0:00:00Dieter Bohn, first time on the talk show. It's been too long without having you on.
0:00:04Yeah, I've been a long time listener. It's good to be on. How are you doing?
0:00:07Oh, terrible. Today was Gruber Family Christmas tree day.
0:00:11Oh, wow.
0:00:12It is still... I say was as though it's the past. Well, it's in the house. Our living room is on
0:00:21the second floor. I don't know if you know this or not. I don't know if you follow my wife on
0:00:26Twitter. My wife has a predilection for very large Christmas trees. So take a tape measure,
0:00:33measure the ceiling in your abode, and then add two feet and that's how big
0:00:38of a Christmas tree she wants. And it is every year. My son even said in the car ride on the way
0:00:46home from the artisanal Christmas tree farm we have to drive to. Yeah. That doesn't
0:00:56and it feel like it was just yesterday. I mean, at least this one fits in the house.
0:01:03That's all I can say. But it did get it up on the second floor is so hard. And then try
0:01:09to pick up all the needles on the way up. Just a disaster. Do you know what, though?
0:01:12We've been doing this for a long time. My wife and I have been together for many years
0:01:16and we've always had a big Christmas tree and it's always a huge mess getting the damn
0:01:21thing out of the house. And then I don't know why. And this is, this is just me being an
0:01:25idiot. This seems like something I should have thought of years ago. But last year,
0:01:29we had a tree that we moved to a bigger house a couple years ago, well, a house with higher
0:01:34ceilings at least. So we got a bigger tree than ever last year. And it was literally
0:01:39impossible. I honestly didn't see how we were going to get it out of the house. I mean,
0:01:42you get it in because it's tied up. You know what I mean? They they tie these trees up
0:01:45and you get it in. And then it opens up and it's you know, it's honestly like the Christmas
0:01:51Vacation movie where it's flowing and then all of a sudden it's like there's no room for anything in
0:01:56the living room other than this giant tree. But then you know, how do you get this tree out? Well,
0:02:01you cut it up. So we got like one of these big like hand shears, you know, it means like it's
0:02:07like a jet like the world's biggest pair of scissors effectively. What you should have done
0:02:10was gotten a chainsaw. That's what I was thinking. See, you're you think more like me. I thought
0:02:18Chainsaw and my wife I think sensibly I think bought this hand tool and
0:02:23And again, I I will have to give her credit. She's the one who cut it up. But yeah, it's sort of like dismembering a body, you know
0:02:30Like one finger at a time, but
0:02:35We got the tree. It's been a long day
0:02:37Man, it's funny, you know, my family's in Minnesota
0:02:41my wife's family's in Arkansas and so we're always traveling on the holidays and so we haven't had a
0:02:47tree in a while but my family in Minnesota we used to have a tree and then
0:02:51My mom decided screw it and she got a fake tree and it's gotten to the point now where they don't even take the decorations off
0:02:58The thing anymore
0:02:59They just they fold up the plastic with the decorations on it stick a trash bag over it put it in the garage and then the
0:03:05Day before we show up, you know every year for Christmas
0:03:07They just pull it out pull the trash bag off stick in the living room and it's done if you've got room that sounds so
0:03:13compared to the mess that we're in so I were recording and then after we record I've got to string up the lights that's my job and
0:03:20With any tree I think with a normal precise tree it takes forever to put the lights on the tree
0:03:27But with a giant ass tree it takes forever. I don't know. I'll be drunk
0:03:32Good, it's the right way to do it
0:03:35All right you and you did something crazy. You said what you bought a circuit a surface go
0:03:40yeah, so I
0:03:43You know, I just reviewed the pixel slate. I played around with the iPad Pro a little bit and I have last year's iPad Pro and
0:03:49I you know, I've got a Surface Pro that I you know use every now and then although most of the time when I'm at
0:03:55Home, I use a pixel book. Anyway, I was like look I wanna I want a tablet that has LTE and I have a
0:04:02Unhealthy
0:04:06explainable obsession with tiny computers
0:04:08My favorite computer of all time bar none was the the 12-inch MacBook back at the day
0:04:15And then I used the the new the new 12-inch MacBook, whatever whatever we call that thing wait for the 11 it
0:04:21What do you mean back in the day the power book the yeah when there was the yeah in the mini-me commercial the little guy
0:04:28What was that? What was what was that? I said was that empowered or was it 11 inch? It was called a power book
0:04:35Yeah, how big was that? I know which one you're talking about because I had the keyboard that went all the way to the edge
0:04:39Yeah, I
0:04:42Shouldn't be drawing a blank on this but alright keep going. Anyway, that was my favorite computer. So I love tiny computers
0:04:48I was like, alright, I'm gonna I'm gonna give the surface go a shot because I had I bought the LTE version
0:04:52Microsoft's is
0:04:54Completely incompetent at shipping the thing because it turns out that if you don't actually run a massive retail operation
0:05:00You just sell, you know computers on the side. You don't know how to do it
0:05:04Anyway, I finally got the thing and I'm really impressed with how well Windows integrates
0:05:10with LTE.
0:05:11It just silently falls back when you need it.
0:05:14But I am still – my feelings on Windows are the same as they ever are, which is they
0:05:19laid a great foundation and then they forgot to furnish it.
0:05:24They laid the foundation, they built the house.
0:05:26The house is okay.
0:05:27It's not the best house.
0:05:28It's like a ranch.
0:05:29And then they just forgot to put any furniture in it and they assumed other people would
0:05:32come in and make apps for it and and nobody did. And so it's it's a little bit. I don't
0:05:39know I can I can get a little bit more done on it than I can on an iPad Pro simply because
0:05:43I need so much web app stuff for my job. But generally speaking, it's it's it's nice because
0:05:50it it forces me to not work that hard because you can't do that much.
0:05:55It was in fact a 12 inch PowerBook G4. It was a PowerBook. Okay. Yeah, I don't know
0:06:00why I was I don't know why 12 inch threw me off. I should have known that because it that is the
0:06:04computer and I'm with you on the small computers. That is the power book that I never owned one
0:06:12because at the time I couldn't really afford it slash justify it because I had like a super fancy
0:06:18desktop and I really really only needed a laptop occasionally so I got the the iBook instead. Yeah.
0:06:26but I like side-eyed that one because it was so gorgeous. I've talked to Jason Snell about this
0:06:32too. I remember just a couple years ago, I mean it wasn't that reason at this point, but maybe
0:06:35like two or three years ago I was in a coffee shop here in Philly and I saw somebody with one.
0:06:41Oh wow. But at a glance I couldn't quite, you know, it was just somebody at a table and I saw
0:06:46it and I was like holy shit what is that laptop? That is amazing. That is the first non-Apple
0:06:51laptop I've seen in years that makes me really, really jealous. And then I did the double take
0:06:57and looked and I was like, "Oh, it is an Apple laptop and it's ancient." And it's super thick.
0:07:02But at a glance, just looking at it top down with that keyboard, it was like, "Oh man, that is
0:07:08perfect." Yeah, I was a grad student at the time and I would bike to school. And so it was small,
0:07:15I had to fit my bag with the five books I had to stick in my backpack or whatever it was.
0:07:20And I would always impress people when I would pull it out because they couldn't believe that
0:07:24it existed. And honestly, that computer in a lot of ways was one of the reasons I dropped out of
0:07:31grad school, went into technology, because everyone was like, "What is that thing?" And I'd talk about
0:07:34the thing and then all of a sudden, I realized I was more interested in the computer than I was in
0:07:41semiotics.
0:07:42So you bought the surface? I did. It's about the same size recording the show on what are you using
0:07:54to record this? I'm on a I'm on a 13 inch MacBook Pro with a touch bar, which I regret getting the
0:08:01touch bar not just getting the escape because I really hate the touch bar but I wanted just that
0:08:05little bit of extra power because I have it in my head. Because I make YouTube videos that I'm going
0:08:10I'm gonna go into this world where I'm gonna shoot some stuff and do some basic editing myself and then hand it off to somebody
0:08:15That actually knows what they're doing
0:08:17But I I have yet to figure out how to effectively podcast on anything else other than a Mac
0:08:24I've taken a little bit of time and played around with some stuff
0:08:26But when it comes down if I don't have audio hijack, I just feel like I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah, and it's
0:08:32you know, it's I've used this analogy is probably one of my favorite things I've ever written but that
0:08:39More or less that it's the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light, you know
0:08:44and and you know what we and we've all in the last two months everybody in our racket has run through this entire circle of
0:08:51These two and ones, you know
0:08:54Yes on the iPad to the surfaces to now now Google's in it with the pixel slate
0:09:00in that
0:09:03The iPad is going at it from this sort of blown-up phone OS and it doesn't do a lot and all of these complaints are
0:09:10around things that a
0:09:12quote-unquote real computer can do or makes easy or you don't have to think about and the iPad either can't do or you've got to
0:09:19jump through a million hoops and then you know, like the Chromebooks and the Windows computers are coming from a PC and trying to put a
0:09:27iPad a tablet interface on and they are it in a to me in a nutshell
0:09:32They all fall short in the most obvious way
0:09:34which is that none of them really make jump the chasm from where they started that the iPad is still fundamentally a
0:09:41big phone tablet and
0:09:43The the computer E ones like the Chromebooks and the Windows ones never really get the simplified thing
0:09:49but one of the things you don't even think about is the way that on a Mac you've got so many audio options and like
0:09:56Every app running on your computer can listen to the microphone come, you know
0:10:00The USB microphone coming in if it wants to and on the iPad
0:10:03No
0:10:06Well, and you also you just have so much more ability to really sort of fiddle with the way it works
0:10:12What's the what's the other app that rogue amoeba does that lets you squirt audio to different sources and?
0:10:17Mix and match where it comes in and where it goes. I used to use that all the time
0:10:23There's audio hijack and
0:10:25What else do they have? They've got the new one called
0:10:28They just have an update to loop back
0:10:31but that does that similarly loop back is like you can
0:10:35Like if I want it if I played sound effects on my podcast or have yeah theme song I could play the theme song
0:10:40Right now and then you would be able to hear it because it would I could if I so choose
0:10:44Pump the audio through to Skype or or whatever right and back of the day if you wanted to record Skype
0:10:50It was the only thing that you could use because you wanted to record locally
0:10:55You didn't want to just record the output from Skype and then you'd want to like take it from one thing to the next
0:10:59So it was a whole fiasco
0:11:01Yeah, the the thing about like all these different I wish there's a better term than future of computer computers
0:11:07But that's kind of where we're at
0:11:09I I've been talking about like big screen computers just to try and you know admit that phones are everybody's primary device these days
0:11:15I think you're right that the the where they start is kind of where they are now and
0:11:20Part of the up until this year, maybe last year, I was relatively forgiving, especially
0:11:26with the iPad.
0:11:27I was like, look, they're gonna get there.
0:11:29It started as a blown up phone, but they've done a really good job of making the UI work
0:11:33on the big screen.
0:11:34And they're trying to think beyond what just traditional windowing are, and that'll be
0:11:39fine.
0:11:40But at this point, it's been a really long time, right?
0:11:45Like iPad has been around a long time.
0:11:47Yeah, I just I just mentioned that it's it's 2010 and so it's eight years, you know, eight and a half years really
0:11:54That's a long time and like my thing that I compared it to and I it's not the first time
0:11:59Other people have done this in years past but now that we're eight and a half years in but just comparing it to the Mac when?
0:12:04The Mac was eight years old, which would be around 1992 or so. So it's like that was one year into the system 7 era
0:12:11and the Mac was
0:12:14Totally like the cloud that was like the the the peak of the classic Mac era if anything, you know
0:12:19It was yeah, it wasn't just that the Mac had was ahead of the iPad
0:12:21It was like the the classic Mac had reached its apex if anything entire industries like graphic design and the print industry
0:12:28Had it were it within eight years the entire print industry had been
0:12:33completely
0:12:36Blown away and everything was based on Macintosh computers it which when I was young, you know
0:12:43and that was, you know, I was like, you know, first couple years of college, and then I
0:12:46came out of college and worked in the graphic design industry. It all seemed very normal
0:12:50to me as like, you know, 21 year old 22 year old that Yeah, of course, all of this stuff
0:12:55revolves around Macintosh is this whether it would, you'd have to be an animal to do
0:12:59this some other way. But in hindsight, now that I'm in my 40s, and I think about an industry
0:13:04that completely dropped everything it did every technology from what the designers use
0:13:09to what the guys in the print shop did in eight years. Everything was thrown out. They
0:13:15just threw it all out and switched everything to Macintosh computers. It was amazing.
0:13:19You know.
0:13:20Is there any, like, are there any parallels to that today? I'd really have to stretch
0:13:25my mind to think of something. You know, you say that the Mac being heavy is what lets
0:13:30the iPad be light, but I think it also, it gives people an excuse not to do that with
0:13:35the iPad. Yeah. If since the Mac is there, you don't have to convert everything over to the iPad
0:13:40and that in some ways holds it back. Yeah, in some ways. And I think that's the fear that some
0:13:45Macintosh fans have. And like I've said recently, like, if anything, I would be if I was a fan of
0:13:51one of, you know, the had to, you know, had all of my chips in one of Apple's platforms. The one
0:13:58that I would be the most worried about if I was all in on would be iPad, because it's the iPad
0:14:02that's never gotten the love like the Mac users are the ones who are paranoid and have this fear
0:14:06that Apple wants is going to abandon the Mac and have everybody you know just use iPads or stick
0:14:12iOS on a laptop or big s 30 inch you know iMac style thing but if anything that you know it's
0:14:20the iPad that's seen the least love over the last eight years really has yeah just in terms of I
0:14:26mean they they added the split screen and there's a little slide over thing and you know there's a
0:14:30a few of those accommodations.
0:14:31But it's like you need to be like an alchemist.
0:14:35You need to be a wizard to really get to some stuff that
0:14:38feels pretty basic.
0:14:39And it's like drag and drop and even the file management stuff.
0:14:43And I recognize whenever I talk about this, people in media
0:14:46are like, well, you're asking for the past.
0:14:48You're asking for like mainframe computers and command
0:14:52lines in an age of the GUI and just accept the future.
0:14:55And like, I'm trying.
0:14:56I'm trying super hard.
0:14:59Whenever I am not at my office, I
0:15:01am using one of these computers and trying
0:15:03to use it in the way that it's meant.
0:15:05And I just hit that wall every time.
0:15:07And there are different walls for these different computers.
0:15:09So the Surface Go, the thing that's
0:15:11really interesting about Windows is it never tells you no.
0:15:15It never says, hey, you know what?
0:15:17I can't do this.
0:15:17There's this weird wall here.
0:15:19And you have no idea how to get a file onto this thing.
0:15:22You could always do whatever the hell you want on a Windows
0:15:25computer.
0:15:25But on a Surface Go, being able to do whatever the hell you
0:15:29ends up being a huge problem, right?
0:15:32The cognitive load ends up being holding yourself back
0:15:34from like opening up the 10th Chrome tab.
0:15:37Whereas that's not a problem on the iPad.
0:15:39The iPad will never screw up,
0:15:41but there's just things that it just refuses to do.
0:15:44- Yeah, you can't shoot yourself with an iPad.
0:15:47- Yeah.
0:15:48- And sometimes, you know, sometimes you need a gun.
0:15:51(laughing)
0:15:53So the Surface Go is the one
0:15:57that does it it i get confused which one is the surface go so the surface go is the it's the tiny
0:16:05one so microsoft their whole surface line they've got the surface pro which is their their you know
0:16:09thing with the kickstand and you know they've been around forever and it started off really badly
0:16:14because they had it running windows rt which was an embarrassment of an operating system and that
0:16:19windows 8 didn't make it much better blah blah blah blah it's come around to being a really nice
0:16:23pretty flexible device and people like it. But I think most people just use it as a laptop. And then
0:16:28every now and then, if you want to read a book or something, you can flip the keyboard around.
0:16:32The Surface Go is the tiny version of it. So it's, I forget the size of the screen. It's like,
0:16:39I don't know, 10 inches or something. Pretty ridiculous. But it's about the size of the small
0:16:43iPad. And- Meaning not the iPad mini, but like the small iPad Pro.
0:16:51like the 11-inch iPad Pro, yeah.
0:16:54And the reason I like it is, one,
0:16:56it lets me do a little bit more work stuff
0:16:59than I can on an iPad, just because I
0:17:01need to drag and drop an image without having to try four
0:17:04times in a row to do it.
0:17:05It honestly comes down to that.
0:17:07But also, they have a version that has LTE.
0:17:10And man, I do not ever want to buy another computer again
0:17:14that doesn't have LTE built in.
0:17:16And I understand why companies don't make them.
0:17:19they barely sell, especially if you have a computer with an Intel chip, getting it to
0:17:24integrate well, turns out to be pretty difficult. And you have to have a whole lot of extra
0:17:28parts on there, whereas on an ARM chip, you know, the whole thing can be built into the
0:17:31the SOC.
0:17:32I wonder if that's the long story short of why Apple still doesn't have a MacBook with
0:17:38LTE. And because when you ask them, they they they really go off the rails. I mean, they
0:17:46Apple product marketing people are usually very good about even giving a non answer but the non answer on why aren't there LTE max is
0:17:53Really like I get to the end of it. I'm like, what did you say?
