00:00:08 ◼ ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 212. Today's show is brought to you by Pingdom,
00:00:14 ◼ ► PDF pen from Smile, and Eero. My name is Myke Hurley, and I am joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason Snow.
00:00:20 ◼ ► Hi, Myke Hurley. It's the temperature in Fahrenheit at which water boils, and it's the area code of New York City.
00:00:29 ◼ ► Great. Thanks. Is this your new thing now? Like a number fact at the beginning of every episode?
00:00:34 ◼ ► Me, me, me, me, number fact. Actually, yeah, let's, uh, we're gonna have a new, we're gonna have a little, uh,
00:00:38 ◼ ► Chris Breen stinger that we're gonna drop in that's gonna be like, "Upgrade number fact, boo!"
00:00:56 ◼ ► Um, I, I did ask for this, I suppose, and I was surprised on Accidental Tech Podcast a few weeks ago that
00:01:04 ◼ ► I was reminded, I think I knew this before, that John Syracuse was, was like me in this way, I believe.
00:01:19 ◼ ► a pinned-at-the-bottom right-hand dock person, where the dock would be in the bottom right corner and grow up from there.
00:01:26 ◼ ► Um, and why, the reason why is kinda lost to history, other than to say that I am one of those people who feels that there's way more, um,
00:01:37 ◼ ► extra space left to right on my screens than there is top to bottom, and that I, I just have for a long time now run it on the right side,
00:01:47 ◼ ► um, and therefore that's where it goes. That's, I'm a dock on, dock on right person, and not hidden.
00:02:00 ◼ ► I, so what I have is, I'm experimenting right now, just in the last couple of days, with this Mojave feature where it actually puts recent apps in the dock.
00:02:08 ◼ ► Yeah, which is also nice because it distinguishes between running apps in the dock that are not normally in the dock.
00:02:17 ◼ ► So like, I don't have Skype in my dock, and when I launch Skype, you know, it goes in the dock,
00:02:22 ◼ ► but now, right now, Skype and Audio Hijack and my IRC client are all in the dock, but they're in that other section of like, apps that aren't normally over here.
00:02:30 ◼ ► I'm super surprised to hear that those three applications are not in your dock, considering you must use them multiple times a day every single day.
00:02:37 ◼ ► I use them specifically for these tasks, and I just launch them with Launch Bar, or if I, when I get my app together, um, something like Keeper My Stroke to sort of make it even simpler,
00:02:59 ◼ ► I do have, I have a, also in that dock, um, a link to, to, um, screen share with my server, my Mac Mini server.
00:03:08 ◼ ► So I can click on that, and then its window appears, which is very convenient because, um, that is otherwise a multi-step process where you have to connect it.
00:03:22 ◼ ► Um, and then I've got a, yeah, my downloads folder and my Dropbox folder are in there too.
00:03:37 ◼ ► I haven't played around Mojave yet, but I really don't think that anyone's going to use the desktop stacks feature.
00:03:43 ◼ ► I just don't, it is solving a problem for people that don't want the problem to be solved, I think.
00:03:50 ◼ ► I mean, some people are just hopelessly, disastrously messy and it might help them because they, they don't have to do anything.
00:03:58 ◼ ► I am a little disappointed with, um, the decisions they made about what stacks get created.
00:04:26 ◼ ► Like, I think fundamentally the issue is like, like the one that gets me is, um, I was listening to Stephen talk about this on connected last week, uh, that you can also do it, organize it by tags.
00:04:43 ◼ ► Like who is that person who every file gets tagged, but then they just throw them on the desktop and they're like, whatever, I don't care.
00:04:57 ◼ ► But who, who is the person who is so devoted to, to tagging things and yet does not care about filing things.
00:05:13 ◼ ► Um, yeah, so we'll see, we'll see how people use it, but I do think there are people who have basically declared a desktop bankruptcy and might get their desktop back a little bit.
00:05:23 ◼ ► Um, by I, like I changed, I used to, I got a lot of crap on the internet when I post screenshots and people would be like, look at all that stuff you've got unorganized on your desktop.
00:05:35 ◼ ► But I did after that, the most recent time I did actually change so that my desktop is now sorted by name.
00:05:44 ◼ ► Which basically means it's on a grid and, uh, I can't drag something and have it just float randomly.
00:06:00 ◼ ► So I can see somebody in a even more precarious situation than I was saying, uh, yes, turn on stacks.
00:06:12 ◼ ► So the problem I have with stacks is that then you look in like an open or save dialogue box and you just see the whole mess.
00:06:33 ◼ ► And then the other thing about stacks, since we're, there's like a little mini Mojave check in here in Snell Talk.
00:06:37 ◼ ► But, um, when you click on an item in a, you click on a stack and it opens and it pushes everything around on the screen, which is weird.
00:06:44 ◼ ► I wish it opened in a floater instead, but then you click if you, if you, um, like you can scroll through items in a stack, which is great.
00:06:50 ◼ ► And then you click on the item that you want and you can, then you can like double click it.
00:06:54 ◼ ► You can drag it somewhere or you can hit space bar and open quick look, which is great.
00:06:57 ◼ ► Except the moment you move your, your cursor out of where it's hovering over that file, it goes back to just being a stack.
00:07:04 ◼ ► So like you open it in quick look and you're like, Oh yeah, I want to, I don't know, move to the next page or press play or whatever.
00:07:12 ◼ ► I want to interact with it in quick look in any way you move your mouse and goes, it's gone.
00:07:28 ◼ ► The only issue I have with the right-hand doc is that if I'm in a situation where I want to play around with having a second monitor, it is the worst.
00:07:36 ◼ ► If I want the second monitor to be on the right, because what MacOS 10 or MacOS does is, um, if you, if you write doc, obviously it puts it at the farthest right point.
00:07:46 ◼ ► Which means that now that my doc, if I have a second monitor to the right now, my doc is like, I can't be found.
00:07:59 ◼ ► That is, that is a real downside of having the doc on the right that has bitten me every now and then in the last 15 years.
00:08:07 ◼ ► I think a lot of people are like this where, um, geography on my screen is like one of the ways that I keep things together.
00:08:13 ◼ ► Like I keep certain apps in certain places and I keep the doc where it is because I'm used to it there.
00:08:34 ◼ ► So, I mean, you know, my Wacom tablet, obviously I use my left hand, but before I got the Wacom, so for basically all of my computing life, I was navigating with my right hand.
00:08:42 ◼ ► I am, I think slightly ambidextrous in that I write with my left hand, but my right hand is, is my dominant hand.
00:08:54 ◼ ► I don't really know why I'm built this way, Jason, but that's kind of just mostly the story of just me as a human.
00:09:04 ◼ ► No, that's, I feel like one of the things we do in this podcast is we explain that we do things a certain way and then everybody asks why and we have no good answers.
00:09:12 ◼ ► No, but I feel an affinity with people with side docs because I feel like side doc makes more sense to me than the, than the lower doc.
00:09:39 ◼ ► You can just send in a tweet with the hashtag Snltalk and it can be something to open the show.
00:09:44 ◼ ► You clearly saying there could be a potential theme here, so maybe you want to keep going down that route or you can send in absolutely anything you want.
00:09:51 ◼ ► Um, I didn't necessarily have this in the document for today cause we have a pretty packed show talking about new hardware, but Mac OS Mojave is coming out today.
00:10:16 ◼ ► I mean, honestly, I just, I don't think that like Mac OS releases are typically incredibly exciting.
00:10:24 ◼ ► Now it's interesting stuff that happens in them, but I mean, like, yeah, we talked about it when it came out.
00:10:30 ◼ ► That's the, so I'll say my experience on running the beta and I've definitely heard people on podcasts, including you and Steven talk about this.
00:10:37 ◼ ► Like I found the Mojave beta after, uh, for the last month or two to be incredibly stable.
00:10:45 ◼ ► There was a period where I was rebooting or using a different computer to do podcasts after I installed it on my iMac Pro because it was not stable enough.
00:10:53 ◼ ► And, um, that went away within a few weeks and I've been using, I've been 100% on Mojave for the last maybe six weeks.
00:11:10 ◼ ► Like I, there are still some weird USB quirks with the USB pre to my audio interface that are no different than they were before.
00:11:20 ◼ ► The software I use all got updated to work with Mojave and all works fine audio hijack and loop back and things like that.
00:11:43 ◼ ► I feel like dark mode will be good when all apps and websites understand that computers can have a dark mode.
00:11:55 ◼ ► Because right now what happens is, uh, and Apple has made no attempts to kind of override here, which surprises me a little bit.
00:12:02 ◼ ► Like you can be in dark mode and if you've got just apps that are using dark themes, everything's pretty good.
00:12:06 ◼ ► And then you open a webpage and the webpage assumes you want a white background and black text, and you get this huge blinding white rectangle and it's no good.
00:12:16 ◼ ► And similarly in mail, if you open a mail message, that's an HTML mail message, uh, it'll have a background color set.
00:12:28 ◼ ► First off that Apple hasn't proposed a CSS thing for websites that basically says, here's how you detect that we're in dark mode.
00:12:38 ◼ ► Um, I'm, I'm just, I'm a little surprised that Apple hasn't been more forward with that with WebKit to say, uh, hey, people who want to support Mojave dark mode on Macs, here's how you do it on your website.
00:12:53 ◼ ► Um, and nor has Apple made an attempt to do something like optionally like smart invert colors, which they have on iOS, which basically inverts the text and background of a page, but not the content.
00:13:10 ◼ ► If you're reading at night on an iPad and it's an article on a website that's white background and black text, you can go into smart invert colors mode and the pictures don't invert and get look weird.
00:13:21 ◼ ► But the text and the background does like, they didn't make any attempt to do that or to do any sort of detection about like, well, we're on the super light webpage, but you're in dark mode.
00:13:37 ◼ ► We'll leave it, but it kind of ruins dark mode to have so much stuff that just assumes that you are working in a light mode.
00:13:46 ◼ ► And, um, so every time I've tried dark mode in Mojave, I can't, even when I said this week, I was like, all right, I'm just going to use it for a few days.
00:13:57 ◼ ► It's too much of a mishmash and it's not Apple's fault in a way, but Apple has also not tried to mitigate a bunch of these places where, you know, the reality is that, that the assumption is not dark mode.
00:14:11 ◼ ► And I mean, you and I are sitting here in a, in a Google doc right now, right? That, that in dark mode would be a nightmare.
00:14:24 ◼ ► I mean, it would not surprise me if in a few years, everybody who does all this stuff has an affordance for your, uh, computing environment theming in some way, even if it's just as simple as light and dark and adapts.
00:14:43 ◼ ► Now, maybe if you've got a very specific set of apps and you're not worried about web pages and mail and stuff, then it may make you very happy.
00:14:52 ◼ ► But for me, I found it the way the apps I use and, uh, the web content that I see, it's basically unusable.
00:15:03 ◼ ► If I knew how to do it and, and Apple had offered that as a sort of a standard thing that you could do in Safari and Mojave Mojave, I would absolutely have done it already.
00:15:14 ◼ ► I looked when this came out, I was like, how do I make a dark mode version of six colors?
00:15:22 ◼ ► I could make a mode that you could click and switch to and all of that, but that seems kind of ridiculous.
00:15:31 ◼ ► And then, and then my last thing about Mojave is the four new apps are there and basically, um, I'm glad that home kit support is there in the home app.
00:15:45 ◼ ► I think Apple news, I think, again, if you're somebody who likes Apple news on other, um, iOS devices, being able to get it on the Mac is nice.
00:15:54 ◼ ► Um, as apps, I think they're really bad and they're, they're lousy Mac apps and there are embarrassingly bad failures to convert them to be Mac apps from iOS apps, including the worst one being when you're scheduling something in the home app and you get the spinner.
