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Connected

158: The EchoSystem

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:06   From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode 158.

00:00:11   Today's show is brought to you by Casper Squarespace and Balance.

00:00:15   My name is Myke Hurley.

00:00:16   I am joined by Federico Vitticci. Ciao Federico.

00:00:19   Welcome back, Myke.

00:00:21   Thank you very much.

00:00:22   And Stephen Hackett, how did you?

00:00:24   The family's back together.

00:00:26   I know this feels really weird.

00:00:27   I got off a plane this morning, like five hours ago from America and I'm back in my

00:00:37   office after one month of being away from my office so my iMac seems like a billboard,

00:00:44   it's like the biggest screen on the planet.

00:00:48   Everything is weird, I don't feel like I fully know where I am.

00:00:51   I also haven't recorded anything in over a week so the wheels might fall off this one,

00:00:57   basically why I'm attempting to tell everybody. It's fine. It's not a connected without some

00:01:02   sort of chance of disaster. That's true. It's fine. You should have really just done the

00:01:08   show from an airplane. You should have bought the internet connection from the flight and

00:01:15   opened Skype from... I mean, it's not like Skype can get any worse in terms of quality.

00:01:21   So I'm pretty sure that, you know, the experience for us would have been the same. Can you imagine,

00:01:26   on an airplane on a night flight and I'm just like "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

00:01:56   whiplash from the change of tone that we're about to attempt here. It's gonna

00:02:01   get serious and then we're gonna talk about your iPad. Okay great.

00:02:04   September, dear listener, I guess the two of you, my two co-hosts, September is

00:02:10   National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and readers of my site will know

00:02:14   that in September I forgo sponsorship. This year I'm also donating the

00:02:19   membership and YouTube revenue because I didn't have those things last year and

00:02:22   now I do, to raise money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. It's a

00:02:27   hospital here in Memphis dedicated to saving the lives of kids with cancer and

00:02:33   it's really close to my family's heart. Our oldest son is a patient there. So the

00:02:38   first link in the show notes will be to a page on my website where you can read

00:02:43   about it. If you haven't read about it before you can see why it's special to

00:02:45   us, see why St. Jude is special and I would love it if you if you can to help

00:02:51   support St. Jude this month. They don't charge families a dime for their

00:02:56   care. So we've received millions of dollars of health care for our son and

00:02:59   they've never billed me once which is just incredible. So I would love

00:03:03   for you to support them. Like I said, first link in the show notes. Go check it

00:03:07   out and many thanks from my family for doing that. So Stephen is trying to raise

00:03:14   $9,000 this year to help support St. Jude and it says his kids are going to

00:03:20   around the kids marathon for this. It's already 42% of the goal after just a couple of days.

00:03:26   I think it would be amazing if this goal could be met by next week. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

00:03:31   And so connected listeners, please, please, please give whatever you can. I know that

00:03:35   there's a lot of really worthy causes for charity right now. I understand that there's

00:03:40   a lot going on in the world. But this is, if you listen to the show and you enjoy what

00:03:45   we do, this should have some element of importance to you, I think, if you've been following

00:03:51   us for any period of time. So it would mean the world to all of us if you could give some

00:03:57   money to St. Jude. So yeah, thank you so much.

00:04:01   All right.

00:04:02   All right, so if I'm following correctly, I listened to last week's episode this morning.

00:04:11   We discovered that Federico's iPad wasn't bent due to some kind of boiling point issue,

00:04:18   which I found hilarious.

00:04:19   Like that somehow a beach in Italy had found the perfect, I don't know, like some kind

00:04:25   of sun flare, which put you to 100 degrees Celsius, with my understanding, to vent your

00:04:32   iPad.

00:04:33   That was really unfortunate.

00:04:34   Every point from ours was dead, but the iPad was fine.

00:04:35   So happy you came away unscathed from that Federico.

00:04:39   Yeah, yeah, that was really a close call.

00:04:42   I also could really feel your, um, I'm trying to think of the right word. Like, I could

00:04:50   really feel like a sense of awkwardness, of trepidation from you at the idea of having

00:04:58   somebody else's iPad. I could feel that. I feel like you didn't say it at the time, but

00:05:04   I really felt that you were like, "I don't want someone else's iPad!" Which is your concern

00:05:08   about how your replacement was given to you? It's just more more of a yes I think you're right and

00:05:16   I think it's a it's a consequence of the fact that I don't like to you know when I'm investing

00:05:24   my money on big purchases I don't like to buy used things you know because this is money that I save

00:05:34   you know, my personal savings, whether it's for my new car or my equipment.

00:05:39   And I really don't like the idea of I'm saving money and I'm given something that's already

00:05:45   been used and might be damaged in some way that I don't know. I just like the idea of control.

00:05:52   And I realize that I'm a little obsessed with this idea of something is new and if it's broken,

00:06:00   I know it's, you know, 90% it's my fault. And I've bought, and I think going back in time,

00:06:08   this goes back to the problems that I've had with buying used cars. My first three cars were all

00:06:15   previously owned by someone else. And I've had so many problems and I've wasted so much time and

00:06:21   money on fixing those problems. And I can, the worst part was not necessarily the time and the

00:06:28   the money, it was not knowing what the exact cause for those problems were.

00:06:34   And I, I just said, you know, the next time I'm going to buy, you know, I'm

00:06:39   going to have a big expense in my life.

00:06:41   I'm going to save more money.

00:06:44   I'm going to wait more time, but I will buy something that is new.

00:06:48   And if it's broken, I, at least I can know what the problem is and what made this

00:06:54   iPad situation especially bad was that I bought a new iPad but I didn't know what

00:06:59   the cause was even if it was new and so not knowing what the problem was was

00:07:06   with the iPad and the potential of now I'm getting a used iPad in return it was

00:07:11   really the worst of both worlds and I don't know I'm just I can just say that

00:07:19   you know, when I bought my new car last year I bought a new one and so far, fingers crossed,

00:07:26   still no problems. So yeah, that was the reason for my trepidation and the, you know, kind of like my

00:07:33   feeling uneasy with the idea of a refurbished iPad. Because I really don't like when I don't know

00:07:41   what happened to a product that was owned by someone else. Well I have some good news for you,

00:07:46   Federico, that according to all of our follow-up, your replacement iPad is

00:07:52   probably new. Yay! So it's, it's, I think it's probably actually impossible to

00:07:58   know. So Apple used to use a different serial number for refurbished products.

00:08:02   That, according to at least one email I have from somebody, I believe that

00:08:06   practice has come to an end. But it's still early enough in the, in the, in the

00:08:10   cycle that it's probably, probably new. And even if it is remanufactured, like

00:08:15   anything you touch or see would be new. So I like you know I view that as like

00:08:21   you bought a new car but it has bits of old cars in it because they recycle old

00:08:24   cars. Like it's it's not like they just someone replaced it returned an iPad

00:08:28   and they shipped it to you directly without like scrubbing the guy's

00:08:30   fingerprints off. So I think you're fine but I think it's probably new so

00:08:34   hopefully that that helps you sleep better at night. Yeah it does. I mean you

00:08:37   could try and send it somewhere for DNA testing. Definitely, definitely don't do

00:08:41   that. That opens a can of worms you can't reclose.

00:08:44   Mm-hmm. I think you should send it some of the DNA tests.

00:08:49   So Steven, you've joined the 20th century.

00:08:59   Would you like to tell listeners what's next in our document? Yeah, I really don't

00:09:03   understand what is going on here. Are you crazy, Steven? So I have a story to tell you.

00:09:08   Is this a midlife crisis?

00:09:10   It may be.

00:09:11   I feel like we all have, just looking at this document today, we all have weird stories

00:09:15   to tell and I think this is, we're going to start with Steven's story.

00:09:19   So a couple of days ago I bought an album on iTunes and I said this is great, I was

00:09:26   on my Mac, this album came out, hey I want to have it on my phone.

00:09:32   And so I buy it on my iMac and I put my phone in its dock to try to sync that album to the

00:09:38   phone like a normal human being used to do.

00:09:42   And it just fails.

00:09:44   Like I don't get an error message.

00:09:45   It's in the right playlist.

00:09:46   I confirm this.

00:09:48   iTunes just won't move it across the USB cable to the phone.

00:09:51   I restart iTunes.

00:09:53   I restart my computer.

00:09:54   I restart my phone.

00:09:56   I sacrifice some small animals.

00:09:58   nothing will make this album cross the whatever it is you know two foot long

00:10:05   USB cable out of my iMac into my phone it just refuses to work I don't use

00:10:10   iTunes match so I can't do that and this this for some reason just was the last

00:10:16   straw for me. I know everyone else has had this epiphany many of you years

00:10:21   ago. I'm a little slow I guess. And so I went to settings on my phone and I

00:10:28   deleted all my local music and I already had a Spotify account because I have an

00:10:32   Amazon echo and I put Spotify on my home screen. Yesterday I went through and

00:10:37   found all the music I want. I downloaded a bunch of music to my phone from

00:10:41   Spotify which is kind of a terrible user experience. You have to like leave the

00:10:45   screen on on your phone so the app can stay awake. It's terrible. But after many

00:10:49   hours I now have my music library rebuilt in Spotify and much of it local

00:10:54   on my phone and and so yeah so I am I'm all in on on trying this I don't know if

00:11:02   it's like on the Mac it's weird because iTunes on the Mac like yes it's old and

00:11:07   and by the way is like a there's a sub point to all this if you don't listen to

00:11:11   app stories the the podcast Federico does with John Voorhees it's really good

00:11:16   and this week you all talked about iTunes on the Mac being replaced. It's

00:11:20   like as I was going through this yesterday I was listening to that podcast

00:11:23   and I felt like you were my two life coaches like urging me down the road.

00:11:29   So let me ask you this. Okay. The choice of Spotify comes primarily because you

00:11:38   have an Amazon Echo and so you want to have that integration. Well and I'm

00:11:41   already paying for Spotify I didn't want to like okay I have problems with the

00:11:46   idea of Apple music of like mixing my old library and like streaming stuff and

00:11:50   I really dislike the music app in general so but primarily was already

00:11:55   pay for Spotify why not give it a shot so let me ask you this what happens if

00:12:02   you stick with this if you keep streaming music yes what happens when

00:12:06   the home pod comes out I don't think I'm gonna buy a home pod I really like the

00:12:11   And I have I have too much stuff that's echo dependent now that the

00:12:16   That the home pod won't be able to do easily like what?