0:17:57I don't even understand what I don't even understand what you just said like
0:18:00They have an answer ready to go
0:18:02But it's like talks you around in a circle and it's like you feel like you just got pickpocketed
0:18:07Yeah, I think that putting LTE on a computer
0:18:11represents like a half dozen compromises you you compromise on sales numbers because no one no one buys them really
0:18:17You compromise on the system design of the thing itself because you have to put an extra Qualcomm chip
0:18:24And then you have to make sure it works in there and they got to figure out how that goes
0:18:27You and then you you compromise on the body of the computer because you have to have a SIM card, right?
0:18:32And you add the antennas
0:18:35Yeah
0:18:35And the other thing about the antenna is that everybody on all of these devices everybody wants to use aluminum right now
0:18:42Yeah, aluminum is the material of the decade and you can't get cell signals through metal, right?
0:18:48So you've got to have some you know, you got to do something to get the antenna on the outside
0:18:51Yeah, and I just think that you start stacking those compromises up and I don't know Johnny Iver somebody inside Apple's just like nope
0:18:58That's that's one too far
0:18:59I mean, I'm sure that if Apple could they would they get rid of the you know
0:19:04SIM card door on the iPhone, right? And they would be right to but the the way that, you know,
0:19:10carriers work. So not gonna happen. So let me, this is actually a good I didn't have this in
0:19:16my notes to talk about, but I should, because it's the sort of thing that I don't want to write an
0:19:20article about, because I feel like I would waste two days on it. And it's a little too self survey
0:19:26to be an article, but it's a good podcast rant is, all right, my family is on Verizon, and we
0:19:32have a family plan. And Verizon has a pretty good deal. I think you have to pay a $30 activation
0:19:38fee, which is total bullshit. And it really, really it's like $30 that feels like 300 to me,
0:19:44morally, it I really hate it. But you get an iPad on the family plan. And then after that,
0:19:49you just pay 10 bucks a month for the extra device. And it's just uses the shared pool data.
0:19:55And you can just sort of keep track of how much data your family uses and adjust your plan. You
0:20:01you know, it's like turning a dial, they make it very easy to say, you know what, let's go from 15
0:20:05to 20. Because we're going away, you know, this summer, we're going to be traveling, we're going
0:20:09to be on LTE all the time. It's once you're on it, it's pretty easy. And so it's only 10 bucks
0:20:13more to get another device on, which is a great deal now. So actually, no, it's not. Well,
0:20:18why are you paying that 10 bucks? I actually I agree with you that that is actually it is kind
0:20:25of offensive after they had the activation fee. You're right. But still it for me the 10 bucks a
0:20:32month it there's a moral outrage that I have to pay anything at all. But yeah, it's it's a good
0:20:39deal. Yeah. So all of my LTE devices are on project fi which is Google and I'm sorry, it's called
0:20:47they just changed the name to Google Fi and assign it maybe they're not going to kill it like they've
0:20:50They've killed every other communications product
0:20:52they've ever made.
0:20:53And I love it because if you don't use that much data,
0:20:58it's pretty cheap.
0:20:59It's 10 bucks a gig flat, that's it.
0:21:00And it's 20 bucks for a phone line.
0:21:02But data only devices cost nothing.
0:21:05So you can just go to the website and order a data SIM.
0:21:08And I've got like four of them just sitting around
0:21:10and anything you put them in, they just work.
0:21:12They come off the same bucket of data.
0:21:14They don't cost anything per month.
0:21:15They're just around and they've got LTE if you need them.
0:21:18Yeah, that and then there's a nice cap on the fee where it's like if it's one device,
0:21:23I think it's like after six gigabytes, which is 60 bucks, then you don't pay anymore until
0:21:29you get to like 25 gigabytes or something and then they just slow you down. So yeah,
0:21:33they slow you down and then you can pay a little extra to turn it off. Right. So it's
0:21:36really good. So if you use seven gigabytes or eight gigabytes on a device, you don't
0:21:40even pay over the 60. No, it's a really good rate. Well, here's the thing I don't use I
0:21:46I don't put my personal iPad on the family Verizon account. I have an AT&T account for
0:21:50it simply because I like the safety of having a second network, you know, especially in
0:21:58airports. I don't know why, but it's like every airport in the country, in my opinion,
0:22:02in my experience, there's like, each terminal gets reception on one carrier, maybe, maybe.
0:22:08And it's like, of all the places in the country that should be saturated with cell service,
0:22:12it should be airports like every single person in the airport is on their phone. I don't
0:22:16understand why airports have such I don't I don't know if it's a safety thing or what
0:22:20but even in 2018 you get terrible cellular reception in airports and it often helps you
0:22:25know like my phone on Verizon gets Nada and the iPad with a TNT get something but it's
0:22:35it's like your options on a TNT and because I just got a new iPad I reviewed it I reviewed
0:22:39the whole thing and what am I paying for it. And it's like, I think it's like 15 bucks
0:22:44a month that you can get something from AT&T, but it's literally like 250 megabytes or something
0:22:50of data. It is preposterously low. So I'm paying 50 bucks a month for my iPad to get
0:22:56seven gigabytes of data, which is a lot of money for a second device. I mean, that's
0:23:00600 bucks a year, but I checked and I actually like went through my account and looked and
0:23:06And I use three, four, you know, last few months, three, four, five gigabytes at a time
0:23:10because I use it all the time when I travel. So I do use it, but it kind of sucks. And
0:23:18I'm starting, you know, I'm wondering, you know, should I just cancel it and just take
0:23:21my chances with Verizon everywhere? But anyway, here's the thing I went through is my, I had
0:23:26a SIM card for my old iPad on AT&T and I popped it out and I put it in my new iPad, the iPad
0:23:35and it worked and I'm I was on the account but when I went to setting cellular to like do this thing where I was like
0:23:42I want to review my account and see if I'm getting the best deal
0:23:45Should I switch or whatever it would it had like no I forget what the interface said
0:23:49but it was like it wouldn't let me sign into my AT&T account and
0:23:53I have to go through this crazy thing and I went through the website and they wouldn't take my password
0:23:59and I had to reset my password and blah blah blah and it's like
0:24:04And then I found out the password reset wasn't wasn't kicking in and then I found a second form on the AT&T website
0:24:11for like iPad users who can't log in and
0:24:14Instead of just your email address. They wanted your email address and like the EMEI
0:24:19Identifier. Yeah
0:24:23And the SIM card number so I could get the SIM card number pretty easy, but the EMEI number it wouldn't work
0:24:28It kept saying this isn't recognized. And then I realized it was it probably wanted my old iPads
0:24:35EMEI number
0:24:37And I went to the old one and that one didn't work and then I thought about it and I thought you know
0:24:41I've been using an AT&T since I had like a 2014 or 2012
0:24:45iPad mini I'm like Jesus do I even still have that so I like had to go through my office
0:24:50I mean this seriously took me like like an hour
0:24:52Find an old iPad mini from like 2012 the first one I had with like cellular fire that thing up
0:24:58and get the EMEI number off that and it worked. Holy shit that it actually let me in. I mean,
0:25:05I probably should have just called it actually probably would have taken me less time and less
0:25:08aggravation to actually get on the phone and call them. But yeah, I had to go through all of that.
0:25:12And then it finally worked. And I had this SIM card and I went through all that work to get the
0:25:17SIM card working. And then I thought, well, what about this eSIM thing? Isn't that nice? And and
0:25:21so I did the thing to switch my iPad to the eSIM. And that worked. But after I went through all that
0:25:27work to get the SIM card working. And then after I did
0:25:30this, I found out like immediately like within a minute,
0:25:33I was googling something. And I found out that because AT&T is
0:25:37AT&T once you lock your once you put your eSIM on an iPad on
0:25:42AT&T, it is permanently locked to AT&T. What? Yes, I'm not
0:25:47making this up. So even though it's a virtual SIM, it is a
0:25:51virtual SIM, it is permanently locked to AT&T. And I guess
0:25:55there is some kind of way that you can go to an AT&T store and
0:25:58ask them beg them and they'll maybe if you cancel your
0:26:01account, maybe they'll unlock the device. Yeah, I I'm not
0:26:05making this I never would have done this. If I had known this,
0:26:07I would have just stuck with the SIM card I had at work. But now,
0:26:11not only is my iPad, e SIM locked to AT&T, I no longer have
0:26:15a SIM card, I can pop out and put in a new iPad. Yeah. God, it
0:26:19was what a mistake. What a nightmare. And so of course, long
0:26:22way of saying I kind of get why device makers are aren't putting LTE into everything. Right.
0:26:28Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. I don't know I deal with with switching carriers and dealing with
0:26:33this crap all the time. My biggest headache recently and this is one that I prayed nobody
0:26:38ever has to deal with was getting the palm phone activated on Verizon. That little thing.
0:26:45Yeah. And by the way, I pray no one ever has to go with this because nobody should buy
0:26:48this thing. I'm actually I'm supposed to put my review of it next week. We'll see if I
0:26:51around to it. All right. Yeah, hold that thought. I'm gonna do our my first sponsor. So funny.
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0:29:55My thanks to Bank activity. Alright, this palm phone. Yeah. I saw this a month ago, somebody
0:30:03at the Apple, I think it was, I forget what we were doing in New York. I don't know.
0:30:09One of the things, oh, it was the iPhone XR, when the iPhone XR came out and there were
0:30:14press briefings in New York and one of the other writers had the Palm phone, so I got
0:30:19to see it. I wanted it to be good.
0:30:23Yeah, I wanted it to be good, not because I have a super long history with Palm, but
0:30:29Just because I like the idea--
0:30:31again, small computers-- I like the idea of a small phone.
0:30:34And everyone got really jazzed about this idea
0:30:36that you could have a phone that would keep you less distracted.
0:30:40But man, it's just bad.
0:30:42It's bad in every way.
0:30:44It doesn't have volume buttons.
0:30:47It doesn't have volume buttons.
0:30:49The battery is terrible, which is--
0:30:55if your whole job is to have a phone that you
0:30:57take with you on a weekend trip or something. It should last at least a day and it can't.
0:31:02And this isn't just me using it. It's me, I don't know, having it around and like turning
0:31:09on every now and then to test it a little bit. It's just, it's terrible.
0:31:12Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 10s): I forget who had it at the Apple event,
0:31:15but he was showing it and it was 10 30 in the morning, or maybe even earlier,
0:31:18but it was around 10 in the morning. And this was at 37%. It was comical.
0:31:27And I mean to go back to the the carrier stuff
0:31:31I'm sure you know, the the guys who started this company
0:31:35They you know, one of them was a former Samsung guy and he made some pretty decent devices for Samsung back in the day
0:31:42And so I believe that they were like an independent company that started up but they got captured by
0:31:49Verizon just immediately so you can't buy this thing on its own
0:31:53You just can't you can't go buy it and make it a phone. You can only buy it as an add-on device on Verizon and
0:31:59It is impossible to use it and get text messages on it
0:32:04Unless you use Verizon's text messaging app, which is called message plus
0:32:08Dude if you want to experience the worst messaging app on planet earth
0:32:16download and install message plus it has
0:32:20Custom emoji it has a feature if you want where you can have your
0:32:24Usage tracked so that they can share your information with oath AOL oath. Yeah, you know
0:32:30Work that also which sites it has a feature where if you want they can suggest
0:32:35Greeting cards to you that you can buy in the app
0:32:38And it's slow and it's buggy
0:32:41But it's the only way to get a text message on Verizon that doesn't use the classic SMS system
0:32:47but comes over IP.
0:32:49And otherwise, you don't get your text messages
0:32:52on this thing.
0:32:53It's ridiculous.
0:32:55I'm downloading it right now on the Pixel 3.
0:32:59My Pixel 3 is not even on Verizon, so I have no idea.
0:33:02You can actually get it on the iPhone.
0:33:05Yes, if you have-- so if I have my Verizon SIM in my Pixel,
0:33:08I can download this on my iPhone and then
0:33:11scan a QR code on the Pixel.
0:33:13And then it becomes like a little iMessage app,
0:33:16a little text messaging app on the iPhone that gets numbers that are sent to my Verizon
0:33:19SIM on my Pixel phone. It's completely insane.
0:33:22It refused to run because I wouldn't give it permission to make phone calls.
0:33:28Yeah, sorry. And this, by the way, is why I spent the last month emailing every single
0:33:35carrier in the U.S., asking them when Rich Communication Services, RCS, is finally going
0:33:41to launch because I really want to see are they going to be as horrible with RCS as they have been
0:33:48with literally everything else that they do. It's really bad. And if you don't allow it to take over
0:33:54as your default SMS app, it won't run. It quit. It's just, do you want Verizon messages to handle SMS
0:34:03for you? And I said no, and it quit. Yep. Well, I installed it.
0:34:10You don't really have phones
0:34:11I mean and that it's it's like because I would never install the equivalent of this on my Mac because I would just assume that
0:34:17it was putting some kind of
0:34:1911 year old kernel extension in
0:34:21Doing all sorts of irreparable harm in the library folder
0:34:25Phone is so fun, even you know Android iPhone, whatever you can just install it laugh at it and then delete it
0:34:38Well, we put it off long enough. Do you want me to rant about the pixel slate? Yes the pixel slate man
0:34:44So if you're not familiar it is Google's new Chrome OS tablet
0:34:50They've had Chrome OS laptops before the pixel book was last year's it's still around
0:34:53It's it's actually a pixel book is up to number three, right? Isn't it? Like the third I forget so they had they had
0:34:59Chromebook pixels before so they had one and two and then they took a couple years off and they made the pixel
0:35:05slate or the pixel book and now they're making the pixel slate which is the the full-on tablet with a detachable keyboard and
0:35:13Man everything about this thing is just frustrating and
0:35:18Usually not good if you have the keyboard attached and it's sitting on a desk
0:35:22It basically feels like a pixel book like a standard Chrome OS device and you got Windows and all the stuff and you can move stuff
0:35:27Around and you might have a couple of Android apps because it can run Android apps and it's okay
0:35:33But as soon as you do anything other than that, it just falls completely apart
0:35:36the the response time in tablet mode to like, you know, move a window around and go into split-screen is
0:35:43Measured like the the lag is almost a second if not more
0:35:47Like us like it should be less than 20 milliseconds for a human not to notice anything like it could be a second
0:35:53I and that's one of those things where I I actually read your review first and then I
0:36:00I usually do watch the videos too, but sometimes I find that the videos are spoilers. I'd rather
0:36:06read the whole thing first. And if I'm going to hear something again, I'd rather hear it again in
0:36:09the video than have it spoke. But anyway, somebody on Twitter mentioned something like, Oh my God,
0:36:14I can't see how anybody who watches Dieter's video could, you know, not say this thing is a turd. I
0:36:20was like, Oh, I gotta watch the video. And I watched the video and like your description of it as
0:36:24juddery, generous. It's like, how did they ship this?
0:36:28Who at Google in their new hardware division, presumably
0:36:33it's a guy in charge Rick Osterlow, who is pretty good guy
0:36:36came over from Motorola back in the day. Who at Google's job is
0:36:40it to say no, don't ship this. I don't know who that person is.
0:36:45And that person should have said, like, I honestly don't
0:36:47think they should have shipped this. Or they should not have
0:36:51shipped it with the quote-unquote tablet features that it has. I would have much rather,
0:36:56if it had been a tablet and I had to deal with the awkwardness of windows on it, I would have been
0:37:00like, well, or it only worked in full screen or something, which is the way Chrome always used
0:37:04to work. I would have been like, well, this is bad, but they'll fix it next year. And in the
0:37:09meantime, at least full screen works if you just want to watch a movie or something, life goes on.
0:37:13Instead, they tried to make it a little bit more iPad-like, and it was so bad,
0:37:19I don't understand why nobody just said hey, you know what we don't we don't need this
0:37:24It's not like Google makes any money off of these things. Yeah, like they get nothing out of selling this other than
0:37:29Like a halo effect, right? It's sort of like when Microsoft first started making surface devices you'd ask
0:37:35Well, why are you making this thing like well, you know
0:37:37We want to we're not worried that we're gonna undercut our competitors
0:37:40and honestly, we need to learn how to make these things so that they will learn how to make better things because
0:37:46Windows laptops are actually they had a really long period where they were awful. Yeah, I mean and
0:37:51After Microsoft started making the surface they all sort of like oh wait
0:37:54We'll do it that way and they got a little bit better over time. It actually worked
0:37:58Yeah, what Microsoft said at the time and and there was you know as longtime in you know
0:38:03People who watch the industry it just seemed bizarre for Microsoft to be making PC hardware when they've been the company that works with every
0:38:09How can you both be their partner and their competitor but it worked it raised the bar, you know for for PC laptops
0:38:16Yeah, and Google's done the same thing for years with the the Nexus devices before they made this target vision started calling everything pixel
0:38:23And the Chromebook is supposedly in the same category like here's the flagship
0:38:28We know that a hundred thousand people at most are gonna buy this thing
0:38:31But whatever we need to learn how to develop for this new processor and we want to teach everybody that's making the $300 Chromebooks
0:38:38how to do it better, so we're going to make this thing.
