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The Talk Show

222: ‘Pseudorandom Gibberish’ With Rene Ritchie

 

00:00:00   We gotta pack a three hour show into about 90 minutes here,

00:00:02   Rene.

00:00:03   - We can do it.

00:00:04   - I think we can.

00:00:04   No baseball, no sports, no movies, nothing like that.

00:00:08   We gotta get right to work.

00:00:10   - Okay.

00:00:10   - Got a good list of topics.

00:00:12   I'm gonna say number one, I wanna talk about

00:00:15   MacBook keyboard failures.

00:00:18   It's a recurring theme on the show.

00:00:20   And in between the last episode of this show

00:00:22   and us talking today, a fellow I know

00:00:26   (laughs)

00:00:28   got hit by the speck of dust of doom.

00:00:31   And that fellow would be you.

00:00:34   - Yeah, like you, I think we both had a bunch

00:00:37   of different review units since they came out in 2016.

00:00:41   They were the original Skylake ones,

00:00:43   they were last year's Kaby Lake ones.

00:00:45   Between MacBooks and MacBook Pros, my own and Apple's,

00:00:48   I've probably gone through eight,

00:00:50   and I've used two or three of them consistently,

00:00:52   and I never had any problem, and then two weeks ago,

00:00:56   the control key stopped working.

00:00:59   And I don't use the control key often.

00:01:00   I use it for terminal and ludicrously to pick up,

00:01:03   to pull out the emoji keyboard picker.

00:01:05   - Yes, yes, yes. - Yeah.

00:01:06   (laughs)

00:01:07   And I wasn't able to do that anymore.

00:01:10   - For people who do not know, you can type on a Mac,

00:01:15   you can type control command space

00:01:18   and it brings up the emoji picker.

00:01:19   And it's a fantastic feature.

00:01:23   It's funny, I've kind of gotten away from tips and tricks

00:01:25   in recent years. I don't know why, but it's like I've started, I'll get to some later

00:01:30   that are on the show notes, but that's another one. And it's like, I know that there's some

00:01:35   cool third party utilities that help with emoji and stuff like that. But I think if

00:01:38   people knew about the command control space and the fact that you can search, yes, it's,

00:01:45   it's a fantastic feature. It's so it's like, you know, you type flower and it's like all

00:01:49   the flower emoji show up. Oh, I love this feature. Anyway, I can't reassign it. So if

00:01:54   control key is gone you just you can't use it which exact model was this it was

00:02:03   a MacBook Pro correct yeah it was a 13 inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar all

00:02:08   right almost so what's the current status you made a video I have it in the

00:02:11   show notes it will be there and you can you know you went through the rigmarole

00:02:15   with the Apple support document where you hold the the MacBook at a precise 61

00:02:21   degree angle and then hold the can of air at a 57 degree angle.

00:02:27   Yeah, and you can't go too far because then it'll push cold out and not dust and you'll

00:02:31   get, not that I did this too often, but you'll get like frozen stuff all over your keyboard.

00:02:35   I think that's why some people like, you know, it's just like everything in life where it's

00:02:40   like you can go really cheap or really expensive. But I know some people have those, instead

00:02:45   of buying the aerosol cans of compressed air, you can get like an actual mechanical device

00:02:51   know, which I think solves that problem of when you hold it at a weird angle, it turns

00:02:55   to ice and you worry that you're about to give yourself frostbite or something like

00:02:59   that.

00:03:00   Ben Stuart Yeah, no, I went through all of that and it

00:03:02   worked-ish. If I hit the control key a little more briskly than I usually hit keys and I

00:03:08   bias towards the left side, it works, but it's not comfortable. I have been shown how

00:03:15   to take the key off. I have friends in the industry and they've shown like an easy way

00:03:19   taking the key off. So I'll probably do that next. Pop it off, clean it more thoroughly,

00:03:22   pop it back on.

00:03:23   You know, I've heard that taking the keys off this model of keyboard, it's in the

00:03:28   litany of things that are bad about this keyboard design. What I've heard is that it is a precarious,

00:03:35   it is very precarious and that you can damage it. You know, and that in fact, it's so

00:03:41   easy to do that even people who take it in for service, like the genius or might try

00:03:46   to do it and therefore it's covered but then it's like oh broke a little piece of plastic

00:03:50   now the whole top piece has to go back and be replaced yeah like apparently the space

00:03:54   bar is just impossible because it will break if you try to take it that's what i've heard

00:03:57   yeah yeah some of the other keys aren't as dangerous um so i might try that or i might

00:04:02   just take it to the gym i i use my space bar yes so does casey nice that apparently he

00:04:10   had huge complaints about the space bar all right so your current status is you haven't

00:04:14   - You haven't taken it in for service.

00:04:15   You're thinking about performing surgery.

00:04:17   And you know what the worst part is?

00:04:18   Control is the one, you know,

00:04:20   there's option and command on both sides,

00:04:22   but only one control key.

00:04:23   - Yeah, absolutely.

00:04:24   And I should preface this by saying that

00:04:26   I didn't have any problems at all with these keyboards.

00:04:29   My previous generation MacBook before this new keyboard,

00:04:31   the scissor switch one, I had the E key fail

00:04:34   and I took it in and I had, it was like $500

00:04:38   because they had to swap out the entire top case

00:04:40   and battery assembly as well.

00:04:42   And it took 24 hours.

00:04:43   It was covered by AppleCare.

00:04:45   So I just thought I was lucky, but now apparently there's no generation of MacBook whose keys

00:04:50   I can tolerate.

00:04:51   Darrell Bock Well, and we have WWDC next week, so you need

00:04:54   this thing, right?

00:04:55   I mean, do you have like a Plan B?

00:04:57   David Schanzer Yeah, I still have the review unit they gave

00:05:01   us last year for Mac OS High Sierra, which I haven't used very much.

00:05:06   But it's 15 inches, which I don't usually travel with, but I might do that and just

00:05:09   bring my MacBook Pro with me.

00:05:11   Darrell Bock Comfortable on the near.

00:05:12   my iMac Pro. Well, I would just use it. Sorry. I use the iPad Pro on the airplane now because

00:05:16   the seats have gotten so small. It feels like they're not Mac friendly.

00:05:19   No, that's true. It's very true. I can't remember the last time I used to. I guess

00:05:23   the only time I sometimes use a Mac on a plane is very specifically the return flight home

00:05:31   after an Apple event if I haven't finished writing about it. That's like the one time.

00:05:35   Like I don't do any kind of general productivity with a Mac on an airplane. It's just too

00:05:41   unwieldy. Even when I get upgraded and I'm in first class and there's plenty of room,

00:05:48   it's just ungainly. It's not your shorter room, but there's no good place to put it.

00:05:54   You can literally put it on your lap and it's not really a great angle. And then you put

00:05:59   it on the tray and I feel like I'm a little kid at the lunch table and my arms are up

00:06:03   at my shoulders. It's too high.

00:06:05   - And the funny thing for me is I'm keyboard agnostic.

00:06:08   Like I can use the iPad Pro fine.

00:06:10   I do tons of writing on it.

00:06:12   I can use the old MacBook keyboard, the new one.

00:06:14   I was setting up the review unit

00:06:16   that I hadn't used in a long time.

00:06:17   And those keys are just super tight.

00:06:19   And then I went back to the 2016 one

00:06:20   that I've been using for two years.

00:06:22   Like all these butterfly keys feel all loosey goosey now.

00:06:24   It's amazing how fast your brain acclimatizes.

00:06:27   - Oh yeah, I totally, I mean,

00:06:28   I've never really used the new one.

00:06:30   And Ben Thompson and I talked about this,

00:06:31   I think on the last episode.

00:06:32   I've never really used one as my main machine.

00:06:34   I've only used review units.

00:06:36   My personal MacBook Pro is still a 2014.

00:06:38   But even after just a few minutes with the other one,

00:06:41   this keyboard, I love it because I feel it's 100% reliable.

00:06:45   But it does feel like the keys are all ready to fall off.

00:06:50   They're so jaded. - See, they both betrayed me

00:06:52   now, so I have no safe harbor.

00:06:53   - All right.

00:06:56   - But it is, I mean, a lot of people are complaining

00:06:59   that you do have to replace the entire top assembly.

00:07:02   And that's an industry-wide problem,

00:07:04   it's a trans industry problem because Apple made unibodies and

00:07:07   they're much better structurally, but they're huge

00:07:08   things you have to replace. And your car now has these huge

00:07:11   crash panels and crumple zones. If you get a little dent, you've

00:07:14   got to replace the entire panel. And as we get better and better

00:07:17   manufacturing, stronger and more efficient devices, we lose we

00:07:21   lose the miniature like the modularity of them.

00:07:24   You know, this is I'll hear from it. And I know that there are

00:07:28   people listening to the show who are on the other side of the

00:07:30   fence and who are angry if you know better to have very strong

00:07:35   feelings about the entire industry but Apple and Apple

00:07:39   specifically is move away from modular devices meaning you know

00:07:47   the best example this primary example is room removable

00:07:50   batteries right i mean again it was a topic on my show one of

00:07:55   the most recent episodes but it's funny the way that it used

00:07:57   be like it seems so antiquated now but part of like the pre WWDC trip checklist is make

00:08:06   sure both of your MacBook batteries are fully charged. Right? Where's that spare? Where's

00:08:10   the spare that I haven't used since the last time I went on a big trip? Oh, there it is.

00:08:13   What's the charge on that one? You know, it just seems so ridiculous now. Now it's the

00:08:19   external USB C battery. Right. But you know, and it's the same, you know, with the phone,

00:08:24   It's just, you know, there's just something goes wrong

00:08:27   and usually a lot of it has to be replaced.

00:08:29   And I get it, you know, and there's trade-offs, you know.

00:08:32   There were advantages to being able to just swap out

00:08:35   the keyboard without swapping out everything else,

00:08:37   but there's also disadvantages.

00:08:39   And like you said, you know, the structural integrity

00:08:41   of the unibody designs is incredible.

00:08:42   Like, you pick up an old, you know, MacBook

00:08:46   from 10, 15 years ago, and not only does it feel

00:08:49   thick and heavy, but it just feels sort of--

00:08:51   - It's creaky.

00:08:51   - Junk, yeah, creaky, exactly.

00:08:53   It's like, man, I can't believe that we tolerated this.

00:08:56   We were spending $3,500 on these things back then

00:08:59   and they creak.

00:09:00   - And that's the opportunity cause.

00:09:01   It's like everybody wants everything, but you can't.

00:09:03   Everything's a trade-off.

00:09:04   Apple can design for structural integrity

00:09:06   or they can design for modularity.

00:09:08   You can't have both.

00:09:09   You gotta have trade-offs.

00:09:10   - So I'm on board with that.

00:09:12   That's the trend.

00:09:12   I see why.

00:09:14   I see that the train left the station years ago.

00:09:16   I'm on board with it.

00:09:18   But that to me, it's not an argument

00:09:20   that Apple should go somehow figure out a way

00:09:24   to make a keyboard that can be swapped in

00:09:26   if the keyboard goes bad.

00:09:28   The argument is that they, with this design,

00:09:31   the keyboard needs to be more reliable than ever.

00:09:33   - Yes. - Right?