00:16:13 ◼ ► For setting time and you can kind of click through it, or you can hover your cursor over it and like scroll on your track pad.
00:16:21 ◼ ► Um, in this modal window, that's in the middle of this other window, cause it's not really windows. It's a single window interface.
00:16:28 ◼ ► Um, and it's early and the functionality being on the Mac is good, but it is, I just, they got a lot of work to do before they hand this stuff over to developers.
00:16:47 ◼ ► And I hope that's their vision because the alternative is that their vision is the future of the Mac is just apps that behave like iOS apps. And that's just how it is.
00:16:56 ◼ ► And I have a problem with that because I don't think it, I don't think it works unless they're making even more changes to the platform where, you know, after a couple of years, we're all using touch screen Macs and, and then all of these touch interfaces make sense.
00:17:11 ◼ ► But I just, there's a lot more work to do. This is why they didn't give it to third-party developers this year, but I can't let it go and say, yay, news and stocks and, and voice memos and a home are on the Mac.
00:17:24 ◼ ► It's like, yes, I'm happy for the functionality, but they're not very good. Like the news interface is kind of a mess.
00:17:32 ◼ ► Yeah, it's better than it was at the beginning of the beta because they added some menu items in to do things that were previously sort of happening within the interface only.
00:17:41 ◼ ► But really, you know, the menu bars are perfunctory. The interface is weird. You've got arrow buttons in weird places. The keyboard shortcuts when they exist are strange.
00:17:52 ◼ ► It's just not, it's not a great experience and I'm glad that they're there because they add functionality. But when you think of Mojave as half of an operating system that is fresh coat of paint, a bunch of new stuff, I like the new accent colors.
00:18:07 ◼ ► That's great. They should have done that in OS 10, 10.4. They waited until now to let you say, oh, how about orange, right? I'm great. Finally, they did that.
00:18:18 ◼ ► I like that Apple is showing like they actually are thinking about what they want the Mac to be and adding features like Steven said on connected last week.
00:18:24 ◼ ► I think features that are not just for iOS synchrony, but like features that are about the Mac, like finder features, that all is great.
00:18:31 ◼ ► So that's about the present and making the Mac something different. And I think that's great. But the other half of Mojave is the story about where is it going with all of these iOS based apps that are going to become Mac apps next year, presumably.
00:18:44 ◼ ► And you know, it is what we've got is not, they're fine, but they're not very good. And it gives me some concern about, you know, the work that Apple has to do over the next year to make it so that those apps are decent.
00:19:02 ◼ ► Because the bad scenario here is that like literally next year, yay, you can run iOS apps on the Mac and they're all just very clearly just iOS apps and they're weird. And it's almost like you're using virtualization or something.
00:19:16 ◼ ► There's just a weird iOS mode that some things are in. They don't talk to Mac apps. They don't behave like Mac apps. You have to say what kind of app is this every time you open an app. And that's not good experience.
00:19:26 ◼ ► So there's a lot going on here. And again, I'm going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt that they will hopefully do that right thing next year.
00:19:35 ◼ ► But I don't look at the news app and say, aha, I am completely confident that we'll get there in the next year. It's more like, they got to do better than this.
00:19:48 ◼ ► Now they got a year to do it. So, or at least I guess what, nine months to get to WWDC next year. And we'll see.
00:19:57 ◼ ► Apple is sometimes Apple, they only said next year, right? They can wait until December or even delay it further if they don't, if it's not ready.
00:20:05 ◼ ► But it's going to be a huge change for the Mac and they need to do it right. And what we get in Mojave is just a little toe in the water and we'll see where it goes from there.
00:20:15 ◼ ► But I don't love those apps. I'm happy that they're there, but I don't think they're great.
00:20:20 ◼ ► Yeah, it is interesting. The general consensus seems to be that they're bad. And I understand that this is the beginning of a process, but Apple's not really calling this a beta or anything.
00:20:33 ◼ ► Right? Which I'm surprised that they're not all called like home beta and news beta. They're being kind of shipped as if they're finished.
00:20:41 ◼ ► Yeah, this goes back to the conversation we had back in June, which is why even announce it this way? And I think the answer is one, the existence of Steve Trout and Smith.
00:20:55 ◼ ► And everybody like him, there's nobody like him, but you know, it would have been clear very soon upon the release of the first Mojave beta that these four new apps that Apple extolled on stage are actually iOS apps, right?
00:21:07 ◼ ► It would have been clear. Everybody would have known that you just look at them. You can tell, right? So how could you not say anything? And it is a developer conference.
00:21:15 ◼ ► It allows Apple to say on the record, "Hey, guys, next year we're going to ask you to do this." Not this year, but think about it. Start thinking about it, which I think is good.
00:21:26 ◼ ► I think it's great for developers to get that piece of information. Here's where they never do this.
00:21:30 ◼ ► Here's where Apple is going in 2019, which is they're going to give you a way to convert your iOS apps and run them on the Mac.
00:21:39 ◼ ► And so many people at WWDC are iOS developers. We're going to give you that next year. So start thinking now, but we don't have any tools for you now.
00:21:48 ◼ ► And I think that was the right move. I think that's the right move. And the truth is they do have a year.
00:21:54 ◼ ► So what they are doing now is dogfooding, right? They're using this stuff and they're finding out.
00:22:01 ◼ ► I think it is great because I think there is probably somebody who's responsible for news, who's looking—or not news, for a home—who's looking at that spinner in the scheduling and being like, "Whew, we can't do this. This has to be better."
00:22:13 ◼ ► And I'm disappointed that they didn't do that in Mojave, but I'm optimistic that sometime perhaps in a Mojave update or perhaps the next year's release,
00:22:26 ◼ ► stuff like that that is very clearly not good enough will get addressed. Like multi-window apps is not a thing right now.
00:22:34 ◼ ► And perhaps it will be. And it might even be related to changes in iOS next year, right? Where if iOS apps get multi-window support like Safari has now,
00:22:44 ◼ ► that could be part of the same thing that allows Mac apps running based on iOS to have that.
00:22:50 ◼ ► But anyway, so I think it's a good thing that they're doing it. And it might give them an excuse to be like, "Yeah, we know they're weird, but at least you can—"
00:22:59 ◼ ► Because the truth is, at least I can turn my lights on and off from my Mac now. I used to sit in here with no iPhone and no iPad and be like,
00:23:08 ◼ ► "Oh, I need to turn that—" And I have to get up and go find an iOS device because my Mac, sitting right here, was incapable of doing it.
00:23:15 ◼ ► So I mean, I'm glad the home app exists. I'm glad it's tied into Siri. That's all great. It's just, you know, it does make you wonder what exactly the plan is for next year.
00:23:27 ◼ ► All right, today's show is brought to you by our friends over at Eero. The folks at Eero have built the Wi-Fi system that you're going to want for your home.
00:23:35 ◼ ► They will give you a fast, reliable connection in every single room, and it can even go all the way out to the backyard, too.
00:23:40 ◼ ► They can blanket your entire home in the Wi-Fi connection that you want. It's going to be reliable. It's going to be super fast.
00:23:47 ◼ ► The Eero features three 5GHz radios. This is faster than it's ever been before, and it will sit flat on any surface.
00:23:55 ◼ ► You just plug it into the wall with the included power adapter. Then you'll be ready to connect your Eero device either via—wirelessly or via Ethernet.
00:24:03 ◼ ► And then once you've got that one set up, if you want to extend it out to the home, you just get yourself some of these little Eero beacons.
00:24:08 ◼ ► They're these tiny little things. You just plug them straight in. That's all they are. They're just basically plug sockets. You just put them straight in, and that's it.
00:24:21 ◼ ► Yeah, sure. And then all you need to do is plug those straight into the wall. They will expand the coverage to any room so you don't have to move to a different part of the house to get the speed that you want, because it will be super fast wherever you want it to be.
00:24:33 ◼ ► Plus those little Eero beacons, they have little night lights in them, too, which is super cute.
00:24:37 ◼ ► Having one router, look, it just doesn't work anymore because our homes are bigger and we have more technology and we want and we desire faster connections because we're doing more with them.
00:24:48 ◼ ► And like light waves, Wi-Fi waves don't really go through walls very well. You wouldn't turn on a light bulb in the bedroom and expect that you'd be able to get some light out into the backyard, maybe. That's just not how it works.
00:25:00 ◼ ► No, and that's exactly the way that Wi-Fi is. And with Eero, you can install an enterprise-grade Wi-Fi system in your home in just a few minutes.
00:25:13 ◼ ► Yes, and I know that Jason has a lovely back patio garden situation, and I know that I would want to hang out there, and I know that Jason does, and I'm sure that his Eero helps him get some Wi-Fi coverage out there.
00:25:23 ◼ ► Yes, indeed. When I'm sitting out there on my IKEA furniture, and there's a story there that we'll tell next time, I think, about the IKEA furniture.
00:25:34 ◼ ► But the Wi-Fi is out there. I've got some connected devices that are in the backyard and also in the front of the house.
00:25:39 ◼ ► And these were areas that could not be reached by my Wi-Fi before, but now I've got three Eeros in various places, and they all talk to each other, and it couldn't have been easier to set them up.
00:25:52 ◼ ► And now everything is covered. And I don't have a particularly big house, but there were enough connection issues to reach into the backyard that it was a problem.
00:26:01 ◼ ► If you've heard this and you want to get your new Eero straight away, you can get free overnight shipping to the US or Canada when you go to Eero.com. That's E-E-R-O.com.
00:26:11 ◼ ► And at checkout, you select the overnight shipping option and then enter the code "upgrade" and it will be free.
00:26:17 ◼ ► So it's Eero.com, E-E-R-O.com with the promo code "upgrade" for free overnight shipping.
00:26:26 ◼ ► I want to tell you, we mentioned the Snell Zone during that ad read. People who skipped the ad, you missed it.
00:26:32 ◼ ► And I just wanted to share. So for my wife's birthday last weekend, we did an escape room.
00:26:42 ◼ ► Which is the first professional escape room I've been in. I, of course, have done the Ool escape rooms.
00:26:53 ◼ ► And we got it done in like 48 minutes. And there was one thing that we were hung up on or we would have been out of there in 40 minutes.
00:27:00 ◼ ► And it was me and Lauren and the kids. We were the team. And we did it. Everybody contributed.
00:27:10 ◼ ► But in the end, they give you a little thing and they take your picture, which is great.
00:27:14 ◼ ► They take your picture and it's a little whiteboard that's got your what room it was in, what your time was, and a name for your team.
00:27:31 ◼ ► So that is Team Snell Zone that escaped the escape room. But yeah, that was a lot of fun.
00:27:46 ◼ ► No, no, nope. Well, Mojave just popped out and said, "Hey, I'm coming out today. Maybe you should talk about me."
00:27:53 ◼ ► I was like, "Okay, fine, Mojave. Shut up." Yeah, follow-up. I just, I feel bad for Mojave.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Really, I've been writing stories this whole week about iOS and Apple TV, TV OS releases and all that.
00:28:04 ◼ ► And it's always like, "Ah, this is the week where Apple releases all its operating system."
00:28:13 ◼ ► Mac OS. Oh, anyway, last week's episode was called You Will Pay. It was about, in part, the Apple pricing strategy,
00:28:22 ◼ ► where we talked about how Apple's sort of been slowly boiling the frog and raising the prices of iPhones
00:28:27 ◼ ► and raising the price of the iPhone line. And I just wanted to mention, I did write a whole article,
00:28:38 ◼ ► And it is one of those things where it got tweeted out over the weekend by Macworld with a question.
