Podcast Search

The Talk Show

168: ‘You’ve Got the Nubbin’ With Serenity Caldwell

Select a time to play from there. The line being spoken is highlighted as the audio plays.

0:00:00Oh shit, I'm so stupid.

0:00:02(laughing)

0:00:04Oh, it's not that stupid.

0:00:06But I am starting a new thing where I'm just sharing

0:00:10an Apple Note with whoever's on the show.

0:00:13- Mm, okay.

0:00:14- And then you can just paste, we can paste links in there.

0:00:17- I like it.

0:00:18- Right now, all it just says is TTS 168 Serenity Caldwell.

0:00:22Anyway, the stupid thing is that I was trying to do it

0:00:25and I'm like, why can I not do this?

0:00:27I know I've done it already and it's because

0:00:28I'm staring at a Mac that's still running El Capitan.

0:00:32- Oh no!

0:00:33- So I've gotta do it from my phone.

0:00:36- Ugh, such technology problems.

0:00:40- Did you get this?

0:00:40Did you get it? - Yes I did.

0:00:41- Anyway. - Let's see if it'll open.

0:00:43- So we're sharing, we are sharing, this is my new thing.

0:00:45We can't even tell people on the air, it's not a secret,

0:00:47but I've shared a note from Apple Notes with Serenity

0:00:52so that we could paste links and maybe I'll remember

0:00:56to put all the links in the show notes that I say that I put.

0:00:59Seems like a perfect use of the shared note feature,

0:01:02but before we started recording,

0:01:04I spent a minute staring at my screen,

0:01:06trying to figure out how to do it,

0:01:08and it was because I'm staring at a machine

0:01:09that's still running a Mac, running LCAP,

0:01:11which doesn't have the feature.

0:01:13- Where is my collaborate button?

0:01:15Where has it gone to?

0:01:16- I am, we have so much to talk about,

0:01:19I don't know how the hell we're gonna do it,

0:01:20but I'm excited, here's what I'm excited about.

0:01:23My last show was with Jim Dalrymple,

0:01:25and everything was still new.

0:01:26And I feel like, you know, like the phones and the watch,

0:01:29and I don't think Sierra was out yet.

0:01:31I like talking about these things more

0:01:35once I've gotten to know them a little better.

0:01:37Like I even said on my show the last time,

0:01:39I found writing a review of the iPhone after five days

0:01:42to be incredibly stressful, 'cause I don't know what I--

0:01:43- It's really hard.

0:01:44- Right, so I'm anxious to hear your thoughts

0:01:47now that we've starting to settle in with these new devices

0:01:49and both new operating systems.

0:01:51But what I was gonna tell you is,

0:01:54I'm like a reckless, I'm reckless with my iOS devices.

0:01:57I'll install the first beta of whatever's coming out

0:02:01as soon as somebody else on Twitter says they installed it

0:02:04and it didn't blow up.

0:02:06- Oh yeah, same.

0:02:07- So my iPhone, my personal iPhone is already running

0:02:10the developer beta of 10.1 because who cares?

0:02:15- Is your personal iPhone a seven plus this time around

0:02:17or just a seven? - No, it's a seven.

0:02:18I've just switched, I think Saturday I switched

0:02:22from my Plus review unit to the phone

0:02:26I ended up buying for myself,

0:02:27which is jet black regular, so.

0:02:29But I had to run the beta because I put the beta on the Plus

0:02:35so I could take portrait mode photos,

0:02:38and then once you've upgraded that device,

0:02:40if I wanted to keep carrying forward that backup and restore

0:02:44so I have all my stuff and don't have to set up

0:02:46my email accounts and everything again.

0:02:48So I have to be running the beta here.

0:02:49but I find iOS betas to be just fine.

0:02:52- Yeah, they've been remarkably stable.

0:02:54I think the entire iOS 10 beta release cycle

0:02:57has been remarkably stable.

0:02:59I installed two days after WWDC for running the dev beta

0:03:04and I have not had problems since.

0:03:05Like little things here and there, little problems, but.

0:03:09- But on my Macs, I tend to be very conservative.

0:03:12I don't like running,

0:03:13I don't run the developer betas over the summer

0:03:15and I haven't, I've upgraded my MacBook

0:03:19which I don't really use that much.

0:03:21Or at least I haven't been

0:03:23'cause I haven't been traveling lately.

0:03:24So I did install Sierra on that one,

0:03:27but I'm not, my iMac at my desk, I'm waiting.

0:03:30- I am exactly the same.

0:03:32I did not install Sierra on this iMac

0:03:34until the day after release,

0:03:36because our, thankfully, we have a staff at iMore now,

0:03:39which is really lovely,

0:03:40and Lori Gill kind of took point

0:03:42on all of the macOS Sierra coverage,

0:03:44which meant I didn't have to worry about it.

0:03:46So I had like seven devices,

0:03:48Like seven iOS devices running iOS 10 and no Macs in the house running Sierra.

0:03:53I just typed uptime in the terminal.

0:03:55So my iMac's been up for 23 days without a restart.

0:03:58And I find that to be very typical.

0:04:01Like I just come in here every day and just hit the keyboard to wake it up.

0:04:04There are features I'm looking forward to.

0:04:06I can't wait to get the thing where I can log in with my Apple Watch.

0:04:10Auto unlock, yeah. That's been kind of fun.

0:04:12I've enjoyed that the last four days.

0:04:14So I maybe by the next episode I record I will be running Sierra here and it does seem it seemed to me on on my macbook

0:04:21where I did upgrade to Sierra that it was the

0:04:25Least inconvenient major version of Mac OS 10 upgrade I've ever done

0:04:32It seemed to me like almost nothing broke or changed

0:04:36Yeah, I have had no problems created. I haven't launched an Adobe program yet

0:04:41So Photoshop still could be completely borked and I wouldn't know it

0:04:44But I'm pretty sure I haven't heard any complaining from my artist friends.

0:04:48So I haven't really run into anything major where it's just completely broken or completely a pain.

0:04:52Yeah, one of the reasons I'm so conservative upgrading a Mac is that I have so many little super nerdy things that I install and set up.

0:04:59Like I have a bunch of scripts I've written for myself in Perl, and they require Perl modules from the CPAN open source repository.

0:05:08And you just type some things on the command line and install them.

0:05:11And every time to my memory, every time I've ever done a major upgrade of Mac OS 10. I've had to reinstall those because pearls considered part of the system.

0:05:20Oh, yeah, that would make sense.

0:05:23It's just I accept it. It makes sense to me. But then this time I didn't have to all the stuff I had installed from CPAN was still there.

0:05:30They finally the you know, the Mac OS engineers listened to you and said, You know what, we're just gonna make the the pearl upgrade process easier this time.

0:05:39Who's our friend in the background?

0:05:40- That's Olive, who I'm actually gonna go tell

0:05:43to quiet down in just a second.

0:05:45There's a new puppy in the back fence

0:05:47that she gets really excited about.

0:05:49- I like having a dog on the show.

0:05:51- Oh yeah, it gives it a little bit of color.

0:05:53- People got very mad at me last week.

0:05:55I said I don't like cats.

0:05:57- I am an equal opportunity pet lover.

0:06:01We have two dogs and one cat in this house.

0:06:03- There we go, that brings balance to the talk show

0:06:06so people can stop complaining.

0:06:07And then the problem was that--

0:06:09- Balance to the forced touch.

0:06:10- The problem was that Jim Dalrymple agreed with me.

0:06:12- Oh no.

0:06:14I'm nothing against dogs.

0:06:15Dogs are great, but I grew up with cats, all cats,

0:06:18and then my fiance owns dogs,

0:06:20so it's been a kind of like a merging of the households.

0:06:23- Well, there we go.

0:06:24I think the last time we had a dog barking

0:06:26in the background of the show was Joanna Stern

0:06:28when she had her dog was a puppy,

0:06:31and I think had an accident in the room

0:06:33while she was on the show.

0:06:34- Oh no.

0:06:35- Comic gold.

0:06:36- Yep, yep.

0:06:37It's like, okay, let's talk about MacBooks

0:06:40- Oh, wait, wait.

0:06:42- I don't know.

0:06:43So it seems to me like Apple has their upgrade mojo in place

0:06:47and it just scanning the internets,

0:06:49it seems like there were relatively few people

0:06:52who's seemingly on Twitter had any kind of problem

0:06:55upgrading either to iOS 10 or to Sierra.

0:06:58- Yeah, and honestly, this is probably

0:07:00when one of the smoother upgrade cycles

0:07:03that I've seen on the Twitter webs.

0:07:07The only thing I've really seen complaints about

0:07:10the home button. And even those have kind of tapered off after the first couple days, you know,

0:07:14there were the there were the outrages of like, why doesn't my slide to unlock work and even my

0:07:19personal trainer when I went to saw her last see her last week, she was she was very outraged at

0:07:24the idea of of having to change her home her unlock behavior. And then when I saw her the next

0:07:29week, she's like, Yeah, I've gotten used to it. It's fine.

0:07:32That's an interesting change because it's one that I've heard that too from, you know, real people.

0:07:37And I've, what I recall is I think I started running the second developer beta,

0:07:45maybe the third, because I had like, I was traveling in early July and I didn't want to

0:07:49take a chance while I was traveling. So as soon as we got home from a trip in July, that's when

0:07:53I started running the developer betas on my iPhone. And I've at first, like anybody else, I was confused.

0:08:00It seemed like getting into getting past the lock screen was weird.

0:08:04And I just thought what I remember thinking was, ah, it's a beta.

0:08:08I'm sure they'll figure this out by the end of the summer.

0:08:11And they didn't really, I don't think they actually changed anything.

0:08:13It's just that eventually I, I, it became the new normal to me.

0:08:17Yeah, it gets, you get comfortable with it and then you switch back to a device

0:08:21running iOS nine and you're like, why won't you, what, what I'm

0:08:24just, I'm trying to unlock you.

0:08:26Yeah.

0:08:26And it's just seems normal now.

0:08:29Although I guess it's, I guess it's,

0:08:32are there still a lot of people who don't have Touch ID?

0:08:35- I don't think there are a ton of people

0:08:36who don't have Touch ID, but the,

0:08:39I like my personal trainer who I was talking to,

0:08:41she's like, I've never put a passcode on my iPhone.

0:08:43And immediately I told her, well,

0:08:45here are the reasons why you should put a passcode

0:08:47in Touch ID on your iPhone.

0:08:49But there are a lot of people who still don't do passcodes

0:08:52and don't do Touch ID despite having Touch ID-enabled iPhones

0:08:55which boggles my mind.

0:08:56It's so easy.

0:08:58- That would be an interest.

0:08:58I wonder what that is.

0:08:59I've always thought, and I do think it's true,

0:09:03that the original slide to unlock, which Apple bragged about,

0:09:10it was a big part of the original iPhone presentation.

0:09:14It was a part of the ads.

0:09:15It was a part of the brand.

0:09:16It was actually a big part of their lawsuits with Samsung.

0:09:21I forget.

0:09:21I think they sued other people too, right?

0:09:23And it was held up.

0:09:25It was like Apple's version of Amazon's one click.

0:09:28You know, like this is a ridiculous thing

0:09:30to be able to patent.

0:09:31No, this is actually genius.

0:09:32You know, arguments on both sides

0:09:34should be able to patent an idea that's so simple,

0:09:36blah, blah, blah.

0:09:37I really do think though that that feature

0:09:40was designed for a phone that doesn't have a passcode.

0:09:44- Oh yeah.

0:09:45I mean, it was designed in kind of the pre-passcode era

0:09:48where I don't think until my iPhone 4

0:09:52that I really ever thought about having passcodes

0:09:54my devices or thought seriously about what it meant to protect the information that was on my

0:10:00device. Because the iPhone 3G and 3GS, I feel like all I had on those phones were like Twitter

0:10:06and the camera app, and I wasn't taking any pictures that were particularly sensitive,

0:10:12and I wasn't doing a ton of banking on my phone because 3G networks at that point were still slow.

0:10:17But now, I mean, you know, my 7 Plus, I feel like I can pretty much do my entire job on it.

0:10:23I don't need a computer for some things.

0:10:28- No, I think that's definitely true.

0:10:30- Yeah.

0:10:31- That's what I hear from so many people.

0:10:33But I just think we just didn't, I don't know,

0:10:36the whole industry, both on the company's side,

0:10:40like Apple's side, as the creator of this device

0:10:44and this operating system, and on the consumer side,

0:10:46and on our side as people who write about this stuff,

0:10:50the last decade has been a real eye-opener

0:10:53in terms of privacy and security.

0:10:55Like I think before that, we really only thought

0:10:57of security as security that goes through bugs.

0:11:00You know, like, oh, there's an exploit in Windows XP,

0:11:05and all you have to do is visit this website

0:11:08and code can get run locally with full privileges

0:11:11on your computer and you're in trouble.

0:11:13And that's what we thought of it as.

0:11:15As opposed to just the privacy aspects of this system,

0:11:19it doesn't have any bugs, it's working as designed.

0:11:23But if somebody picks up your phone

0:11:24and plugs it into iTunes,

0:11:25they'll just be able to see all your stuff.

0:11:27- Yeah, yeah, and it's, I mean,

0:11:31the scary thing about that

0:11:33is really the social engineering part of it,

0:11:36where even I think until really,

0:11:40we got it with Snowden,

0:11:41and we got it with even Mr. Robot of all things,

0:11:44alerting people to the idea of like,

0:11:46yeah, if people know your security questions

0:11:49a couple of facts about you, they can pretty much take over your life. Like, I remember,

0:11:52do you remember Matt Honan's piece from a few years ago?

0:11:54Pete: Yep.

0:11:55Jodi, yeah, about his password dilemmas and troubles and how basically somebody took over all of his

0:12:00stuff and like, that kind of stuff is, I think, an eye-opener for, definitely was an eye-opener

0:12:06for a lot of the tech concerted audience, but it's still, I think, making its way towards the general

0:12:11public. Where the general public is worried about security and this broad, nebulous idea,

0:12:16but they don't really think about it on a very discreet,

0:12:19you know, individual basis.

0:12:20Like talking to my personal trainer,

0:12:22if someone picks up, if you go to Africa

0:12:24and someone picks up your phone,

0:12:26they could basically steal your identity.

0:12:29No problem.

0:12:30- Right, it's true.

0:12:32- She was going to Africa, it's not just like random.

0:12:35Picking Africa, picking on Africa.

0:12:37- And I also think the iPhone, and therefore iOS

0:12:39in particular, also started on the wrong foot in some ways

0:12:43because it's in some ways I think Apple had conceived of it as as much as the

0:12:50successor to the iPod as it was to the Mac and so yes there were some you know

0:12:57some aspects of whatever you want to call the original the original version

0:13:01of iOS when I think it didn't even have a name it was called like iPhone OS

0:13:05iPhone OS yeah and they even had like marketing material that they even called

0:13:09it OS 10 it was like runs OS 10 you know they didn't know what to call it at

0:13:12first. But a lot of it was was sort of stripped out by the idea that it was sort of more like an

0:13:19iPod, which never had any real sort of security, right? You could always just plug an iPod into

0:13:25another computer and see what was on it.

0:13:27Well, you had DRM to music for a long time, or you had music, it was one way transfer, right?

0:13:32The security was really more on the the format of the files you bought from the store than the

0:13:37device itself. And you know, just wasn't a protected device. I mean, you could really

0:13:43just plug somebody else's iPhone into your, you know, your Mac and, you know, communicate

0:13:47over USB. So they've had, you know, obviously come a long way from there to here. And I

0:13:51do think that the slide to unlock just didn't really fit, you know, touch ID is slide on

0:13:57the slide to unlock for the modern secure world.

0:14:01Yeah, it's the, this is the easy way to open your phone after you've put it some level of security.

0:14:08And especially as they've rolled out touch ID to more places, including like on iOS 10, a little feature that I even noticed today is if you go into say Apple Music and you're signing into your user account,

0:14:20As long as you have Touch ID enabled for iTunes,

0:14:25you can now use your fingerprint for that.

0:14:26You don't even have to enter in your password

0:14:28in these weird random places of the OS,

0:14:31which I think was even still a thing in iOS 9,

0:14:34where there were still some areas

0:14:35where you had to type out your long complicated password.

0:14:38And now it's all like,

0:14:39as long as you're already in the system,

0:14:41you can authorize just about anything

0:14:43with a Touch ID fingerprint.

0:14:44- It does seem like I've had to type my passwords

0:14:47in fewer times.

0:14:48And it's one of the little things that it seems like,

0:14:52it's so annoying that we notice it

0:14:55when we're getting badgered by it

0:14:56and we yell at Apple for it,

0:14:58and then we don't really notice when they fix it.

0:15:00So we don't get to give them the little pat on the head

0:15:02and say, "Thank you, Apple."

0:15:04You know, and the number of times where I used to have to,

0:15:08I'd just be out and I would just get prompted

0:15:10for my iCloud password, and it wouldn't even tell me why.

0:15:14Right?

0:15:15It's just like a system-- - Oh, I know.

0:15:16It's just like this random thing.

0:15:17- Right, but it does seem to me anecdotally,

0:15:19at least for me personally,

0:15:20that I don't see that as much as I,

0:15:23almost never, it's almost never inexplicable.

0:15:25It's always got like an explanation

0:15:27and therefore I don't feel bad about it.

0:15:29So good for Apple on that.

0:15:33So before we get into the details,

0:15:35while we're on this subject, let's try to,

0:15:38I have at least one, but think about the things

0:15:41that Apple still has a lot of,

0:15:45Where are they falling short on their upgrade,

0:15:48when you upgrade devices?

0:15:50Overall, I think they're getting really good at it.

0:15:52But I'll give one example. - They are.

0:15:53- And I know this has gotta be worse for you than me,

0:15:56'cause I think you have more Apple Watches.

0:15:58- Yeah, I was gonna say,

0:15:59does your example involve upgrading to a new Apple Watch?

0:16:02- Yes, and upgrading to a new Apple Watch is the worst.

0:16:07- Yeah. - It takes forever,

0:16:09and if you forget to do it in the right order,

0:16:12you've gotta start all over from scratch.

0:16:14You just want to put like a head to the desk kind of a thing.

0:16:20It's very frustrating, especially as people who are dealing with review units, having

0:16:26certain Apple watches paired to certain devices and some of them being backups of your old

0:16:30phone and some of them not being backups of your old phone, and then trying to switch

0:16:35those watches from one device to another is pretty much impossible unless they're on your

0:16:39Apple ID and on your specific backup.

0:16:41- You're basically tied to the phone.

0:16:43And that's the thing that took me a while

0:16:46to wrap my head around,

0:16:47is like if your Apple Watch is not a separate device,

0:16:51it's your Apple Watch and your iPhone.

0:16:53And all of the backups get stored basically

0:16:57as your iPhone backups.

0:16:58So if you pair an Apple Watch to a brand new iPhone

0:17:01that you haven't restored from backup,

0:17:03and then you're like,

0:17:04"Oh, I wanna switch that Apple Watch to a backed up iPhone,"

0:17:08you're gonna be in a little bit of trouble.

0:17:10You're not gonna be very happy.

0:17:12- I find that the thing that gets me

0:17:15is the fact that you don't get your watch backed up

0:17:18until you unpair it from the phone.

0:17:22And that feels so wrong to me.

0:17:24And I don't see how any normal person,

0:17:26no normal person would ever, ever think

0:17:29that that's how it should be done.

0:17:31And even if they're told that that's how it's done,

0:17:33it doesn't look like you're doing the right thing.

0:17:37Like even if you're just, somebody says,

0:17:40here's what you do with your new iPhone.

0:17:42First, unpair your watch from your old phone.

0:17:46- Well, and the thing is-- - Then back up your old phone.

0:17:48Then restore your new phone from that backup.

0:17:51And then your watch, as you knew it, will still be there.

0:17:54And then you can repair the watch,

0:17:56and it'll go right back to where it was.