0:38:41But if your flagship Halo device that
0:38:44is supposed to lead the way for the industry of how it's
0:38:46supposed to go can't move a window around in tablet mode
0:38:49without everything shuttering to a stop, that's a big problem.
0:38:55And I haven't even-- that's just the baseline.
0:38:57Like, I could go on for another 45 minutes of complaints
0:39:00about how the keyboard folio works,
0:39:02about how Bluetooth crashes.
0:39:04The whole thing was just a mistake.
0:39:06They shouldn't have shipped it.
0:39:07I don't know. I don't know how that happens inside a company like how you get past that.
0:39:12Hey, go or no go. And this thing is literally like the software equivalent of crumbling apart.
0:39:18Yeah. I guess that somehow you you get a, you know, they obviously wanted to announce it
0:39:25alongside the pixel three. So they have this ship date, you know, announcement date in late September,
0:39:30early October, whenever that was. And they somehow had this on the whiteboard that we've got to ship
0:39:35this then. And you know, the hardware, I guess is clearly ready. I don't think it I don't think,
0:39:40you know, because it works so well in laptop mode. It's not crummy hardware. It's Yeah,
0:39:46no, it's really good hardware, actually. And I feel like that's the problem. I feel like,
0:39:51you know, if the hardware is good and hardware, you know, you can't fix can't send over the air
0:39:55patches to hardware, you know, the hardware has to be or not be and you can talk yourself in a
0:39:59circle that well, we can always fix software later, you know. And I guess that's it. Yeah,
0:40:04Yeah, for Google in particular with Chrome OS,
0:40:06they've been telling themselves that for literally years,
0:40:09because a new version of Chrome OS comes out every six weeks.
0:40:13And usually it's just bug fixes and a couple of tweaks
0:40:16here or there.
0:40:18But it's great, because you know it's secure,
0:40:21and little features sort of pop up that are kind of useful.
0:40:24And it's nice to know that you're not
0:40:27going to have to wait a year for some app to get updated.
0:40:30This is, to me, the most frustrating thing
0:40:32using an iPhone is all of those software developers working on a new version of the app,
0:40:37it all gets bundled into this big giant iOS update every September.
0:40:42Trenton Larkin They've sort of been doing, I think,
0:40:45the last at least two years, Apple's done a better job of having like a dot two or a dot three
0:40:53around February or so, or February or March, that is sort of like the high point of the year for the
0:40:58software. Right. But there's an awful lot of features that like, you just know that if it's
0:41:05coming, we've got to wait till September. Yeah, yeah. Well, and, and if you think about it, like,
0:41:09it's actually kind of nuts. Like, could you imagine if Apple wanted to update the I don't
0:41:13know, the mail client on the Mac? I mean, I guess they kind of wait there. But an Android phone around
0:41:18I guess, I guess on a pixel, there aren't really any apps on a pixel that ship built in just a
0:41:22couple. If Google's got a new version of Gmail that they like, they just, it's just there,
0:41:27because they ship everything through the infrastructure
0:41:29of the Play Store.
0:41:31Anyway, the point is, since they're
0:41:34able to update this Chrome OS operating
0:41:36system every six weeks, any time something goes out
0:41:39that's not that great, they know that there's
0:41:42going to be a new version.
0:41:43They can fix it every six weeks.
0:41:44And so I think it might lower the stakes
0:41:48of shipping bad software.
0:41:50Whereas with Apple, if they're really
0:41:51going to wait a year for the next big thing,
0:41:54or they're going to wait till the next big, you know, dot update to go out. If Apple ships
0:41:59something that is subpar, it's a much bigger deal. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think that Apple is,
0:42:06it has, I think it's part of the rhythm of the Apple calendar year, you know, the way that
0:42:11Apple sort of does everything, you know, it, they're a very annual company. And in a way
0:42:19that the real test is can we show this at WW on stage at WWDC? It does obviously doesn't have
0:42:25to be ready. I mean, beta still means beta. But like, they'll never show a mock up of what it's
0:42:33going to look like, like when they do a demo of iOS 13, this coming June, whatever they're showing
0:42:38is actual software running on an actual device. And so if it's not in close enough form that they
0:42:44could actually demo it on stage, it doesn't make the cut for iOS 13. It's, you know, you're sorry,
0:42:50your your team is on iOS 14, you know, yeah, come back next year. And that gives them then three
0:42:56months to get it in shape, you know, like, okay, we've demoed it, we've promised it. Let's, you
0:43:01know, let's actually finish it. But it can't be like, one frame per second.
0:43:08Well and apple apple is so consistent about shipping the stuff that they demo that the few times when they don't
0:43:15It just it becomes a you know
0:43:17A running joke that everybody can can reference and everybody knows about so right? I mean group face time was like face time air power
0:43:24You know, I don't know like open source sync face time, I guess was like one thing but like
0:43:29They almost never promised something on stage that they don't eventually ship
0:43:34You know the story behind the open source face time, right?
0:43:37I think so. But I think was it WWDC was it? I don't know if it's WWDC or Mac world Expo.
0:43:47I think it was probably a WWDC. But either way, it was a Monday keynote. And it was like Saturday,
0:43:52and they're doing like Saturday or Sunday. So it's like the 48 hours or 24 hours before and they're
0:43:58doing, you know, full dress rehearsal of the keynote. Yeah, I get to the FaceTime part. And
0:44:03Steve Jobs gets to it and says, "Hey, what about FaceTiming people on other devices?
0:44:09Wouldn't that be great? Not everybody has an iPhone. What about FaceTiming people on computers?"
0:44:17And they're like, "Well, I don't know. We'll think about it." And he was like, "What if we
0:44:19just open source it? We'll open source it. We don't care. We'll make it a standard." And you're
0:44:24like, "All right." And the FaceTime team heard about it when they were watching the keynote
0:44:30Monday morning. And so the team is like in in their offices,
0:44:37watching the live stream, the internal live stream of the
0:44:39keynote, and they hear Steve Jobs saying, we're gonna make
0:44:42it an industry standard, it's gonna be open source. And
0:44:45they're all looking at each other. And they're like, at some
0:44:47of them were mad, because they're like, why didn't they
0:44:50tell me why wasn't I told and then managers are like, I got
0:44:54me. And then engineers were like, well, we didn't write
0:44:57this, you know, we can't open up the source of this. You know,
0:45:00there's x, y, and z reasons that, you know, if you were
0:45:04going to make it open, you would write it, you know, the different
0:45:06way, right, or not use certain patents or license certain
0:45:09things. So like, we can't open source this. And, and basically,
0:45:13that's one of the reasons why I mean, there was a like a very
0:45:15specific lawsuit that Apple was involved in, over some kind of
0:45:19awful, awful software patent. And it's partly why FaceTime
0:45:22got bad for a couple of years, because they actually had to
0:45:24like change the code. But so there's other reasons too. But basically, long story short of why
0:45:30FaceTime never went open sources. It was, it never really could. It was just something Steve Jobs
0:45:35pulled out of his ass like the weekend before. So I've heard I don't know this for a fact. I don't
0:45:40have I don't have a first hand report of that. I have secondhand report of that. But that's
0:45:45incredible. Sounds true, right? Yeah, totally. Sounds like Steve Jobs. Right. But yeah, I think
0:45:51that June WWDC tent pole in the calendar of if we can't show it, it doesn't ship in September.
0:46:02I mean, the only thing that they ship in September that they don't show at WWDC
0:46:05are features specific to the new phone, like so face ID they didn't show. But I think internally,
0:46:12it obviously had to be ready months in advance. It's not like in June you could say, well,
0:46:19FaceTime isn't working yet, but don't worry. We'll have it by September.
0:46:23People just ship stuff constantly throughout the year. And so it's funny, in some ways,
0:46:34their big developer conference is Google I/O in May. And in some ways, it's just like,
0:46:40"Well, we'll just announce whatever is close right now, I guess." But nobody actually holds
0:46:46anything for it. Like this is stuff that's ready this week. So
0:46:48this is like the thing I got it. You know, I people were mad at
0:46:52me because I called them out on it. But they they had the what
0:46:55was the thing called where they were gonna duplex duplex. Yes.
0:46:58And I said, Hey, this looks, this looks like a pile of
0:47:00horseshit. And here we are in November, and there's still no
0:47:05duplex. There's a very cool similar feature in in, in the
0:47:09latest Android operating system that your phone can answer a
0:47:13Robocaller, a super cool feature that I really, really hope Apple can somehow steal.
0:47:19Because it's awesome, but it isn't duplex. It isn't telling your Google Assistant to make you a
0:47:27dentist appointment. So yeah, it's launched in like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny beta. And we've
0:47:34actually managed to make a couple reservations for it. There was a thing last week where someone
0:47:39at a restaurant posted a recording of it. And just last week, you just let yeah and and you listen to
0:47:45it and it says hey I'm from Google something something something but it never said I'm a
0:47:49robot right or never said I'm the assistant it's just that I'm calling from Google on behalf of
0:47:54so and so and so like you change your disclosure this is bad and it turns out that that was one of
0:47:59the duplex calls that was actually completed by a human being and so it's and the other thing is
0:48:06So far as we can tell the only restaurants that it's rolled out to are restaurants that have
0:48:10Uh, like already a pre-existing pretty close relationship with google through their their small business thing
0:48:16um, and and so
0:48:18I don't know. I think it's going to be a long time before this becomes a regular feature that that anybody uses people totally
0:48:24misunderstood my skepticism too, like I wasn't saying like
0:48:28uh, you know and people some people jump on the whole like they think that i'm in the bag for apple and they're like
0:48:33Oh my god, can you know you think syria is so great, you know?
0:48:36know, you have no idea how good Google Assistant is. It's like,
0:48:38No, I know exactly how good Google Assistant is. I use these
0:48:41things. And I get it. And I totally understand that if
0:48:44there's any organization on earth that might have something
0:48:48like this actually working in a lab, it's my money would be on
0:48:52Google, you know, maybe my second bet would be on Amazon.
0:48:54You know, I get it that Google is working on things like this, I
0:49:00get it that we will this something like this will be
0:49:02available eventually. I'm just saying that what they showed on
0:49:05stage and said would be shipping in a couple of weeks. And, you know, in the quote unquote
0:49:11near future to like everybody, it that isn't, that isn't what they're that isn't happening.
0:49:16Yeah, well, you know, there may be no other organization that could do this than Google.
0:49:21But there's also I don't know if there's any other organization that could be as,
0:49:24I don't know, make an unforced error of not understanding how people would react to it.
0:49:30Yes, right. So it doesn't occur to them, right, that people might be,
0:49:35one, skeptical about the, you know, whatever edits they made to the audio to like, have it fit in the
0:49:39keynote, like, is this real or not? And two, that people would be like, wait a minute, I don't know
0:49:43if I want to talk to a robot. Like it just they're like, they're so impressed with how cool it is,
0:49:47they doesn't, they don't think about that there are people outside of the Silicon Valley bubble,
0:49:51they'll be like, wait a minute, that's or no, or not that you don't want to talk to a robot,
0:49:57but that you don't want to sick a robot on your hairstylist, you know, like, hey, I've been going
0:50:02into her for 10 years. She knows me. I don't want to have her talking to a creepy robot on behalf of
0:50:09me. And then I go in there and have to look her in the eye and say, "Oh, yeah, I did that. I sent
0:50:15a robot to make this appointment for me." Even though, you know, and again, it will happen and
0:50:20we will be doing it and it'll all seem normal, but it has to be introduced the right way.
0:50:25Jon Streeter Yeah.
0:50:27I want to keep talking on some of this Google stuff. And I want to talk definitely want
0:50:32to talk about the pixel three. But in the meantime, I'm gonna take another break here
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0:52:56order your fracture prints for the holidays. Great gift idea, but you're running out of time.
0:53:01Anything else on the pixel slate here? I guess the one thing here's the thing that stuck out
0:53:08out to me from your review is that the the the pixel book is
0:53:14is probably about as good as a Chromebook could be. I don't
0:53:19have one, but I've seen it is very nice. You know, nice
0:53:23display. It's a nice hardware laptop. It's got a good track
0:53:27pad. It's got a good keyboard. And it does. If you like Chrome
0:53:33OS, if you want a Chrome system running on a laptop, it's about as good as you could
0:53:39get, you know, I mean, you know, obviously, it's a year old at this point. So there's,
0:53:42you know, some kind of speed bump they could get, which but probably isn't worth it. Like,
0:53:48I don't think it's, it's not just Apple, that sort of is on an irregular update schedule
0:53:54for their laptops based on Intel CPUs. There really is sort of a, like, when I talked to
0:54:00some people at Apple about, well, look, why are the Why did it take so you know, why aren't
0:54:05why doesn't why don't you get a one year update every on everything in the MacBook lineup every
0:54:09year. And they're like, you know, some sometimes, you know, there's just diminishing returns on
0:54:13Moore's law at this point where it's not even worth it. Yeah. But it's really it's a great
0:54:19realization of what a Chromebook could be. Whereas the pixel slate is so flawed, right? And to me,
0:54:26it almost is like a mar on the pixel brand. Yep. You know, and the phone and we'll get to it. But
0:54:33the phone is the both phones, the big one and the small one are very, very, very good realizations
0:54:39of what an Android phone can be in 2018. And it's, you know, the pixel brand is a good one,
0:54:45and then they stick this turd out there. Yeah, it's it's baffling. And the there, there was a
0:54:52rumor that there was going to be an update to the Pixelbook that would make it better by making the
0:54:57bezels around the screen smaller. And I don't know, it may have just been, I mean, the rumors
0:55:03came from like these advertisements that were popping up and people would like pixel peep them
0:55:07and be like, this screen is too big. So it may have just been like an overzealous like marketer
0:55:11that was like, I'm going to make this thing look better and make the screen bigger. But anyway,
0:55:15there were some rumors that they're out there. And if they had done that, and you know, bumped
0:55:19the processor to this year's processor.
0:55:21Everyone was like, "All right, yeah, they made it a little bit better."
0:55:24I would have said, "Oh, they fixed the Bluetooth."
0:55:26You know, a couple of things and everybody would have been pretty happy.
0:55:31Now, when you put the Pixel Slate into tablet mode, you can flip the keyboard around.
0:55:36You run into a lot of the same problems, but because it's a laptop that you just use
0:55:41as a tablet if you want to every now and then, which everybody tells me when I talk to people
0:55:45in the industry, "Nobody does this."
0:55:47you have a computer with a touchscreen that you can flip around to tablet mode. Everybody who buys
0:55:53it, it's like, Oh, yeah, this is great. I'm not carrying another tablet. I'm going to watch movies
0:55:57on it. And then nobody ever does anything except use it as a laptop, right? Right? Because a lot
0:56:02of them have it set up so you can you can turn it upside down and set it up like a like a TP almost
0:56:11to watch videos. But why would you do that? Why not just watch the video in laptop mode?
0:56:16Right. It's like it does it really mar your movie viewing experience on the plane to have the keyboard in front of you as
0:56:21Opposed to having the keyboard behind you in an upside down v
0:56:25Yeah, I mean you can you can
0:56:28Get a little bit more space to put your weird little you know drink and yeah, I guess tray of food there, but whatever. Yeah
0:56:35um
0:56:37But anyway, the what you would the pixel book doesn't do as well in tablet mode
0:56:41it feels like the pixel slate in a lot of ways. But because nobody ever does that it doesn't matter
0:56:46as much. Whereas the pixel slate is constantly like as soon as you detach that keyboard,
0:56:50as soon as you flip that keyboard around, it's like, all right, I'm a tablet now. And it's just
0:56:54so bad at being a tablet. It drives me crazy. So my son, it's interesting, my son's 14.
0:56:59He had a broken MacBook Pro, like a four year old MacBook Pro, and it eventually gave up the ghost,
0:57:07but it worked except that I think the internal USB controller was broken so his keyboard
0:57:11only kind of worked and his trackpad didn't work at all. Nothing, not even like little
0:57:17easily had to like plug a mouse into the side to like use the mouse. And he still while
0:57:23we're deciding what to get him as a replacement still used it as his YouTube machine rather
0:57:28than use his iPad just because the he just he's just so used to using you know the fact
0:57:35you don't need to stand right right and walk around the house and wherever he sits down the
0:57:40the screen is already propped up right so even without a working trackpad he still used a macbook
0:57:46to watch youtube and again you know for as many hours as he'd be allowed to uh rather than use an
0:57:52ipad just because it's already propped up i mean that's how useful the the laptop form factor is
0:57:56i really don't see the need for the bend around backwards thing yeah i i guess i would i have it
0:58:03like on an iPad in particular like this. The funny thing is I don't like the new keyboard on the new
0:58:08iPad Pro. Because I do use that flip around thing when I'm on a plane or when I'm like,
0:58:13lying in bed. I'll like a flip around then you can get the screen just a little bit closer to your
0:58:17face. And then it just if you don't have to worry about hitting the key or something.
0:58:22And you can't do that with the new keyboard, the old keyboard you could you could put into a
0:58:28sort of just like, like an easel mode or something. Yeah. And the new keyboard, you can't do that.