00:12:20   Like I mean like a lot of the the I like a lot of the news stuff that it does

00:12:25   Every evening we're making dinner. We have the thing read the news to us

00:12:28   We have some if triggers now

00:12:32   So we've talked on the show about the canary how that's tied to it like the home pod could take over all my home kit

00:12:37   stuff because I don't install any smart stuff or try not to that the home kit and Echo both

00:12:43   can't talk to. I guess the only thing that the Echo can talk to in my home that a HomePod

00:12:50   cannot is the thermostat. But I already feel really like embedded in the Echo ecosystem.

00:12:56   I have three of them now.

00:12:57   Could you call it an Echo system maybe?

00:12:59   Oh, Myke, please come on.

00:13:01   Yo, I'm back everyone!

00:13:03   No!

00:13:04   That's really good. I'm deep in the Amazon ecosystem. I would try the HomePod. I'm really

00:13:11   curious how it sounds because the Echo sounds like garbage for music. But Amazon could fix

00:13:15   that tomorrow with a new Echo and I'd be perfectly happy.

00:13:19   I want to take a pull. I want to start a pull on how long it is until you just give up and

00:13:25   go back to your local music again. This feels like such a Steven thing, right? To do this,

00:13:31   go through all the effort and then just give it up like a week later.

00:13:35   Like when he bought the MacBook and then he did a video and then it changed to another

00:13:40   computer?

00:13:41   Yep, or like, Remember the Milk or Evernote or basically anything.

00:13:46   I'm gonna go with three weeks to one month before he goes back.

00:13:52   Alright, I'm gonna take the up to three weeks point then on this.

00:13:56   Because, I mean, after, I feel like a month, that's pretty, like, you know, I'm going to

00:14:02   take up to three weeks and then in Federico you can have like between three to four weeks.

00:14:06   Okay, okay.

00:14:08   One thing, so I'm in this process of learning all the things that Spotify can do that, again,

00:14:12   everyone else already knew.

00:14:14   But so far, one of my favorite things is that if I have music playing on my computer, I

00:14:17   can control it from my phone.

00:14:19   Like it's really, like the integration is really nice and I'm listening to something

00:14:22   my car and I get out of my car and I walk into my office I can just open

00:14:26   Spotify and like pick up right where I left off like some of that stuff that

00:14:29   Apple Music and iTunes should totally do but it doesn't because iTunes on the Mac

00:14:34   is holding it back. There's still a feature somewhere inside of Spotify that

00:14:38   you might enjoy. It's in the Mac app somewhere where you can upload local

00:14:44   music to Spotify and download it to your phone so if you have like a specific

00:14:49   live recording, you can still do that.

00:14:52   Which I do.

00:14:53   Yeah, I definitely have some stuff like that that's kind of stranded in the old library.

00:14:57   I know that it can see local files.

00:15:01   I wonder if I try to add to queue, I don't know, save to your library.

00:15:07   There's some options here, so I need to dig into that, because I definitely have some

00:15:09   stuff that I do not want to leave behind in the old library.

00:15:14   So maybe that means that I still sync that stuff to my phone, or try to whenever, whatever

00:15:18   bug I hit is resolved. So we'll see. We will see how it goes.

00:15:23   Yeah, I know it's still in there somewhere. I used to do that feature. I used to use that

00:15:27   feature quite a lot and I believe it's still in there. So it's worth digging around. But

00:15:31   I'm pleased you're using Spotify. These services, they're very, very convenient. I'm looking

00:15:38   forward to you living that convenience. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. We'll check back

00:15:43   in I guess. Alright, today's show is brought to you in

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00:16:51   they are passing those savings directly to you and you don't have to go down to a mattress

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00:17:09   - Yeah, Stephen, I know that you have

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00:17:12   I have not seen it.

00:17:15   I stayed at your house,

00:17:15   but I actually didn't see your mattress.

00:17:17   I didn't ask to go test the mattress.

00:17:20   So can you tell me what your mattress is like?

00:17:23   - I think you really should have.

00:17:24   If you just jumped right on it,

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00:17:27   - I don't wanna tell you.

00:17:28   - It's super great.

00:17:30   So we had one of those big foam things before,

00:17:34   which was fine, but you'd always be hot

00:17:37   'cause you kinda sink into it.

00:17:38   and in Memphis that's a problem because it's hot here.

00:17:40   - Very hot.

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00:17:45   is that you still have a bunch of those benefits

00:17:48   of a foam mattress to really soft, really comfortable,

00:17:51   but you don't sink down into it,

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00:17:55   It's very, it sleeps very comfortably

00:17:57   even in the hot southern summer.

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00:18:29   Thank you so much to Casper for their support of this show.

00:18:33   All right, so Alexander sent in something to us which is so perfect for this show. It

00:18:42   is a website called productgraveyard.com and it is a project in which this website features

00:18:52   products and services, so like web stuff, web services mostly, that have died and/or

00:18:58   probably been sunsetted. And it has a bunch of details of each of the products. You can

00:19:04   go in, you can click into the products, and it will tell you the cause of death, the product's

00:19:08   lifespan, what it's remembered for, and its last known residence, which I thought was

00:19:13   hilarious. And there is a really good entry for kind of a friend of the show, Everpix,

00:19:20   which is one of the first products that we really kind of went into in depth that got

00:19:26   shut down and there is a nice 2011 to 2013 in memoriam page on the product graveyard

00:19:34   website so you can go and see it yourself. I just thought this was really funny and just

00:19:39   something worth putting in. They have 1057 deceased products in their library. Honestly,

00:19:46   I have no idea why this thing exists. Like I don't know, there isn't really much information

00:19:52   on the page that I can find as to like why this was set up.

00:19:55   But it's there and it's interesting, it's funny,

00:19:59   and it's also kind of sad.

00:20:00   But it is something that I think ties quite nicely

00:20:05   in with this show so I thought I would include that

00:20:06   in our follow up today.

00:20:08   - I'm flipping through this and I'm trying to find

00:20:10   the worst startup name.

00:20:12   And I think I did it.

00:20:15   - All right.

00:20:15   - So there is iZ3D.

00:20:19   iZ3D designs and develops stereoscopic 3D visualization systems.

00:20:24   I mean, are you sure it's worse than... I got to...

00:20:29   Voila!

00:20:31   That's pretty bad.

00:20:32   And hold on, hold on.

00:20:34   I cannot say this, but this product was called...

00:20:39   Hold on. It was called "Ducks Board" and the logo is a duck.

00:20:47   And Duxboard allowed you to visualize and monitor your data in a single platform.

00:20:54   That's good.

00:20:55   Oh, that's good. Now, I mean, how could it have failed?

00:20:58   Yeah. There's a .cloud right there on the same page.

00:21:03   Duxboard lived between 2011 and 2014, and it was a web app. So, yeah.

00:21:13   I wanted to ask you now that we've talked about this website, what happens if this website shuts down?

00:21:20   I think at that point we have to take over and create the product graveyard.com graveyard.com

00:21:26   Have you ever wondered what happens to the?

00:21:29   Guardian of the graveyard when the Guardian dies, I guess it just goes to the Guardians child to look after

00:21:37   Hmm, right. Hmm. That's been my option

00:21:42   That is a very grim life goal to perpetuate the role of a graveyard guardian forever.

00:21:51   I want to try and lift us out of this funk that we've accidentally walked away into.

00:21:55   No, I found Groove Shark.

00:21:57   You found what?

00:21:58   Groove Shark.

00:21:59   Groove Shark.

00:22:00   Yeah, that's the thing.

00:22:01   What did they do?

00:22:03   It was music, I think.

00:22:05   There are a lot of companies that start with my, so myteamzone, myhomekey.com, mycube,

00:22:13   myfrontsteps, myshape, which is not myspace, myshape, and my personal favorite mylackey.com.

00:22:21   Oh no, that's so bad.

00:22:23   What about, what about kaptain with two p's for some reason?

00:22:29   Kaptain.

00:22:30   Kaptain.

00:22:31   Like, part of the reason your product fails is because nobody can find your website.

00:22:38   It's like, what's the name of your product?

00:22:41   Captain, but it's spelt with two P's.

00:22:46   I heard a thing once which I really liked, I think it was Kevin Rose who said this, it's

00:22:50   like if you can't tell me the name of your product in a bar, I can't invest in it.

00:22:56   That's good.

00:22:57   That's good.

00:22:58   Are you saying that Rotor Communications Corporation is not a good name?

00:23:03   So I want to tell you a little story

00:23:08   Okay, okay

00:23:10   Me and Idina we were going out to the beach and we're on the ferry

00:23:14   we're sitting on the ferry run a top deck of the ferry going out to the beach and

00:23:17   We're just sitting there and the ferry isn't moving for a while and we're like five or ten minutes past the time period and we

00:23:25   keep hearing this like siren there's like a siren playing and like we didn't

00:23:29   know where it's coming from we're sitting on a boat it could be anything

00:23:31   it's like a just like a doo doo doo sound like that then all of a sudden my phone

00:23:36   goes crazy and I have three text messages from Adina that are saying that

00:23:44   she is she's she's sounded an emergency call and has given me her location there

00:23:51   three of these messages that came through right so it's like adena is in an emergency

00:23:57   um i want to see if i can find i'm gonna find the exact wording for you but these came in

00:24:02   right and then once that one came in we had another one like a fourth one but this is

00:24:08   what we're looking at her phone right so it said emergency sos adena and yam 2 has made

00:24:15   an emergency call you are receiving this message because adena has listed you as an emergency

00:24:20   contact and it sends her location with a pin on a map. So we had no idea what was going

00:24:25   on. We're looking at her phone. There was nothing happening and then like a green bar

00:24:30   would appear at the top of the phone, right? And then the green bar would go away and it

00:24:36   was calling 911.

00:24:37   Oh no.

00:24:39   So she'd also made five 911 calls.

00:24:42   It's not good.