0:17:57But when you go through those steps,

0:17:59it doesn't look like you're doing that.

0:18:01It looks like you're erasing your watch.

0:18:04- Yeah, and there's no good dialogue from that box.

0:18:08And it is, I'm pretty sure the watch

0:18:10does get backed up nightly the same way

0:18:12that the iPhone does when there's an iCloud backup.

0:18:14No, it doesn't, 'cause there are intermediary backups

0:18:17that are made, however, if you want to upgrade,

0:18:21so let's say I'm going from a watch Series 0

0:18:23to a watch Series 2, and I don't unpair the watch Series 0

0:18:28before I go to the Series 2, the most recent backup

0:18:31I might find might be two, three days old.

0:18:33it's not gonna be current, which means you're not gonna

0:18:35have your move data and you're not gonna have

0:18:37your activity stuff, or it might be even older

0:18:39if the backup didn't go through properly.

0:18:42And that's really frustrating, the fact that you can't,

0:18:45and there's no way to make a manual backup

0:18:48unless you unpair it, which you were talking about,

0:18:50which is like, that is the most frustrating thing.

0:18:53Because when people Google how to backup your watch,

0:18:58and it's not how to backup your watch,

0:19:00it's how to unpair your watch,

0:19:01which also makes a backup.

0:19:04Like why couldn't there just be a button Apple?

0:19:06Like really?

0:19:07- I don't even see how you can see

0:19:09where your latest backup is.

0:19:10I don't know that you can.

0:19:11I'm looking at that.

0:19:13- The only way that you can see where your latest backup is

0:19:16is when you're pairing a new watch, which is really dumb.

0:19:19'Cause that's, I ran into that in a weird kind of,

0:19:24where I had, this is complicated,

0:19:26I had a backup of my phone,

0:19:28or I had restored an iPhone 7 review unit

0:19:31from the regular backup of my phone.

0:19:33So it was running all of my apps and everything else.

0:19:36And then I had a watch that I was doing some activity data on

0:19:41and then I switched to my Jet Black iPhone 7 Plus,

0:19:45which came in.

0:19:46And the iPhone 7 Plus, I had restored from an iPhone backup,

0:19:50but I'd restored from an iPhone backup like two days prior.

0:19:53So the 7 Plus and the 7 were two days off

0:19:58in terms of backups.

0:19:59So when I got my new, my non-review Apple Watch Series 2

0:20:03and I went to pair it with the jet black iPhone 7 Plus,

0:20:08it was only showing me Apple Watch backups

0:20:11that were two days old or more.

0:20:13Because it couldn't see that, despite the fact

0:20:16that these phones were essentially going

0:20:18to the same iCloud backup and had the same information

0:20:21on them and like had the same health data even

0:20:24because of it being in iCloud,

0:20:27it couldn't see the Apple watch backups that the iPhone seven made because in

0:20:32iCloud's mind it was an iPhone seven plus Apple watch combo and an iPhone seven

0:20:37plus plus Apple watch combo. And it's just like,

0:20:41it's, it's the same iCloud account. It's so frustrating.

0:20:46I really hope that they put some effort into that. And I,

0:20:48I'm almost surprised they haven't because I always think like, okay,

0:20:51so when people like me and you sit here and complain and it's worse for us

0:20:56because I'm on my third iPhone 7 now.

0:20:59I had two review units and the one I bought and now own.

0:21:03And only the one watch, I'm still

0:21:05wearing the review unit watch because I don't know

0:21:07what I want to buy for myself.

0:21:08But I realized that it's a tiny little violin that's

0:21:14playing sad music for us because we have this--

0:21:16We have all of these phones.

0:21:18Yeah, we have all these gadgets to play with.

0:21:21But I just can't help but think--

0:21:23and I know that they're not supposed

0:21:24to solve these problems for us because we're edge cases.

0:21:26But even normal people who just bought one new phone,

0:21:29it's terrible if you go through

0:21:31and didn't remember to unpair your watch first.

0:21:33- Yeah, or the worst part is if you're wearing your,

0:21:36yeah, if you're wearing your watch

0:21:37and it's still paired to your old phone

0:21:39and you don't think about pairing it to your new phone

0:21:41until a couple days after you've had your new phone,

0:21:44which is entirely likely because people,

0:21:46again, you treat the Apple Watch as a separate device

0:21:49for a certain period.

0:21:50It was what you were saying with the first iPhone, right?

0:21:52Where it's like, they're treating the Apple Watch

0:21:54as pretty much a separate device.

0:21:56oh, it has GPS now and you can go outside for walks

0:21:59and you leave your iPhone at home,

0:22:01but it is still tied to the iPhone.

0:22:02And that's something that's not really marketed enough

0:22:05outside of the, yeah, it uses the iPhone cellular signal.

0:22:08No, it is an iPhone accessory.

0:22:10So if it's not tied to your right iPhone,

0:22:12then everything falls apart.

0:22:13And that is something that I can see being very confusing

0:22:16for the average user and something

0:22:18that they'll just throw their hands up about.

0:22:19- Well, and the thing is that surely

0:22:21there must be a lot of people inside Apple

0:22:23who go through the same thing

0:22:24because they are using test devices.

0:22:27So that's why I'm a little surprised that they

0:22:29haven't addressed this.

0:22:31I mean, and I think it's one of the reasons why

0:22:34you are now able to have multiple watches paired

0:22:36with one phone.

0:22:38Oh, yeah.

0:22:39And part of it is that, of course, yeah,

0:22:41if you want to buy a couple Apple watches,

0:22:43Apple would love to sell you a couple.

0:22:45But I'm sure that part of the reason that it's in there

0:22:47is that some of the most likely--

0:22:48Testers.

0:22:49The most likely people to have several Apple

0:22:52watches at the same time are people inside Apple who are testing new, you know, either

0:22:56new, new software or new hardware or both.

0:22:59Yeah.

0:23:00It's got to get better.

0:23:02It absolutely has to.

0:23:03And I mean, I'm hopeful, especially as the as the watch evolves, but it's still it's

0:23:08a pain point.

0:23:09Yeah.

0:23:10And it also seems like one thing in Siri, I didn't put a stopwatch to it.

0:23:13So maybe it's just it went from really bad to sort of kind of bad.

0:23:17The wireless network speed between your phone and the watch or something is so unbelievably slow.

0:23:25It's so painful.

0:23:27I swear I was restoring this watch after I just went through this again over the weekend where I had to unpair it,

0:23:36because now I have it paired with the phone that I own myself.

0:23:39And I let it go for an hour and I came back to it and it was still on that spinning, that slow spinner around the outside.

0:23:46Oh no. I was like this is crazy. Did you restore your apps too?

0:23:51Yeah, I don't have a lot of apps on my phone. But even so, yeah exactly.

0:23:55It just it takes, when I was, I did a ton of speed tests because I got a, I got a series 2 review unit

0:24:02but I also bought a series 1 for myself and then I had my original series 0 and I was doing like cross

0:24:07crossways speed tests on all of these and the one thing like the series 2 like blows the series 0 out of the water in

0:24:15in a bunch of different ways, the original generation Apple Watch. But when it comes to

0:24:21barking talks, when it comes to the difference between like series two, series one, and the

0:24:28original generation Apple Watch and boot time or restore time, like the boot time on an Apple Watch

0:24:35series two is still over a minute. The boot time on series zero is like two and a half minutes,

0:24:41But it's still like, if I'm waiting a minute and 20 seconds for my watch to start up, problems.

0:24:48I'm going to tell you about a good friend of the show. It's Fracture. You guys know Fracture. They

0:24:51are the photo decor company that is out to rescue your favorite images from the digital ether.

0:24:57They print your photos directly onto glass and add a laser cut rigid backing so they're ready to

0:25:03display right out of the box. They even include the wall anchor. I've told you about them before.

0:25:08They've been sponsoring this podcast, in my mind, forever.

0:25:12And they're back because you guys keep buying pictures from them.

0:25:15They're just a great, great service.

0:25:17It is, it's not just, I always say this, it does not look like a piece of paper that has

0:25:23a photo printed on it mounted to glass.

0:25:25It looks like, it's like the retina display.

0:25:28It looks like the picture is somehow on the glass.

0:25:31It is an amazing feature.

0:25:32When you hang them on a wall in your house and people come in, they will say, whoa,

0:25:36because it's noticeable. There's no frame around it. It's edge to edge. It looks like nothing else.

0:25:43And they'll say, "How did you do that?" And then you'll tell them about fracture.

0:25:45One of the reasons that they're advertising right now, I know it's early. I know it's late September

0:25:51as we talk and probably as you listen. And it seems like Christmas is forever away. But these

0:25:57are amazing gifts. They really are. You could knock out a whole bunch of your family gift-giving early

0:26:04And they do tend to run late or they get backed up.

0:26:08So you won't be able to order fractures in early December

0:26:12and still get them by Christmas.

0:26:14So it's a good time to knock off a little bit of that.

0:26:18Go there to find out more.

0:26:19They have all sorts of sizes, great prices, great, great

0:26:22quality.

0:26:23And if you go to this URL, fractureme.com/podcast,

0:26:29you will save 10% off your first order.

0:26:31fractureme.com/podcast.

0:26:35And then don't forget to mention the show in their very, very

0:26:39long one-question survey, which is,

0:26:42where did you hear about fracture?

0:26:44So just mention the talk show there,

0:26:46and they'll know you came from here.

0:26:47So my thanks to fracture.

0:26:48Go do it.

0:26:49You'll thank me later for getting all your family

0:26:52Christmas gifts out of the way.

0:26:53Anything else that bothers you about Apple's upgrade process?

0:27:00like Mac, iOS, switching to a new device,

0:27:03upgrading the OS, anything along those lines?

0:27:06- Overall, I find it pretty smooth.

0:27:10The only thing that I think is a little bit frustrating

0:27:13is the, as much as I love the over-the-air download process

0:27:17for iOS, it can be very frustrating to update

0:27:21if you're on the go, obviously,

0:27:23because it's a big download.

0:27:24It's a bit, the iOS 10 download was a gigabyte.

0:27:28But the problem is, because of the way

0:27:30way that the download currently works, say I'm waiting around for my download to fit

0:27:35in, like it's update day, right?

0:27:37It's release day and I've downloaded half of the release, half of iOS 10 to my iPhone

0:27:42and then for some reason I need to go out and do an errand.

0:27:45Well, I could either leave the phone at home and at the rate that it was going maybe like

0:27:5010 kilobits a second, that would be downloaded, maybe half downloaded by the time I get back,

0:27:56Or maybe I need the phone while I'm out and about, and if I take the phone and I leave

0:28:02while it's downloading, there's no place where I can be like, pause my download while I go

0:28:07off Wi-Fi, go do my errand, and then come back and resume my download and still have

0:28:12the half of the update that I downloaded back.

0:28:15You can do that on Safari for the Mac, you can do that even with iOS apps at this point

0:28:20with pause download.

0:28:22But there's no way to do that for these big updates.

0:28:25And I realize that's, again, maybe a bit of an edge case.

0:28:29But I know a lot of people who don't end up updating to iOS 10 because they don't

0:28:34find time to.

0:28:35Even with, Apple's done a lot better with the install while I'm sleeping and

0:28:40stuff like that.

0:28:42And the auto install night, that's all really nice improvements to this feature.

0:28:48But it still runs, there are still people who, they start to install it and

0:28:54and they think it's installed

0:28:55because they started the process

0:28:56and they don't even think, oh, you know,

0:28:58if I leave my house before the install process is completed,

0:29:01it's never, it's just going to stop the install process

0:29:04and I'm never gonna get it installed.

0:29:06Like just the average user

0:29:07is not obsessive about download things.

0:29:09They just, they've gotten used to the iOS app, you know?

0:29:13I'm downloading an iOS app

0:29:15and the iOS app is gonna download wherever I am.

0:29:17Or it'll, you know, even if it can't get

0:29:19a good network connection

0:29:20or if I have cellular data turned off

0:29:22while I'm running around,

0:29:23it'll come back and finish downloading

0:29:25when I get back to my computer.

0:29:27But the update is not like that.

0:29:29So that's my nitpicky complaint.

0:29:31I can't really think of too many other ones.

0:29:33- Me neither, but I agree with you.

0:29:36Here's one thing, if we're gonna skip around,

0:29:39but if we talk about iOS 10

0:29:42and how it's faring in the real world,

0:29:44I'm hearing from, I don't wanna drop names,

0:29:48but people in the house,

0:29:52that the heavier doses of 3D touch to do things,

0:29:59or force touch, whatever they call it.

0:30:01I guess on iOS it's called 3D touch.

0:30:04It is not a welcome addition to the operating system.

0:30:09Not a welcome addition, how?

0:30:10That it's too confusing or not intuitive

0:30:14when you need to press hard and when you just

0:30:16need to normally tap.

0:30:17and that having these things that,

0:30:19like just to do the stickers in messages

0:30:24that you have to force touch on the arrow.

0:30:25- Oh yeah, to move it.

0:30:27- I see some merit in that.

0:30:32And to me, it's sort of like the old one button mouse

0:30:36versus two button mouse argument,

0:30:39where it seemed like, but maybe a little different,

0:30:44because it seemed like in the old days

0:30:47when Apple seemingly obstinately stuck to a one-button mouse

0:30:51when every single, it was a fundamental aspect

0:30:55of the Windows user interface

0:30:56that there were things you would right-click on.

0:30:58You couldn't really even properly use Windows

0:31:02without a two-button mouse, and I don't know that anybody,

0:31:05I don't even know that you could buy it

0:31:06like a one-button mouse for a PC.

0:31:09It wasn't even a thing.

0:31:11Whereas, and it seemed like everybody,

0:31:13the consensus among the nerds was that Apple

0:31:16just sticking to this out of spite. Whereas what I saw was that this is, sure, if you're

0:31:21a power user, you can go buy a two-button mouse or mouse with a scroll wheel and plug

0:31:26it in and it'll work. But for most people, all they have to do is understand click. And

0:31:31having just one type of click is fundamentally, it's so much simpler than even just having

0:31:37two types of clicks, let alone the crazy gaming mice you can buy with 20 different buttons.

0:31:43But even just going from one to two is a huge difference.

0:31:46And everybody has seen people in the real world who don't know what to click on, what

0:31:52to double click on, and stuff like that.

0:31:55Click and double click was confusing enough for some people.

0:31:59And I felt like that was part of the genius of iOS, was dialing that all the way back

0:32:03to just tap.

0:32:04Everything is a tap.

0:32:06And I think Force Touch convulates that to some degree.

0:32:10Yeah.

0:32:11we were already getting into more advanced options with things like long presses, which have existed, I don't know, at least at least four or five iOS generations, maybe more. And earlier with the with third parties, I see 3d touch a lot in the way that I see two button mice on, you know, 1990s, early 2000s Apple computers, which is, there's not really anything on an iPhone, at least that I can think of,

0:32:40where 3D touch is necessary to do a core function.

0:32:44You know, 3D touch makes it faster

0:32:47to open the battery pane in settings,

0:32:48but you can still get to the battery pane

0:32:50if you tap on settings and then tap on battery

0:32:52and then tap on low power mode.

0:32:54Like, can you think of something in,

0:32:57like I can think of stuff on the watch

0:32:59where you need force press to do extra things,

0:33:02but is there something besides maybe stickers

0:33:06where you really need a force press?

0:33:07- The messages is one where there's certain things

0:33:10that you seem to have to force press.

0:33:11And then the other thing is to interact

0:33:13with the notification widgets, right?

0:33:15It seems like-- - Yeah, well, that's true.

0:33:17But again, you can tap on the notification widget

0:33:20and it'll send you to the right area.

0:33:22- Well, I get it, but it seems like Amy,

0:33:25to just name one person, doesn't always get,

0:33:28and she seems frustrated that sometimes she thinks

0:33:33she's pressing plenty hard enough to get a force touch

0:33:36and it's not registering.

0:33:38- Yeah, well that I think is an absolutely valid complaint

0:33:41in that Force Touch sometimes works marvelously.

0:33:45And I have my Force Touch 3D Touch pressed firmly.

0:33:50I have my setting to the lightest version

0:33:53so that it will trigger almost immediately

0:33:55once I start pressing down on the screen.

0:33:57And I would say it works about 75% of the time.

0:34:00- Right, that's not good enough.

0:34:02- No, exactly.

0:34:03And it's like, I mean, it will work other times,

0:34:05but other times it requires a little bit of firmer press

0:34:07and I'm not sure if it's because there's something

0:34:10on my fingers or if it's just the screen is misreading.

0:34:13But yeah, it's a little bit frustrating.

0:34:16And the place where I notice it the most

0:34:18is turning the keyboard, if you press firmly

0:34:21when the keyboard's active, you can turn that

0:34:24into a movable cursor.

0:34:25And I use that all the time when I'm writing on iOS.

0:34:29And it was very, I don't know, very noticeable for me.

0:34:32- I would just, I will reiterate that.

0:34:34That is my favorite 3D Touch feature.

0:34:37The first time I saw it last year, I was like,

0:34:39oh, I will use that all the time.

0:34:41And then I proceeded to forget that it existed

0:34:43for weeks at a time.

0:34:44So for listeners of the show, if you take one thing away,

0:34:46if you're gonna write down an actual note

0:34:48while you're listening to us talk,

0:34:49the one thing I would emphasize is remember

0:34:51that you can force touch on the keyboard

0:34:53to make the cursor like a mouse cursor

0:34:56that you can move around.

0:34:56Because once you really do internalize that

0:34:59and you don't even have to think about it to use it,

0:35:02it is the best text editing change

0:35:05since the original iPhone.

0:35:07- Yeah, since copy and paste, quite honestly.

0:35:09I don't use the, I rarely use the loop ever.

0:35:13Like, and if you press harder--

0:35:15- If you get a notification that you want to reply to,

0:35:17like a messages one would be an example,

0:35:20Tweetbot has it now for DMs,

0:35:22you have to force touch on it to get the inline,

0:35:25don't even open the app, just let me reply right here.

0:35:28- Yeah, no, it looks like if you just tap the notification,

0:35:31it'll send you directly into the app.

0:35:33But I mean, again--

0:35:33- But you have to force touch to get that little shortcut.

0:35:35to get the short, but again, we're talking about shortcuts.

0:35:37We're not talking about things where it's like,

0:35:40or you know what, actually, I take it back,

0:35:42because if it appears at the top of the screen,

0:35:45you can drag down and it'll give you the information.

0:35:49So you can drag on it the same way that you could

0:35:51in I think iOS 9 or iOS 8,

0:35:53and it would give you the same kind of further preview.

0:35:56- If it were up to me, I think I would make,

0:35:59I think that Force Touch should only and always

0:36:03be a shortcut for a long press.

0:36:06- Yes, I agree with that.

0:36:07- So that anything that you do with a force touch,

0:36:10if you just hold there, you'll get the same thing.

0:36:13And I think that would be an accessibility win,

0:36:16'cause I think it would help for anybody

0:36:17who actually can't press hard enough.

0:36:20And I think conceptually it would simplify things.

0:36:22And I know that there are some conflicts.

0:36:25Like right now you force touch on an app icon

0:36:28on the home screen to get the list of shortcuts

0:36:30for that app, and you long press

0:36:32to get into jiggle mode where you rearrange apps.

0:36:35But I-- - That's so annoying.

0:36:36I wish you'd just do both.

0:36:38- Yeah, I think it should just be one shortcut

0:36:40and then one of the options for every app

0:36:42would be like edit dot dot dot.

0:36:43- Edit, yeah, exactly.

0:36:44- And use like an icon to indicate that,

0:36:47I'm sure there's some visual way that you could indicate

0:36:49like this is how you get into the old jiggle mode.

0:36:52It could easily be tied together like that.

0:36:56And the other one that I remember

0:36:58is if you go to the Apple Weather app

0:37:00and you go to the list of cities or locations,

0:37:05I tried to rearrange them before a trip

0:37:08to move where I was going up to be number two

0:37:11so I could always, right beneath the local,

0:37:14wherever I am, and I couldn't remember

0:37:17how to rearrange the cities for the life of me.