00:28:43 ◼ ► It was like, "Why are iPhones so expensive?" And that's the worst, because then what happens is
00:28:49 ◼ ► all these people who follow Macworld reply trying to helpfully answer the question. It's like, "No, no, no, no.
00:28:55 ◼ ► Read the article. The article answers the question." And I got all these like, "Well, because Apple wants to make more money. Thank you."
00:29:00 ◼ ► Yep. Anyway, if you want to read words about why Apple is charging more for iPhones and how they're doing it and what's happened, you can read that article.
00:29:10 ◼ ► Jason, I would like to welcome the triumphant return of Upstream to the upgrade program.
00:29:15 ◼ ► It's been away for a few weeks because we have so much stuff to do, but it's back and we have a selection of things here.
00:29:22 ◼ ► Apple has ordered a mini-series starring Chris Evans. The Captain America star will play the lead role in a series called
00:29:30 ◼ ► Defending Jacob. It is based on a novel by William Landay. It is a drama show and has been given a straight-to-series order.
00:29:38 ◼ ► Chris Evans hasn't been on TV, I think it says in this article, since like 2010 or something like that.
00:29:44 ◼ ► Or since the 2000s. Long time. So he's coming back because Apple is writing huge checks, continues to do so,
00:30:01 ◼ ► On that note, there was a Wall Street Journal article that hit over the weekend talking about Apple trying to keep their content somewhat clean.
00:30:12 ◼ ► The article starts off talking about a story that I know has been in an article before.
00:30:18 ◼ ► Where Tim Cook declines Dr. Dre's show. Remember those working on a show about Dr. Dre's life?
00:30:24 ◼ ► That show seems to not be happening anymore, and partly because it features lots of sexual content and violence, which Tim Cook didn't want.
00:30:33 ◼ ► So the Wall Street Journal is reusing this story, along with other sources, to once again state that Apple is not keen on
00:30:42 ◼ ► "contuitive sexual content, violence, or strong language" for their shows. They say that Apple currently prefers a family-friendly approach for their programming,
00:30:52 ◼ ► but they do have a small selection of shows that will veer into TVMA, so like mature content territory, but only a little bit.
00:31:01 ◼ ► And you and I have talked about this and speculated about this, and I have with Tim Goodman over at the TV podcast, I do with him, TV Talk Machine.
00:31:09 ◼ ► The question here--so there's a lot to unpack here. First off, we've heard this before.
00:31:20 ◼ ► That Apple is not--it's interesting--is not completely going to avoid mature audience content?
00:31:28 ◼ ► Yeah, I find it so strange, because these articles are written in such a way where they're like, "Oh, prudish Apple, they're not gonna do it."
00:31:33 ◼ ► But there is some. And I think I'm kind of on board with this. If the story calls for it, go for it. But other than that, just try and keep it to a minimum.
00:31:46 ◼ ► Yeah, what Apple doesn't want is for all of its shows to be mature audiences only, right?
00:31:51 ◼ ► Apple wants a spectrum, which, you know, it is Disney-like in that way, because the Disney services are gonna be like that, right?
00:31:59 ◼ ► And in a world where Netflix has these Marvel shows that are all TVMA, right? There are other Marvel shows on cable channels that are not.
00:32:13 ◼ ► So it's this interesting thing of like, "Well, what do you want your mix to be of your service? Do you want it to be all TVMA? Do you want it to all not be?"
00:32:21 ◼ ► And it sounds like Apple is pretty hands-on in saying, "We want a range." And that they've got a standards department, or as it's often called, sensors, that are gonna be like, "This is what we want for this show, and this is the level we want."
00:32:36 ◼ ► And that that has apparently had some conflicts with some of the people they've made deals with. Some of the stuff is really overstated. Like, they mention the amazing stories, I think.
00:32:49 ◼ ► And how they separated from the showrunner there, and what is not stated in that article is that—
00:32:59 ◼ ► Yeah, because Amazing Stories had a showrunner and it had a concept, and when they sold to Apple, Apple wanted it to not be as dark and mature audience as the original showrunner wanted it to be.
00:33:11 ◼ ► And so that showrunner left. But that's not the case that Apple—it was a different order, and it was like there was an original concept, but when it got sold to Apple, the concept changed and the showrunner exited.
00:33:23 ◼ ► It's just a little bit different. So I think this could be good, I think this could be bad. Every time I talk about this, somebody says—so I'm sure there are people out there listening who are saying this—
00:33:31 ◼ ► Why do you have to have violence and swearing and sex in order to make good drama? And those people tend to be people—not always, but tend to be people who don't want to see it, right?
00:33:43 ◼ ► And what I would say is, I think you make a good point. Network TV had great drama for many years with broadcast standards in place, right?
00:33:54 ◼ ► The difference is that—not NBC, we'll get to that—Apple is competing not just with NBC and Fox and ABC and CBS, Apple is competing with Netflix and Amazon and other streaming services who potentially have no standards.
00:34:08 ◼ ► They're like literally whatever. Or their standards are very, very limited. They're competing with them not just for audiences, you can't just think about that.
00:34:19 ◼ ► They're competing with them for creators. For high-profile creators, people who they think are going to be making great stuff.
00:34:26 ◼ ► Whether they're already famous or whether they've got a great hot new property that everybody likes and thinks it's going to be a hit.
00:34:34 ◼ ► And the more of a reputation you get for meddling with what the creators want to do, for giving notes, for saying you can't say that, you can't show that, the more those people get turned off.
00:34:49 ◼ ► Right. And Apple can counter that with money, but only to a certain point. And that means that Apple is now spending more to get those people than Amazon or Netflix would.
00:34:57 ◼ ► Because they have to counter, they have to use their money to counter the creative things.
00:35:01 ◼ ► And above a certain point, a lot of these creators are going to be like, "Well, I can make a slightly cheaper deal with Netflix and have complete creative control."
00:35:09 ◼ ► Or I could go to Apple and get a little more money, but they're going to be in my face for however long I'm doing this, changing my vision into something else.
00:35:17 ◼ ► Now I'm not saying that's right or wrong. I'm not saying that those creative people, when put in a little bit of a box, wouldn't come up with creative solutions that mean they don't really need to be TVMA and they can still make a really great show.
00:35:28 ◼ ► I'm not saying that because I do believe that is actually true. I think you can make a perfectly great, modern, dramatic show without it being full of nudity and sex and graphic violence and strong language.
00:35:44 ◼ ► I'm saying if I'm a successful TV producer and I've got a choice between the service that's going to read every script and give me feedback and say, "Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this," and this other service that will pay me just as much and not say anything, who am I going to pick? Like, really, who am I going to pick?
00:36:05 ◼ ► So that is the challenge here, and it's a reputation thing, and it's about making deals with the people who are making these shows and being a place that creative people want to go.
00:36:15 ◼ ► This is the story of HBO, right? Like, creative people want to go to HBO because of the reputation HBO has. And that is what NBC is working with here.
00:36:28 ◼ ► The most damning thing in the entire Wall Street Journal thing is Apple being referred to by people in Hollywood as "expensive NBC," which made me laugh out loud when I saw it.
00:36:39 ◼ ► Because what it means is Apple's got a lot of money, but they want broadcast standards. They are expensive NBC. They don't want to make a super edgy HBO show. They want to make an NBC show, but they'll pay you a lot of money for high value.
00:36:55 ◼ ► Now, on one level, that seems like a recipe for failure because people don't watch network TV anymore. They watch streaming and premium cable and stuff like that.
00:37:06 ◼ ► And network TV is seen as this area of, like, kind of boring, completely sanded-down entertainment.
00:37:15 ◼ ► The other way to view it would be that maybe the money is part of it, and that Apple's money could counteract that and make something that was for a particular target audience, but not compromised in a way that makes it not interesting.
00:37:32 ◼ ► I think Apple is walking a really dangerous line here where they may turn off good creators and they may end up with programming that isn't as good as it could be because of meeting these standards.
00:37:49 ◼ ► But at the same time, they're picking who their target audience is, and I really appreciate—like, Lost in Space on Netflix. It's a bad show. I didn't like it.
00:37:56 ◼ ► But what I appreciated about it—watch the whole thing. It was bad. Don't write me. What I appreciated about it is that that was built for a target audience. That was family audience. It was not built TVMA.
00:38:10 ◼ ► There was just—what is it? Is it Netflix or Amazon? Just has a show that just came out. Tim Goodman actually reviewed it.
00:38:18 ◼ ► And there are a few of these shows now popping up on streaming that are basically like network stuff. Fuller House is another good example, right?
00:38:26 ◼ ► If you're Netflix, you actually want to not just get an HBO audience. You want a broad audience. You want people who are leaving network TV behind but still kind of want the stuff that's on—of a style that's on network TV.
00:38:39 ◼ ► So what I'm saying is as this whole world of streaming and television changes, there's going to be a desire for all sorts of different kinds of content at different levels, targeted at different audiences.
00:38:53 ◼ ► So it may just be that Apple is trying to be really careful of not coming out of the gate with every single show being TVMA because what they want is a range.
00:39:01 ◼ ► They want kids' shows. They want stuff that families can watch, and they want some stuff that's adult, but they don't want all their stuff to be adult.
00:39:08 ◼ ► If you think about it in the network context, you've got to have an 8 o'clock show, you've got to have a 9 o'clock show, and a 10 o'clock show.
00:39:14 ◼ ► And the content that's allowed in those different time parts or whatever you want to call them—I think it's like in the UK, it's like before and after the watershed, right?
00:39:24 ◼ ► Kids don't watch after the watershed, right? It's that idea. If you're Apple, do you want to spread a—I'm like, I can kind of get behind that, that they want to spread.
00:39:32 ◼ ► Disney will do the same thing with their streaming services. They're going to want a spread of content for audiences. They're not going to want it to all be for little kids, unless it's a little kid service, right?
00:39:43 ◼ ► You're defining it as a broader service. So I don't know. I think this could be okay, but in the back of my mind, I keep thinking, "I'm a creator. Apple's getting a reputation for micromanaging some of the details of the show that I want to make because they don't want it to be TVMA, and it's going to be a fight."
00:40:02 ◼ ► Or I can go to Netflix or Amazon if I have that option, and it's not going to be a fight. And that means those people are not going to pick working with Apple. And that's not good for Apple.
00:40:12 ◼ ► Disney's streaming service is going to be getting more original Marvel content. Apparently—so there's rumors now, but you know how it is in the TV industry—
00:40:21 ◼ ► Apparently they are planning a number of limited series centered on Marvel characters like Loki and Scarlet Witch. But what's more, these shows are expected to feature the movie actors reprising their roles for six to eight episode miniseries about the characters.
00:40:37 ◼ ► This is how serious Disney is about launching their service. They have never done this where they've taken movie characters and made TV shows about them for Marvel. The Marvel TV stuff has been produced largely separate from the Marvel films.
00:40:52 ◼ ► And it's typically people that aren't in the movies at all. They don't recast people. They just don't put them in.
00:40:58 ◼ ► Right. So this is "We Will Pay Tom Hiddleston to do a six-hour miniseries about Loki for our streaming service because everybody's going to want to see it because they watch all the Marvel movies and now he's going to also have a TV show."
00:41:10 ◼ ► It is—yeah. I read this and I was like, "Okay, game on." This is them willing to spend a lot of money in order to play this card, which is they've got this incredibly valuable film franchise. And the existing Marvel Netflix shows and other network shows don't really dovetail with the Marvel films.
00:41:35 ◼ ► They're being serious. You know, people like Hiddleston movie money. Right? Like he's going to get paid, but he'd get paid for doing a movie. Probably. Right? Because it's going to be like three hours, probably, of content that will be produced. So it's going to be very big.