00:24:43   With varying lengths. The phone is just doing this on its own. So I was like, turn the phone

00:24:47   off like I have no idea what's going on but we need to stop you from calling 911

00:24:52   she turns her phone off and then like we have no idea what's going on right so it

00:25:00   stopped obviously because the phone was off so she turns her phone on again and

00:25:04   a little while later we hear a siren then another call is made then her

00:25:10   brother calls because this is like 10 minutes have passed at this point her

00:25:15   brother calls because he's an emergency contact as well so he thinks there is an

00:25:19   emergency right so that's dealt with he's all okay and then I'm like what is

00:25:26   going on here so I start googling at this point a fifth I think a fifth

00:25:31   emergency call had been made at that point there was five total and this was

00:25:35   the fifth one why is this happening can any of you guess what had happened why

00:25:42   this was happening. So let me ask you two questions. Was Adina wearing an Apple

00:25:47   watch? Not at that moment she wasn't. Does Adina have an iPad? Adina does have an

00:25:53   Apple watch she wasn't wearing it she does have an iPad. The watch was in her

00:25:57   bag. The watch was in her bag. It was on somehow or the button got smashed in. It

00:26:03   was on and the button was being just held. Oh man. Wow. So it was making the

00:26:10   calls triggering the emergency SOS turns out if you just hold the button for a

00:26:17   long period of time it will trigger the emergency SOS and will continue to do it

00:26:24   over and over again now that I don't think is the right cause of action no

00:26:29   no especially because the watch was in her bag it was not on her wrist yeah so

00:26:34   why would you trigger multiple emergency calls while the user is not

00:26:39   wearing the watch. I mean I get one but it was five times so like we were

00:26:44   worried like the boat wasn't leaving like oh my god are they sending like a

00:26:47   helicopter like what is going on right now right but like 911 obviously get

00:26:52   this because the calls were 35 seconds 15 seconds 2 seconds and then they were

00:26:56   rejecting them so they must have some kind of system that understands either

00:27:02   where the call is coming from like what has triggered it so like they know it's

00:27:06   an Apple watch or whatever I don't know or that they can see that it's like an error.

00:27:11   But yeah so we worked it out and then I was like take that watch out of your bag, turn

00:27:16   it off and put it on your wrist. We're not dealing with this anymore. So yeah there you

00:27:21   go. It makes a little siren sound. The watch was making a siren sound from her bag but

00:27:25   we didn't realise that was the case. And it just kept calling 911 over and over and over

00:27:31   again.

00:27:32   Wow.

00:27:33   That's no good.

00:27:34   So that is a funny story, a bit of a mystery, and a word of warning to everybody.

00:27:42   I once had a customer a long time ago when I was doing consulting and she would get to

00:27:47   work and her MacBook Pro would be hot in her bag.

00:27:51   So it was like waking up.

00:27:53   And it was a very similar thing except she had a Bluetooth mouse that she wasn't turning

00:27:56   off and so it would get like jostled in her bag and it would move the cursor and wake

00:28:02   the computer up, but of course the computer's closed in a bag, so it would just get super

00:28:07   hot and it was like this cycle, like the machine would wake up and it would do things, like

00:28:11   sometimes things would be done, like system purposes would be open, or something she was

00:28:16   working on would have a bunch of crazy things in it, because the mouse was getting moved

00:28:22   around and jostled as she walked and put the bag in her car and stuff. It's a weird thing

00:28:26   until you figure out what's going on.

00:28:30   There are already a bunch of people in the chat room saying that they've done this exact

00:28:33   thing with the Apple Watch to the point where people are just turning the feature off.

00:28:37   I think I may do that, actually I didn't know you could.

00:28:39   I think I'm gonna, once we're done today, I'm just gonna turn this feature off from

00:28:42   Adina's watch.

00:28:44   It's coming to the iPhone, this thing, as well, right?

00:28:46   Was it like, you press the home button five times and it activates an emergency mode?

00:28:53   So what it does, so I'm gonna do mine right now.

00:28:55   Oh no, don't call it emergency mode.

00:28:56   So it brings up a new screen that has slide to power off,

00:29:00   and then medical ID, and then the emergency SOS.

00:29:03   You have to drag over.

00:29:05   So if I drag it over, I can see my medical ID.

00:29:08   There's a picture of me and weight and sort of stuff.

00:29:10   But that's also what's being referred to as cop mode,

00:29:15   where you have to re-enter your PIN to unlock the phone.

00:29:19   It doesn't--

00:29:20   - Yeah, 'cause when you do this--

00:29:20   - It disables touch ID.

00:29:22   - Yeah, you hit it five times,

00:29:23   and then touch ID doesn't work anymore, right?

00:29:25   you have to enter your code in. So like if you're in a sticky situation you hit

00:29:30   the home button five times and then it disables touch ID which is cool. Mm-hmm

00:29:35   yeah it's great that it's there but yeah it's it's definitely can be done

00:29:40   accidentally. Yeah I wonder I wonder if there is a way to trigger the emergency

00:29:44   call automatically from that like in the way that there is from the Apple watch

00:29:49   because I would I would be concerned about that. I don't think there is I

00:29:52   I think you've got to slide it over you gotta use that little multi-toed slider multi-toed slider.

00:29:56   I hope that's the case. But yes there you go turns out you just hold that button down and

00:30:01   you will continue to call 911 over and over and over again until somebody works out what's happened.

00:30:06   Oh I'm glad it wasn't a real emergency. Me too. Apple has killed the Apple Music Festival.

00:30:12   It's dead 10 years and it's gone away. Yeah rest in peace I guess.

00:30:18   Yeah, I mean, this is an interesting thing for me.

00:30:21   Like it kind of seems like Apple confirmed this to some music industry

00:30:26   blogs, websites.

00:30:28   It feels kind of to me now more than ever, it makes sense for them to have this big

00:30:33   Apple Music Festival, like making live recordings of these festivals available to

00:30:38   Apple Music subscribers, making the videos available to Apple Music subscribers.

00:30:43   that seems like a more compelling use case than ever before.

00:30:48   Like the iTunes Music Festival always felt like

00:30:51   this weird thing that they kind of just did

00:30:53   for the sake of doing it.

00:30:55   But I mean, I would maybe argue that in a way,

00:30:59   I mean, Steven, you can disagree with this.

00:31:00   I've been wondering if this is true or not.

00:31:02   If kind of financially music is more important to Apple

00:31:07   than it's ever been, would be my, my posit here.

00:31:12   Now I know that of course the iPod was a huge, massive,

00:31:16   massive important part of the company,

00:31:19   but it was maybe more sales of the iPod

00:31:21   than sales of music that was important?

00:31:24   - Yeah, I think, to the bottom line, I think so.

00:31:26   - Yeah, and now the services revenue

00:31:30   is such an important part of Apple

00:31:32   from Wall Street's perspective,

00:31:34   and Apple Music is a linchpin of that,

00:31:37   that it kind of feels interesting to me now

00:31:39   that like to get rid of a potential feature for Apple Music subscribers? Yeah

00:31:45   I mean I think that they are maybe they're trying to focus or like shift

00:31:51   focus like they're getting rid of this but then they're also doing a bunch of

00:31:54   TV stuff like yeah so that that's the what kind of comes to mind for me like

00:31:58   if this is something that they are getting rid of then like what what's

00:32:02   replacing it and maybe it is that TV stuff maybe they're gonna do you know

00:32:08   They used to do a lot more of this where a band would go into an Apple store and do something

00:32:13   like acoustically or whatever and then they'd record it and release it.

00:32:17   I forget what the name of those were.

00:32:19   They had a name for that series.

00:32:22   But maybe they're doing more stuff like that and not this giant festival concert thing.

00:32:26   I don't know.

00:32:27   Well, there's this article in the show notes from musicbusinessworld.com where they mention

00:32:32   the fact that it seems like Apple has been focusing in some other areas.

00:32:36   So there have been some concerts recently that have been sponsored by Apple Music or

00:32:41   kind of in conjunction with.

00:32:43   So artists like Haim and Arcade Fire have done gigs where Apple has been a partner of

00:32:48   it and they also in last summer, Apple Music was the sponsor of Drake's 32-Date Tour.

00:32:54   So it might be that they're kind of pushing the Apple Music branding into already existing

00:33:00   events as opposed to hosting their own.

00:33:02   But it is a shame though because the iTunes Music Festival, the Apple Music Festival was

00:33:07   always this cool thing that happened in London and it is a shame that I never got to go to

00:33:13   it even though I applied for tickets every single year.

00:33:17   Maybe that's the problem though, right?

00:33:19   Maybe they want to do more US based events instead of being in London.

00:33:24   Yeah, maybe.

00:33:25   Maybe that's it.

00:33:26   Didn't they do something last year though?

00:33:29   It was South by Southwest, right?

00:33:30   Yeah, it was a Southwest West, they did some kind of mini concert or something, I think.

00:33:37   I don't remember who was the artist, honestly. But yeah, that's the idea, I guess, of doing

00:33:42   more smaller events throughout the US and other continents, maybe. I don't know. But

00:33:49   instead of having to organize this huge event, which must be not just from a financial perspective,

00:33:54   but also from an organizational point of view, it's a big thing to organize. Like a week,

00:34:00   days in London, you know, flying artists in and streaming everything and setting up the entire

00:34:05   organization and event, that's a lot of time and money and maybe they think that having more

00:34:13   presence at concerts and other events is a better strategy. I don't know.

00:34:17   I'm sad because it was kind of cool, you know?

00:34:20   Yeah, it's a thing that I think we'll miss but I'm interested to see if they push into

00:34:28   working on other events and maybe it will like, the spirit will live on with the music festival

00:34:34   but as a more segmented and something that's spread around a little bit more but yeah it's

00:34:40   something that I will miss anyway but it's interesting to see where they're going to go

00:34:44   with this. So I mean I would expect it's definitely not a money thing right, it's not like they can't

00:34:49   afford this. I assume there is just some change in direction here that they're going to start to put

00:34:55   in place.

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00:36:36   So Siri has moved in with Craig.

00:36:40   I know that seems like it's just gossip, but the story is, as was the end of last week

00:36:45   I think, that the Apple leadership page now reflects that the Siri organization is now

00:36:51   underneath Craig Federighi.

00:36:52   It was previously under Eddy Cue, which I think maybe made sense in the beginning, but

00:36:58   I think for a long time seemed sort of a stranger and stranger place for Siri to be.

00:37:04   And now Apple has changed that, at least publicly.

00:37:07   We don't know when it actually happened.

00:37:08   I guess maybe it's been this way for a while, but according to the public page now, this

00:37:15   is the deal.

00:37:16   Siri has moved.

00:37:17   As our resident historian, Steven, can you explain why Siri was ever under Q's division?

00:37:27   used to have like an oddball assortment of services and I think that that has

00:37:34   streamlined over the years and you know it started as an acquisition and you

00:37:40   know maybe that it just wasn't I think I think as it has grown in importance it's

00:37:44   become stranger that it was under his his command I think it started as like

00:37:47   it's just a service on the iPhone and now it's sort of a whole business and a

00:37:51   whole super important part of all their products and so I think it's just sort

00:37:55   have evolved out of his purview.