0:58:33Like it's it's either the keyboards flip behind it or it's sitting there in front of you
0:58:37And it's I get why they did it. It's better because like it's a little bit stabler on your lap in that mode
0:58:43Yeah, and it also means I don't know they could move that smart connector to the back and that you know weird place
0:58:49And there's there's probably a bunch of reasons why it's better
0:58:52I'm sure all their you know research and all their usability testing say that people prefer it
0:58:56and I I had this weird guilt about not liking it because I
0:59:00Spent two years making fun of the original smart keyboard because it had this origami fold
0:59:05And yeah, it was awkward to like fold it up, but it turns out it was actually a pretty good solution
0:59:10Exactly. I think there's somebody at Apple who came up with it. Who is like see see I
0:59:16Know exactly what you mean it was it's like better as a laptop with the new keyboard
0:59:21But the other one all the hmm. Why is this so funny?
0:59:26Why do you have to fold it and learn how these funny things it was and why does it have this bulge and
0:59:30And now it's like, yeah, I guess I kind of see why.
0:59:33Because then you could just put this one thing on it
0:59:35and use it everywhere from laptop mode
0:59:38to airplane tray mode, you know.
0:59:41The other thing, here's the other thing
0:59:44about the Pixel Slate that I found baffling immediately
0:59:47right at the announcement is why in the world
0:59:51are you making people who might buy this
0:59:54choose between this baffling array of CPU options
0:59:57and RAM options and all of it.
1:00:01It is mystifying.
1:00:05So they had to go with Intel because Chrome on ARM, there's only been one good Chromebook
1:00:10on ARM in my opinion, the rest of them have been pretty bad.
1:00:14And so they wanted to go with Intel.
1:00:15And if you go with Intel, you are stuck with Intel choices.
1:00:19And I think in their head, they were like, "All right, well, when people buy other
1:00:24devices, you put them at like $100 price breakpoints, and then you just increase the storage. Well,
1:00:29okay, let's do that. Well, people don't actually don't care about storage on a Chromebook.
1:00:32They care about processor speed. And we really want to hit this, you know, $600 price point.
1:00:37Is it six or 700? I think it's $699. Yeah, I think the low maybe it's 699. I don't know.
1:00:44It's 599. And the do not buy that. I mean, don't buy it in general right now until they
1:00:50they have some of these software problems.
1:00:52I didn't realize they were still making Celeron processors.
1:00:55Right?
1:00:56I didn't even realize that was still a thing.
1:00:58Man, not only are Celeron processors still a thing,
1:01:01they also are increasing the confusion amongst other processors.
1:01:05So the Surface Go that I just bought, like a weirdo,
1:01:07has this thing called a gold processor.
1:01:10I don't even know what that means.
1:01:11And then there's the M3, which if you think M with Intel,
1:01:16that usually means, oh, it's really slow.
1:01:17But it turns out the new M3s are basically the same as the Core i5 and the Core i7y series
1:01:23just with slightly lower clock speed and something, something.
1:01:27And maybe there's a core difference, I don't know.
1:01:28But anyway, I think they just got lost in the weeds of, "Well, we want to have $100
1:01:33breakpoints, so let's just pick specs at these $100 breakpoints."
1:01:36But the result is there's five different SKUs and unless you know exactly what you
1:01:43you think you're gonna do with this thing,
1:01:45picking one is impossible.
1:01:47And I just, they should have just said,
1:01:50all right, we'll make the cheap one,
1:01:52and then we'll make the nice one,
1:01:53and then we'll make the crazy,
1:01:55we'll make a third one, I guess I'll let you do that,
1:01:56that has like super insane specs, and then be done.
1:02:00- Right.
1:02:01- But to have two in the middle, it's just like,
1:02:03you're getting to put that price point out in the world,
1:02:06but you're doing it in a way that's actually going to hurt
1:02:09the Chrome OS brand again, because just like Windows,
1:02:12Chrome never says no, it never stops you from opening the tab, it'll slow it down. Right?
1:02:18So people are gonna buy this thing. And they're, you know, they're gonna think it's gonna perform
1:02:21like an iPad. And it's just super not. And they're just they're shooting themselves in
1:02:25the face with it.
1:02:26Right. And to me, RAM options are another one where it's like, man, that is that is
1:02:31the old that is not something people buying this device should be worried about, you know,
1:02:36give them enough RAM, and then that's it, then they don't have to worry about it. Because
1:02:39I wrote about this and I got some more negative feedback than
1:02:44I expected. And I should have known it because the people who
1:02:46like to configure stuff built to order are are vocal about it.
1:02:51But I like that the new MacBook Air doesn't have any CPU options
1:02:55that you're there's just one CPU for all the MacBook Airs. And
1:03:00there's people who say, Well, that's not because it's a good
1:03:02idea. That's because Intel only has one chip that meets their
1:03:05thermal specs. You know, there's one chip and one chip only that
1:03:08meets him. So if there were more, they'd have CPU options. And it's like, Oh, maybe because
1:03:12all the other Mac books do. But none of Apple's ARM machines have CPU options. They make one
1:03:17chip for the model year. And that's it. And it's that chip is good. And, you know, that's
1:03:24it. You don't have to worry about it. You pick storage, and that's it. Yeah, it to me,
1:03:28it's delightful.
1:03:29Yeah. And for the MacBook Air, just philosophically, like, it's the mass market laptop that most
1:03:34people should get in terms of a Mac by far.
1:03:39And why not just give them one processor option?
1:03:44By offering something up, you get an upsell, I guess.
1:03:47But the upsell is there on the MacBook Pro.
1:03:51It's already confusing enough that they've
1:03:53got the 12-inch, the MacBook Air,
1:03:56and the 13-inch MacBook Escape all sort of jostling around
1:03:59in the exact same price range.
1:04:01you were to throw on upsells on processor speed on the MacBook Air on top of that confusion,
1:04:06nobody would know what to do. Right. And you know, to me, it's the way of the future with the to me,
1:04:12inevitable move to Apple's in house ARM chips for at least for MacBooks, whether the whole Mac line
1:04:17goes or not, we could do a whole episode on but clearly they're going to make mobile Macs that run
1:04:21on on their own chips. And then I just don't think they're going to have CPU options. I think,
1:04:26you know, I don't know if they'll call them a series, maybe they'll call them some other
1:04:30letter for the Mac chips, but they'll be the M1 chip and that's it. That's the MacBook chip
1:04:38for this year or something like that. Maybe the MacBook Pro would get its own.
1:04:41So this is a huge drive and hold, but I just got to ask, assuming that they're going to move
1:04:48some Macs to ARM, I also assume that they are, what is the software fix going to be? Are they
1:04:56just gonna like do something like Rosetta? Are they gonna just like use marzipan apps? And you
1:05:01know, sorry for your luck. If you want to tell apps, I know, it's actually not clear to me,
1:05:04no, it won't be the marzipan. The marzipan thing is, is I think, a red herring. I don't know,
1:05:10maybe that's the wrong term. I don't think it's related to the switch. I think it is entirely just
1:05:16a developer play that that there's a, and then, you know, it is true that there's more iOS
1:05:22developers than Mac developers. And there's an awful lot of services that have native iOS apps
1:05:28that don't have native Mac apps, or if they have a quote, native Mac app, it's really just a,
1:05:34you know, web view wrapper. It's not really a Mac app. And those things, it would be better to have
1:05:40the iOS thing running like these marzipan apps. But I have a rant, I will get it out soon. I'll
1:05:47get it out before the end of the month. But I think the marzipan apps are garbage. I think
1:05:52they're, they're some of the worst apps on the Mac. I cannot believe Apple shipped them. I really
1:05:57had bought, you know, I don't want to waste the whole rant here on the show. But I think they're
1:06:02terrible apps. I think it's absolutely baffling. I it's crazy that there's a news app and you can't
1:06:08double click a news article to open it in a window. Like to keep it open like, like, Oh,
1:06:13here's the story I would like to keep open because it's a long story. I want to keep reading it, but
1:06:17but I want to read other articles. No, you're, you're, it's, you're limited to the user
1:06:23interaction of the phone, like a four inch phone on a 30 inch iMac. It's crazy. It's
1:06:29a garbage app. So I don't think that has anything to do with it. And they certainly couldn't
1:06:33say marzipan apps only at this point, because, you know, they only have like these four toy
1:06:37apps. Yeah. I the the question is, I think they would do it the same way they did the
1:06:44Intel switch, announce it at WWDC before there actually is the hardware and tell developers and
1:06:51say, you know, I it's so funny because I watched the video again. And I just I've watched a bunch
1:06:57of old Steve Jobs videos recently. Simply because I it occurred to me that we're at the point where
1:07:03it's not so sad that he's dead anymore. Right? I don't mean that. That sounds callous. But it's
1:07:10like enough time has gone by that it no longer feels like a fresh wound. And I can watch Steve
1:07:17Jobs videos now and just enjoy them for what they are. And I watched that one. I watched the one
1:07:23where he announced this switch to Intel. And it's so good. It's like five minutes. And it is like,
1:07:30he conveys so much information. But it's so amazing. I tweeted it. It's like the arguments
1:07:35he gives are exactly the arguments that they would give for switching to from Intel to arm.
1:07:41It is entirely about not just performance, like he says, like, Look, I we promised you a year or
1:07:48two ago, a g5 power book. We haven't shipped it, you know, that's on us. It's our fault.
1:07:53That's our fault, because we promised it, you know, and he took the totally said, you know,
1:07:57we're Apple, we're the ones who said we ship it, but we can't because it's not the chip isn't there.
1:08:03And he said, "We're looking at the PowerPC roadmap, and we have ideas for some great
1:08:10machines we'd like to build, and we can't build those machines with the chips on their roadmap.
1:08:16And it's not just about performance. It's about performance per watt." And then there's this chart
1:08:21that shows performance per watt. And of course, the Intel chips had really high bars and the
1:08:26PowerPC had puny little bars. It's like, "Wow, this is incredible performance per watt."
1:08:32that's exactly what they're going to say about switching to ARM. I swear they could just take
1:08:39the script and just have Phil Schiller say it instead of Steve Jobs. It is the exact argument.
1:08:45So I think they announced it at WWDC. Tell developers, and here's Xcode whatever version
1:08:51number makes it easy. If you've been writing independent, Swift is already, everything in
1:08:59in Swift is already automatically just check a box and it'll all spit out ARM code. Your
1:09:04x86 code, if you've been following our guidelines, all of your objective C code will do the same.
1:09:12If you do have assembly, you're going to have, that's where you're, and it's rare these
1:09:18days that people are writing assembly code, but if you do, we've got tools to help you,
1:09:23whatever. But we're going to be shipping these next year and we will have some kind of developer
1:09:28hardware in available in the meantime, so that you can get your apps running. Yeah,
1:09:35and that'll be it, you know, so I don't think you have to write marzipan apps, I think
1:09:38most and I think most modern apps will just literally just recompile. So the only problem
1:09:43will be the older apps you have that are no longer being maintained, but you still use
1:09:49what happens with those. Will there be some kind of emulation and what I've heard from
1:09:55people who know is that as performant as these apples arm chips are for reasons that are
1:10:01above my head, emulating x 86 code on arm is slow. That did right. It's it, you know,
1:10:11emulating a power PC on x 86 12 years ago, when they made that transition could fly like
1:10:19you really didn't notice. I mean, if you were using something really, really performance
1:10:23heavy you might notice, but regular day-to-day apps that you would use if you launched a
1:10:28PowerPC app with what they call it, Rosetta was the technology. You didn't really notice.
1:10:33It was great. I don't think that that's possible, but who knows? Maybe they've got
1:10:39a genius who can make it happen.
1:10:42Jared: Yeah, and then the question is just how many of those legacy apps and what are
1:10:47they? And the one that everybody pays attention to, it's the one everybody's paying attention
1:10:51too with the iPad is probably going to be Adobe stuff.
1:10:57And there may be this bizarro world
1:11:00where the Adobe stuff ends up not being a problem,
1:11:03because they made a good marzipan app.
1:11:06Right, right.
1:11:08If their iPad app gets good enough
1:11:09that you could run it on a Mac and marzipan--
1:11:12No, because the Mac--
1:11:14I mean, it won't.
1:11:14I know, I'm just saying.
1:11:16There's like, if you look at the--
1:11:18enough like, there's enough Jenga pieces sort of yeah, stacked up here that if you look three years
1:11:23down the road, you could see a lot of bizarro things popping out of the switch to arm with
1:11:30with with what's going on with Adobe and a few of the pro apps on the iPad. The other thing that
1:11:35Jobs did that I could see them replaying was he was like, now what about Mac OS 10? You know,
1:11:40how are we going to get that running on Intel? He goes, Well, let me tell you, it's always been
1:11:45been running on Intel. We've had, and he brought up like a Google Earth image of Apple's
1:11:50campus, and he even circled the building. He's like, "We've had a team in this
1:11:53building right here building every single version of Mac OS X for Intel all the way
1:11:58back to version 10.0 in 2001." And this is the total Jobsian, "Oh my God, of course
1:12:06he did it, but it was such a crowd pleaser." He was like, "Oh, and by the way, all the
1:12:10demos I've been showing you so far, this keynote, yeah, they're all running on this
1:12:13right here. This is an Intel Mac. Like, and you know, he was like an hour into the keynote already.
1:12:18Yeah. And I mean, the crowd just went nuts. I mean, they just went bananas. And of course he
1:12:23did that. Of course, the whole thing was running on Intel up until then. But when he said it,
1:12:27it was just like, Oh my God, it's like, I can't believe people didn't storm the stage.
1:12:31So I would imagine him doing the same thing again. And just saying, Oh, by the way, this
1:12:37whole thing has been running on an ARM Mac. Yeah.
1:12:41I'm excited for it. I can't wait. I mean, you know, you've used the air. I reviewed the air
1:12:45I think it's I think it's pretty good. But there's it just doesn't have could be so much better. Yeah
1:12:51Yeah, it was so funny. It's so I
1:12:54Feel for it because if I could only have one if I had to go away to
1:12:59Desert Island for 30 days and I can only take either the iPad Pro or the new MacBook Air
1:13:05I would take the Mac because that the Mac is what I need for work, you know
1:13:09If I only had one I would rather have it. I think it's great. But man when you just got the new iPad Pro
1:13:16And as frustrating as this over could be the hardware is so amazing. Yeah, man the MacBook Air just seems like oh my god
1:13:24Why can't I have this in this?
1:13:26It feels anyway
1:13:30And you I feel I bought of course the 11-inch iPad Pro even though I had the 12.9 inch for review my wife
1:13:39absolutely loves it. My wife loves the iPad. My wife is prototypical, uses her iPad way more than
1:13:46every other device, phone, Mac combined, and just loves the 12.9 inch because if it's your main
1:13:52computer, it's fantastic to have that 13 inch size. Me, I just love this tiny little 11 inch
1:13:58thing that is so super lightweight. It just feels so amazing to me. Yeah.
1:14:03Yeah, I have last year's 11. And I don't think I'd go up to the 12. Now, if Apple with iOS 13,
1:14:11you know, make some moves, you know, I would, I would think about it pretty seriously, actually.
1:14:18I don't know, I would have to be for me, probably never, just because I know I'm always going to
1:14:24have a Mac until they pry it away from me. But I that's why I like having the secondary, portable,
1:14:31biggish big way bigger than a phone screen. That just is optimized for being crazy small
1:14:36and lightweight. Yep. Yep. Where were we? We were we were working our way to the pixel
1:14:45three and we went sideways. So the pixel three. Is that your main phone? Yeah, although I'm
1:14:55My SIM's in an iPhone right now, which is fine.
1:15:00I've got an iPhone 10.
1:15:02But I'd say I'm probably like 65%, 70% Pixel, and 20%, 35%
1:15:08iPhone.
1:15:10And which Pixel do you have, the bigger one or the smaller one?
1:15:13So this time around, I went with the smaller one,
1:15:16partially because I didn't want to look at the Doofy notch
1:15:19on the Pixel 3 XL, and partly because after using
1:15:25the iPhone 10, I just didn't want to go to something that felt oversized.
1:15:30Yeah, I can see that. I like this. I have the smaller one. I bought the smaller one.
1:15:38And I've been using it a fair amount, but I never actually did what I thought I was
1:15:43going to do, which is try to just use it as my full-time phone for at least two weeks
1:15:47because I so quickly determined that there's just no way I want to use Android. I really
1:15:55I just don't like it. I think this is the best version of it that I've ever seen.
1:16:02And you know, it is what it is, but there's no point to me using it full time. So I'm
1:16:06sort of treating it I bet I've had it with me everywhere. I'm sort of just using it
1:16:09as a camera. Yeah. And I love the size. I don't know it to me is actually a better
1:16:18size than the iPhone 10. I really, really like the size of this phone. And I like the
1:16:23weight. It is, I forget exactly how many grams. I actually got out my little precision kitchen
1:16:30scale and I know I could look up the tech specs, but I weighed them and it's, it is
1:16:34noticeably lighter than the iPhone 10. And by 10 I mean 10 and 10 R and 10 S and 10 S
1:16:42max. But it doesn't feel like insubstantially light. It feels like, oh, this is the way
1:16:49iPhones used to weigh.