00:09:34   Like, it's not just that this keyboard

00:09:36   isn't reliable enough, it's that it really should be,

00:09:39   given how hard it is to replace

00:09:41   and how integrated it is with the whole top piece.

00:09:44   It really oughta be more reliable than the previous design.

00:09:48   - And that was the worst part.

00:09:49   Apple Insider did a great job with the numbers,

00:09:51   but almost nobody actually bothered to read the article.

00:09:53   It didn't say that there were more,

00:09:56   so just to back up for a second,

00:09:58   in every way the new MacBook Pro

00:10:00   looks to be way more reliable than previous generations.

00:10:03   The number of incidents in their sampling pool

00:10:04   were way down in everything except for keyboard.

00:10:08   In 2016, they were way up.

00:10:09   In 2017, they looked like they approached 2015 levels again,

00:10:14   but that's when the rest of the computer

00:10:15   got way, way better and the keyboard really didn't.

00:10:18   So we're just left to see that maybe it was worse,

00:10:21   maybe they've slowly improved it,

00:10:22   but it hasn't seen anywhere near the improvements

00:10:24   of the rest of the body.

00:10:25   - Yeah, the one that I like the most is the hinge.

00:10:29   And when they first came out with these devices,

00:10:32   and I had my briefing, and they said,

00:10:34   "This is, you know, we can't put everything in a keynote."

00:10:36   And there's some things that would sound silly

00:10:38   in a keynote, like bragging about the hinge,

00:10:40   but that the new hinge compared to like my 2014,

00:10:44   A, the biggest difference is that it's so much easier

00:10:47   to open the screen without like with just a thumb,

00:10:50   without the bottom moving and to with like one finger

00:10:54   to position it at exactly the angle you want

00:10:57   and it'll stay there, right?

00:10:59   Like, so it's easier to move, you know,

00:11:02   to adjust the angle that it's open,

00:11:04   but yet also just as stable in terms of,

00:11:08   oh, it's not gonna droop a little bit when you let go.

00:11:10   It's truly a fantastic hinge

00:11:11   and I believe it's actually more reliable.

00:11:13   I think that's one of the,

00:11:15   Because it's a common source of failure.

00:11:18   Because there's so much that goes,

00:11:19   passes between the display and the bottom part.

00:11:23   All right, that's it for the keyboard.

00:11:27   (laughing)

00:11:28   Oh, here's one.

00:11:29   Here's a tip and trick I posted over the weekend.

00:11:32   I've avoided this feature my entire life.

00:11:34   There's a feature in iOS that you can turn on in security,

00:11:37   in the settings,

00:11:39   that after 10 failed passcode attempts, wipe the device.

00:11:45   And I forget when they added that.

00:11:46   I think it was back around IS4.

00:11:49   - It's when they added the hardware encryption

00:11:51   'cause they could just throw the keys away.

00:11:53   - Right.

00:11:53   - They didn't have to actually wipe the device.

00:11:54   - Right, that's the way that works is it,

00:11:57   everything on your SSD and your phone is encrypted.

00:12:01   And rather than sit there and wait for a 256 gigabyte drive

00:12:08   to be wiped, they can just throw away the key

00:12:11   and without the key, there's no way

00:12:13   It's effectively unreadable.

00:12:15   - It's pseudo random gibberish to anybody who looks at it.

00:12:18   - Right.

00:12:19   I avoided this feature for the reason

00:12:23   that it seemed like a good idea.

00:12:25   And I'm trying to think, what are the hypothetical cases?

00:12:30   Like personally, I'm not really worried

00:12:33   about law enforcement to my knowledge.

00:12:36   I have broken any laws other than the speed limit

00:12:39   in a number of years, but it's possible.

00:12:42   It's, you know, I don't know, something could happen, you know. And if my phone were taken by,

00:12:49   you know, I don't know, TSA agents or something. Even just a thief who wants to not have to bother

00:12:54   with activation lock to get into the phone. But the most common scenario for me would be a thief,

00:13:00   you know, and it could be something like it falls out of my pocket in a cab and I leave it and

00:13:05   somebody else picks it up. In theory, I don't want to be paranoid. But, you know, remember when Matt

00:13:11   Honan from now at BuzzFeed got targeted as a journalist a couple of years ago and had

00:13:16   his iCloud account hacked. And once his iCloud account was hacked because they had access

00:13:20   to his email and he used that email for a whole bunch of other services, you know, he

00:13:24   got owned in a bunch of ways. It's possible that somebody, you know, WWDC who knows who

00:13:29   I am could try to take my phone or something like that. I never turned it on. But then

00:13:35   I looked at it and I just have been reevaluating my security stuff overall, just sort of a

00:13:41   a self-audit on what do I do. I'm looking at two-factor stuff too, like how do I keep

00:13:47   track of those one-time codes. But I looked at this feature and I realized that I had

00:13:52   misinterpreted it all along, ever since until this weekend. I thought that if you turn this

00:13:57   on, somebody who got your phone, like a prankster at a bar, a "friend" who just leaves your

00:14:04   phone, that they could sit there and enter "1234 1234 1234 1234 1234" 10 times and then

00:14:10   and boom, your phone's erased. Turns out it doesn't work like that at all. And the difference

00:14:17   is—well, number one, I asked in a poll on Twitter, which I find fun sometimes, "Do

00:14:22   you enable the feature?" And I got, "Do you use that feature?" And out of 4,700

00:14:29   votes plus a bunch of Tweetbot users who just wrote yes or no, no problem. But it seemed

00:14:37   to run like this. Almost exactly, it was 34% and 66%, so exactly one-third, two-third.

00:14:43   One-third enable it, two-third don't. And the number one reason people gave for not

00:14:48   is no, I have kids. Meaning they don't want their kid, you know, you're sleeping, kid

00:14:53   comes into bedroom, picks up your phone, starts playing with it, trying to unlock it, and

00:14:56   then all of a sudden your phone's erased. Well, here's the thing that this feature is

00:14:59   so much more clever than I had thought, and I shouldn't be surprised. You get five free

00:15:06   attempts at your passcode. Five as fast as you can enter them. But after that fifth failed

00:15:12   one, you're putting a one-minute timeout where the only thing you can do with your

00:15:15   phone is make a 911 call. And if the sixth one fails, you go to a five-minute timeout.

00:15:22   And if that one fails, you go to a 15-minute timeout. And I think it—I didn't press

00:15:28   my luck further than that. But apparently, the timeouts escalate to the point where no

00:15:33   matter how long you wait between tries, it takes at least three and a half hours to get

00:15:37   10th to enter the 10th one. Once I realized that, I turned it on instantly on every iOS

00:15:45   device I have because I cannot imagine a scenario where the phone is out of my hands without

00:15:53   my knowledge for three and a half hours and where I wouldn't want this feature enabled.

00:15:58   - Yes.

00:16:00   No, I mean, there's a classic debate

00:16:01   and I have to credit Dave Nainian, a super duper,

00:16:03   for opening my eyes to it.

00:16:04   I was all about everything has to be encrypted,

00:16:07   everything has to be safe, everything has to be secure.

00:16:09   And when I was talking to him for an article,

00:16:11   he said, "Well, no, because in a lot of cases,

00:16:14   you don't want fail secure, you want fail safe."

00:16:16   There are circumstances where your worst nightmare

00:16:19   is information being stolen from you.

00:16:21   But in other situations, your worst nightmare

00:16:23   is you losing access to that information.

00:16:25   And it's why some people will never encrypt backup drives

00:16:28   because if those have your wedding photos

00:16:30   or the photos of your children being born,

00:16:32   you cannot do disc recovery on an encrypted drive.

00:16:35   So if somebody else deals those photos,

00:16:36   yeah, they have your photos,

00:16:37   but if you lose them, you're getting divorced.

00:16:39   Like there's just no way to come back from that.

00:16:41   And this to me, I think people were worried

00:16:43   that they would lose their data.

00:16:45   Someone like their kid would type it in,

00:16:46   but this is really a case where you can have that security.

00:16:49   You're not risking the deletion of your information.

00:16:51   - One of my favorite tips along those lines,

00:16:53   and I remember when I first read it, I was just like,

00:16:57   No, but it was because it was from somebody who I trust implicitly, Bruce

00:17:02   Schneier, security expert, great writer. But he wrote a couple of years back and

00:17:08   he's referenced it since that for a lot of typical users a great way to keep

00:17:13   track of your passwords, especially important ones, is to write them down on

00:17:17   a piece of paper. And you think like, "No!" But his explanation, it makes sense, is

00:17:24   is that people have been good at keeping physical objects,

00:17:29   important physical objects secure

00:17:32   and in a known location forever.

00:17:35   Like we're kind of hooked up evolutionarily

00:17:37   to be able to keep a physical object safe.

00:17:40   It's the digital stuff that we can make goofy,

00:17:44   absent-minded mistakes or be tricked into fishing

00:17:47   or something like that.

00:17:48   But like if you keep your passport safe,

00:17:52   Why not keep a piece of paper with your most important passwords wherever you keep your

00:17:57   passport?

00:17:58   It's probably way safer than any digital and less likely to be victimized by phishing

00:18:04   or something than anything you could do digitally.

00:18:07   And this is also part of when you listen to Apple's rationale for why they stay in countries

00:18:11   like China or the data repatriation thing, France wants citizens' data to be local

00:18:16   to that country.

00:18:17   And you can understand this on a global scale.

00:18:19   In some countries we happen to like better than others or we are less afraid of than

00:18:23   others but no one really likes the idea of a foreign government having ownership of their

00:18:26   data but one of the things that big companies have to factor in is for an average citizen

00:18:31   even in China, even in the EU, even in North America, South America, whatever, some of

00:18:35   them care less about security than they do about backup and them keeping access to iCloud

00:18:40   photo library as silly as it sounds is so much more important to them than them having

00:18:45   Access to a VPN app. Yeah, and they have to balance the interests of a very large customer base. Hmm. Totally true

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00:21:05   baby it, but the wheels are as good as they were on the first day. It's really great.

00:21:12   And the other thing is the carry-ons come with a built-in battery that you can use as

00:21:17   USB ports and you can use it to charge whatever, anything that charges over USB. And I know

00:21:23   that there's some rules on certain airlines now about these built-in batteries. You can

00:21:27   take it out very easily. So if you're flying somewhere and they're like, you know, you

00:21:31   you gotta take the battery out.

00:21:32   You can just take it out.

00:21:32   It's not a problem.

00:21:33   It's not like you can't take your suitcase on the plane

00:21:35   because you have a battery.

00:21:36   It comes right out.

00:21:38   But it's just such a convenient thing.

00:21:40   So it's like every seat in the airport now has,

00:21:42   for me, has a charger because I've got my bag with me.

00:21:45   You don't have to hunt around for the seats

00:21:47   that happen to be near an outlet or something like that.

00:21:50   Anyway, they have a 100-day free trial.

00:21:52   So you buy it, use it for three months,

00:21:54   and if you don't like it, you can get a refund.

00:21:56   No reason to worry about it.

00:22:00   And they have free shipping on any order

00:22:02   within the contiguous US.

00:22:04   So sorry, Alaska.

00:22:05   Anyway, it's a great product.

00:22:09   I use it, I'll be packing it for WWDC over the weekend.

00:22:12   Wouldn't wanna travel without it.

00:22:16   It's a really great bag.

