0:00:00You believe that cubs are in the World Series again. Every goddamn year.
0:00:03I know, isn't it? It's annoying.
0:00:05It's the same shit every year.
0:00:07It's getting, you know, as a sort of Mariners fan, it's getting pretty embarrassing.
0:00:15You know it's bad when the cubs are in there.
0:00:18Yeah, it's like, huh, well, okay, pretty soon it's just gonna be us.
0:00:28it is the way i don't like baseball anymore
0:00:32and what's with cleveland cleveland can't stop winning it's no fair
0:00:37they win all the championships terrible yeah
0:00:41it's rigged just like the election just like the election
0:00:48the whole thing is right yep the system is flawed
0:00:51how are you john i am fine and how are you good
0:00:55I'm a little chilly. Yeah? What's it like there? What's it like there these days?
0:00:5959. 58, 59.
0:01:00That's not bad. Yeah, that's about what it is here.
0:01:02Yeah. Can't complain.
0:01:04Yeah. I'm in the basement though, so it's cold. It's cooler down here.
0:01:08My office is chilly. It is. I actually, I've, you know, I'm a very delicate individual and I'm very
0:01:16sensitive to minor fluctuations in temperature. But I'm at the north end of the house, and so,
0:01:24I get that my office gets, does not get the sunlight. And I, that makes the difference,
0:01:31you know? Like what's temperate throughout the main floor of the house is a little chilly in here.
0:01:36Yeah. Well, I podcast in the basement, and usually it's about the same all year round,
0:01:41I would say. My office is up in the, what is, was the attic, it's a reef, it's a finished attic,
0:01:48and it is boiling hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. And there's like, there's
0:01:55like three days on either, you know, where those two meet where it's decent. So, kind of screwed.
0:02:01It's a great place, you know, the boiling hot part is a particularly nice place to have a
0:02:06bunch of computer equipment. [Laughter]
0:02:07Pete: That's very good. It's good for the equipment, really.
0:02:11Jared; Yeah, yeah.
0:02:12Pete; Everything I know about computers is that it's very, very good for them to be…
0:02:16And to be subject to, you know, wild temperature changes. Wires and things love that. So I'm
0:02:29looking forward to Thursday.
0:02:31Yeah. I will be flying out tomorrow. We're recording on Tuesday. The show will air. I'll
0:02:36probably post it from an airplane tomorrow. I'm sure that'll work perfectly well.
0:02:41[laughter]
0:02:42(laughing)
0:02:44And then I will be there on Thursday.
0:02:50I am excited.
0:02:51I feel like this is a good one
0:02:53because we don't know what the hell is going on, really.
0:02:55- No, I mean, not really.
0:02:57I mean, there have been some rumors
0:02:59about the new MacBook Pro.
0:03:01- Right.
0:03:02- That's the only thing I know about, though.
0:03:03- Yeah, and I feel like everything else is sort of unknown.
0:03:07Like, then there's rumors that there's gonna be another new,
0:03:09we'll get to all this in detail,
0:03:11but there's rumors that there's gonna be another,
0:03:13in addition to the MacBook Pro,
0:03:14a 13-inch MacBook of some sort,
0:03:17whether this is an updated Air,
0:03:19whether it's a new 13-inch regular Retina MacBook,
0:03:23which makes no sense to me, we don't know.
0:03:26- Yeah.
0:03:28But I'm in the market.
0:03:31- Are you really?
0:03:32- Yeah, 'cause my MacBook Air is a 2012.
0:03:36- Ooh, so that's good timing.
0:03:38Yeah, so this is really exciting for you.
0:03:40Yeah. I mean, I was thinking that maybe I would get this year's MacBook when that came
0:03:43out in the spring, but that wasn't quite a big enough update.
0:03:50It's a beautiful little machine. It's so nice. It really is the most beautiful Mac that Apple's
0:03:55ever made. Every time I see it in the Apple Store, and I just, you know, I told you, I
0:03:59told you, if you listen to the show, but whoever the guests were in the last few weeks, that
0:04:04we had a weird problem with Amy's Apple Watch where the back came off and we went and I
0:04:09I picked it up.
