And so the question is, will the Beats thing

00:41:56   maybe inject this other philosophy

00:41:58   and the fact that Steve is gone

00:42:00   and people are able to revisit what Apple wants to be

00:42:03   and change it, will they change it?

00:42:05   'Cause they totally should change it.

00:42:07   - Well, it would be insane to hire a world famous DJ

00:42:12   for his experience in music.

00:42:14   - So you can't talk to anybody ever again

00:42:16   or admit that you're doing anything.

00:42:18   Why would you do that? - Or even then,

00:42:19   just not put his name by his pics.

00:42:23   You know? - Right.

00:42:24   - It'd be crazy. - Why would you do that?

00:42:26   But that's what's happening,

00:42:27   and again, this is happening in music.

00:42:28   So the question is, would that happen somewhere else?

00:42:31   Would that happen in podcasts?

00:42:32   Would that happen in Mac apps?

00:42:34   Would that happen in iOS apps?

00:42:36   There was a moment when they were recruiting people

00:42:38   from the Mac App Store and I thought,

00:42:39   well, you know, the person they should probably hire

00:42:41   is Dan Frakes because he does the Mac Gems column

00:42:44   at Macworld, which is entirely highlighting

00:42:47   amazing software you've never heard of for your Mac.

00:42:51   It's like, well, that is a perfect skillset

00:42:54   for a job like that theoretically.

00:42:57   But if what you're gonna do is hide that person

00:43:00   behind a mask and nobody knows who they are

00:43:02   and they never actually write anything,

00:43:04   they only just pick things on the site

00:43:05   and it's this weird kind of black box thing.

00:43:08   First off, why would somebody like Dan

00:43:09   ever wanna do that job?

00:43:11   And second, you've completely waste

00:43:13   what makes what the work of the Dan did so great.

00:43:16   So will Apple's approach to music change

00:43:21   and will that bleed into Apple's approach

00:43:24   to other forms of media?

00:43:25   I don't know.

00:43:26   I hope it does because I think it should.

00:43:30   I think there are some great content people inside

00:43:34   and curation people inside Apple now

00:43:36   who are not allowed to have a voice

00:43:39   because that's not what the policy is.

00:43:42   the policy is, everybody, it's just a secret.

00:43:45   It doesn't make any sense.

00:43:46   - I do think that this will change.

00:43:50   - I hope so.

00:43:51   - I think they're staffing up in an interesting way.

00:43:54   And it would make sense to me if Chris Breen

00:43:58   was going to do something like this.

00:43:59   Like I would understand that, you know?

00:44:02   Not that I'm saying that's what I think he's doing

00:44:04   because I literally have no idea.

00:44:06   - I don't think that's what he's doing.

00:44:07   I don't think that's what he's doing, but yeah.

00:44:10   it would make sense for at least somebody like him,

00:44:12   you know, to go and do a job like this,

00:44:15   I think would be very sensible.

00:44:17   - I don't think those jobs exist right now at Apple,

00:44:18   but maybe they will someday, you know, maybe they will.

00:44:21   But I just, it's that,

00:44:23   I realize I've just ranted about this for a while,

00:44:27   but it's that, it really sets me off.

00:44:29   'Cause I had that moment where Rick LePage,

00:44:30   my old boss at Macworld,

00:44:32   who previously was the editor of MacWeek,

00:44:34   been around this business a long time.

00:44:35   And he told me,

00:44:38   at some point he said, "Look, this royal 'we' that we've all been taught to write when we review stuff

00:44:46   is a lie. Because if you write a review and like something, that's you. You liked it. And somebody

00:44:55   else might disagree." So pretending that there's only one possible opinion here, and it's yours,

00:45:01   and it's not even your voice anymore, it's this, you know, God up on the mountaintop,

00:45:05   is disingenuous. You're actually, you're hiding, you're lying to your audience.

00:45:11   And that, I mean, that really stuck with me and my belief that you need to, people need to see

00:45:17   who's back there. And to see Apple kind of continue in some places to cling to this idea that

00:45:23   it's all a secret and we're just a secret society that pushes things, you know, through a slot,

00:45:29   and then they go out in the world and who knows where it came from or what the motivations are.

00:45:34   It's not effective. It's not a 21st century approach to curating content.

00:45:40   And so yeah, I hope with the DJ hiring and the purchase of beats that this is a sign that they're changing the approach.

00:45:47   Because how great would the App Store be if it had a much stronger voice and stronger set of people who were visible saying,

00:45:57   "Here are great things in the App Store."

00:45:59   More curation on the App Store would not be bad.

00:46:02   It would be really great.

00:46:05   - I would love to see more, and I say more,

00:46:08   and I'll say one in a moment,

00:46:09   guest sort of recommendations as well.

00:46:12   Because Apple do something called the Indie Game Showcase.

00:46:16   It's something that's kind of,

00:46:17   I think it's there every week.

00:46:18   And they showcase a game, right,

00:46:21   and they write about the game a little bit.

00:46:23   And then the developer of that game,

00:46:27   they recommend, they have a section on the page

00:46:29   that recommends their favorite games.

00:46:32   So it's a way like that I like that kind of thing you know like let's say for

00:46:38   example they contacted you and they wanted you to pick your five favorite

00:46:42   apps or like post a picture of your home screen and what are all the apps there

00:46:46   you know I'd love to see that in the in the App Store it'd be fantastic I mean I

00:46:52   know I know there's already a lot of places that do that like your website

00:46:56   but I think it would be really nice to see that kind of stuff there as well.

00:47:00   Well, Apple has the power to reach an audience that no independent website can do because

00:47:05   they're Apple, because they built the apps. It's always been a challenge because Apple

00:47:08   has had, I mean, remember they did iReview where they were writing reviews of websites

00:47:12   and things like that. It's like Apple's history with content creation shows that they are,

00:47:16   they have no idea about how to create content. That was a long time ago. They could change.