00:22:17   Very lightweight, great wheels, everything like that.

00:22:19   Here's the deal for listeners of the show.

00:22:20   You've saved 20 bucks at awaytravel.com/talkshow.

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00:22:34   Save 20 bucks at away travel.com/talk show.

00:22:37   Next on the list. We got to keep going. We got so much, so much.

00:22:44   Do you know what I, while we're talking about security,

00:22:49   there's these apps. One of the things that I've done,

00:22:54   I just isn't even on the notes, but

00:22:56   One of the things that I've been convinced of is that using your phone number as a second

00:23:03   factor in two-factor auth, meaning you say, "Oh, I'll use two-factor with this service

00:23:09   and I'll enter my name, my password, and then it'll send me an SMS message with a code and

00:23:16   I can enter the code." It's better than not having two-factor, but SMS, I've been convinced,

00:23:25   not something you should rely upon because of how many times I've seen stories of people,

00:23:31   their carrier getting social engineered effectively. So somebody who wants to steal Renee Richie's,

00:23:39   you know, Dropbox account, and they know your phone number, they could call your carrier

00:23:44   and say, Hey, this is Renee Richie, is it my phone number? I need to, you know, I need

00:23:49   to get a new SIM because I got this new phone, you know, what do you know, and you'd think

00:23:53   that shouldn't work. But and I don't think it's easy. I don't think it always works.

00:23:58   But I've read enough horror stories that it's not trustworthy.

00:24:01   Jared Ranerel I'll go a step further. I mean, I refuse to

00:24:03   use that because I've heard stories about people who are traveling and you know, they

00:24:07   have their tickets on their phone, they present it, and the custom person will just seize

00:24:10   the phone and then they see two factor, they can type in a request for it, get it on the

00:24:15   phone and get into your account. So it's I just don't think it's secure at all. It's

00:24:19   out of band, but it's doesn't add doesn't add any security to your device.

00:24:22   Yeah, that's interesting

00:24:24   And it's also the case I I you know and it's rare

00:24:30   I mean it's it's you know

00:24:31   This is not something you want to optimize for but it is an issue is you're in an airplane or you're overseas

00:24:38   Where you're just on Wi-Fi, so you don't have to incur roaming fees

00:24:43   And you've got Wi-Fi, but you can't get an SMS right? It's because you can't get a phone call up in the air

00:24:52   It's just not great. So I've tried to get rid of my phone number as a second factor

00:24:58   on any service that will let me, including Google. Like my Google accounts, I have a

00:25:03   few, but my Google accounts, none of them know my phone number anymore. I don't use

00:25:08   my phone for anything related to my accounts if I can. But then what do you use for a second

00:25:15   factor. Well, Apple uses Apple lets you not think about it because Apple uses just the

00:25:23   devices themselves, right? The assumption is if you have more than one Apple device

00:25:27   and you can say that you trust one, it will send push notifications. You may know people

00:25:33   out there may not even realize they're not using SMS for this, that it's just sort of

00:25:37   a magic right to your device. You know, if your phone's your trusted device and you're

00:25:42   setting up a new iPad and you're logging into iCloud, it'll send a push notification

00:25:47   to your other trusted devices. You might get the same thing on your Mac and your phone,

00:25:53   but then you answer it on one, put the code in, and then it's all good. And then the

00:25:56   new device is added to your list of trusted devices. That's something Apple can do,

00:26:03   and I think they've done a great job and it's sort of unheralded, but it wouldn't

00:26:07   for somebody like Dropbox or something like that. So what you can do, and again, I'm not

00:26:14   an expert on this, but they have these things, I forget the name of the protocol, it's like

00:26:18   T-O-T something, but effectively it's a standardized way to get one-time expiring passwords that

00:26:27   only last for like 30 seconds. Google has an app called Google Authenticator. Have you

00:26:32   ever used that?

00:26:33   I used to I use aussie now. That's where and that was what I'm switching to. That's exactly

00:26:38   great minds think alike. So but they generate the same type of codes. There are six digit

00:26:44   numbers, they only last for 30 seconds. And then the apps, all the apps I've tried,

00:26:49   show you like so if you have, you know, whatever your name is, at gmail.com,

00:26:54   you open up the app, and it'll say whatever your name at gmail.com. And it might say, you know,

00:27:01   729123. But it'll tell you that it's got 20 seconds left. So if it says it only has three

00:27:07   seconds left, just wait three seconds. It'll give you the new one for the next 30 seconds,

00:27:12   then enter it in and you're in. So I've been using Google Authenticator for this for about

00:27:19   a year. And as part of my reevaluating my security stuff, the one thing that annoys

00:27:26   me about it is that Google Authenticator is tied to one phone. So like I have it on my

00:27:34   iPhone but then when I get a new iPhone it's like I have to kind of be careful because

00:27:40   I don't want to wipe the old phone until I've set up the new phone and used the old phone

00:27:45   to get the Google Authenticator codes because they're only being generated on that one device.

00:27:54   If I lost the phone, if somebody stole it, if it broke, if I dropped it and it just shattered,

00:27:59   somebody steals it, whatever. You're not locked out of your accounts. There's recovery codes

00:28:05   that you can print. And again, like the thing I just said, like keep them in a secure location.

00:28:11   There's ways to recover, but there's no easy way to get right in. Wouldn't it be better

00:28:16   if you could get it from any device? And that's what Authy does. Authy syncs these things

00:28:20   so you can install the Authy app, A-U-T-H-Y. And then you can get the same codes on multiple

00:28:29   devices. So I'm in the midst of moving everything from Google Authenticator to Authy for that

00:28:34   reason.

00:28:35   I use 1Password for passwords and they now have two factor built into them. They didn't

00:28:41   at the time, so I just got started with Authy and I stayed that way because I like having

00:28:45   a separate app for that.

00:28:46   Yeah, well, I know a couple of people, Ben Thompson, in particular, he uses one password,

00:28:50   and he uses authy for the one time fee. He's the one who kind of pushed me towards this.

00:28:54   And his explanation is exactly what he's just it. Maybe it's not even logical, but he just

00:28:59   doesn't want to have the password and the second factor in the same app. You know, like it somehow

00:29:06   feels more compartmentalized to have your password and one password and have your, you know, one time

00:29:13   authentication code in a separate app. I looked at one, I don't use one password for my passwords,

00:29:18   I just use the keychain. But I looked at one password as a rival to Authy, because I could

00:29:27   have it on my phone and my Mac and get, you know, just use it for these one-time keys. And it's a

00:29:34   great app, I could see why people like it, but it doesn't make sense to use it only, in my opinion,

00:29:39   to use it only for the one-time things.

00:29:41   Like you're either buying into the one password lifestyle

00:29:43   and putting everything in one password or it's overkill.

00:29:47   - So for me, I didn't, I liked the idea of iCloud Keychain,

00:29:50   but until iPhone 10 and Face ID,

00:29:53   they never put any sort of security intercept

00:29:55   between the device and the password.

00:29:58   So let's just say, you know, someone's lost

00:30:00   and they wanna use your phone or you're at a conference

00:30:01   and someone wants to show you a website,

00:30:03   you hand them your phone and they have immediate access

00:30:06   to your passwords and your credit cards,

00:30:08   where with something like 1Password or LastPass

00:30:11   or Dashlane, all those things,

00:30:13   they'd have to enter in another password

00:30:14   or use Touch ID or Face ID to get it.

00:30:17   But now with iPhone 10 and the Face ID thing,

00:30:19   if it had launched like that,

00:30:20   if it had launched with Touch ID support,

00:30:22   I would have probably gone all in on it.

00:30:24   - Well, I get away from that

00:30:25   because I don't let anybody use my phone.

00:30:27   (laughing)

00:30:28   - That's fair.

00:30:30   - Not really a problem.

00:30:31   But anyway, Authi, I recommend it.

00:30:34   So the takeaway from this segment of the show

00:30:37   is if you're using SMS as a second factor

00:30:39   on various services, I say look into taking an afternoon,

00:30:43   cleaning this up, get rid of SMS as your second factor.

00:30:46   There's also just the fact that SMS isn't encrypted.

00:30:50   And again, what, is the Russian spy agency gonna come in

00:30:55   and put a tap on the line and intercept this unencrypted SMS?

00:31:01   I really doubt it, but still, it is unencrypted.

00:31:06   It just seems wrong in principle to use an unencrypted protocol to send something that

00:31:14   should definitely be encrypted.

00:31:17   And we're living in a time when we have vast data storage capabilities and it seems like

00:31:22   organizations just collect this data and sit on it.

00:31:25   And no one's doing anything criminal here, but you never know when something's going

00:31:29   to happen, an accident will happen, or a lawsuit or a criminal prosecution will ensue, and

00:31:33   they'll be able to go backwards in time and just look at all the data they collected on

00:31:37   you and find something to support whatever they want to get you on. And I don't even

00:31:40   want to risk that.

00:31:41   Right. All right. Next topic. Anyway, so take away, get rid of SMS as a factor and look

00:31:48   into Aussie if you're looking for a client to sync these things. I suppose there's some

00:31:55   mild security trade off between the way that Aussie syncs these things. Now what they sync

00:32:00   to the server is encrypted. So there's nothing on Authy's server. It's end-to-end encrypted,

00:32:05   so it's not like your code—somebody can log into your Authy account and see your codes,

00:32:12   or if their server was compromised, that your codes would be exposed. I suppose there's

00:32:17   some kind of security advantage to Google authenticators only on one device thing, but

00:32:22   it's just so inconvenient when that's the device you're looking to replace.

00:32:25   — especially if you lose it, then you're done.

00:32:27   Right. Especially if you lose it. Right. Anyway, next topic. Gotta get this out. I don't

00:32:35   think I talked about it. I think this whole thing erupted in between the last show and

00:32:38   this show. I've had a bit of a gap in the programming schedule. But this whole thing

00:32:44   with Google's duplex demo on stage at I/O, which I raised some questions about.

00:32:50   I hadn't even thought about it until you said it. I was just all hooked right in.

00:32:54   I it took me a day the first day I watched and it was in my opinion

00:32:59   I know that there for Android, you know, I owe is Google's version of WWDC and there's two types of news

00:33:06   There's you know it to

00:33:08   Use two very broad buckets. There's general-purpose news

00:33:12   Of interest to anybody who uses the platform and then there's developer news

00:33:17   And so the developer news for Android is a bit outside my wheelhouse

00:33:22   Like I don't know how big a deal the new Android and Chrome OS features are app slices

00:33:28   But in terms of stuff that broke through out of you know, developer news into mainstream news

00:33:34   I don't think there's any question that this duplex demo was the one that got the most attention

00:33:39   It for two reasons it seemed like just the fact that it

00:33:45   Supposedly worked that you could say, you know, hey dingus

00:33:49   Call whatever hair salon and try to get me an appointment Wednesday afternoon

00:33:54   And that it would actually place a phone call and have this interaction and make a phone call according to the recordings

00:34:02   They played that's interesting enough because that's that that's a serious

00:34:06   Break, that would be a serious breakthrough in

00:34:09   In this voice driven assistant stuff like nobody has anything that does that does that right now?

