00:00:00 ◼ ► All right. I'm going to do something I should probably do more often on this show is back at the beginning of the month, Tyler Hayes at writing a post that I linked to at Yahoo wrote suggesting that anybody looking for a smaller phone should try maybe one of the Motorola Razr flip style phones. And I wrote a response sort of pooping all over it. And you know what I've decided to do? I've had Tyler Hayes on the show right here. Tyler, welcome to the show.
00:00:30 ◼ ► Hey, John. Appreciate that. Yeah, it's one of those things that I've been listening to the talk show since it began. I've been reading Daring Fireball for as long as I can remember. And so at first, it's like, wow, Gruber, he linked to me. This is great. And then I read it and it's like, oh, he does not agree. And this maybe it's not great. But at least it wasn't claim chowder or anything like that. It's been a while. But if I could redo the thing, I think I would take out the word perfect.
00:01:07 ◼ ► Just to give people some context, the article is titled, Do you think phones are too big and want a smaller one? I have the perfect solution. And so again, in hindsight, I don't think it's the perfect solution. But these Motorola Razr flip phones, I've had it for about a year. Just the last couple of weeks, I've had it sitting on my desk. And then by happenstance at a kid's birthday party or talking with other adults. And it always seems to come up in different contexts of my phone is too big.
00:01:37 ◼ ► And so then after sitting here with the Razr, just thinking, just kind of the two worlds collided. And so the front screen on the Razr is, I think it's usable enough that people who are just really, really want a small phone could get by with just using the front part of the screen for the times that they're out, the times that they just want something pocketable to hold in their hand.
00:02:03 ◼ ► And so I think the new one's about four inches in usable screen. And so it's a big difference from the 6.1 or 6.3 inch iPhone.
00:02:15 ◼ ► All right. And so here's where maybe and this is why I really wanted to have you on the show to just to talk about it. But because I will admit that I'm just shooting my mouth off by my stance that I don't think the front screen on these phones is usable. It's usable. It's glanceable, right?
00:02:35 ◼ ► I'm sure because Apple watches with super tiny screens are glanceable for getting notifications, right? So I mean, some people really love that about the Apple watches. Notification comes in. What is it? Just look at your wrist.
00:02:49 ◼ ► Okay, it's a text message from my wife, or it's a work message from Slack, or it's something about the weather, whatever. You look at it on your wrist, and you can decide what to do about it. My argument is that I don't think for actually doing something like responding and typing, the front face is all that usable. But I'm saying that without actually having used one of these Android vertical flip phones.
00:03:17 ◼ ► Yeah. And again, you don't want to do a ton of writing on it. But a lot of them have a thing where it says full screen mode. And so basically, it'll just give you just the keyboard and the part that you're writing at the time. So definitely enough to do a text message, short email, a couple sentences or something like that.
00:03:37 ◼ ► Again, a lot of people in their mind, they don't think that they want to write much on their phone, even though they'll type out tons of social media posts, they'll type out tons of stuff, like in little short bursts. But I think like, again, doing a search for Apple Music, you can use that on the front screen, you can use most of the apps on the front screen.
00:03:58 ◼ ► And so any type of little text thing, I think is more than usable, especially what was the first iPhone 3.5 inch?
00:04:07 ◼ ► Do you feel that's a fair comparison? Yeah, it was 3.5 inch diagonal, which is tiny. And it was several years ago, I guess I'll make a note here and see if I can find it. But it was, I think it was like when the first plus sized phones came out, like the iPhone 6 plus, where even with that phone, you could put the original iPhone on the display of the plus side iPhone.
00:04:33 ◼ ► And the whole iPhone fit within the display of like an iPhone 6 plus. If like me, you keep a museum of old iPhones, and you ever go back to some of the first really pre iPhone 6, the iPhone's original call it the iPhone 1 iPhone 3 3g iPhone 4 and then the iPhone 5.
00:04:56 ◼ ► They're tiny in comparison to modern phones. And but it is weird because the 3.5 inch diagonal screen, it's like we've gotten so used to the quote unquote, all screen designs of the iPhone 10 and later, which have taken over the whole industry, where there is no chin or forehead, the of non screen space on the front, that it makes it seem even smaller, right?
00:05:21 ◼ ► Because you say like a such and such iPhone now is 6.3 inches diagonal. Yeah, and the iPhone original was 3.5. That's an even bigger difference that makes it seem like it's a bigger difference than it actually was as a device that you carry around.
00:05:37 ◼ ► But it still is a dramatic difference. You know what I mean? It's a huge difference in some terms of the overall device size, but you can't just go by the display size diagonal because of the chin and forehead that used to be in hasn't been since 2017 or 18.
00:05:53 ◼ ► Yeah. So I guess my spitball speculation was that with the cameras, when you flip the phones close, the cameras that are at the top when it's open, the back outward facing cameras use up space at the bottom.
00:06:10 ◼ ► But I guess effectively, that's just like going back to having a chin. And when we had chins on our phones, we didn't think it was hard to type on them.
00:06:19 ◼ ► And it's funny because, you know, the circles are there, the cameras are there. But depending on the app, it just ignores it and put stuff behind it. And even that is not terrible. It sounds like a terrible way to use anything.
00:06:32 ◼ ► But you kind of forget about it as your as your thumbs going over the screen that you just kind of just you learn to navigate around it, I guess.
00:06:46 ◼ ► Oh, no. So I'm arguing for this. And it sounds like I'm in love with this idea of using the flip phones.
00:06:51 ◼ ► But it's more, I guess, in the sense of it seems like Apple is going to make a book style folding phone, a small tablet style where you open it horizontally.
00:07:01 ◼ ► But then the top style folding phones, the old style flip phones kind of it seems like it just to me, it seems like that is the way that you get a smaller phone going forward.
00:07:13 ◼ ► Whether it's Apple or somebody else that it's just that is how you get back to the point of having a smaller phone is that you take the regular iPhone and you fold it down in half because we're not going back to just a 3.5 inch screen anymore.
00:07:34 ◼ ► Well, it's not nobody, though, right? As you noted before we decided to do the show together, that I've been talking about it on recent episodes and reminiscing.
00:07:46 ◼ ► And every time I bring up the iPhone 12 and 13 minis, I definitely hear from the people still holding on to them.
00:07:53 ◼ ► My daughter has an iPhone 12 mini because she has small hands and that was the one she kind of wanted. So there's your reason for that.
00:08:01 ◼ ► I think it was this year's World Series afterwards where somebody because you can kind of identify it where Shohei Otani, his wife was taking pictures from the stage or the parade in Los Angeles after the Dodgers won the World Series.
00:08:17 ◼ ► And she's using I'm not quite sure if somebody from the color of the phone could tell if it was a 12 or 13 mini, but it was definitely one of them.
00:08:25 ◼ ► And there I think the wisecrack I saw was, hey, Shohei Otani makes five hundred million dollars a year or something.
00:08:43 ◼ ► And if you really love small phones and it's there, there just hasn't been anything in a over a decade close to the size of the 12 and 13 mini.