00:41:49 ◼ ► And lastly, Amazon announces a TiVo-like device called the Fire TV Recast. They had like an absolute billion amount of Echo devices last week. I know that you covered them on download. Right? Like just everything.
00:42:04 ◼ ► Yeah, Amazon is doing everything. One of them was the Fire TV Recast. It can send a signal from an antenna to Echo devices that have screens on them, Fire TV devices, or to mobile devices via an app. It allows you to record two shows at once. And there are 500 gigabyte and one terabyte models. As a TiVo fan, does this interest you in any way?
00:42:25 ◼ ► Well, it is not a device meant to be hooked up to cable. It's meant to be hooked up to an antenna. And so for people who live, and there are a lot of people who do, in the US near their local TV antenna where they can get the broadcaster, where they can get over the air, like there's high quality, high definition over the air broadcasting happening, and you can capture it and record it. And so then you can cut the cord and keep your local channels, which is really cool. And that's what this does. TiVo has a device like this. There are a couple other devices like this.
00:42:55 ◼ ► I can't get over the air, so it's irrelevant to me. But I think it's interesting that Amazon is going in here because this is a niche market, but I think that it could grow with education, the idea that you're a cord cutter with an antenna on your roof or on your patio or whatever, because it does make it easier to cut the cord if all your local channels come along.
00:43:18 ◼ ► Like, you know, your network affiliates and local independents, they're downloaded onto your hard drive and it's done. Of course, a lot of the streaming services will offer your local channels too, but this is a way to get it for free, basically, if you can get them via antenna. So it's kind of interesting. It's still going to be a real niche product, though.
00:43:41 ◼ ► All right, let's talk about the iPhone XS's. We both had them for the whole weekend, right? I know that you have both, right? The XS and the XS Max?
00:43:58 ◼ ► I went down to Cupertino, picked up some review units, got a briefing. And yes, I got both sizes to try out, which is fun.
00:44:07 ◼ ► I have, obviously, my XS Max. And I kind of wanted to just go through a few different sections and kind of just talk about our experiences with them.
00:44:17 ◼ ► So the design of the phones overall is mostly the same. The colors are different. What color do you have with yours?
00:44:38 ◼ ► I have the gold and I love the gold. It's really interesting, actually, because I went to the Regent Street Apple store and picked up mine in the morning.
00:44:48 ◼ ► And in the store with the in-store lighting, the gold is very, very subtle. But at home, it's much deeper. It's like a copper color when I'm at home.
00:44:58 ◼ ► It seems to react to different lighting in different ways, but I really do like the gold. I mean, I am a case person for my phones because I just don't trust myself.
00:45:08 ◼ ► And I got a blue case and it matches quite nicely with the little gold accents that pop out like the bottom or the ringer switch and stuff.
00:45:17 ◼ ► I really like the gold. Ultimately, because I do put my phone in cases, it kind of doesn't really matter anymore what I get because all the phones have dark faces now.
00:45:27 ◼ ► But I wanted to go for the gold and I went for the gold. I'm really happy with my decision, actually. I've seen all three colors, right?
00:45:48 ◼ ► Sorry, little spandau ballet sideline there. How could you not? No, the gold is very pretty. They did a good job.
00:45:54 ◼ ► This is the thing that kills me every time. Syracuse refers to the white, silver iPhone X design as dishwater white. I don't read it that way at all. I think it's beautiful.
00:46:04 ◼ ► I think he's very wrong because I think the space gray is the worst looking. I think the space gray looks like a chocolatey brown color.
00:46:12 ◼ ► Yeah, it's a chocolate phone. I was about to say the exact same thing. It's the chocolate phone.
00:46:16 ◼ ► And I always go for the black phone, right? I bought that last year and then my review unit was a white one, a silver, and it's prettier. It's absolutely better looking.
00:46:29 ◼ ► And the reason is that I don't view the white back as dishwater color. I view it as this kind of shimmering silvery white.
00:46:38 ◼ ► It's got this kind of almost pearl finish to it and it's beautiful. The gold is that but gold. They're very pretty. They did a good job.
00:46:49 ◼ ► And I stand by my statement that I think the space gray phone is actually the most boring. If you put it in a case, it doesn't really matter.
00:46:58 ◼ ► But if you're just judging it without a case, I think that the chocolate phone is no good.
00:47:03 ◼ ► There isn't really anything else to say about the physical hardware design, the look of them. I want to talk about the size of the Macs.
00:47:12 ◼ ► I have one thing to say, which is just I love the fact that in the future, people who are analyzing what model of iPhone you have when you bring it into an Apple store or to an independent or whatever are going to be looking at the speaker grates on the bottom to see if they're symmetrical or not.
00:47:32 ◼ ► That's bad. That's one of those things that like so basically, in case you don't know, if you look at the bottom of your iPhone, they have little holes in the bottom, which is the speaker grates.
00:47:40 ◼ ► And on the 10, they were symmetrical. They were like five and five or whatever. How many there were. But on the 10s, there it is an uneven number.
00:47:50 ◼ ► So on the Macs, it's four on the left and seven on the right. So the speaker holes are not symmetrical anymore.
00:47:58 ◼ ► And this is one of those things that like for years you would see somebody post a picture at the bottom of an Android phone, like a Samsung phone, and be like, oh, look at this.
00:48:09 ◼ ► They don't even like when people are trying to show that Samsung have copied Apple. Right.
00:48:14 ◼ ► And they'll take pictures of the two, the bottom of both phones and Samsung will have asymmetrical speaker grates or whatever.
00:48:20 ◼ ► And people are like, oh, bleh, design. Well, now Apple does it too. And it's because they've the antenna line is there. I don't know why it's there.
00:48:31 ◼ ► On the left, it's three. It's three and six for the 10s standard size. But yeah, it's and so that's going to be one of those things where if you're a super knowledgeable Apple person, you're going to look and you're going to be like, oh, that's not a 10s.
00:48:48 ◼ ► Almost, but not quite. Anyway, it's a silly little thing. But otherwise, otherwise it's indistinguishable. Like, I put my 10s review unit in my 10 case because they do fit. They're not quite perfect, but they fit.
00:49:02 ◼ ► Yeah, a little bit, but it's close enough. And it's the same phone. Like, it feels exactly the same. It is not, it does not feel different in any way.
00:49:12 ◼ ► This is one of those years where the design is basically unchanged. And that's fine. But the gold is pretty.
00:49:18 ◼ ► Unless you got the big one, in which case, in which case, so let me, let me lead you into talking about the big one because you're the plus club and I've never been in the plus club.
00:49:24 ◼ ► And what I'll say is one of the funny things about having both of these phones is you spend a little time with the 10s max and you start to lose, like lose track.
00:49:34 ◼ ► You become unmoored from reality and you're like, oh, I didn't, I don't remember that the iPhone 10 was this big, but it's fine.
00:49:40 ◼ ► Because it is, it is so weird because it is, it is just an iPhone 10 that has gotten a little bit bigger. It's, it's, it's this really strange feeling.
00:49:54 ◼ ► It doesn't feel like, like I wouldn't choose it because I prefer the smaller phone in my hand, but it feels just like an alternate version of the iPhone 10 to me in a strange way.
00:50:09 ◼ ► And then you carry that around for a while and then you put it back down next to the iPhone 10s, not max, and you go, oh, look at the teeny little phone that's there.
00:50:18 ◼ ► Right? Because you lose perspective about it because they're literally the same phone, just one of them's bigger.
00:50:25 ◼ ► So I have my theory about this, right? So I'll just say, I find the max to be very comfortable in the hand. It reminds me so much of the plus.
00:50:32 ◼ ► It feels like less of a jump and I feel like people like yourself who were very much in the anti plus size.
00:50:40 ◼ ► I think what's happened is, cause a lot of people that I know saying similar things like, oh, this actually isn't too bad.
00:51:00 ◼ ► So I think that the fact that the phones got bigger, the 10 got bigger. Now there being another bigger one.
00:51:05 ◼ ► Well, it's just a little bit bigger again. And I think that that's maybe it is part of it, right?
00:51:10 ◼ ► That the design makes it feel that way. But you already got used to having a bigger phone.
00:51:15 ◼ ► So how getting used to having an even bigger phone is way less harder than it used to be.
00:51:20 ◼ ► That's kind of my my theory on this one. Why I think there seems to be a lot of people in basically every review,
00:51:26 ◼ ► even from people like that I know would never have bought a plus phone, including John Gruber, right?
00:51:31 ◼ ► So basically a similar thing to you, which is like, I could actually see myself using this.
00:51:39 ◼ ► I would even go so far as to say that if I was in a particular scenario where I was spending a lot of time with just my iPhone and I needed to get stuff done,
00:51:51 ◼ ► I could see choosing this because of the bigger battery and also because of just having that bigger screen.
00:52:00 ◼ ► It's like, you know, you're in in horizontal mode where you can see three tracks at once and you can like I totally out of the podcast on the tennis max.
00:52:09 ◼ ► I could do it on the tennis, but it would not be pleasant, but I think it would actually be OK on the tennis max.
00:52:25 ◼ ► but I could see other scenarios where this one would would be worth it for me in a way that the plus models wouldn't have been.
00:52:33 ◼ ► It was really funny. So, you know, everyone knows this who's listened over the past years.
00:52:38 ◼ ► I think everybody does this. As soon as I get the phones, I open up Apple Notes and I just start writing down everything that I'm experiencing.
00:52:49 ◼ ► And there was one thing that I wrote a couple of things that I wrote after holding the Max was within minutes, my iPhone 10 felt tiny.
00:52:57 ◼ ► Like just was like, what is this baby, baby phone? And I kind of I wrote down the size like it's big.
00:53:09 ◼ ► And that I kind of had this feeling of that I was home again. Right. That's kind of how I felt.
00:53:15 ◼ ► It's like this feels like home again. Having the bigger phone about 20 minutes after Federico received his phone, he sent me a text.
00:53:26 ◼ ► Right. Because I didn't say it to him. But he also being someone, a previous proponent of Plus Club, I think it's just like having these bigger phones.
00:53:34 ◼ ► This is what we're used to. Like, I love these phones for media and in lots of apps, even ones that haven't been like specifically tuned for it.
00:53:42 ◼ ► You can just see more at once. And that can either be something you want or something you don't want.
00:53:47 ◼ ► But it is for people that like these bigger phones. It's one of the main reasons to get them.
00:53:52 ◼ ► It's just you want to be able to see as much as you can see on the screen that you have.
00:53:56 ◼ ► And so I'm very, very happy with the size of this phone. But every new phone Jason brings with it, set up.
00:54:04 ◼ ► So I wanted to talk to you a little about that set up. So like last year, the quick set up feature really makes this process so much easier now.
00:54:14 ◼ ► So this is where if you have if you have an old phone on and near any device, actually, even like an iPad that is signed into an iCloud account,
00:54:22 ◼ ► when you turn on the new phone, it will prompt you and be like, do you just want to transfer the settings?
00:54:27 ◼ ► This is something I hadn't seen before. It popped up on my iPad and was like, you have this phone.
00:54:32 ◼ ► We know you have this old phone. Do you just want to transfer the settings of the old phone to this one?
00:54:39 ◼ ► Yeah. So what it's doing is it's it's connecting. It's providing just a basic amount of information that's necessary to transfer directly.
00:54:48 ◼ ► And then it's kicking off the iCloud backup of the rest of it. And it's a it's funny since we one of our, I think, most popular episodes ever, three years ago, maybe,
00:54:57 ◼ ► was complaining about how unpleasant the what should be your most pleasant day as an Apple product buyer should be.
00:55:04 ◼ ► And this this thing, which they've had for a little while now, but it keeps getting better.