00:47:21   I'm not sure whether they're willing to change or not, but it wouldn't be great. And, you

00:47:25   You know, winds of change are blowing at Apple, so maybe this is a place where we might see

00:47:32   some of that.

00:47:33   I don't know.

00:47:34   My guess is that there are a lot of people inside Apple who think that having more voice

00:47:38   and more visibility is the right thing to do, and my guess is there are also people

00:47:41   within Apple who are sticking to the old approach, which is, "No, no, no, we're going to be totally

00:47:46   objective and we don't put the names of who writes our software in our about box, so why

00:47:53   Why would we put the names of people who have opinions about apps?

00:47:56   It's like trying to, and again, this is one of these fallacies where they're using their

00:48:00   they're thinking about their products to think about content.

00:48:03   And that's why Apple traditionally has done a bad job with content, which is the problem

00:48:07   when you've got a content store and you're trying to curate it is it's not software,

00:48:12   it's content, different people have different takes.

00:48:16   And what you're looking for is the experts with taste to make choices and let the user

00:48:21   decide.

00:48:23   that's different than the way you build software where you gotta make the

00:48:26   choices and you don't let the user decide you make the choices.

00:48:29   They're just totally different and I don't know. My optimistic side says

00:48:34   maybe that that will finally change at Apple. I'm sure there are people at Apple

00:48:38   who feel that way too but they should, you know, yeah, yeah. It's just funny, we

00:48:43   talk about it with music. Apple seems to have a little bit more comfort when it

00:48:46   comes to music but they should be doing that for TV and movies and apps,

00:48:50   absolutely with apps. Maybe. We're running a little long now because we we both got

00:48:58   very passionate there. I know I know well let's uh. I love it I love that that I

00:49:03   didn't expect that I don't think either of us expected that conversation but I'm

00:49:06   pleased that we had it it was a very interesting one I look forward to seeing

00:49:10   people's opinions on that. Thanks to our friend Chris Breen who is not

00:49:15   actually doing any of that but is working at Apple and is awesome and we'll

00:49:20   wrap up this section on that note which is I worked with Chris Breen

00:49:25   I did the math I worked the same publication as Chris Breen for 20 years

00:49:30   from 1994 to 2014 first a Mac user and then a Mac world I think the world of

00:49:38   him I felt really bad for him when he was the last soldier standing when

00:49:44   everybody else left Macworld last fall and I wish him nothing nothing but the

00:49:49   best. Also he composes every podcast theme song out there including ours so

00:49:54   thanks to Chris for that. He's told me that he'll continue to compose podcast

00:49:59   music as long as I keep sending him t-shirts. So thank you Chris and best of

00:50:05   luck at Apple. Because now he's going to sink beneath the sea and we're never gonna you know I

00:50:09   those who know Chris's writing well will look for his the words that are his

00:50:13   favorite pet words that he works into things that nobody else uses and then

00:50:17   we'll know it's him. Sending like warning shots over the wall you know so we

00:50:23   know that he's still there. There are words, there are words only Chris Breen

00:50:27   writes and if we see one of those somewhere on an Apple website sometime

00:50:31   we'll know it's him. But anyway I just I wish him the best he's great I think

00:50:37   this is an exciting new adventure for him. The the loafer is on the other foot

00:50:40   He's been a work-at-home guy for the last, you know, forever basically and now he's gonna be commuting

00:50:46   Whereas I am now the the longtime commuter is now the work-at-home guy

00:50:50   So we we crossed crossed jobs there a little bit which is pretty hilarious too. So wish him the best. Absolutely

00:50:57   Congratulations, Chris. Yeah

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00:52:58   of this show.

00:52:59   - Hooray.

00:53:02   - What would you like to talk about?

00:53:04   Should we talk quickly about this Apple Watch Magnum Opus

00:53:08   that you and Mr. Moran worked on this week?

00:53:11   - Yeah, let's talk.

00:53:12   We'll do a little Apple Watch.

00:53:14   Little Apple Watch.

00:53:15   We'll continue to tease Internet of Things

00:53:17   and Connected Home stuff for a future episode.

00:53:20   (laughing)

00:53:21   It's our new Kindle thing where we just promise it

00:53:24   for weeks and weeks and never deliver it.

00:53:26   But yeah, let's talk about the Apple Watch.

00:53:27   Oh, I should mention, by the way,

00:53:29   for those who are listening,

00:53:30   special guest next week on Upgrade.

00:53:34   Special guest, stay tuned for that next week.

00:53:38   It's not Chris Breen.

00:53:39   - You make it sound like it's someone

00:53:40   who has an Apple Watch.

00:53:41   We're not talking to the Apple Watch next week.

00:53:44   - No, it's serious on the Apple Watch.

00:53:45   - Hello, Jason, how can I help?

00:53:48   - Ahoy, watch.

00:53:49   (laughing)

00:53:51   - So what made you want to write this

00:53:54   and what is this post?

00:53:57   So it's called the, what is it?

00:53:59   Apple Watch, what we know?

00:54:00   - Yeah.

00:54:01   - So back at Macworld, we would write these FAQ stories

00:54:05   about various Apple products and they were really popular

00:54:10   and I don't wanna give that up.

00:54:13   And Serenity Caldwell has learned this lesson well

00:54:15   'cause she's writing them and I'm worn out too.

00:54:18   I didn't wanna give them up.

00:54:18   And so we wanted to do one about the Apple Watch

00:54:20   and we wanted to start,

00:54:22   we probably should have started this back at Macworld,

00:54:26   but when the Apple Watch was announced,

00:54:28   but somehow, you know, the next day

00:54:30   we didn't work at Macworld anymore.

00:54:31   So, with the, in the run-up- - Somehow magically.

00:54:36   - That just happened.