00:34:15   That's that's a breakthrough and then the second factor

00:34:18   is the vocal intonations where the assistant was doing these umms and you know these verbal tics

00:34:29   that gave it a life rather uncanny lifelikeness like and you could hear gasps from the audience

00:34:38   and I think that's why it was so engaging and I realized and and day one the the you know the

00:34:45   takes were wow, Google has this amazing voice assistant that can make phone calls and it

00:34:49   sounds human. And immediate 15 minutes later, followed up by wow, this thing is really creepy.

00:34:56   You know, yes. Right. And I get that take the Hey, this is creepy. We shouldn't is,

00:35:04   you know, some people were outright some people just reasonably just reasonably asking it.

00:35:09   it ethical to create an AI that would trick the receptionist?

00:35:18   It tries to masquerade as human.

00:35:19   Right, but is that ethical? I don't know.

00:35:24   It's such a nuanced argument because for a normal person using it, maybe it isn't. But if you have

00:35:32   accessibility issues, like you don't speak the language, or you have a speech impediment, or

00:35:35   you're mute? Is it ethical to force someone to disclose that they're using an assistant?

00:35:39   Dave Asprey And what is the difference? What is the difference

00:35:42   between using it as an accessibility thing? To me, those ethical questions are not clear

00:35:50   cut. And we're running right up to questions that science fiction writers have been dealing

00:35:59   with since the dawn of science fiction.

00:36:02   I think that's what was off-putting about at least for me

00:36:04   What was off-putting about the discussion is that Google was sort of treating it as cocky

00:36:08   What look at we can do with technology and they didn't exhibit any humanness any respect any

00:36:12   I didn't give us any idea that they understood the responsibility of what they were doing, right?

00:36:16   It seems very clear to me that they hadn't really thought about that. Yeah, and and again

00:36:21   even if the conclusion is

00:36:24   That a service like this shouldn't masquerade as human

00:36:31   without at least disclosing it up front, like this is a call from the Google, your Google assistant,

00:36:36   you know, I'm working on behalf of a client or something, you know, whatever

00:36:39   preface they would say to make clear that this is what's going on.

00:36:41   In the aftermath of that ethical criticism, Google came out with the statement that, oh, yeah, yeah,

00:36:48   we're going to have it, we're going to have it to disclose itself. But if they were thinking of that,

00:36:53   why would they have added all of these ums and ahs that make it sound human?

00:36:57   Right. And if you had any basic, like even basic PR, anyone who's doing a keynote, you go through

00:37:01   objection handling, you go segment by segment, and you realize what the reaction will be to each

00:37:05   segment as you try to get the best language possible. So either they were completely inept

00:37:10   and didn't think about it, or they didn't care. Yeah, I don't know. But put all that aside,

00:37:16   put the ethical questions aside. It is damn cool, if it works as they're recording shows, which I

00:37:24   do believe as time goes on is a bigger and bigger if, but put it aside as to whether it should do

00:37:30   that. And maybe it shouldn't, but if the fact that they could do it is amazing, it really is the

00:37:37   stuff of science fiction. I mean, it is... Could be one of the most fundamental technologies of

00:37:42   our time. Yeah, it's really a very cool thing if it works. Well, just to add further to it,

00:37:50   to this whole issue, what happens if something goes wrong? Like, you're calling to make a

00:37:54   hair appointment. I spoke about this with Steve Aquino on his show, and all of a sudden

00:37:58   it books you a perm and a blonde dye job, and that's not what you want. And should

00:38:01   it just—at that point, when it's failing, does it have to tell you it's not human?

00:38:04   Dave: Right. Or, you know, I don't know. I just imagine there's so many ways that

00:38:08   it could fail. But anyway, the next day—I don't know what made me go back to it, but

00:38:14   I was like, you know, sometimes that's how I start the day is I just review, "Well,

00:38:18   what the hell did I write about yesterday?" And I thought about it, and I watched that

00:38:22   segment of the keynote again, and my spidey sense just went nuts. Like, as I studied it

00:38:30   the second time and stopped, wasn't, you know, no longer was wowed by the humanness of the thing,

00:38:35   I just actually listened to the details of the call. And I thought, and the fact that Sundar

00:38:42   Pichai said, "This is a actual call to an actual hair salon," that, you know, he emphasized it

00:38:48   multiple times that this is these are real calls. And they were just so many red flags to me,

00:38:54   like the way that they didn't answer the phone with the name of the establishment.

00:38:58   Like the fact that like, I, you know, I don't I haven't done a survey of 100 hair salons,

00:39:06   but I, you know, there's places that you can just walk into without an appointment. And then there's

00:39:10   places where you need an appointment. And when you book an appointment, they usually ask like,

00:39:15   you know, if there's a particular stylist who you want, you know, like your reg, if you're a

00:39:19   regular customer or something like that, you know, and I'm sure you could say, I'll just take whoever

00:39:25   is available, you know, at one o'clock on Wednesday. But that that that just wasn't

00:39:30   brought up in the call, you know, and just, and then I there was a CNET store, I forget who wrote

00:39:37   it, but somebody at CNET got access to this a couple of days before IO, which is, you know,

00:39:43   a very typical PR move for tech companies. Apple, to my knowledge, doesn't do it before

00:39:51   keynotes because they're so super secretive about keynotes. But they'll have stuff ready

00:39:59   to go.

00:40:00   They'll sometimes see a wired piece or some big magazine thing.

00:40:02   But Matthew Panzareno recently got access to... What was it that he got access to?

00:40:11   The Mac Pro.

00:40:14   That's right.

00:40:15   And Infinity War.

00:40:16   The man is intolerable.

00:40:18   The Mac Pro and the Mac Pro team and the Pro Tools team that has, you know, and you got

00:40:25   this scoop on how they've hired actual professional music producers and film editors and have

00:40:34   hired them as contractors to just work right across the hall from like the Final Cut Pro

00:40:38   team and the logic team. When they run into a problem, to be able to just grab an engineer

00:40:46   or one of the managers or somebody and say, "Here, here. This annoys me. I clicked this

00:40:51   button. I clicked this menu." Every time, it takes eight seconds for the menu to finish

00:40:56   filling in, and I clicked this menu 30 times a day. That was an actual example that they

00:41:03   came up with. Then they figured out what the bottleneck is, and then all of a sudden, they

00:41:05   it so the menu just opens instantly. Companies do this. They'll seed an exclusive to somebody.

00:41:13   So this guy for CNET got an exclusive on Duplex a couple of days before I/O, but all he got to do

00:41:20   was hear recordings. He didn't get to hear a live call happen. It just seems very strange to me.

00:41:27   And I realized, I mean, it's like, I don't know if you saw the Twitter debate on this, but it was

00:41:35   so bifurcated between people who are like, "Hmm, you're right. This is a little fishy.

00:41:42   I wonder what's going on." And the people who are like, "You're nuts." The comparison that kept

00:41:48   coming up was that I had gone full birther. Well, that's a reference to the…birthers are the people

00:41:55   who think Barack Obama was not born in the United States. But the people who insisted that he had to

00:42:03   show a birth certificate to prove that he wasn't born in Kenya or whatever.

00:42:09   At the Apple events, if they showed you Face ID on stage, they have working examples backstage

00:42:14   and people explain how they work and walk you through it and you see live. Even if you

00:42:17   don't get to do it yourself all the time, you get to see it done yourself.

00:42:21   Right. Again, I wasn't comparing it to Apple at all. It's just, I guess, because that's

00:42:27   what I typically write about everybody makes it about Apple, especially the Googler type

00:42:33   people who read my stuff. But they're like readers. Well, what

00:42:37   you know, what about HomePod? HomePod? You know, where's the

00:42:40   to HomePod support? Well, which is actually

00:42:42   to see that at WWDC. They walked us in the back and they showed

00:42:45   it. Right. We got to hear it at WWDC. And even when HomePod

00:42:50   first shipped earlier this year, at the product briefings, you

00:42:55   know, and you know, it famously Airplay two didn't ship until

00:42:58   literally yesterday. Yeah, I think right. It's been a long

00:43:02   week. It's been a long week. So yes, HomePod shipped and spent months on the market without

00:43:08   any of the AirPlay 2's features, which include pairing two of them in stereo or pairing multiple

00:43:15   ones throughout a home to play the same music simultaneously in multiple named rooms, you

00:43:21   know, and being able to tell your dingus to move the song to the dining room or whatever.

00:43:27   of those features shipped with HomePod because AirPlay 2 didn't ship. But at the briefing when

00:43:34   HomePod shipped, and I think you did too, got to see ones running obviously beta software,

00:43:44   but paired in stereo or in multiple rooms, and could see it in action and could tell Siri to

00:43:50   play a certain song and it all worked. I mean, again, it wasn't shipping. Nobody said it was

00:43:56   shipping. Everybody said this is coming. But there were, you

00:43:59   know, everybody who was everybody in the media who got a

00:44:02   briefing got to see that it actually live demo, right? Yeah.

00:44:06   It's very strange not to play a recording and not have a demo.

00:44:11   And and again, there are certain types of demos that don't scale.

00:44:14   So self a perfect example is self driving car. There's no

00:44:18   they can't bring a self driving car on stage at IO and have the

00:44:21   car drive around the I mean, I guess I could have it move

00:44:25   forward six inches or something, but you can't do a road test for an audience of 4,000 I/O

00:44:32   attendees. That's why the trusted people in the media exist, that somebody who writes

00:44:40   for whatever website and you know them, they have a body of work behind them and they say,

00:44:45   "I got invited to Google's test track or whoever's test track and I got to see this

00:44:50   car and it did this and it did that and I was in the back seat and this is what happened.

00:44:57   That's why the media are there. You don't just take the company's word for it, but somebody

00:45:01   gets a demo and gets to report on how it went. This duplex thing, nobody did it. And there's

00:45:06   still to this day, as of May 30th, to my knowledge, there's still not one person in the media

00:45:13   who has seen or heard a duplex call take place live, which really makes me think that something

00:45:20   really, really screwed up. A number of mistakes were made in between "Let's put this in the

00:45:27   I/O keynote and here's what Sundar is actually going to say." I think there were a number

00:45:32   of mistakes. My guess is that it doesn't sound nearly as good as the recordings they played.

00:45:42   Either longer pauses between segments, either more awkward inability to parse certain questions

00:45:50   like, do you have a particular stylist in mind or something like that. And I wouldn't

00:45:54   even be surprised if the human-like audio, you know, voice quality doesn't sound like

00:45:59   the recordings. That this was sort of, these recordings were sort of idealized versions

00:46:05   of what they're trying to build and somehow between making them and then Sundar getting

00:46:11   up on stage, it turned into these are actual calls. And once they realized this and, you

00:46:17   know about the only one raising questions there was a great story at

00:46:19   axios with a bunch of just just perfect I love axios because they just they have

00:46:24   this style of like just getting right to the point and if the whole point is only

00:46:29   200 words it's a 200 word story and there's no padding but they just had a

00:46:33   great list of questions of you know you know just more or less how do we know

00:46:37   that this actually is is real because you guys said it's for Google is

00:46:40   answering right which is the astounding part because usually yeah you you talk

00:46:45   to the—and even if you don't get a statement on the record, you get enough background information

00:46:49   to be able to convey, like, yes, it really is working, or no, or this. And it's astounding

00:46:53   for two reasons, because first, like, there's this whole trust but verify thing, and Google

00:46:58   has enormous credibility with assistants, but you can't go on stage and show a product

00:47:03   that's not real. That's just—you lose so much credibility. But also, you can't

00:47:08   not demo it at all for anybody. That product is not real unless you've shown it to somebody

00:47:13   outside the company.