00:55:08 ◼ ► And it got better again this year, which I think it was this year because I do this every year now with my reviews.
00:55:15 ◼ ► Not only is there the thing where you hold the camera over the other thing and see little dots just like on the Apple Watch,
00:55:19 ◼ ► and it does that basic transfer between the two devices, and then it kicks off the wireless and you have to put in the password of the one phone on the other phone and all the security stuff.
00:55:34 ◼ ► I know you're not an Apple Watch person, but let me tell you, the Apple Watch stuff, which used to be a total disaster.
00:55:40 ◼ ► You had to remember to unpair your Apple Watch from your old phone and it would take forever because it's the Apple Watch.
00:55:46 ◼ ► And then you had to go transfer to the new phone and then you had to repair and restore from a backup and all of that.
00:55:51 ◼ ► And this time when I did it, it was like, oh, you've got an Apple Watch. You want me to transfer that, too?
00:55:59 ◼ ► But it was way smoother than it has been in the past where it realized I have an Apple Watch attached to my phone.
00:56:17 ◼ ► Other than having to re-enter my Gmail password, which was not a big deal, everything else transferred and was there and was super easy.
00:56:36 ◼ ► And I did see one thing that I hadn't seen before that I really liked where on the XS Max, it popped up and said,
00:56:42 ◼ ► "Hey, your iCloud backup is a little bit out of date." It hadn't been updated since 7 p.m. the day before.
00:56:54 ◼ ► And when I tapped yes, the backup began on the X. I tapped the button on the XS Max and then an upgrade, like a backup began on the X.
00:57:13 ◼ ► There are too many weird things, like too many apps I'm logged out of or my settings are different in some way.
00:57:20 ◼ ► I'm fully aware of the fact that if you backup on a Mac and do the encrypted backup, things are more likely to be transferred correctly.
00:57:31 ◼ ► But I do iCloud restores because that's how the vast majority of people getting a new iPhone will set it up.
00:57:45 ◼ ► They're pushing you down the iCloud restore. And I feel like for two weeks afterwards, none of my music that I downloaded on my X is downloaded on my XS.
00:57:56 ◼ ► I have to manually go in and download all my music from Apple Music if I want anything to be offline.
00:58:01 ◼ ► There are a bunch of applications that I open them up and they're just logged out. But not every app is like this.
00:58:08 ◼ ► Some apps I go there and it's all there again. I find this process to be way too splintered in a way that I am unhappy with.
00:58:28 ◼ ► And until Apple gets to that point, I will continue to be unhappy with the way that this process works.
00:58:40 ◼ ► I understand the technical reasons why it happens. But I think it's a poor user experience.
00:58:45 ◼ ► Because the problem is that it's not consistent. Some apps I'm logged into, some apps I'm not.
00:58:57 ◼ ► I want to system whatever it is they have to do to make it that this won't be an issue.
00:59:11 ◼ ► That they could do something in the future where if an app requires you to re-login again,
00:59:21 ◼ ► I want to see stuff like that happening. Because when I open my email app and it's all there.
00:59:38 ◼ ► I think this is made easier by the fact that now with the new app login stuff and the new password stuff,
00:59:46 ◼ ► that I was able to get one password inserted into a lot of my apps when I needed to re-login.
00:59:56 ◼ ► The fact that I could just hit that little suggestion in the quick type keyboard and could get my one password.
01:00:02 ◼ ► This year was a nicer process, but it's still way too manual for me. I want more of this to be automatic.
01:00:13 ◼ ► the response maybe should be to allow that stuff to be able to transfer as part of that initial device to device transfer.
01:00:23 ◼ ► Literally you show you have the password for this other device, and now it's going to transfer all of its stuff to you and then do an iCloud backup.
01:00:32 ◼ ► I'm sure there are lots of security ramifications there, but it strikes me as being a way to solve this.
01:00:38 ◼ ► Because at some point as a user you need to be able to say, "All the stuff on there is my stuff. Move it over."
01:00:44 ◼ ► Maybe there are issues with things being tied to a particular device or something like that.
01:00:49 ◼ ► If that's the case, then make changes to the operating system that allow app developers to not necessarily tie to a specific device,
01:00:56 ◼ ► but tie to you as a user. Maybe they're already in the process of doing that. I don't know.
01:01:03 ◼ ► I think it is a minor inconvenience to log into apps now instead of a major inconvenience to get the phone to a point where it's functional.
01:01:12 ◼ ► I'm doing this on launch day, and I'm not having these problems anymore where my iCloud restore is sitting for six hours doing nothing.
01:01:35 ◼ ► But it's because that's gotten better, I want the whole experience to be even smoother still.
01:01:40 ◼ ► I feel like this is an important thing, and I would love to see them get even better at it.
01:01:56 ◼ ► But even things I've found like text selection in notes feels smoother than it did before.
01:02:02 ◼ ► There are a lot of little places, and we're going to talk about the camera's performance, but even the camera app is moving way quicker.
01:02:21 ◼ ► There's not a lot of them, but I'm getting some weird bugs and weird freezes on the Macs that I wasn't getting on my iPhone X.
01:02:29 ◼ ► My assumption here is just because I would assume that based upon Apple's secrecy, not a lot of testing occurs necessarily on the Mac's phone.
01:02:43 ◼ ► I would assume the majority of testing in iOS 12's development is occurring on the stuff that already exists.
01:02:52 ◼ ► I would assume that mostly, I'm sure they do test this on the new hardware, but it's probably much more limited, right?
01:03:00 ◼ ► So, I mean, it is pretty normal that a couple of weeks after a phone comes out, there is a super quick point update that just clears out some bugs.
01:03:07 ◼ ► I've even had stuff like, I had no app crashes on my iPhone X for the entire iOS 12 beta.
01:03:24 ◼ ► And this is on the XS and XS Max, which is so strange. I don't understand why that would be occurring.
01:03:32 ◼ ► But that is not a completely unique experience. I've been seeing a few cases of this in different places.
01:03:38 ◼ ► But the phones do feel really snappy. They're really quick. We need to talk about the camera.
01:03:43 ◼ ► I'll say, before we get to the camera, one last thing about the apps on the Max that aren't explicitly updated for the Max size are scaled.
01:03:53 ◼ ► And the difference is that the resolution of the X is so high, and the XS and the XS Max, all these phones, these free phones that are kind of the same in a lot of ways,
01:04:02 ◼ ► so high that it's actually almost impossible to tell, unlike on the Plus, right, where the scaled ones all looked fuzzy.
01:04:08 ◼ ► On the XS Max, the scaled apps look fine. Now, supporting the native size puts a lot more content on the screen,
01:04:16 ◼ ► and so it's worth doing if you're an app developer. But as a user, my feeling is you basically don't notice.
01:04:38 ◼ ► And I think it's just because there's been enough history of this now that it's not so bad.
01:04:44 ◼ ► But I'm seeing some apps that need a little bit of update in getting it, and I'm looking forward to seeing when people have this phone and the XR in for testing,
01:04:55 ◼ ► that we may see some more developers taking advantage of the bigger screens in even more ways, which I love.
01:05:01 ◼ ► But the camera, now this is so interesting to me, just the performance of the camera on these phones,
01:05:19 ◼ ► And he goes into a lot of detail about stuff that just wasn't spoken about, like for example, that there is a 32% increased focal length.
01:05:31 ◼ ► Okay, sorry, yes, that's it. And that increases focal length, is what I was trying to say.
01:05:36 ◼ ► So the sensor is larger, and it increases the focal length, so it means if you take a picture with a X and a XS in the exact same place,
01:05:53 ◼ ► What it is is the effective lens size is larger, so, you know, it is, therefore you get this, you get a little more in there.
01:06:06 ◼ ► Yeah, and there's more light going into the sensors, and there's a lot more going on because that sensor is larger, which means that it's taking in more light.
01:06:18 ◼ ► I am doing everything I can right now to take pictures in ways that I wouldn't normally take them.
01:06:24 ◼ ► Like, "Hey, stand in front of this light fixture and let me take a picture of you," is what I've been doing for the past couple of days.
01:06:38 ◼ ► Like, you know, you can't take a picture facing into the sun, it'll blow out the picture.
01:06:45 ◼ ► Like, the way it deals with low light, the way it deals with bad light sources is wonderful.
01:06:56 ◼ ► And I know, like, it seems that all of the reviews that I've seen from sources where they look at Android and they look at iPhone are saying that, like, this camera is incredible, the Pixel 2 still takes better pictures, but this phone, this camera is incredible.
01:07:10 ◼ ► It makes perfect sense to me because if the big improvements here are because of machine learning, Google's going to have that on lock because that's what they do.
01:07:20 ◼ ► But the argument for this stuff always is, like, I don't want the best camera, I want the best camera on an iPhone because I want to use an iPhone.
01:07:31 ◼ ► I would say I have heard this argument, and I did hear it on Connected last week, that the argument is Apple's got to work hard here because Google is great with machine learning stuff and computational photography is all about that sort of stuff.
01:07:47 ◼ ► However, what is Apple good at that its competition is bad at, or at least not as good as Apple at?
01:07:57 ◼ ► So just because, so yeah, here's the thing, Google can be better at machine learning, but they still got to run that on a Qualcomm chip.
01:08:06 ◼ ► And if Apple can beat the pants off Qualcomm at the neural engine performance, basically, then that's Apple's advantage.
01:08:23 ◼ ► That's right, but they're both pressing their advantages, which is why Apple talks all about the neural engine and the eight cores and all of that in the promo of this, because that's what they're really good at.
01:08:36 ◼ ► I think that it does everybody a disservice to say that, and also Qualcomm has actually done really well with the neural processing subprocessors on their mobile chips, too.
01:08:45 ◼ ► So it's not like one company is bad at one thing and good at the other, but there is an arms race happening.
01:08:52 ◼ ► Apple have done an incredible job with the machine learning and all the neural stuff to make Smart HDR work, because it is one of my favorite features that Apple have introduced to an iPhone ever.
01:09:09 ◼ ► I want to be forgiven for the bad photos that I will inevitably take, because I am not a photographer, and I am personally not massively interested in learning all of the stuff that I'm going to need to know to take good pictures.
01:09:34 ◼ ► I have a thing I want to capture forever. I want it to be captured in the way that I'm going to be happy with it in years to come.
01:09:42 ◼ ► So I want my computer phone to take this picture for me and give me something that is closest to what my eyes can see. That's all I want.
01:09:57 ◼ ► It's not true that every photo you take you want to look exactly like what you're seeing, because something like having a blurred background, right?
01:10:04 ◼ ► You're actually creating something that's not like what you're seeing, but that is pleasing aesthetically.
01:10:09 ◼ ► But I do think so much of consumer photography really is about, "I see this thing happening in front of me and I want to capture it."
01:10:23 ◼ ► Not just the optics, just to make a parallel to computers, not just the optics, but the neural processing, right?
01:10:29 ◼ ► Like our brains do a lot of processing of the images we get from our eyes, but it's way better than a camera can do.
01:10:35 ◼ ► So what the Smart HDR is doing that I think is really powerful is getting that image that you're seeing, especially where there's huge dynamic range in the scene,
01:10:44 ◼ ► there's darks and lights in the same shot, is to try to get something that is closer to what you actually were trying to capture,
01:10:56 ◼ ► But how many times have you done that where you're like, "Oh, this is great," and then you take a picture and it's like you can't see half of it because there was too much light and it adjusted for the darkness and blew out the lights,
01:11:08 ◼ ► And for stuff like that, it does a spectacular job and I think people will like it and they won't think anything of it, right?
01:11:14 ◼ ► That's the other thing about this being turned on by default and doing all this stuff is, as far as you're concerned as a user, you press the button and it takes a picture and the picture looks good.