0:37:19I just kept force touching on them

0:37:20and it just kept opening them

0:37:22and it took me a minute to remember

0:37:24that you have to press and hold on that.

0:37:24- Wow, you have to press firmly.

0:37:27- No, not press firmly.

0:37:28You press firmly-- - Oh, no, no, no,

0:37:29- That's right, press lightly to rearrange.

0:37:32Press firmly to like pull up a pop-up.

0:37:34- Right, and if while you're waiting

0:37:37for the hold to be long enough,

0:37:38you start pressing too hard, it opens up.

0:37:40- Those little things are so frustrating,

0:37:44especially if you are somebody who goes in between

0:37:48pressing firmly and long presses,

0:37:50like trying to rearrange your app icons.

0:37:52That's kind of an exercise in frustration,

0:37:56And maybe just not enough people rearrange their app icons on a regular basis anymore.

0:38:01They just, they don't care about the way their home screen looks or, cause I feel like Apple must be getting complaints about this, right?

0:38:08Oh, I'm trying to rearrange my icons and I can't remember how to do it anymore.

0:38:11I don't know.

0:38:12It just, uh, I feel like it could be made together.

0:38:16I feel like they, you know, be like an iOS 11 change, not like an iOS 10.2 change, but I feel like long press and force touch could be unified.

0:38:25I think so. And it may, it may be one of those things where, sorry, the...

0:38:33A little more.

0:38:34Yeah. I think Rick is coming home. So they're really excited. Yeah, I think it may be something where in iOS 11, we may see a more drastic change to the home screen or something like that, where they're kind of like, we know this is a hack job right now.

0:38:52but we promise it will all go away soon.

0:38:56And I under, like, part of me understands that from a,

0:39:00okay, we're working towards a bigger objective

0:39:03and a bigger picture here, but the fact remains

0:39:05that 3D Touch has now been in an operation

0:39:07or will be in operation for two whole release cycles.

0:39:10And to say, like, this is a hand wave,

0:39:12we're gonna make it better soon for two years worth,

0:39:15that's stretching it for the average user.

0:39:18That's kind of painful.

0:39:20- It is interesting to me watching the reaction

0:39:22of people who are all new to iOS 10.

0:39:26And we talked before about the home button change,

0:39:29where you have to--

0:39:31there's no more swipe to unlock.

0:39:34Seems like at first, an awful lot of people

0:39:37objected to some of the visual changes in iOS 10,

0:39:41which I think in broad strokes--

0:39:45In terms of the new control center?

0:39:47Yeah.

0:39:47And the-- yeah.

0:39:49In a way, the widgets look more like windows.

0:39:53There's like a 3D-ness, and they're not full width.

0:39:57They have entire-- they're encapsulated.

0:40:00They're a little bubbly.

0:40:01Yeah.

0:40:02There's just a little bit more depth to the interface.

0:40:04It is-- to borrow an overused term from when iOS 7 came out,

0:40:10it's less flat.

0:40:12And not so much in a way that the actual individual buttons

0:40:16and little windows themselves have 3D,

0:40:19but that the layering of where they are in the system

0:40:22is more 3D.

0:40:22I like it a lot.

0:40:23I think it's actually, to me, it's like iOS 10 has really,

0:40:28it just shows how long it takes to get a major design right.

0:40:35And to me, iOS 10 is the one where,

0:40:38what they were thinking with iOS 7,

0:40:40they've really dialed it back up

0:40:44to the appropriate level of depth.

0:40:47- It's an iMovie 08 to iMovie 11 kind of thing.

0:40:50- Yeah.

0:40:51- I wrote a, go ahead.

0:40:53- Well, it just seems to me like people complained

0:40:55about it at first, but it seems like right now,

0:40:57as of now, everybody, now it was really just the newness

0:41:00that bothered them.

0:41:01And now they've gotten used to it.

0:41:03- Well, it's the, any time that you change

0:41:06someone's interaction path, they're gonna grumble

0:41:08about it for a little while.

0:41:09Same thing we were talking about with touch ID

0:41:12and opening the phone, where it's like the control center

0:41:14now having multiple cards.

0:41:16Initially, that was a bit of a pain,

0:41:18especially if you're dealing with sliders,

0:41:20because if you don't tap on the right place for a slider,

0:41:23you might accidentally slide the pane left to right,

0:41:26and putting things in slightly different places,

0:41:29being like, oh, I can't find this anymore,

0:41:31and where is this?

0:41:32And why does Notification Center

0:41:34still have the widget screen in it,

0:41:36despite the fact that the widget screen

0:41:37is now its own real thing on the left-hand side?

0:41:40Like there are still little bits and pieces here

0:41:43that aren't quite right, but I wrote about this

0:41:47right after WWDC in terms of the way that Apple

0:41:50has changed the visual narrative to really be about

0:41:53stacks and layers and about, you know,

0:41:55the home screen is kind of your neutral layer now

0:41:58and then apps pop up on top and you've got control center

0:42:02and notification center on top above everything else.

0:42:06And it's just, it's unified it now,

0:42:07where it actually makes sense.

0:42:09and then the lock screen is on top of everything else

0:42:11because the lock screen is basically like

0:42:12keeping you in this box.

0:42:14Like, you're opening the box, you're pressing through

0:42:17with the home button to go into this box.

0:42:20And it's, I don't know, from a purely like,

0:42:24tactile visual sense, which, odd combination of words there,

0:42:28but really, it's very pleasing subconsciously, I think.

0:42:33And initially, again, people are gonna be complaining

0:42:36about it because it's not what they were used to, right?

0:42:39But as you get used to it,

0:42:41I think it becomes more and more comfortable

0:42:43and things make sense.

0:42:45It goes from a, I'm looking for this feature.

0:42:49Oh, well, now I'm getting trained.

0:42:51I'm getting visually trained to be like, okay,

0:42:54well, apps are found by pulling something up

0:42:58or pulling from a side of the screen

0:43:00or moving from side, like there's, I don't know,

0:43:03I really like the direction they're going with this.

0:43:06- One of the things that I think

0:43:08that they got wrong in iOS 7,

0:43:10and to me, this is, iOS 10 is really where they've fixed it

0:43:15in a lot of ways, is, and this is something I think that,

0:43:19I'm willing to excuse a lot of it

0:43:20as it just takes more than one or two years

0:43:23to get a complete redesign right.

0:43:26This is one of the things I think they could have gotten

0:43:28much better right from the start,

0:43:30and for some reason whatever was in their heads,

0:43:33collectively, was wrong, was making sure

0:43:37that the visual indication of something

0:43:39that's either on or off is absolutely clear.

0:43:43And I think it was a desire for aesthetic purposes

0:43:50to not use color is what burned them in iOS 7.

0:43:55And so for example, what I'm looking at

0:43:57is the way that when you have Wi-Fi on in Control Center,

0:44:00it's just a bright, vivid blue.

0:44:02And then if you tap it to turn it off,

0:44:04it is very clearly off because it's gray and drab.

0:44:09I think that's one of my favorite changes,

0:44:11is just the way that they're way more

0:44:14willing in iOS 10 to use plops, little bits of very vivid color

0:44:20to clearly indicate state in a way that they weren't before.

0:44:24Yeah.

0:44:25I mean, the color changes to iOS 10, I think,

0:44:27have been one of the biggest improvements

0:44:31upon the flat design, because you do,

0:44:34it's like, okay, we can't use depth inside our buttons

0:44:38to show what's on, what's off,

0:44:40so let's actually use really bright, vivid, nice colors.

0:44:43And you saw them kind of experimenting with that

0:44:45in the original music app,

0:44:47but it's really come kind of full circle now.

0:44:50And you can kind of even see where they're going

0:44:53by looking at the new music app and the new maps app

0:44:55in terms of that like bolder, the bolder design

0:44:58and using bright colors for each of the entries.

0:45:01I like that so much more than just,

0:45:03here's black and here's gray.

0:45:06- All right, here's one I got like,

0:45:08it was like my most explosively popular tweet of the month

0:45:12was just the simple observation

0:45:16that the night shift button in Control Center

0:45:19has an unusual prominence and amount of screen real estate.

0:45:22- It's so large, I don't understand.

0:45:25Like, I never ever want to use this feature.

0:45:29I don't like it.

0:45:30I understand lots of people do.

0:45:33Very popular with some people,

0:45:34but I don't understand why it's so much more prominent

0:45:36than any of the five things at the top,

0:45:38airplane mode, wifi, Bluetooth,

0:45:41do not disturb, and then rotation lock.

0:45:45- Especially because night shift

0:45:46should be set automatically, right?

0:45:49- Right.

0:45:50- It's like to go at a certain time.

0:45:51- Right, if you really like the feature,

0:45:53why in the world wouldn't you have it set

0:45:54to turn on at sundown.

0:45:57- I wonder if it's a placeholder for something.

0:46:01- That's what an awful lot of people suspect

0:46:04is that it's a placeholder,

0:46:06but what is it that they think it's a placeholder for?

0:46:09- I don't know.

0:46:10- There is something, and it's not occurring to me.

0:46:13There's something that people--

0:46:14- I mean, you could argue play/pause buttons

0:46:16instead of the music having its own--

0:46:18- Well, that's the thing, that's where I'm going,

0:46:19is that there are people,

0:46:21'cause there used to be room there

0:46:22for the little playback controls.

0:46:25And people, that does seem like one change

0:46:27that I think has merit,

0:46:28and it's not just resistance to change,

0:46:31but that seems to me like real people

0:46:33are not happy with the playback controls

0:46:36being on a second screen.

0:46:38- Yeah, I don't mind it so much.

0:46:41It's just, it's the problem of discovery, right?

0:46:44Where people who are used to Control Center

0:46:46just having one pane, they pull it up,

0:46:48and they don't see the tiny dots at the bottom.

0:46:50They just see the fact that there are no music controls,

0:46:52so they automatically assume that the music app,

0:46:55just you can't control it from Control Center anymore.

0:46:57- It would be nice to be able to edit

0:47:00the Control Center though,

0:47:01to make Control Center something

0:47:03where you can configure it to be just what you use.

0:47:07- I completely agree.

0:47:09Maybe that's the placeholder for Night Shift.

0:47:12- Some people, I've also seen some people

0:47:14in response to my tweets say,

0:47:15why can't it be like Notification Center

0:47:17where you pull down from the top

0:47:19and Notification Center is full screen?

0:47:21Why doesn't control center full screen?

0:47:23Then there'd be room for everything on one screen.

0:47:25And I think that the obvious answer to that is,

0:47:29especially with the plus,

0:47:30you can't reach the stuff at the top.

0:47:33- Yeah, and-- - You know, that it's,

0:47:34it seems very clearly designed to me

0:47:37that it's meant to be reachable with one thumb,

0:47:40and then, you know, so therefore it really shouldn't

0:47:44and can't be full screen.

0:47:45- Yeah, and if you try, you can't use reachability

0:47:49when Control Center is active?

0:47:51You can with Notification Center,

0:47:52but not with Control Center.

0:47:54- Reachability is a good one.

0:47:57So I wrote in my iPhone 7 review

0:48:00that I had to turn reachability off

0:48:02because I found myself constantly,

0:48:05inadvertently invoking it.

0:48:07Anecdotally, asking around with a bunch of friends on Slack,

0:48:13A, my friends, a lot of my friends

0:48:17have run into this themselves

0:48:18and had to do the same thing, turn off reachability.

0:48:21And B, they reported that the normals in their life

0:48:26have been running into the same thing

0:48:30and that the normal people have no idea

0:48:33what the hell reachability is.

0:48:35And that it just--

0:48:36- They just don't know why their screen

0:48:38is going down halfway.

0:48:39- Yeah, a friend of the show, John Siracusa,

0:48:41said that his mom invoked it on her iPad

0:48:45and his dad fixed it by restarting the iPad.

0:48:47(laughing)

0:48:49But that it was so confusing that it looked,

0:48:52and I can see why.

0:48:53It almost seems like a drawing problem.

0:48:55Like you've run into this bizarre bug

0:48:57where the computer is drawing your screen halfway down.

0:49:00- Oh my gosh. - Have you run into this

0:49:02or no?

0:49:03- You know, I actually, I was expecting to,

0:49:06after hearing a bunch of people get really concerned

0:49:08about it with the new home button,

0:49:09and I actually haven't at all.

0:49:11Then maybe that's just because I have used reachability

0:49:16a fair amount when I've been using the plus.

0:49:18So I have figured out kind of a way to trigger it

0:49:21versus a way to just press the home button.

0:49:23The bigger problem that I've actually been having,

0:49:24and again, this is kind of a niche thing,

0:49:26but I've had a problem taking screenshots

0:49:28where I used to have no problem whatsoever,

0:49:32but because of the home button,

0:49:33I now have the same problem that I have on the Apple Watch

0:49:35where I have to press one button and then the other

0:49:38to really make sure that the screenshot takes,

0:49:40especially if I'm doing something weird,

0:49:41like taking a picture of the camera app

0:49:43while the camera app is open.

0:49:45I don't know why either.

0:49:48I don't know why.

0:49:49And subjective preference for the new home button

0:49:54versus the old home button aside,

0:49:56I find that my screenshots have like a 50% failure right now.

0:50:00Either the home button takes me home

0:50:05before the screenshot takes off

0:50:07or the power button powers off of the--

0:50:09- Turns it off and that's even worse.

0:50:11- Turns it off.

0:50:12(laughing)

0:50:13I have found the opposite though.

0:50:16I found that the only way I can get it to work reliably

0:50:18is to concentrate very hard on simultaneously post,

0:50:22very, with much concentration,

0:50:24pressing both buttons at the same time.

0:50:26- It's even worse on the plus model too,

0:50:28because it's so darn big.

0:50:30Just trying to time it is impossible.

0:50:33Like those are truly, truly first world problems.

0:50:38And not a huge deal.

0:50:40But you know, it's things that I certainly

0:50:43wouldn't be adverse to an Apple engineer looking at

0:50:46and being like, hmm, maybe we need to adjust the timing.

0:50:48- Yeah.

0:50:49Trying to think what else people are complaining about.

0:50:54Like that might be it.

0:50:55- Yeah, hmm, on the iPhone.

0:51:02I mean, people are complaining

0:51:03about the home button behavior,

0:51:05that aside, or just the feel of the home button.

0:51:07But I feel, I don't know.

0:51:08I really like the new home button.

0:51:10I vastly prefer it. - Okay, that was

0:51:11my next question. - Yeah.

0:51:13- What setting do you use?

0:51:15- Currently, I have the hardest click on,

0:51:16'cause I do like, I just like the feel of the Taptic Engine,

0:51:20so I like having kind of that rumble

0:51:24when I press in on the home button.

0:51:26But I also like kinda, Matthew Panzorino mentioned this

0:51:30in his review, and I thought that it was quite smart,

0:51:33where he was saying, "Oh, I switch the severity

0:51:36of the Taptic Engine when I'm doing things where I

0:51:39don't want to wake up my baby or I want to do, you

0:51:41know, I want to access the home button while I'm on

0:51:43a podcast and I don't want to disturb anybody.

0:51:45And I'm like, that's actually brilliant because

0:51:48there are, there've been so many times where I'm

0:51:50like, I want to test out an iPhone or test out a

0:51:52feature in the middle of a podcast.

0:51:53But, but the click on an old iPhone, especially

0:51:57if you're doing it anywhere near the mic is a,

0:51:58is pretty prominent.

0:52:00And it's, it's like a click on an old, a click

0:52:03on an old trackpad or an old mouse.

0:52:05I am still firmly in the I prefer the old the old button old button and I it's been enough time now

0:52:13uh that I think it's I think it you know I forget when did I get this when did I start using this

0:52:20it must have been three weeks three weeks yeah um but I can accept it and I've I had that feeling

0:52:26right from the start even just a day in I was like I don't think I like this I think I prefer

0:52:31or the other way, but it's fine.

0:52:33I am also on button level three.

0:52:38Other friend of the show, though, Ben Thompson,

0:52:40of Stratechery fame, he loves the new button.

0:52:44And that's where I'm going with this,

0:52:46is that it is very clear that I don't like it as much.

0:52:49Other people-- you, Ben Thompson-- like it,

0:52:52prefer it to the old button.

0:52:53Ben also is a proponent of setting one.

0:52:57He thinks that setting three is for people

0:53:00who want to fake a button and that you should go with the flow that it's not a button.

0:53:06And he likes it on setting number one.

0:53:08And so on his advice, I spent a day and a half on setting one.

0:53:12And I guess I can kind of see it, but then when I went back to three, I was like, "Oh,

0:53:16no, this is much nicer."

0:53:17No, you know, I just like tactile sensation too.

0:53:20This is the same reason why sometimes I will just open up the date picker and just play

0:53:25with it on the new models, because it's just nice.

0:53:28It's nice to feel.

0:53:29On that, I was thinking, I'm so glad you said that, because you mentioned with the control

0:53:36center, when you go to change the brightness slider, if you miss, you actually just slide

0:53:42over to music.

0:53:43They should have a little taptic feedback for the slider.

0:53:46Oh, that's a great idea.

0:53:47Like a little tick, tick, tick.

0:53:49Yeah.

0:53:50As soon as you, then you know that you've got the little, the thing that you actually

0:53:54slide.

0:53:55- Especially you already have the haptic

0:53:57in Control Center when you slide up.

0:53:59- Right. - But you don't have a haptic

0:54:00sliding side to side, so clearly.

0:54:02- It would let you know, it would confirm for you

0:54:04that you've got the nubbin or whatever.

0:54:06- I honestly think right now in iOS 10.0.2,

0:54:10I think we're on the main seed,

0:54:15taptic feedback is very,

0:54:16I don't wanna say haphazardly implemented,

0:54:19but it's very much like the engineers put in

0:54:22a bunch of potential things

0:54:24and then left out a bunch of potential other ones

0:54:26and like, let's see what sticks.

0:54:27Let's see what people like.

0:54:28Let's see if, you know, people might write and say,

0:54:31we hate all of this tactic stuff.

0:54:33But every, like there are places where I feel like

0:54:35I should have tactic.

0:54:36Like in notes, tapping on a note

0:54:39to change to the keyboard view,

0:54:40I wanted like a little, a click there to let me know,

0:54:44oh, I'm in editing view, oh, I'm out of editing view.

0:54:47Or have you, this is my favorite--

0:54:49- Well, it should feel like it comes up.

0:54:50Like in the way that when you spin the date picker,

0:54:52it feels like it's spinning in the direction

0:54:55that you are spinning.

0:54:57The keyboard, when it slides up,

0:54:59should have like a slight chunk

0:55:01that would fake the-- - Signify, yeah.

0:55:04- Like when you had a slider phone,

0:55:06and you'd, like the old Palm Pre,

0:55:09obviously when you slid the keyboard down,

0:55:11it felt like something was sliding down, because it was.

0:55:14- Well, and you have that feeling

0:55:17for control center anyway,

0:55:18so it's a haptic that's already implemented.

0:55:21- Right, it should be exactly the same

0:55:22the control center on?

0:55:24- Yeah, have you used, and this is my favorite haptic

0:55:27maybe in the system, if you go over on the digital keyboard

0:55:32and you hold down, not firm press mind you,

0:55:36just long press on say the dash button,

0:55:39it brings up a little haptic to change it

0:55:42from a dash to an end dash to an end dash to a bullet.

0:55:46And then when you're sliding between those,

0:55:48you have haptic for all of those little options.

0:55:52And that is my favorite.

0:55:54Like as soon as I discovered that,

0:55:56that made me look towards the future

0:55:58where I was saying like,

0:55:59where things are not so haphazardly implemented.

0:56:01And when perhaps we might have the battery life

0:56:04to be able to put the entire keyboard haptic,

0:56:07which I actually, I really wanna see a full haptic keyboard,

0:56:11even just as a proof of concept

0:56:12with the current haptic engine.