00:08:53 ◼ ► And on the Android side of the fence, while, yes, today, and we're already talking about it, Android has both dimension foldables already and has for years.
00:09:05 ◼ ► I mean, so many years that might break the record, if all the rumors are correct, that Apple is going to come out with a book style foldable next September.
00:09:16 ◼ ► And the collective reaction from the Android side of the enthusiast world is going to be the always we've had this for years.
00:09:28 ◼ ► I've it's at least five or six years since some of the Android handset makers have been making book style foldables.
00:09:35 ◼ ► But so while there's variety on the foldable front on the Android side, there's never been variety on the overall small footprint.
00:09:44 ◼ ► There's no equivalent to like the 12 or 13 mini on the Android side of the fence that I'm aware of.
00:09:53 ◼ ► No, I mean, I've looked into it in the past when especially when my kids were wanted phone as I mean, these some of these ones are just huge in their hands.
00:10:15 ◼ ► I've seen some of those every once in a while I go looking and I because I think, hey, I really kind of only pay attention to the quote flagships.
00:10:28 ◼ ► I pay attention to Verge headlines, but I don't pay attention to the smaller brands and the zillion phones that are so far below flagship specs that are sold.
00:10:42 ◼ ► There's just walk if you ever just get bored when you're in a mall or whatever and walk into a Verizon or an AT&T store and just look at some of the low priced Android phones.
00:10:55 ◼ ► And I always say every once in a while I haven't done it in a while because I gave up after too many tries where I think, well, is somebody making something vaguely the size of a mini?
00:11:05 ◼ ► And it's like once the Android phones got big and I'll admit I was wrong about the I still am.
00:11:12 ◼ ► And I was biased by my own personal preference, which hasn't changed for smaller overall, smaller phones that back when we used to call them phablets.
00:11:26 ◼ ► I'm kind of glad it I'm definitely glad it didn't stick, but it was almost inevitable that it wouldn't stick because what we called phablets with a pH.
00:11:39 ◼ ► But it was like when it was a curiosity that some of the brands were making much bigger than iPhone sized smartphones.
00:11:47 ◼ ► Eventually, the whole Android market went that way to quote and then Apple more or less followed.
00:12:17 ◼ ► And it is a little thicker than the iPhone Air, the new iPhone Air, but overall feels so much smaller than even an iPhone Air.
00:12:37 ◼ ► I was very a little lackadaisical with the comparing the thickness of the Razer to the iPhone.
00:13:07 ◼ ► But then the reason I had initially done that is because I just had the iPhone 17 just sitting on my desk.
00:13:20 ◼ ► And so if you put both of them next to each other at that top spot where the camera bump is,
00:13:34 ◼ ► The thickness is not a big deal, which, again, I don't think the thickness is a huge deal.
00:13:40 ◼ ► But that's just kind of so if anybody sees that, that's kind of where the genesis for that was.
00:13:47 ◼ ► Do you think – so say Apple or somebody is able to make an ideal folding phone like this that substitutes as now people have a small phone that they can do.
00:14:18 ◼ ► It's at least two or three years of very, very sure – as sure as Apple rumors ever get.
00:14:26 ◼ ► But the Mark Gurman's and whoever else, the Ming-Chi Kuo's, have pretty much been reporting as close as a rumor can get to fact that in 2026, Apple's going to have a folding phone that's book style.
00:14:51 ◼ ► Like how it's just something, something, a book style phone and Apple's waited and waited until they could make the crease when it's open either disappear or relatively disappear compared to the state of the art from Android.
00:15:08 ◼ ► And I do believe that because that is – the crease is the sort of thing that would drive – that just is anathema to anybody who works at Apple, right?
00:15:17 ◼ ► And I know that people who kind of like the book style Android ones are like, ah, you really only see the crease when it's – when the screen is off.
00:15:42 ◼ ► But either way, if it's just pretty much like a Samsung Galaxy whatever book style fold right now, I don't think I'm going to like it.
00:16:02 ◼ ► That's the use case is if somebody has a spot that they sit back on the couch and they want to – I don't know.
00:16:09 ◼ ► They have spots where they can use a tablet instead of a phone, then maybe it's worth the tradeoff.
00:16:16 ◼ ► But unless you actually see that in your life already, it's going to be hard to just take the leap of faith that it's going to – you're going to start figuring out places to use a new tablet style device.
00:16:27 ◼ ► I do still think it's partly why the phablet started coming into existence when they did around 2013 or 2012 on the Android side was that the Android handset makers weren't and still aren't as good as Apple.
00:16:44 ◼ ► Apple watches tend to be much smaller than any other competing smart watches, especially the smaller slash women's size Apple watches.
00:17:05 ◼ ► I just don't think – something that competes pretty well on specs but is that size and gets – especially with the iPhone 13 mini gets decent battery life.
00:17:30 ◼ ► And for exactly what you said, Tyler, I think for people who want to carry both their iPad and phone with them in one foldable size, this could be it.
00:17:50 ◼ ► But at some point this year, my wife and I went to see a – it's long enough now that I remember the phone but not the comedian.
00:17:57 ◼ ► But we went to see a comedian here in Philly at a big theater and I went to the restroom before the show and I was coming back to join my wife in our seats.
00:18:09 ◼ ► And I was like, what kind of an asshole brings an iPad or a tablet to a show at a theater?
00:18:27 ◼ ► And here's the part where it's like you don't want to talk to the people you came to the show with.
00:18:36 ◼ ► When I'm using my phone, I'm using my phone and I've used my iPad so little that I still – my personal iPhone is still a 2018 iPad Pro.
00:18:49 ◼ ► Actually, it was at a Padres game and the camera person was going to put us on the big screen.
00:18:59 ◼ ► And so somebody took out their folding phone, set it up as a tripod, kind of using that as a stand, and was able to record that on the big screen.
00:19:33 ◼ ► We can talk about that in this segment where my finger is literally hovering over the – possibly by the time this show comes out, I'll have purchased a 17 Pro for myself.
00:19:45 ◼ ► And again, it's the privilege of having the review units and I can keep going back and forth between the two.
00:19:52 ◼ ► And like I mentioned on this show just recently, after I thought I was done and I was like, yeah, I'll probably get the 17 Pro.
00:20:00 ◼ ► And it was the – oh, the iPhone Air sales are so bad, they're going to delay the next one.
00:20:06 ◼ ► And it made me so mad because even though I don't want one myself, I'm so happy they're making it.
00:20:13 ◼ ► It is – even though I'm not buying it myself, it is my favorite iPhone Apple has made since the iPhone X just because of the ways that it's novel and it's moving in new directions and making different compromises or tradeoffs, whichever word you prefer.
00:20:35 ◼ ► And just yesterday on Thanksgiving, I used the 4X lens on the 17 Pro to shoot some of the family of gathering photos I took.
00:20:45 ◼ ► And while I'm using it, I'm thinking, yeah, if I had the air, I wouldn't be getting this shot.
00:20:50 ◼ ► And most – again, I shot over 200 or 300 photos and most of them, 90% of them were with the 1X lens.