01:11:23 ◼ ► And that's all it should be. Like there shouldn't be any fiddling around here. It should just do it.
01:11:27 ◼ ► You don't have to tap, like be sure to tap on the light spot and then it'll get the dark spot.
01:11:33 ◼ ► And I'll throw in on the video side something that they also didn't talk about so much, which is the idea that there's this extended dynamic range video, which blew me away.
01:11:42 ◼ ► As somebody who tries to think about how much processing and how much data is going on here, they don't say HDR. They say it's extended dynamic range video.
01:11:51 ◼ ► This is a feature that has existed before and other things. Dan Sturm told me that it's a feature on RED cameras to do this, which is a high-end professional video camera.
01:12:02 ◼ ► But the way it works on the iPhone XS is if you take a 4K video at 30 frames a second, the device is capable of capturing 60 frames a second, right?
01:12:14 ◼ ► So if you take it at 30, what it does is it still captures at 60, but it captures every other frame as a stepped up or stepped down image.
01:12:28 ◼ ► And then on the fly stitches those two images together into a single extended dynamic range image, which means, follow me here, it's shooting 4K video at 60 frames a second, adjusting the settings every 1/60th of a second,
01:12:44 ◼ ► and every 1/30th of a second, taking two frames of 4K video and analyzing them to see if they can put them together in a way to extend the dynamic range.
01:12:56 ◼ ► And all you do is you press the button and record video. But some of their videos where they've got bicycles going through the forest and there's light streaming through and there's a deep shadow in the back,
01:13:07 ◼ ► what it's doing there is the dark stuff is being taken from one of those sets of frames and the light stuff from the alternate other set of frames and then it's stitching them all together.
01:13:21 ◼ ► That is amazing that that kind of stuff is happening. But that's where we are with this technology is that how do you get around the limits of sensors in terms of dynamic range?
01:13:31 ◼ ► And the answer is build faster sensors and take a bunch of pictures and then have software stitch them all together on the fly.
01:13:37 ◼ ► And it's happening today. Like literally the shipping iPhone today, if you take video at 30 frames per second, it is capturing and extending dynamic range and you don't even know it.
01:13:49 ◼ ► So I just want to before we move away from this and we start talking about the Apple Watch, I put a link in the show notes to a camera test that I did yesterday.
01:13:58 ◼ ► Me and Nadine we went out and we were having a drink in a bar, low light in there, and I took a picture on her phone and a picture on my phone.
01:14:06 ◼ ► You see this link I put in the show notes? Yeah, I see it. You compare those two, right? So on the left is the iPhone 10 and on the right is my XS Max.
01:14:15 ◼ ► That difference, like this is the exact type of thing I'm talking about, right? Like if we're out at a nice place, I might want to take a picture of her, right? She has a drink.
01:14:28 ◼ ► What it looks like is she's backlit. There's a light right behind her head. And on the XS picture, what it looks like is it looks like almost like a photographer's assistant was off screen with like a reflective thing to light her face.
01:14:42 ◼ ► Because a professional photographer, that's what they do if you're backlit, is that they're going to front light you to counteract the backlighting.
01:14:49 ◼ ► But in this case, what's happening is the XS Max is doing that long exposure and also the other exposures and then putting them together.
01:14:58 ◼ ► And so it's able to capture. Also, I'll point out, the light behind her is also not blown out like it is on the X.
01:15:05 ◼ ► Like the X, it's all bulgy and there's like a big flare at the top of the light. And on the XS Max shot, it is the shape of the light, which is also kind of amazing.
01:15:29 ◼ ► Nobody who knew what they were doing with a camera would take this picture, right? Because it's just not going to come out, right?
01:15:35 ◼ ► Like just me on my own taking this picture. But I want to take it. I want these pictures.
01:15:41 ◼ ► And this camera is allowing me to do that. Like all of the detail, all of the color, the color of her sweater, like all of this stuff comes out in a way that I could never have captured before.
01:15:52 ◼ ► Like I am really, really blown away by how good this camera is at fixing my mistakes. And I think that that is awesome.
01:16:13 ◼ ► I think that they did a bad job of selling this thing to me because the pictures that they're taking are professional photos.
01:16:22 ◼ ► And that's not what they should be showing me. Like I want to see pictures like this. Show me pictures of someone in a bar.
01:16:29 ◼ ► Like don't show me pictures of someone standing like next to the Golden Gate Bridge. Like and it be all beautiful.
01:16:34 ◼ ► Because that's not like... that's not how me and you take photos. Because that's not what we do.
01:16:39 ◼ ► We take pictures of our friends, you know, doing silly things in places and we take pictures of our dogs in the park, right?
01:16:51 ◼ ► Because it's been so funny like as I've been sharing some of these pictures over the past few days that people were like, "Oh, now I want one of these."
01:17:02 ◼ ► I think this is the feature that would get if you have last year's model. The thing that will make you say, "Oh, I do need to update." Which again, most people are not needing to update from last year's model.
01:17:11 ◼ ► But if there is something that's going to drive it... I mean I posted something in our Slack like a picture of my dog. I was taking a walk.
01:17:16 ◼ ► And one of these situations where it was the afternoon and we were on the side of the mountain on a trail and there's light parts and dark parts.
01:17:24 ◼ ► And like you can see the dog in the shadows. You can see the blue sky. It's not blown out. You can see the leaves on the trees.
01:17:36 ◼ ► And it's just that... Again, if you're a professional photographer, you know not to do that.
01:17:41 ◼ ► But this is consumer photography and you don't care where the sun is. You care where your kid is or your dog is or whatever.
01:17:47 ◼ ► And you want to take a picture of that and have it actually look good. And this does that.
01:17:59 ◼ ► And none of this is conclusive, but it's some of the stuff that has made me happy that I upgraded my phone.
01:18:12 ◼ ► I want to talk to you about the PDF Pen, which is one of my very favourite applications.
01:18:27 ◼ ► You can mark up and highlight PDFs. You can search and redact sensitive information such as account numbers if you're sending them off to somebody else.
01:18:38 ◼ ► And you don't have to do that weird thing where you convert it to a different format and try and convert it back again.
01:18:43 ◼ ► You can insert, remove and reorder pages in PDFs. You can move and adjust images, record and playback audio annotations.
01:18:51 ◼ ► Or as well, you can grab PDF Pen Pro, which will allow you to create fillable PDF forms.
01:18:57 ◼ ► You can create an edit table of contents, convert websites into PDFs and even add and edit document permissions.
01:19:04 ◼ ► PDF Pen 10 comes with a bunch of new features such as watermarks and a new precision editing tool.
01:19:10 ◼ ► Head over to the Smile blog and you can get details and animated gifs of all of these features in action.
01:19:18 ◼ ► I use it every single day. I deal with contracts so much in my work and I get sent some of the most wild things you'll ever see in your life.
01:19:25 ◼ ► I love when somebody sends you a Word document and like, can you sign this? How? How? How do you think I'm going to print this?
01:19:37 ◼ ► So you can learn more about PDF Pen and PDF Pen Pro right now at smilesoftware.com/podcast.
01:19:54 ◼ ► I didn't buy one of these myself, but I did buy one for Adino and I wore it for a whole day just so I could kind of get a feeling for it.
01:20:04 ◼ ► When I went to the Apple Store, though, I did try on the gold stainless steel in the 44 millimeter and immediately fell in love with it.
01:20:13 ◼ ► That is the, in my opinion, the most beautiful Apple Watch that Apple has ever made. I think it is stunning.
01:20:31 ◼ ► It's because you are gold. Always believing. Anyway, we're back to spin about. I have the aluminum space gray as I always do.
01:20:43 ◼ ► I saw it, but they did not give me a gold watch to review. I did see one and it looks very nice.
01:20:51 ◼ ► The gold stainless looks really, really nice. If you want a gold watch, shiny gold watch, it's definitely.
01:20:58 ◼ ► I don't love the fact that the stainless is only the cellular model because that's a $300 gap between the GPS only aluminum and the nearest stainless.
01:21:11 ◼ ► And I don't love that, but it is what it is there. I get why they're doing it, but I don't love it.
01:21:18 ◼ ► Did you use coming the original packaging? Because I don't know how this stuff comes from Apple.
01:21:24 ◼ ► Because they've changed the way that they do the watch packaging, which is really interesting to me where you now get the watch and the band in two separate boxes and it's kind of held together in this paper.
01:21:37 ◼ ► Yeah. So my expectation is, I mean, they're clearly doing this to help with logistics, right? Because then they don't need as many what's called SKUs, right?
01:21:47 ◼ ► So they don't need as many options and as many prepackaged watches with the bands, because now the boxes, the watches are all just exactly the same and they add the band choice.
01:21:57 ◼ ► My expectation is they are building towards a build to order for the watch, which you can't do right now.
01:22:03 ◼ ► Like if you want to get X watch, it comes with X band and that's it. And there might be a couple of options, but like you can only choose from the options.
01:22:11 ◼ ► But then there are way more colors and a band you can buy afterwards. I expect that Apple is like beginning the steps towards you go to the website, you say, I want this watch and this band and ship that to me because that feels like where they're going with this.
01:22:25 ◼ ► And this is kind of step one of that, of getting that process in place, because that's where they should go.
01:22:34 ◼ ► You know, like you don't get a prepackaged case with your iPhone, right? Like that's not how it works. You just buy the iPhone and you get a case if you want it.
01:22:42 ◼ ► But they have so many band options that, you know, you shouldn't just have the choice of like two sport bands in two different colors.
01:22:51 ◼ ► It is so annoying that they have the whole, like I was looking to see where they're in stock because the one I ordered for Lauren is not coming until next month.
01:22:59 ◼ ► And they're like, oh, well, we have the one with this band in stock here and the one with this band in stock here.
01:23:10 ◼ ► Plus you're like, I don't want a white sport band, but if you can get the phone with a white sport band and you've got existing bands, I guess I'll just buy the white sport band.
01:23:17 ◼ ► So I'm also hopeful that maybe this is going to lead to some sort of either uncoupling of the two or you'll be able to order it online with and pick your band.
01:23:28 ◼ ► And because, you know, in the supply, and certainly it means that right now when you've got two band options for each one or even more than that, maybe for some, it means that at the factory, they can, you know, all the watches are just made with the same process in the same box.
01:23:44 ◼ ► And then they're wrapped, which probably helps them if there's like more orders for one or another, you can do that on the fly.
01:23:54 ◼ ► So on the wrist, these watches really don't wear much bigger. They are bigger, but they don't necessarily feel it.
01:24:02 ◼ ► I will say for me, so Idina is very small and the 38 was always big on her and the 40 millimeter is still big on her, but she finds it comfortable.
01:24:14 ◼ ► Right. And that's kind of the thing is like, yes, these are bigger and they are physically bigger, but it's how do they feel?
01:24:20 ◼ ► And the fact that they're lighter and they're thinner, right, so they're lower down to the wrist.
01:24:24 ◼ ► I found this for me, she's found it for her. And this seems to be a general consensus that yes, they are bigger, but they don't necessarily feel it.
01:24:31 ◼ ► They're still very comfortable and they're comfortable in new ways, which I think is a big difference for this one.
01:24:37 ◼ ► Yeah, I like, um, I got the bigger one and it doesn't feel bigger. It looks bigger when I tap on it.
01:24:44 ◼ ► I actually have been like my passcode. I get the numbers wrong because the metrics are a little bit different because it is such a taller screen than it was before.
01:24:53 ◼ ► But, um, it doesn't, I mean, what makes part of what makes it feel bigger is that there's more pixels stretched out.
01:25:01 ◼ ► I don't know how much of it is the screen is actually taller and how much of it and wider, but that it's that it's just, it goes to the edges now.