00:47:14   - Right, and it's like I wrote in my last,

00:47:16   hopefully last piece on this

00:47:17   until something actually ships.

00:47:19   As far as I'm concerned,

00:47:23   unless it comes out maybe in the next week or so,

00:47:26   I was right.

00:47:29   It wasn't listenable as recorded in May.

00:47:34   Like if it ended up that it's shipping

00:47:35   in some limited means in August,

00:47:39   that doesn't mean that I was wrong

00:47:40   that it wasn't ready in May, right?

00:47:42   Like it famously, and people aren't angry about it,

00:47:45   but back in 2002, there was a New York Times story

00:47:48   that claimed that Apple was working on a cell phone

00:47:53   that ran Mac OS X.

00:47:55   And I wrote, it was really one of the first articles

00:47:59   at Daring Fireball 2002 was the year I started the site,

00:48:01   and I called it iPhony.

00:48:04   And I just tried to explain,

00:48:05   this is, what they're describing is impossible.

00:48:10   Then people stumble on that site that it's four years before the iPhone

00:48:15   People stumble on that article and they're like, you know, usually in good in good cheer, but they're like, wow you really blew that one

00:48:22   Because it's you know, what they're describing does sound a lot like the iPhone

00:48:26   It's a cell phone that runs a modified version of OS 10

00:48:29   But I wasn't wrong in 2002

00:48:32   It literally was impossible to get Mac OS 10 back Mac OS 10 barely ran on piece on Macs in 2002

00:48:39   right? It was barely running on Macs. That was pre-Lobot, pre-Purple, pre-everything.

00:48:47   Right. And it was a technical miracle that it ran in 2006, or 2007, I guess,

00:48:56   when it actually shipped. It was unbelievable feats of hardware and software engineering to

00:49:04   to get it working the way it was in 2006.

00:49:06   In 2002, ARM hardware and mobile GPUs

00:49:11   and display technology, none of it was there.

00:49:14   Like, just because it happened four years later

00:49:17   doesn't mean that I wasn't right in 2002.

00:49:19   And I feel like the same thing is gonna happen

00:49:20   with this Google Assistant, where again,

00:49:22   I don't dispute that among all companies

00:49:25   or include university AI labs and stuff like that,

00:49:31   that if anybody's close to getting a vocal assistant

00:49:35   that can do this, I would bet on Google.

00:49:37   There's no doubt in my mind.

00:49:38   I think you'd be a fool not to make them the odds on favorite

00:49:41   to get something like this working first.

00:49:43   Like that's where it's so exasperating

00:49:47   where it felt like, you know,

00:49:49   there'd be people on Twitter telling me

00:49:51   that I'm just bent out of shape

00:49:53   because Siri is so far behind.

00:49:56   I, you know, I don't understand

00:49:57   how far ahead Google Assistant is.

00:49:59   It's like, no, that has nothing to do with it.

00:50:00   I just smell a fishy demo.

00:50:02   - There was a whole feeling about that show.

00:50:04   They mentioned the word AI so often

00:50:06   that they thought we were afraid,

00:50:07   like it felt like they were afraid

00:50:07   we were gonna forget that AI existed.

00:50:09   And the entire thing was so cocky

00:50:11   and so full of hubris that they were just,

00:50:14   it felt like we wanna show off our technology,

00:50:16   we wanna show that we're the leaders.

00:50:18   And that's not what these things should be about,

00:50:19   at least in my opinion, they should be about,

00:50:21   like again, like the responsibility

00:50:22   that comes with these things.

00:50:23   I think that's the gist of why

00:50:24   we felt uncomfortable with it.

00:50:26   - Well, and think about it this way too,

00:50:27   in terms of how would they get there?

00:50:29   You know if you're thinking like I am like that they probably made some kind of catastrophic not catastrophic but a terrible

00:50:34   Mistake in terms of overselling where they were and like one way to think about it is just which tense

00:50:40   Verb do you use you know like you know nobody was saying in February HomePod?

00:50:47   Includes do present tense include the support for stereo pairing. Yeah

00:50:53   Everybody wrote it in the future tense that Apple says it will ship an update later this year to enable

00:51:00   dual speakers whereas the headlines for this duplex thing I have I cited a whole bunch of examples and I don't blame them I

00:51:08   Kind of got hooked into that

00:51:10   Present tense on day one where I just kind of trusted Google

00:51:13   But they're all written in the present tense Google assistant can now make phone calls, you know to make appointments for you

00:51:19   And that's I really think that's wrong. They didn't show that

00:51:23   that and I think it makes a difference. Yeah, no, totally. I mean, AirPower still hasn't

00:51:28   shipped but they were sitting there on the tables when we went backstage. Right, and

00:51:32   you could pick up the phone and see that it stopped charging and put it back down and

00:51:36   see that it started charging and pick up their sample watch that was on it and, you know,

00:51:41   it was there for us to play with and, you know, again, it was obviously a prototype

00:51:47   but they had prototypes that, you know, and again, I didn't have a stopwatch to see,

00:51:51   know, how fast it charged. I don't know. But I mean, at least in terms of what you could

00:51:55   do in five minutes hands on time, it was, it was there to play with. All right, enough

00:52:00   on that. Let me let me take another break here and thank our good friends, such good

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00:55:06   of the talk show.

00:55:08   Do you see this thing where there was Motherboard got some court documents on the iPhone 6 bendgate

00:55:16   and the story, the headline they use, "Internal documents show Apple knew the iPhone 6 would bend."

00:55:22   Which, I mean, I didn't, I wasn't a huge fan of how the story got covered. Like, my understanding is

00:55:28   Apple has this materials department and they understand materials. So, for example, when they move from

00:55:33   moved from the aluminum iPhone to the plastic iPhone 2G,

00:55:37   they knew that plastic was more likely to crack,

00:55:39   but it had some benefits over aluminum for them.

00:55:41   Then when they moved to glass,

00:55:42   they knew that glass was more likely to break,

00:55:44   but there were benefits to moving to glass anyway.

00:55:47   Same thing when they moved from the iPhone 5 design,

00:55:51   which had the, I forget if it was aluminum

00:55:52   or stainless steel band on it, and the aluminum back,

00:55:55   they knew that the larger surface and the lack of the frame

00:55:59   was gonna allow it to bend more because physics.

00:56:01   They knew these things, but they were trade-offs

00:56:04   that they thought were important to make.

00:56:05   And over the course of the iPhone 6 lifespan,

00:56:09   when they had millions of people using it,

00:56:11   they found out exactly where those issues were.

00:56:13   And just like they made every product,

00:56:14   like the iPhone 8 glass is way better

00:56:16   than the iPhone 4S glass,

00:56:18   the iPhone 6S aluminum frame is way better than the 6.

00:56:22   So it's like they knew

00:56:22   because they understand material sciences,

00:56:24   but this made it sound very conspiratorial.

00:56:27   - Right, it makes it sound conspiratorial.

00:56:29   And the problem starts right in the headline,

00:56:30   where it says Apple knew the iPhone 6 would bend.

00:56:33   Well, everything can bend.

00:56:35   - Yes.

00:56:35   - Right?

00:56:36   - Well, like ceramics shatters, right?

00:56:37   Apple.

00:56:38   Every material has a problem.

00:56:40   - The problem is that you need to say relative to what?

00:56:43   And the article does then go on to say

00:56:45   that it bends more easily than the iPhone 5S,

00:56:48   which is the model it was replacing

00:56:50   at the top of the product line.

00:56:51   Well, duh, of course it bends more easily than the 5S.

00:56:55   I mean, we know that, right?

00:56:56   We know that from all the videos.

00:56:57   Like you can, a strong person can take an iPhone 6,

00:57:01   or at least the ones that shipped originally,

00:57:03   and if they really try hard,

00:57:04   they could bend it with their own hands.

00:57:07   And an iPhone 5S doesn't bend like that.

00:57:09   Of course it bends more easily than a 5S.

00:57:11   It's bigger, it has a bigger surface area.

00:57:13   - And it's metal.

00:57:15   - The comparison isn't does it bend more easily

00:57:18   than the 5S, it's, the comparison is does it bend too easily

00:57:22   to have shipped as the design?

00:57:24   That's the question.

00:57:25   and it's not answered at all in these documents.

00:57:28   And I would say that the fact that the iPhone 6

00:57:31   remained in the product line until last year

00:57:34   would suggest that it was fine.

00:57:36   It was obviously a con to the new design,

00:57:41   but not catastrophic.

00:57:44   - Yeah, and again, the iPhone 3G cracked.

00:57:49   The plastic would crack along the buttons.

00:57:51   The iPhone 4 had the antenna issues,

00:57:53   and Apple kept that in the lineup after the 4S.

00:57:55   All of design is compromised, material science is compromised, and this is a normal process

00:57:59   of development for a product.

00:58:02   There is, now there is the case that they did somewhat, at some point in the iPhone

00:58:08   6's product lifespan, they did alter it with some kind of reinforcement at the bend point.

00:58:16   But I believe, I think that anybody who had problems up until that point, if it was still

00:58:21   under warranty could get it replaced, I believe, right? I think it was covered.

00:58:28   I believe so. I mean—

00:58:30   And if not, then that's—

00:58:32   I guess that's a problem, but I believe it was covered.

00:58:35   Yeah, Apple is usually pretty good. And this is the same thing with the keyboard issue.

00:58:39   They have internal metrics, and when something becomes an issue, it's an automatic alert,

00:58:43   and then people have to make a decision about it. But it has to reach that level. Apple

00:58:46   is just too big a company. Sad to say this, but like 1% of Apple users is a huge amount

00:58:50   of people, but if an issue fluctuates one to two to three percent within a product lifestyle,

00:58:55   that's not exploding phones. There's always some battery failure in every phone. It's

00:58:59   when it's catastrophic that it becomes a problem.

00:59:02   Dave Asprey The iPhone 4 and Tennegate is my favorite

00:59:05   example of that because it's like the tech press became—it was like blood in the water,

00:59:12   a bunch of sharks attacking it. I mean, the extraordinary—truly extraordinary in hindsight

00:59:19   that Apple held the special press event

00:59:20   just to address Antennagate.

00:59:23   - I mean, they had to because Antennagate was reproducible.

00:59:26   You could take any iPhone 4 and reproduce attenuation.

00:59:30   It didn't affect everybody

00:59:32   because it would only lower the signal by a certain amount.

00:59:34   And if you had a good signal, you didn't even notice it.

00:59:36   But if you were barely online,

00:59:39   you could use it as a play/pause button.

00:59:40   - Right, to me, it's a casebook example

00:59:43   of how to handle a PR crisis, right?

00:59:45   It's take your time, get your ducks in a row,

00:59:47   but then get out in front of it, as far out in front of it as you can.