00:21:10 ◼ ► Like I've spent more time with the Air as my daily driver than I ever did with the Plus or the Max phones that I've reviewed in the past, even though this is closer to a Max-sized phone, the iPhone Air.
00:21:25 ◼ ► And the thing I've really noticed in using it daily for more time over the past two-plus months than I ever have with a phone that big area-wise is living in the city, Center City, Philadelphia, and being a pedestrian most of the time, how often I take my phone out one-handed and expect to be able to reach side to side with my thumb without – because my other hand is holding a shopping bag or something, often a shopping bag.
00:21:55 ◼ ► I use my phone one-handed more than – I knew I used it a lot one-handed, but I use it even more one-handed than I thought.
00:22:13 ◼ ► I like the 6.1 the best, but I don't have a problem per se with this size, but it's a very fine line between all of a sudden it's just too big and the Air is an interesting one because it's
00:22:25 ◼ ► it's almost like an optical illusion for that of you don't realize – you pick up the phone and you're mesmerized by the thinness and by some of the other aspects of it until some of the reality set in.
00:22:38 ◼ ► I forget the exact numbers and it doesn't matter because it's the subjective experience that matters more than the math.
00:22:53 ◼ ► But it might be – the comparison to the 17 Pro Max might be better for some people who know they want the bigger area of the display because then the weight difference is maybe more like half.
00:23:06 ◼ ► But for me, who's sort of torn between these two dimensions of smallness, the smallest possible area and therefore the best one-handed just sliding my thumb like a windshield wiper from the bottom usability versus the dramatic thinness of the air,
00:23:25 ◼ ► where the side-to-side usability wins out, even though it is about two-thirds of the weight, which is really noticeable in pocket.
00:23:32 ◼ ► And by volume, if you just multiply the width times height times depth, skipping the camera bump, just pretending that the camera plateau isn't there,
00:23:57 ◼ ► The camera's nice and, you know, I like having the ultra-wide, especially the 4X telephoto.
00:24:19 ◼ ► But I feel like at some point you are limited by human hands because if they keep making the smaller Pro phones bigger,
00:25:16 ◼ ► Or do you think otherwise having a foldable in front of you that unfolding the razor is sort of –
00:25:25 ◼ ► You get used to it, but I think it almost feels a little bit fragile in that sense to keep doing that.
00:25:31 ◼ ► But again, with our old flip phones, people got used to just flipping them open like a Zippo lighter type of situation.
00:25:57 ◼ ► repeatedly talk as a point of pride that the company could put every product it makes on one table in an Apple store.
00:26:08 ◼ ► I'm sure they could technically fit them all on one table at this point, but it would be a very crowded table.
00:26:13 ◼ ► But having fewer models of each product lineup compared to their competitors is a point of pride.
00:26:24 ◼ ► And some people think they've already got too many, right, that there's too many iPads that they make.
00:26:41 ◼ ► and then have multiple sizes within those categories to one smaller, one larger, like iPad Pros, like iPad Airs.
00:26:57 ◼ ► And it's kind of curious to me that the iPad Mini is seemingly popular enough for them to keep making it,
00:27:08 ◼ ► But not the iPhone Mini, presuming that even the iPhone Mini must have sold better than the iPad Mini.
00:27:16 ◼ ► Maybe the world I'm in where I hear from people who care about small phones so much that it's so disproportionate to the general audience that it didn't even sell as well as the iPad Mini.
00:27:29 ◼ ► I'm still curious on that because it wasn't the iPhone Mini was the first one they kind of experimented with with a different size.
00:27:58 ◼ ► Just a smaller, non-flip phone that's like roughly the size of the iPhone 13 and 12 Minis.
00:28:10 ◼ ► Well, and that's I mean, that's my recommendation to people is to get a refurbished one.
00:28:24 ◼ ► But again, your iPhone Mini 13 refurbished is that's your best bet for right now still.
00:28:31 ◼ ► And I get it now, right, because I feel like at this point, it's already four years old.
00:28:36 ◼ ► It's already close to whatever the drop off is going to be for when it stops getting iOS updates.
00:28:42 ◼ ► And that's and that's the real thing for these things is basically how long do you have before it starts getting stops getting the updates?
00:28:53 ◼ ► But if it's not getting the latest software, then, you know, you don't really want that.
00:28:58 ◼ ► You know, and again, I keep repeating myself, but I keep repeating myself because I think I'm kind of right.
00:29:03 ◼ ► Like, I feel like the people who loved the iPhone Minis, the 12 and 13 Minis love them so much that they would have paid a premium for them.
00:29:12 ◼ ► And I can't help but think that part of the problem from Apple's perspective was making it not a pro phone and charging a premium for it.
00:29:21 ◼ ► Because I don't think they're going to sell they're not going to sell a ton of the book style iPhones, no matter what the price is, but because it's the competing ones like the Samsung ones are like $2,000, right?
00:29:35 ◼ ► Presumably, the iPhone fold next year will be the most expensive iPhone Apple's ever made and the most expensive one in the lineup.
00:29:42 ◼ ► And so a small percentage of overall unit sales, but at the highest price point is much more interesting to Apple just from a purely mercenary point of view than the iPhone 12 and 13 Minis,
00:29:59 ◼ ► which sold, I think, 4% to 5% of new phones in those years were the mini ones, but they were the lowest priced phones in the lineup.
00:30:08 ◼ ► So the lowest priced phone in the lineup only selling 4% or 5%, you could see how they kind of lose their, I don't know, financial boner for it, right?
00:30:16 ◼ ► Yeah, that's a good point that it would be interesting if they would just, if there was a little something feature-wise they could have added to it to make it just that much more premium
00:30:26 ◼ ► and then be able to charge a little bit more to make it, the financials balance out more.
00:30:33 ◼ ► Do you think you're going to be an iPhone fold person or no, because it's going to be bigger the overall?
00:30:47 ◼ ► Yeah, so I mean, mostly, again, the commentary track to all this stuff is that, like, it just, from family members, from different people, you just hear about it a lot.
00:30:56 ◼ ► And so then seeing this phone, it was, like, not a perfect solution, but I think that for somebody who's, like, cannot stand anything bigger than 6 inches or 5 inches or whatever, that's, you know, that is a possibility.
00:31:17 ◼ ► The weight is, obviously, I would love it to be lighter than heavier, but it's less of an issue.
00:31:25 ◼ ► Again, the Air is amazing when you pick it up, but the 17 Pro is not, I don't think that's bad.
00:31:36 ◼ ► Laptops are thinner and lighter than they've ever been and keep moving in that direction, right?
00:31:47 ◼ ► That 6.3 inches is sort of the small phone in the way that 13 to 14 inches is the small standard laptop versus 15 or 16 for the large size laptop.
00:32:10 ◼ ► Like, the original iPod seemed so small for something that could hold 5,000 songs in your pocket.
00:32:16 ◼ ► And then the iPhone mini came out, or iPod mini came out, and everybody's like, oh, this is so crazy small.