1:16:50Yeah, the the weirdest craziest thing for me is when I bounced from pixel 3 back to an iPhone 10
1:16:57The difference here. It's it's measured on like, you know millimeters me. It's gotta be less than 10 millimeters of
1:17:035 millimeters is the width. Yeah, the iPhone 10 feels so much wider than the pixel 3
1:17:08No, when you look at it, it's like yeah, this is basically the same
1:17:11Yeah, but you just there's something about it that you're like, oh, this is the iPhone 10 is wide
1:17:14Yeah, there is something weird about it and in the watch world
1:17:19It's always the case that you cannot in my opinion
1:17:23No matter how much of a if you're any level of a watch nerd
1:17:26You have to see a watch in person before you really know if you like it or not
1:17:30There's just absolutely no way to judge a watch from a photograph because you can say well like I like the style of it
1:17:36but until you see it in person, you really don't know how big it is and
1:17:40You know how thick it is and and you can see the numbers and you can say well
1:17:44I've got a watch that's twelve point seven millimeters high and it's not too high and this one's 13 millimeters
1:17:51So it's only three tenths of a millimeter. That'll be fine
1:17:53And then you put it on your wrist and it feels like it's a bubble, you know, and it's the same with these phones
1:17:59It's like I forget how many millimeter it's just tiny tiny little bit difference in width
1:18:03And when you I'd like you said when you eyeball them side by side
1:18:06They look about the same but then you put it in your hand and it feels narrower. Yeah. Yeah completely. I don't know
1:18:14So what is it you don't like about Android?
1:18:16It's totally fair. I'm like there are many things that bug me about Android it is hard to articulate
1:18:23overall
1:18:26on the surface there are things that just bug me because they're so obvious like
1:18:30There's no way on the home screen to get most of the apps
1:18:34I use like the app names don't even fit in like a desert golf
1:18:39It so shows up as desert G dot dot dot. I mean, that's not a long app name. Yeah
1:18:45Instagram Instagram is I don't know if you've heard of it. It's pretty well known app. I
1:18:51Swear to God I'm not making this up
1:18:54Instagram on my home page shows up as
1:18:57insta
1:18:59Grah, grah
1:19:01Dot-dot-dot, but I swear to God but the dot-dot-dot I think is I think it's wider than the M
1:19:09That's surreal. You must have some like zoom settings.
1:19:15Well, I don't have the zoom setting, but I do have the font size turned up one click because the font is tiny.
1:19:20That's another thing that I don't like. Like you can turn the font size up and it still is tiny.
1:19:26And they use like on the home screen, they use a compressed font.
1:19:30Yeah, it it's really there's little things. There's so many little things like that that just make me crazy.
1:19:38Yeah, so the way that I've dealt with some of that stuff is I set up my home screen
1:19:44So that most stuff is in folders. So I actually don't actually when I look at my home screen
1:19:48I don't see any text at all. I just see rounded icons
1:19:51Play store shows up as play stow
1:19:54Yeah, that's ridiculous it's a system app
1:19:58So, I don't know I could go on and on I don't
1:20:06It just doesn't fit my mental model for how things should work. I don't like gmail
1:20:12Although I do think they've made the gmail app a lot better. I've
1:20:16It's better than I remember it being on the gmail app went through a period of like two three years a couple years ago
1:20:24Where they they put too much like webview stuff in it and it was just god-awful
1:20:29It was even worse on the iPhone
1:20:32And so they finally were like, oh wait
1:20:35We should they bought this this great email company called sparrow
1:20:39And so they finally they finally used the tech from sparrow to like fix up the gmail app
1:20:44But it took them way too long to get it done. Yeah, the spiral guys had a good Mac app, right?
1:20:49Or was it an iOS app? I forget. I think they had both. Maybe they had both. Yeah
1:20:53No, I remember when they got acquired that makes sense
1:20:56You know and there's other apps, you know Twitter the actual if you use the Twitter branded Twitter app
1:21:03It's you know more or less the same so it's okay. Yeah
1:21:08You know I could get by like I've said many many times before if I had to if you put a gun to my head
1:21:14And said you either have to switch to Android
1:21:16But you can keep using a Mac or you can keep using
1:21:19iPhone and you have to switch your computer to anything else other than the Mac
1:21:24I would take the Mac and an Android phone and I'd be fine
1:21:27I mean, I'd be a little I'd be I'd gripe about it, but yeah, I'd be fine
1:21:31whereas if you took my Mac away, I would feel like
1:21:33I was in handcuffs. Yeah. Yeah, I'm able to switch between iOS and Android pretty seamlessly
1:21:38I I don't really run into anything. But the reason I could do that is I'm pretty militant about
1:21:45Turning off iMessage because I need to use Android so often. Yeah, and that's that's the only thing that allows me to do that
1:21:52Yeah, and I have to say cuz I'm and I know Joanna Stern
1:21:56wrote a column recently about you know, I think it was specifically when she was testing the pixel 3 about the pain of
1:22:02of dropping off the iMessage universe.
1:22:05- Yeah.
1:22:06- And all of a sudden all your group iMessage things
1:22:10don't work, it's tricky.
1:22:12And the pain of that, and I have an alternate SIM,
1:22:15I have a T-Mobile SIM that I used on the Android
1:22:17so I could do that.
1:22:18But then I'd still have to carry my iPhone around
1:22:22in case the phone rings.
1:22:23- Yeah.
1:22:24- So, I don't know.
1:22:25- And then you just use it?
1:22:26- It just isn't worth it for me to do it
1:22:28'cause I know I just don't like it.
1:22:30I just don't.
1:22:31I don't know what else to say.
1:22:34No, that's fair.
1:22:35It's totally fair that it honestly I feel like sometimes the only reason I prefer the
1:22:39Android phone is because the home screen lets me put the the icons at the bottom of the
1:22:43screen instead of at the top.
1:22:44I did I kind of like that.
1:22:47I don't really like the home screen on either any of these devices.
1:22:50I feel like I feel like nobody's really made a good home screen yet.
1:22:53And I feel like the iOS one where the apps always fill in top left down.
1:22:58It's kind of crazy that we're in 2018 and it still works that way.
1:23:01Especially on the plus size phones. It's like, what are you doing? Like everybody,
1:23:06did you see what Samsung is doing on the next version of the Galaxy phones?
1:23:12No, I don't think so.
1:23:13They're used to be called TouchWiz, never made fun of it. And then they changed the name and now
1:23:18they've got this thing. I think it's called One UI. And what they have done is they have made all
1:23:24the headers on all of their apps, massive. And so literally everything is shifted down to the bottom
1:23:30half of the screen. So like you open up messages and there's like the top half of the screen is
1:23:34white space at the word messages. And then you can see like three or four of your recent conversations.
1:23:40It's hilarious. I did see screenshots of that. And it's like you can kind of, I mean, maybe I
1:23:47err too heavily on these companies rip off Apple narrative, but you can kind of see where there was
1:23:53a meeting where they looked at like iOS 11 and they saw these big headers that Apple started using
1:23:58these big bold headers at the top and they're like well if Apple went that big what if we went bigger
1:24:03we can go way bigger we'll beat them let's ship this because then we'll be first and they'll be
1:24:09forced to copy us and make the font 192 points and it's it is kind of funny too because we've
1:24:18reached this world where everybody is sort of like yeah I guess the whole world does want you know
1:24:22five inches phones, you know, because you can pack more stuff on them and then they
1:24:27they've reduced like the usable size down to like where we were years ago.
1:24:31Well, it's it's the same thing as everybody copying the notch, right? It's like it
1:24:36actually justify it before you throw that thing on there because it does like it does look silly
1:24:41and we've convinced ourselves that it doesn't but it just does. What do you think on the Pixel 3?
1:24:46so I have the smaller one too, and there's no notch. It just instead has symmetrical chin and
1:24:53forehead. But they're small, smaller than in the old days, and I'm fine with it. But they rounded
1:24:59the corners off on the display. And there's something about the way that they rounded the
1:25:04corners off that I can't put my finger on, and I don't—it's like there's not enough of an inset
1:25:10for like the icons up in the top row.
1:25:14- Yeah, if you want to hate your Pixel forever,
1:25:18turn it off and then turn it on
1:25:21and stare at the corners where they rounded off
1:25:24and you will see that it's actually bigger
1:25:27than what they round off and then they in software
1:25:29round it a little bit smaller, more so,
1:25:32and it's not the elegant way that the,
1:25:34what's the-- - Liquid retina.
1:25:36- The liquid retina that Apple does.
1:25:38It's just they like this doesn't quite match.
1:25:40And so they just rounded a little bit more just for the heck of it.
1:25:43But the screen is still sitting there able to show pixels, but they just,
1:25:47they just cut it off to like get a different, different corner on it.
1:25:50Oh, I just did what you said.
1:25:51And I see what you mean.
1:25:52Yeah.
1:25:53Oh, why won't they just let me have that?
1:25:55Oh my God.
1:25:56It is.
1:25:57The corners are so much better.
1:25:58Oh, there it goes.
1:26:00It is funny.
1:26:03You know, what's funny about this, this device shipping so soon after the
1:26:08quote-unquote liquid retina did is that Apple spent time talking about
1:26:11how much effort they put into getting the corners right on the LCD of the iPhone 10 are and
1:26:20Guess this is an OLED. This isn't LCD, but you know, it's still getting these round corners is you know
1:26:27There's work to be done and I know it need I didn't Eli break out a microscope with the 10 are just to show
1:26:33You know and it's even more detailed than you think like yeah, literally at the microscopic level. Yeah
1:26:38That's how you know the effort Apple put into getting those round corners, right?
1:26:43And then they here's what happens if you don't put that level of effort into it
1:26:47It just feels crowded for some reason it is a much bigger phone than I ever thought I would like
1:26:54And I you know, it is a very large screen but yet because of the way they rounded the corners
1:26:59I'm constantly thinking it feels a little cramped. Yeah
1:27:02Yeah, let me add this Dieter. Here's another thing
1:27:05I absolutely despised about Android and could I'll just never ever ever ever get used to it is
1:27:10The the way that notifications get icons up there in the in the status bar. Oh, you don't like looking at the little
1:27:18Stand it. I can't stand the way that if you've got three from Instagram, you've got three Instagram's up there in the status bar
1:27:25I don't want any of them in the status bar and I don't think you can turn it off. I
1:27:30Mean, I think you can do do not disturb. But yeah, you might be right that you can't turn it off
1:27:34I I don't mind him. I I kind of I kind of like seeing what they're up there
1:27:38My my my gripe goes the other way like the status bar is annoying sure
1:27:42But the the information density on iPhone notifications with those big cloudy bubbles
1:27:49They fixed it a little bit with iOS 12, but the speed with which I can go through notifications on Android
1:27:55It's it's literally three times faster than what I can do on an iPhone
1:27:59I can I could pull that thing down see everything sort of stacked and grouped together swipe way the stuff
1:28:03I don't want act on the stuff. I want whereas with the iPhone they just feel
1:28:07Just way more onerous to me in some way see and I love the iPhone ones this but now that they've added
1:28:15Like I feel like now I maybe only with iOS 12
1:28:19I feel like I finally am happy with iOS notifications
1:28:22But I totally get your take on this like I don't I don't I don't think I Android's notification thing is bad
1:28:28I just don't like it. Yeah, I hate the way that you can swipe things this either way and it does the same thing
1:28:34Like I don't know why and it because in some ways I kind of see how it shouldn't matter whether you swipe left or right?
1:28:41Because there's nothing semantic that says, you know dismiss one way take action the other right?
1:28:46There's no natural way to swipe. So why not be able to swipe both ways? Yeah, and I so I think that's less of a
1:28:54objective criticism and more of a I
1:28:58I natively think in iOS idioms, and therefore this feels foreign to me.
1:29:04Like, I don't think it's a bad design. In fact, I can kind of see how it's actually
1:29:09a good design because you're just swiping off. It shouldn't matter whether it's left-right,
1:29:14but it bothers me.
1:29:15Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, and this is—I have the exact
1:29:17same problem but in the opposite direction. So the thing I most want to do with most notifications is
1:29:21swipe them to make them go away. Just dismiss them. And the fact that on iOS, you can't—it's
1:29:27always two actions to just dismiss a notification. You it's a swipe and a tap or like you it's a swipe
1:29:33to open. But if you just want the thing to just go away, you can't do that. You got to swipe and
1:29:39then tap clear. No, you can swipe it all the way and it'll go away. Which direction do you swipe
1:29:47it left or right swipe it to the left. Oh, if you and then if you keep if you Okay, but if you do a
1:29:52quick swipe, it opens up the buttons, but if you do a slow swipe, then it goes away.
1:29:57See, that's crazy town.
1:29:58Like if you're trying to—
1:29:59Yeah, that's sort of it.
1:30:00Okay.
1:30:01Yeah.
1:30:02Yeah, it is kind of crazy town.
1:30:04Anyway.
1:30:05But I like it.
1:30:06Well, I'm used to it, I will say.
1:30:07Right.
1:30:08And I do kind of feel—honestly, I'll just say, I think iOS's notification system is
1:30:15simpler and therefore more suited to my dumb mind.
1:30:21the density of the of the Android one makes me feel like I'm a little bit under attack.
1:30:26Trenton Larkin Oh, for sure. The the iOS notifications
1:30:29are like, they're like a lower cognitive load. It's not about a dumb mind. It's that there's
1:30:35there's less to think about when you're looking at them for sure. And so I appreciate that because I
1:30:40need I need a lower cognitive load. Another thing hardware wise, I then to me,
1:30:51This is baffling is why in the world did Google take this phone which is otherwise so nice
1:30:56It really is the nicest hardware. I've seen on any phone other than an Apple phone
1:31:01It is a very nice object in my hand. The buttons are nice
1:31:07Didn't have the pixel - I had the pixel one and the pixel one did a thing where they they put like an etching on
1:31:13The power button ran. I never liked that. I was like, why would you just does not feel like a nice button? It feels like
1:31:20It feels industrial. It feels like something in the shop, you know, like a metal working
1:31:25thing. It just does not feel appropriate. So you know, I don't know why they did that.
1:31:30The buttons on this device very, very nice. I'm not a fan of volume buttons that are
1:31:34a single rocker. I like to have volume up and volume down, but I'm okay with it. It's
1:31:40a nice feeling volume button. It has a smaller camera bump than the iPhone. So put aside
1:31:48the single lens versus dual lens. It's just it just in and of itself, a smaller camera bump is
1:31:54inherently a good thing if image quality is maintained. Yeah. And we can we can go on a
1:32:01whole separate rant later about, you know, photography on the pixel three, but inarguably,
1:32:06the pixel three takes good pictures for a cell phone, very good pictures for a cell phone.
1:32:13So the fact that it does it with a smaller camera bump is a good thing. But why in the world did they
1:32:18do this laser etching thing on the glass on the back? What this photographs do not do justice to
1:32:27this what they've done to the glass. It you can't you have to feel it to understand it and it is
1:32:35to me it is not pleasant to the touch. It is it is not pleasant. At times sometimes depending on
1:32:43the texture of my skin. And we're at that time of the year on the East Coast where my hands will go
1:32:48from dry to sweaty, you know, because I've got gloves on and my hands get real sweaty. Or I've,
1:32:55you know, it's just cold and I don't have gloves on and my hands get real dry, you know. So my hands
1:33:00are all over the place skin-wise. And there are times when it has plenty of grip, but there are
1:33:05times when it is the slipperiest goddamn phone I've ever owned in my life. Yeah. Now, Dan Seifert,
1:33:11reviews editor at the word he he just goes off on this because this phone doesn't then
1:33:15one plus phones do it and i don't know man like the the this like window shade thing they call
1:33:23it where the top is glossy and the bottom is matte has been like the identifying feature of
1:33:28pixel phones for a while if they just made it glossy glass people would have assumed it was
1:33:32a samsung but you can see what the glossy glass part feels great and looks great and and it's
1:33:39Obviously what the glass started at before they laser etched it so it could have just been the glossy back
1:33:45And it would have looked like the jet black iPhone 7
1:33:48except glass
1:33:50Or they could have etched it on the inside so that it's like that like some kind of the color
1:33:55Two-tone thing that they want to have right?
1:33:57the other thing that caused
1:34:00So every phone that comes out every flagship phone that people pay attention to always has a bunch of gates
1:34:05like what are the problems with it and
1:34:07The Pixel has had more than its fair share and some of them are pretty bad.
1:34:11We've written about a few of them, but I haven't actually experienced most of them.
1:34:17So there's an issue where like pictures don't save.
1:34:20There's a couple other software things that are just kind of inexcusable.
1:34:25But the the one at launch was the question of whether or not this etched glass
1:34:32Scratches more easily than the glossy part of the glass because if you take a key and rub it up against the phone
1:34:40It is the most terrifying thing you've ever seen because it's just you get these massive things that look like horrific gashes
1:34:47But it turns out what's happening is it's pretty hard glass
1:34:51And so it's actually you know, it's just like you're you're filling it in with the rattle and then you can rub it off
1:34:56and so people did a bunch of videos showing that and then there was a YouTube fight and blah but
1:35:01At the end of the day. I do think this thing scratches like I've got scratches on this thing
1:35:06I don't think I would have had otherwise and it's not because I was like taking a diamond to it
1:35:11I think it does just scratch a little bit more easily than it should
1:35:14That it's it's like you can it's a sign to me of
1:35:19And and again, I think that the the pixel hardware team is doing great work
1:35:23And and I get so frustrated when I see articles like why does why does Google even bother with hardware?