0:04:10So I've been in the Apple store a lot recently,
0:04:12and every time I walk by, I always think,
0:04:14"God damn, that's a nice little laptop."
0:04:16- Yeah, yeah.
0:04:17And do you, what are your feelings on the keyboard?
0:04:22- I could live with it.
0:04:24I haven't spent significant time,
0:04:27like I never got like a review unit of the regular MacBook,
0:04:31so I've never spent like a significant amount of time on it,
0:04:33but I'm sure that I could get used to it.
0:04:35Anything that has actual physical keys,
0:04:37I'm sure I could get used to.
0:04:38I think in the hypothetical future where they go to some kind of touchscreen like surface
0:04:43for the keyboard to make it even thinner, I might have a serious problem then.
0:04:48But yeah, I would have a problem with that too.
0:04:50Up until that point, I'm sure I could get used to it.
0:04:53Because I like I do like and it's you know, it's funny because I'd like a real old fashioned
0:04:57mechanical clicky keyboard.
0:04:58Right.
0:04:59But that's just what I prefer.
0:05:00So anything less than that is, it's, you know, fine.
0:05:04It's not what I prefer, but it's fine.
0:05:06Yeah.
0:05:07Yeah, I think for me, the baseline is some motion.
0:05:11But glass is not really gonna cut it.
0:05:15I was at... I'm trying to remember, I think this was when
0:05:19Hank broke the screen of his
0:05:23iPhone 6s? Yeah, 6s.
0:05:27Over the summer we went in there, and the genius that was helping me
0:05:31was typing on her iPad, and just like...
0:05:35it would look like 65, 70 words a minute.
0:05:38I mean, it was crazy.
0:05:39(laughing)
0:05:40I was like, how do you do that?
0:05:43But I guess maybe people now, the kids these days,
0:05:47maybe coming up learning how to type on glass screens
0:05:51much faster than we can.
0:05:52- Yeah, I've spoken to some people at Apple who've said,
0:05:55and this was from a couple years ago, that yes,
0:05:58that, and in the interim, since I've had this discussion
0:06:03with people at Apple, they've come out
0:06:04with the smart keyboard cover for iPad,
0:06:07which has physical moving keys.
0:06:09So it's not like they're saying,
0:06:10"Hey, we don't need physical moving keys."
0:06:12But that, you know, don't under,
0:06:15if you say you can't type on an iPad,
0:06:17don't assume that that means everybody can't type.
0:06:19And the younger it goes, the more natural it seems
0:06:23because it's just what they grew up with.
0:06:24- Yeah, yeah.
0:06:26And you're missing a thumb, right?
0:06:28- Yes, that is correct.
0:06:29- So I would think that's even harder.
0:06:30(laughing)
0:06:32- In my left, my left.
0:06:34I mean, it's not missing, it's there,
0:06:35it's just kind of hanging on by like a thread, right?
0:06:37- Exactly.
0:06:39- You know where it is.
0:06:40- I do have, I did suffer an injury
0:06:44and I don't know what happened.
0:06:45My left ring finger feels like the first knuckle.
0:06:50We used to call them dummies.
0:06:54When I used to play high school basketball,
0:06:56like you'd get a dummied finger.
0:06:58So your finger wasn't broken, didn't have a broken bone.
0:07:00- Oh, you couldn't feel it?
0:07:01No, but you know, like, in basketball it happens all the time if you catch a ball the wrong
0:07:06way, but it would swell up at the knuckle real bad.
0:07:10Okay.
0:07:11And you wouldn't be able to flex it all the way. But you know, you could tape it up and
0:07:15it'd be alright. It's just one of those little things where you get old and stuff doesn't
0:07:20heal quickly. I don't know what happened. I know it was over summer, though, because
0:07:25I know that I noticed it when my family was on vacation. So this was like early August,
0:07:30and I was like, I don't know what the heck I did.