00:32:37 ◼ ► It's like, I don't know, the march of technology in most categories is smaller and lighter with better functionality.
00:32:52 ◼ ► I still remember that the iPod Nano was the one that just blew my mind, that advertisement next to the pencil.
00:32:58 ◼ ► But it is interesting that, like, on the laptops, like, phones just, you know, was it 15 years or however long?
00:33:05 ◼ ► It just, they haven't really found a dedicated sweet spot that it's still always in flux.
00:33:11 ◼ ► If you go look at charts of the widths and the heights and stuff, it's just, they're always noodling with it.
00:33:23 ◼ ► It's absolutely, we're talking about the camera, but it's like, the whole category of point-and-shoot cameras has effectively disappeared, right?
00:34:16 ◼ ► And does very Apple-like things, like gets rid of the idea of SD card slots and instead just has 230 gigabytes of built-in storage.
00:34:37 ◼ ► But so there are interesting point-and-shoot style cameras or small cameras that aren't full-size sensors and stuff.
00:34:56 ◼ ► And again, it gets back to my argument about the 12 and 13 mini being wrongly priced at the consumer end as opposed to premium priced at the pro end.
00:35:08 ◼ ► And yes, it has fewer lenses than the bigger pro iPhones, but make them really good and charge the premium price for it so that you can find yourself financially motivated to sell something that doesn't sell in huge quantities.
00:35:21 ◼ ► But the whole idea of little $200, $300 point-and-shoot cameras that every family in America owned like two or three of them, they've all disappeared because everybody just uses their phones and at this point gets better pictures with their phones than they ever got with the point-and-shoot cameras of 10, 15, 20 years ago.
00:35:41 ◼ ► It was certainly 20 years ago because the computational photography angle aspect of it has gotten so good where the computer helps you with things like, oh, it's so good at finding faces in the frame and making sure the faces by default are in focus and so good at doing exposure compensation and doing white balance computation.
00:36:06 ◼ ► It's just all sorts of problems that you still have with nice standalone cameras today, like individual, you know, just looking at the photos I took at Thanksgiving yesterday with my Ricoh, a bunch of out-of-focus ones that I never have out-of-focus shots with my iPhone.
00:36:23 ◼ ► And I have the habit from 25-plus years of prosumer hobbyist photography of knowing that I just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot with a standalone camera and trust that while some of them will be out of focus, if I just shoot hundreds of photos, a bunch will be in focus.
00:36:43 ◼ ► So the fact that they've just completely eaten the point-and-shoot consumer phone industry and put it in the phone, of course the phones have gotten bigger and heavier because now it's a phone and a camera and a Walkman and this and that.
00:36:57 ◼ ► And it's getting back to the, hey, what if you could open it up and it could become your iPad?
00:37:09 ◼ ► More people tend to be younger, but a lot of people who are older, it's the only computer they use is their phone.
00:37:24 ◼ ► Yeah, and so to that point, when the phones were growing, especially when the phablet was a new concept, a lot of people were talking about how women would use larger phones because they couldn't fit any phone in their pockets.
00:37:41 ◼ ► So it didn't matter about how big or it could be huge because they just put it in their purse.
00:37:46 ◼ ► The very first time I ever remember thinking, oh, I think maybe I'm wrong about these phones, I was in a T-Mobile store here in Philadelphia.
00:37:57 ◼ ► And it was to deal with an issue because I'm not on T-Mobile normally, but I used to have – now I think I'm on – yeah, I'm on Google Fi.
00:38:05 ◼ ► But I have a spare cell phone account that I use for, like, a spare Android phone so I can keep at least one foot somewhat in that side of the pond or whatever the metaphor is.
00:38:26 ◼ ► And there was a couple, a young couple in their 20s, and the woman was a very small Asian woman, very short, and, you know, just small hands, small everything.
00:38:47 ◼ ► And she literally just said, I can't fit any of these phones in my pocket anyway, so why not get this one?
00:38:54 ◼ ► And I could tell – he was saying, okay, like, okay, you're going to get a phone you're going to hate.
00:39:04 ◼ ► I was like, this is pretty interesting because I totally had thought – bought into that argument that women with smaller hands and smaller pockets would want smaller phones.
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00:40:41 ◼ ► You can add music to scenes, rearrange them, even make a scene from whatever device you're listening to right now.
00:41:06 ◼ ► I don't know if to call it an app or a suite of apps because it runs everywhere and they're native on all of these Apple devices.
00:42:04 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, no, I think it went to $7.99 and then it's slowly gone up, especially for the monthly cost.
00:42:19 ◼ ► So again, you know, if you're hearing this a couple months later, it may be way different.
00:43:10 ◼ ► Put aside the shenanigans over the getting rid of it and just calling it Max for a year or two or however long that was.
00:43:19 ◼ ► But I do feel it dilutes part of the HBO brand from the outset in 1970-whatever when HBO first became a thing and you used to have to get a special box just for HBO from your cable company to decode the signal was no commercial interruptions.
00:43:40 ◼ ► And I think it's an underrated aspect of the long game Apple's playing with Apple TV that they're going to be, or maybe they already are, the last one standing who doesn't even have an ad-based option.
00:43:57 ◼ ► And Netflix was obviously the big one, right, and for a while held it as a, you know, like on analyst calls, quarterly calls when analysts would, in their polite analyst way, gently ask about an ad-supported tier.
00:44:12 ◼ ► Ted Sarandos or whoever was on the call would, you know, more or less come out and say, like, no, that's part of our brand is not having ads.
00:44:22 ◼ ► And they've come around and now, you know, they're doing very well, ARPU-wise, active revenue, or whatever the A stands for, revenue per user from the ad tiers.
00:44:31 ◼ ► If anything, I think from my friend Ben Thompson, I think maybe they arguably make more on the ad-based users, but there's a brand aspect to it, right?
00:44:40 ◼ ► So if you're Netflix and your only business is the streaming, then it's kind of important.
00:44:49 ◼ ► I almost think it would be untenable for them not to have done it, and they seem to have done a good job of, after an uneven start using other people's technology for the ads, they've sort of taken control of their own ad tech.
00:45:05 ◼ ► I pay to get out of the ads on everything because I'm an idiot and money runs through my fingers like water.
00:45:15 ◼ ► And so I do have some of the ones that with ads, again, having kids, you just – we need to have a few more services than –
00:45:25 ◼ ► But, no, I mean, I can't watch certain shows on Hulu anymore because I just can't stand the ads on that one.
00:45:38 ◼ ► But no matter how the ad is itself, it still feels super disruptive to be in the middle of a show or a movie.
00:45:57 ◼ ► The television from our childhoods, that they sort of perfected the, hey, we're going to go like seven and a half minutes at a time, and then we're going to have a natural break, right?
00:46:11 ◼ ► Whether the show was a sitcom or an hour-long detective show or a news show, it didn't matter what the show was.
00:46:30 ◼ ► There was like an almost cinematic aspect to, oh, there's a little mini cliffhanger in this episode of Dynasty or whatever the show was.