0:56:14'Cause I think it would actually be better.

0:56:16Not like obviously it's not gonna feel

0:56:17like a real keyboard, but I think it would be a lot better

0:56:20than people currently think it might be.

0:56:22- Yeah, I have that on the Moto X.

0:56:27This is my most, I guess I'm waiting

0:56:30for to see what Google announces next week,

0:56:32but it's the most recent Android device I bought.

0:56:35It's from December 2014, and it's the one

0:56:38that you could pick what the material on the back is.

0:56:42Remember that phone?

0:56:43- Yeah. - That's a real gimmick.

0:56:44But anyway, this phone has haptic feedback

0:56:47on the keyboard, but it has no directional sense at all.

0:56:51You know, like so whether you're in the Q at the top left

0:56:55or the M at the bottom right, it's the same tap.

0:57:00Whereas it seems like Apple's got something

0:57:02in the new phones that has a little bit of a,

0:57:05you know, X and Y axis.

0:57:07- Oh yeah, there's definitely a rotational motor.

0:57:09And you can kind of feel that even just doing 3D touch

0:57:12on the home screen, where if you tap on something

0:57:15in sort of the bottom right corner,

0:57:16that's gonna pull up a widget going upwards,

0:57:20you can actually feel it going up,

0:57:22as opposed to pressing at the top of the screen

0:57:24and having a widget going down.

0:57:26And I don't know how much of that is brain trickery

0:57:28and how much of that is actually the motor jiggling

0:57:30in a certain direction, but it's nifty.

0:57:33- I can't, I have to imagine that they looked into it

0:57:35and just, either they weren't satisfied

0:57:38and therefore didn't release it,

0:57:39or there's some, they had to have tried it.

0:57:42Because for all the things that,

0:57:44if we're gonna start putting haptic feedback

0:57:46in the OS, the keyboard had to have been on the top of the list of things to try.

0:57:52Well, that's, I think that's got to be their eventual goal. Like when they talked about

0:57:56putting the Taptic Engine way back in the first generation of the Apple Watch, that

0:58:00was my first thought is I'm like, this is, this is our slow path to getting a fully haptic

0:58:05keyboard and having that work properly. But I have to imagine that haptic is not quite

0:58:11where they want it, where they actually want to, you know, put it on the keyboard, because

0:58:15I imagine their eventual goal is to combine haptics with the pressure sensitivity of the screen.

0:58:22And really, like, in a way that what 3D Touch is currently doing, but if you can actually feel

0:58:27depth, which you can sort of with 3D Touch, but not really, and it requires a much bigger

0:58:35touch target area. But if you could feel depth on those tiny little keys, like that is potentially

0:58:40a game changer for mobile keyboards. And it's, you know, it's, it would have to be done exactly

0:58:46right or feel like gimmick. And right now the the Taptic Endon does feel a little a little static,

0:58:51but the potential is there, the potential is there. And, you know, as I said, I, I can tell

0:58:57it's not ready yet. But I still want a third party keyboard that just doesn't all have to keyboard

0:59:01just for fun. Because I think it would be a blast. I can't help but think it's coming. I do think

0:59:09I've said this many times over the years that it often matters what's tacked on five, ten

0:59:18years, fifteen years after something was created as opposed to what was there from the outset.

0:59:26The Force Touch and the haptic feedback to me has that sort of, it would be different

0:59:31and more pervasive if it had been there right from the original iPhone.

0:59:35It's like in the original iPhone, every single control,

0:59:40every single standard user interface control

0:59:43was reimagined from what that looks like on the Mac

0:59:47to accommodate the difference between a touchscreen

0:59:50with a big fat finger as opposed to a mouse and keyboard

0:59:54and a mouse and pointer system

0:59:56where you have this pixel level precision.

0:59:58So things like the date picker, right,

1:00:02where you get the spinning control on iOS

1:00:05as opposed to a dropdown menu that you get on.

1:00:08I think that if they had 3D touch from the beginning,

1:00:13every control would have some sort of haptic feedback.

1:00:17Whereas like you said now,

1:00:19it seems like half the teams went through

1:00:21and added some haptic feedback

1:00:23and some of the other teams just were like, ah.

1:00:26- Yeah, they're like, okay.

1:00:30There's pretty much no haptic feedback in music,

1:00:32for example.

1:00:33Music is another one of those that has a card

1:00:35that kind of flies up that could use it.

1:00:37But yeah, there's not a, I really think it's an early,

1:00:41we're seeing it in kind of its early days.

1:00:43And did you get a chance, there was an app

1:00:47on one of the demo phones at the event a few weeks back

1:00:50that was a music app where you could play keys.

1:00:53- Yes, yes. - Yeah, and it would,

1:00:54I have no idea what that app is,

1:00:56but I really wanna find it.

1:00:58- I might be able to get that for you.

1:01:00- Yeah, I could probably email somebody

1:01:02get that information. But I just remember playing around with that and having a light bulb go off in

1:01:10my head and being like, this is what Apple's waiting for. They're, yes, playing with it

1:01:16themselves, but what they're really waiting to see is how third-party apps take advantage of Haptic.

1:01:22And also, I imagine where they can steal. Not necessarily steal as in a bad way, but steal

1:01:28as in the pull to refresh kind of thing,

1:01:30where watch how third parties are doing it

1:01:32and see if they're coming up with better ideas

1:01:35than the internal team is coming up with.

1:01:37See if they wanna try something different

1:01:39that we've never thought of before.

1:01:41- Yeah, so I don't know what the name of it was,

1:01:43but the demo app they had put up like a piano keyboard

1:01:46that was the width of the iPhone.

1:01:47And it not only gave you the feedback,

1:01:50the feedback seemed to correlate

1:01:52to the location of the key you were pressing.

1:01:54- Yeah. - That's the main thing,

1:01:56is it really did feel like it wasn't just that the phone was clicking, it was that the key on the

1:02:01screen was clicking. Yeah, it's not just, it's not a rumble controller, it's a specificity controller,

1:02:07and, and you could change, you could change how heavy your press was, and you could feel that

1:02:14difference, which that was the really like, yeah, again, it's the, it's the pressure combined with

1:02:19haptics, which really makes this not just like a Nintendo rumble controller, but something much

1:02:25more powerful.

1:02:27Yeah. Um, let me take another break here. Thank our next

1:02:31sponsor and we'll, we'll go on from there. It's our good

1:02:34friends at back blaze. You guys know back blaze. They provide

1:02:37unlimited native backup for Mac and PC. Uh, you get started with

1:02:43no credit card, no risk, a free 15 day trial at a back blaze.com

1:02:49slash daring fireball. Uh, here's the way it works. You go

1:02:54there, you download their software, you install it, you get a nice little panel

1:02:59and system prefs, and it just starts backing up everything on your Mac to

1:03:04their servers in the cloud. Everything. It's not just like your home, you know,

1:03:08home folder or your documents folder or something like that. You don't have to

1:03:12tell it. It'll just back upload everything. And then if you have external

1:03:16drives, it backs those up too. And there is no limit, and you don't have to pay

1:03:20more to get more. You just have to wait longer for everything to upload. That's

1:03:24That's it.

1:03:25And then what do you pay once your 15-day free trial's up?

1:03:29$5 a month.

1:03:30That's it, per Mac.

1:03:32So if you have two Macs, you can back them both up.

1:03:35You'll pay $10.

1:03:36Great deal.

1:03:37$5 a month.

1:03:39No limits, unthrottled, off-site backup.

1:03:42It is such a relief.

1:03:43You will sleep so much better knowing

1:03:45that everything on your Mac is backed up somewhere off-site,

1:03:50so that if some sort of catastrophe

1:03:52happens if your Mac gets stolen, if you spill water all over it

1:03:57or something like that, you'll have an off-site backup.

1:04:01Cannot tell you how great this service is.

1:04:03I would recommend Backblaze to you

1:04:05even if they weren't a sponsor of the show,

1:04:07but I'm certainly happy that they are a sponsor of the show.

1:04:11So go check them out.

1:04:13You get a 15-day free trial.

1:04:14Backblaze.com/daringfireball.

1:04:20One time I did a read for Backblaze and I said,

1:04:23"Blackblaze?"

1:04:24(Karen laughs)

1:04:25And they, I think that's what I said,

1:04:27and they went and registered the domain.

1:04:29(laughs)

1:04:30- Just in case.

1:04:31- Yeah.

1:04:32(both laugh)

1:04:33- It's not quite as bad as your botched Microsoft read.

1:04:37- Yeah, if you go to-- - Close.

1:04:38- If you go to blackblaze.com,

1:04:40it'll just redirect you right to backblaze.com.

1:04:44So you could probably use that

1:04:45and they'll know you're coming from the show too,

1:04:47'cause I really doubt anybody else is mangled.

1:04:49(laughs)

1:04:50- The same way.

1:04:50(laughs)

1:04:52You were talking about the music app.

1:04:55I hear something that I still don't get

1:04:59about going from one phone to another.

1:05:02I don't understand how I'm supposed to get all my music

1:05:05from one to another.

1:05:06It just seems to me like every time I back up my Mac,

1:05:11here's how I do the phones.

1:05:11I do it to the Mac through iTunes

1:05:13'cause I think it's faster than iCloud.

1:05:15So I take my old phone or the review unit phone I use for two weeks, back it up to my

1:05:21Mac, and then I take the new phone and go through the initial setup and say "restore

1:05:26from iTunes" and then I connect it to my Mac and I restore it.

1:05:30And then it seems like none of my music is here.

1:05:32It's all got the cloud.

1:05:33And I don't know if it's because I'm using Apple Music, but I had all of my music.

1:05:38What I would like is to have my entire personal music library on the phone for all time and

1:05:45And then anytime I'm anywhere on an airplane or something like that, I've got all my music.

1:05:49And I would like to use Apple Music to listen to anything else that I want to listen to

1:05:53that I don't maybe don't own as a thing.

1:05:56And it doesn't seem to me like I know how to do that.

1:05:59Yeah.

1:06:00Do you understand?

1:06:01I do.

1:06:02I completely understand.

1:06:03Okay.

1:06:04But only because I've spent like practically a year troubleshooting Apple Music.

1:06:07Can you explain this to me?

1:06:09If you can explain this to me, this will be worth the entire episode of the show.

1:06:13Okay.

1:06:14So, from what I understand, when you restore from a backup of your phone, your previous

1:06:18phone had all of your music locally, or had it, or ideally that's what you want.

1:06:23Right.

1:06:24Okay.

1:06:25So, you had downloaded all of your local music previously to your previous phone, and for

1:06:27some reason it did not restore with that music.

1:06:29Correct.

1:06:30Is that right?

1:06:31Yes.

1:06:32Okay.

1:06:33So, I'm just, as a guess, because you have iCloud Music Library installed, I'm thinking

1:06:39that Apple says, well, you know, john obviously wants, you

1:06:43know, wants his apps restored. And so we're going to make a

1:06:47actually not a deep with with an iTunes backup. Now, do you do

1:06:50you still get all of your apps from the iTunes backup? Or does

1:06:53it make it download them from from the cloud, I still have to

1:06:55download them from the cloud. And there, that's the trick

1:06:58then. So that's, that's their argument there is that to make

1:07:02your iTunes backup faster, and not, you know, not stress about

1:07:06it so much, we're going to save your information and make sure that all of the data for your

1:07:11apps is all fine.

1:07:12And when you restore your apps, that data gets plugged back in.

1:07:16But we are not going to take the time to download multiple gigabytes of apps to iTunes and make

1:07:22your restore longer.

1:07:24And probably the same exact thing applies to your music where it's like, you may have

1:07:28downloaded 40 gigs of music onto your old iPhone 7 review unit, but we're not going

1:07:34to wait while 40 gigs of music is backed up to this phone or

1:07:39backed up to your iMac and then rebat and then like transferred

1:07:42back to your to your new iPhone seven that's, that's going to

1:07:45be that's going to be too long for you, you're going to get

1:07:47frustrated, it's going to take half the day. So instead, we're

1:07:50just going to say, okay, if you want to redownload that music,

1:07:53you can from iCloud music library. What I don't get is

1:07:57when you restore a when you restore a an iPhone, your, your

1:08:02apps all download automatically, I'm surprised that it wouldn't download your, redownload

1:08:08your music from the cloud, because it knows, again, it has that metadata, it knows what

1:08:11you had prior.

1:08:13So in theory, that should happen as well, if we're following that same model from the

1:08:17apps.

1:08:18But it doesn't sound like it's currently doing that.

1:08:21And that's a point of contention.

1:08:25What I will say that Apple has done that's much better this time around with iCloud Music

1:08:32library than prior. Well, A, they've made it so that if you're subscribed to Apple Music,

1:08:39your music gets uploaded to iCloud Music Library as your music. So there's no more DRM, which

1:08:44is very helpful, unless you're downloading an Apple Music song. And that also allows them

1:08:50to essentially split your library. So now there's a setting, I'm just going into settings

1:08:56really quickly so I can remember what it's actually called so I don't misquote it here.

1:09:00inside Apple Music, there's now a setting called add playlist songs. And essentially, when you add

1:09:09music from the Apple Music Library, if you don't have add playlist songs enabled, those songs will

1:09:17just go into an Apple Music playlist. So they won't, they won't contaminate your library. They'll

1:09:24just kind of hang out sort of in an in an Apple Music repository rather than messing around with

1:09:31your local library. At least that's how it worked in the beta. Hopefully it hasn't changed.

1:09:35I like that. Yeah, exactly. That was that's a really nice, like subtle thing. And I believe

1:09:40it's turned off by default. It's on online and I don't remember turning on so I don't know.

1:09:44Alright, then maybe Yeah, it might. It may have changed in the beta. But that is that is one

1:09:51option for kind of separating your two. And then also, of course, there's the downloaded music

1:09:57option. I think I feel like there was an easier way to download a bunch of albums.

1:10:05I know.

1:10:05I didn't find it. And

1:10:07well, oh, you know, I mean, it also is probably I'm like, I'm tapping on the my various albums. And

1:10:13I'm like, maybe I have all of my albums stored locally on this phone. Maybe that happened

1:10:18because I'm tapping on all of them and it says delete from library. Of course that may be delete.

1:10:24Yeah, oh yeah, download. There we go. So you can download by album and you can download by,

1:10:30no, you can't download by artist. I would just like to say download everything. Download all,

1:10:36yeah. I wonder if you can do that in the music settings. And now we're just troubleshooting on

1:10:40the air. This is great. Well, we'll look at it later. Anyway, I wish, I think that Apple Music

1:10:46is much better designed this year than last.

1:10:49I think it's a very promising sign that they got it,

1:10:53that what was so confusing last year.

1:10:56I still feel like it has a long way to go.

1:10:58- It really does.

1:10:59There is automatic, yeah.

1:11:01Optimized storage is now a toggle, which is really nice.

1:11:05So you can just keep your downloaded music

1:11:07as your downloaded music.

1:11:08- Right, and that's the feature where

1:11:09if your device is running low on space,

1:11:11it'll start removing--

1:11:15- Culling.

1:11:16calling music that you haven't played recently, which

1:11:19is a pretty good feature.

1:11:20And only stuff that you can re-download if you need to.

1:11:24Yeah.

1:11:25I really wish there was an easier way to download all music.

1:11:27It's a little frustrating.

1:11:29I still feel like at a fundamental level,

1:11:32they're trying to do away with the distinction between my

1:11:35music, my personal--

1:11:37the music collection I started building when Napster first

1:11:39collected, I first started downloading MP3s

1:11:43or turning my old CD collection into MP3s, and Apple Music,

1:11:48this thing that I pay for that has everything.

1:11:50I still-- I just want--

1:11:52I just want all of my music, which now easily fits--

1:11:55I forget how big my total music library is,

1:11:57but it used to be in the old days

1:11:59where, like when the 8 gigabyte was the big iPhone,

1:12:02couldn't have it all.

1:12:03And now it's a joke.

1:12:05It's-- I don't know.

1:12:06If I've got like 10 gigs of music or something like that,

1:12:08well, a 256 gigabyte iPhone can have it all easily.

1:12:12- And then some. - Right.

1:12:14- And then-- - And record some 4K video too.

1:12:16- Right, and so then no matter where I am,

1:12:17if I have no network access whatsoever,

1:12:19I'm in an elevator on an airplane. (laughs)

1:12:24I know that I at least have all the music

1:12:27that it's my music and I can play it all right now.

1:12:30So anyway, that's-- - That's the way it should be.

1:12:33Maybe in the, when they finally redesign iTunes, ha ha ha.

1:12:39- Yeah, maybe, I don't know.

1:12:41All right, so what did you end up buying a phone for yourself yet?

1:12:45I did.

1:12:46What did you get?

1:12:47I ended up buying a jet black iPhone 7 Plus.

1:12:50And you have it already?

1:12:51I have, well, I have it because I ordered it.

1:12:54I didn't know that Renee and I were going to be getting review units until a couple

1:13:00days before the launch.

1:13:02So I ordered mine at 3am, 3.01am on the Apple Store app from bed because I wasn't sure when

1:13:09otherwise when I would be getting a phone.

1:13:12So I just, I went ahead and I was just like,

1:13:15I really, I really, I hate, I hate the plus.

1:13:18Sorry, hashtag Mike was wrong.

1:13:21But I wanted the camera features

1:13:25and I knew that if I was going to be writing

1:13:27about the camera features, I kinda needed the bigger phone.

1:13:31But I was like, you know, I also have 14 days,

1:13:33so if I really despise the giant phone carrying,

1:13:38then I can return it and go back to an iPhone 7

1:13:41or wait like a million weeks

1:13:43to get an iPhone 7 properly.

1:13:44So I have that and then I have an iPhone 7

1:13:48and an iPhone 7 Plus that are my review units.

1:13:50So I actually have jet black iPhones in both models.

1:13:53No one come rob me.

1:13:54- You must have gotten your order in like at 301.

1:13:59That's Eastern time.

1:14:00- Oh yeah, yeah.

1:14:01I was probably one of the first people,

1:14:03at least in my Twitter feed,

1:14:04who actually got the app open

1:14:07and showing on the ordering screen.

1:14:08And I still was pushed out a week.

1:14:11Like I didn't get my seven plus until,

1:14:14I don't know, the middle of last week.

1:14:16- I think that was the first batch, I really do.

1:14:18- Yeah. - Yeah.

1:14:19- Well, they went quickly.

1:14:21I think like two people I know got them on release day.

1:14:24- And well, was it the plus size?

1:14:26'Cause it seems like the plus--

1:14:27- The plus jet black, yeah.

1:14:28- Wow, that's amazing.

1:14:29They must have really been like in the first--

1:14:31- Right on the, yeah.

1:14:33- I had a lot of trouble with the app.

1:14:35And in years past, the app always seemed like

1:14:38that was the way to go, use the iPhone app to order.

1:14:41So I switched like 10 minutes in to,

1:14:45after 10 minutes of things not going well,

1:14:49switched to the website,

1:14:50and the website actually worked perfectly.

1:14:52I just was like, bloop, bloop, bloop, new iPhone,

1:14:54bloop, bloop, bloop, another new iPhone.

1:14:56- I had no problems with the app

1:14:59once I got it to actually load.

1:15:01My initial thing was just, I mean,

1:15:04I was doing probably the horrible thing

1:15:06that no Apple server tech wants to hear,

1:15:09which is as soon as 3001 hit,

1:15:14I kept on force quitting the app and then reloading,

1:15:17force quitting, reloading, force quitting, reloading.

1:15:19It's like the horrible version

1:15:22of the command refresh on a Mac.

1:15:25And I got through probably 302, 303,

1:15:28and other people were trying to do that

1:15:29and didn't get through until 315, I think.

1:15:31- It wasn't clear if you just left the app open,

1:15:34whether it would reload.

1:15:36- Yeah, no, it's true.

1:15:37- It wasn't clear.

1:15:38My assumption was that it would,

1:15:40but since I don't know force quitting,

1:15:43I know it's gonna reload, so therefore I force quit.