00:59:51   But the thing in hindsight that to me proves that it wasn't really a catastrophic or scandalous

00:59:56   problem is that the iPhone 4 was the top of the line iPhone for a longer stretch of time

01:00:04   without any alteration to the antenna design than any other phone because it was the last

01:00:10   one that shipped in late June and then the iPhone 4S was the first one that shipped in

01:00:17   the fall and I think even that one that was late and shipped in October yes so

01:00:24   it was the top-selling iPhone for like 16 or 17 months on the market for years

01:00:29   especially and then stayed on the market for years afterwards as a lower priced

01:00:34   option in the line with a completely undesired unchanged antenna design now

01:00:41   yes they did change that style of antenna design starting with the Verizon

01:00:47   iPhone 4 that came out, you know, like six months off cycle, and then they used that

01:00:52   Verizon-style antenna with the 4S, and that was better. And it's, you know, to me very

01:00:58   much analogous to the way that the iPhone 6S used a higher grade aluminum than the iPhone

01:01:05   6. That's just progress, you know? Yeah. But was it bad enough that it never should

01:01:09   have shipped in the first place? No.

01:01:11   Yeah, but at the same token if if a hundred percent if you could show keyboard failure to 100% level like you could go to

01:01:17   An Apple store and make any Apple keyboard fail or you could go to an Apple store and make every iPhone 6 Bend

01:01:23   You'd have to treat it similarly

01:01:24   But these things have so so few instances compared to something like the like the antenna issue

01:01:30   That you just can't hold them in the same sphere

01:01:34   All right, let's move on Apple accepts then rejects valves steam link app boy

01:01:42   This is a weird story. Yes, cuz it's not like

01:01:46   you know like it, you know me and you decide to make an app and we're indie developers and we have a

01:01:53   rejection problem over questionable grounds

01:01:56   You know, which is bad enough and as often, you know something that we'll write about or talk about or whatever

01:02:02   But this is Steam.

01:02:03   This is not-- or Valve.

01:02:04   You know, this is not like a little indie developer.

01:02:07   This is a huge game developer.

01:02:12   Probably one of the most important game developers

01:02:15   in the world.

01:02:15   Right.

01:02:16   And they don't interact with Apple the way

01:02:18   that indie developers interact with Apple

01:02:21   through the black hole of the iTunes submission thing.

01:02:25   And both sides are pros.

01:02:31   Valve is so far, at least publicly, is taking this with a stiff upper lip.

01:02:34   They didn't make it public. They did bring the negotiations public.

01:02:40   Well, they had to though. They had to because the part that's so weird is it seems clear. I don't,

01:02:48   this isn't fair, but it seems clear that they had been in contact with Apple in advance while

01:02:53   they were working on bringing Steam Link. And just, I'm not an expert on these things, but

01:02:58   Basically, my understanding is that Steam Link is like VNC for gaming.

01:03:03   So if you have a Mac or PC in your house with Steam installed, and Steam is like a Netflix

01:03:08   for video games type thing, except you can buy, but you can go there, you can publish,

01:03:14   it's like their own little app store for games, for PC games.

01:03:18   Very well respected company, people love it.

01:03:19   There's all sorts of cool indie games that are on Steam.

01:03:24   It's a great service.

01:03:25   Steam Link is a way you have your Mac or PC somewhere on your land, in your house, with

01:03:31   Steam installed. You put Steam Link on your iPhone and now you can play these games. And

01:03:36   I guess where it would really be cool would be on Apple TV where you could use a controller.

01:03:41   But then you can play these games and it just streams over your Wi-Fi. And you can't do

01:03:48   it outside your house. You can't like go to three blocks away and then get on cellular

01:03:54   and do it from anywhere. It's not streaming from Valve's servers. It's only a way to connect

01:04:01   to the thing that's already in your house when you're in your house. It seems pretty

01:04:05   clear that somebody, some connections at some levels, Valve and Apple were in communication

01:04:11   on this in advance. Then they finished and submitted it and it was accepted. And that's

01:04:17   when Valve announced it. And then the next day, it's it, you know, see, again, we don't

01:04:23   know this but it seems pretty clear that some other you know it was like the left

01:04:26   hand at Apple was like yeah yeah this is great can't wait to have it we'll

01:04:29   promote it we've got a you know we've probably had like an App Store promotion

01:04:32   ready to go and then the right hand was like what is this and then it got

01:04:38   cancelled and I kind of feel like apples in the wrong on this one I get it and

01:04:43   again this isn't about whether they should be protecting the App Store's 30%

01:04:49   you know, revenue share for any kind of in-app purchase in general. Let's just say for the

01:04:54   sake of argument that we all agree that that's fine, and it's a good business practice, and

01:04:59   you know, Apple is well warranted to protect it. I don't think this is that. I don't think

01:05:04   this is an end around the app store's 30/70 split.

01:05:08   Yeah, it's super interesting to me. Famously, when in-app purchases first came out, you

01:05:14   couldn't do it with free apps because Apple didn't want an end run around the app store.

01:05:18   They thought maybe paranoid or maybe not

01:05:21   that the minute you could make transactions

01:05:25   outside the app store, everyone would make a free app.

01:05:27   They would have their own commerce running on their backend.

01:05:30   And Apple would essentially be maintaining

01:05:31   the world's largest free app store for no money.

01:05:33   And Apple doesn't operate things at a loss.

01:05:35   So then when they did make it free,

01:05:37   apps could use in-app purchases.

01:05:38   They said you can't run your own store

01:05:40   because again, they knew that everyone would just make

01:05:41   a placeholder app and do all their commerce.

01:05:44   This has some slight flavor to that

01:05:47   because you can go and buy all your games on Steam

01:05:49   and then play them on iPhone.

01:05:50   And games is by far the biggest revenue generator

01:05:53   for the App Store.

01:05:55   But I think with Apple, it's not always about money.

01:05:57   It's about control of the platform.

01:05:59   And the only thing I can see with this

01:06:01   is that they don't wanna cede control of iPhone gaming

01:06:04   to Valve.

01:06:05   And in a paranoid world, this might be that.

01:06:07   - Games might be number one overall,

01:06:09   but I did look, I was curious the other day,

01:06:12   and I looked at the top grossing,

01:06:13   which you can't get to on the iPhone anymore

01:06:16   far as I can tell. They have top paid apps and top free apps on the iPhone App Store,

01:06:21   but they don't list top grossing anymore. But they still do have it on the website and

01:06:27   I guess in iTunes. And I thought it was pretty interesting in the top five. And this is related

01:06:32   to something Ben Thompson and I were talking about, which is that these pay-to-play games

01:06:36   like Candy Crush are kind of an ethically questionable territory.

01:06:40   - Yeah, the casino game.

01:06:41   - Yeah, it's like a casino game.

01:06:43   And it's kinda off-brand for Apple

01:06:46   to be involved in that to any degree.

01:06:49   And my analogy to that would be like,

01:06:52   you go on a cruise ship,

01:06:54   and they usually have a,

01:06:56   almost always have a casino somewhere on board the ship,

01:06:59   because once you're in international waters,

01:07:01   there's no laws, and I don't know if you've ever heard this,

01:07:04   but casinos can be rather profitable for the casino owner.

01:07:08   The Disney Cruise Line does not have casinos.

01:07:12   Not because it's not profitable, but because I believe that they've concluded, probably

01:07:18   correctly, that it's too off-brand for them, for the Disney brand.

01:07:27   But anyway, I looked at the top grossing apps, and number one was Netflix.

01:07:32   Hulu was like five, and Pandora was three.

01:07:36   So three of the top five.

01:07:38   Again, I don't know how that goes with the long tail.

01:07:41   I bet the long tail has a lot more games than streaming services.

01:07:48   There just aren't that many streaming services like Netflix and Pandora and Hulu.

01:07:53   But I thought that was a pretty good sign in terms of there's a source of revenue where

01:07:57   there's no moral qualms about it.

01:08:00   When you pay 10 bucks or 12 bucks a month for Netflix and you get Netflix, that's a

01:08:05   fair deal.

01:08:06   You knew exactly what you're getting into.

01:08:08   You're not getting badgered.

01:08:10   Give us another dollar and we'll take out the commercial.

01:08:15   You're getting what you paid for.

01:08:17   So anyway, I'm not quite sure.

01:08:18   - They figured out early on in the app store,

01:08:22   they, I mean, game developers,

01:08:23   that people would not pay $10 for a game.

01:08:25   They wouldn't even pay $5 for a game,

01:08:27   but they would pay $50 to $100

01:08:29   to have a better farm than their friends.

01:08:30   They'd lord it over them,

01:08:31   or to get their car back on the track faster

01:08:34   'cause they were bored.

01:08:35   We will pay for ego gratification and instant gratification,

01:08:38   and that's the best way to separate a human being

01:08:40   from their money.

01:08:41   And everyone has gone all in on this,

01:08:43   and it's led to the detriment of the gaming industry.

01:08:46   But to your point, yeah, Disney does not have casinos.

01:08:48   Usually profitable does not have them.

01:08:50   And there's an argument to be made

01:08:51   that Apple could run an app store that's very different

01:08:54   than this just by policy decisions alone.

01:08:56   But to the previous thing,

01:08:58   this whole thing with Valve is so bizarre

01:09:00   because you have Phil Schiller commenting on it now

01:09:02   saying that they're discussing it with Valve,

01:09:04   and they're working on problems in the app store.

01:09:06   And I like to give Apple, not the benefit of the doubt,

01:09:09   but I like to assume that I don't know everything.

01:09:10   Like famously, everyone got super upset

01:09:13   when Apple banned a popular app from the app store.

01:09:15   And it turned out that that developer

01:09:16   had a ton of shady stuff going on as well.

01:09:19   And we just all thought Apple was guilty immediately

01:09:22   until all of that came out.

01:09:23   So you never know if there's like a privacy concern

01:09:25   or a security risk or something like the VPN connection

01:09:28   isn't secure and they wanna work on it.

01:09:30   I just don't know here,

01:09:31   but I'd like to find out what's happening.

01:09:32   - The Schiller thing came in an email to a Joe Random customer

01:09:37   who just wrote to Schiller knowing that he's the direct,

01:09:42   the app store, the buck stops with him,

01:09:44   with the app store.

01:09:45   And when people like Phil Schiller

01:09:48   write back to somebody like that,

01:09:49   they know there's a chance that the guy's gonna turn around.

01:09:51   And he actually sent it to me too.

01:09:53   I didn't realize till yesterday

01:09:54   'cause I was catching up on email.

01:09:56   But he sent it to me, he sent it to MacRumors.

01:09:58   I don't, you know, I wouldn't do that personally,

01:10:01   But it's clear from the way Schiller wrote the email,

01:10:03   he knew that I could leak.

01:10:05   And it was written very carefully.

01:10:07   There's nothing embarrassing.

01:10:08   I thought it was interesting that he listed

01:10:10   user-generated content as a problem.

01:10:12   And I don't know enough about Steam.

01:10:13   I don't know if they've got games

01:10:14   where you get to dress up as a Nazi or--

01:10:18   - Or adult content or something.

01:10:19   - Yeah, or something like that.

01:10:20   But that user-generated content,

01:10:23   it sounds like it might be a little bit more than just,

01:10:26   "Hey, we think it's an end around the 70/30 split."

01:10:29   So there have been issues with apps that include discussion groups previously.

01:10:33   Like it's interesting because Apple has Safari and you can get anything in the world on Safari.

01:10:38   But when it comes to the app store, even embedding web views for a while was controversial.

01:10:41   They wanted you to put that 18 and over sticker on it and then it was discussion groups.