00:54:37   In the run-up for the release of the Apple Watch,

00:54:41   I thought this would be a good time to start a document

00:54:44   that explains what is going on with the Apple Watch.

00:54:47   And that way we can use, we can start that,

00:54:49   we can ask people to,

00:54:51   we actually did a form that's linked to from that

00:54:54   that you can ask your questions

00:54:55   and we'll do updates over the next few weeks.

00:54:58   And from a pure sort of like website strategy standpoint,

00:55:03   having an article that is linked to about the Apple Watch

00:55:07   is great because that helps us in search.

00:55:11   And when the Apple Watch comes out,

00:55:13   what we'll do is we'll update that post.

00:55:15   So it'll be more current,

00:55:17   but it will have already been out in the world.

00:55:19   So if people are searching for a question

00:55:21   about the Apple Watch,

00:55:22   one of the answers in their search results,

00:55:25   hopefully will be our story.

00:55:27   So there's a content strategy portion of it,

00:55:30   which was sort of the playbook that we used at Macworld too.

00:55:33   But I figured we're about to enter Apple watch time.

00:55:39   And so it's good to have that reset and refresh.

00:55:41   And for us, it was good to pour through

00:55:43   Apple's marketing pages and try to figure out

00:55:46   all the details of this.

00:55:47   And it's funny, there's this whole conversation happening.

00:55:50   John Gruber is sort of at the center of it about like

00:55:53   what the different prices are for the watches

00:55:55   and what the different bands are and all of that.

00:55:57   And it was funny that that was going on

00:55:59   just after we had had that whole conversation ourselves,

00:56:03   me and Dan, about what the different models were gonna be

00:56:06   and what the prices were gonna be

00:56:07   and are the bands available with the different models.

00:56:10   And some of the feedback I got about our story was,

00:56:15   you say it's this, but it's gonna be this.

00:56:17   And I said, where does it say it's gonna be that?

00:56:19   And a lot of times the response I get is,

00:56:21   oh, well, I just assumed it was gonna be that.

00:56:22   like, well yeah, this is one of the challenges for writing a story like this

00:56:25   is there are a lot of things we can guess about but what do we know? What do

00:56:29   we know and what do we think is likely? And trying to keep those

00:56:33   clear about, you know, what we know and what we don't. So hopefully it's useful

00:56:37   as a refresher for people who've forgotten the avalanche of information

00:56:40   that came out in September about the Apple Watch and we can use that as a

00:56:43   jumping-off point as more information comes out as we're now in the run-up to

00:56:47   it's being released.

00:56:49   Is there any information in here that you were able to get yourself?

00:56:54   Like, either from being at the event, I'm sure some of these photos are yours,

00:56:59   and/or like, have you been able to get any information from Apple

00:57:04   that has helped inform this piece?

00:57:06   No, we've just been... it goes back to the Apple Watch time we had in September

00:57:14   and all the stuff that Apple's posted.

00:57:18   It's mostly just trying to glean from that what the details are

00:57:21   because Apple's got these beautiful web pages

00:57:23   that show a whole bunch of different things and there's just so much there

00:57:26   and we wanted to boil it down into a simpler kind of like,

00:57:30   "Does it do this? Does it do that?"

00:57:32   Also, we've seen a lot of people ask us these questions

00:57:34   where we know the answers and we get them repeatedly

00:57:38   and it makes you realize,

00:57:39   "Oh, people just don't understand this thing about the Apple Watch,

00:57:42   so let's put that together."

00:57:43   I'd say the biggest new thing is the developer information

00:57:47   because Apple rolled out the WatchKit stuff

00:57:50   and there's like the first wave

00:57:51   where they're projecting onto the screen

00:57:53   and a bunch of developers are talking about

00:57:55   how you get your app to do something

00:57:58   which is like a very lightweight kind of control

00:58:00   that can go on the watch.

00:58:01   And then down the road,

00:58:02   there's supposed to be a more full fledged app SDK,

00:58:04   which they'll probably see at WWDC.

00:58:07   Maybe, maybe not, maybe later than that.

00:58:11   So some of that got to be in there too.

00:58:14   - Having looked through all of this information again

00:58:19   and kind of refreshed yourself on it,

00:58:21   what is your personal feeling about the device?

00:58:25   Like, do you want one?

00:58:27   Like actually for yourself other than just like the need

00:58:32   or the perceived need to write about it?

00:58:35   - I mean, I'm gonna have to have one

00:58:36   because I'm gonna have to write about it,

00:58:38   but you're right.

00:58:39   - Probably, as I've said on the show before,

00:58:42   I've had a pebble for a couple of years.

00:58:44   - I'll call pebble as we record this tomorrow.

00:58:47   They're having an event and some images came out today

00:58:51   that were leaked.

00:58:52   I'll put a link in the show notes,

00:58:53   but maybe by the time you listen to this,

00:58:55   you know what pebble's device is gonna be,

00:58:57   and it looks a disaster.

00:59:00   I feel so bad for them.

00:59:02   They shouldn't be making,

00:59:03   basically they're making a color screen pebble.

00:59:07   And if what we've seen is what they're making,

00:59:11   they should have just not made it.

00:59:13   They should have just stuck as they were

00:59:15   and just went with the E Ink screen, I think,

00:59:18   because that made them different.

00:59:19   But anyway.

00:59:20   - Yeah, it doesn't look good.

00:59:23   So my answer is that, yeah, I think I do want an Apple Watch.

00:59:27   I think it's gonna be cool.

00:59:28   I've been primed by my two years with the Pebble,

00:59:31   and I think that having something that works much better

00:59:33   with my iPhone is something I'm looking forward to.

00:59:36   So yeah, I think so.

00:59:38   I doubt that was ever a real question,

00:59:40   'cause it's me, I love this stuff, but yeah, I'll get it.