1:15:45- Exactly, exactly.

1:15:46It's the same principle way back when with the live blogs.

1:15:50I don't know.

1:15:51- If they just would've printed on the,

1:15:55the store was down before they enabled it,

1:15:57if they would've just put on that page

1:16:00saying that the store is down,

1:16:01that there is no need to refresh,

1:16:03then I would have trusted them and I would have left it open.

1:16:08It also says, MacRumors--

1:16:10I don't know if you saw this this morning--

1:16:12has a report from Ming-Chi Kuo, the supply chain guru,

1:16:20that Jet Black models are suffering from a, quote,

1:16:23"low casing production yield rate," meaning 30% to 40%

1:16:27of the units that they are making

1:16:30don't pass Apple's quality standards.

1:16:33I don't think there's any difference

1:16:35between the regular size and plus on that.

1:16:37- No, no.

1:16:38Or at least there isn't anything in his data

1:16:40that was released to MacGromers.

1:16:42But what I do think, I'm not surprised by it,

1:16:46given how tetchy Jet Black is to begin with,

1:16:49and the deals with scratches and everything else.

1:16:52But specifically, I don't know if you noticed this,

1:16:55you have at least one Jet Black review model, right?

1:16:58- I have a Jet Black review model,

1:17:00and the one I bought is Jet Black.

1:17:02jet black. Yeah. The thing that we were noticing at iMore is that the unlike pretty much every

1:17:11other model of iPhone 7, there's a little bit of a, like a protrudence for the SIM card. If you put

1:17:20your finger on the side with the jet black iPhone, you've got a little bit of a bump there. Whereas

1:17:26if you do that on anything like on another iPhone 7, like on a matte iPhone 7, you don't really feel

1:17:32that so much. And I have to think that there are little bits, little things like that with the

1:17:37anodization, especially because of the way they do this and the double anodization process with,

1:17:44you know, I'm going to get it wrong if I try and describe it in detail, so I'm just going to avoid

1:17:49it. But I mean, there's a lot of technology that goes into making this phone look the way it does,

1:17:55which is honestly kind of magical in terms of like how ridiculous it ends up looking.

1:18:01If I go into full Princess and the P mode, I would claim, and I think I could do this blindfolded,

1:18:09that my review unit, iPhone 7 in Jet Black, the SIM card prudence is almost indistinguishable.

1:18:17And on this one that I now own, it is noticeable. Not like I am complaining about it.

1:18:25Not, it's not, yeah.

1:18:26But it is slightly different.

1:18:28Yeah. And I imagine all of them are slightly different. Like on my review iPhone 7, it is much more noticeable than on my 7 Plus. There's a definite cutout.

1:18:42So are you happy that you ordered Jet Black for yourself?

1:18:45for yourself.

1:18:46Sarah: Oh yeah, without a question. I was a little nervous about it initially because I really wasn't

1:18:53sure how badly it would scratch up and whether or not the material finish would be enough that I

1:19:01would feel comfortable keeping it caseless, especially with the 7+ being as massive as it is.

1:19:07But I have, you know, I've been rocking the review unit in a case because I generally try and not to

1:19:12destroy Apple's materials.

1:19:13um and then the way i treat my review units better than the ones i own and i know some of the other

1:19:18reviewers don't they're like yeah what the hell is a review unit yeah the only thing i've done

1:19:23to the the poor reviewing unit is made it film underwater a bunch of times and it seems to be

1:19:27okay good good good phone uh but yeah my my seven plus i got in jet black no regrets i love i love

1:19:33the tactile finish i've got probably i don't know i'm like the thing is i've got it i know i've got

1:19:40a ton of scratches on this thing, but unless I'm looking at it in direct light, I really

1:19:44can't see them.

1:19:45That's kind of the beauty and the curse of the jet black finish, is that in sunlight

1:19:50or in direct light, you can see every single scratch and bemoan it and cry and have it

1:19:56hurt your heart.

1:19:57But in every other lighting, and just by holding it in your hand, you can't feel the scratches

1:20:03on the casing.

1:20:05You can't really notice them and even in direct sunlight, it just, it looks, again, it ages,

1:20:13it's starting to age well, as opposed to just looking like, I could have seen a version

1:20:18of this, maybe not an Apple phone that had a sort of this kind of aluminum anodization,

1:20:24where the second you get a scratch, you can start to see like the aluminum under the black

1:20:29casing and it starts feeling really weird and just not not ending up being a good experience

1:20:35but I'm I'm pretty impressed in how they've ended up doing that was the problem that people

1:20:39had with space black on the the iPhone five oh it was just scratching that way they called

1:20:47it did they call it space black I think so it was either you might have just been black

1:20:52it might have been before the era of space blank whatever it was I liked it but it when

1:20:56- When it did scratch or flake,

1:20:58especially around that beveled edge,

1:21:01it did show the more naturally aluminum color underneath.

1:21:06And I do feel like they've gone back to these dark colors

1:21:11because they've got it down now

1:21:13where the anodization layer is deep enough

1:21:17that even if you get a scratch,

1:21:18the scratch is still the same color as the...

1:21:20- The regular, yeah. - The virgin device.

1:21:26- Yeah, I remember an Apple spokesperson talking to me

1:21:29about having the anodization,

1:21:31doing a double coat of anodization

1:21:33and having one of them seep into the pores of the aluminum,

1:21:36which may or may not be an actual description

1:21:38of how the process actually works,

1:21:40but I can definitely believe that idea.

1:21:43And we did, I will say, RIP Rene's review unit,

1:21:47because he did drop it a couple of times

1:21:50into water at semi-high velocities,

1:21:53and there's a little bit of a chipped corner

1:21:56on one of the phones.

1:21:57And that one, the very visible chip

1:22:01does have a lighter aluminum look to it

1:22:03than the just normal run-of-the-mill scratches.

1:22:07But I think that's to be expected.

1:22:08If you physically smash a corner of your phone

1:22:12into pavement, you're probably not gonna retain

1:22:15that beautiful finish.

1:22:16But the screen didn't break, so.

1:22:18- It is a finish.

1:22:19I mean, it's not magic.

1:22:20It's not like they-- - No.

1:22:21- Well, I don't know, maybe there's something.

1:22:23Maybe they could make black aluminum, but it is a finish,

1:22:26not just like the metal itself is that color.

1:22:29I am 100% convinced I've made the right call

1:22:32for me personally.

1:22:33It took me a long time though.

1:22:34Even when I recorded a week ago with Jim,

1:22:36I was still on the fence as to whether it was the right move.

1:22:40But now I'm convinced.

1:22:41And I really don't even care what it looks like

1:22:43after a year, even if it's all scratched up.

1:22:45The feel alone is enough for me because I've always been,

1:22:51I mean, it's starting with the five even,

1:22:54five, five S, six, six S.

1:22:57So for four generations, I've always been a little unhappy

1:23:01with the slipperiness of the aluminum back.

1:23:03And it was particularly bad with the iPhone six.

1:23:07And anecdotally broken, backed up by the fact

1:23:09that the iPhone six was the one and only iPhone

1:23:12I've ever cracked a screen on.

1:23:14- Yep.

1:23:15- And I remember last year with the six S asking,

1:23:19When I got the review unit and had the briefing, I said, "This feels more tactile to me.

1:23:28Did you guys change something, or is it just that my personal old iPhone is worn?"

1:23:34And they denied it.

1:23:35They said, "Oh, that's interesting."

1:23:37It's like the weird way that when Apple doesn't want to talk about something, they won't say

1:23:42you're crazy.

1:23:43They'll say, "It's interesting you would say so."

1:23:44No, I don't think we've done anything.

1:23:47But I think they did.

1:23:48disclose right and I just think that they didn't want to say that the old one

1:23:52was slippery so they didn't want to say the new one is less slippery but it

1:23:56clearly was to me and it seems like everybody I know who's had both backs it

1:23:59up but the difference with Jeff black is just night and day it's it's oh yeah

1:24:03it's just not slippery at all and that to me is like it it just feels so much

1:24:09better coming in and out of my pocket I found so much more certain that I'm not

1:24:12going to fat finger the the phone then it's worth it somebody posted a picture

1:24:18on Twitter the other day showing their old, either very

1:24:22original or first or second year iPod.

1:24:26Oh, yeah.

1:24:27I forget who posted the picture, but the back of the iPod

1:24:30was a very shiny, polished, mirrored aluminum.

1:24:34And they all got scratched to hell.

1:24:37Oh, yeah.

1:24:38The original case.

1:24:39Right.

1:24:40That nobody complained.

1:24:42We've gotten to the point now where--

1:24:44and if your personality type is the such

1:24:47that the idea of these quote unquote micro abrasions

1:24:50bothers you, it seems to me that's very clearly half

1:24:53of the reason why they have the regular black in addition

1:24:56to jet black.

1:24:57I think the other half being the aforementioned production

1:24:59problems with jet black.

1:25:02But if you're bothered by the idea of an easily

1:25:05micro abrasioned finish, don't get it.

1:25:10Yeah, no one is forcing you to get the jet black iPhone.

1:25:14But if you don't care so much about resale value

1:25:17And I think that is a big concern for folks,

1:25:19especially overseas, is, you know,

1:25:21I'm gonna get this phone, but I'm gonna keep it

1:25:23in pristine condition for a year,

1:25:25and then able to resell it.

1:25:27And once the Apple upgrade program, I think,

1:25:30floats out to more countries and more areas,

1:25:35that will become less of an issue, maybe, possibly.

1:25:39Although, I mean, still, you're talking about reselling

1:25:41into the gray market, which is a whole different question.

1:25:44But that's the only reason why I could think

1:25:46to avoid the jet black or to get the jet black

1:25:49and then immediately put it into a case.

1:25:51'Cause you can.

1:25:52My review unit, my iPhone 7 jet black,

1:25:55has basically been in a Sena case

1:25:57since the day I got it, or the day after I got it,

1:26:00and it has maybe one or two scratches on the back,

1:26:05and then the one night that I kept it out of its case

1:26:09to do some photo tests, this is my own damn fault.

1:26:16I had also gotten a brand new nylon band,

1:26:19and I had taken it out of its, you know,

1:26:21out of the packaging from the Apple store,

1:26:23and I'd put the nylon band in my pocket,

1:26:26and I put the iPhone 7 in my pocket,

1:26:28and the nylon band's buckle rubbed up

1:26:31against the front upper corner of the poor iPhone 7.

1:26:34So it has this now very, very smoothed in set of scratches

1:26:39from that nylon band buckle

1:26:42just kind of etching its way in there.

1:26:45And it doesn't, again, you cannot tell

1:26:47that it's scratched at all unless you catch the light.

1:26:50And then it's this like circle of doom here.

1:26:54But otherwise, you know, eh, it looks fine.

1:26:56- I do feel that the term microabrasion,

1:26:59it's slightly euphemistic, but I feel like it's warranted.

1:27:01'Cause for me, the definition between a scratch

1:27:04and a microabrasion is these microabrasions,

1:27:06and this is all I've seen on both of the ones I have here,

1:27:09are exactly like you said.

1:27:10You have to catch the light at the right angle

1:27:12and look for them, and then you can see them.

1:27:14but you can't feel them with your skin

1:27:17and you can't even feel them with like your fingernail.

1:27:19And to me, a scratch is something that you can see

1:27:23in regular light and/or something that you can feel

1:27:28with your skin or your fingernail.

1:27:30- Mm-hmm.

1:27:31There's a, I got a scratch on my iPhone 6S Plus

1:27:36on the screen that is very noticeable.

1:27:38That's like a fingernail type scratch.

1:27:41And I, you know, this, I've put the 7 Plus since I got it through some fairly hefty, like, it was out on the beach doing some photography for my upcoming Apple Watch review.

1:27:51And I managed to walk away from this thing not only being near the beach, but also being dipped in the water and like swum around with sand particles and dust particles and everything else.

1:28:03And it came out of it pretty much pristine.

1:28:06So I really think that although the yield rate may be low on the jet black, it's probably for a good reason.

1:28:13And I kind of feel for Apple's shipping department and their production lines, because I'm sure having the yield rate below is a pain in the ass for their profit margins and everything else.

1:28:25But it's resulting in, hopefully, a much better overall product for people when they finally get them into their hands.

1:28:30Yeah.

1:28:30And I've said this before, I will probably say it again all year long.

1:28:34I actually feel bad for regular black because I love it.

1:28:38I love the regular black. - Oh, it's gorgeous.

1:28:39I almost got it.

1:28:40- I wish that they'd come out with it a year ago

1:28:42so that I would have had a year

1:28:44where I got to use the regular black

1:28:46because I like it so much more than Space Gray's sort of,

1:28:49am I dark, am I light, eh, sort of in the middle.

1:28:52- Shrug.

1:28:54- I really feel bad that this new finish

1:28:57that I absolutely love that I didn't,

1:29:01I'm not gonna actually own.

1:29:03Here's my hope.

1:29:03My hope is that they bring the exact same flat black aluminum

1:29:07finish to the MacBook Pro.

1:29:09Yes.

1:29:10I would love that.

1:29:11And I do-- I really like the flat black aluminum.

1:29:13I thought that was the phone that I

1:29:15was going to get until I touched the Jet Black.

1:29:17And I think yield rate and cost aside,

1:29:21even if it was the exact same yield rate and cost for Apple,

1:29:24I think Jet Black would be wrong for the MacBook Pro.

1:29:28I feel like you're--

1:29:31You know, like, okay, so there's fingerprints that you can wipe off on this, but the fingerprints

1:29:35are always pointed away from me, right?

1:29:37You know, on the back of the phone.

1:29:40Whereas like on the palm rest on your MacBook, I think it would be really ugly.

1:29:45Well, also, you remember the—I think about Apple's history with black laptops, and

1:29:50I think about the Wall Street, and I think about the black MacBook, and all of those—I

1:29:54mean, have they ever really made a glossy computer aside from the iBooks outer shell?

1:29:59No, I don't think so.

1:30:01I just think it's I think it's glossy is just wrong for a Mac

1:30:04book. Yeah, it just doesn't feel right. So that's my hope. My hope

1:30:07is they bring that that that same black to the MacBook Pros

1:30:10and then I'll get to own it.

1:30:11Yeah, oh, for sure. That's I would I would buy a new black

1:30:16Mac laptop in a heartbeat.

1:30:18I would buy what I'm so superficial. I would buy one.

1:30:22Even if it didn't have any if it was like, Whoa, what's going on?

1:30:25Exactly the same. This is a two year old Intel CPU.

1:30:29It's black.

1:30:30It's mine.

1:30:31Let me thank our third and final sponsor.

1:30:37I still have more I want to ask you about,

1:30:39but it's a good time to break.

1:30:41I want to thank Automattic.

1:30:44Automattic makes the little adapter.

1:30:47It's like a dongle, a dingus.

1:30:48It's like a little dingus, and it turns your car,

1:30:51whether it's new, whether it's kind of old,

1:30:54into a smart, connected car.

1:30:57Every single car made since like 1997

1:31:00has this standard port somewhere under the dash.

1:31:05And it's where, when you go to the mechanic,

1:31:07or you go to wherever you go to get your car inspected

1:31:10and stuff like that, they plug in.

1:31:12And it's a standard adapter.

1:31:13And it's where they get all the diagnostic information

1:31:15from your car's computers.

1:31:18Automatic is a dongle that you plug in there on your own.

1:31:22You plug it in yourself.

1:31:23And it gives you so much more information about your car.

1:31:26You probably didn't even know your car could give you this information.

1:31:29I've had one for a while.

1:31:31I love it.

1:31:32It's great.

1:31:32That's the old one though.

1:31:33They have a new automatic has just launched automatic Pro.

1:31:37It is their new unlimited 3G car adapter, which has no monthly fees or

1:31:42subscription.

1:31:43So if you think that's too good to be true.

1:31:45Well, Amazon's been doing the same thing with Kindle for a while where you

1:31:48can get a 3G Kindle and you don't pay for the 3G service.

1:31:52I don't know how they worked out this deal, but they worked it out.

1:31:55So now, you're automatic.

1:31:56You plug it in your car.

1:31:57It's got 3G networking.

1:31:59You don't pay.

1:32:01It's just built into the price of the device.

1:32:03And then you can do things like if you forget where you parked,

1:32:06or if you share a car with somebody else in your house

1:32:09and you don't know where they parked, just launch the app

1:32:12and it'll tell you right where the car is.

1:32:15They have so many things in the app.

1:32:17It's obvious stuff like your gas mileage

1:32:20and what kind of miles per gallon you're getting.

1:32:23and it can give you tips on how to drive to be more efficient

1:32:26with stuff like that.

1:32:28But you can totally nerd out with automatic.

1:32:31They connect to IFTTT so you can get almost endless

1:32:35customization.

1:32:37Just things like connecting to-- if you have a Nest thermostat

1:32:40at your house or Amazon Echo, you

1:32:42can do things like once your car is within five minutes of home,

1:32:46change the temperature in the house.

1:32:48You don't do anything.

1:32:49You just set it up, and then it happens automatically.

1:32:53It is really, really great.

1:32:55And it's just amazing because there's no monthly fees

1:32:58or anything like that, not just for the cell service,

1:33:00but for the device.

1:33:01You just buy it, own it, and you use it for free.

1:33:05It is so great.

1:33:07What a great deal.

1:33:07Normally, it costs $129.95.

1:33:10So let's call it $130.

1:33:13Use this exclusive offer code, though, the talk show,

1:33:19and you will save $20.

1:33:21So go to automatic.com/thetalkshow,

1:33:26automatic.com/thetalkshow.

1:33:28And you can get this cool device and save $20 at the same time.

1:33:35Really, really just a great, great product

1:33:38at an unbelievable price.

1:33:41You can even-- even has Apple Watch support.

1:33:44Unbelievable.

1:33:45So go check them out, automatic.com/thetalkshow.

1:33:48talk show. You've been doing a lot of stuff with the cameras, you and Renee,

1:33:53with the iPhone. And I saw last night, I think it was last night, but it was

1:33:57certainly over the weekend, where you were doing like product review

1:34:02photography of Apple Watch. And had, what did you say? It was like you did a

1:34:07glider? What was it that you were talking about? Oh yeah, yeah, so a slider.

1:34:12So yeah, with a, and actually I didn't even know this was the

1:34:16professional term for it until we were filming with Michael Fisher, who used to work for

1:34:22pocket now someone and now works on his own YouTube channel. And he brought these big

1:34:28giant slider rigs to put his camera on which are basically exactly what they sound like

1:34:32where you put your camera on a on a big like horizontal thing. And then you move your camera

1:34:39all along the slider reel while you're while you're filming. And it and it makes for those

1:34:44like beautiful nice pans that you see in product videos or like this the slow zooms the you know

1:34:53it basically it's like a it's like a tiny steady camera rig for the for the ground or for a table

1:34:58and I don't have any of that equipment because I do some videography but I'm not you know I

1:35:08generally am only doing videos for specific events. And I think it was last year when we

1:35:16started experimenting with the idea of could we shoot a review video on a phone, I did the iPhone

1:35:236s review entirely on my iPhone as a fun, like, just a throwback after Rene did his official

1:35:31review and in order to shoot like those beautiful like pretty device shots I'm

1:35:38like well I can't shoot this even with my I have like a couple of different

1:35:41pseudo steady cam rigs for the phone and even with those rigs I can't shoot a

1:35:47nice slow pan without it looking jittery and too much for Final Cut to fix and so

1:35:54while I was filming this stuff I had kind of an epiphany last year and I'm

1:35:57like, Wait a second, what if I shoot in slow mo. So I flipped

1:36:04over to the slowmo slider and I made sure it was I think it's

1:36:06like 120 frames per second 1080p and then just shot the same the

1:36:12same pan, but shot it in slowmo with my rig. And when you play

1:36:16it back in slow motion, it looks almost identical to using those

1:36:21sliders.

1:36:22I I've just done it. I've put a link to your tweet with it, which

1:36:25has the video in the show notes, and people can go.