0:07:32Like if I jammed it on a door or what the heck I did,
0:07:34but I noticed I woke up one morning
0:07:35and my left index finger was swollen and hurt.
0:07:38Like swollen enough that I wouldn't be able
0:07:40to get my wedding ring off.
0:07:42I still can't, and now it's the end of October.
0:07:45I still can't, and it still hurts a little bit.
0:07:48And it just seems like the sort of thing
0:07:50like when I was like 17,
0:07:51it would be injured 10 times worse,
0:07:54like a golf ball swollen,
0:07:56and three days later it would be back to normal.
0:07:59You realize you're gonna be trouble in trouble if Amy leaves you
0:08:03Get the jaws of life out
0:08:07You realize you do realize I realize as as I rock it through
0:08:12In the deeper into my 40s that when you're a young person you really are sort of you're you've sort of like halfway to like
0:08:18being like Wolverine
0:08:20Appreciated at the time, but as you get older you definitely don't appreciate it
0:08:28Yeah, yeah, I find I found that I like I'm you know a bit older than you but but I
0:08:32Bruise I get these bruises now and they don't they just like stick around for like a month
0:08:38They don't hurt or anything, but it's like where did how did that happen? And why won't it go away? I
0:08:44Have the same thing. I will occasionally pick up a bruise like on the back of my elbow, right?
0:08:50And it's like I don't remember it hitting anything. I don't think it happens. Well, I'm asleep
0:08:56[Laughter]
0:08:57Pete: And they don't go away like they used to.
0:09:00Jared; I roll over too fast and boom, I got a bruise.
0:09:03Pete; So, what do we know? All right, so what's coming at this event?
0:09:09Jared; Yeah.
0:09:10Pete; The MacBook Pro is the guarantee.
0:09:13Jared; Right.
0:09:14Pete; That's like a-
0:09:15Jared; That's the one thing that we've seen some pictures of and there have been fairly
0:09:19hefty rumors about.
0:09:20Pete; Yeah, Germin, I think, maybe gets credit for breaking it first with this,
0:09:24They're replacing the F keys above the keyboard
0:09:27with some kind of touch screen.
0:09:30I don't know.
0:09:31At some point, somebody says it's an OLED.
0:09:33I don't know if that's true or not.
0:09:35That'll tie into the next discussion about the-- what
0:09:41do you call it-- the Google Pixel that I got last week.
0:09:45Because I've got to tell you, I still-- even though people say
0:09:47they like this pixel display, I still
0:09:48don't like the colors on an OLED display.
0:09:50But that's neither here nor there right now.
0:09:54Some kind of touch screen strip and the idea would be that it's therefore because it's software you could you know Photoshop could put like a bunch of tools up there or presumably you know maybe like you know a word processor could put style stuff you could just tap like a bold button or something like that.
0:10:15- Yeah.
0:10:16- I don't know.
0:10:17So 13 inch, 15 inch MacBook Pros.
0:10:20They're supposed to be thinner.
0:10:21And then there is a case leaking.
0:10:23Did you see this thing?
0:10:24There's somebody in China leaked a,
0:10:27like the top of the case or the unibody enclosure.
0:10:33And I think, according to the leak,
0:10:37it's like, it's got four USB-C ports,
0:10:40like two on each side.
0:10:42Still has a headphone jack.
0:10:43And then that's it.
0:10:44So no more USB-A ports.
0:10:46USB-A is the traditional big sort of rectangular USB port
0:10:53that we've known and loved since the iMac in 1998.
0:10:57So no more USB-A ports and no more SD card slot, no more--
0:11:06what else does the MacBook Pro have?
0:11:08I think it has HDMI, right?