00:59:46   In fact, I have to say doing the thing out of the research,

00:59:50   the thing that struck me the most about this

00:59:52   is that the more I looked at the gold ones,

00:59:54   the edition models, I kept thinking,

00:59:58   I kept thinking, oh man, and this is why they don't do it,

01:00:01   is I would love the, they've got the regular Apple Watch,

01:00:06   not the sport, but the mid range one that's the Apple Watch.

01:00:09   And that's in, that's basically in stainless steel or black

01:00:12   or black stainless steel, whatever it is, Joe steel.

01:00:16   It's, wouldn't that be nice if it was gold,

01:00:22   but it's not like colored gold, but nope.

01:00:26   If you want gold, you're gonna get the real thing

01:00:27   and you're gonna pay $10,000 for it.

01:00:29   It's like, wow, I would like that watch,

01:00:32   but I am not gonna ever buy that watch.

01:00:34   So, yeah. - I see what you're saying now.

01:00:37   - What it's done is it's made me think,

01:00:39   I'm not sure whether I want the sport

01:00:40   or whether I would actually pony up,

01:00:43   or I guess in CRISPR-ing terms, pungle up,

01:00:45   more money for the regular model,

01:00:50   which I really like the look of the regular model too.

01:00:53   But the most beautiful one is the one that is,

01:00:56   alas, elusive.

01:00:57   - So you mean the Apple Watch model?

01:00:59   Apple Watch model. It's just so... why did I do that? I don't know. I like the Apple Watch.

01:01:06   It's a fair fashion industry. That I think is what I'm leaning to. But, I don't know the price of it yet.

01:01:11   No. It could be a thousand, could be five hundred, could be seven hundred. Probably has something to do with

01:01:18   the what band you get. It's... who knows. It's all... there's much more information to be downloaded.

01:01:26   That's why we will be updating that Apple Watch what we know story as time goes on.

01:01:30   Do you have any sense about what's going on with the bands? Because it seems to be getting more

01:01:36   and more confusing as the days go on. Like originally it seems so simple.

01:01:40   Yeah, well one of the things that... different bands are shown on different pages and it's

01:01:46   unclear whether those are the only bands that will work. I have a hard time believing that the

01:01:50   Apple Watch is configured so that a band from one can't work on the other because then they're

01:01:55   building different bands for the different models. And the way Apple described it on

01:02:00   the day when they announced it and when I got to see it demoed in person in a room with

01:02:06   Apple executives, I saw them taking the bands on and off. And it seemed to me like they

01:02:10   were really banking on the fact that you could just switch in new bands. So now people are

01:02:16   sort of like, "Oh, well, you know, the sport band is only..." or I guess the sport band

01:02:20   is on most of them. It's like, "This leather band is only on this model, so the people

01:02:23   who have this model won't be able to use it. I don't... I'm skeptical of that. I

01:02:27   think what we're seeing is when you buy a watch you get it... you can choose which

01:02:34   band it comes with from this selection. But if you want another band, I'm sure

01:02:41   Apple would be happy to sell you another band for some ridiculously marked up

01:02:46   price, right? It's gonna be a watch band that, you know, you can get

01:02:51   that second watch band for another hundred or 120 or 180 or whatever it is

01:02:56   and that'll just kind of pile up but I think that's different from saying oh

01:03:01   it's incompatible you can't get the whatever in fact I would I would say and

01:03:06   nobody can confirm this but my recollection was that what the Apple

01:03:10   executive said to me in my briefing was a something about how if you buy the

01:03:15   Apple Watch Edition it might actually come with like a sport band in addition

01:03:20   your beautiful expensive you know millenia millenia loop it might also come

01:03:26   with a sport band so you can slide it off and slide on the sport band and then

01:03:30   go with that that I don't I don't have it in my notes but that that that I have

01:03:35   big tickle in the back of my brain that that they said something about that and

01:03:39   yeah so why wouldn't you be able to do that if you're going for a run you don't

01:03:43   want your beautiful expensive band you could put on the sport band the more that

01:03:47   look at it the more I see that yes you will be able to buy other bands but I

01:03:52   think that you will only be able to buy bands within your watch tier so if you

01:03:58   have the Apple Watch Sport you won't be able to buy Apple Watch bands and the

01:04:06   reason I think that is because luxury there won't be massive to the eye like

01:04:12   The difference between the sport and the regular Apple Watch will be the shininess of the aluminium

01:04:19   or the stainless steel, but the majority that you'll see on someone is the band.

01:04:25   So if you can maybe save $300 and then spend an extra $200 on an upgraded band, you're

01:04:36   getting the effect.

01:04:37   And the reason I say this is, and I know it's hard for maybe us nerds to get our heads around,

01:04:42   Because it's like, well, why wouldn't you do that?

01:04:44   The reason is luxury and status.

01:04:47   And if Apple really do want to get into that world, the fashion world, that is just something

01:04:54   that happens.

01:04:56   Like you don't get to get the cheap version and pretend you have the expensive one.

01:05:02   So I agree with that to a point.

01:05:04   The problem is, one, that's a lot of different bands that they're going to have to make available.

01:05:08   Two, are they going to make them physically incompatible?

01:05:12   otherwise you could just order a sport or a regular you know Apple Watch watch

01:05:17   band and put it on your Apple Watch Sport and nobody would care so are they

01:05:20   go are they really gonna engineer three slightly different connectors for this

01:05:25   slide on slide off connector that they built I they could but that's a long way

01:05:29   to go and then my third point is there's just gonna be an aftermarket band that

01:05:35   is a beautiful leather band that attaches to your Apple Watch Sport

01:05:38   that's been reverse engineered that you can buy online that will let you do it

01:05:43   and if if that's gonna be the case does Apple really want to be like well fine

01:05:48   that's a bootleg that happens to luxury brands too or are they gonna say no I

01:05:52   want the person who cheaped out and bought our $350 watch I want them to

01:05:57   give us $150 for another band. I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility to

01:06:03   create slightly different connectors because they kind of already have to

01:06:06   create they're already creating different versions of it anyway for the

01:06:12   like larger and smaller yeah so I don't know I mean I know it's a lot of

01:06:18   peculiar I'm just saying I wouldn't be surprised to see it go that way but but

01:06:24   we'll see I mean genuinely I I hope not because I think that my tastes are

01:06:30   are pushing me in a direction that's going to be very expensive for me.