00:37:58   Because wasn't, I guess, wasn't there a time when Q had kind of like all cloud

00:38:02   services, like mobile me and stuff was under Q's division?

00:38:06   I think so, yeah. Yeah.

00:38:07   And that was before Forstall left, right?

00:38:11   When it was, when the divisions were much different and it got restructured after

00:38:15   Forstall. But for some reason, Siri, Siri remained under Q's division.

00:38:19   I think probably incorrectly.

00:38:20   I just don't think that was the right place for it at that point, because I would

00:38:24   expect that they've done this and they've moved it under Craig's banner

00:38:27   because they want to make it more core to the operating system would be my

00:38:31   thinking. When you consider all the integrations that you know Siri has with

00:38:37   iOS and the fact that Puerto Rico overseas has to oversee like stuff like

00:38:43   SiriKit for example the frameworks and the you know all the extensions and the

00:38:47   direct hooks into the, between Siri and the rest of the local OS.

00:38:53   You could argue that Siri is as much a cloud service as it is a native system feature.

00:38:58   And so I think it definitely makes more sense to have the same team and the same set of people

00:39:05   look into this stuff, even if it means they have to bring in new kinds of expertise,

00:39:11   you know, because you need both cloud people and local OS like foundation and iOS people to

00:39:18   make Siri and to make sure that it works. But if we consider Q more of the Hollywood

00:39:27   impresario type of guy that seems to be his role these days, it makes more sense to have

00:39:32   have Siri be part of Federighi's role rather than Q's?

00:39:37   - Yeah, I guess, I mean, I would hope that it signals

00:39:44   more of a change for Siri, maybe for Siri to step up

00:39:50   a little bit more.

00:39:51   I think we would all agree that the advancement

00:39:56   of Siri has been slow.

00:40:00   even as SiriKit has started to become a thing, the intents that are being added to SiriKit

00:40:08   are not being added at a breakneck speed. And so maybe it is time considering, I mean

00:40:15   we're going to talk about just a slew of smart speaker news in a moment, but I think

00:40:20   that we can all agree that maybe Siri is becoming a bit of a thorn in Apple's side as their

00:40:28   competitors are to varying levels of success, boosting their efforts.

00:40:35   When you look at something like the HomePod, which we all believed was going to be the

00:40:40   Siri speaker, at least the last time we saw anything about it, has limited Siri functionality,

00:40:46   when really that product, as everybody imagined it, would be the Siri speaker, not an Apple

00:40:52   music speaker with some Siri stuff built in.

00:40:54   So that's kind of strange because if you look at the HomePod specs and the leaks that came out a few weeks ago, there are all the Siri questions that you can ask natively on iOS.

00:41:07   You should be able to get a response from the HomePod. It's just that they didn't open up SiriKit to the HomePod at all.

00:41:14   And that's kind of strange, especially if you consider how Apple has been pushing this expansion of Siri to third-party apps.

00:41:22   But it also kind of makes sense because there's no App Store for the HomePod.

00:41:27   And so we go back to the problem that I think we discussed a few months ago of Siri for Apple is both local and in the cloud.

00:41:36   in the cloud in the sense that there's no concept of SiriKit that lives on the web and

00:41:43   you can ask for example to do something with Todoist if you don't have the Todoist app

00:41:49   installed on your device.

00:41:51   So because you cannot install apps on your HomePod therefore you can only ask native

00:41:55   features that Apple directly makes and puts into the HomePod firmware.

00:42:01   So the bigger question, I guess, is how can Apple follow up to the Amazon Echo, to the

00:42:08   Google Home, and now if Sonos is doing something perhaps, how can they turn the HomePod into

00:42:14   an app platform without running into the limitations of watchOS?

00:42:18   That is, it depends on the iPhone for communication between apps, which makes everything slow

00:42:23   and less reliable.

00:42:25   So how can they expand Siri to support a variety of commands without having users do stuff

00:42:34   like install this app on your phone or make sure your iPhone is within range, you know?

00:42:39   So how can they do that?

00:42:40   I have no idea.

00:42:44   We'll come back to the smart speaker stuff in a second, but can we talk about ediQ for

00:42:48   a moment?

00:42:49   Okay.

00:42:50   What do you want to talk about?

00:42:52   Alright, so I feel like over time, Eddie has become, at least in our community, like a

00:43:03   joke, he's become a joke. Like, people use him as a meme, right? Like, there are jokes

00:43:10   made about Eddie. And I think a common consensus seems to have arisen that Eddie is no good,

00:43:18   right, like that he is bad at his job. And I mean some of the, some of the thinking around

00:43:25   this is like a bad Apple Music introduction, right, like just really bad, just like just

00:43:31   bad bad. And no Apple TV deals, no TV deals have been announced, right, like people assume

00:43:38   and I think rightly so that these fall under his purview, this is his part of the business.

00:43:45   So I kind of wonder like I'm assuming that he must be good at his job or parts of his

00:43:54   job that we don't see because Tim Cook seemed to have no real problem getting rid of Scott

00:44:01   Forstall when Forstall was considered to be a problem. So if Eddy Cue was bad I'm sure

00:44:10   that he wouldn't be around anymore, right? I don't know because but then you know at

00:44:16   the same time two big parts of his organization have been removed from him and that could

00:44:22   mean a million different things, right? Like it doesn't necessarily mean that he's bad

00:44:25   at his job but that maybe he was given things that he never really should have been managing

00:44:30   in the first place. So when things start to look like they're going wrong it's because

00:44:34   well they were in the wrong place. Like Siri shouldn't be, shouldn't have been a part of

00:44:38   division, neither should the App Store. Like it didn't make sense considering the other things

00:44:41   that he had to look after. So I wonder, like, I wonder, is Eddie Q bad or has he been dealt a bad hand?

00:44:49   I tend to see Q as the guy that goes to the Hollywood studio people and other executives and

00:45:01   makes deals. Now I don't know what this means specifically, I just have this idea of when

00:45:10   Apple needs to go and you know have dinner with some folks from Sony or convince an artist to

00:45:19   put out a video on Apple Music or an exclusive on Apple Music, they send Q. That is totally my

00:45:27   interpretation I'm not sure if this is correct and I'm sure that the guy has some... like you say Myke

00:45:34   it has to do something right otherwise it doesn't seem like Team Cook would just keep him

00:45:40   around because they're friends. So either Q is doing something that we have no complete idea of

00:45:49   what it is. You know like admin stuff or manager type of stuff that is not easily explainable like

00:45:55   Like, I don't even know how to describe it, but you know, the way that these deals are

00:46:01   made is pretty obscure to me.

00:46:05   Or maybe they just keep him around because he's good at convincing people.

00:46:10   He's good at, you know, talking up to with the music studios and work out, for example,

00:46:16   a commission fee on streaming.

00:46:19   He hasn't been doing well with the TV stuff, it seems.

00:46:23   So I wonder if his talents reside mostly in the music industry.

00:46:32   That's where I assume because of iTunes and because of the iPod and because of the Steve

00:46:36   Jobs legacy, maybe that's where he has the most contacts and connections and leverage

00:46:45   on other folks in the industry.

00:46:48   I just assume.

00:46:50   But yeah, it is kind of a mystery.

00:46:53   You know, especially considering he hasn't been at keynotes since last year.

00:47:01   Was it two years ago?

00:47:02   I don't remember.

00:47:03   I mean, last year I can't wait to do it.

00:47:06   WWDC.

00:47:07   And that was, I think, his last public appearance, maybe?

00:47:11   That's the last chance you get.

00:47:12   You say that line and you're done.

00:47:14   He did a...

00:47:15   Didn't he do a recode thing?

00:47:17   Yeah, I was talking about Apple keynotes and introducing Apple stuff.

00:47:22   Yeah.

00:47:23   So here's the thing, right? So like about that TV thing. Apple were praised a few

00:47:30   months ago, right, when they hired those TV executives, those two Sony executives,

00:47:34   right, that were like responsible for Breaking Bad and stuff. What if Q did

00:47:39   that? You know? Right, exactly. I think he probably did. I mean I think that if that's still

00:47:45   under him then I think that... You would assume that this is his, this is, this is

00:47:50   what he does, right? And we were talking about, and everyone's been talking about this billion

00:47:55   dollar budget for TV shows. This might be all of his work, right? And again, I know

00:48:01   that Carpool Karaoke and behind the app, every time, every time, Planet of the Apps hasn't

00:48:08   really been met with much fanfare, but I assume he's doing something, right? He's this funny

00:48:18   guy who is really awkward but that doesn't mean that he's bad at his job right because

00:48:25   he's not good at presentations. Do you know what I mean? Like I just feel like he must

00:48:29   be good. He must be good because he's an executive of the biggest company in the world.

00:48:35   Yeah I just I just yeah I just have the feeling that maybe Eric Yu, Jimmy Iovine and Dre are

00:48:42   just a posse of Apple. They go around and they talk to people, they convince

00:48:49   executives to come on board and they talk to artists and they make deals. They are

00:48:55   deal makers and maybe that is important. I'm sure that is important to Apple.

00:49:01   In that book, Becoming Steve Jobs, he is praised, right? His abilities are praised then.

00:49:09   I think they said that they needed Steve to close the deals but this was earlier on in his career

00:49:14   and that he was apparently just really good at this stuff. And there are people who have those

00:49:21   skills but those skills don't necessarily transfer into everything else. He might just be really good

00:49:25   at schmoozing and they need that. Apple need that. They've always needed it. They're going to continue

00:49:30   to need it and the thing about the TV thing, my feeling on that is I expect that the TV

00:49:39   industry are very hesitant of Apple because they don't want to become the music industry.

00:49:47   Because Apple kind of ran through it and owned it and I'm sure they don't want Apple to have

00:49:54   any more than what they currently have which is an ability to sell stuff. So that's kind

00:49:58   of my feeling on that like the reason we haven't seen some Apple TV service like

00:50:02   that's probably why but I just wanted to talk about it because I know you know

00:50:05   it's it's fun it's fun to make jokes but I'm sure I'm sure he's good at his job

00:50:10   but he is also just terrible on stage so they yeah and and I think it's made

00:50:17   worse in our community that we like Craig Federighi is kind of the nerd hero

00:50:21   right and yep some it's harder to care about the media side of the business and

00:50:28   And I think a lot of nerdy people actually loathe

00:50:32   the media side of the business.

00:50:33   They don't want Apple to make TV,

00:50:34   they want Apple to make a new Mac Pro.

00:50:37   And I think that gets dumped onto EdiQ

00:50:40   probably unfairly by members of the nerd community.