0:11:11I think HDMI is the one that I'm always
0:11:13trying to plug something into it, and it doesn't work. So that's the rumor. It's probably true,
0:11:23I bet, because it sounds right to me. Yeah. Yeah, that makes some sense. And,
0:11:30you know, I've been using a MacBook Air for four years, but if it's thinner—I might go back to the
0:11:3813-inch MacBook Pro. Yeah, HDMI, there it is on the current one. Power to USB. The heck
0:11:48is that one? So I think, I don't know how, this is that some of the stuff that I, I
0:11:55feel like I'm getting old and I'm out of date on some of this stuff. So, uh, USB-C, I
0:12:01know based on the retina MacBook that you can use USB-C for lots of stuff. So
0:12:07So the Retina MacBook has one port.
0:12:10It's USB-C. It uses it to charge,
0:12:12and it uses it to connect to a display,
0:12:15and it uses it--
0:12:16because you can do a Thunderbolt over USB-C.
0:12:21And it uses it, obviously, to connect to any USB peripherals
0:12:24you want it to connect to.
0:12:27So if this new MacBook Pro only has four USB-C ports,
0:12:32then if you wanted to plug it into power
0:12:35plug in a peripheral and plug it into a display, would you be able to use any of these ports
0:12:39to plug the display into, or is there going to be like, well, this is the, you know, you
0:12:42got to use this top left one for the display?
0:12:44Oh, that's a good question. I would think you'd be able to use any of them, but I don't,
0:12:48you know, in the past that some of them, there have been differences in the USB ports, like
0:12:52some of them have different, have had different power output.
0:12:56Yeah, I don't know. And how would they differentiate? It seems very un-Apple-like to, to require
0:13:02you to remember that these four points that look the same actually are different? I mean,
0:13:08I guess what they could do is print like a little, I don't know, some kind of little
0:13:13icon next to the one that, you know, but that doesn't seem right. Seems like you should
0:13:17be able to use any of them for anything, but I don't know if electronically that works
0:13:20out. I don't know.
0:13:22Yeah. I mean, I guess that's, yeah, and that's just part of the, is Apple doing the lightning,
0:13:31or not the lightning the um what's the line does usbc have uh the thunderbolt in it yes
0:13:46yeah but i mean but is that apple's doing or is that the usbc standard i think it's the usbc
0:13:51standard okay i think it has some something to do with intel okay well then then i don't know why
0:13:56they wouldn't all have it. Right. It sounds like a good update to me. I don't know. I mean, and
0:14:07suppose, you know, the whole thing is going to be thinner. Presumably one of the reasons they're
0:14:11getting rid of USB-A is just because by today's standards that's a big fat port. I'm not saying
0:14:19that the device is actually, you know, the device is obviously not going to be, no matter how thin
0:14:23it is it's not going to be so thin that they couldn't put a USB a port in but I
0:14:28think you know you could I think it's probably gonna be thin enough where USB
0:14:31a would look ugly yeah and you know we all know the most important thing when
0:14:36you buy a computer is making sure that the ports look nice VGA is there gonna
0:14:42be a VGA port there will be a dongle for big I've always been a little bit the
0:14:50VGA port? I've even used it. I have, you know, I still use some standalone cameras
0:14:56so I, you know, I have SD cards and I have used it, you know, the SD, the SD slot on
0:15:02my MacBook Pro on occasion. I've always thought it was a little surprising that
0:15:06Apple put an SD card slot in the MacBook Pro just because, and it's thin, you
0:15:12know, and I would presume that they could do it on the new one by, you know, it's
0:15:15certainly a pretty thin little slot. It just seems like an Apple-like thing to
0:15:19do though it seems to me like if you want to use a card you know they want
0:15:22you to be punished by having to use a dongle and I say that I'm being a little
0:15:27facetious but it's just you know Apple's you know really takes the minimalism on
0:15:32these ports to an extreme and adding a SD card slot built in is sort of unusual
0:15:37for Apple yeah yeah still on the iMac too yeah I use that too I've already
0:15:44said that's my favorite game to play on the iMac is plugging yeah well that's
0:15:47- That's the thing, yeah, I mean, on the back of the device,
0:15:50it becomes very difficult.
0:15:52- I've gotten very good at it.
0:15:53I've gotten very good at sitting at my desk,
0:15:55not being able to see, get an SD card into the slot
0:15:59in the back.