1:35:29they're, you know, their pixels never going to amount to anything in the world in terms of
1:35:34marketing share, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, if you're only going to get into hardware, if you
1:35:38have 20% market share, or something like that, it's, there's only going to be three hardware
1:35:42makers, right? I think it's a great, I think it's great that Google is doing hardware. I think it's
1:35:48great that Microsoft is doing hardware regardless of whether they are industry Titans in terms of
1:35:54a market share or not. I think it's really good for the companies. I think it's really
1:36:00good for their ecosystems. And, you know, and the companies are full of clever people.
1:36:05This hardware overall is very, very good. But I think it's very clear that they're,
1:36:12like, just 1015 years behind Apple in certain ways. And one of them is like Apple made the
1:36:18same mistake. 15 years ago, there was an iPod nano. Yes. That was made of a crosswise. Right.
1:36:28You could actually scratch it by staring at it hard enough, like a good hard stare. And it would
1:36:35scratch the the polycarbonate whatever the material was of this of this iPod nano. And I remember I
1:36:43I didn't have one right away, but I did get one fairly quickly.
1:36:47But I remember people were putting videos up, and I thought it was like a gag.
1:36:51People were like, "Look, if you just put it – here's my keys.
1:36:53Here's the iPod.
1:36:54And look, it has like – here's two scratches on it, right?
1:36:57All right.
1:36:58I put it in my pocket.
1:36:59I jump around a little.
1:37:00I take it out.
1:37:01Now there's four scratches."
1:37:02I was like, "Oh, that can't be."
1:37:03It was like, "Oh, yeah, actually, that's how easily it scratched."
1:37:06That is literally the test we did with the Pixel 3 for our review, and the same thing
1:37:10happened.
1:37:13I just feel like you you wind up building a company winds up building like a checklist
1:37:17After after a thing like that and no product ever comes out again that doesn't go through
1:37:23Put it in a pair of jeans with with a regular pair of keys and see what happens
1:37:29The thing to watch with Google hardware on the phones is next year's pixel
1:37:35Because this year, you know
1:37:38They used to Nexus phones and they were basically they'd work with some company like Samsung or HTC or Huawei and make it
1:37:43But they bought HTC's phone division. I don't know year and a half ago two years ago
1:37:48And so this hardware is good and it is Google made hardware. You know, they did design it top to bottom blah blah blah
1:37:55So it's not like those old the first pixel phone or the old Nexus phones were really it was technically like a Huawei phone or whatever
1:38:02but
1:38:05It takes a minute to integrate a whole damn company that you bought into your systems and into your processes and into your product roadmap
1:38:13And so I think that next year's pixel will be the first phone hardware from Google that actually takes
1:38:19Full advantage of the fact that they bought a phone company. Well, I'm not just a phone company
1:38:24HTC was a for a while was a really good phone company like their fall from
1:38:32the top tier of Android hand makers was kind of baffling because
1:38:36You know and it was funny because I I don't know how I remember this because I wasn't really I'd never really cared about
1:38:43Windows Phone but back when Windows Phone was a thing HTC was far and away the number one Windows Phone maker
1:38:48yeah, and I thought it was a testimony to the the
1:38:51It was a real feather in the cap of the company that they pivoted
1:38:55You know because it's really easy to when you're number one at
1:38:58something to stay in it and then you turn around and realize that you're on this Windows Phone boat and you
1:39:04You you you know you're on the beach
1:39:08The boat isn't even in the ocean anymore
1:39:11It's like oh, how did we get here like they?
1:39:13Sidestepped from being the number one Windows Phone maker to being a top or maybe for a while the top Android handset maker
1:39:20Really? Well, I thought that that was a sign that boy. That's a that's a well-run company
1:39:26That is it, you know is you know keeping their eyes on the horizon not just looking down at what they're doing right now
1:39:32And then all of a sudden they're gone. Yeah. Well, so I mean they've been they they made the very first Android phone
1:39:37The g1 and they made a bunch of really good Android phones later and they they were really good with materials
1:39:45But they were never great with cameras and they were mediocre at software
1:39:50but the thing that they didn't have was
1:39:53Samsung's marketing budget right and like that's that's kind of the whole story is with a lot of Android manufacturers, especially in the West is
1:40:00Nobody could compete with with Samsung and marketing and Samsung was good enough high end quality
1:40:06That you know if you walk into a carrier store, which is what everybody did back in the day to buy a phone
1:40:12They would just push you to Samsung and that was the end of it. Yeah. Yeah, that's but that makes sense
1:40:21The other thing I like I bought the the Google I don't know I you I know from your tweet where you showed the unfortunate
1:40:28Scratch on your your pixel 3 that you don't you weren't using a case at least but I bought the Google case
1:40:36The one with the cloth fabric cloth one. Yeah. Yeah, I I'm not a case person
1:40:41But I'm trying to be just because I I don't know why because I know
1:40:46Now I feel it feels strange to me that I don't use an iPhone case
1:40:5095% of the time but 95% of the people use 100% of the time like they buy it
1:40:55They the only time they ever touch it without a case is when they take it out of the box after
1:41:01Unboxing it and putting it under the case
1:41:03You know and people are you know, they're very expensive devices that are easily broken when dropped and so I understand that
1:41:12but you know, it seems to me like most people treat it like a
1:41:16a heart surgeon treats the heart as they move it from the icebox into the transplanted patient.
1:41:24Until they get that iPhone into a case, they act like they're handling a raw egg or something.
1:41:35But I'm trying it. I like this Google case. It is a very nice case. And I've wasted
1:41:39an unbelievable amount of money on iPhone cases recently as I try to find one that I
1:41:44kind of stand. And I would say it's up there with the very best iPhone cases I've seen.
1:41:49It's a really nice case.
1:41:50Yeah, I am. It's just a tad thick for me. But nobody's made a good thin case for the
1:41:57Pixel 3 yet. So that's one of the reasons I'm not using a case. But yeah, everybody
1:42:03at the New York office at The Verge who has a Pixel swears by that cloth case. They all
1:42:07love it.
1:42:08I like it. And I kind of wish it was available for iPhone because the thing I do like having
1:42:12an iPhone case for and I keep one in my backpack, but I like it when I'm like on vacation, or
1:42:18we go to Disney World or something like that. And when I'm using my phone as a camera most
1:42:22of the time, so I'm on vacation, and I'm in tourist mode, and I'm taking lots of snapshots.
1:42:26I like having a case for grippiness because when I'm using my phone when I'm, you know,
1:42:31doing that, you know, Twitter and email and stuff like that, I never feel like I'm going
1:42:35to drop it. It's the times when I you know, I've had very few drops over the years, but
1:42:40But the times when I feel like it's the most precarious is when I'm photographing
1:42:43things.
1:42:44So I like having the grip of a somewhat grippy case.
1:42:48And I like the idea that if I do drop it and it's in a case, it's less likely to come
1:42:53to harm.
1:42:54This case to me is like the cloth is really nice for grippiness because it's not sticky
1:42:59at all.
1:43:00So there's no friction going in and out of the pocket.
1:43:02But if you have like, if your hands are sweating because it's hot or something like that,
1:43:06it's like the perfect texture.
1:43:08Yeah. Yeah, honestly, the reason I don't like it is hitting the fingerprint sensor on the back.
1:43:14There's just like an extra little angle that drives me crazy, which is silly, but there it is.
1:43:20Trenton Larkin Well, and I will tell you, as I tell you also why I can't really bear to use this
1:43:24as my main phone, I cannot go back not to having face ID. That's another factor. Yeah. And I kind
1:43:29of knew that going in. Because back in June, when iOS 12 betas came out, I my habit for years has
1:43:37has been never to, don't put the betas on my main phone
1:43:41until at least late in the summer.
1:43:43This year I kind of did it early
1:43:45and I know lots and lots of other people who did notice
1:43:47that iOS 12 was an unusually stable beta
1:43:50throughout the whole summer, even beta one.
1:43:52It was like the most stable WWDC beta ever.
1:43:55So hats off to everybody who worked on that.
1:43:58But when I got home from WWDC,
1:44:00I wanted to put the first beta on my iPhone 8
1:44:05and put it on.
1:44:06I was like, all right, now I put my sim in there. I'm going to use this as my main phone
1:44:10as I get used to iOS 12. And like an hour later, after the 10th time of just staring at it and
1:44:16like, Hey, why isn't this unlocking? I was like, I can't use this. I, you know, took, I spent more
1:44:21time installing the beta on it than I did actually using it before I realized I I'm ruined forever.
1:44:27Yeah. And I have to say that having a fingerprint sensor on the back, it's not horrible,
1:44:33but it's not. It's like a separate thing, right? Because you can't unlock, well, you can unlock
1:44:38the phone with it, but when you're dealing with notifications on the notification screen, it's
1:44:42an entirely different thing. Yeah. Well, and also like you just have to pick it up. So there's a
1:44:49little, just like if it's sitting in a charging stand or something and you want to unlock it
1:44:52without taking it off the charging stand, you know, you can't, you got to like tilt it forward,
1:44:56you got to punch in the code and that's super frustrating. Yeah. And I, the thing, I'm sure
1:45:02people who listen to my show are mostly all on iPhone 10 already. Well, not mostly. I know,
1:45:07you know, I, majority, I'm sure are, you know, surprise, surprise, it's an early adopter crowd.
1:45:13But for those who aren't, and I know that there's like a natural skepticism of people who like,
1:45:19or even love touch ID, who are just so skeptical about switching, you know, that, that the,
1:45:26that the new way forward from the iPhone 10 forward is not touch ID plus face ID. It's,
1:45:31you've touch away, touch ID is gone. Now you have face ID. The thing I can't emphasize enough is
1:45:36that once you get used to it, it's like your phone isn't locked at all, right? You just pick it up,
1:45:41and it's raised awake, or tap to wake, right? You just tap it if you need to. And then you see a
1:45:46notification and you're like, Oh, I would love to read that news story. I this headline is very
1:45:51enticing. And you just, you know, open the notification and now you're reading the article.
1:45:56It was like you never even thought about the unlock part. And going back to something where
1:46:01it's like, "Ah, I got to stick a finger on that hole in the back of the phone." It's
1:46:05just an irritation every single time.
1:46:07Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, totally. It totally is. And I don't know
1:46:11when they're gonna—if they're gonna switch the in-screen fingerprint sensors that are out there
1:46:16are pretty slow relative to what you can get if you just have a separate one. So maybe they can
1:46:22they can switch to something like Face ID.
1:46:24I'd like them to, but Apple probably
1:46:27has got the thing padded up the wazoo.
1:46:29I wonder, though, because Apple was first with the touch--
1:46:33well, I know they weren't the first fingerprint sensor,
1:46:35but they were the first good fingerprint sensor.
1:46:38And now everybody's got a good fingerprint sensor.
1:46:40Yeah, well, and there's Windows Hello.
1:46:42So you can-- on a Windows laptop, they support it.
1:46:47And that uses an infrared camera.
1:46:50So yeah, maybe it's maybe they could do.
1:46:51It's the sort of thing where, you know, it's easy for me to
1:46:55say, because my name isn't on the face ID patent, but it's the
1:46:59sort of thing that as a generally, you know, not someone
1:47:05who's not generally a fan of software patents. It's the sort
1:47:09of thing that I hope isn't hindered by patents, because
1:47:12it's so clearly the right way to go. Yeah.
1:47:14So do you want to hear my conspiracy theory? Yes, I love
1:47:17conspiracy theories.
1:47:18- The Pixel 3 has one camera on the back
1:47:22and two on the front.
1:47:23- Right.
1:47:24- And the two on the front are there
1:47:26because one of them is a wide angle thing.
1:47:28And they also do actually use a little bit of it
1:47:30for portrait mode stuff.
1:47:31But the idea is mainly people love having
1:47:34wide angle selfies and it's easy to poo poo that,
1:47:37but like actually like handing it to a normal person
1:47:40and then be like, look, you can get it this wide.
1:47:42They love it.
1:47:44My conspiracy theory is that Google
1:47:46wanted to do the same thing with face unlock
1:47:49that Apple's doing with Face ID, but be able to claim that it
1:47:51was as secure as Face ID without having to use lasers,
1:47:54because they are able to do with two cameras,
1:47:58detect your face accurately in the same way
1:47:59that they don't need two cameras to do portrait mode
1:48:01on the back, if that makes sense.
1:48:03They're so good at applying machine learning to what
1:48:05the camera sees that they could have a secure face
1:48:07unlock with the selfie cameras.
1:48:10I'm sure this isn't true, but it's my crazy conspiracy
1:48:13theory informed by absolutely no sources or hints from anywhere?
1:48:17That makes it does make some sense. It's funny, I've, you
1:48:22know, and like I said, I've been using the pixel three mostly as
1:48:25a camera for at least a month. I'm just not a big selfie taker.
1:48:29So I've tried, you know, and I do see it, I see how from and
1:48:36you know, it it is optimized for arm's length, it is it is it is
1:48:42very useful if you're the sort of person who takes a lot of pictures of themselves in it and wants to
1:48:47see the background or takes a picture of yourself with friends and family right next to you. It
1:48:52it it does exactly with it. Google says it does you know it is a good camera for getting more
1:48:58people in from exactly the length of of holding the camera out at arm's length.
1:49:04Well, it's a weird focal length at all sorts of other areas in the way that why super wide angle
1:49:11fisheye. I mean, I wouldn't quite call it a fisheye lens, but it's close because it's so wide.
1:49:16And there's all sorts of stuff that looks bad if you get it at the wrong distance, but it's,
1:49:21you know, it's surprise, surprise optimized for arm's length. It is weird, though, that they have
1:49:26two pictures on the to me, the lesser side, not the greater side. I mean, two cameras on the lesser
1:49:32side. Well, I think that, I mean, it's weird to me as well, but I'm also not a millennial. Right?
1:49:40I mean, it's easy to make jokes about millennials, but I do think that in a lot of ways,
1:49:44the selfie camera is the most important camera on a lot of phones. And I say that with no judgment.
1:49:50Like it's just people love it.
1:49:52Right. You know, I've even budged. I went a long time. I used to be, my other pet peeve years ago,
1:50:00nobody even talks about blogs anymore, period. But for a long time in the early years of
1:50:04Daring Fireball, I went out of my way to always use the word web blog instead of blog. Because
1:50:09for some reason I really, I thought, I still don't like the word. I think that it's,
1:50:13I don't know, there's something about the word that I don't like.
1:50:16But I went out of my way for a long time to not use the word selfie. I still do sometimes. I will
1:50:25use, there's a lot of places in Daring Fireball where I will use the term self-portrait, where
1:50:31Everybody else in the 20th, 21st century would use the word selfie.
1:50:36I feel like if even Apple calls them selfies and every time Phil Schiller says the word selfie,
1:50:44it always sticks out to me because he always seems to me like the sort of person who,
1:50:47if he's using the word selfie, then I should be using it too. It's give it up. It's a word.
1:50:53Language evolves and that it is what it is. But...
1:50:56But I think I think everybody needs to have their one language thing that they refuse
1:51:00to John. For me, it's beg the question when people say beg the question and then like
1:51:05actually state a question what really when they misuse the phrase beg the question that's
1:51:09that's the one that I get persnickety about.
1:51:11I I'm big on people who say that they're nauseous when they mean that they're nauseated because
1:51:23something that is nauseous is what makes you nauseated. Like a nauseous odor makes you
1:51:29feel nauseated. And I'm correct on that, but in general, unless I try to be as much of
1:51:38a descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, the language evolves and it's, you know, using
1:51:44nauseous to mean nauseated is so common that it's actually accepted in some places. But
1:51:52But it's one to me that every time somebody says it, I always think that's wrong.
1:51:56Yeah.
1:51:57To bite my tongue and not correct them or go on the rant that I just did right there.
1:52:02All right, let me take a final break here and thank our third and final sponsor of this
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1:55:05and conditions to apply. I saw the pillow. I think so. Yeah, they have pillows. Yeah,
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1:55:25absolutely adore. I don't I like it. I you know, I'm not going to speak poorly of them as a
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1:55:49it's, I'm a drooler when I sleep. So I don't know if that's
1:55:54too much information. I need washability. Alright, pixel
1:55:593 camera. It is an excellent camera. But before I get to the camera, I have to say this. Here's
1:56:07the other thing about the Pixel 3 that I just, as an iPhone user, I cannot believe. I can't
1:56:11believe what a shitty screen it has. And I cannot believe the default setting for the
1:56:17display. I cannot believe it. There's…
1:56:20Which of the ones does it default to? Does it default to the super adaptive crazy camera?