01:25:08 ◼ ► And so that makes it feel different. The edges are rounded down in a way that the previous models weren't.
01:25:14 ◼ ► That makes it feel thinner. And then it is actually a little bit thinner and it feels, it looks and feels much thinner on my wrist.
01:25:27 ◼ ► Yeah, which is, it makes the overall just makes it for, I think very comfortable. It's that I think they've done a great job.
01:25:40 ◼ ► And I feel that, I mean, okay, so I haven't worn an Apple watch for like five or six months nearly at this point, but like five months.
01:25:47 ◼ ► I haven't, I don't, I haven't worn an Apple watch on a daily basis at all, but the digital crown, that's a real nice addition.
01:25:54 ◼ ► But the Taptic motor in general feels slightly different to me. And I wonder if you feel the same.
01:26:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm not sure I would say that it is more prominent because I actually had prominent haptics turned on before and I have them turned on now.
01:26:07 ◼ ► And I feel like they're maybe less prominent than they were before, but they're still, but they're maybe a little more distinct.
01:26:13 ◼ ► Like, like there's a little more fine feel there. I don't know. They just, it feels different for sure than the old one.
01:26:19 ◼ ► I do like the, the digital crown haptics are very clever and they, you know, they're software controlled.
01:26:27 ◼ ► So it's not like every little bit that you rotate, it makes a tick it's based on whatever you're seeing on screen.
01:26:39 ◼ ► Every line of the emoji picker is a tick. And that, that just reinforces what you're seeing in the UI, which I think is smart.
01:26:50 ◼ ► I like them. I am still kind of, well, first off, I think the jury's out because you have to build, if you're a watch app maker,
01:27:05 ◼ ► The old, you would have thought that they would have done some sort of compatibility mode where like there's an overcast complication and it's on my utility face and it's round.
01:27:21 ◼ ► You need a different, it's a different style of complication to get in those circles on the Infograph faces than it is on the other faces.
01:27:27 ◼ ► And so apps need to be updated. So I'm encouraged by it. I kind of like them. I like how they look.
01:27:33 ◼ ► I, I don't like the Infograph, the non-modular, the Infograph with the hands as much as I thought because I want to put numbers on them.
01:27:46 ◼ ► And you can't because they've put complications where all the numbers are. So that, I kind of like a watch with watch face with numbers.
01:27:53 ◼ ► But the big thing is going to be, I don't have enough things to fill the complication slots.
01:27:58 ◼ ► Like there just aren't enough things that I think are useful. Like Apple has, Apple's like, oh, well, we'll put the air quality index on there and we'll put the UV on there and all that.
01:28:08 ◼ ► So what I want is a bunch more Apple Watch complication stuff to be added that feeds those complications.
01:28:18 ◼ ► And I mean, I'm increasingly interested in the Infograph modular, which has a huge space in the middle for a giant mega complication.
01:28:28 ◼ ► And right now what's on offer there is not stuff that I'm super interested in, but I'm hopeful that if something comes out that I'm really excited about that that will be a more likely use case.
01:28:40 ◼ ► I am so frustrated. I have to say the there's a calendar face that's actually pretty good.
01:28:47 ◼ ► That shows you your next calendar event in the Infograph face and the complications been around a long time, but there's more room for it.
01:28:54 ◼ ► It looks nice and it's got the date also on it, but it's the same thing as always, which is when you don't have a meeting, it puts text on your wrist that says no, no, you know, no more events.
01:29:12 ◼ ► But every time I check my watch, it's going to say no events today, no more events today.
01:29:16 ◼ ► It's just, it's stupid. It's the one thing that Apple watch, even with watchOS 5 has not gotten to yet is the idea of being really conditional where like I want to see a timer if a timer is running, but I don't want the timer complication on my watch all the time.
01:29:31 ◼ ► I guess the Siri watch face is closest to that, but the Siri watch face comes up its own set of drawbacks, right?
01:29:43 ◼ ► I just think there needs to be more content for them and I haven't yet figured out kind of exactly how I want to do, how I want to set them up.
01:29:50 ◼ ► So I'm still, I'm still kind of exploring there, but you know, but it looks, they look great.
01:29:56 ◼ ► I really like them and I think that they could be, they are built to have information overload.
01:30:00 ◼ ► Like that's what they're for. And right now there aren't enough complications that are compatible with them that fulfill my desire for information overload.
01:30:08 ◼ ► And I hope, I hope we get there because I do want to load it up with things that I actually want, things I want to see when I check my watch.
01:30:16 ◼ ► And right now there are, you know, I've got carat weather and I've got the activity complication and I've got the date and the time and that's literally it, which is not, not much.
01:30:28 ◼ ► I, uh, I set it up with the regular Infograph watch face and I love the one with the white face when you're gonna have the white face to it, just like the way that looks a lot.
01:30:38 ◼ ► I had the same problem as you. Like there are a couple of complications where it was like, well, I'm just going to put these there cause I need to fill the spaces.
01:30:45 ◼ ► I do like on that watch cause you've got the four kind of circles in the middle that you can assign one of your favorites from your favorite contacts into there.
01:30:52 ◼ ► And it puts the little picture there and you can tap it and send them a message or call them. I like that. That was cool.
01:30:57 ◼ ► But I ended up with like, I put the solar system one in. I don't know what to put in here, but I do. I mean, I know that these are polarizing because I understand why it is a, it is a very particular design decision that's been made with these of like having all this information with different colors and stuff.
01:31:15 ◼ ► But I really liked the way that it looks and I really like the corner complications. I like the way the current weather and like they're great for weather, right? Where you show the, like the, the low and high temperature and on that little graph.
01:31:29 ◼ ► I love that is such clever interface design. Like that's one of the best ways that I've ever seen to show temperature. Like it's genius. I've never seen it.
01:31:38 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure it's been done somewhere like this, but I've never seen it displayed in that way where you've got this like low and high and then a point on that line. I think it's really smart.
01:31:46 ◼ ► It gives you like, I like the idea of like, okay, how does it feel right now? All right, well, this is the middle point of temperature today.
01:31:55 ◼ ► And it's like, I like thinking of it that way. That's a nice visual way of showing that information.
01:32:00 ◼ ► So my other frustration about these watch faces is that there are these nice circular complication spaces in the Infograph face, and yet they didn't update the other faces.
01:32:11 ◼ ► They updated the other faces for the Series 4 because like the bottom on my beloved utility face is now curved when before it was straight.
01:32:21 ◼ ► But what they didn't do is modify the circular complication areas on that face to use the new fancier circular complications.
01:32:32 ◼ ► They're using the old ones. And I just don't, I don't understand why that is. There's a discontinuity like that. Like on the Series 4, perhaps you should use the Series 4 fancy complications and design around them.
01:32:49 ◼ ► But it's weird that like they've got these new complication types, but they can only be used in two places and that's it.
01:32:54 ◼ ► Like it's kind of like this, the Series stuff again, right? It's like, well, okay, you can build some areas that tie into the Series watch face to show contextual stuff.
01:33:03 ◼ ► But no, not on any other watch face. On every other watch face, it will just show no more events, right?
01:33:08 ◼ ► Like it's like, why are the watch faces being built in these weird silos? It's very strange.
01:33:14 ◼ ► Okay, so this is jumping ahead to an Ask Upgrade question. Rajeev asked if you can get cellular signal status on any other face besides Explorer. The answer is still no.
01:33:25 ◼ ► Why can you only find out your cellular status on the Explorer face? That should be a complication. Like it's very strange. Very strange. I don't really understand that.
01:33:40 ◼ ► So I will say that I'm very happy that the Apple store on Regent Street didn't have any of the gold stainless steel watches in stock.
01:33:50 ◼ ► Because I loved it so much wearing it, I probably would have ended up walking out with one.
01:33:56 ◼ ► And now after having worn the Apple watch for a day, I was reminded of the things that I didn't like about it and also given some new things that for some reason I now just don't like about the Apple watch anymore, so I won't be buying one.
01:34:09 ◼ ► So I found myself frustrated about two main things. One was the Apple watch's inability to show me the time.
01:34:18 ◼ ► Like I find, I still find it really annoying that I can't just glance down at my wrist and see the time. I find it really annoying that I have to raise my hand in a way and there is a slight weight.
01:34:30 ◼ ► Like there is still just those milliseconds. I feel it now because I've been used to seeing the time whenever I wanted it because my watch can just show me it.
01:34:39 ◼ ► You know, like one advantage that my Apple watch has over my standard watch is that I can get the time in the dark easier with an Apple watch.
01:34:48 ◼ ► Right, that's really nice because my Nomos watch that I wear, I'll put a link in the show notes to my watch in case you're interested, it doesn't have any glow in the dark features.
01:34:58 ◼ ► Right, so that's one tick up for the Apple watch, but aside from that every other time I feel like I'm waiting and I cannot fathom why Apple has not built a system for an always on watch face.
01:35:15 ◼ ► It is very strange to me that they haven't found a way to do this yet or just for whatever reason have decided not to do this yet.
01:35:22 ◼ ► And I think the Apple watch really needs it because I find it annoying. I find it really annoying that I can't just look.
01:35:34 ◼ ► I can't do that with my Apple watch and I find that even more annoying now that I've lived without it for a while.
01:35:45 ◼ ► I have a new annoyance, which is very weird to me considering how I live my life with the Apple watch.
01:35:54 ◼ ► This wasn't a thing that I felt before. This wasn't a thing that I felt when I was wearing the watch.
01:36:06 ◼ ► Right. But I can I can easily ignore it because I'm focused and it's just lighting up or it's you know, it's behind me and buzzing, but it doesn't intrude on me.
01:36:25 ◼ ► And I have now noticed that I don't like that so much. I like that I get notifications when I want them more.
01:36:33 ◼ ► So basically what I've learned is my old system for receiving the amount of notifications that I would get doesn't work for me anymore.
01:36:41 ◼ ► And if I was to wear an Apple watch again, then I would need to cut down my notification types a lot more.
01:36:46 ◼ ► But it was just interesting to me to notice that the way I used to do it, I don't want anymore.
01:36:52 ◼ ► And I found that really, really weird. So even with because I wasn't doing one to one monitoring because I set it up the way I always did.
01:37:04 ◼ ► So I would need to change that. But it was just something that I found peculiar because this was not how I felt when I wore an Apple watch for like three years.
01:37:14 ◼ ► Yeah, I had that same thing where I set up my new review unit as a new watch and discovered that the default notification settings were not going to work for me.
01:37:33 ◼ ► And I had already obviously on my other watch, I'd set them that way. But I went back to the defaults and it was like, no, like I have carefully curated what my Apple watch is allowed to annoy me with.
01:37:50 ◼ ► Yeah, but I found that even my previous level of curation does not fit Myke of September 2018 for whatever reason.
01:37:59 ◼ ► So I super appreciate how much better the Apple watch has gotten. This is by far the best Apple watch ever. It is so good.
01:38:09 ◼ ► It is so good. It is the first Apple watch that I've actually lusted after the design of.
01:38:15 ◼ ► Previously it was like, okay, I like this. And which one do I like the most? But I was never like, oh my God, I love this thing.
01:38:25 ◼ ► But that gold one, I'm like, I really want it because I find it very visually attractive.
01:38:37 ◼ ► And I think the edge to edge display adds into it too. When it's open, right? When it's on, not completely blank.
01:38:46 ◼ ► It is, I think it adds to the attractiveness, especially on the new faces that it's a more full kind of watch experience.
01:38:55 ◼ ► Plus some of the little subtle changes they made in the corners, especially making it thinner, making it kind of slope down a little bit.
01:39:05 ◼ ► Like all ceramic back. Like in the previous watches, it kind of felt like this just looks how it looks because it has to look this way.