1:36:28I was blown away, honestly.

1:36:31Part of it is that I'm an idiot, and I still run a website.

1:36:35It's 2001, and there are no videos.

1:36:40But--

1:36:41Probably for the best.

1:36:42I feel like one of--

1:36:44it made me realize that I wouldn't have a reason

1:36:47to do it for that, like a product review

1:36:50shot of Apple Watch.

1:36:51But I realized, looking at that, that I'm vastly

1:36:54underusing slow motion video in period, just for my personal use.

1:36:59It's like it hasn't really gotten into my head

1:37:02that I have an amazing slow motion camera,

1:37:06and that it can make all sorts of things interesting.

1:37:10I tend to only think of the most obvious thing,

1:37:12like catching my kid at the beach jumping off a rock into the ocean.

1:37:18Well, shoot that in slow-mo.

1:37:20That'll look cool.

1:37:21But that's the most obvious-- that's the first thing everybody thinks of.

1:37:24That's your traditional slow-mo shot.

1:37:26Right.

1:37:27You can get, like, for just shooting a panorama

1:37:30or something like that, I think it smooths out

1:37:32the motion in an amazing way.

1:37:34It's just unbelievable to me that this video in your tweet

1:37:37was shot with a phone.

1:37:39I know.

1:37:40Without some kind of complicated tracking rig,

1:37:44slider, whatever they call it.

1:37:46It really is amazing.

1:37:48And on top of that, that particular shot,

1:37:50that was shot freehand.

1:37:51That wasn't even shot with a stabilizer rig or anything.

1:37:55That was just shot with my hands next to a--

1:37:58- That doesn't make any sense to me.

1:37:59I mean, it's amazing.

1:38:01- Yeah, it's--

1:38:01- It's a really, really great shot.

1:38:05- Thank you.

1:38:05I have really been having a ton of fun with these cameras,

1:38:09not only with the 7 Plus and portrait mode

1:38:11and all of that stuff, but even with video,

1:38:14I think one of the things that people are discounting

1:38:18is that the iPhone 7 with optical image stabilization

1:38:22becomes pretty great for low light photography,

1:38:25but becomes amazing for video all of a sudden.

1:38:28Like the iPhone 7 is now a camera

1:38:30that I feel as comfortable shooting with

1:38:33as I did with my 6S Plus,

1:38:36which prior to that, the 6S Plus was the only thing

1:38:38I would use to film anything with,

1:38:39because it looked too shaky

1:38:43and it didn't have the same,

1:38:45you know, the right temperature and color tone that I wanted because the OIS just, you know,

1:38:51it wasn't there. All it had was digital image stabilization. And now that the 7 has that,

1:38:55that's a huge step up for anybody who wants to shoot video. And then you combine that with the

1:39:01f/1.8 aperture on the wide angle lens, and it means that you can shoot video in lower light

1:39:06situations. It means that your slow-mo in lower light situations is going to look better. And

1:39:11that's even that's even a almost a bigger deal. Because 240

1:39:15unfortunately, their 240 frames per second slow motion is still

1:39:19limited to 720p, which is kind of a bummer. I was kind of

1:39:22hoping that they would bump up maybe, maybe we'd see 4k slow

1:39:25motion this year, but it's you know, there's only so much only

1:39:30so much you can do with a with a tiny, tiny sensors.

1:39:33Well, 4k is a big jump. I just getting it is getting the 240

1:39:37frames per second at 1080 would be

1:39:38Oh, well, exactly, exactly. I was hoping that we saw everything move up slightly once, so maybe

1:39:43we got 4K at like 60 frames per second, right? And then we got, we still have 1080 at 120 and

1:39:49maybe 1080 at 240 would have been really nice to see. But even so, you can do 720p at 240 frames

1:39:59per second now, and in a dark room, that used to be a non-starter. It was just, you know, I would

1:40:05try and film, I used to do roller derby tests all the time for slow motion. And the 240 frames per

1:40:12second option just was just no, it wouldn't work in a dart in any kind of like indoor practice

1:40:17space. And now it's a legitimate option. It's still not great because it's 720p. But you can

1:40:22actually you can use it without feeling like it's the worst thing that you've ever done in your life

1:40:27with a camera. I mean, that's not exactly high phrase, but it's, there are some definite

1:40:34advances that come with both OIS on the 7, but also that larger aperture on both the 7 and the

1:40:417 Plus. And the zoom feature, did you, you linked to Austin Mann's adventure in Rwanda.

1:40:47If you watch that video, they shot that entire video on 7 Plus, which was kind of amazing to

1:40:57sort of imagine. But on top of that, they did several times during the shoot, they had video

1:41:04where they actually sort of jumped, not even a rack focus, but like, jumped from the 1x lens to

1:41:13the 2x lens. And there's a little bit of software stutter in between the two, but overall it's a

1:41:19really cool way to snap onto a subject and something that I wouldn't be surprised if we

1:41:26we saw that got used more often in photography.

1:41:29- Yeah, it's, it is, well, I'm trying not to talk it up

1:41:34because I'm not gonna use a plus personally.

1:41:36(laughing)

1:41:38It hurts my heart to talk about.

1:41:39- You don't wanna talk about portrait mode

1:41:41and all that fun stuff? - I do, I do.

1:41:42(laughing)

1:41:44Gotta be a big boy.

1:41:45If I'm gonna use the small phone, I've gotta face up to it.

1:41:49No, but it does, it is one of those things

1:41:50where I thought, oh, but this doesn't even work

1:41:52midway through a video.

1:41:53But it does, and it is pretty cool.

1:41:58I do think-- sometimes with the camera stuff,

1:42:01it's like when you get all nerdy and start

1:42:03listing the technical specs.

1:42:06Everybody knows megapixels.

1:42:08I think it's finally gotten through to almost everybody

1:42:10that megapixels is not a simple--

1:42:13the bigger the number, the better.

1:42:15Quantity versus quality.

1:42:16And the factor's like noise, because you

1:42:21You have more of these, you know, more light,

1:42:23you know, having fewer pixels,

1:42:24but having the pixels on the sensor be bigger

1:42:26so they each soak up more light is actually way better

1:42:29than having more pixels.

1:42:30And even if your goal is to blow the picture up real big,

1:42:34you'll get a better image.

1:42:35Optical image stabilization is one of those things

1:42:39where it just, you know,

1:42:40everybody can kind of figure out what it means.

1:42:42It's, you know, it's a very clear term

1:42:44and, you know, like the illustration that Apple uses

1:42:46where they show the little lens sort of bouncing on a,

1:42:49you know, little suspended thing.

1:42:50You get it, but the practical effects of it

1:42:53are so dramatic, especially for video.

1:42:56'Cause like on a still photography,

1:42:57you don't really, you may not know

1:42:58that optical image stabilization helped

1:43:00because it just means you can get a clear picture

1:43:04with less light, but you may not realize,

1:43:06you don't have to realize that it is.

1:43:07But with video, it really is a very clear difference.

1:43:11In typical just consumer fashion,

1:43:14like you're at the soccer game for your kid

1:43:19and you're just holding the phone out in front of you

1:43:22and panning it, or if you're walking, especially walking,

1:43:26and even if you try to keep it stable,

1:43:29the motion that you get without optical image stabilization

1:43:33when you shoot video is really distracting visually.

1:43:38It just looks unprofessional.

1:43:39And the difference with OIS is so dramatic.

1:43:42It's not like, oh, it really improves it a little bit.

1:43:45it really does make it look like you've got a steady cam.

1:43:49Like maybe you're not the world's best steady cam operator,

1:43:51but it does look like your phone is, you know,

1:43:53somehow floating through the air.

1:43:55- It's really remarkable, both in the shots

1:43:59that we did for the iPhone 7 review

1:44:00and also the shots that I was having Rick help me with

1:44:03for the Apple Watch review.

1:44:04There were a couple of shots where, again,

1:44:06he's free handing, walking backwards on a bike path

1:44:09while I'm talking.

1:44:10And I get the, I take the initial video of that

1:44:13and put it into Final Cut Pro.

1:44:14And I'm like, I'm going to click the stabilization button and then I actually watch the video

1:44:19and I'm like, this doesn't even need stabilization.

1:44:21That's ridiculous.

1:44:22That's not fair.

1:44:25We've come so far.

1:44:26And especially, I remember the first time I got to play with a phone that had OAS, which

1:44:32was the 6 Plus, I believe, was the first one.

1:44:35Shooting video on the 6 Plus, specifically with Derby, and shooting video while being

1:44:43on roller skates and shooting somebody on roller skates, despite the little tiny bumps

1:44:48that happen when you're rolling on unpaved or badly paved concrete, it looked like I

1:44:54was basically running a $700 rig.

1:44:57And I remember two years before that when I actually had a Steadicam rig for the iPhone

1:45:034 that I had gotten from Steadicam as a review unit when they were trying to market Steadicam

1:45:11for the iPhone and thinking this iPhone, this iPhone 6 Plus shoots better, more stable video

1:45:21than the $200 steady cam rig that I was playing around with all those years ago. And that's crazy.

1:45:29Dave: Being a dedicated 4.7 inch iPhone user, not liking the plus size, it bothered me a lot more

1:45:35last year when the Plus got OIS for video than it did in the previous year

1:45:41where the Plus did have optical image stabilization but only for stills.

1:45:46It bothered me way less because I've, you know, shot enough low-light stuff, you know,

1:45:51amateur style in my life where I know the tricks like resting the camera on a

1:45:57table or something so that it's not just my hand, you know, in low light like ways

1:46:01to keep the camera as still as possible to do that.

1:46:06I'm not saying my little resting the camera on something

1:46:10to hold it stable is as good as OIS,

1:46:11but I felt like I could compensate for stills.

1:46:15But for video, there's no way to simulate it.

1:46:19It's a fantastic, fantastic feature.

1:46:21I see people posting, I mean, I see people just posting,

1:46:25just typical, not really thinking about it,

1:46:28I've got my camera, I'm just gonna quick shoot a video

1:46:30this weird thing I just saw in this, you know, here's a weird thing I saw on the sidewalk.

1:46:35The video looks so much better stabilized.

1:46:37Mm hmm. And well, and on top of that, you think about how iPhones have been used to

1:46:42cover news breaking events, things like that. Yeah, you know, for someone to be able to

1:46:48pull out a phone at a rally or, you know, God forbid watching somebody get hurt by another

1:46:53member of society and be able to film that and have that that footage is now broadcast

1:46:58It's 4K. That's pretty impressive.

1:47:01The two biggest differences, I think, as consumer cameras have gotten to be so good at high-def video,

1:47:06the two biggest differences between professional footage and amateur footage is stabilization and focal length.

1:47:13Yeah, lenses.

1:47:14And that's still where the Plus has the advantage where people, if somebody's shooting a breaking news event

1:47:19but they can't get close for whatever reason, they can switch to 2X mode and get a dramatically different picture.

1:47:24different picture. But when they do that, I don't think there is no OIS on the 2x mode, right?

1:47:29Katie Grant No, there's no OIS on the telephoto. So it's a it's much shakier, both in, you know,

1:47:34in still photo and video. But it is pretty remarkable. Like, you know, I've been playing

1:47:39around a lot with the zoom. And digital zoom is still digital zoom, it's not going to, you know,

1:47:45blow the doors down anything when you start shooting at five or 10x. But the fact remains

1:47:50that you can now shoot at 5 and 10x both in still photographs and video.

1:47:58And even though the video, again, you're going to have fuzzy video at like very fuzzy video

1:48:02at 10x, but you're going to have the ability to focus on that like tiny thing that you're

1:48:08zoomed into.

1:48:09Whereas if you were just shooting at like 1x and then tried to blow it up artificially

1:48:13later you were going to get a much fuzzy picture.

1:48:17And being able to shoot at 10x, like I thought this was going to be complete garbage and

1:48:21I was never going to use it.

1:48:23And I'm still, you know, it's still not great.

1:48:26But for things like we were just talking about, for things like news broadcasts or breaking,

1:48:31you know, important things, you can get a legible picture at 10x.

1:48:36It's not going to be a great picture.

1:48:37It's not going to be a picture that I'd really want to put on the news.

1:48:40But it is a legible picture.

1:48:41You can see what's happening.

1:48:43Yeah.

1:48:44It's an impressive difference.

1:48:46in the same way that before we had the second lens

1:48:49that you could shoot at 2x and you knew it was digital,

1:48:51but you know, and you couldn't get it exactly

1:48:54'cause I didn't show you exactly,

1:48:55but you know when you pinch that you're,

1:48:57you're not really pushing your luck

1:48:59with digital zoom too much.

1:49:01You know, you could get closer to something

1:49:03and it was usable, but now by starting

1:49:05with that telephoto lens, it's really amazing.

1:49:09- Yeah, it is.

1:49:10I guess I should clarify on video,

1:49:12you can only go up to 6x,

1:49:14but it's equivalent to the framing of 10X

1:49:18because video's pushed in.

1:49:20- Cropped sensor, et cetera, et cetera.

1:49:22So, portrait mode.

1:49:25- Portrait mode.

1:49:26- This is the part where I'm gonna start crying.

1:49:29- Well, you got to play with it this weekend, right?

1:49:33You were playing with it on your review unit?

1:49:35- When did I put it on, Friday or Thursday?

1:49:37I think it was last Thursday I did.

1:49:38- I saw your Flickr photos of Jonas.

1:49:42And some of them turned out great.

1:49:44And it's sort of a no-lose situation by default,

1:49:47because it shoots--

1:49:48You got both.

1:49:50It shows-- by default, you get both.

1:49:52And so if it does something undesirable with your image

1:49:56by blurring something that probably shouldn't have been

1:49:58blurred or putting-- sometimes your heads look like there's

1:50:01a halo around them.

1:50:03Edge detection on hair is sometimes imperfect.

1:50:05The worst case scenario is you just

1:50:07delete the one with the depth effect,

1:50:09you've still got the no, nothing fancy was applied. This is just the image you shot with

1:50:14the camera picture. And it also the fact that it does both really does make it fun to compare

1:50:21if you want to nerd out and try to figure out how the heck they're doing this.

1:50:25Yep. And you're like, oh, which is which is blurred and how much is blurred. And it was

1:50:29interesting because I did a ton of tests of this that my first thought as soon as it became

1:50:34live is that the beta was the developer beta was I think live on.

1:50:38or Wednesday because the public beta was live on Thursday.

1:50:43And so when I downloaded it, my first thought was,

1:50:46well, you know, Apple keeps joking

1:50:48that it's gonna compete against it,

1:50:50or that it looks, you know, at small scale at least,

1:50:53indistinguishable from a DSLR, so I'm like,

1:50:55well, let me just take my entry-level DSLR

1:50:57and shoot comparison photos.

1:51:00So I shot the same like 12 photos side by side,

1:51:03one with a Canon Rebel XTi

1:51:05with a 40 millimeter 2.8 portrait lens

1:51:09and one with portrait mode on the 7 Plus.

1:51:12And you know, it's not, I mean, it's still a DSLR

1:51:15and it still has a much better sensor

1:51:17and a much better, you know, mine isn't a full frame,

1:51:21it's a cropped frame camera.

1:51:23But you know, for comparing a $800 camera

1:51:27to a $900 smartphone, the 7 Plus takes photos

1:51:33that are in 50 to 60% of cases on this beta,

1:51:38this number, you know, beta number one,

1:51:41not even really available for public consumption

1:51:43outside of the public beta program,

1:51:45it takes photos that are up to a certain point

1:51:50comparable to the DSLR,

1:51:51which that is a little bit mind blowing.

1:51:54And it's like, I've taken great photos on an iPhone before

1:51:57and great photos that I've preferred

1:51:59to a photo that my Canon shot.

1:52:01but to not necessarily show up the cannon

1:52:06in a 40 millimeter portrait,

1:52:08but to play in the same ballpark as that,

1:52:10to like go into a major league baseball game and be like,

1:52:13"No, I'm not gonna bat 400,

1:52:15but I'm still gonna hit some pitches

1:52:17and I'm gonna maybe like get a double

1:52:18or a triple every now and again,

1:52:19like from a cell phone camera."

1:52:22That blows my mind.

1:52:23- It's a very Phil Schiller feature.

1:52:26'Cause I know that Phil is a serious amateur

1:52:29photography enthusiast.

1:52:31and he really described it so fairly on stage

1:52:34'cause he emphasized, he went over backwards to emphasize

1:52:37that in no way, shape, or form does this feature

1:52:39on the iPhone pose any threat to digital SLR

1:52:43as in terms of genuine image quality.

1:52:46- Yeah, it's not gonna replace your DSLR.

1:52:50- But some of the shots that you get with this

1:52:52are in this like heretofore uncharted territory

1:52:59between what you get with these little tiny lenses

1:53:03and sensors on phones and what you can get with an SLR.

1:53:07Like, it isn't, side by side, the image quality is,

1:53:10you know, not gonna, you know, the fake bokeh

1:53:12isn't gonna compare to the real shallow depth of field

1:53:15of a nice camera, but when you just look at the image,

1:53:18it is, when it works, it's so much better

1:53:22than the image you were gonna get without this effect.

1:53:24- Oh yeah.

1:53:25And when it works well, it's incredible.

1:53:29And it's one of those things where,

1:53:31I hate this phrase, but it's still relevant.

1:53:34It's the whole best camera is the camera

1:53:35that you have with you idea.

1:53:38And it's like, the T4i is a wonderful camera.

1:53:41And I definitely, like, I bring it along

1:53:44when I'm going to things

1:53:46where I want semi-professional photos,

1:53:48like weddings or vacations,

1:53:50things where I really wanna have beautiful memories,

1:53:53and I want to be able to shoot some artsy photography.

1:53:58And with the iPhone 7 Plus,

1:54:01things I wouldn't bring it along to

1:54:02are events like I went to yesterday

1:54:05where Rick and I went to a corn maze

1:54:07and picked out pumpkins.

1:54:08And I'm like, I'm not gonna bring a fancy camera

1:54:11to shoot pumpkins because, I don't know, it's not 2006.

1:54:16This is not my life anymore.

1:54:19But I shot a whole bunch of stuff on the 7 Plus,

1:54:23looking through those photos, I'm like, these are not, again, these are not photos that are going to

1:54:27beat the T4i if I had brought the T4i along, but I'm not regularly carrying my Rebel. My Rebel

1:54:34doesn't fit into my back pocket and for me to be able to get photos that are like 75% the quality

1:54:41of the Rebel and photos that I would feel comfortable even because they were in good

1:54:45light blowing up to like a picture frame or something like that, like, that's pretty fantastic.

1:54:52That's a really wonderful step forward for mobile photography.

1:54:55The threshold for "do I want this heavy camera on a strap around my neck all afternoon"

1:55:01is getting higher and higher. The bar is getting raised for just how much I care about the pictures

1:55:06to do it. Yes, exactly. How many years are these pictures going to be in rotation? And

1:55:14how big a size am I going to eventually want to blow them up?

1:55:18I am so curious as to how long it's going to take for this dual camera system to trickle down to

1:55:26the smaller size. Like is I, you know, is next year too soon? It might be because it's, you know,

1:55:32like optical image stabilization took two years. Yeah, although of course when it came, it came for

1:55:40both image and video, you know? That is true. So it's like less than two years behind. It's like,

1:55:45you know, it caught up to where they were last year.

1:55:48- Yeah, I think it's really gonna depend on

1:55:52how the form factor changes, if at all, in the next iPhone.

1:55:56Because, you know, there are, of course, rumors of

1:55:58the idea of getting rid of the top and the bottom

1:56:00of the bezel and making the iPhone a little bit smaller,

1:56:03you know, squat-wise.

1:56:06And while that would be awesome from a

1:56:09holding a plus model perspective,

1:56:12it does mean that you're taking away usable space

1:56:14for things like sensors and battery and stuff along those lines. So that is going to be a big

1:56:21question. If they change the form factor, are they still going to have enough space to add the double

1:56:27lens camera on the 7? And if they do, are they going to have enough space to add stabilization

1:56:33to the second lens on the plus? Because I think that's the no brainer next step feature. Or putting

1:56:40in a bigger, the telephoto sensor also has a smaller sensor than the wide-angle lens.