0:16:00- I can't even plug USB things into the back of mine.
0:16:04- I tweeted that, and a bunch of people,
0:16:06I hadn't thought about this, 'cause I never owned
0:16:07one of the side-loading iMacs.
0:16:10You know, before they got the real thin sides,
0:16:13the slot was on the side, which is, in theory--
0:16:17SD card was? Yeah. Oh really? Okay. Yeah, I missed that. They also had CD slots over there though,
0:16:22and so apparently a real common problem. It was a very, I mean, I wouldn't believe how many
0:16:28tweets I got. The SD card and the CD slot? Yep. And everybody played along with my idea that this
0:16:32was a great game and they were like, "It's a good way to lose all of your lives."
0:16:37You just tuck it in and the second you let go of it and like, you know, get it all the way in,
0:16:45you realize what you've done. Oh god, that's terrible. And then you got to fish it out. Yeah.
0:16:50Better have better to have it on the back.
0:16:52So yeah, MacBook Pro. And, and then everything else is just
0:17:05up and maybe, yeah, so there is there's rumors of a new 13 inch model. And this is to me where
0:17:14being you earn our pundit points because the you know macbook pro is a little self-explanatory but
0:17:19what is this 13-inch macbook pro some people are calling it a macbook air ming chi quo of of kgi
0:17:25securities or whatever his company is called the analyst who gets he gets a lot wrong actually uh
0:17:31philip emmer de whit has an interesting scorecard for his like last three years of predictions but
0:17:36his iphone stuff is usually spot on yeah um usually he just gets wrong the timing right
0:17:41He's not that great on timing.
0:17:43And he's like every--
0:17:45he's really not an Apple analyst so much as an Apple Asian
0:17:51supply chain analyst.
0:17:53His sources are very clearly-- it's almost transparent
0:17:55that his sources are from the Asian supply chain.
0:17:57So he doesn't get things like product marketing,
0:18:00because the Asian supply chain doesn't
0:18:01know about stuff like that.
0:18:03What's the name of the device going to be?
0:18:05They don't know that until the last minute,
0:18:06and they start printing it on the devices.
0:18:10And they, you know, pricing and stuff like that,
0:18:14nobody knows, pricing is like the top held secret at Apple.
0:18:17Like, there's only, you know, very seldom leaks
0:18:19because I don't think it ever really leaves, you know,
0:18:22from in between like Schiller's group and Tim Cook,
0:18:26you know, and, well, and surely Jeff Williams,
0:18:29but, you know, it's like a top people type thing.
0:18:32- Right, and whoever's making the webpage.
0:18:36So he's been calling it a MacBook Air for a while,
0:18:39a new 13 inch, or maybe he's been calling it a MacBook,
0:18:41I don't know.
0:18:42But the idea that they would make a 13 inch MacBook
0:18:47like the 12 inch MacBook makes no sense to me.
0:18:49Like 13 inch--
0:18:50- No, I don't understand that either.
0:18:52- You need like two inches to have a separation
0:18:56that makes sense, you know, like, oh yeah, I can see.
0:18:59This 13 inch is sort of like regular size
0:19:02and the 15 inch is big.
0:19:04this oh and this 11 inches tiny 12 and 13 are way too close to each other so
0:19:08that doesn't make any sense to me plus it doesn't seem like I mean it seems
0:19:12like it's a little early to bring out a new macbook right because the the
0:19:17current ones only came out I think in April right right right so if so so then
0:19:23the speculation is that it's an error right and you know some people have
0:19:30specula. Nobody seems to be willing to commit. Not Ming-Chi Kuo, not German.
0:19:35Nobody is saying what kind of display this thing has, which is
0:19:38inconspicuous to me because it would, like, so they're just not mentioning it.
0:19:42Meaning, does it have a retina display? Which is certainly what people who are
0:19:47hoping for a retina MacBook Air are hoping for. If it doesn't have a retina
0:19:51display, is the display improved at all versus the existing MacBook Airs?