01:10:45   What was the content of the discussion groups?

01:10:47   So it seems like that's something they still wrestle with.

01:10:49   All right, let me take a third and final break here and thank our third sponsor.

01:10:54   This is really a trifecta of great sponsors on this episode.

01:10:57   This one is for Eero.

01:10:59   Now Eero is a Wi-Fi system for consumers that lets you build out what's called a mesh network.

01:11:09   That basically, you've probably heard about this, but you get a couple of pieces of hardware.

01:11:14   They're all about little puck size things about the size of an Apple TV, the main ones.

01:11:18   You put a couple of them throughout your house and their website will make it clear.

01:11:22   You give it the square footage or how many floors you have or something like that.

01:11:26   they'll help you decide how many you might need.

01:11:28   You set up, one of them is the main one

01:11:31   that connects to like your cable modem

01:11:33   or your files connection or whatever,

01:11:34   but it's the same, it doesn't matter which one you pick,

01:11:37   it's the same hardware.

01:11:38   And then the other ones in the house,

01:11:40   they just talk to each other and they create one network.

01:11:44   So it's not like you've got like three,

01:11:46   if you've got three of them that you have three networks

01:11:48   and your phone has to be ready to switch

01:11:50   from one network to another.

01:11:51   The way these mesh networks work is three devices

01:11:55   work together to create the illusion of one network

01:11:58   that your devices use and it could just fill your house

01:12:01   with really solid wifi.

01:12:02   There is no way in my current house

01:12:04   that one base station could ever,

01:12:07   it's a row home in Philly and it just goes up

01:12:11   and it just, signals don't go through floors very well.

01:12:14   There's just no way that one base station would work.

01:12:19   It just wouldn't.

01:12:20   So we've switched to Eero a while ago.

01:12:22   Apple's out of the base station game now.

01:12:25   I really can't think of a better one

01:12:29   than Eero to recommend.

01:12:30   I know they're the sponsor,

01:12:31   I'm getting paid to tell you this,

01:12:32   but I'm telling you, even if they weren't,

01:12:34   it's what I would tell you to look at first.

01:12:36   You set it up with a really nice iPhone app.

01:12:39   They have an Eero iPhone app,

01:12:40   you manage the network with it,

01:12:42   but you don't feel like you're a junior network engineer.

01:12:46   It really is a setup process

01:12:48   that an Apple user would appreciate.

01:12:51   You're not typing in weird 192.168 IP addresses to log into a skanky web server running on

01:13:00   the thing. It's a really nice app. You can name the devices, tell them which room they're

01:13:04   in, all very graphical. You could even run like a speed test to see what type of performance

01:13:10   you're getting right within the app. And the second generation products that Eero has include

01:13:18   something called the Eero Beacon. It's half the size of the regular Eero base station,

01:13:23   which is already pretty small, but it's even more. It's half the size and you can simply

01:13:27   plug it into a wall outlet to expand coverage into any room. So if you just need a little

01:13:32   oomph just to get to like the fourth floor of your house or something like that, you

01:13:35   can just add as many of these beacons as you want. If there's an outlet, there's Wi-Fi.

01:13:40   And since the beacon doesn't have an Ethernet port, you do need at least one regular Eero

01:13:47   to connect at the modem. But other than that, you could just use these beacons. And they're

01:13:52   even included, you think it sounds like a nightlight, you just put it in a socket. Well,

01:13:55   guess what? They have an LED nightlight in the device, so you could use it as a nightlight.

01:13:59   And of course, if you don't want to, you can turn it off very easily right in the app.

01:14:05   They even have an ambient light sensor though, so that if you want to use it, it'll just

01:14:09   intelligently adjust the brightness automatically depending on the time of day and how much

01:14:13   light there actually is in the room where you have it. Just a great idea, really a great

01:14:17   way to go. The second generation is such a great upgrade in terms of just being easy

01:14:22   and small and convenient. I really love this product, I love the company. Very happy customer,

01:14:30   me. They even have incredible customer support so if you do need help, and you probably won't,

01:14:36   but you can get a hold of a WiFi expert in 30 seconds or less most times of the day.

01:14:42   I have one running right now. I'm talking to Renee over in euro Wi-Fi network.

01:14:46   Really recommend it. So here's the deal. Their code is the talk show. They have the the.

01:14:53   So what you do is go to euro.com. Remember that code, the talk show,

01:14:58   and you can get free overnight shipping to the US or Canada. Hello, Renee. Just visit

01:15:05   euro.com and at checkout, select overnight shipping and enter that promo code, the talk show,

01:15:10   and you'll get the shipping for free. So overnight you'll have it tomorrow listening to you. Whatever

01:15:15   day of the week you're listening to me right now, you could have an Eero network in your house

01:15:18   tomorrow with free shipping. So my thanks to Eero. Mine actually just arrived yesterday. I haven't

01:15:24   set it up yet, but the box came yesterday. Isn't it nice? It's nice packaging too. Yeah,

01:15:29   it's beautiful. Looking forward to it. Really, it's great stuff. I was just looking at it the

01:15:34   other day in my bedroom and I was like, you know how you know this is nice is that my wife doesn't

01:15:38   complain that we have a Wi-Fi base station in our bedroom. Well, we were just talking about it after

01:15:44   Apple discontinued the airport line. Like, which company do you trust? Because this is your data.

01:15:48   It's your data on the front line of the internet. And there's a lot of companies whose business is

01:15:52   predicated on the collection and use of your data, to put it delicately. And Apple was a company that

01:16:00   you could trust. They didn't care what data you had. And it was hard finding another company like

01:16:03   that but Euro is so former Apple engineer and Apple's mindset centric that it was an easy choice.

01:16:10   Yeah. Anyway, before we move on to WWDC rumors, of which there's not a lot to talk about really,

01:16:20   which is kind of exciting, iOS 11.4 and AirPlay 2 shipped yesterday. And finally, I think this is

01:16:28   truly an unironic finally. But in my practice so far, we have two home pods in the house.

01:16:36   I moved the one from the bedroom down into the kitchen, so we have two in the kitchen

01:16:40   to play with the stereo. Everything works exactly as it says on the tin. It was just

01:16:46   as easy to set up a stereo pair as Apple had promised, even with one that had already been

01:16:52   configured in another room. Once I got the software update on the home pod, it immediately

01:16:57   prompted me, "Hey, I see you're in the same room as the other HomePod. Do you want to

01:17:01   set them up as a stereo pair?" And I was like, "Yes." And then I immediately said, "Play

01:17:05   whatever," and whatever immediately started playing in stereo on the two devices. I cannot

01:17:12   imagine how it could be easier to set them up. I really can't because if it was any more

01:17:17   automatic it might do it when you didn't want it to.

01:17:20   And you can go in and tweak it. Like you can go in and switch the left and right and make

01:17:23   them say tones to test and you can do all that. But the automatic setup is amazing.

01:17:27   Yeah, the automatic setup is amazing. You know, it's a shame it took as long as it did,

01:17:32   but apparently they wanted to get it right. And I have to say, day one, it works seamlessly.

01:17:37   I mean, it's exactly as promised.

01:17:40   The interesting thing is they made a conscious decision to have Siri only respond from one

01:17:44   of them. So by default, the left channel will be the one that has Siri. You can change it.

01:17:48   Like when you ask Siri something, the docs, I think, say you hold down on it and it will

01:17:52   I couldn't get that to work, but if I went to the right

01:17:54   HomePod and I said turn on Siri it would switch Siri to there and stay there so you can move it back and forth

01:18:01   But that was an interesting choice. I the way I it is interesting that they don't both talk at once I can see why

01:18:07   And it seems like it's a little smarter than that. It seems like in in in

01:18:12   Like when I was up in New York yesterday for a demo of this

01:18:16   And they had it set up like on two ends of a yeah of a table against a wall

01:18:21   Which I think is a very typical distance for stereo speakers in my kitchen. I set them up on different sides of the room and

01:18:28   It seems to me whichever one I'm facing is the one that answers me which makes sense

01:18:34   Like because I'm not I can't face both of them at the same time

01:18:38   So if I turn around and look at the one that doesn't seem to answer by default when I'm in a neutral physical position

01:18:45   It that's the one that answers me though because my voice is coming right at it

01:18:48   - That's interesting.

01:18:49   So when I pair it, as far as I know,

01:18:51   once you pair them, it just picks one,

01:18:53   but it does use the microphone system

01:18:55   from both of them all the time to make sure it hears you.

01:18:57   - Yeah, well, try putting them on opposite sides of a room,

01:18:59   and I suspect you'll see that.

01:19:01   I think it's just that if your voice is coming

01:19:03   at both of them more or less

01:19:05   like from an equilateral triangle position,

01:19:08   there is a default one that always seems to answer.

01:19:11   - Yeah.

01:19:12   I like, some of it is just so cool.

01:19:13   Like you can do with Apple TV, you can do it with iPhone,

01:19:15   but then you put them in other rooms

01:19:17   And you can just say play whatever song in the bedroom or play this song in the living room

01:19:21   And it just I mean like people who are not Apple people who've been doing this with the Amazon or Google forever

01:19:27   They're laughing

01:19:27   But there's something about having it so deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem and the way that Apple handles interface that makes it just as a very

01:19:34   fluid experience yeah, I don't want I wouldn't have a lot of time so I'm not gonna go on with it more but

01:19:39   I like it

01:19:43   WWDC rumors or lack thereof is my heading in the show notes. They double down

01:19:48   so who knows you know that stuff is the closer we get the more likely stuff is to leak because it's just the nature of

01:19:55   The game that they you know

01:19:57   rehearsals and who know and marketing material

01:20:01   Start getting finalized and more people are exposed to it

01:20:05   And you know, it's no coincidence that like in the 48 hours before a keynote. There's often last-minute leaks

01:20:11   Which is I think attributable simply to the fact that people who are less invested in it

01:20:16   I've suddenly have access to it and you know are willing to spoil the surprise, but we'll see you know Apple famously is as

01:20:24   you know issued that report earlier this year about leaking and how many leakers they've caught and

01:20:30   Fired yeah

01:20:34   So we'll see I don't know

01:20:37   I'm really hopeful though that not much more will leak because I think this is more exciting

01:20:42   I think it's way more exciting to like kind of not even to know what's coming

01:20:47   I mean do I don't there's I don't know if you know anything

01:20:50   There's two sorts of leaks like there are leaks when something is doing something wrong and you it needs to get out like people who?

01:20:56   Are whistleblowers and stuff like that, but this is always more like spoilers, right?

01:21:00   Do I want to read the plot to the next Marvel movie or the next?

01:21:02   Star Wars movie and then go see it and think the whole thing is boring. So already know it. No, I really don't

01:21:07   I have to monitor these things because it's my job, but if I didn't have to do this

01:21:11   I wouldn't want to know anything about the show

01:21:12   I'd want to go in there and really enjoy the hell out of it

01:21:15   So I'm kind of happy when stuff doesn't leak because it makes the show more exciting for me

01:21:19   Yeah

01:21:19   I wrote something this week or that Koi Vinh friend of the show had a really nice article about the custom illustration work that

01:21:27   They're doing in the App Store and that he you know had when I first this is with the iOS 11 App Store that debuted

01:21:33   last year

01:21:34   and

01:21:36   Effectively, they're running it as a periodical.