00:46:44 ◼ ► And when you watch them now, those old shows on streaming, if you just go back and watch – my wife and I watched a bunch of seasons of Seinfeld just a couple years ago.
00:46:59 ◼ ► And even when we had – and we watched for years and years and years with TiVo, you still had to, with TiVo, until the very last few years, you'd still have to pick up the remote and kind of blip, blip.
00:47:18 ◼ ► It's weird when the shows that have natural commercial breaks are shown without commercial breaks.
00:47:23 ◼ ► And it's even weirder when a show or a movie without commercial breaks has them inserted.
00:47:31 ◼ ► One of the things – so when Netflix raised their prices in earlier this year, April, March, something like that, that was the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge.
00:47:40 ◼ ► It was like we had been paying $15 a month and then all of a sudden now it's $18 and it's just – because then it's looking at am I going to pay $18 a month or am I going to pay $8 a month?
00:48:03 ◼ ► But it was kind of the idea of like if you're going to show me ads anyway, might as well get the whole thing for free and I'll just watch your ads if I want to do that.
00:48:13 ◼ ► Versus it feels a little insulting now in the streaming age to pay for the service, $100 a year and then still have to watch the ads.
00:48:21 ◼ ► So there's select services that I'm like HBO I don't – there's no ads on and there's one other one.
00:48:30 ◼ ► And again, part of it I know is the bias of I grew up – I was born in 1973 and the whole commercial infrastructure of TV was already there.
00:48:44 ◼ ► But it just felt right that it was like all these other channels you could just get over the air and yes, every seven or eight minutes there was a commercial break.
00:48:57 ◼ ► And when cable was first invented and became widely available in America, it really did feel like you weren't paying for channels.
00:49:07 ◼ ► It felt like you were paying for a service that came into your house with more channels and significantly better picture quality, right?
00:49:17 ◼ ► Like the thing that got my parents to get it and my parents were both notoriously just really cheap.
00:49:33 ◼ ► We watched the movies on HBO and they're like, ah, you can go and rent movies at Blockbuster or whatever.
00:49:38 ◼ ► But the thing that got them to get cable kind of early was as soon as they saw cable TV at somebody else's house and could see how much better it looked than over the air where the picture was often static, literally staticky.
00:49:57 ◼ ► It felt like you're paying for the service of just having a better picture quality and more channels.
00:50:01 ◼ ► And it just felt natural that they all came with commercials except for HBO and it's sort of siblings like Cinemax and Showtime where, OK, you have to pay extra for them.
00:50:19 ◼ ► And now it's, oh, well, paid with commercials that you can't skip, right, which is so annoying.
00:50:28 ◼ ► It feels such so backwards where the computerization of watching TV with TiVo and the other DVRs of 25 years ago in the early days were all about giving you the user control over skipping or fast forwarding commercials.
00:50:44 ◼ ► And now the computerization of watching TV is ever more elaborate ways to make sure you can't possibly fast forward or skip the commercials.
00:50:55 ◼ ► They were spending so much money on these original shows that it just or in movies and all this content that you could see it wasn't sustainable.
00:51:15 ◼ ► We weren't paying for it or we had the free tier and my wife was watching, I think, the Real Housewives, one of the Real Housewives.
00:51:26 ◼ ► And if it's, let's say it was an hour long episode and she only got through 35 minutes of it, but then she wanted to come back the next day and watch the second half of it.
00:51:39 ◼ ► She'd still have to, she could only go as forward as the first break, which she'd already been to before.
00:51:48 ◼ ► I'll just here, just give me the remote and I'm going to upgrade us to the one that doesn't have this annoyance.
00:52:05 ◼ ► But it does mean that no matter who you are, if you have Apple TV, you have no commercials.
00:52:10 ◼ ► Well, and so again, now we can kind of talk about the other benefits of Apple TV that like, I think that there's enough content there.
00:52:18 ◼ ► There's almost 300 titles of shows and movies and of those shows, like 65 of them at least have more than one season.
00:52:27 ◼ ► And so to go through and try and watch all these in a year, you would, I don't think most people could do that just in a year of all the ones they wanted to watch.
00:52:37 ◼ ► And so I think we're at a spot now, was it six years into Apple TV, that there's just enough of a back catalog.
00:52:44 ◼ ► There's enough of these shows that are prestige quality that have won awards that are people are talking about that you can subscribe for several months and still not watch all the stuff you want to.
00:52:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I think one of the, I comment on this periodically, I think, but it's an underestimated institutional quality of Apple is that they are very good at playing long games.
00:53:08 ◼ ► Apple Pay is another one, and it's like, I did look back recently at like when Apple Pay first came out, and how many articles there were in the months after it debuted, who called it a flop or something to that effect, because there were so few places where you could use it and so few terminals that took it.
00:53:27 ◼ ► And I remember that in the early days of Apple Pay, there was so much more talk in the early days about who officially supports it, right?
00:53:56 ◼ ► It was like, just use current C and come up to the register and show a QR code and something will happen.
00:54:06 ◼ ► But there was a whole thing where it was like Rite Aid or somebody, some, one of the, or CVS.
00:54:16 ◼ ► It was a major U.S. drugstore chain, Rite Aid or CVS, call it CVS, who had terminals and they took Android Pay, but they didn't partner with Apple.
00:54:33 ◼ ► They set up Apple Pay on their iPhone, went up, and they checked out, and it worked because it's not a totally proprietary thing.
00:54:41 ◼ ► And now in today's world, I don't think you can buy a point of sale system that doesn't support Apple Pay.
00:54:47 ◼ ► It's almost like you have to go extraordinarily out of your way to run a store that has a computerized point of sale system and not take Apple Pay.
00:55:00 ◼ ► And it wasn't like it worked like, oh, if you shake the soda machine, free sodas pop out the bottom and somebody's going to fix it because the kids all figured out they can get free sodas.
00:55:17 ◼ ► They took out and cut off the Android Pay that they were taking because they didn't want – I guess they wanted Apple to pay them something to take Apple Pay.
00:55:35 ◼ ► And nobody else complained because before Apple Pay, even though it technically worked on some subset of Android phones, nobody used it until Apple came in and did it.
00:55:45 ◼ ► And there were all these articles in the first year, maybe even two years after Apple Pay came out saying it's a flop.
00:55:53 ◼ ► And Apple just nose to the grindstone, just waited and kept improving it and kept waiting for stores to replace their point of sale systems.
00:56:03 ◼ ► And yada, yada, yada, yada, without any kind of a claim or one moment, boom, here it is.
00:56:11 ◼ ► And I don't even hesitate to leave my house with no way to pay other than my phone a lot of the times these days.
00:56:17 ◼ ► And I kind of feel it's the same way with the Apple TV library, right, where Apple TV shipped 67 years ago.
00:56:26 ◼ ► But my God, it's so, you know, they don't have they didn't buy any existing catalog of movies or TV shows.
00:56:44 ◼ ► And like you point out, it's actually a pretty good library at this point and still growing.