0:19:56because there's things I think like I don't think that I forget there's certain technical things
0:20:01even if it doesn't go retina that could be improved in the the macbook air display like I think like
0:20:07ips and stuff like that okay um I don't know nobody knows that's why it's exciting uh the idea
0:20:18I guess is that if it needs it I'm a little surprised that they're updating it all I've
0:20:22been under the assumption that the MacBook Air is only hanging around to occupy price points,
0:20:28like that $899 that the 11-inch started at, and the $999 that 13-inch started at,
0:20:33and that there's no other reason for those devices to exist, and so that Apple would just keep selling
0:20:38the old ones as long as people keep buying them. Exactly like the... There's still that old MacBook
0:20:46Pro that has a spinning CD drive that Apple sells. They don't really advertise it. They
0:20:53don't have it out in the Apple stores, but if you go online, you can still buy it.
0:20:57That has a CD drive even? I think so.
0:21:01Let me check this. It definitely has a spinning hard drive.
0:21:04Maybe it has a spinning hard drive. Maybe it doesn't have it.
0:21:06Yeah, I think it's just a spinning hard drive.
0:21:07All right. Doesn't have it.
0:21:08No, it does not have a CD drive.
0:21:10All right, whatever.
0:21:11Yeah.
0:21:11Does it have a floppy drive? Or a zip drive? It has a zip drive.
0:21:15It's got swappable bays. But you can take the zip drive out and put a jazz drive in.
0:21:23Is that what that works? Yeah, yeah.
0:21:27I got one of those upstairs. A jazz drive? No, I don't know. I don't have the drive. I have an old,
0:21:36our pal Jim Ray gave me his old, God, what is it? I think it's a Wall Street.
0:21:42um, what was it called? PowerBook.
0:21:46Oh yeah?
0:21:47With the, with the thing that you could pop out, I think.
0:21:50Does, what's, did that one have that? Anyway, it's a really old, I have a really old PowerBook
0:21:55upstairs.
0:21:56Well, anyway, Apple still sells some sort of ancient MacBook Pro that I can't even remember
0:22:04the details of that is only there because people keep buying it.
0:22:07Yeah.
0:22:10I mean, I would think that now is the time just to be going all retina, and they would
0:22:20sweep away that one and then the other, but these rumors seem to indicate maybe not.
0:22:26There we go. It's at the bottom of the MacBook Pro page, and it costs $1,099.
0:22:33Right.
0:22:34- Right.
0:22:35- So it has a 500 gigabyte 5,400 RPM hard drive.
0:22:40So that's what I was thinking of.
0:22:42- Yeah.
0:22:42- I guess it's like some of these Apple products
0:22:46seem to me like products from the past.
0:22:49I can't imagine, like I splurged when I bought,
0:22:54my iMac is almost two years old now,
0:22:56but that was the last device I've bought
0:23:00where I was maybe possibly even thinking vaguely
0:23:03I might still get a spinning hard drive.
0:23:04I thought maybe about, 'cause the upgrade
0:23:07to get like a full one terabyte SSD
0:23:10was seriously expensive.
0:23:12But of course I love to spend money, so I just got it.
0:23:16But it was the last time I even hesitated for a second
0:23:19and thought maybe I should just get the Fusion drive.
0:23:22So I, you know, and I realized as I bought this iMac
0:23:26that it'll be the last, that whatever the previous iMac
0:23:29I bought was the last, you know,
0:23:30I'm never gonna buy a spinning hard disk.
0:23:32- Yeah. - Inside a Mac again.
0:23:35- Yeah. - Maybe on external drive,
0:23:37just for backup or whatever, but not inside.
0:23:40And I don't think I'd ever buy,
0:23:41personally I would never buy another device
0:23:44without a redness screen.
0:23:45- Mm-hmm, but yeah, and so that's the other thing.
0:23:48The hard drive, I would think that now
0:23:50would be also a good time.
0:23:51They probably, well, this they probably won't do,
0:23:53'cause it seems like it's too ubiquitous
0:23:55across several different product lines,
0:23:57but to get rid of, someday soon,
0:23:59they need to get rid of the spinning drives.