1:56:46And that's also something that's like damaging the photos a little bit, not a ton.

1:56:51I think that one though is a factor of like, if you do the sideways drawing of the lens optics,

1:56:56Yeah, it's impossible.

1:56:58Yeah, I think it's actually impossible unless they made the bump stick out further. That there's sort

1:57:03of like a max, like the sensor size is determined by, okay, if we make the lens, this is how big the

1:57:08the lens will be circumference.

1:57:10This is how thick the lens,

1:57:12how far out we're gonna allow it to protrude on the bump.

1:57:15Then you just draw these lines

1:57:17and then that defines how big the sensor is.

1:57:19So I think that the consternation that people had

1:57:22about the sensor size of the telephoto thing was misplaced

1:57:26because there's nothing that can be done about that.

1:57:29- Yeah, it's physics.

1:57:30There's really unfortunately--

1:57:31- In the same way that if they put a wider angle lens,

1:57:34like a fisheye lens, you could get an even bigger sensor

1:57:36because it would, you know.

1:57:38- Mm-hmm, because of the optics.

1:57:40- Right.

1:57:41- Yeah, absolutely.

1:57:42- Oh, I asked that would be a huge win.

1:57:44- Yeah.

1:57:44- Why do you think that portrait mode is in beta?

1:57:48It's better than I thought.

1:57:52I thought it was gonna be like crashy.

1:57:54It seems to me like the only problems it has

1:57:57is that it still sometimes, you know,

1:58:00fuzzes out the side of your head or something like that.

1:58:02- Yeah, it's data.

1:58:03I mean, here's my curiosity and my question,

1:58:08is I wonder if they're using differential privacy

1:58:12in the beta to gather anonymous information

1:58:17about these photos to better figure out.

1:58:20I don't know how they would, though.

1:58:22I don't know how they would-- - Yeah, I don't think so

1:58:22because I didn't have to opt into anything privacy-wise.

1:58:25- No, you didn't. - It seems like it's all

1:58:27just right there, you just had to opt in

1:58:28to say I agree that this is a beta.

1:58:30- Yeah, but I'm not sure if that's in the,

1:58:33that's the thing I would think is that you use it as a beta so that you can have people,

1:58:39you can not only have data to figure out how to make your detection better, but you can also

1:58:45have people give feedback and say like, "Yo, this picture is great!" Except it blurred out half of

1:58:50my hair. And this picture of an object is great except, you know, half of the object is out of

1:58:55focus. And granted, you know, object detection is not officially supported in any way, shape,

1:59:01perform. If you go by the official Apple line, the only thing you should use portrait mode for is

1:59:06portraits. But of course, people like taking close up pictures of their pets and objects and things

1:59:12like that. I saw a great photo of a pair of boots today.

1:59:16I'm looking at that on your Twitter account as we speak. And it's a it is a perfect example of a

1:59:20photo where I wouldn't want it. I'm not I'm not enough of a photo nerd. And without zooming in,

1:59:27just looking at it at the natural size, if you wanted to Pepsi challenge me like, okay,

1:59:32was this shot with portrait mode? Or was it shot with a $2,000 Canon SLR and a 50 millimeter prime

1:59:38lens? I would not want to answer the question because I know I can't tell.

1:59:42You can only really tell blowing it up to full screen resolution on my 5k iMac.

1:59:48Right. And that's sort of, sort of one of the reasons that I think that this feature is going

1:59:55is going to be so popular and it's so useful,

1:59:57is that so much of the time we spend looking at photos

2:00:01is on iPhones or other phone-sized screens.

2:00:05And the difference between the fake depth effect

2:00:09and the real optical depth effect of a better camera,

2:00:11it's way harder, the smaller you make the picture,

2:00:14the harder it is to tell the difference.

2:00:16- Absolutely, and they're doing,

2:00:17Apple is doing a really smart thing here

2:00:20in terms of the levels of detection they're using,

2:00:24the depth map that they're making, where I feel like Android, there have been Android phones that

2:00:30have attempted to do a feature like this right now before and actually our friend friend of I'm more

2:00:37and our Canadian editor Daniel Bader did a comparison between the Honor 8 camera and,

2:00:42and the iPhone which because they both have dual lens systems and a fake bokeh kind of effect.

2:00:48But the difference, the main difference is that not only is Apple using this in a pseudo telephoto portrait style lens,

2:00:57but they're blurring, the blurs are soft, when it works well, the blurs are soft, gradual and intentional so that in the very far back of the picture, you've got it at sort of max Gaussian blur.

2:01:10But if you get to like the second depth, so like the leaves, like I'm looking at one of the corn

2:01:16pictures that I did, the leaves right behind my head are only slightly blurred when you compare

2:01:21that to the blur at the very back of the corn field, which is much more blurred and almost to

2:01:27the effect, almost to the extent where you'd get kind of the quote unquote bokeh style light

2:01:33aberrations. Whereas stuff like the Honor 8 just does a flat blur and doesn't really try and make

2:01:40a super depth map of it. Or maybe it tries to make a depth map, but it just fails utterly and just

2:01:45ends up just doing a mass like, here's, here is the subject cut out of the picture. And then here

2:01:51is just straight Gaussian blur. And that's, that was my fear when portrait mode launched is that it

2:01:56was when it launched when it was announced was that it was going to just be that where it's just

2:02:01going to be straight Gaussian blur, and then subject cut out. And they've really done something

2:02:05much more refined with this. I guessed very wrong about how it was going to work. My initial guess

2:02:10coming out of day one of the Apple event,

2:02:12based on what they said was my guess was

2:02:14what they were gonna do is use the two cameras

2:02:17to create the depth map and use that to set focus point,

2:02:21the focus point on the telephoto lens,

2:02:24which would take the main image,

2:02:25but that they would then take a second image

2:02:28with the wide angle camera,

2:02:31but at a focal length of like one inch,

2:02:34so that it would blur everything,

2:02:37everything would be blurry,

2:02:38and then they would crop that, you know,

2:02:40something like that, like,

2:02:41so that you'd get actual optical blur from the,

2:02:44but that's not how they're doing it at all.

2:02:45That is not-- - No.

2:02:46- And--

2:02:47- But it might be in the future.

2:02:50- I don't know, but it's this,

2:02:52the reason my mind went that way

2:02:54is I thought it would look better,

2:02:56but this looks so much better than I thought it would

2:02:59based on the fact that it's all in software,

2:03:01from a, you know, with all the imagery

2:03:05coming from the one lens.

2:03:07- Oh yeah, there's, I mean, some of these images I look at

2:03:10and like this, the ISP was able to give this to me

2:03:14in under a second, like this didn't take five minutes

2:03:17of rendering to put together.

2:03:19- And it's, you know, they're doing it live.

2:03:21I mean, it's so fast that the preview is live,

2:03:23but I wonder if that is one of the reasons

2:03:26they're calling it beta, because the frame rate

2:03:28on the live preview, it's, I don't know,

2:03:30I'm complaining about this thing that a couple of years ago

2:03:33would have taken like 30 seconds to render in Photoshop.

2:03:35you know, you'd have like a progress bar showing you how close it is.

2:03:40And now I'm getting it as a live preview and I'm complaining about how slow it is because

2:03:44the frame rate looks to me like it's somewhere in the 20s.

2:03:49It's clearly under 30 frames per second though.

2:03:52Yeah, it's definitely, I would say looking at it side to side, it's probably 24s.

2:04:01But maybe it's not even, it's not stat, you know, maybe it varies given the complexity

2:04:05of the picture.

2:04:07And I've definitely seen it stutter when it's trying to figure out more complex depth maps.

2:04:13Even in times when the actual picture ends up coming out really well, like a picture

2:04:18of pumpkins I took, the original depth map that it was previewing for me had like half

2:04:23of the pumpkins blurred.

2:04:25And I've learned kind of to trust that the ISP knows what it's doing and even if the

2:04:29preview isn't correct, it's probably going to look better.

2:04:32It really must have killed the product team that this didn't, wasn't able to ship in the first

2:04:38version just because all of our initial reviews didn't, all we ever made.

2:04:43Didn't include it, yeah.

2:04:44All we could mention about portrait mode is that, you know, this is a feature that's coming in and

2:04:49it's software update. But it is super compelling in my opinion.

2:04:53Better to get it right than to ship it early and have it be not great.

2:04:57Right.

2:04:58And it's like, it's not bad right now.

2:05:00It's very promising for beta one.

2:05:03But I'm glad that they're starting it as a beta

2:05:06rather than shipping it unfinished

2:05:08or shipping it kind of with half hazard edge detection.

2:05:12I just don't know how they're gathering data to fix it

2:05:14while it's in the beta.

2:05:16- I don't know either.

2:05:17And I've definitely noticed,

2:05:18and I don't know how much this is factoring

2:05:20into the beta description.

2:05:22Like you said, it definitely wants you

2:05:24to take a picture of a person

2:05:26because it's doing this facial recognition

2:05:29to get the focus point and depth map.

2:05:31And when I've tried to use it to shoot inanimate objects,

2:05:34the results are, it's harder,

2:05:37it often refuses to even engage depth mode.

2:05:40And then even when it does, it's all messed,

2:05:44sometimes all messed up in terms of what it chooses to blur.

2:05:47- Have you manually, have you used the manual focus point?

2:05:50- By tapping the screen?

2:05:52- Yeah.

2:05:54- Yeah, but it doesn't work.

2:05:56Sometimes it doesn't help.

2:05:58So for some reason, it'll focus on that point.

2:06:00It's not that it doesn't focus,

2:06:02but it isn't able to do the depth map.

2:06:04- To do the, yeah, to do the blur properly.

2:06:07- So for, you know, probably most people listening

2:06:11either don't already have a seven plus in their hands,

2:06:14and even if they do, they may not be foolish enough

2:06:16to be running a developer beta on it.

2:06:18So by the time most people listen to this,

2:06:20they won't have used it firsthand.

2:06:23thing is it's it's very much like the HDR indicator so when you're you know

2:06:29before you even snap the photo if you have HDR on it'll it'll the HDR

2:06:34indicator turns bright yellow so you know you're getting an H HDR is on like

2:06:38if you have a VR set to auto so when you when you're shooting in portrait mode

2:06:43you know whether it sees whether it's going to shoot with the mode or not

2:06:48because it actually turns yellow with a yellow background and says depth effect

2:06:51And if it does, if you don't see that,

2:06:54you're not going to get,

2:06:55you're definitely not gonna get the depth effect.

2:06:58So you don't even have to judge it

2:07:00based on the live preview to see

2:07:02if you see the fuzzy background or whatever.

2:07:05If you don't see that yellow indicator of depth effect,

2:07:07it doesn't, it's confused by what's in the frame

2:07:10and hasn't yet done it.

2:07:12And with inanimate objects,

2:07:13it definitely can take a lot longer than with humans.

2:07:16- Absolutely. - With humans,

2:07:17with humans, you really can just sorta put it in that mode,

2:07:21frame it, shoot, and trust that it's going to use depth effect.

2:07:24Yeah.

2:07:25It's not too bad with pets.

2:07:26It works pretty quickly.

2:07:27You answered my question.

2:07:28My question was, because of the vague similarities, you know, eyes and a round head, does it seem

2:07:34to do better with pets than, say, you know, bottles or shoes?

2:07:39Yeah.

2:07:40Oh, yeah.

2:07:41It has a lot of problems with anything that's semi-reflective.

2:07:44So iPhones, it doesn't have a huge success rate with right now, especially jet black

2:07:49iPhones or I tried to take a picture of a whiskey bottle that I put in my DSLR comparison and it was

2:07:56like half blur and half whiskey bottle and then the label was blurred out. So, it has problems

2:08:01with writing and it has problems with reflection, but pets seem to, it seems to treat pets pretty

2:08:07well. I've gotten some really, really spectacular pictures of my dogs with this mode engaged.

2:08:15And even I was taking pictures today out on a walk with one of the dogs. So this was motion

2:08:22portrait mode. And even like while my dog was moving, it managed to get a pretty good

2:08:29picture. Granted, I've only looked at it on the preview in photos, so I could go back and look

2:08:35at it now and it could be awful. But to my recollection, it actually looked pretty great.

2:08:40- Great.

2:08:41- Yeah, I shot a whiskey bottle actually for a friend

2:08:47'cause it was somebody who was looking for a recommendation

2:08:49and it came out amazing, I think.

2:08:53Here, I'll send it to you now.

2:08:55Let's hope I'm sending it to the right person.

2:08:57(Bridget laughs)

2:08:59Nope, that's my dad.

2:09:00(both laugh)

2:09:01- Close enough.

2:09:02- No, but it definitely took some time

2:09:07with the playing with manual focus

2:09:08to get the depth effect indicator to come on.

2:09:12- Yeah, you have to take a little while

2:09:16and then even when the depth effect indicator comes on,

2:09:18it may not always work.

2:09:19I feel like with objects and with non-human subjects,

2:09:26there's one of two things that happens.

2:09:28It's either it blurs out too much stuff

2:09:31and it goes too much into the actual object

2:09:35or it creates this very fine cut around the subject. And if you zoom in, you can see like,

2:09:43maybe like a millimeter, half a millimeter of fuzz of the pre-blurred background. But when

2:09:52you're looking at it, you know, in just on an iPhone screen, you can't really tell.

2:09:57Yeah.

2:10:00I also-- and this whiskey bottle shot that I sent you

2:10:03is one more example of it to me, where it seems to me like--

2:10:09and again, maybe I'm getting a placebo effect here

2:10:15because I'm seeing what I want to see.

2:10:16But I think so far-- and this is something

2:10:19I've only noticed after I wrote my initial review--

2:10:22but it seems to me like the noise you get from the iPhone

2:10:24and seven cameras is a more pleasant noise.

2:10:29- Oh, especially on the telephoto.

2:10:31- Yeah, and this whiskey bottle shot I sent you to me.

2:10:34And it's sort of, I used to have this camera

2:10:37from years ago, I used it so much that it actually,

2:10:40I used it until it wore out and it broke.

2:10:43Like the digital camera, it just doesn't work right anymore.

2:10:46It was called a Rico, it was from Rico, it was a Rico GRD.

2:10:50And Rico is sort of an obscure, everybody knows him

2:10:54It's like a photocopier company.

2:10:55They don't have a big presence in North America.

2:10:58And when I bought the Ricoh GRD,

2:10:59I think it was like 2006 or so,

2:11:02it was like a point and shoot

2:11:03with a fixed 28 millimeter F 1.8 lens,

2:11:08or maybe it was a 2.0 lens,

2:11:10but a very, very fast lens,

2:11:11especially for 2005, 2006 point and shoot.

2:11:14And I had to buy it on the gray market

2:11:17'cause they didn't actually sell it in North America.

2:11:20But it was probably one of my favorite,

2:11:23probably my very favorite camera camera

2:11:25that I've ever owned in my life.

2:11:26In fact, I wouldn't hesitate.

2:11:27Just as a camera, I took more great photos

2:11:32with that camera because it was small.

2:11:34But one of the things Ricoh, and it made me buy it,

2:11:36was that Ricoh had this reputation

2:11:38that their digital image processing

2:11:44created more film-like noise, right?

2:11:47Noise is, with small digital cameras, noise is inevitable.

2:11:50There's no way to get around it.

2:11:52the combination of the size of the sensor

2:11:54and the size of the lens, you're gonna have noise.

2:11:57But that, some of the shots I shot over the years

2:12:00with the Ricoh really, to me, looked like vivid film prints,

2:12:04but like, you know, ISO 400 or ISO 800 film prints,

2:12:07where, you know, there is no, there's definite film grain,

2:12:10but it's just pleasant to look at.

2:12:14I think the iPhone 7 cameras have that sort of effect

2:12:17that they've, and I think it's to their credit,

2:12:20where maybe I think if we wanted to knock the iPhone 6

2:12:23and 6s cameras, that maybe they went too far

2:12:26trying to reduce noise, and that the noise reduction,

2:12:29the bad effects of noise reduction

2:12:31were a little bit too visible.

2:12:33- They try and smooth it a lot, and that's something,

2:12:35I mean, I see that, I'm sending you a couple pictures,

2:12:38trading of a couple of low light pictures especially.

2:12:42I'm still seeing that sort of smoothing process happening

2:12:46on the wide angle lens and on sort of brighter,

2:12:51brighter facial tones when you're shooting indoors.

2:12:55But these dark shadows, I think the iPhone 7

2:12:58and 7 Plus cameras are doing so much better on.

2:13:01Whereas prior, you kinda got just either like a flat,

2:13:05like very, very variegated blur on people's faces.

2:13:10I can't describe the smoothing exactly,

2:13:12but it feels very digital.

2:13:14that feels very, not tacky as in a bad thing,

2:13:17but tacky as in almost sticky, almost in a weird.

2:13:21- The picture you sent me of Rick is a great example.

2:13:23Nobody's gonna call this your best picture of Rick,

2:13:25but it is, but it doesn't, it has a character to it

2:13:30that you just never would have thought

2:13:31came from a phone camera.

2:13:32- Exactly, the soft blur on that is beautiful.

2:13:35- And you end up with, yeah, and I'm looking at the noise,

2:13:38it's in your, is that your kitchen?

2:13:40I don't know, but there's--

2:13:41- Yeah, that's my kitchen.

2:13:42- It's obviously at night, and there's dark shadows

2:13:44underneath the cabinets and there's not really noise

2:13:47underneath them.

2:13:48It's really, really effective.

2:13:49- Yeah, I'm really looking forward to,

2:13:52especially one of the sort of downsides

2:13:56to the telephoto lens is of course,

2:13:59because it doesn't have OAS

2:14:00and because it's a 2.8 aperture,

2:14:05on the normal photo mode,

2:14:06if you try and shoot in a low light situation,

2:14:09it automatically defaults to the wide angle lens,

2:14:12zoomed in at 2X, but it doesn't do that with portrait mode.

2:14:16So you can actually use portrait mode,

2:14:18even if you're not using the depth effect,

2:14:20to shoot low light portraits with that telephoto lens.

2:14:23And I really do think that the telephoto

2:14:25has a much nicer grain, maybe because of the fact

2:14:29that the aperture is a little bit higher

2:14:32and the light received to that sensor

2:14:35is a little bit different.

2:14:36But it really does produce these really beautiful,

2:14:39maybe it's just the framing,

2:14:40But it produces these really beautiful, almost film-like images, and I like that.

2:14:45I love that texture.

2:14:47Yeah.

2:14:48And some people would complain, like one of my Rico nerdery, the counter argument was, you shouldn't be trying to simulate film, you know, be pure to digital.

2:14:57And I think that's nonsense.

2:14:59I think you should be trying, you know, that the engineer...

2:15:01You want a good image.

2:15:02Right.

2:15:03The engineer should be optimizing for pleasantness.

2:15:05And whether that means simulating film or not, it doesn't matter.

2:15:09Does this look, is this more pleasing to your eye?

2:15:13And if the answer is yes, then do it,

2:15:14whether it's legitimately digital or fake analog,

2:15:17you know, don't worry about it.

2:15:18- Exactly. - Don't overthink it.

2:15:20- Looking at that whiskey bottle you sent me,

2:15:22like the, yes, the blur is artificial,

2:15:24and the blur is Gaussian, and I know a lot of people

2:15:27are throwing their hands up and just being like,

2:15:28well, it doesn't look like an optical blur,

2:15:31it looks so fake.

2:15:32I'm like, yeah, but the picture of the whiskey bottle

2:15:35with the artificial blur looks about 100 times better

2:15:39the whiskey bottle without the artificial blur.

2:15:41- It's actually not a Gaussian blur.

2:15:43I don't know if you saw this. - Is it not?

2:15:45- Matthew Panzareno, friend of the show,

2:15:47frequent guest, he got the scoop on this.