01:21:40   I don't think I know anybody in particular who's on that team, but I know that they've hired people from actual magazines.

01:21:48   People who worked at like Cone Nast and other really high-end design magazines.

01:21:52   It's run as a real editorial operation.

01:21:55   And they have, I don't know if they're on staff or if they're all contract work, but they hire, pay real illustrators to do real custom illustrations to accompany the articles that they write.

01:22:05   that they write. And it's really nice. And it's, as Coy says, in this world, it's so

01:22:10   many people just go write the clip art instead of commissioning original artwork. It's nice

01:22:13   to see somebody do that. And I just wrote offhandedly that one of the things I'm looking

01:22:17   forward to at WWDC is seeing the iOS App Store 2.0 come to the Mac. And somebody, I think

01:22:24   it was like 9 to 5 Mac, was like, "Oh, maybe Gruber knows something that we don't know."

01:22:30   often coyly drops them like that. This isn't the secret. I don't know if it's coming this

01:22:36   year. I don't. But it was on my show last year where I asked Phil Schiller about it.

01:22:44   And he just said, "We thought it was the right thing to do to bring it to iOS first, but

01:22:48   we're invested in the Mac App Store. It's important to us." He didn't say it'll come

01:22:53   next year, but he said, he very strongly suggested that it will come, this sort of thinking will

01:22:59   come to the Mac App Store.

01:23:01   - I thought it was almost understood

01:23:02   'cause during the briefings last year,

01:23:04   I think everybody asked about it

01:23:05   and they said it was being worked on

01:23:07   and it feels like a this year thing.

01:23:10   - So it wasn't, you know what I mean?

01:23:11   This isn't like a deep dark secret little birdie.

01:23:14   This was Phil Schiller on stage at a public event,

01:23:18   strongly insinuating that they were already

01:23:20   at work on the Mac one.

01:23:21   - And they're doing all of them.

01:23:22   Like the bookstore is getting,

01:23:23   every store is gonna get this makeover.

01:23:25   - Right, and I completely agree with him.

01:23:28   I think it's very obvious that it was very, you know, it's the biggest and most important

01:23:32   store to store. So of course the iOS one got the treatment first. So that's something I

01:23:39   expect next week. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if maybe it's more than the Mac App Store.

01:23:44   Maybe there is a new bookstore and other stuff. What else? There's rumors about a Beats branded

01:23:52   Siri speaker sort of like a little brother to the home pod that would come at a lower price

01:23:57   yeah, I guess the same way that the

01:24:00   W1 chip went into beats products and made air pod equivalents. There'll be some beats equivalent of the home pod, right?

01:24:06   there's the the

01:24:10   Thing from months ago that Mark Gurman called marzipan

01:24:14   Which he says was is some sort of secret effort to get iPhone apps

01:24:20   running on the Mac, and there were certain people who got very excited about this. I

01:24:24   don't believe that's coming next week, and B, I don't believe it actually is a

01:24:31   way to get iOS apps running on the Mac. I think it's more of like a cross-platform

01:24:38   UI toolkit that would help you share code and components between Mac apps and iOS apps,

01:24:44   I don't think it's like, boom, here's your iOS app running on the Mac with a recompile

01:24:51   and Xcode or something like that.

01:24:53   My understanding is that since Apple did that reorg, they've had this problem.

01:24:56   The iMessage team has to build iMessage for iOS and iMessage for app and they've across

01:25:00   the company, they've built new and undisclosed tools that helps them do all this.

01:25:04   And they're going to pick one.

01:25:05   I don't think it's ready for this year either, but they're going to pick the ones that are

01:25:07   best and write them as public tools, not internal tools, which are often, you know, see to your

01:25:12   pants stuff and then we'll get this.

01:25:14   but there's several interplaying projects.

01:25:16   - Yeah, I've been talking, bottom line is that Apple's,

01:25:19   you'd think that they would have internalized this by now,

01:25:23   but Apple, when they ship the stuff

01:25:27   that they actually use themselves,

01:25:29   it's the best developer stuff that they ship.

01:25:31   And when they ship stuff that's like,

01:25:33   good enough for you people, but we don't use it,

01:25:36   it's buggy. - Including frameworks.

01:25:39   - It's buggy and incomplete.

01:25:43   The best example I could think of, or just, well, maybe it's not the best example, but

01:25:47   a simple example is that a year after the iPhone shipped and the App Store came, you

01:25:52   know, was announced, you know, in February or whatever, and by the time the one year

01:25:56   anniversary rolled around, they opened the App Store and developers had had three or

01:26:00   four months. The, you know, the App Store, you know, the eight, the public APIs for writing

01:26:05   iPhone apps in 2008 right away, it didn't include everything Apple could do because

01:26:09   obviously Apple has to write the system level software that operates at the lowest levels.

01:26:15   But for the most part, though, it gave third party developers ability to write apps as

01:26:20   good as Apple's apps. And that, you know, maybe a lot of maybe some of Apple's apps

01:26:24   were written completely within the API limitations of the public APIs. Compare and contrast with

01:26:32   the original Apple Watch, where the original watch kit wasn't really native at all, but

01:26:36   All the apps that Apple had on the watch were native.

01:26:39   And so you'd launch one of Apple's apps on the watch

01:26:41   and it would open up and you could use it.

01:26:43   And you'd launch a third party app

01:26:45   and it would spin for 30 or 40 seconds and maybe open.

01:26:50   - But I mean, iOS, iPhone OS too, that was a complete,

01:26:53   Henri Lamoureux's team had to do

01:26:54   a second forest march basically.

01:26:56   And I think Scott Forestall wrote scroll and table

01:26:58   and they had to rewrite UI scroll and UI table

01:27:01   and make them public.

01:27:02   They were in no shape for public at first.

01:27:03   - Right, so the thing I've heard from a few

01:27:05   developer friends about this cross-platform UI toolkit, whatever it's called, is that

01:27:11   they hope it's something that Apple themselves are using, because there's a good chance

01:27:15   then it'll be good, and they really hope it is not a, "Well, we don't use this,

01:27:19   but you dummies who want a shared UI code between two platforms can, here you go."

01:27:23   It's my understanding that there's a bunch of stuff Apple's using that they're going

01:27:26   to sort of rewrite for public consumption over the next year or two.

01:27:31   Other than that, man, what the hell else is coming?

01:27:33   I guess...

01:27:34   to me because like there was rumors of the new MacBook Air but that sounds like

01:27:37   it was pushed off there were rumors of the new iPad pros but there have been

01:27:40   zero leaks and usually there are some hardware leaks from from the supply

01:27:44   chain right and a curious thing if they don't do iPad pros is then presumably

01:27:50   the next time it could happen would be September typically Apple these days

01:27:55   they used to sometimes have August event but they don't have it in years and even

01:28:00   then they were like software like for iLife apps or something so if they don't

01:28:04   do it at WWDC, then they're pushed back to September, and that would mean that the iPad

01:28:08   Pro either skips an entire generation of A11 processors and goes right to the A12, or the

01:28:18   iPad Pro gets the A11 an entire year late and remains a year behind CPU-wise the iPhone

01:28:26   whatever comes after the iPhone X and 8. It's just curious.

01:28:33   And the Macs are a huge question mark now because Intel is just having the worst, ever

01:28:37   since they went to 14 nanometer, they've had the worst time.

01:28:39   They went from TikTok, TikTok to TikTok, optimize, optimize, optimize.

01:28:43   And I've talked about this before, but every time I fall asleep, I'm afraid I'm going to

01:28:46   wake up and they will have sandwiched another lake in between Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake.

01:28:51   So they've been, a lot of the Mac delays we've seen lately are entirely because Intel hasn't

01:28:55   had the chips ready.

01:28:56   And I don't know if the Coffee Lake Mac chips are ready at this point.

01:28:58   insert we don't have time to go on a long tangent about the hypothetical move to ARM

01:29:04   for the Mac except to just say that at a certain level you can wave your hands over some of

01:29:11   the technical complexities. It certainly would make sense for the MacBook. The MacBook would

01:29:16   actually get a performance bump, I think. My guess is that a MacBook running an Apple

01:29:22   a 12 processor or even an A11 processor would get a nice performance boost across the board.

01:29:28   The problem would be that there's no known ARM chips that compete with Intel at the high end,

01:29:35   for let's just say the iMac Pro, the Mac Pro, devices that Apple has publicly recommitted to

01:29:41   very recently. So it's not like the story is, well, they're getting out of the pro hardware game.

01:29:46   theory apples chip team could have secretly been working on arm based chips that actually do compete at the highest levels of

01:29:54   performance

01:29:56   But that would be shocking. I mean it would be great news. It'd be terribly exciting, but

01:30:01   It would be a thunderbolt out of the sky in terms of being

01:30:05   shaking up the industry and and

01:30:08   Just to put a little bow on it. I think it would be really difficult for Apple to move

01:30:14   to arm without moving the entire platform to arm I

01:30:18   Think it could also be super interesting if the MacBook and maybe sort of an Apple TV Mac mini hybrid

01:30:24   We're running purely on arm if the intermediary devices were fusion cores where you had arm cores for

01:30:29   Look for power efficiency and you still had legacy Intel cores for compatibility and performance and on the high end

01:30:36   They stay at Xeon because if there's one area that Intel is investing in it's still the Xeon chips

01:30:42   Yeah, so it's possible that they have something it would be terribly exciting. But again, there's no there's no leaks about it

01:30:48   I mean, it's all just spike. It's just

01:30:50   podcasters

01:30:53   Podcasters and Twitter users saying well, maybe they'll switch to arm

01:30:55   Yeah, no, I mean they've had the same way they had Intel Mac. They had Intel Macs in the closet for years

01:31:02   They've had arm maps in the closet for years. It just depends

01:31:05   They hold them over Intel's head to say what you guys aren't done yet, but actually shipping it raises a lot of

01:31:12   implementation questions right and every other time that they've switched from 68k to power PC and then from power PC to Intel

01:31:18   There was like a one year transition period and then after that your tradition transition period everything was running the new platform

01:31:25   Yeah, it just and again they could do it

01:31:27   You know, it doesn't have to go that way but for a bunch of reasons that we just don't have time to expand upon in

01:31:32   Detail it just makes a lot more sense though that if you're going to move you move the entire platform from top to bottom

01:31:37   So I don't know

01:31:38   It also depends on they position it because you can do pitch you could position it as an iOS clamshell

01:31:42   And then you nicely sidestep a lot of the Mac issues. So what are we we're got Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday

01:31:48   So we're five days out from the keynote. I'm gonna say five days out from the keynote

01:31:53   We have less we have fewer rumors about what might be in the keynote than any year. I can remember. Yeah

01:31:59   Terribly exciting. Yeah

01:32:02   I'm thrilled. All right, anything else? I got it. Yeah. Yeah, you got to go

01:32:07   - I know, so I'm looking forward to seeing you on Monday.

01:32:09   - All right, yeah, I can't wait to see you eat too.

01:32:12   It'll be fun.

01:32:13   Everybody can follow René on Twitter @RenéRichie.

01:32:18   And of course, you can see all the fine work from him

01:32:21   and his very talented staff at iMore.com.

01:32:24   I'm sure they'll have extensive coverage of the keynote

01:32:27   and all the news on Monday.