01:39:12 ◼ ► Right. Like there's just nothing we can do about it. We need these sensors. This is how it looks.
01:39:19 ◼ ► But now it's like it looks like they spent way more time designing that to be attractive, visually attractive.
01:39:28 ◼ ► Yeah. That after four years of working on this, they've in the fourth iteration, they were able to really and they had to write for the electrocardiogram stuff, but they redesigned the whole back.
01:39:39 ◼ ► They made it ceramic so that it's more transparent to radio waves, which means that it's got better reception, all of these things that go into it.
01:39:47 ◼ ► But it is, it is, it feels less curved too. It feels less intrusive on my wrist than the old one does.
01:39:55 ◼ ► I don't know if that's actually true or not, or if it's just a factor of the thinness and all of that, but it feels less like it's bulbously pushing into my wrist.
01:40:04 ◼ ► It's smaller. The protrusion is smaller than it was, whatever you call it. The bulbousness is less.
01:40:16 ◼ ► So I mean, you know, obviously I am a big fan of the upgrade from my phone because I got the bigger size. I got what I wanted.
01:40:25 ◼ ► But I still think that for people using, and if you use an iPhone every day, use an Apple Watch every day, the Apple Watch upgrade is a better upgrade than the iPhone upgrade is.
01:40:40 ◼ ► Like that, if you are a daily Apple Watch user, this new Apple Watch is a very good purchase for you.
01:40:48 ◼ ► Like I would almost say like it is close to how the iPhone 10 was a step up from the iPhone 7 or the iPhone 8.
01:40:55 ◼ ► Like in how much of a jump that was in so many different ways. I think the Apple Watch is similar, right? Like it looks amazing.
01:41:03 ◼ ► They've given you much more screen. It's way more capable. You know, the battery life is still incredible. It's super fast.
01:41:11 ◼ ► They've added just niceties like that Taptic thing. They did not need to add that. They just added it because it's nice.
01:41:17 ◼ ► You know, like in the way that like the stainless steel was nice, right? On the iPhone 10.
01:41:22 ◼ ► Like I think the Apple Watch makes me, is reminiscent of that kind of upgrade for me. It is a fantastic product.
01:41:32 ◼ ► Yeah, I agree. It's a really, really good upgrade. The first kind of major design change with the screen change.
01:41:41 ◼ ► And it's nice if you have an older Apple Watch. I think a lot of people who have stuck with the Series Zero.
01:41:50 ◼ ► I keep talking to people who are like, "Oh yeah, now is the time." Because you don't get watchOS 5.
01:41:55 ◼ ► Yeah, if you still have a Series Zero and you love your Apple Watch and you have the means, you should upgrade.
01:42:02 ◼ ► Like without, I mean, I would say that no matter what one you have, you could probably be good with it.
01:42:06 ◼ ► Especially if you're back down there on Series Zero. Like you should think about that upgrade.
01:42:15 ◼ ► But before we do, let me thank our friends over at Pingdom for their support of this show.
01:42:21 ◼ ► Pingdom are amazing because they help keep websites online. They keep your site online, the site you love online.
01:42:26 ◼ ► Because if something goes wrong with a website, you want to be able to get in and fix it.
01:42:31 ◼ ► But you want to be able to get in and fix it as quick as you can. And that's why you need Pingdom's real-time monitoring and feedback.
01:42:41 ◼ ► Pingdom detects around 13 million outages every single month. That is 400,000 outages a day.
01:42:47 ◼ ► Because stuff breaks on the internet all the time. It doesn't matter what type of website you have, whether it's tiny or whether it's huge.
01:42:53 ◼ ► You need alerts about any critical website issues that you have. Because you just want to know.
01:42:58 ◼ ► Pingdom will be able to let you customise how you're alerted. So depending on the severity of the outage, you can alert different people in different ways.
01:43:06 ◼ ► And they'll also track and analyse your website's load time as well, so you can see what's affecting an experience.
01:43:11 ◼ ► And if you've had Apache time, then you can see if the work that you've done has improved it. Because they will give you those reports.
01:43:18 ◼ ► Pingdom have a no-fuss approach to getting started. You just give them the URL that you want to monitor. They take care of the rest.
01:43:24 ◼ ► So go to pingdom.com/relayfm right now for a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.
01:43:31 ◼ ► Then when you sign up, use the code 'upgrade' at checkout and you'll get a wonderful 30% off your first invoice.
01:43:49 ◼ ► Well, I have a few that I rotate through. They're going to be boring, but I rotate through an orange sport band, which of course they don't make anymore.
01:43:59 ◼ ► Yeah, let's just say most of these are probably not made anymore, right? Because the colours, they change.
01:44:04 ◼ ► They change them, yeah. But an orange sport band, a black sport band, which is the classic.
01:44:09 ◼ ► And the Nike Plus, it's the white with the black dots. I don't know what that's called, but that's actually what I have on right now.
01:44:21 ◼ ► But I mostly rotate through those three. I do have a leather band and a knockoff, a Milanese loop, but I almost never wear those.
01:44:29 ◼ ► It's almost always the sport band. And then sort of seasonally, I will swap out different colours.
01:44:35 ◼ ► I love the sport loops. My favourite is one they still sell, which is the black sport loop. Do not let its name fool you.
01:44:42 ◼ ► It is full of tiny little coloured pieces of thread. It's a great band. I absolutely love that band.
01:44:49 ◼ ► Adina got the gold aluminium watch and she had one of these sport loops. Looks fantastic, right?
01:45:00 ◼ ► So yeah, that's my favourite, is the black sport loop. And that one is still available. You can still buy that.
01:45:05 ◼ ► I'm pleased because that's one that they should keep around for a long time because that is a great Apple Watch strap.
01:45:12 ◼ ► Kapila asks, I've got a Series 2 watch with WatchOS 5 installed. However, the toggle to enable raise to speak for Siri just isn't there.
01:45:26 ◼ ► So this is a new feature in WatchOS 5, which I actually think is pretty good actually. I enjoyed the feature.
01:45:32 ◼ ► You have to get the distance right because you kind of have to raise it really close to your mouth and you start speaking.
01:45:39 ◼ ► And you kind of feel like an idiot when it doesn't work. But when it does work, and I found it worked for me pretty much every time I tried it,
01:45:50 ◼ ► My expectation of this is something to do with the chip, right, because it's like how AirPods don't have the always listening Ahoy telephone right now.
01:46:01 ◼ ► I assume it's whatever chips there are in Series 3 and above allows them to do whatever it is that's required to go that one step further from the always listening Siri.
01:46:17 ◼ ► Yeah, it's all in the timing and you do feel like an idiot when it doesn't work. But when it does work, it's magic.
01:46:25 ◼ ► And then the second time I was like, "Oh, check this out." And it was a complete failure. Yeah, yeah.
01:46:34 ◼ ► And I've also had it where I've lifted it and then said something to somebody and been like, "Oh, no, it's trying to interpret my thing."
01:46:40 ◼ ► So it takes some getting used to. But it is kind of nice to not have to be like, "All right, I'm going to hold down the button and talk to the lady now."
01:46:51 ◼ ► And the speaker's louder in the Series 4 too. It's a lot clearer to hear what she has to say.
01:46:56 ◼ ► Yeah, it's much, much clearer. So Kamil asks, "If you ask Siri to resume Overcast on your HomePod,
01:47:09 ◼ ► All right, so a couple of things that need to be mentioned here. So if you just ask a HomePod randomly to resume Overcast,
01:47:18 ◼ ► it will just start playing music. But if you set up a Siri shortcut in iOS 12 that has that you set it up with some kind of trigger word to resume Overcast,
01:47:32 ◼ ► like "resume Overcast," if you ask your HomePod to do that, playback will resume on your HomePod, not on the iPhone.
01:47:40 ◼ ► This is amazing. This is not how the feature behaved during the beta period, but it is once the HomePod got its update.
01:47:48 ◼ ► So if you set up the Siri shortcut, you ask your HomePod to resume Overcast in whatever way you ask it,
01:47:56 ◼ ► it will just start playing on the HomePod and not on your phone. Really great. Big fan of that. It's awesome.
01:48:02 ◼ ► Dramskovk asks, "AirPods don't fit in my ears. What is the best alternative? Is there a real alternative at all?"
01:48:15 ◼ ► The struggle is real. Well, the good news is Apple makes another headphone with that, actually several,
01:48:22 ◼ ► with the chip that's in the AirPods. What you're looking for is Beats X, not pronounced "ten," apparently.
01:48:34 ◼ ► Beats X, which are earbuds with, I believe you get to select, there are different tips you can put on them,
01:48:42 ◼ ► and they're connected together. They're wireless, but they're connected to each other by a wire,
01:48:47 ◼ ► so you wear them behind your neck and put them in your ears. But that gives you much more ability to fit,
01:48:54 ◼ ► because they have different ear tips that are available, so you can figure out which ones fit your ears.
01:48:59 ◼ ► Yeah, it comes with four ear tip size options in the box and also those little wings that you can put on them,
01:49:05 ◼ ► so they hold in place with the rest of your ear. And it has all the same internals, right, as the AirPod does.
01:49:11 ◼ ► So that is a good choice. And finally today, Benjamin asks, "If you were starting from scratch today,
01:49:22 ◼ ► I would, oh, I don't know. It's a hard one. I would probably use Dropbox, because Dropbox has a bunch of features
01:49:39 ◼ ► I've used shared folders. I've used upload links, because that's one thing you can do that I use all the time for my podcast,
01:49:45 ◼ ► which is give people a Dropbox link where they go to a web page and upload their file and it pops into my Dropbox.
01:49:50 ◼ ► That's amazing. And I'm a big Dropbox proponent, to the point where I just actually upgraded to their higher level
01:49:58 ◼ ► that gives me not just more storage, but it gives me that feature where I can sort of download on demand on my Mac.
01:50:05 ◼ ► I decided I was going to try that out for a while. So iCloud is way more competitive than it used to be.
01:50:11 ◼ ► And depending on how you're using it, especially if you're already paying for iCloud space, it can be a good choice.
01:50:16 ◼ ► But that said, I think given how all the different ways I use Dropbox today, I would have to find alternatives
01:50:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I agree. There are just some features where Dropbox saves my butt and iCloud doesn't offer them.
01:50:36 ◼ ► And it's like that file restoring for stuff that is far into history or the versioning.
01:50:43 ◼ ► And those power user features, they're things that I want. They're available to me and they've saved me in a bunch of different ways.
01:50:50 ◼ ► So I really, really like Dropbox a lot and also just the way it ties into some apps and stuff,
01:50:57 ◼ ► just the ways that iCloud doesn't and let alone the sharing features being really kind of next level.
01:51:06 ◼ ► All right. So that's it for today's episode. If you'd like to send in a question for us at the end of the show,
01:51:13 ◼ ► Thank you so much to everybody that continues to do that week after week. We appreciate it greatly.
01:51:17 ◼ ► If you want to ask something a little bit more fun, a little bit more esoteric, you can send in a tweet with the hashtag #SnellTalk.
01:51:22 ◼ ► It's a great way to open the show. Thanks again to Eero and PDF Pen and Pingdom for their support of this week's episode.
01:51:30 ◼ ► If you want to find Jason online, go to SixColors.com. He is on Twitter. He is @JSnell.
01:51:36 ◼ ► You can find more of his work at TheIncomparable.com. And this show is a part of Relay FM.
01:51:41 ◼ ► Me and Jason both host many shows at Relay FM. You can go to Relay.fm/shows to find more.
01:51:50 ◼ ► Instagram.com/imike. I'm trying to put more time and effort into there because I enjoy Instagram a lot, Jason.