00:50:45   - But you know, there's a person behind the fancy shirt.

00:50:51   He has feelings too.

00:50:52   - Sometimes you can see more of the person

00:50:54   than you want through the fancy shirt.

00:50:56   We know it's there.

00:50:57   We all remember.

00:51:00   Alright, coming back to smart speakers. There was just a plethora of smart speaker related

00:51:07   news in the last week and I want to just run through some of the things that caught my

00:51:11   eye. So, first off, Amazon adds multi-room audio support to the Echo. So you can now

00:51:18   create groups of Amazon Echo devices like the Echo, the Echo Show and the Echo Dot even

00:51:24   when the echo dot is attached to speakers and you can put them into groups and you can

00:51:28   play music so you can be like hey echo play this song on everything you set up a group

00:51:34   it's called everything and it's all of your devices so you can you can group devices into

00:51:39   one big group or into singular groups right now I think only one device can be attached

00:51:44   to only one group only I expect they'll change this in the future because it's really weird

00:51:48   but it is it works I have heard it in action it works it sounds great like it's like a

00:51:53   of Sonos it works and Amazon is also working with third-party manufacturers

00:51:58   to create an API to do this and they have said they are currently working

00:52:02   with Bose, Sound United and Samsung to put their stuff into and I assume it's

00:52:07   the echo assistant into these boxes and then have the multi-room audio support

00:52:13   throughout and this feels like it's something that could finally kill Sonos

00:52:19   because this is Sonos' thing and now Amazon's like yeah we just added it to our thing for

00:52:24   free like people can just can just do this thing.

00:52:27   I wonder if they're on product graveyard let's look Sonos.

00:52:31   So you say this right but Sonos also announced a smart speaker event a reveal event on October

00:52:38   4th right so my thing I have a theory here I think this is a Sonos with echo functionality

00:52:47   built in. That's what I think it is. I think honestly if Sonos are trying to build their

00:52:53   own smart speaker platform it will 100% kill the company. It will tank them immediately.

00:53:00   They may as well just give it up. If they're trying to create their own, so considering

00:53:05   that Amazon has already announced a partnership with Sonos, they've already announced that

00:53:11   they're working together, right? That was announced ages ago. Now they're doing a smart

00:53:15   speaker and Amazon have added multi-room audio support, I think that they're just

00:53:20   gonna say "hey we have now deeply integrated with the Amazon echo platform

00:53:25   and you can use our products as part of it now, we have cheaper ones, we have

00:53:31   expensive ones, we're making great hardware for Amazon". That's what I think

00:53:35   this event is gonna be because anything else would be I think just a really

00:53:41   really bad idea from Sonos. I just don't see them lasting in this world anymore

00:53:49   like it reminds me of Everpix because these services like Everpix and

00:53:58   Picture Life they could exist when they are on their own but when these huge

00:54:03   companies walk into these things and they don't need to make money on these

00:54:06   services there's no way companies like Everpix can survive right because

00:54:11   Apple and Google could offer photo storage and they kind of baked some of

00:54:18   the price of it into the fact that you're buying into their ecosystem and

00:54:21   hardware but Everpix like that was a hundred percent of their business they

00:54:26   needed to make money from it otherwise they couldn't exist and I look at Sonos

00:54:29   in the same way Sonos if they're trying to build their own platform here they're

00:54:35   just not gonna be able to do it because Amazon is always gonna offer a cheaper

00:54:40   alternative, they're just always going to because they have all of the Prime

00:54:44   stuff to back it up and Apple are always going to be able to offer premium stuff

00:54:49   at similar prices but with ecosystem lock-in. So Sonos don't have a place

00:54:54   here I think if they're going to try and do it on their own anymore. So I expect

00:54:59   that that Sonos event is where they announce their Amazon Echo Sonos

00:55:03   speakers. That's my impression.

00:55:05   You know, they are testing the integration with the echo.

00:55:12   Yep.

00:55:13   You know, if you have an Amazon Echo and you set up the Sonos speaker and you can sort

00:55:17   of chain the two and ask, you know, play music in my kitchen or play music in my living room.

00:55:23   And I think you're right because, you know, having to own two separate devices, it just

00:55:30   these integrations they can always be a bit flaky.

00:55:34   And it just seems like a better solution to me to have

00:55:38   the Echo Intelligence and voice features directly built into the Sonos speaker.

00:55:42   And so I think you're onto something here, Myke.

00:55:46   Long term, it just would make a lot of sense for Amazon

00:55:50   to buy Sonos and to use whatever talent and

00:55:54   hardware and design taste they have and make

00:55:58   make better speakers sold by Amazon, honestly.

00:56:01   - So I was having this conversation with someone

00:56:03   the night before Amazon added the multi-room audio support.

00:56:08   Of like, Amazon should buy Sonos so they can build

00:56:12   these amazing speakers in the multi-room audio.

00:56:14   So I thought, like you, Federico,

00:56:17   'cause it makes perfect sense.

00:56:18   Amazon clearly doesn't need that.

00:56:20   - No, they don't.

00:56:21   - 'Cause they've worked it out on their own.

00:56:23   I think it made sense for them to buy Sonos

00:56:25   a little while ago, and I think that maybe

00:56:27   Sonos were hoping that would happen.

00:56:30   But I think Amazon has proven

00:56:31   that they don't need to do that.

00:56:32   But I think what Amazon does need

00:56:35   is premium speakers for their system.

00:56:38   Like really good speakers and Sonos can make those.

00:56:42   - It would be interesting to see what happens now

00:56:44   that there's, we are witnessing, I think,

00:56:48   this consolidation on two fronts.

00:56:50   There's Amazon and products with Echo integration

00:56:55   on one hand, and on the other we have Apple

00:56:59   that is coming out with the HomePod

00:57:01   and with the AirPlay 2 standard,

00:57:04   which in theory, Apple says that they have

00:57:07   a bunch of brands on board and that speakers will come out

00:57:10   as soon as iOS 11 is released.

00:57:12   Some new speakers and other, you know,

00:57:15   there is some recent ones will get software updates

00:57:18   for AirPlay 2.

00:57:19   And AirPlay 2 introduces, you know, multi-room support

00:57:22   and deeper iOS integration, you know,

00:57:24   It's even got some features that, you know, it can kind of work like the Sonos system in that, you know, if you have music playing or a podcast playing on an Airplay 2 speaker, and if a sound notification comes in, or if a phone call comes in, it doesn't pause playback on the on the Airplay 2 speaker.

00:57:43   So this sort of battle between speakers either made by Amazon or compatible with Amazon versus

00:57:53   speakers made by Apple or compatible with Apple's APIs. That would be interesting to see how it goes.

00:58:00   But I do believe this is the sort of the world that we're going to see on the smart speaker

00:58:07   front because and I'm counting out Google because I maybe I shouldn't include Google but it just

00:58:12   just seems like, I should, but it seems to me like Amazon at least has captured

00:58:17   more of the mindset, at least among us tech people. I think Google are the Windows

00:58:23   phone in this argument. Yes, yes. Wow. But I wouldn't count them out yet. Like, not yet,

00:58:31   not yet. Because they have the money, resources and patience to make Google

00:58:38   home more of a thing. Plus Android. That is a huge ecosystem. If they can continue to

00:58:48   just push Google home into more stuff, people are going to want these more and more because

00:58:54   it works with their phone. I think that is a thing that will continue. I just think that

00:58:59   right now Google is behind in a couple of ways. They did just announce the first third

00:59:06   party speakers and devices that are going to be integrating with their SDK. So one is

00:59:13   coming from Anchor, another is coming from a Chinese manufacturer called Mobvoi and LG

00:59:19   have announced that like a bunch of their home appliances are going to have Google Home

00:59:23   built in. So they're making moves, right? They're continuing to make moves as well.

00:59:28   Like it's Amazon is doing stuff, Google is doing stuff, like everyone is doing things

00:59:34   right now, which continue to make this stuff more interesting, especially

00:59:39   Microsoft and Amazon are teaming up to get their

00:59:44   two voice assistants to talk to each other.

00:59:48   This is an official partnership from Amazon and Microsoft.

00:59:51   So the Amazon assistant and Cortana, Microsoft's assistant.

00:59:55   I feel like I can say Cortana because I can't imagine many people are using it.

01:00:00   So I'm going to keep doing that one where I won't say the Amazon one out loud

01:00:03   because it's upsetting. So soon you will be able to summon either assistant from the other

01:00:09   assistant. So you can say "Hey Echo, tell Cortana to do this" or whatever. Now, whilst

01:00:16   that sounds weird and clunky, think for example if you use a Windows PC, you could trigger

01:00:24   your hue lights from your Windows PC. Sure, if you can beat them, join them. And that's

01:00:29   That's what they're doing. There's a great quote from Nick Wingfield that the New York

01:00:32   Times, Dan Morin quoted this in his article on Six Colors. These two companies have struggled

01:00:38   in the smartphone business, which makes it hard to get people using their speaker services,

01:00:44   their voice services outside homes and offices. So by pairing these two things together, they're

01:00:50   like spreading their bets further. So I find it really interesting. And I think it's more

01:00:58   More on the getting Amazon Echo into PCs is more interesting than anything else. Putting

01:01:04   Cortana into my Aircode doesn't really, I don't really know what that does to me. Maybe

01:01:08   I can control my Windows PC. I actually don't know what Cortana can do. But it's super interesting

01:01:14   to see two competing companies like this joining forces. It's Amazon man, they are really going

01:01:23   for this and right now they are leading. There is no joke anymore. They are pushing further

01:01:31   into software, more into hardware, they have products they're releasing all the time, they

01:01:36   have integrations that they're continuing to push on, they're doing deals with huge

01:01:40   companies. You can say which service you prefer but right now they are owning this space.

01:01:48   got it. It's theirs. And everybody else, I think, is catching up.

01:01:53   Well, yeah, I kind of agree. I kind of disagree, but we'll get to this in a few minutes, I

01:01:59   guess.

01:02:00   Well, I mean, as I say, you can have your favorite, but like, if you're looking at the

01:02:04   smart device, smart speaker voice assistant thing, right?

01:02:09   Right, yeah.

01:02:10   They are owning the majority of the space right now because so much of the conversation

01:02:17   is focused around them and the things that they are doing.

01:02:20   That is true, but it's also true that the Echo is available in three countries.

01:02:26   I feel like it's important to contextualize how relevant a smart speaker alone is

01:02:38   if it doesn't work with your smartphone or computer.

01:02:44   I guess it's...

01:02:46   Oh, I mean, you know, you can use the app. You can use the Amazon app.