01:06:34   (laughter)

01:06:36   But we'll see. We'll see how that ends up rolling out.

01:06:41   But I'm excited about it. I'm finding myself more excited about it.

01:06:45   And we said this before on the show, and you mentioned it,

01:06:48   because me and you come from a slightly different background

01:06:50   in that we understand the utility of a device like this.

01:06:55   So I'm excited for the utility, but I'm also just excited for the product

01:06:58   because I think it looks really nice.

01:07:00   And it's a totally new thing and it's gonna be shiny

01:07:05   and the battery's not gonna last long enough,

01:07:06   but it doesn't matter 'cause it's gonna be awesome.

01:07:09   Shall we finish off with some Ask Upgrade?

01:07:15   - Yes, let's do it.

01:07:16   #AskUpgrade brought to you by MailRoute.

01:07:21   Imagine a world without spam, viruses or bounced email.

01:07:25   This is the world that I live in.

01:07:27   I open my email in the morning and I see only legitimate mail, the stuff I want to receive.

01:07:32   The spam has already been filtered out before it even reaches my mail server.

01:07:37   That is thanks to MailRoute.

01:07:39   There's no hardware for me to install.

01:07:41   There's no software to install.

01:07:42   It all happens in the cloud on MailRoute's servers.

01:07:45   MailRoute receives your email first.

01:07:47   It does its smart filtering.

01:07:49   It finds the bad stuff, puts that away, and says, you know, go over there in the penalty

01:07:53   box.

01:07:54   Delivers only the clean stuff to your mail server.

01:07:57   It's easy to set up, it's reliable, the largest universities and corporations use this.

01:08:02   If you're a desktop user like me, you'll find that the interface is simple and effective.

01:08:05   I have it set to send me a little spam digest every day saying, "Here's all the spam you

01:08:11   received."

01:08:12   I like to read it and giggle at the ridiculous subjects that are in vogue in the spam world

01:08:17   on any given week.

01:08:18   If I do see something that has been filtered to spam mistakenly, which very rarely happens,

01:08:24   It does happen occasionally, maybe once or twice a month.

01:08:26   I can click and with one click,

01:08:28   that person is automatically white listed.

01:08:30   They'll never be filtered again.

01:08:31   And that mail is delivered immediately into my inbox.

01:08:34   So super convenient.

01:08:35   And if you're an email administrator or an IT professional,

01:08:39   MailRoutes built all their tools with you in mind.

01:08:41   There's an API for easy account management.

01:08:43   They support LDAP and Active Directory, TLS,

01:08:46   mail bagging, woohoo, outbound relay.

01:08:51   Thanks, you're a little late on that one, Myke.

01:08:52   - I know.

01:08:53   Is your enthusiasm for mailbagging flagging, Myke?

01:08:56   No, I'm just getting, like, stage fright.

01:08:59   I don't know what to do.

01:09:00   I feel like I'm not upping the mailbagging stakes

01:09:03   sufficiently.

01:09:04   I think shouting "mailbagging" in the background

01:09:07   like a madman is the classic Myke mail route behavior,

01:09:11   and you should just stick with it.

01:09:12   Should we do it again?

01:09:13   All right, let's try it.

01:09:14   Let's try it and see.

01:09:16   LDAP and Active Directory,

01:09:17   you don't have to say anything there.

01:09:19   TLS, mailbagging.

01:09:21   Mailbagging!

01:09:23   There we go.

01:09:24   Outbound relay, all of this stuff,

01:09:27   everything you want from the people who handle your mail.

01:09:29   So remove spam from your life for good

01:09:32   by going to mailroute.net/upgrade.

01:09:36   That's mailroute.net/upgrade for a free trial,

01:09:39   10% off for the lifetime of your account.

01:09:43   The whole time you're with mail route, 10% off.

01:09:47   So thank you so much to mail route for sponsoring

01:09:49   #askupgrade.

01:09:52   Thank you mail route for being so awesome and such good sports every week.

01:09:57   Mail bagging!

01:09:59   [laughter]

01:10:01   I don't know what mail bagging is but it sounds great.

01:10:05   I literally have no idea. But I love it. I'm happy that it exists but I don't know what it means.

01:10:11   Yes. Let's see. #AskUpgrade. We made a slight change to how we're going to be processing #AskUpgrade in the future, didn't we?

01:10:20   didn't we? You made the change. Yeah, I was if they've got some new apps and such

01:10:26   called Do they have and they've rebranded the standard if right app so

01:10:33   I've been checking checking those out and kind of like digging around and I

01:10:38   came across a very similar to our Google Drive sheet basically it does a search

01:10:45   Well I ended up creating on my own because the one that I found didn't work.

01:10:49   It just does a search for Ask Upgrade and adds it to our Slack channel instead.

01:10:54   I don't know if it's gonna be better but I like that it's there and so we have

01:11:01   that. So I will put a link to the recipe in the show notes so people can

01:11:07   can use it for themselves. If they also want to have Ask Upgrade tweets in their

01:11:11   Slack channel they can. So you can go crazy.