1:56:25So, so in you, you go to settings display and then you have to go to advance. So you
1:56:31don't even know if you're just a typical user and you think, ah, advanced, I, I, you know,
1:56:35I'm, that's, that's not for me. You would never even know this setting is there. You
1:56:38go to advanced and then there's a, what do they call it here? Colors. They have three
1:56:43options, natural, boosted and adaptive. And they have a photo of like a hummingbird and
1:56:48some flowers to show you what these three mean, but there's no text describing what,
1:56:53the difference is. The default is the last one adaptive. And I think it's crazy. I don't
1:57:00know what the hell they're, I don't know what it's adapting to other than making everything
1:57:04look bad. It is so super saturated. I have no idea why they don't call that one boosted.
1:57:11Even the terms they use are wrong.
1:57:13Yeah. Okay. So natural is supposed to be straight RGB or sRGB, right? Boosted is supposed to
1:57:21be straight SRGB, but they boost it like 10%. And then adaptive is adaptive to the colors
1:57:29on the screen where they make stuff super vivid, but they try to be intelligent about
1:57:34not boosting skin tone so that they look Donald Trumpy.
1:57:38It is they fail at that. Everything. Well, everything looks red.
1:57:41Yeah, everything looks red. So the history here, and I in particular, I'm part of this
1:57:46history is fascinating. So number one, the context to know, and by the way, none of this
1:57:52is like an apologia. None of this is saying that these are the right decisions. I'm just
1:57:57like the con—I'm trying to explain the decisions I think they've made. So number one is if
1:58:00you look at any other Android phone, and especially a Samsung phone, it makes the even the adaptive
1:58:07super vivid mode on the Pixel 3 look washed out and muted. It is the most insane colors
1:58:13you've ever seen on a screen in your entire life. Then Samsung has always tuned its colors that way.
1:58:18And so I think that there is a context for in the Android world where if they don't have the default
1:58:24presentation of the screen be bonkers, then people will think it looks washed out in the store
1:58:28relative to a Samsung phone in the same way that like all the wrong settings are on the TVs at
1:58:33Best Buy. Right. Right. And it's like a blue state, red state America where it's like, you know,
1:58:38there's parts of the country where it's totally, you know, very typical to have like 10 guns in
1:58:42your house and other parts of the country where it's like, it's shocking if you own a gun,
1:58:47you know, and it's like, wow, what a difference, you know, and it's like, we've sort of gotten
1:58:50like, that's, it's not political. It's obviously aesthetic. But Apple adheres to this very, very,
1:58:58very to me, absolutely pristine color space that is realistic. And yeah, and not really,
1:59:04just almost with scientific, literally, maybe not even almost like with scientific rigor,
1:59:11trying to be realistic. And yeah, Samsung and other Android makers have pushed the Android world to
1:59:17this vivid nightmare escape. And that leads me to the second part of the context, which was last
1:59:23year's Pixel 2 XL had such a terrible horrific screen that they are probably overcompensating
1:59:31with the way that they handle reds in particular on the screen. So we actually pulled our review
1:59:36for a while because we were worried about burn-in, brought it back, but the screen was like cast off
1:59:40LG screens I guess, I don't know. But the reds looked brown, everything looked muddy
1:59:46like you were looking at it through a sheet of parchment paper, and it was just, it was
1:59:51a terrible screen. And so I think when they got better suppliers here for these two screens,
1:59:57I think ironically the smaller one is LG and the bigger one is Samsung. I forget which
2:00:01is which now. Anyway, I think they, when they tuned the adaptive colors, they turned it
2:00:09up relative to what they had on the Pixel 2 to like show that there was a clear difference
2:00:13in the screen. Because their defense of the original Pixel 2 screen was, hey, no, these
2:00:17are actually color accurate. We scientifically tested the colors, but it just looks terrible.
2:00:23And so well, it's funny because displays are displays are a funny thing to review. Because
2:00:29you can't show you can't really show a display because you're whoever's watching your video
2:00:35or looking at the photos on your review is looking at those on its on a display, right?
2:00:40Yeah, you can't really show a display on a display. You know, I mean, you can and there
2:00:45you can put one side by side and see some of the Oh, I see I see which way it's going.
2:00:49But until you see it in your hand, you're like, you can't do it. And I remember last
2:00:52year thinking, I don't know if I should buy the pixel to, you know, I already have the
2:00:57pixel one, I didn't really use it a lot. Maybe I should just get one every other year. And
2:01:00I went into a Verizon store. And I remember reading the reviews, and I picked one up and
2:01:04I was like, it's like the Grandpa Simpson thing where he goes into the bordello. He
2:01:10walks into the bordello and Bart is working the door and he takes off his hat and then
2:01:15he just turns, sees it's Bart, just turns around and walks right out. I just picked
2:01:18up the Pixel 2 and I thought, "Oh, I see." And I just put it down and I was just like,
2:01:24"I'll wait till next year." That was a bad display, whatever the calibration was.
2:01:29I just can't believe that this defaults to this adaptive thing and that it's not a first run setup
2:01:37thing. And I totally get that like maybe Apple airs on the side of too many steps in the first
2:01:44run, you know, and I know that it's it's a tricky balance because you don't want to make it feel
2:01:49like you're taking a the SAT before you get to use your new device, you know, nobody likes setting up.
2:01:56But you have to ask some questions. And if you're even thinking about making the default
2:02:00so such a polarizing decision, I can't believe that they don't even bring it up as an option.
2:02:07I really can't believe it. I thought and Matthew Panzorino of TechCrunch, he got a review unit of
2:02:14the Pixel 3 around the same time. And so we both had them when we were in New York recently for the
2:02:21I think it was when we picked up like I said, like when we picked up the 10 hours.
2:02:24And we're both very at the time we're very very new to the pixel three. No, it wasn't for the 10-hour thing
2:02:31It was for the iPad event because I remember I saw you I was when we saw you guys in the green room then
2:02:37Yeah
2:02:37Yeah
2:02:37So
2:02:38Panzerino and I are both new to the pixel three and we're taking pictures and we're both like what the hell are all these people
2:02:43Saying that this is a great camera. This is the worst camera I've ever seen that doesn't get any of the colors, right and
2:02:48And I've and we're both we're like this is garbage and then I thought to myself wait
2:02:54Maybe it's the display and I like sent one to myself and I looked at it on my iPhone and I was like, oh
2:02:59This is a terrific camera
2:03:01This the colors are completely
2:03:03Right. Yeah, and we were like, oh my god, and then we started digging around and you know
2:03:08It's not like the setting is hidden. It is in settings display advanced colors
2:03:12I mean, it's you know, once you the advanced thing I think is a little unnecessary
2:03:16And again, the terms aren't good. But then once you switch it to natural, it's better.
2:03:20Yeah, but the colors still aren't right. And I've shown this to a couple people like
2:03:25a lot of indoor areas, I'll hold up an iPhone hold up the pixel three indoors. And I'm you know,
2:03:32so I'm looking at the same scene on an iPhone through the camera on the pixel three through
2:03:36the camera and with my eyes, looking at the actual scene. And the colors on the iPhone look exactly
2:03:42like what I see with my eyes and the colors on the Pixel 3 don't. But then I take the
2:03:46picture, send it to my iPhone or look at it on a Mac and they look, the colors are perfect.
2:03:51- Yep.
2:03:52(laughing)
2:03:53- I mean, there's nothing else to say.
2:03:57- Well, that's, and so part of--
2:03:58- Samsung and Apple are the only companies that make really good displays.
2:04:00- So part of my gripe about the argument that the Pixel 3 is the best camera phone in the
2:04:06world is I don't know how it can be the best camera phone in the world when it doesn't
2:04:09have a good viewfinder because the colors aren't right. Like you kind of have to trust what you see,
2:04:16you have to just trust that it's going to get the camera right, because it's not going to look right
2:04:19when you look at the screen. Right? Yeah, I mean, that's fair. But I mean, I guess, for me, it's,
2:04:26you know, the reason for me to take a photo is to send it to somebody and nobody owns a pixel
2:04:31three. So they're gonna have a better display. It is it was it was shocking. And it is it shows
2:04:38how spoiled I am and maybe how insular I am to the Apple world where I'm just so used to perfectly
2:04:45calibrated displays that I never have to worry about that it didn't occur to me for days that it
2:04:50was the display and not the camera. I really thought that guys like you, the rest of the guys
2:04:55at the verge like Vlad, I thought you guys were like pulling the biggest punk in the history of
2:04:59the world. I'm like, I wasted it. I spent like 700 bucks on this phone because the bird said it was
2:05:05was a great camera this is garbage everything's red everything looks like
2:05:10you're in you know you know like again like a bordello everything things all
2:05:15like red now I I switch mine what mode am I on right now I think I'm on natural
2:05:21but I may have gone to boosted just for the I boosted for a couple days good I
2:05:25don't like natural either adaptive though makes me want to throw the phone
2:05:29in the garbage I cannot believe that they don't even ask about it very
2:05:32range. But the camera is good. I do see why people who are fans of the Pixel 3 don't really talk
2:05:41about video. Video is not bad, but it's not good. It's not great. And it's definitely a place where
2:05:54You can do a lot with software, but the hardware--
2:05:59if your hardware-- what am I trying to say?
2:06:01Video will betray your hardware every time.
2:06:04And Apple has an incredibly powerful chip,
2:06:07an incredibly powerful image sensor, an image processor.
2:06:12And that means that you're able to do good video.
2:06:15You can't do machine learning on video files.
2:06:17They're too big, and it would take too long.
2:06:19Yeah, and one of the ways that it's not a machine learning
2:06:22thing. I think it's an image signal processing performance thing is video is always a crop of the
2:06:30sensor. Like you don't get the full you know, when you switch if you ever know, you know,
2:06:34just in case if you're not a big fan, just open up your iPhone or whatever phone you have. Look at
2:06:40the still photos at one x magnification switch to video and it zooms in a little is what it looks
2:06:46like, because it's a crop, the pixel crops a lot more. So yes,
2:06:51it is. It's a, it is the widest you can get in video on the
2:06:55pixel is not very wide. It's very unnatural to me as somebody
2:06:59who's so used to the iPhone for video.
2:07:01Yeah, and I mean, I don't know how Google's gonna solve this
2:07:07problem. Because at the end of the day, they don't have an A
2:07:10series processor, they're waiting on Qualcomm. And for as
2:07:13much shit as we give Intel for not knowing what it's doing.
2:07:17Qualcomm is not that much better what you get outside of its bread
2:07:20and butter use cases of modems and sort of standard processing
2:07:25for Android phones.
2:07:27When you get into smartwatch processors or other sorts
2:07:32of things, the computation you need to do to shoot good video,
2:07:35they just don't have it.
2:07:36And I don't know how Google gets around that, sort of making
2:07:38its own silicon.
2:07:39And it's doing that a little bit.
2:07:40They have their own image processing chip.
2:07:42But I think they're gonna have to do a lot more if they want to catch up
2:07:45For stills it is absolutely it is. I think it's just a terrific camera
2:07:50Maybe I don't I don't know if it's for certain better than the iPhone. I think
2:07:54It's close but it's certainly in the ballpark and in certain ways. It's you know, it's it's better
2:08:01The night sight thing is amazing. It really is
2:08:03Yeah, so I prefer the pixel photos just because they they tend to be there
2:08:11This is again. It's all it all comes out to aesthetics at this point or mostly
2:08:14I do think that they tend to look a little bit more dramatic. They're a little bit more contrasty. Yeah
2:08:19But what's interesting is the pixel 3 actually became a little bit less blue
2:08:25A little more yellow a little bit less dramatic and a tiny little bit less contrasty compared to the pixel 2
2:08:31So Google actually moves the aesthetics of its images and its image processing a little bit closer to what the iPhone does
2:08:38Yeah, which is really fascinating. Yeah, I saw it
2:08:41But you know, and I told you, we did the family Christmas tree thing today. And I took I had
2:08:46both phones with me and I have some photos and I was looking at them just before we started
2:08:49recording and there was a couple I took of my son and you know, he's surrounded by green
2:08:54Christmas trees. And I had to say that I like the pixel one better because it was more contrasty
2:09:00and the green was very like a rich, vibrant green of these trees. Whereas the phone the
2:09:06The iPhone seemed, I wouldn't say washed out,
2:09:09but it looked, the greens look washed out
2:09:12compared to the Pixel side by side.
2:09:13I think it was like, they're both so good,
2:09:16but it's clear that their engineering teams
2:09:18have made different priorities, had different priorities,
2:09:22and are slightly different decisions in that,
2:09:26the pipeline between image sensor
2:09:27and saving the actual JPEG.
2:09:29And you could see that.
2:09:31And then certain, so sometimes one looks better
2:09:33than the other.
2:09:35It is for sure. I think Apple I think Apple cares more about getting
2:09:39The people right and the skin tone especially on people, right?
2:09:43and I think Google's looking at the whole scene a little bit more and
2:09:47That's gonna lead to like one's gonna win some situations one's gonna win in other situations. Yeah cases
2:09:54It hasn't kicked in for me much in real life
2:09:57I don't know why but and I've taken a ton of photos with that. I forget how many I took at least 600
2:10:03maybe more
2:10:05But when it
2:10:08Decide asks you if you'd like to take a different frame because the subject was looking away
2:10:12It is so it's so brilliant and it yeah
2:10:15And the other thing is in over a month with hundreds of pictures taken it has never once
2:10:20Asked me that it almost never does it only comes up a couple times
2:10:23It has never asked me that when it wasn't an improvement
2:10:27Really? Yeah. Oh, that's yeah. I've had a couple that were a little bit a little bit off
2:10:32But again, that's like I don't know how many like thousand photos I've taken the worst
2:10:35I can say was there was one where they were it was hard to say it was 50/50
2:10:39Yeah, and it was sort of like they were right that neither was great
2:10:43Yeah, there was it's and it's sort of spooky that that the machine learning is so good at identifying a
2:10:50Hmm your could the subject of this is clearly a human being and this human being doesn't really look good. Yeah, what's
2:10:56yeah, what's impressive about the experience of using the camera the pixel 3 is
2:11:01is what they did, they fixed their algorithms,
2:11:04they improved their portrait mode a little bit.
2:11:06It's not quite as good as the iPhone with the two lenses,
2:11:08but it's pretty good.
2:11:10And then they just ladled on a bunch of features.
2:11:12And having reviewed phones for 12 years or whatever it is now,
2:11:18anytime a company says, here's our camera
2:11:20and here's the 15 new things we added to it,
2:11:22you know you're in for a disaster,
2:11:24because they're all going to feel like they're tacked on
2:11:26and they're going to feel like gimmicks
2:11:28and they're not going to work very well.
2:11:30And somehow they managed to avoid that for the most part on this camera, the stuff that they do
2:11:37feels pretty well integrated. And when you use it, it's, you know, it seems like it's worth using.
2:11:43It's a very well done app. It's not just that the features are there and the machine learning
2:11:49and the AI and what you know, the this ignorant image chip that they have, whatever. It's not just
2:11:54the engineering. It's to me, it's by far and away, my favorite app on the device. It's a
2:12:00really nice app and you know in some ways you know there's there's a it's not that different
2:12:06from using the iphone camera app i mean you know like i don't know they put like the button to
2:12:11switch from the front to the back on the left instead of the right and well you know that's
2:12:15just a choice but uh i don't know it just it it doesn't get in your way and like you said it sounds
2:12:21like ah there's a bunch of features how much how annoying are they going to be uh and not they're
2:12:25not annoying. There's an interesting philosophical difference between Google and Apple that I
2:12:32thought about as I've used this because I've I didn't get I didn't I'm not enough of an
2:12:38Android nerd. I didn't want to screw the phone up. So I didn't get the night sight thing when it was
2:12:44like unofficial. Yeah, I didn't do that. I just waited to get the over the air thing.
2:12:49And I got it and I you know, it's obviously it you know, because it's the only phone in the world
2:12:54that has this feature. It's, it's, you know, super exciting. And it, you know, at times is,
2:13:00it's often amazing. And at times, it gives you a picture that you just simply couldn't get
2:13:07otherwise. Yeah. That's what a picture worth keeping. There are other times where it takes
2:13:13pictures. And I, you know, even in the example pictures that people have posted, where it's like,
2:13:18that's technically amazing, but it, I don't like it, because it looks like daytime. It's so it's
2:13:23Yeah, it gets such a good exposure that it doesn't look it doesn't look true to the scene like, you know
2:13:28This is supposed to look like a dark street at night and it looks like daytime. Yeah
2:13:32Well, that's why I'm really glad they made it a separate mode if they had tried to build that into like something that happens
2:13:38Automatically in the main camera. I would have flipped a lid because I want I want consistency and like I want to get know what?