01:02:51   Sure, sure. But it just...

01:02:54   It feels like if you take into account the ecosystem of services,

01:03:01   it feels like Google even is in a better position than Amazon.

01:03:05   You could say because of Android, because of, you know, the...

01:03:10   it's the whole suite of products into the same ecosystem.

01:03:14   And that's what Apple kind of wants to do as well.

01:03:16   And so if you consider the smart speaker alone, Amazon is clearly ahead.

01:03:20   But if you consider, you know, the whole thing, like the whole ecosystem,

01:03:25   Google is ahead maybe.

01:03:27   And Apple wants...

01:03:29   I feel like that that's just like saying, you know, Microsoft are, because

01:03:35   there are PCs everywhere and the PCs can have Cortana in them, right?

01:03:39   Like, you know, I don't necessarily think it's like who has the most devices is

01:03:43   winning.

01:03:44   No, not the most devices, but the

01:03:47   more versatile ecosystem.

01:03:51   I'm trying to find a way to phrase it that makes sense.

01:03:54   Like once you if you want to use an Amazon Echo,

01:03:58   you know, you're limited to just the speaker.

01:04:01   Whereas if you maybe in a few months, if you have a HomePod and right now

01:04:06   if you have a Google Home, the Google Assistant is everywhere.

01:04:09   So you don't have to apply a different set of skills.

01:04:12   Whether you're on your phone or talking out loud in the kitchen,

01:04:17   it's always the same service.

01:04:19   This this is why I'm saying don't count Google out because the Google Assistant,

01:04:23   which is powering all of this, is available everywhere

01:04:27   and on Android natively.

01:04:29   But like my point that I'm trying to drive at is if you're looking at

01:04:35   where the advancement is coming from, like who is pushing it forward fastest.

01:04:41   It's Amazon, I think, right now, like that they are unrelenting

01:04:44   in everything that they're trying to do with the Echo platform.

01:04:48   Which I guess brings us to Federico's peculiar story

01:04:53   to round out our peculiar stories of this episode.

01:04:55   This is just an experiment, though we are trying now.

01:05:00   But basically, as we came back from our month long vacation,

01:05:04   came back home and we did some reorganization.

01:05:08   Especially of our bedroom and my corner

01:05:12   of the room which is my mini studio. And we realized

01:05:16   just how much stuff we

01:05:20   had in there. Like

01:05:24   too many electronics and just stuff with

01:05:28   cables everywhere and like we had the

01:05:32   the multiple echoes and the Sonos and a bunch of remotes

01:05:37   and the Logitech Harmony.

01:05:39   And we, both Silvia and I, I guess we were,

01:05:44   we were caught by an urge to simplify.

01:05:47   And yeah, and we've been talking about,

01:05:53   especially about the echo and the limitations

01:05:57   that we specifically face with the echo here,

01:06:02   which is we cannot talk to the echo in Italian.

01:06:06   And that can be awkward or weird,

01:06:09   especially if you have people over.

01:06:11   It's funny if you have close friends,

01:06:14   but it's not funny if there's someone who's not,

01:06:17   like a real close friend or relative.

01:06:19   - And I guess it's worth just for the sake

01:06:22   of adding context to this discussion,

01:06:24   that you just remind people

01:06:27   that you only speak English to us, right?

01:06:29   You speak Italian at home.

01:06:31   Yes. Yes. Because I live in Rome and I have Italian friends and, you know, I'm Italian, but I just...

01:06:37   Why?

01:06:38   I speak a lot of Engl- Yes, I speak a lot of English, but I speak with you guys or with my friends at Max Stories and other people for work.

01:06:46   Yeah.

01:06:47   And so the Echo doesn't allow us to talk in Italian.

01:06:51   And we also realized,

01:06:54   in addition to wanting to simplify

01:06:58   and to have like a cleaner look for the house,

01:07:01   like fewer cables, less complexity.

01:07:06   I don't know why that is,

01:07:08   but we were both on the same page.

01:07:11   And also we realized how much

01:07:13   we've been enjoying Siri lately.

01:07:16   It's faster when we want to turn on the lights.

01:07:19   We use Siri a lot for timers and for triggering scenes

01:07:25   and also to open the camera view

01:07:31   because we're constantly checking in on the dogs

01:07:33   when we're not at home.

01:07:35   And taking these things together, I said,

01:07:38   "You know, we should maybe try and see how it goes

01:07:42   if we get rid of the Amazon Echo.

01:07:46   if we can do what we currently do just by using Siri and maybe later this year if I

01:07:53   can manage or maybe next year if it comes to Italy to get a HomePod.

01:08:01   In addition to this, there's also the fact that I've been personally, for my English

01:08:06   usage, I've been using the Amazon Echo less and less as I've been testing the new iOS

01:08:13   domains for SiriKit coming in just a few weeks for taking notes and saving tasks in my task

01:08:22   manager.

01:08:24   I realized that a lot of my Amazon Echo usage was about saving tasks in Todoist.

01:08:31   And now without getting into the specifics, this stuff is coming with iOS 11.

01:08:37   And I'm really enjoying the fact that I can do this stuff natively on my device and it's

01:08:43   immediately saved into my task manager by using voice. And if you combine that

01:08:49   with the fact that I'm not using Spotify anymore, you know, Silvio and I, we have a

01:08:54   family subscription with Apple Music. Taking all these factors together, Siri

01:09:01   works in Italian and English, there's a speaker coming, we're using Apple Music a

01:09:06   lot more, we're using Siri a lot as a, you know, in our family, you know, in our

01:09:12   household usage. We like Siri because it's faster and it seems more reliable

01:09:17   and we wanted to simplify. The conclusion of this feels kind of obvious to

01:09:24   me that we wanted to have a simpler setup. Just Siri, just Apple

01:09:31   stuff, fewer third-party dependencies. And I'm not sure if this is gonna work out

01:09:39   for now, especially because the HomePod is not out yet. And the fact that I don't like

01:09:46   the way that hands-free Siri activation works on iOS, I don't fully like it, I don't fully

01:09:51   trust it, so I'm not sure if I will be able to live with an Amazon Echo Free world for

01:09:57   at least a couple of months, if I can manage to get a HomePod from the US or the UK or

01:10:02   whatever. But I can tell you this, that it feels great, it feels very nice to have, you

01:10:11   know, fewer cables, fewer accessories, and there's a... it reminds me of when I used

01:10:23   to be a Mac user and I was constantly fiddling around and tweaking things with scripts and

01:10:31   apps and you know in a way that's I've sort of had the same realization with

01:10:36   home automation I just want to buy stuff that works with HomeKit that works with

01:10:41   Siri then I don't have to think about integrations and you know IFTTT and all

01:10:47   that stuff I plug it in I authenticate with my iCloud account and it works and

01:10:53   it's kind of it's kind of beautiful for now.

01:10:56   a few things. So one, it's very surprising to me in general because you were our patient

01:11:04   zero for the Echo. You were the one that got all of us involved in this. Are you losing

01:11:13   any functionality by leaving this or any of your smart home devices that you were using?

01:11:20   Have any of them been taken away because of this?

01:11:23   - So that's the other point. - I see some.

01:11:24   - No, because I only have,

01:11:27   really my only smart home devices are U lights

01:11:31   and a bunch of HomeKit sensors.

01:11:33   I cannot install,

01:11:37   because this is not our house we're renting,

01:11:42   I cannot install stuff that works with the Echo,

01:11:44   like thermostats or door locks or other of these devices.

01:11:49   - Everything else can go along with it.

01:11:51   I guess that's the good thing.

01:11:52   - Yeah, yeah. - Okay.

01:11:54   But the thing that I would really miss

01:11:56   and why I have no intention of getting rid of these devices

01:11:59   is I just love walking around my house

01:12:01   and speaking commands.

01:12:04   - Yeah, yeah.

01:12:05   - And I agree with you,

01:12:07   I just don't get the same level of accuracy

01:12:12   from using the hands-free Siri stuff.

01:12:15   And I mean, really, the main use in our house

01:12:20   for having an echo is to turn our lights on and off and to set timers, right?

01:12:24   And like being able to just speak those things into the

01:12:27   into the air and it happened that we love it.

01:12:31   It's fantastic.

01:12:33   I would miss that a lot.

01:12:35   And I really don't feel like.

01:12:38   The hands free series good enough.

01:12:40   No, and that that's why I'm

01:12:44   I'm really excited, actually, for the home part, even if I'm still not sold

01:12:48   on the name, I feel like I'm maybe at a point in my life where I don't have time for tweaking

01:13:00   things constantly anymore. And I just want to choose an ecosystem and stick with it and

01:13:08   make sure that it works for everybody in the house. And right now, at least for us, for

01:13:13   dual language support and for the minimal home kit devices that we, you know, setup that we have,

01:13:20   that is Apple and Siri. And we like Apple Music, we like Siri, we like the way that it works and

01:13:26   there's a speaker coming even if it doesn't have the third-party integrations that I would like it

01:13:31   to have. It seems to me like this need for simplification is now better served by getting

01:13:39   rid of these other devices which include the Logitech remote, the Sonos, multiple Echos.

01:13:50   Basically the only things left are Apple stuff, HomeKit cameras, and again also for the cameras

01:13:59   I'm really hoping that the Canary, the Logitech Circle, all of these devices will get HomeKit

01:14:05   software updates because this is now possible with iOS 11. So the more I can

01:14:09   switch to the Apple ecosystem, the less I have to think about keeping up

01:14:13   with external integrations, APIs, different sets of commands, the better.

01:14:17   So right now the only stuff I have is Apple stuff, my video game consoles and

01:14:21   my Synology and that's about it. So that's kind of... it's very refreshing.

01:14:27   There's a very refreshing simplicity that I was kind of missing. I don't know

01:14:31   Maybe I'm turning into Steven.

01:14:33   I'm getting older, I don't know.

01:14:35   I don't know.

01:14:36   - Steven, do you want to take a bet on how long it is

01:14:38   until Federico comes back to the Antarctica?

01:14:41   - What did he say for me on Spotify,

01:14:43   between three weeks and a month?

01:14:44   - Yeah.

01:14:45   - I think it's probably going to be,

01:14:48   I'm going to say six to eight weeks

01:14:51   before something in HomeKit or Siri

01:14:54   just breaks his will to live.

01:14:55   - Yeah, see, I was going to say by the end of the year.

01:14:58   - See, okay.

01:14:59   I reckon that the HomePod will come out, no date for Italy, it comes out, no one is super

01:15:06   enthused about it and he's just like "forget it" and goes back to the Echo.