01:11:16   Lester Shawn wrote in to say, "Myke, what was that speed reading app you

01:11:22   recommended?" The app that I recommended is called Velocity and it's made by my

01:11:29   friends at Lickability and it's an app that I've used. I really like it. Like,

01:11:34   for what it does, it does it in a very nice way and they've got a nice little

01:11:38   UI that they've created. I'm a big fan of the work that those guys do, so you should

01:11:43   check it out. It's called Velocity. I'll put a link in the show notes. The show notes which

01:11:45   you can find in your podcast app of choice or on the web over at relay.fm/upgrade/24.

01:11:55   Lester Gary writes, "Why is there not more cheese vertical, 'need more cheese'?" Well,

01:12:01   Gary, here's my cheese-related story for you. My family and I--so last week my kids had

01:12:07   the week off from school.

01:12:09   It was what they call midwinter break,

01:12:12   they used to call it ski week.

01:12:13   We don't call it ski week anymore

01:12:14   because it's never ever ever going to rain or snow

01:12:17   in California ever again.

01:12:19   - Fair enough.

01:12:22   - So they had the week off.

01:12:26   And yesterday was the last day

01:12:29   before they went back to school,

01:12:31   they went back to school today.

01:12:33   And so we took a hike.

01:12:34   We took a, we wanted to do something as a family

01:12:36   and the kids would rather just play video games all day,

01:12:38   but we decided to do a family activity.

01:12:41   So we took a hike and we're fortunate enough

01:12:43   to actually be so close to good places to hike

01:12:45   that we could walk there from our house.

01:12:47   So we actually walked kind of through a neighborhood

01:12:51   behind our house and up a ridge and around.

01:12:53   And it was good, I would say six mile hike.

01:12:56   We took a picnic.

01:12:59   That was one way to make it more interesting

01:13:00   for the kids, I think.

01:13:01   So we brought a picnic with us.

01:13:03   They got to pick some stuff that they wanted to bring.

01:13:06   So up at the top on a windy hillside,

01:13:09   it was a nice sunny day, a little cool and breezy,

01:13:13   but a beautiful sunny day.

01:13:15   We sat down and had a little picnic

01:13:19   and I was happy to discover that my wife had decided,

01:13:22   because it was a picnic,

01:13:23   what better thing to have at a picnic

01:13:25   than cheese and crackers?

01:13:26   So we had cheese and crackers.

01:13:27   There were two different kinds of cheese.

01:13:29   Gary, this is for you.

01:13:31   There was a traditional yellow cheddar,

01:13:33   I believe is a Tillamook cheddar, so from Oregon.

01:13:36   Not the traditional cheddar.

01:13:38   Traditional cheddar, Myke, would be from cheddar,

01:13:40   England, correct?

01:13:41   - Yeah.

01:13:43   - Is that a place?

01:13:44   - No.

01:13:45   - Is there a place called cheddar?

01:13:46   - No, I don't think so.

01:13:47   - Oh, come on, there's gotta be a place called cheddar.

01:13:49   A village, a little village by a cheddar upon something?

01:13:53   River?

01:13:56   - Probably.

01:13:57   There is actually a place in Somerset called cheddar, yes.

01:14:01   - Boom.

01:14:02   - I don't know if that's where the cheese,

01:14:03   - Oh no, it is the village that cheddar cheese

01:14:05   is named after.

01:14:06   I don't know why I can't just having lived here

01:14:09   for this amount of time just assume that that's the case.

01:14:12   It's so obvious.

01:14:13   - I'm disappointed in you.

01:14:15   Anyway, we did have some of that.

01:14:16   And we also had some like aged cheddar, another cheddar.

01:14:21   There was a white cheddar that the kids don't appreciate

01:14:26   but grownups enjoy that we got that was really nice too.

01:14:29   We didn't have any fancy cheese.

01:14:31   There was no manchego.

01:14:31   We had some Gouda, my wife didn't bring it.

01:14:34   So it was an all cheddar picnic, but plus other foods,

01:14:37   but we're focused on the cheeses of the cheese vertical.

01:14:39   We had a good time,

01:14:40   walked down the rest of the way, it was beautiful.

01:14:42   I took a picture from the high point.

01:14:46   You can look out over these green hills

01:14:48   and then you can see the bay.

01:14:49   And then in the background,

01:14:49   San Francisco across the bay and it was very nice.

01:14:52   So that is my cheese update.

01:14:55   You have any cheese related things, Myke?

01:14:57   - No.

01:14:59   - I like cheese a lot, but I don't have any updates

01:15:04   which are not worthy for our cheese vertical today,

01:15:06   I'm afraid. - All right, think about it.

01:15:08   Think about it.

01:15:08   Listener Peter wrote in to say,

01:15:13   this is sort of our sub vertical

01:15:16   about podcasts and chapters.

01:15:18   Listener Peter says,

01:15:19   "You don't need to make chapter markers necessarily,

01:15:21   "just make a simple list of time codes

01:15:23   "to scrub to in the show notes."

01:15:26   How about that, Myke?

01:15:28   this topic is, I actually think is going to kill me.

01:15:33   Eventually I will die.

01:15:34   All of these things are like,

01:15:38   but then I'm literally sitting there typing out,

01:15:41   like it's an, okay.

01:15:43   I know that there are people that want it

01:15:45   and I'm sorry to the people that want it,

01:15:46   but for me personally, I feel that it is an,

01:15:50   it is an unproductive use of my time.

01:15:53   There are many more things that I should be working on

01:15:57   than putting the time stamps in.

01:16:00   And also, I'm gonna be frank, Jason.

01:16:02   I'm gonna be frank for a moment,

01:16:03   'cause I feel like I should--

01:16:05   - Okay, Frank, whatever you say, Frank.

01:16:07   - We need to make money,

01:16:09   and we need you to hear our sponsors.

01:16:11   And if we put things in,

01:16:12   like and you know there's gonna be a new topic

01:16:14   after the sponsor, then you may never get to it.

01:16:17   And I kind of would like you to listen to them,

01:16:19   or at least give them a try.

01:16:22   And I'm concerned that it would basically stop people

01:16:25   from listening to them.