2:13:46I'm gonna get when I click the camera shutter, but with night sight you kind of don't know
2:13:50It's always something you use like well, this is a crazy
2:13:53Situation to try and take a photo. Let me give this a shot. Yeah instead of just replace the main camera function
2:13:58Yeah, and they have a nice UI for it too because you're just you open the camera app
2:14:02You're just framing a photo and if it's low-light
2:14:05It says try night sight and there's you know
2:14:08If you don't want to you can just take your picture as usual take your chances holding your hand still and then if you want
2:14:14To go night sight it's you know, just tap that button that pops up only when the phone thinks it might be useful
2:14:21Yep, and so you're not surprised, you know, you're in night sight and therefore, you know, you have to take three or four seconds
2:14:29I think you know, maybe two three seconds, whatever it is to hold the camera while it's
2:14:34Yeah, while it's making the exposure and it's interesting
2:14:38So the thought that I had at first was well, this is interesting and it's obviously useful
2:14:42And so, you know, it'll probably spread to other phones including the iPhone in some way whether it's next year or two years whenever
2:14:50But now now that I'm using it and thinking about the way the iPhone works and looking at the difference between the portrait modes on
2:14:56The two phones it occurs to me that maybe not maybe the iPhone wouldn't ever do this because there's clearly a philosophical difference between Apple and
2:15:04Google's camera teams, which is that Apple
2:15:08philosophically only seemingly
2:15:11I mean
2:15:11Maybe they could always change their mind in the future but so far they only do things that they can do live in the viewfinder
2:15:18right and
2:15:19Google will do things that happen afterwards. So in Google's portrait mode, portrait mode
2:15:25is the perfect example. When you're doing portrait mode on the iPhone, you see the portrait
2:15:31phone live in the viewfinder in real time as you move the camera around. And then the
2:15:36image you take is exactly what you saw when you hit the shutter button. Whereas on the
2:15:40Google phone, when you're in portrait mode, it doesn't look any different than the regular
2:15:44mode. And then you take the picture. And it applies the portrait mode in the next maybe
2:15:50second or two. Yeah, you can even see it sometimes. Yeah, like in night mode. If you like,
2:15:55you hop into the picture right away. You like see the garbage and the sun that resolves. Right?
2:15:59It's exactly right. Night sites. Perfect like that. Because you take it and of course, I'm super
2:16:04excited to be taking night sight pictures. So I'm like, Oh, here's a good time. Oh, I'll take it and
2:16:09it's like up. This isn't that great. And then say, Oh, no, wait. Oh, that's interesting. You know,
2:16:14but it takes that much time. Yeah. And night sight now so portrait mode obviously can happen
2:16:20in real time because it Apple does it in real time. Right. But night sight by definition can't
2:16:26happen in real time. You can't right. You can't in real time preview what three seconds worth of
2:16:31exposures algorithmically stitched together into a cohesive sharp still image will look like by
2:16:38definition because you need the three seconds. And so I wonder if Apple will do it. I mean,
2:16:44maybe they, if it becomes popular enough and other phones pick it up, they might have to,
2:16:49quote unquote. Yeah, I hadn't thought of the idea that Apple philosophically doesn't want to do
2:16:54anything that you can't preview live in the viewfinder. And I'm trying to think of like,
2:16:59I mean, I guess you could argue that like Panorama doesn't, but even that it's like,
2:17:03I don't know, if you think that's really like a philosophical thing that they want to believe in.
2:17:07No, I mean, I've talked to people who are familiar with the situation and it is okay.
2:17:13It's why the 10 R that you know, the 10 R has portrait mode and 10 R does everything in real
2:17:23time to even with a single camera, but the 10 R in portrait mode doesn't have the stage lighting
2:17:27effects, which I don't really find useful. I've never once I almost never even apply them, frankly.
2:17:34Yeah, so you don't want to have tried to apply them. They don't look like the ones Apple has that look good
2:17:39They look like somebody's head got cut off or something. Yeah
2:17:41Yeah, but that 10-hour doesn't even have them because it can't do them in real time
2:17:45Huh with the just with the one, you know, obviously it has the same chips. So it's not the chips
2:17:51It's the fact that it doesn't have two cameras, right? So it is that's yeah
2:17:55and every feature that they have
2:17:59The in like the latest and greatest that doesn't work on older iPhones
2:18:04It's not marketing spite like oh we're gonna we want you to pay to get the new phone to get it
2:18:10It's because they can't do it in real time without blank
2:18:12Right. So some of the new stuff can't be done in real time just because the new
2:18:16The neural engine thing on the a12 is so much faster than it was before
2:18:22Like every single one of those things that that seems like it could be marketing spite as I call it is
2:18:29literally, I mean, you can say that the that the refusal to not
2:18:33do anything that can't be shown in real time is marketing spite,
2:18:37but that's their attitude.
2:18:38Right. I mean, that makes sense. Again, like the most important
2:18:42thing with the cameras predictability, right? You're
2:18:44going to take a picture and it's going to do what you think it's
2:18:46going to do.
2:18:46Well, but on the other hand, like I started my life in as an
2:18:50amateur photographer shooting on film and film. Film was entirely,
2:18:53you know, find out what you got later. Right. So I'm like, I
2:18:58don't even it to me, it's a six of one half a dozen of the
2:19:01other, it's two different approaches. I don't say one is
2:19:03better than the other. I mean, there's advantages to both. But
2:19:06I'm not like put off by Google's render it later approach,
2:19:10because maybe it's just the old film shooter in me where looking
2:19:14through the viewfinder of a 35 millimeter camera, there was no
2:19:17Boca, you know, everything was in focus, I could focus at any
2:19:22distance I wanted to. You know, it's it. And and you'd find out, you know, what kind of
2:19:30depth of field you really had when you got your film developed. So right, you know, having
2:19:34to wait two seconds as opposed to waiting three days. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. It still
2:19:40feels like magic to me, but it couldn't happen in night sight. Otherwise. Yeah.
2:19:46I do wonder what other photographic problems
2:19:53Google thinks machine learning can tackle.
2:19:54So I know that the next one for them
2:19:56is going to be white balance.
2:19:58They actually have a different white balance algorithm
2:20:00in the standard camera than they do in Night Sight.
2:20:05So the way Night Sight works, it takes up to 15 frames.
2:20:11They're not long exposures, but they can be longer.
2:20:14And then it stitches them together,
2:20:16And then it also, if you have handshake,
2:20:19it's able to use machine learning to make sure everything
2:20:21lines up and stays sharp.
2:20:22And so what you get is you get a picture that often has less
2:20:25noise than you otherwise have because it's
2:20:27able to average over the different shots you took.
2:20:29And it also makes it look unreal because it's brighter
2:20:32than it otherwise would be.
2:20:34Anyway, when you do that and you make a photo that is--
2:20:37you took it in the dark, but it looks like it's daytime,
2:20:40it turns out that white balance goes bonkers.
2:20:43It goes crazy.
2:20:43Everything looks yellow or strange.
2:20:45And so they did a standard machine learning thing,
2:20:48which is they're like, well, these all look wrong.
2:20:50So they had everybody fix them to make the white balance
2:20:52right.
2:20:53And they did that with some sample of photos.
2:20:56And then they just told the camera, all right,
2:21:00make the white balance look like that.
2:21:01So they didn't manually tune anything.
2:21:03They're just like, these all look right.
2:21:04Those will look wrong.
2:21:05Make it look more like that.
2:21:06And that's the white balance that
2:21:08gets applied to Night Sight.
2:21:09And I'm sure they're going to try and bring
2:21:12that to the main camera.
2:21:15But I got to think there's other stuff that they think can be machine learned or whatever.
2:21:19And so then at some point, will that philosophical difference of what is a "true picture" of
2:21:27a thing going to be and what counts and what doesn't might be a bigger rift between Apple
2:21:34and Google if Apple falls on putting that line at a different spot?
2:21:39because at the end of the day there's no such thing as like a true image right and i think
2:21:43apple's you know excitement over the um the fake bokeh in portrait mode shows that they're not
2:21:51adamant about that either because it's right you know you know there are you know purists if you
2:21:58will, who are offended by the idea of fake bokeh. And, you know, I'm, you know, I was always a fan,
2:22:09I liked the early years of Instagram, when everybody was using the, the filters. Yeah,
2:22:14me too. I thought that was great. And, you know, I think it was this thing of the times, you know,
2:22:19and it wasn't going to last forever. But it was a fun, it was a very effective way, in my opinion,
2:22:25to patch over the fact that the camera phones of the time were still kind of camera phony and not
2:22:32real camera camera-y. You know, that they were still kind of, you know, we're getting to the
2:22:38point where a camera phone was actually just a good camera in any way, period. Applying those
2:22:43filters that made them look like snapshots from 1977 was a fun way to patch over that.
2:22:49So I'm cool with that and I'm cool with portrait mode and sometimes I get portrait mode shots. I
2:22:55I like them and they especially look good on the phone itself when they're small.
2:23:02And then there's a lot of times I'll take a portrait mode photo and then I look at it
2:23:06on my iMac and I'm like, "Oh, that's actually not good at all.
2:23:12That is, ooh."
2:23:13And it looks totally fake and gross.
2:23:16But most people look at their pictures on their phone.
2:23:19Yeah, and they'll scroll by it on Instagram and they'll look at it for long enough to
2:23:23double tap it to give you a like and they move on to the next thing. No one's actually,
2:23:27you know, zooming in to see if the hair got cropped perfectly correctly or not. Right.
2:23:30Right. So I mean, you know, ideally, you want it to look good as big as it can get. And
2:23:34you know, an Apple famously for the last three or four years now has spent a gazillion dollars
2:23:38on the shot with iPhone marketing campaign, putting iPhone photographs on the biggest
2:23:43billboards you know, they can buy. So you know, Apple certainly on board with making
2:23:48printing iPhone photos very large. But I think it's okay to add features that work best when
2:23:55looked on the iPhone itself. And portrait mode is one of those things.
2:23:58Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I wonder what else AI can do. I feel like I'm not I'm not imaginative
2:24:06enough like I feel like they're going to continue to surprise us.
2:24:09Yeah, well, it is literally just imagination, right? The method for this white balance thing
2:24:16is just take a data set, fix it, and say, do that thing.
2:24:20And in my head, when I think about machine learning
2:24:23and camera stuff, I always think in terms of,
2:24:24I don't know, it's like a Moore's law,
2:24:26like more processing power, better sensors, faster chips,
2:24:31blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
2:24:33But this was just them saying, oh, wait,
2:24:35we have this methodology that works for recognizing dogs
2:24:39on the internet.
2:24:40Well, that same idea could work to fix white balance.
2:24:42So it's literally, can you take that same method
2:24:45and apply it to some other thing.
2:24:47If you can build a data set, you can tell a computer
2:24:49to try and match it.
2:24:50Yeah, and I think the other thing that's exciting
2:24:55is that the actual Moore's law, Moore's law with CPUs
2:25:00has been over for a while.
2:25:02Our CPUs just aren't getting faster.
2:25:04And so the things that could be improved by radically faster
2:25:07CPUs we're not getting.
2:25:09But the machine learning stuff is
2:25:11in a early years of the '80s CPU phase,
2:25:15where the A12 really is ridiculously faster than the A11 at the neural engine stuff.
2:25:23And Google's got their chip, and the Pixel 3 one is way faster. The one year, just wait a year,
2:25:30this stuff gets so much faster. And when you have those cycles and you can throw that many
2:25:35iterations of the machine learning thing at an image, you can really, really do amazing things.
2:25:44I feel like the portrait mode stuff is going to get so good so fast that this anybody who's skeptical about it still is
2:25:50Eventually is going to have to give in
2:25:53Yeah, oh for sure
2:25:55I mean I have to imagine every time a phone ships and people that are working on this stuff
2:26:00See what we all say about the portrait mode
2:26:03Are just gritting their teeth because they know they've got something ten times better sitting in the lab. You know, I
2:26:09I think so, too. And I but I also wonder then too about like the people who are working on those things
2:26:15Like how do they stand leaving at the end of the day and then using the you know?
2:26:19the pixel 3 or the iPhone X s and
2:26:22They're stuck with this crummy camera when they when they know that they've got they've got one in the lab
2:26:28That is just so much better. Yeah
2:26:31Anything else what else did you do anything else you want to talk about?
2:26:34man, I don't know
2:26:37I'm just sort of glad hardware seasons over. Yeah, I wish that my last review hadn't been on the pixel slate and all the palm phone
2:26:44But that's that's way it goes. I guess Peter's out
2:26:47it's it's been a unusually busy review season for me personally because I I did the phone I did the iPad and the
2:26:56Mac Mac
2:26:58MacBook Air. Yeah, I did not do the Mac mini
2:27:02Because I it's like I'm glad Apple is doing the Mac mini, but it's like probably the least likely Mac that I would buy
2:27:09Yeah, it's it's such a it's so interesting because a lot of people still still think of it as like that entry-level consumer Mac
2:27:16And it's super not that thing anymore. No, it's absolutely not and that's why
2:27:20You know, it's funny that they're still calling it the Mac mini and we can you know
2:27:24There's the whole thing about why they still calling the MacBook Air the air when it's thicker and heavier than the regular MacBook
2:27:29It's like yeah those it's just names that have stuck
2:27:32You know
2:27:33Like the air is the one that looks like that and there's 13 inches and the Mac Mini is the one that's a square
2:27:39That's this big even though it's actually not that many compared to a lot of these NUC computers and it's downright
2:27:46gigantic compared to the little computers you can just put on a thumb drive
2:27:50But it's actually a nice size for what they're doing now, which is putting like pro components into it. Yeah
2:27:57Well, anyway, it was good to have you on the show. I really enjoyed the last and you know true to form
2:28:03It was it was only like an hour or so
2:28:05I want to find more to talk about so I don't have to go back to
2:28:10putting lights on the Christmas tree, but I
2:28:13Feel like I've taken up enough of your time. So my thanks to you everybody can follow you
2:28:18you are back on BAC k l o n on Twitter and
2:28:24and can read your fine work at The Verge. Someday, next time you're on, what we should
2:28:31talk about is the real palm.
2:28:34Oh yeah, happy to do that for days.
2:28:38Because if people don't know this, if people don't remember, you were—were you the
2:28:45editor-in-chief? What was your title?
2:28:47Yeah, so I was the editor-in-chief, and I also founded it, and at the time it was called
2:28:52pre-Central, now it's called. Well, now it's gone, but it was webOS Nation for a minute.
2:28:57But yeah, so we had this model where it was called, now it's called WebO nations, but it was
2:29:03smartphone experts. So I founded Windows Central and iMore, although at the time it was called
2:29:08Phone Different because we didn't know what we were doing. Android Central, a few others. Anyway,
2:29:16But it all grew out of the original website, which was called Visor Central.
2:29:22And so I was very involved in the Palm community for a long time.
2:29:26Met my wife because of Palm.
2:29:28A whole long thing.
2:29:32It would be great for a huge topic on the show, but it is very funny because I was always
2:29:37a fan.
2:29:38I never had one, but I was a huge fan of the UI.
2:29:42It was the thing to love about the phone was that it had this great, the whole system,
2:29:47and I mean that in the truest sense of the word, was cohesive and thoughtful.
2:29:53And 11 years later, all the other phones have finally caught up to the UI.
2:29:58Yeah, everybody took a minute.
2:30:01That's the one thing, you know, like everybody has come to this user interface that is kind
2:30:05of basically the palm card interface where you swipe up from the bottom and you go side
2:30:13to side to switch between apps.
2:30:15Yep.
2:30:16And just this year, Apple and Google got around to implementing the idea that you should be
2:30:24able to use the thing that you search to also do actions.
2:30:28So with Siri shortcuts and whatever they're called on Google, I guess it was called actions.
2:30:34I'm still waiting for somebody to to put the notifications at the bottom, which I thought
2:30:40was I thought that was so perfect.
2:30:44I think it's perfect until you have a software keyboard and then it's probably a disaster.
2:30:47That's probably that is probably why that nobody's done that. I guess I don't know.
2:30:53But aesthetically, it was it was superior and it felt like faster. Yeah, for sure. I
2:30:58you know what, I will say this as a final note, it is easier to switch between iPhone
2:31:03and Android, or at least the pixel version of Android than it ever has been in the past,
2:31:08just because so many of the interactions are similar now. And I don't I don't think it's
2:31:14a case of copying, I think it is sort of water seeking its own level and the best ideas.
2:31:21You know, everybody kind of arrives at these good ideas, you know, I mean, without question,
2:31:26we talked about notifications that iOS was clearly behind, at least on the features of
2:31:31notification display system for a long time. And it's gotten a lot more like Android, where they're
2:31:36grouped together by app, and you can deal with them as a group if you want or expand them,
2:31:41et cetera, et cetera. The card-based UI switching and stuff like that,
2:31:45it's definitely easier than it has been in the past.
2:31:48Dr. Tim Wolfe Yeah, that's very generous of you. I do think
2:31:52that the multitasking system and the core card switching system on the Pixel feel like they're
2:31:59They're a little bit more of a rip of the iPhone
2:32:01and it's certainly way less elegant.
2:32:02It's way more fun to switch between stuff on an iPhone
2:32:05than it is on a Pixel.
2:32:06- I was trying to be generous.
2:32:07(laughing)
2:32:10The one thing that drives me nuts
2:32:12is that you still have to tap the home button.
2:32:15You can't, it's like they didn't copy enough.
2:32:18- Do a quick swipe up, yeah.
2:32:19Yeah, the companies that are more willing
2:32:22to just blatantly steal from Apple,
2:32:24like OnePlus has a different multitasking,
2:32:26like UI system for the buttons at the bottom,
2:32:29just better. It's just like swiping up is way more natural. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back on Twitter,
2:32:35The Verge, where it says where your fine work can be read and viewed. And I thank you for your time.
2:32:42Have a good holiday season. You too, man. Have fun with those Christmas lights. This has been a blast.
2:32:46God help me.