00:56:50 ◼ ► I mean, I don't think Apple TV is a moneymaker in the sense of it's not going to prop up any it's not going to set the world on fire.
00:56:58 ◼ ► But I think if it can mostly pay for itself, if you can get enough subscribers, I think there's so many halo effects to having this original content again with the awards.
00:57:10 ◼ ► And just then having something to display on your devices, having the that kind of stuff is beneficial just across the spectrum.
00:57:34 ◼ ► And the idea, you know, and Matthew Bologna has become this sort of the go to gossip columnist for Hollywood.
00:58:01 ◼ ► That was the one where he mentioned that he had a problem with his iMac and Craig Federighi came over to his house to fix it.
00:58:15 ◼ ► You can't knock him off what he wants to talk about, but he just he just does it on the fly without memorizing talking points in advance.
00:58:24 ◼ ► It's like he knows what he wants to talk about and what he does not want to talk about, but he doesn't rehearse talking points to do that.
00:58:32 ◼ ► And it makes for such a better interview than, say, just to name a person at Apple, say, Tim Cook, who is just comes across as very, very rehearsed.
00:58:43 ◼ ► And yeah, it's just a different personality style and much more reminiscent of Steve Jobs.
00:58:51 ◼ ► But he said, you know, Matthew Bologna expressed the Hollywood trepidation about Apple and Apple TV, which is it's got this reputation for being a great place to have a show or to do a movie that they're very friendly and collaborative with the creative people.
00:59:15 ◼ ► You know, there was a lot of fear before Apple got started that because Apple has a overall sort of Disney esque G rated company brand that they weren't going to have sex or violence or curse words in their shows.
00:59:35 ◼ ► There's never going to or at least in the near future, there's not going to be a show where China is the bad guys in a Apple TV movie or show.
00:59:43 ◼ ► There's the very cute little gimmick where they really do seem to insist that if there's a bad guy or villain that they and they have a cell phone that it's not an iPhone.
00:59:57 ◼ ► And does actually make for a bit of a spoiler where if you're watching an Apple TV movie and you see somebody who's using an Android phone and they're not a bad guy, you're like, oh, that's like a traitor.
01:00:14 ◼ ► But Matthew Bologna expressed this belief that, yes, you guys have a great reputation and you guys are making great shows like the studio, which because it's about Hollywood is a super big hit within Hollywood.
01:00:56 ◼ ► And he tried to get him to talk like how many subscribers they have, how many people watch certain shows.
01:01:12 ◼ ► Well, and speaking of money and subscribers, it's just with Apple One, having something else to put in these bundles, like with iCloud storage and Apple Music.
01:01:24 ◼ ► And then now Apple TV, I just couldn't leave the bundle, I don't think, because I need all those things anyway.
01:01:30 ◼ ► I sort of feel like Apple, I'm surprised because it felt like when Apple came out with Apple One, it felt like, yes, this is the reason they're doing Apple TV or what we used to call Apple TV Plus, right?
01:01:41 ◼ ► This is why they have this whole streaming video movie endeavor is to make the Apple One bundle more appealing.
01:01:50 ◼ ► And, yeah, I would say the big three are Apple TV, shows you love, and now sports that maybe you're interested in, Apple Music, right?
01:02:00 ◼ ► So you pay this one fee and now that's your streaming music and the iCloud storage, which either you already need or you should be buying because you need it.
01:02:10 ◼ ► And you're somehow getting by with five gigabytes of online storage and therefore not backing up your phone online, which is a disaster waiting to happen.
01:02:24 ◼ ► I really expected that would be, you know, like in the way that Amazon never, ever, ever gets tired of promoting Prime membership.
01:02:53 ◼ ► I see more promotions for the individual things like Apple Music than I do for Apple One.
01:02:59 ◼ ► Yeah, and it seems a little crazy because, again, most of these people, they kind of want a music service.
01:03:07 ◼ ► And it's getting to the point where Apple TV is becoming something that it just – you kind of – most people could enjoy that a lot.
01:03:21 ◼ ► I know some people love Apple Fitness, and I know that they're competing against the Peloton, which isn't just a bike.
01:03:28 ◼ ► It's actually like perhaps the bigger appeal is the Peloton instructors or sort of mini influencers slash celebrities.
01:03:37 ◼ ► There's the Apple Arcade where you get games that don't have in-app payments and all the annoying stuff in a lot of other games.
01:03:45 ◼ ► Yeah, which is – that's probably one of the sleeper hits of the thing because if you have any kids in the house, it's amazing to be able to say whatever you want to download on Apple Arcade, just do that.
01:04:03 ◼ ► But again, that's another little thing that I'm surprised they don't promote more, right?
01:04:08 ◼ ► And I guess with that one, maybe it's the conflict internally at Apple where, yes, they make this thing called Apple Arcade that if you have small kids is great because the games have no in-app purchases.
01:04:29 ◼ ► They're rigorously content-rated, so you know that any kind of Apple Arcade game for kids isn't going to have any kind of inappropriate content.
01:04:37 ◼ ► I guess the conflict internally is that the company makes gobs and gobs of money on the other side of the App Store outside the Apple subscription bundle from the games that do all the things you're comparing it against.
01:04:51 ◼ ► To make the killer commercial talking about how awesome Apple Arcade could be with small kids, you've got to have the other side of the argument, which Apple actually takes 30% of the money from and is a big source of their services revenue.
01:05:05 ◼ ► So they're playing both sides of the fence there, but it makes them not be able to – I guess.
01:05:10 ◼ ► But if – I would rather see them promote it and, yes, keep taking the 30% from the other side, but promote the hell out of the arcade version.
01:05:19 ◼ ► Because I suspect there's just a lot of people with iPhone families who don't realize that Apple Arcade is there and for a very reasonable monthly sum gets you out of the hell of in-app payments to play games.
01:05:45 ◼ ► I've thought about it for years, but, you know, I feel like my sports time is already taken up by the sports I already watch.
01:05:55 ◼ ► You know, so I've watched a little bit of MLS specifically because it's on Apple just to see what they're doing with it.
01:06:21 ◼ ► Like when they made the F1 deal, they – in interviews, he said they're interested in owning the whole experience for the sport.
01:06:29 ◼ ► So they're way more interested in paying a lot of money to get – to be the exclusive streamer for F1 in America than they would be to pay a similar fortune just to get Thursday night football from the NFL and outbid Amazon for those rights.
01:06:47 ◼ ► To get one game a week on the NFL and to have the NFL dictating a lot of what they can do that might be innovative with the broadcast or something like that.
01:06:58 ◼ ► Well, and I don't watch F1 now, but the same idea of if it comes there and it's available included.
01:07:09 ◼ ► And that's something that they're adjusting with MLS, too, where they kind of had to wait out the existing pro tier for MLS.
01:07:16 ◼ ► And now they're just like, yeah, if you have – if you pay for Apple TV, you just get it, right?
01:07:21 ◼ ► Well, and I lucked out on MLS part because San Diego just got a team this year, and so it's a little bit easier to have – to follow when you're interested in that,
01:07:43 ◼ ► And they do have Friday Night Baseball, which is the thing I said that – and I don't think that's why they don't talk about it as much as the other sports because they don't own all of baseball.