01:16:26   Should I not have said that?

01:16:28   - I don't know.

01:16:30   I mean, you didn't really say it, Myke.

01:16:32   Frank said it.

01:16:33   So we'll just take what Frank has.

01:16:36   No, I think you're right.

01:16:37   So Joe also wrote in to say

01:16:40   that we have clickable chapter markers on the incomparable,

01:16:44   which I've been experimenting with.

01:16:45   They're not actually in the file.

01:16:46   They're on the website.

01:16:47   If you go to the website and you can actually pass a link

01:16:50   and the player will automatically go to the timestamp,

01:16:53   which is neat.

01:16:53   And I'm gonna try to use that some more.

01:16:55   And that might make podcasts more shareable.

01:16:58   We were talking about having shareability problems.

01:17:01   I think it's not unreasonable.

01:17:04   I am using on the incomparable,

01:17:06   I'm using it for the broadest of show notes.

01:17:09   Like for me, it's like literally we talked about two movies.

01:17:13   Here's movie one, here's movie two.

01:17:15   I think that's reasonable.

01:17:18   Also, I gotta say, if you're gonna go to a new topic

01:17:21   right after a sponsor break,

01:17:23   put your bookmark at the sponsor break

01:17:25   and not the new topic, then everybody will have to listen

01:17:27   to the sponsor. - Yeah, no.

01:17:29   - I don't view, I think you're making valid choices.

01:17:34   I do chapter marks very specifically for certain things.

01:17:39   I don't do it for everything.

01:17:41   I think the problem is what you say,

01:17:43   which is I think people maybe underestimate

01:17:46   the amount of work that goes in.

01:17:47   You spend time putting together a podcast and editing it,

01:17:50   and then you need to go back and do another pass,

01:17:51   or you have to build into your workflow

01:17:53   in a note taking workflow where you're writing

01:17:56   down time code and if you change anything later

01:17:59   that affects the time code, then all your time code is wrong

01:18:02   and you have to do it again.

01:18:04   And you're talking about basically

01:18:06   annotating an entire podcast.

01:18:08   And I think that's a lot of extra work.

01:18:11   I think there's an assumption by a lot of people

01:18:13   that that's not a lot of extra work and that's wrong.

01:18:16   Does it have value?

01:18:17   I think it does have value, but you have to weigh that.

01:18:20   And I totally understand you saying,

01:18:25   look, like I said, I like the idea of chapter marks

01:18:27   in a big scale.

01:18:28   I think some people envision it as being super small scale,

01:18:31   like every podcast episode is gonna have eight chapters

01:18:34   in it, and that's kind of a lot.

01:18:35   I would say, if I'm gonna be a diabolical podcast

01:18:38   entrepreneur for a moment, that there is an opportunity

01:18:42   for crowdsourcing here, and that maybe somebody

01:18:45   should create some sort of a tool that lets you create

01:18:50   annotations on the podcast you listen to that the podcast owner could then publish in the show notes.

01:18:56   Yeah, so you'd have to put it back to us because all it's going to be is just people saying this

01:19:00   is where the ad stops. Like, yeah, well that's in a pod, in a podcast app that, that, you know,

01:19:05   whatever. But I'm saying it would be great if, you know, maybe we should have some, you know,

01:19:10   a form or a wiki or something where people can, people can put in the time code or maybe somebody,

01:19:15   I'd also say, you know, maybe this is something for volunteers. I'm not asking it for relay.

01:19:22   I'm just saying, you know, if somebody really wanted to volunteer to do detailed timecode

01:19:27   notes for a show that they love, and they talked to the podcaster of that show and they said, "Sure,

01:19:32   you know, you listen on day one and email me the timecodes and I'll put them in,"

01:19:37   you know, then that would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But it is a lot of work,

01:19:42   And a lot of podcasts are done with,

01:19:45   it's already a lot of work

01:19:47   and they're trying to shave time off of what they're doing.

01:19:50   And this just adds more on top of it.

01:19:53   And for me, I do time code

01:19:56   when it's absolutely clearly useful

01:19:59   and I try to keep it pretty minimal.

01:20:00   So I do time code on Clockwise

01:20:02   because it's very well-defined and formatted,

01:20:05   but that's, I think, an exception to the rule.

01:20:07   Anyway. - Yeah.

01:20:10   - I just wanna, in case it offended anybody,

01:20:13   if you want to skip the ads, that is perfectly fine.

01:20:16   - Sure, sure, but making it, putting in extra time

01:20:20   in your work schedule to make it really easy

01:20:23   to skip right over the ads without thinking about it

01:20:26   is probably-- - That is extremely

01:20:27   counterproductive, isn't it?

01:20:28   - It is a bad trade-off, right?

01:20:29   I mean, having Marco, this is why Marco,

01:20:32   you know, Marco could very easily do

01:20:33   an auto ad-sensing thing based on user behavior,

01:20:36   and he doesn't do it in Overcast.

01:20:38   But there's a 30-second skip button.

01:20:40   And what do you think that's for?

01:20:41   But the idea is if you really don't wanna listen,

01:20:44   of course you can jump ahead.

01:20:46   But to make it something that eliminates all ads

01:20:50   for everybody is incredibly counterproductive

01:20:54   because that's how these shows survive.

01:20:57   And yeah, that's how Myke and I are not,

01:21:01   we're making more podcasts rather than going back

01:21:05   to other jobs and making fewer podcasts,

01:21:07   which would be the other way to go.

01:21:08   it quite literally pays my bills and puts food in my stomach.

01:21:12   So it's, you know, forgive me if it's something

01:21:14   that I'm a little bit apprehensive of.

01:21:17   - Yeah, absolutely.

01:21:19   And it's very hard to get the math to work

01:21:21   where listener support can compensate

01:21:25   to the equivalent of what the ads are.