01:15:10   Okay, we'll follow up on this.

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01:16:50   All right, so we are a week away, really burying the lead today, we are a week away from an

01:16:57   Apple event. It is going to happen at the Steve Jobs Theatre at Apple Park on September

01:17:04   12th. It's going to be the first event there. We're going to be recording the day after

01:17:08   as we like to do on this show. So we let kind of the news settle in, piece together all

01:17:12   the stuff that we want to piece together. What do we think is going to be announced?

01:17:17   Federico, what do you think is going to happen?

01:17:19   Alright, so I think it's safe to say we are expecting three new iPhones and I'm confident that what people are referring to as the 7S and 7S+ will actually be called the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.

01:17:35   And the special, you know, the all new, all screen, top-notch iPhone will be called something like the iPhone Edition or iPhone Pro or iPhone X.

01:17:45   I don't know, but some other name that makes it different, but that doesn't also make the iPhone 8 line less important.

01:17:57   So I think we'll see three new iPhones.

01:17:59   And then we can go over some of these individually, but I think we'll get the Apple Watch 3 with longer battery life and LTE support as a separate version.

01:18:11   Like iPads, you know, if you want, you can get the cellular model.

01:18:15   And I think we're going to see the 4K Apple TV and 4K content on iTunes.

01:18:21   And after the event, we'll look into the specifics of 4K and we'll be able to follow up and say,

01:18:28   "Yes, it is indeed based on the HEVC video codec," as Steven and I speculated, I think it was last week.

01:18:35   Yeah.

01:18:36   So these are my main three, iPhones, Apple Watch, Apple TV and 4K on iTunes.

01:18:43   So we can dig into these things in a little bit more detail where we want to but just to kind of round out general predictions

01:18:48   The Mac I mean there are Mac products still coming this year anything. Yeah, I don't I don't think we're gonna see anything

01:18:56   they showed the iMac Pro at

01:18:59   WWDC I think they could do a a

01:19:02   Press release and you know when that thing's ready, that's a press release

01:19:07   I don't think we're gonna see anything about the Mac Pro this calendar year. So I

01:19:12   I don't I just don't see there being a a

01:19:15   Enough max stuff to warrant stage time at this point. They just did the MacBook pros. What about high Sierra?

01:19:23   I mean maybe I mean usually

01:19:26   so if they do one event in the fall, we'll see like a high Sierra recap, but there's no hardware to tie it to and

01:19:32   I don't think the iMac Pro is gonna ship early in October

01:19:36   So I don't think there's gonna be an event then so I mean hi

01:19:39   Sierra may get a little time on stage but three new phones, new Apple watch, new

01:19:45   Apple TV, that's plenty for an event. This could be a Mac free event I think. What

01:19:50   about the HomePod? Anything? I mean there's still more to tell. Are they

01:19:55   going to show that now? Will they do an event later on in the year which maybe

01:19:59   has more information about the iMac Pro and the HomePod? Like would they build an

01:20:04   event around that? I mean that's the wild card like do they show do they recap

01:20:10   what's at WWDC about the HomePod or if it's gonna ship in December you know

01:20:15   maybe we see a late October even November event and maybe it's HomePod and

01:20:20   iMac Pro I mean maybe that would be unusual but they've also usually don't

01:20:25   pre-announce things that are gonna ship months out. Like I'm expecting more

01:20:28   because like we kind of glossed over this earlier but like for the things that

01:20:32   and Federico were saying there was a disparity, right?

01:20:34   So Federico was right in saying like the HomePod leak

01:20:37   showed a bunch of Siri stuff.

01:20:39   But WWDC, they were like limited Siri integration.

01:20:42   These are the things that Siri might do and maybe some more.

01:20:46   You know, like there was like,

01:20:47   they were very like hand wavy about Siri's functionality

01:20:50   on the HomePod at WWDC, I think.

01:20:52   And they were talking about like limited stuff,

01:20:54   but then the HomePod firmware leak

01:20:56   maybe showed that it could do a bit more.

01:20:58   So I think that, as you would expect,

01:21:00   they did more work on it, right?

01:21:03   I think that was always the assumption,

01:21:05   is that there was six months to go

01:21:07   before the product was gonna be released.

01:21:09   So there could be some stuff to talk about,

01:21:11   or they could wait.

01:21:12   - Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

01:21:14   I mean, I guess it depends if they feel like they,

01:21:16   this is the question every year,

01:21:17   is there enough for a second event?

01:21:19   And that's weird this year,

01:21:21   because the Macs are all basically up to date,

01:21:23   except for the Mac Mini and these future Macs

01:21:27   that we are now coming.

01:21:29   And then the HomePod was announced six months in advance.

01:21:31   And so, like, do you go in depth with all the Siri commands

01:21:36   and everything the HomePod can do

01:21:38   and people still have to wait another three months?

01:21:40   Like that feels weird.

01:21:41   So I don't know.

01:21:43   That's an interesting little thing.

01:21:45   But I agree with Federico and the broad strokes

01:21:47   that phones, watch, Apple TV,

01:21:49   I think are gonna be the tent poles for this event.

01:21:53   - I agree.

01:21:54   - I'm really interested to see how they deal with the,

01:21:58   Let's just call it the iPhone Pro and its software.

01:22:02   What's the software story in terms of user interactions?

01:22:06   The latest rumors suggest there's going to be like a thin

01:22:10   bar at the bottom of the screen that you use

01:22:13   to swipe up and open multitasking.

01:22:15   Maybe you tap the bar to go back home.

01:22:18   Maybe you press and hold for Siri,

01:22:20   but really how they deal with the status bar,

01:22:25   with the notch,

01:22:26   is what everybody is asking for like how does it work and how do they present

01:22:31   these changes to developers but more broadly how does the iPhone Pro and you

01:22:36   know stuff like facial recognition this new bottom bar that replaces the home

01:22:43   button how does this affect developers who are going to submit ios 11 software

01:22:49   updates can they be ready for the new screen of the iPhone Pro in less than a

01:22:55   Did Apple create graceful fallbacks for the APIs?

01:23:01   For example, if you use Touch ID, does it automatically fall back to face ID recognition in the iOS 11 SDK?

01:23:09   And are we going to see already, or maybe not at the event, but shortly thereafter, are we going to see a beta of iOS 11.1?

01:23:19   which I don't think if we looking at you know previous years I think it should be coming

01:23:24   relatively quickly after iOS 11. So the software story I think it's really interesting and

01:23:30   especially because developers are going to update their apps you know at the event there's probably

01:23:36   going to be the GM seed of iOS 11 but there's also going to be these new APIs for the iPhone Pro

01:23:43   And these seem to me like major changes to authentication into apps, a new form factor for the display,

01:23:50   and new ways to, you know, what happens to tab bars, for example, because at the bottom, there's now this home indicator.

01:23:58   What happens to full screen usage? Can you, as an app, request to hide the home indicator or not?

01:24:05   There's a bunch of details that I'm sure after the event will go look into the iOS documentation

01:24:13   and figure out how it works.

01:24:14   So if you think about rumors and conjecture from earlier in the year, wouldn't all of

01:24:21   this be so much easier if this iPhone doesn't ship until October?

01:24:25   Yes, it would indeed be so much easier to give developers not two days or three days

01:24:32   to update and submit but to have the iPhone come out a month later.

01:24:38   And not that this is the reason, not that it comes out a month later because of developers,

01:24:42   because I don't really think Apple care about that, but the idea of "oh how are we going

01:24:47   to deal with it, how are people going to make that work for them", well that answer might

01:24:53   be given to them by the fact that this iPhone might not ship on the same day as the other

01:24:57   ones.

01:24:58   But I will say that this leak, these rumors of this idea of this line, these multi-touch

01:25:04   gestures etc etc.

01:25:07   I'm very happy because this is what I wanted.

01:25:10   What I have been hoping for was that I would get the full screen for the apps that I use

01:25:15   because otherwise what's the point?

01:25:17   Like I think I said this in this show, what was the point of giving me a big screen that

01:25:22   covers the entire front if there's just a home button on the screen the whole time?

01:25:26   Like it just seems like a waste, right?

01:25:28   Like just a complete waste of that screen

01:25:31   if I can't get the full screen of it.

01:25:33   And plus, you know, coming from a plus phone,

01:25:36   like this screen isn't going to be as big

01:25:39   as the plus's screen, but it will give me everything

01:25:42   that I want from a big screen phone.

01:25:45   Like the reason that I like a big screen phone

01:25:46   is I like to have more content on the screen.

01:25:49   And if you take this new screen and go full screen,

01:25:51   I will get the same, not the same,

01:25:54   but I will get what will feel like just as much, right?

01:25:57   Like all of, I'll be able to see loads of tweets,

01:25:59   I'll be able to see loads of emails,

01:26:00   I'll be able to see loads of messages, right?

01:26:01   Like that's why I like a big screen phone,

01:26:04   because I like to have a lot of content on the screen,

01:26:06   and I will still get the majority of that, I think,

01:26:09   with this phone, because it's long, you know?

01:26:13   So I'm excited about that.

01:26:14   - Yeah, and it's gonna be longer, not wider,

01:26:18   but it's gonna be longer, so you're gonna be seeing more,

01:26:21   more items in any vertical list or presentation,

01:26:25   just not as wide maybe as the iPhone Plus.

01:26:28   And yeah, I agree.

01:26:30   Like we were speculating on does Apple create

01:26:33   like a function bar with persistent buttons?

01:26:36   But in the end, I think probably the idea

01:26:39   of fully embracing the screen makes more sense.

01:26:42   And you can imagine how Apple is gonna sell this feature

01:26:46   with taglines like full screen is now

01:26:50   real full screen, stuff like that.

01:26:52   I can see how marketing could sell that story.

01:26:57   And if you combine that with stuff like

01:27:01   maybe even more battery, maybe, you know,

01:27:04   I'm sure improvements to the dual camera system

01:27:09   and maybe even, you know, 3D sensing cameras

01:27:13   on the front of the device,

01:27:15   maybe even an API for developers,

01:27:17   we could be looking at maybe even a portrait mode

01:27:20   for the selfie camera.

01:27:21   - Yeah.

01:27:22   - And that would be awesome.

01:27:23   So I am excited.

01:27:26   I'm more than in previous years.

01:27:29   I'm really looking forward to this phone.

01:27:30   - Oh, I'm so excited about this.

01:27:32   I really am.

01:27:33   Like, we've been saying this to each other for weeks,

01:27:37   but I am more excited about this iPhone

01:27:40   than I remember being excited for an iPhone

01:27:41   in a very, very, very long time.