01:07:52 ◼ ► But they do have a major league baseball telecast, and there were rumors that they were going to lose that to ESPN or somebody.
01:07:59 ◼ ► But no, the new rights for the next three years came out, and Apple still has Friday Night Baseball.
01:08:21 ◼ ► And I do think this is a long game where people – sports fans can say, ah, Apple TV for sports.
01:08:42 ◼ ► I'm not a fan, but I know that for a lot of sports fans, F1 is their most favorite sport around the world.
01:08:55 ◼ ► And I really do think it could be another one of those – just the sports aspect itself is a very long game.
01:09:02 ◼ ► And 10 years from now, the amount of sports on Apple TV is going to be so much more than today.
01:09:08 ◼ ► But never with one – it's like, oh, 2028 was the year where they got serious about sports.
01:09:24 ◼ ► Have you seen – the other thing I want to talk about before we move on is the new opening.
01:09:52 ◼ ► The other name for these things is a Sonic logo, which is a pretty good name for the thing.
01:10:05 ◼ ► Coinciding with the renaming, the simplification, getting rid of the Plus and Apple TV Plus.
01:10:11 ◼ ► And however confusing it is to call the device and the app and the streaming channel Apple just plain Apple TV, coinciding with that.
01:10:23 ◼ ► I – in between recording and when this episode airs, I'll have a small post on Daring Fireball about it.
01:11:03 ◼ ► It's just that like it's somehow the visuals and the music of it go together and capture that pretty well.
01:11:20 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think the old one, I think – I don't recall anybody from Apple ever verifying it.
01:11:25 ◼ ► But I think it was sort of a piano key or a couple of piano chords meant to sort of mimic the Macintosh startup sound.
01:11:42 ◼ ► But I don't think – and as much as it warms my heart as somebody for whom the Macintosh is always going to be their favorite,
01:11:50 ◼ ► my favorite, my favorite Apple product, it warms my heart that they would call back to that.
01:12:09 ◼ ► And there's a bit of a fuss made over the fact that they actually shot the new thing practically.
01:12:35 ◼ ► But I think what gets lost when you say – when you advocate for, hey, don't shit on digital effects.
01:12:42 ◼ ► Oftentimes, you know, they're as good or better or do things that can't be done practically.
01:12:49 ◼ ► But sometimes – on the flip side, sometimes practical effects just look beautiful in ways that are hard to simulate digitally, right?
01:12:57 ◼ ► But the way that it's like a prism and you get the colors of the rainbow, to me, deliberately harks back to the six-color Apple logo.
01:13:07 ◼ ► So there is a sort of – in the way that I think the old sound of the old one harked back to the sound of a classic Macintosh starting up.
01:13:22 ◼ ► And in both ways, I think it's a way – just a subtle way of saying this whole thing is not a lark or side project for us.
01:13:33 ◼ ► This is something we're very serious about and we consider a very – it's not a detachable appendage to Apple, the computer company and computer services company.
01:13:48 ◼ ► Well, and I mean it's not something that you would see the introduction, five-second introduction visual effect and you don't – nobody thinks, oh, they shot that with a thing.
01:14:16 ◼ ► I mean this might be built to last for a very long time because, I mean, the HBO static thing has been around – and again, I don't know if they've re-shot it.
01:14:29 ◼ ► But it's like, I don't know, I know when The Sopranos was new or Larry Sanders was new in the 90s, there was the HBO static.
01:14:38 ◼ ► Whenever I hear the HBO static, I still – no matter how many years have gone by, I expect The Sopranos theme song to kick in afterwards.
01:14:45 ◼ ► I think part of the reason for that association is on The Sopranos, it was never a cold open after the HBO static.
01:14:56 ◼ ► And it was opening credits for The Sopranos with a distinctive song that I never wanted to skip.
01:15:09 ◼ ► Yeah, and it's interesting how some of those will stick where probably it has to do with if you have good association, if your favorite show was on this service, if there is an affinity for that.
01:15:40 ◼ ► And it's a real credit and reflection of the strength of the overall Netflix brand, right?
01:15:47 ◼ ► And I know Netflix has tweaked theirs over the years, but only to sort of clarify it, right?
01:15:53 ◼ ► It was always sort of like – and I would expect that's – I think with this one, that's what Apple will do five, ten years from now, whenever,
01:16:01 ◼ ► is they might come out with a new one, but it would be just an upgraded version of this one that most people wouldn't recognize as new.
01:16:09 ◼ ► It would – you'd have to be a nerd like us to sort of think, oh, they changed it slightly.
01:16:13 ◼ ► Because Netflix has done that a few times over the years with the ta-dum, but it's always basically been a Netflix and logo and ta-dum.
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01:20:00 ◼ ► So earlier this year, I started this week, the trend as a newsletter, but more so it was just a brand for kind of stuff that I was going to do on my own to then have a spot for, have a brand name, have a thing for it.
01:20:16 ◼ ► And so just because the media industry is so brutal in terms of stability, and so I should have a place to fall back on in case I need to do that.
01:20:27 ◼ ► But in September, so I was doing a newsletter, but in September, I started publishing through Yahoo's creator program where I could bring my own brand.
01:20:40 ◼ ► And so that has kind of, again, muddied the waters on my side in terms of, like, I don't have a dedicated website where I'm publishing everything specifically, but that's more of stuff that I need to clean up and to have a hub for.
01:20:56 ◼ ► But because there's – you guys have – you've talked about recently with Dan Fromer and Stephen Robles about just how Substack and YouTube – it's just – it's hard for a text-based creator to find the audience and to get an algorithm to distribute it to people.
01:21:24 ◼ ► And that's where I found and linked to your story about the Motorola flip phones, which – and here you are on the talk show.
01:21:46 ◼ ► And in terms of, like, this week, the trend, it's – I think Mike Hurley has talked about he started doing stuff with the enthusiast.
01:21:52 ◼ ► And so I like the idea that it's just – I'm not pigeonholed into any specific thing, just a lot of stuff which I'm passionate about at the moment.
01:22:08 ◼ ► And that's one of the things you've covered at this week, the trend, ever since you started writing it.
01:22:18 ◼ ► You know what's funny is that a lot of the gadget stuff – I mean, there's big stuff, like robot vacuums and headphones and stuff I can mention.
01:22:26 ◼ ► But a lot of the ones that I'm very excited about is – are the, like, the chargers and the little tiny gadget type of things.
01:22:34 ◼ ► Anker has their nano charger, which is three ports, and it fits very comfortably in the size of my hand, and it's a 70-watt charger.
01:22:43 ◼ ► These things used to – laptops came with a 65-watt charger, and it was ginormous, and it weighed a lot.
01:22:50 ◼ ► And so now the chargers that are just – as they keep getting smaller and smaller, like, I find that more liberating, I guess, in this, the fact that you can grab one charger, and it will charge your phone and your laptop and your iPad, and it will do it pretty quickly now.