01:21:27   It's just the math doesn't work for most shows to do that.

01:21:31   - But look, fundamentally, right,

01:21:32   if chapter support becomes something

01:21:35   that really does become something,

01:21:37   then we'll look at how we work with it.

01:21:40   But like, you know, the fact still remains that right now,

01:21:44   there is not a solution.

01:21:46   That just, that meets every need.

01:21:49   And until that comes, I'm not,

01:21:52   I'm personally just not interested in going through

01:21:58   the crazy loops that I would have to go through

01:22:00   to get it to work for a subset of people some of the time.

01:22:04   - No, the tools aren't there yet.

01:22:06   and maybe they'll be there sometime

01:22:08   and maybe there'll be enough momentum.

01:22:09   The tools to embed it in MP3s,

01:22:13   to have podcast apps that support that,

01:22:16   to build, like I said,

01:22:18   I just have been experimenting with this JavaScript

01:22:20   that lets me jump in a webpage.

01:22:22   That's great.

01:22:22   That'll actually give me,

01:22:23   that gives me more of a motivator to do some of it

01:22:25   because I have issues where we talk about

01:22:28   two different movies where I wanna be able to say

01:22:30   movie two starts here so you can jump to it.

01:22:33   But we're just not,

01:22:35   The work that I put in over the weekend

01:22:37   to do the JavaScript time jumps for the incomparable

01:22:40   was probably more work than will ever be gotten out of,

01:22:45   you know, pleasure gotten out of it

01:22:46   by people who are using that feature.

01:22:48   But I wanted to do it because it was interesting to me.

01:22:51   So we're not there yet.

01:22:52   And I understand a lot of people are really enthusiastic

01:22:54   about this subject because they're trying to cajole people

01:22:57   into, they wanna get the momentum going.

01:23:00   And so they're trying to cajole people

01:23:01   who aren't doing it to do it

01:23:02   'cause that's when you start saying,

01:23:04   "Oh, well, all the relay shows have all these great time codes

01:23:08   that aren't supported by Overcast.

01:23:10   Marco, when are you going to support it?"

01:23:11   Marco goes, "Oh, well, I guess that's a thing now,

01:23:13   so maybe I'll put that on my..."

01:23:15   And then it all happens.

01:23:16   But, you know, I think it's absolutely fair for you to say,

01:23:20   "Sorry, I can't be the one to start this,"

01:23:22   and invest that time on something that may or may not happen.

01:23:26   -That JavaScript thing that you have, we have that.

01:23:29   Like, but I just don't use it for anything.

01:23:31   -Yeah.

01:23:33   Well, it comes back to why you hate time code, Myke.

01:23:35   Why do you hate time code so much?

01:23:37   - If you want to use them for a compromise, go ahead.

01:23:41   - Well, I've got the data. I guess I could.

01:23:43   I've got the data, but people don't listen to podcasts.

01:23:46   It's for shareability more than anything else.

01:23:48   People don't listen to podcasts on the web anyway,

01:23:51   but I do like the fact that I can tweet out a link

01:23:53   to a very particular part of a podcast

01:23:56   on those episodes of The Incomparable Now,

01:23:58   so it's something.

01:23:59   Anyway, this has been really boring.

01:24:00   We have one more bit of #AskUpgrade feedback.

01:24:05   Sorry to everybody for our little descent

01:24:07   into chapter marks.

01:24:08   - I feel like it's just gonna go on forever.

01:24:10   It's the chapter vertical.

01:24:11   - You could just take it all out if you really wanted to.

01:24:14   But anyway.

01:24:14   - Maybe I'll put a time code in for just that section.

01:24:18   - Oh, yes, do that.

01:24:20   Oh, that's beautiful.

01:24:22   Chapter mark vertical at this time code, beautiful.

01:24:26   - Oh, I'm really tempted to do it now.

01:24:28   - All right, our last bit of feedback is just

01:24:31   from a listener, App Freak, no real name there,

01:24:35   saying, "Can you do the mail route sponsorship like serial?

01:24:40   Support for upgrade comes from Mailroot, Mail-right,

01:24:45   oh, Mail-route, you know, I actually use Mail-route."

01:24:51   (laughing)

01:24:53   - You do.

01:24:56   And then I go, "Yeah!"

01:24:58   Dude says, "Th

01:25:00   So thank you, @freak, there you go.

01:25:02   And scene.

01:25:04   And that's the end of #AskUpgrade,

01:25:07   brought to you by Mail...

01:25:09   Right?

01:25:11   - Mail route.

01:25:12   - Mail route!

01:25:14   And I think that's the end of the show.

01:25:17   - It is the end of the show, the show's over.

01:25:20   Thank you so much for listening

01:25:21   to this week's episode of Upgrade.

01:25:23   If you'd like to find us on the internet,

01:25:25   There's a few ways you can do that.

01:25:26   You can find Mr. Jason Snell at SixColors.com.

01:25:30   He is @jsnell on Twitter.

01:25:32   I am @imike, I-M-Y-K-E,

01:25:34   and I would very much love it if you haven't already,

01:25:37   if you checked out "Inquisitive" behind the app,

01:25:40   which is at "Inquisitive," no, it's a relay,

01:25:43   "dot FM slash inquisitive slash 27."

01:25:47   That's a new series that I'm working on.

01:25:48   I would very much like it if you listened,

01:25:50   'cause I think that listeners for this show may enjoy it.

01:25:54   If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode of Upgrade, you want to go to relay.fm/upgrade/24

01:26:03   And thanks again to our sponsors this week, Mail Route, Igloo, and Smile with PDFPen Pro 7.

01:26:13   But most of all, thank you so much for listening, as always, and we'll be back next time.

01:26:18   Say goodbye, Jason Snow.

01:26:20   Goodbye, Myke Hurley.

01:26:22   [ Music ]