I felt like my post was getting long and neglected this, but I totally agree with you.
I’m not sure where I sit on the iPhone Pro nomenclature. It does seem like Apple could come up with a more precise differentiator that still achieves the marketing effect they want—to note the superiority of a particular class of product.
However, it is consistent with Apple’s binary class dividing line. It’s just not doing a great deal to improve clarity, understanding, or precision. Come up with a term that sells the “superior“ devices without demanding more flexibility then the word pro lends itself to.
With the iPhone Pro, the way I see it as the phone that has the feature that will eventually come out on the regular iPhone next year but too expensive to include now. It’s a nice to have when you need or want to. The 12 Pro camera features are being sold to photography professionals, hobbyist, and content creator. It’s a step up from regular phone users that values better camera pictures. It’s one of the reason why I went Pro a couple of times in the past. Because I value those features because they can help me make money or improve the quality of my hobby. So, I still think it warrants the Pro moniker.
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Ouch!
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My personal favorite : “workflow explainers”, “GTD gurus”, etc. I wish my life was as simple as a podcaster/blogger/“speaker”.
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I am so tempted to go down that rabbit hole! 
Bad language, bad grammar, and typos fill tech articles. One of my pet peeves in both written and verbal conversation is the dangling preposition, especially ending a sentence with “at.” I trust you see the intentional irony of that sentence! While the rule governing dangling prepositions is fluid, especially in conversational English, ending a sentence with at is merely redundant. I always find it grating.
That said, a distinction should be made between published articles and informal writing on a forum like MPU. Taking time to proof one’s writing for every social media post is not necessary or usually expected. However, published material from “professional” journals, blogs, etc., ought to reflect carefulness.
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I do workflow coaching in addition to my regular work, and I agree 100%. If your job is largely self-directed and consists mostly of reading news stories and talking about them on a podcast, that’s an entirely different universe than the average person with a pointy-haired boss that routinely dumps random junk on their “to do” list.
This is the sort of thing, up with which we must not put. 
Absolutely. I mean…I try to proof things, and if I speech-to-text a post I give it a quick glance-over - but unless something is absolutely out in left field it’s usually fine.
As a person who almost certainly overuses semicolons & em dashes, and insists that an ellipsis has four dots (three looks stupid to me, so I do four), I’m willing to cut a bit of slack on “proper” as long as somebody is consistent.
There’s a news podcast around here that - I swear - pronounced the same city name no less than three different ways in one week.
ETA: Discourse apparently disagrees so vehemently with my four-dot ellipsis that it feels the need to auto-correct it to three.
When Winston Churchill was chastised for ending a sentence with a preposition, he is reported to have wittily responded, “This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
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Yup - that’s what I was going for. 
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SELECT * FROM itunesPodcastDirectory WHERE itunesPodcastDirectory.hosts LIKE ‘%David Sparks%’
Out of curiosity, what about the other two (ATP, Thoroughly Considered) keeps you listening?
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That’s the whole thing though - the binary dividing line is just bizarre. Using the word “Pro” for computers makes sense as there are tons of “pro” workflows that benefit from the additional horsepower provided by those machines. There’s a direct correspondence between “person who uses this computer in a professional capacity” and “[iMac|Mac|Macbook] Pro”.
With phones though, I feel like it’s either not a differentiator or it’s potentially even the reverse. The chip in the phone is the same on all the units, with the sole difference between “regular” and “pro” basically being the camera. The iPhone “pro” is actually more suited to average people who want to take really awesome pictures of kids and such.
If that’s the differentiator, I’d suggest “iPhone Photo” or something that actually describes the difference. The people that always have to have “the best of the best” would still buy it no matter what, and for the general public there’d be a clear differentiator right in the name that would help them make a decision.
Same with AirPods and AirPods Pro. If the differentiator is noise cancellation, “AirPods” and “AirPods Silent” could be useful.
I know Apple has done a bunch of weird stuff with names in the past, but it feels like their current naming convention is just getting lazy.
+1 on these comments. I, too, have ditched all Relay podcasts with the exception of MPU and Automators for the same reasons.