01:23:09 ◼ ► So there's – Sarge has a charger called the Pixel 100, and its claim to kind of notability is that it will display light through its dot matrix front, and it will show what speed or how much power a device is drawing.
01:23:27 ◼ ► And then it will cycle through and show you, like, the total amount for the chargers using and then each individual one.
01:23:34 ◼ ► And so, again, these little things of is my device actually charging at full speed, you just kind of never know, and so it's fun to see that on the charger itself.
01:23:48 ◼ ► And a couple companies make – I know Anker has one that's similar, but it's from Nomad, and it's the Nomad – I forget the exact name, but it's thin.
01:24:03 ◼ ► There's a one-port one that's 35 watts, but the one I like is the 65-watt with two USB outs.
01:24:12 ◼ ► And 65 watts total, so you can get – if you just plug in, like, a laptop in the blue one, which indicates the PD port, you can get up to 65-watt charging, which is –
01:24:34 ◼ ► It goes right up against the outlet, and then the charger goes in the bottom and goes down.
01:24:44 ◼ ► Like, if you have to put a charger behind your bed or behind a cabinet or something, having it oriented this way lets you put the furniture really close to the wall once you slide it back into place.
01:24:56 ◼ ► And I also find, as I travel, especially, like, notoriously, airports, and as an East Coaster, Amtrak trains, which have – the nice thing about Amtrak, or at least the Acela, is that there are actual power outlets, not like USB outlets, but actual power outlets at every seat.
01:25:21 ◼ ► Like, whenever you find a – you're, like, at an airport, and you're like, oh, there's a socket, a wall socket.
01:25:36 ◼ ► Because it's, like, the slimness, it's sort of like a – I don't know, like, if that's a cantilever, I don't know what you call it.
01:25:41 ◼ ► But the actual shape of the charger and the fact that there's – the weight goes down, not out, keeps it from falling out.
01:25:51 ◼ ► Well, and that's one of the most frustrating things is to have this top-heavy charger and to go to plug it in, and it just falls out, and it's like, oh, man, what am I going to do now?
01:26:05 ◼ ► I don't even know if they make it because Anker turns over some of their stuff so often.
01:26:31 ◼ ► I'll tell you another little gadget that just came out that is – again, I don't know if anybody listening is going to love this,
01:26:43 ◼ ► And so candle warmers are – instead of lighting it, you just put it under the lamp, and it heats up and still gets the same effect.
01:27:02 ◼ ► So again, if you leave the house, you can have it turn off so that your candles aren't burning up when you're gone.
01:27:09 ◼ ► And so it's kind of like this awesome fallback that technology is solving with these home products.
01:27:24 ◼ ► But I have – notoriously anybody who follows me or my wife on social media knows, especially from years ago when we posted more.
01:27:38 ◼ ► And she – we replaced all of our Christmas lights this year with the Govee, G-O-V-E-E, smart Christmas lights,
01:27:49 ◼ ► which to me sounded like – and you'd think as the resident computer nerd in the family that I should be the one who's like,
01:28:04 ◼ ► It's – I think, oh, isn't it nice to have something as simple as Christmas lights where all you do is plug them in and they're –
01:28:22 ◼ ► And some of them – and, you know, it's complicated, but some of them are on Alexa smart plugs and some are on HomeKit smart plugs.
01:28:44 ◼ ► And now she can make them dance to the music she's playing and they pulse to the beat of the music.
01:29:03 ◼ ► And you can adjust the color, you know, like which colors out of the crayon box you want, and the brightness and the color temperature if you want white lights.
01:29:15 ◼ ► So, like, the disaster of having white Christmas lights where you're like, oh, this one strand burned out.
01:29:24 ◼ ► And the new one is a slightly – slightly different but different enough that it looks terrible with the old ones.
01:29:31 ◼ ► And so you've got to throw out all the old ones and get all the new ones from the same brand to get the same color temperature.
01:29:41 ◼ ► You can, like, deliberately choose to have the strand have slightly different shades of color temperature of white, which adds depth on the tree.
01:29:55 ◼ ► I tried those before, and you can get sucked into a whole – like, it does take a little bit of time if you're going to start doing them individually and make it, like, super custom.
01:30:08 ◼ ► I think most people use the preset ones of having the different candy cane ones or whatever it is.
01:30:37 ◼ ► when I fall in love with a new gadget or computer or something like that, how I get and I just disappear for 18 hours a day at a time.
01:30:44 ◼ ► That's how she's gotten with these Govy Christmas lights, where she's just off programming them in ever more elaborate ways.
01:30:59 ◼ ► And having helped her put them on the tree, they're just – in terms of build quality, so much better than pieces.
01:31:07 ◼ ► They are more expensive, but they're – just the build quality is obviously significantly better over standard $15 Christmas lights.
01:31:17 ◼ ► And, I mean, like, you could theoretically just reuse those, too, of wrap them, do something else with them throughout the year because they're just – most of them are just lights, the twinkly lights that some people put in their rooms or different things like that, that if you wanted to reuse them and use them on the patio or something.
01:32:01 ◼ ► And so while it's not perfect, if you get close, you can still see the dots and it kind of looks a little pixelated.
01:32:09 ◼ ► But to have the ability to put a digital photo frame on the wall without a cord hanging down and have it last for three months of battery life, I think that is starting to – it will start to become something that people – like, I've always wanted a photo here.
01:32:28 ◼ ► So I think that that's – in the next year, we'll start seeing a lot more from different companies doing stuff like that.
01:32:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I saw a post on The Verge by way of Neelai Patel on social media where they were talking about the frame TVs.
01:32:41 ◼ ► And Neelai had the interesting observation that if these things are getting more popular, it's sort of bad news for Hollywood and streamers in general.
01:32:53 ◼ ► And I think it's an interesting observation that for the TVs, that they're terrible TVs.
01:32:57 ◼ ► That's where Neelai was coming from because Neelai, like a lot of us, is very picky about high-quality TVs.
01:33:09 ◼ ► And if that's what people are focusing on is how do I make my TV look better when I'm not watching TV, it's sort of a bad sign for the central place in so many of our lives,
01:33:22 ◼ ► at least our recreational lives, that actually watching TV, wherever the content's coming from, right, whether it's coming from Blu-ray discs or cable TV or streaming Netflix or watching sports.
01:33:37 ◼ ► It's – if what you're most concerned about is how does it look when I turn it off, it's sort of a bad sign for where our screen attention is going, right?
01:33:50 ◼ ► It's that we've all gone to our personal devices in our hands, our tablets and phones and stuff.
01:34:16 ◼ ► But I don't want my wife to find out about those TVs because I'm afraid she would be very interested in hearing about a TV that looks better when off.
01:34:53 ◼ ► I feel – I don't want to be Bill Gates saying 640 kilobytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody.
01:35:09 ◼ ► Thank you very much in particular for being a very good sport about the fact that the last time I linked to you was sort of to disagree, which I think I did politely.
01:35:26 ◼ ► And thank you for joining me over this Thanksgiving weekend and have a good holiday season.