2:15:51He got two days pre-release access to the beta software,

2:15:56and had a really great article at TechCrunch on this thing.

2:15:59And he had written that it was a Gaussian blur

2:16:01'cause somebody at Apple in product marketing,

2:16:04that's what they told him. - Told him that.

2:16:05- That's what they told him.

2:16:06But then somebody who worked on the code

2:16:08was like, "Oh no, no." And then it was like this whole hassle of like somewhere within Apple,

2:16:13somebody who had worked on the code wanted it to be known that, "No, we're not just doing a

2:16:18Gaussian blur." I forget the term, but it's like they've created their own custom disc blur.

2:16:23Okay. Well, so I got my information from Matt's original review. So now that's very interesting.

2:16:30I can believe that. Yeah.

2:16:31If you reload it, he's got like an update at that section.

2:16:34An asterisk.

2:16:34But it does make some amount of sense where that it's a disc blur that because that's sort of the bokeh effect

2:16:40Uh, yeah

2:16:41Well, it gets you it gets you closer to that that light effect that lighting effect that people associate with the the sort of bokeh

2:16:48look

2:16:50um

2:16:51One of the few things I do know about photography is that the effect of actual bokeh?

2:16:57It matters. Um

2:16:59What shape

2:17:02the

2:17:02Iris, what's the iris that the camera called the

2:17:05In terms of the lens yeah the thing that opens in front of the lens

2:17:10The little disk thing that opens in a search the shutter

2:17:13Yeah, the shutter the shape of the shutter

2:17:16Always depends on how it

2:17:19Yeah, and a less expensive camera will have fewer parts to the shutter because it's cheaper, right?

2:17:26It's cheaper to make a five-sided thing whereas a more expensive camera has more parts

2:17:30and so therefore it's more, it's closer to a sphere as it opens.

2:17:33Interesting.

2:17:35And so a more expensive, so just looking at like Canon's 50 millimeter lenses,

2:17:40you get better bokeh out of the more expensive ones. One of the reasons why is the glass is

2:17:45better, but number two, because the shutter has more elements, it actually creates more

2:17:49of a spherical bokeh effect. That makes a lot of sense.

2:17:53So it makes sense to me that their blur is a disc blur.

2:17:56Yeah, to try and emulate, well, and also, the pictures that I just sent you are from my DSLR

2:18:02comparison, and the top one is the iPhone 7 Plus, and the bottom is the Canon XTi. And you can

2:18:09definitely see the difference in sort of that lighting effect between subject and then the

2:18:16light coming through the trees in terms of how that lens operates. So that is something I didn't

2:18:21know about the shape of the shutter and how much, and that actually makes a ton of sense, because

2:18:25you're dealing with a much smaller, by nature, kind of has to be less complex camera because

2:18:32there's really only so much space you can fit inside there. And so concludes the half hour

2:18:40segment of the talk show where I talk about the camera I won't have in my pocket for the next year.

2:18:45It's okay. I mean, it's about the price of a DSLR so you could always buy an iPhone just to shoot

2:18:53with it. Yeah, I know say I just as a final point of the show that it I spent almost a

2:18:59full two weeks with the plus as my soul camera practically speaking and loved the loved the

2:19:07camera especially love the portrait mode and hated everything else and everything else

2:19:13everything else I really I really just just dislike the size I use my phone too much one

2:19:19hand to use the plus. And so I'm convinced that my love for the dual camera system aside,

2:19:27it still doesn't outweigh the benefits to me, just the hand feel and pocket feel of

2:19:33the smaller one.

2:19:34Yeah, the large one for me is definitely a trade off for the camera. And it pains my

2:19:39soul because I really love the Jet Black iPhone 7. It is so comfortable. It's the reason why

2:19:46there's a Sena case on that one and not on the plus yet.

2:19:50- I realize, and I do realize, so my advice to people though

2:19:53is if you can vaguely tolerate, even just,

2:19:55yeah, I don't really love it, but I can tolerate the plus,

2:19:58get the plus because it is amazing.

2:20:00And for the first time, like in previous years,

2:20:03I definitely reviewed the plus

2:20:05and I spent a couple days with it,

2:20:07but it was so clear to me that I didn't want it,

2:20:09that I spent most of my time

2:20:10with the one I figured I'd use.

2:20:12Whereas this was the first year

2:20:13where I spent like two solid weeks living with it

2:20:16It is my day-to-day phone.

2:20:17And the battery life difference really--

2:20:19Oh, it's shocking.

2:20:21It's almost comical.

2:20:22There was one night where I literally forgot to charge my phone overnight

2:20:25because I was so back and forth between two phones,

2:20:28and I just left it downstairs.

2:20:30And it still had 44% battery life.

2:20:33It was like--

2:20:33Yeah, what's your iPhone 7 battery at right now?

2:20:37I don't have the percentage on.

2:20:38And I actually was plugging it in while we recorded.

2:20:40Oh, OK.

2:20:42Well, then never mind.

2:20:43Last night, though, it got down to--

2:20:45It got down to the red before I went to the red.

2:20:48- I mean, the iPhone 7's battery is certainly much better

2:20:50than the 6S, so even if you're upgrading from 4.7 inch

2:20:54to 4.7 inch, you're gonna see a good upgrade.

2:20:57But oh man, the Plus's battery life, I mean,

2:21:00when I switched back to the 6S from the 6S Plus last year,

2:21:06I pretty much had an Apple battery case on that thing

2:21:10pretty much constantly after the Apple battery case

2:21:13released because I'm just like, well, this is easy because it has the lightning connector so I can

2:21:17plug it into all my lightning things. And it basically gives me the battery life of the plus.

2:21:21But now I get to have the battery life of the of that kind of an iPhone, but I get to carry it

2:21:27without a case and I get to enjoy the jet black finish. That probably would not happen if I had

2:21:33an iPhone 7. I'd probably just put it back in the battery case. I like my battery.

2:21:40I I've you know, the battery life on the iPhone 7 is fine and it does seem if anything a little

2:21:49bit better I think in real life than success for me but it's nothing compared to the plus

2:21:53the plus is like it really is like having a battery case on your phone and I you know,

2:21:58I'm not saying anything everybody doesn't know or that the advertised specs don't indicate but

2:22:03it's like you could just use the hell out of it and and not even worry about a charge. Mm-hmm

2:22:08So anyway, that's my take.

2:22:10Anything else you wanted to cover before we wrap things up?

2:22:13- Oh gosh, I feel like we could talk Apple Watch,

2:22:17but there's so much.

2:22:18- Yeah, I don't have a lot to say about it

2:22:22because it's not that different from,

2:22:23as you call it, I love the Series Zero.

2:22:28I love it.

2:22:29But it's, you know, a Series Zero that's updated

2:22:32to watch OS 3 is, you know, it's got almost everything.

2:22:37The brighter screen though is enough for me because it really is the difference between

2:22:42being unreadable and yeah, I can read it in bright sunlight.

2:22:45Yeah, the brighter screen is pretty nice.

2:22:48It's especially nice for me because, and this is kind of my big thing, is that I had a 38

2:22:54millimeter series zero and I don't know how many people who listen to your show struggled

2:22:59with the 38 millimeter all for the last 17, 18 months, but the 38 millimeter has abhorrent

2:23:07battery life. I mean, it was made with pretty much the bare minimum, you know, the bare minimum

2:23:14acceptability standards, I think, because I would use that watch, you know, one two-hour workout,

2:23:21and that watch would be down to like 40%, and it would die around 6, 7 p.m. for me. And I would,

2:23:27you know, like, I figured out ways to make it work, where I would like charge it while I was

2:23:32showering and thankfully like quick charge would work but it was it was such a pain.

2:23:36Yeah. Especially frustrating. I think if you didn't use workout maybe not but anybody who

2:23:42used the workout featured I've heard that. I mean it's same thing with Amy. Joanna Stern was on the

2:23:47show a while back and you know it was a big part of her review. Yeah. 38 millimeters combined with

2:23:52workout was you actually kind of need to figure out a way to sneak a charge in during the day.

2:23:58Yeah, which is really unfortunate.

2:24:00And is that better with Series 2?

2:24:02Night and day. It's actually incredible because one of my big fears when they announced,

2:24:08they were talking Series 2 and they mentioned nothing about the battery, but they did say GPS

2:24:14and they said brighter screen and they said faster processor. And those three things to me said,

2:24:20"Oh great, the Series 2 38 millimeter is going to have the same if not worse battery life,

2:24:26and I'm gonna be really unhappy.

2:24:29And then I talked to an Apple spokesperson at the event

2:24:33and they're like, actually,

2:24:34there is a slightly bigger battery in the 38 millimeter,

2:24:36we're just not advertising it.

2:24:38And actual use case has been incredible.

2:24:43Like to the fact where I was doing a two hour workouts,

2:24:47like I would do a 30 minute workout in the morning

2:24:50just doing an outdoor walk with my dogs.

2:24:53And then I would go, I would use it throughout the day,

2:24:55I would use Siri, I would use directions,

2:24:58I would even pull up Offy a couple of times

2:25:00to do my two-factor authentication.

2:25:02I had my screen on the brightest setting,

2:25:04and then I'd go and play roller derby for two hours.

2:25:07And I'd come back and take a shower with the thing on

2:25:10and look, and my battery was still 20% at the end of the day.

2:25:14And that has never happened to me

2:25:16in the history of Apple Watch.

2:25:17And especially, it was extremely noticeable.

2:25:20I wore three watches on my wrists

2:25:23for about 48 hours straight,

2:25:25where I had a series two, a series one, and a series zero.

2:25:29Just to test all the same things.

2:25:31- Did you go out in public like that?

2:25:33- I did, but I had long sleeves.

2:25:34The only time people actually saw it

2:25:38was when I was playing derby,

2:25:39and I got a little bit of grief there, a little bit of shit.

2:25:42- You look like such, you're actually doing actual work

2:25:46that is practically, you know,

2:25:47has practical effects for your readers,

2:25:49but you just look like such a jerk.

2:25:50- Oh, I look ridiculous.

2:25:52I look like a jackass, yeah.

2:25:53So I tried to hide it as much as possible,

2:25:56but I did, I got some valuable information

2:25:59on 38 millimeter battery tests, and that's, I don't know.

2:26:03I mean, maybe it's entirely possible.

2:26:05- Did I miss it or did you not publish your--

2:26:07- That's tomorrow, it's coming tomorrow, yeah.

2:26:09- Thank goodness, 'cause that would have been terrible.

2:26:11All right, well, the show will probably come out tomorrow,

2:26:14so we will-- - There we go, yeah.

2:26:15I'll send you the link.

2:26:17- Try to get it in the show notes.

2:26:18That is good to hear, though,

2:26:23And I feel like that's very practical.

2:26:24I think one thing too is if I hear faster CPU and I'm still thinking like in the old

2:26:29days where, well, the faster the CPU, the more power it's going to consume.

2:26:33Whereas I think especially on a wearable, it's actually the opposite where…

2:26:37Yeah, more efficiency.

2:26:39Right, because you're looking at the screen less because you're not waiting as long.

2:26:44And it's the screen that's burning way more power than the CPU.

2:26:48So if you can raise your wrist, see what you want to see, and lower your wrist, it's actually

2:26:53a win on battery life.

2:26:55Oh yeah.

2:26:56You know, I never used raise to wake for series zero because I thought it was going to just

2:27:01kill my battery life because I do enough gesticulating with my hands that to have the screen randomly

2:27:07turn on and off, I'm like, "That's just going to drain my battery."

2:27:10And I kept it on the lowest brightness setting for an entire, I don't know, 16, 17 months

2:27:15I just when it was on its brightest battery setting and raised to wake, I couldn't get past

2:27:203pm with the with the watch. So to be able to actually use the brightest battery setting or

2:27:26brightest setting, you know, I've I'm looking at my watch right now it's at 60% at 540pm Eastern

2:27:33time after having gone on an hour and 30 minute walk with GPS enabled on a 38 millimeter watch.

2:27:41I'm 94% but I haven't I didn't I did not leave the house today. You're like I've done nothing

2:27:46Yeah battery life the brighter screen is a huge win for me

2:27:52I would look forward to your review, but I just don't have much more to say than what I've already written

2:27:57It's it's way more about the OS than than the watch even though yeah

2:28:00I have those good things to say about the new watch hardware. It's it's clearly way more about the software

2:28:06Yeah, watch OS 3 basically redirected the Apple watch to a much

2:28:10Smarter place and I don't think the series zero is garbage anymore. You know, it's still it's still quite usable, especially with watch OS 3

2:28:17It's just if you're a 30 mate

2:28:1938 millimeter user

2:28:21Series 2 is is

2:28:23The the magic salve that you've been looking for for your Apple watch. It just it makes it usable. Yep

2:28:29Well, that's good to hear. I will put a link to that in everybody can get

2:28:33All this or any Caldwell they want on Twitter

2:28:38Her username is Saturn se TT ER n

2:28:41And and Oliver work at I'm or anything else we wanted to give a shout out to before we pull the plug. Oh gosh

2:28:49Other than the Apple watch review not not too much. Thank you for having me John this always fun as always always good to have you

2:28:56I wanted somebody who I knew has used all this new stuff. How about the air pods? We haven't talked about then

2:29:00Did you guys oh man units? Yes, so Renee Renee

2:29:04officially got the AirPods, so I only got to play with them in New York and he's been playing with

2:29:08them for the last two weeks. But the two days that I played with them, I really liked them.

2:29:13They still don't quite fit in my ears, but my ears have never liked air – like, I feel like I'm

2:29:20probably of the minority there. My ears just have a tendency – they're very small, so they have a

2:29:26tendency to like, spit out in ear pods where they just don't – they're just like, "No." So it

2:29:31wasn't a – sorry?

2:29:33It's just interesting to me that the AirPods haven't shipped yet. They're at least a couple weeks away

2:29:37But the Beats one of the Beats ones that uses the w1 is already shipping so you could like oh, yeah people have already bought it

2:29:43Yeah, you can you can start and you can start to play with the with the nifty

2:29:48Apple pairing which I know that that's pretty cool. I use them so exclusively that I didn't even realize a

2:29:5610.0 point two just came out and it fixes a weird bug where the

2:30:02lightning headphones lose the ability to play pause.

2:30:06- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:30:07I didn't catch that 'cause I don't use--

2:30:10- I didn't catch it 'cause I think I've,

2:30:12I think I put my lightning ear pods in like for 30 seconds.

2:30:16Yep, they work.

2:30:17Yep, they sound the same back in the box.

2:30:19- Yep, it's like, okay, just simple checks.

2:30:22Yeah, I switched, I really haven't used anything

2:30:25but Bluetooth headphones for the last six or seven months

2:30:28and I'm okay with it. - I can't wait for these,

2:30:30I can't wait for these AirPods to ship

2:30:32and for everybody to have them.

2:30:33They're my favorite thing of the year.

2:30:34- Yeah, I am gonna look into trying to,

2:30:37someone suggested putting Sugaru on the outsides

2:30:40to make them a little bit more pleasurably fitting

2:30:43to people with weird ears, and I'm like,

2:30:45I might try that, because I really love

2:30:47the concept of AirPods, and I think that even,

2:30:50especially on ladies, actually,

2:30:52I think they actually look pretty good in,

2:30:54because they almost look like earrings, in a way.

2:30:56Like, especially from far away.

2:30:58You can't, it doesn't, my biggest fear was,

2:31:01oh my god, I'm gonna look like an obnoxious,

2:31:03like GPS, Bluetooth-like earpiece circa 2001.

2:31:08And they, you know, I'm not gonna say

2:31:12they're the most artistically designed things

2:31:14in the world in terms of like fashion forward,

2:31:17but they do look much better

2:31:18than I thought they were going to.

2:31:19And I feel like the way that you can move them

2:31:21in your ears to kind of tilt the end of the AirPod

2:31:26and the microphone kinda up or down

2:31:28is really, it looks good.

2:31:30And the vocalization, especially when summoning Siri

2:31:33is super impressive in terms of how low you can speak

2:31:36and still have Siri get your every word.

2:31:38It works, Siri, in the three days I used the AirPods,

2:31:42Siri worked better for me on the AirPods

2:31:44than she's ever worked for me on the watch,

2:31:47on the phone, or in the car.

2:31:49- Interesting.

2:31:50I've dictated some pretty complicated texts

2:31:53while you're wearing them or walking around the city

2:31:56and it's pretty good.

2:31:59- Yeah, I'm really impressed.

2:32:00- I will say this too, as one last comment,

2:32:02is wearing them now, and it is the, by far and away,

2:32:06I think it breaks the record of Apple Watch,

2:32:08of the Apple product that I've had pre-release access to

2:32:14that has generated random people on the streets

2:32:16and stores of Philadelphia to ask me, is that blank?

2:32:20Like, way back in 2007, there were a lot of people

2:32:24who asked me, I didn't have a pre-release iPhone then,

2:32:27but I bought one on day one.

2:32:28- But no one else did.

2:32:30- Right, and people would say, "Is that an iPhone?

2:32:32"Is that the iPhone?"

2:32:33And in the Apple Watch two years ago,

2:32:36there was a lot of people,

2:32:37especially when I'd use the Apple Pay,

2:32:39the clerk at Whole Foods was the first place

2:32:42that we had that supported it.

2:32:43Every single time I did it, they'd be like,

2:32:46"Oh my God, did you just pay with your watch?"

2:32:48That's amazing.

2:32:49But with these headphones, it breaks the record.

2:32:53it's almost like I don't want to wear them out

2:32:55because people just stop me and say,

2:32:56"Oh my God, are those the Apple things?"

2:32:59And I say yes, and they're like, "How do you have that?"

2:33:01And it's like, I always just say, "It's a long story."

2:33:05- Yeah, you gotta-- - But they're like,

2:33:05"Do you like them?"

2:33:07And I say, "I love them.

2:33:08"I cannot wait for everybody else to have them."

2:33:10But everybody, it's amazing to me just as a sign

2:33:13of how much awareness regular people have.

2:33:16Just people running the register at the Acme supermarket

2:33:21are totally aware of the fact that Apple has made,

2:33:23is coming out with these wireless ear pods.

2:33:27- Yeah, well, it's funny to me,

2:33:29I don't really watch a lot of local news very much anymore.

2:33:34And I remember last year during the quote unquote

2:33:39tattoo gate story, where I, you know,

2:33:43I had, I happened to have a person who was tattooed

2:33:45that I used to like do tests on with the Apple Watch

2:33:49to make sure that the Apple Watch worked with tattoos.

2:33:51And then 24 hours later,

2:33:53because we were staying at my parents at the time,

2:33:55that was on local news.

2:33:57And that was on local news in the morning,

2:33:59that was on local news in the afternoon,

2:34:01that was on local news in the evening.

2:34:03Not necessarily my story, but just the idea of like,

2:34:06"Does the Apple Watch work with tattoos?

2:34:08"Will your wrists be safe?"

2:34:10And I don't think I really realized until that moment,

2:34:14and then until I started doing, you know,

2:34:17just semi, like Renee and I occasionally do spots

2:34:21on CNBC and stuff, and that,

2:34:24realizing just how much the notion of Apple's dealings

2:34:29and day-to-day stuff is affected and shown on local news

2:34:34and that everybody kinda knows what's going on,

2:34:36it's still a little bit shocking at times.

2:34:38I know it's a big deal.

2:34:39I know Apple is a giant company

2:34:41and that millions and billions of people

2:34:43pay attention to them,

2:34:44But it's sometimes hard to remember that

2:34:48when you're in your little bubble

2:34:49writing about camera tests.

2:34:51Or like how a building zooms.

2:34:53- Totally.

2:34:54All right, Serenity, thank you so much for your time.

2:34:56Thank you for being here, what a great conversation.

2:34:59Like I said, you can find her on Twitter

2:35:01at Saturn and all of her work at iMore.

2:35:04- Thanks very much, John.

2:35:06- Yeah, talk to you next time.