I will put a plug in for iPad Pros by Tim Chaten. Some episodes aren’t the best, but I find many informative (interviews with Devs, eg). Some here may enjoy it. — jay
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Yeah, Tim’s podcast is great. A new one by Jason Cipriani, Work Beyond Mac, is off to a great start with some excellent interviews with folks using their iPads in broadcasting, art, academics. I appreciate that they are going beyond the usual and reaching out to folks and interesting use-cases in the field. Generally I think it’s more meaningful and useful conversation that broadens the perspective of what’s possible with the iPad as a tool.
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Many of them are beholden to clicks, so they figure out what is driving clicks. I’d bet that the more a topic is being covered, the more people become aware of the problem, which then leads to more clicks.
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Well put and factually 100% accurate. What I like about David is that he values the time of his listeners. Most likely because he has another day job outside the tech-news bubble. Sure, there is chit-chat and it is needed to make the shows lively, but those deviations are brief. He also is prepared for his shows, which you can’t say about every (Relay) podcast host. Some of the other shows would be worthwhile if they wouldn’t forcefully try to follow a weekly schedule, because they spread themselves way too thin. In contrast you don’t get the feeling that David’s shows purely exists as a stage for ads. They were started because of a passion and not out of desperation.
To be honest Thoroughly Considered is on the verge to be kicked, though. It used to be one of the rare shows that actually cover small-scale hardware manufacturing. I really liked that they, despite—and if I recall correctly—being trained designers (not sure whether digital or industrial), approached hardware from a laymen point of view. They have no formal education in engineering and preparing designs to be manufactureable. They had to learn about the intricacies of tooling and limitations of manufacturing processes and had to find small shops as partners. All while dealing with the often skewed economics of small batch products. It’s such a different world as compared to making and selling software, not to mention recycling news in written or spoken form.
The recent episodes have gradually shifted to the typical Myke Hurley chatter and don’t feel worth the time invested anymore. He pushes to make this yet another show, where he can recite what was said about Apple products in the other shows he’s on, the utterly irrational world of mechanical keyboards or his (to outsiders) boring coaching/mentoring side-gig. It used to be one of the rare shows where the groupthink was not that prevalent. The show was significantly better, when Myke didn’t put himself in the center and simply was asking “uninformed” questions about manufacturing as a guide for the other two to explain their reasoning and report on their approaches and progress.
Also it is good that the show is only released monthly and has no ad-breaks, besides itself being one for Studio Neat.
ATP is my guilty pleasure “soap opera” sprinkled with a mix of Apple praise and criticism. I listen to them since 2013 and it is one of the rare podcasts for which I’ve activated to be notified of new episodes. I also value that all three of them have an actual technical background, because hacking together Shortcuts doesn’t necessarily make you a developer.
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Great tips!
I’d also like to add Launched FM by Charlie Chapman, the dev behind Dark Noise for which I personally have no use, but I value that his main job is not just reheating news.
Variety of issues here.
The fat middle of viewers really like easy to digest tech news. Click bait works well on them.
Contract tech writing pays next to nothing so there’s little incentive to be really good at it.
Apple is at that point where the iOS devices are no longer splashy and the “Next Big Thing” may be further off than imagined so there’s just not really a lot of new excitement to write about.
I no longer watch the Post Keynote breakdowns and blather on Social Media. It’s become formulaic.
“Everything Apple announced in 8 minutes”
“Should you upgrade to the new XYZ ?”
“Top X reasons why you’ll love XYZ”
“Top X reasons why you should skip XYZ”
“Is Apple losing its grip on …”
“What Apple must do to ….”
“Mega Neutron Star Collapse Leaks! “(Followed by basic assumptions of product pipelines)
“Join my Patreon for more stuff you don’t want to listen to “
Paid Podcasting sounds good if the price is right but like Apple News I suspect it’ll be on life support in 18 months.
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True, but it’s hard to achieve when your income depends on being cool, exciting, accessible and you’re part of a culture that sneers at precision, accuracy and clarity. And where there are pretty much no barriers to entry.
Of course, some people do achieve it but, as in all things, they’re the minority. When you had to persuade an editor or publisher to pay you for this stuff, you had to reach a certain standard. When all you need is clicks from people who want to read about the new new thing, there are no such constraints.
It would ne since if writers spent a little more time considering what’s good, rather than what’s new (credit: Robert Pirsig)
One would think that those qualities are intrinsic to the technology culture. Am I wrong?