01:27:44   Because there is just, it doesn't matter how much we know

01:27:47   or think we know about this device.

01:27:50   it's going to be so awesome to watch this thing be unveiled

01:27:53   because it's just going to be so special looking

01:27:55   and it's going to be so weird and wonderful.

01:27:57   In a way that the iPhone hasn't been

01:28:00   probably since the Plus was released I think.

01:28:02   Like that was maybe the last time that I was this excited

01:28:05   because that then was the phone for me

01:28:08   and this now is the phone for me.

01:28:09   The Plus was the phone that I wanted

01:28:11   when it didn't exist and this is the phone that I want

01:28:16   because it doesn't exist, right?

01:28:17   Like I've wanted for a while to get rid of all of the big bezels and the borders

01:28:22   that go around a phone because I'm excited about this design trend.

01:28:25   But kind of going back to the event a little bit,

01:28:28   something that I'm really intrigued to see how Apple is going to manage

01:28:34   is the other iPhones. Like how are they going to position this?

01:28:40   I'm really intrigued to see just like the dance that they do

01:28:45   and the way that they tell the story of

01:28:47   why you should buy the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus,

01:28:51   but why you should also buy the iPhone Pro.

01:28:54   I'm really interested to see how that's gonna work out.

01:28:58   - I think that the name,

01:28:59   the naming has a lot to do with that.

01:29:00   I agree that I think we're gonna see them

01:29:02   skip the S nomenclature this year.

01:29:05   You know, the rumor is that these phones

01:29:07   are gonna look very similar,

01:29:09   but they're gonna have wireless charging,

01:29:11   which means you gotta have a glass back,

01:29:13   the design will be different to a degree. And so I think as the event goes on

01:29:17   they're announcing these phones as if they're the only phones they're

01:29:21   announcing and then there's a one more thing.

01:29:23   Yeah. There's this the special phone sitting above that and there will be

01:29:26   people who like no doubt this this 8 and 8 plus if that's what they're called

01:29:32   they will not see the the numbers that that the top of the line phone normally

01:29:40   would see. I think Apple's hoping that we're going to make that difference up with the

01:29:44   more expensive phones so the average selling price goes up, everyone's happy. But yeah,

01:29:50   that's the question here and I think they're going to need to have that wireless charging

01:29:57   feature. The case is going to need to be a little bit different to accommodate that and

01:30:00   hopefully that's enough. Like if it looked just like the 7 which looked just like the

01:30:05   the 6s, which look just like the 6,

01:30:08   that's gonna be a real bummer.

01:30:10   And yes, this phone is going to look old

01:30:12   compared to the new one, but the new one's gonna,

01:30:15   the addition or the Pro or whatever,

01:30:17   but that Pro phone is gonna be so much more expensive

01:30:20   and so different than I think maybe Apple's hoping

01:30:23   to split the difference, like, hey, people who, you know,

01:30:25   upgrade every two years or three years,

01:30:28   this is a great phone for you and it's gonna be faster

01:30:31   and it's gonna have this better camera

01:30:32   and it's gonna have wireless charging and that great,

01:30:35   But then the enthusiast phone will be there for those of us who are willing to spend the money.

01:30:40   And I think they're hoping they can just split that divide. And, you know, maybe it's not as big

01:30:45   of a deal as we think it is because people, there's a huge number of consumers who just

01:30:49   upgrade every two or three years to whatever's newest. And that phone will be there waiting for

01:30:54   them. And they'll, you know, it'll be a big upgrade from their six or success or whatever.

01:31:01   So we're a week away. We've got a really big event coming up next week, which I'm really

01:31:07   excited about. I'm interested to see how the new venue looks and how they present that

01:31:14   as well.

01:31:15   Me too. I'm super excited about that. I think that we will see some time in the keynote

01:31:21   dedicated to Apple Park and to the theater that, you know, they used to do retail updates

01:31:26   and they've basically gotten rid of those. But I think there will be some time of like,

01:31:29   welcome to our new home, you know,

01:31:31   some gratuitous drone footage of the campus

01:31:35   and maybe even something about the theater itself.

01:31:38   I think it's, we talked about when they named it,

01:31:41   the name is perfect.

01:31:42   I'm excited to see the space

01:31:43   because I'm sort of like a AV nerd

01:31:46   and like I wanna see what the space looks like

01:31:49   and I think that they will show it off.

01:31:51   I think this is the first time they're on their own campus,

01:31:53   first time that they control everything.

01:31:57   You know, they're not renting out, you know,

01:31:58   the Flint Center and building a giant building next door to it so I think

01:32:01   they'll spend some time welcoming the press in the world to their new home I

01:32:05   think that'll be fun to see. question for you Stephen, natural light. yes. do you

01:32:11   think they'll use natural light? in the theater? with the theater

01:32:16   subterranean so no. but doesn't it have like all that glass roof like I'm just

01:32:21   like trying to understand if there's a way they could do that. so the way the

01:32:25   works it's the big lobby upstairs which is maybe where the hands-on will be I

01:32:30   don't know that is that circle room with glass all the way around it's got a

01:32:34   carbon fiber roof the theater though you go downstairs at subterranean so I don't

01:32:38   think there's gonna be any natural light in the theater I think it'll be you step

01:32:42   into this this you know this auditorium and they control you know everything

01:32:48   which is like all town hall it's not underground like any theater there's no

01:32:51   there's no very few theaters use natural light because they want to control

01:32:55   everything so you're gonna walk downstairs into this giant auditorium

01:33:00   but yeah it'll be fun I agree with you it'll be fun to see that and see what

01:33:03   that space is like I'm very very curious to hear upgrade that week to hear

01:33:08   Jason's because Jason has been to all these venues and I'm very curious to

01:33:12   know how the Steve Jobs theater holds up it'll blow away the old town hall but

01:33:16   what is it like compared to all these other places that they've used over the

01:33:21   - Yeah, I'm concerned over what could be

01:33:23   an 11 billion hour upgrade because--

01:33:26   - It's gonna be very long.

01:33:27   - I really wanna know just about the venue.

01:33:32   Like I'm really intrigued, like what is the waiting area

01:33:36   like, what are the seats like?

01:33:38   Like you know, I'm very intrigued just to find out

01:33:42   what the place is like before we even start talking

01:33:44   about the new products.

01:33:45   - Does the wifi work, is there power in the seats?

01:33:48   Like I would hope, they're talking about this

01:33:50   on the Verge cast this week that a lot of these venues,

01:33:54   because they're not really made for this sort of thing,

01:33:56   like journalists struggle and like the wifi's really bad

01:33:59   or there's very limited power.

01:34:01   It's like you're there for three hours

01:34:02   and you're taking pictures and streaming

01:34:04   and all this stuff, you know, MacBook Pro dies.

01:34:07   Apple has in control of all of that now.

01:34:08   So like, that should all be great.

01:34:10   And I'm very curious to see if they pulled that off.

01:34:13   I hope they have.

01:34:14   - This building has been built for this.

01:34:17   This is what it's for.

01:34:18   Like it should be purpose made for journalists.

01:34:22   So apparently there's some new receipt reservation system

01:34:25   as well which they never had before.

01:34:28   Like yeah, I'm really keen just to find out

01:34:30   what the venue's like.

01:34:31   But talking about upgrade before we wrap up,

01:34:32   me and Jason will be doing our draft this week.

01:34:35   If you've never heard the upgrade keynote drafts,

01:34:38   they're some of the best episodes of upgrade.

01:34:41   We have a lot of fun putting those together.

01:34:42   So that's gonna be, I think we're doing that tomorrow.

01:34:45   Because of my travel we were a little bit delayed,

01:34:47   but we're gonna be ending the upgrade summer of fun

01:34:50   with the keynote draft, I think.

01:34:51   So that's gonna be happening on upgrade tomorrow,

01:34:55   so you can check that out.

01:34:56   If you, I mean Federico, what are you planning?

01:35:00   What kind of event coverage are you expecting

01:35:03   to be taking care of at MaxLories?

01:35:06   - So the full team should be on hand to cover all the news

01:35:11   and all the overviews that we need to do.

01:35:14   I just plan to enjoy, like over the past two years,

01:35:19   I'm fortunate enough to be able to watch the show,

01:35:22   maybe even with Sylvia, enjoy watching the show,

01:35:26   talking with friends on Twitter,

01:35:28   assigning stories to other team members.

01:35:34   Then as soon as the event is over,

01:35:36   upgrade all of my devices to the GM seat of iOS 11

01:35:41   and start taking screenshots

01:35:42   because I'm very happy to communicate, Myke,

01:35:46   that by tomorrow night,

01:35:51   my review should be done.

01:35:54   - Wow.

01:35:55   - Completely edited.

01:35:57   Each chapter has been edited six to seven times,

01:36:02   read aloud, and fully prepared for screenshots and videos.

01:36:08   That's all that's left.

01:36:12   - So, that's, yeah, I can see why you maybe stay away

01:36:15   from the event coverage, 'cause like,

01:36:16   you've gotta get those-- - Oh yeah.

01:36:18   - That's done, right, that's like a big, big job.

01:36:20   Because then it's like, well, we have,

01:36:22   I mean, we can assume when iOS will come out,

01:36:25   but nobody knows, think of it like,

01:36:27   iOS is coming out tomorrow.

01:36:28   We don't actually, you know, we can look at history,

01:36:32   but nobody really knows, so.

01:36:34   - High Sierra's even worse in that regard.

01:36:37   I'm gonna have my review ready,

01:36:38   I could publish it on the 12th,

01:36:39   because they could just be like, "It's out today."

01:36:42   They've done that in the past, just no warning.

01:36:44   So yeah, it's a stressful time if you're a viewer, no doubt.

01:36:48   - Turns out, yep, yep, very stressful,

01:36:51   very stressful indeed.

01:36:52   You can find our show notes online

01:36:56   over at relay.fm/connected/158.

01:37:00   You can find Federico's work over at maxstories.net

01:37:02   and he is @Vittucci on Twitter, V-I-T-I-C-C-I.

01:37:06   You can find Steven's work at 512pixels.net

01:37:08   he is online, he is on Twitter, online. He's on the internet @ismh. I am @imike and I will

01:37:20   say to you, dear listeners, we'll be back next week on Wednesday the 13th so we can

01:37:26   get some distance from the event so we can talk about everything in fine and thorough

01:37:31   detail. But until then, say goodbye guys.

01:37:34   Adios.

01:37:35   Adios.