0:24:01Fusion's not bad. Fusion works fine, but the solely spinning drives are… I would
0:24:07never buy one.
0:24:08Right. So, the conundrum I see. I thought that maybe the Air would just stay as it is
0:24:15with its crummy non-retina displays and just sit at those price points until the Retina
0:24:21MacBook could be sold for like $9.99, and then they would just get rid of the… The
0:24:25Airs would just silently disappear, and there'd be maybe at whatever point in the future this
0:24:30a year-old retina MacBook that sells at $999 or $899 even, and a newer retina MacBook with
0:24:38better specs that sells at $1299 or $1399, you know. That's what I expected. But it's,
0:24:46you know, based on these rumors, it seems as though the air might be sticking around. But
0:24:51again, is it going to be called a MacBook Air? I don't know.
0:24:54Yeah, the MacBook starts at $1,300. So it's still a little pricey to... I mean, it doesn't seem like
0:25:02they could drop, just summarily take $300 off. Right, and it only came out in April, so that's
0:25:09just way, you know, six months later, it's highly unusual for Apple to drop a product by 30% in price
0:25:16or whatever it is. It's about 30%. It just doesn't seem possible. But then what price would this
0:25:23MacBook B. This is the problem I see is if it's a retina MacBook Air, what price
0:25:29does it start at? Because if it starts at $999, that seems like a great deal and it
0:25:35doesn't seem preposterous given that there are competing products from other
0:25:38companies, you know, that have roughly the similar specs. Like, I think, like, let's
0:25:42just say like a Microsoft Surface which has, you know, I think roughly air quality,
0:25:49CPU from Intel and it has a retina screen and it's, you know, has a starting price under
0:25:55a thousand dollars. So it's not like I'm, you know, again, whenever you're on the show,
0:26:00we often play, "Let's spend Tim Cook's money." We're not just saying, "Let's make it $999,"
0:26:06you know, because we're not based on reality. It seems like based on other laptops from
0:26:12other companies that you could do a retina screen on a $9.99 device.
0:26:19But if they did that, who buys, you know, to me that makes the regular MacBook at $12.99
0:26:27look too expensive.
0:26:29Yep, it sure does.
0:26:32Especially since it's slower.
0:26:33And I realize it's slower because to be that thin it has a fanless design, and so it's
0:26:38got like this entirely different, uses an entirely different chipset from Intel that
0:26:44is designed so that it could run fanlessly and never overheat. And the Air uses like
0:26:49this mid-range chipset that is low power compared to like the Pros, but not so low power that
0:26:54it doesn't need a fan.
0:26:56Yeah. I don't know. I mean, they have spent, I mean, there's been a number of years where
0:27:05they've, their entry laptop was $9.99, right? And somewhere it was even more than that, I think.
0:27:11But that was a long time ago. And they are in an era where it's increasingly hard to sell computers.
0:27:21So, moving your starting price point up 100 bucks, I don't know if that's gonna, I mean,
0:27:31that's not going to be great if you want to move units. And there's compounded with this is another
0:27:38rumor about Thursday's update to the Mac line that the 11-inch air is going to just quote go away.
0:27:44Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if... No, I wouldn't either. If it did, if it vanished, but I also
0:27:51wouldn't be surprised if it sort of goes the way of that 13-inch ancient MacBook Pro that we were
0:27:56talking about where it goes away in terms of it really is never going to be updated again,
0:28:01not even like a minor spec refresh, but that they'll keep selling it as is and not even
0:28:07really promote it, but it's there. You can go on a website.
0:28:10For a budget.
0:28:11Yeah, maybe even drop the price to $799 or something.
0:28:14Yeah, that would be really kind of amazing. Because I don't think they've ever been that low.
0:28:20No, I think $899 is the lowest Apple's ever sold a Mac for, and that's been the 11-inch
0:28:25error for a while.
0:28:26A laptop. Right. Not counting something incomplete like the Mac Mini. Like a complete laptop system
0:28:33that you can just open the box and use. It's not missing, you know, it has no RAM. It has no RAM
0:28:40at all. It doesn't have a battery. You gotta plug it in everywhere you go. And plug in an external
0:28:54hard drive. Do you remember years ago there was a rumor about a crank-powered Apple laptop?
0:29:01[Laughter]
0:29:02No, I don't think so. Like, the one laptop for a child thing.
0:29:04That was like, back in the 90s, like, after Jobs had come back, and I think after the iMac
0:29:12had been introduced, there were these rumors coming around about the iBook and what it was
0:29:18going to be. And one of them was, like, one of the crazier rumor sites was that it was
0:29:25going to be—it was going to be crank-powered. And what a boon that would be to people, because,
0:29:33you know, for all those instances where you're running shy, like if you were camping.
0:29:37Kevin Anthony 6.00 Such a common scenario.
0:29:40Matthew 4.00 Right, right. And you needed to use your
0:29:42laptop. You could just crank-power it. Kevin Anthony
0:29:45So I know that there are build-to-order options that can make these prices higher, but right now,
0:29:51looking at the "Buy a MacBook Air" page, there's two 11-inch Air standard configs, $899, and then
0:29:57you're up $200 to $1099, and you get double the storage. You go from $128 to $256, and it doesn't
0:30:08look like you get anything else. That's about the only difference. And then there's a 13-inch
0:30:14MacBook Air that starts at $999. And one that's $200 higher at $1,199. Call it $1,200.
0:30:22And I think the only difference there is double the storage from 128 flash to 256.
0:30:31Jared: Yeah. And it's weird to me that the 13-inch comes in 8 gigs, comes with 8 gigs of memory and
0:30:3711 does not.
0:30:39Pete: Right. I don't know. I guess -
0:30:41Jared; So, if you hit select, though, you can configure that.
0:30:43Yeah, you can definitely configure it.
0:30:45So you could up it.
0:30:46And you can significantly upgrade the CPU.
0:30:48You can go from a 1.6 Core i5 to a 2.2 Core i7.
0:30:54And I don't stay up to date on all that stuff anymore.
0:30:57But I mean, I know enough about the basic gist
0:30:59that going from Core i5 to Core i7
0:31:01is a pretty significant performance upgrade.
0:31:05But they're not the standard configs.
0:31:07And I feel like the standard configs really matter.
0:31:11But what I'm guessing, if I had to guess what Apple is going to do, is I'm thinking that
0:31:16the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Air will still not have a retina screen.
0:31:22And I guess if it's true that they're getting rid of the 11, maybe the 13-inch MacBook Air
0:31:27will now start at $899, but that it's a non-retina screen.
0:31:31And that if you want to get retina, you're going to have to pay at least like $1,200.
0:31:37But it still seems weird to me that you could pay
0:31:39like around $1200 to get a 13 inch MacBook Air
0:31:43with all these ports and then there's the 12 inch
0:31:47retina MacBook at the $1300 starting price.
0:31:51It just seems weird to me that they're doing
0:31:55a new retina MacBook Air.
0:31:58The other thing I could see is that they upgrade,
0:32:01this is the other thing I could see,
0:32:02is they upgrade the 13 inch MacBook Air
0:32:04whatever the latest core i7 whatever mobile chipset is from Intel, but they don't even
0:32:11really talk about it on Thursday. They just upgrade it on the website and it still doesn't
0:32:16have a retina screen and anybody who wants to bitch about the fact that it doesn't have a
0:32:20retina screen, you know, buy a different MacBook. Yeah, that seems to make the most sense to me.
0:32:27Because I can't imagine them going to the trouble putting a retina into
0:32:33the air at this point. Right, and I feel like you can argue well there's other comp, you know,
0:32:38the argument that, hey, like the Microsoft Surface has a retina caliber screen and it's only $999 or
0:32:44whatever and, you know, Dell makes these things with, you know, whatever they call retina screens
0:32:48and they're cheap and it's like, you know, Apple's never competed at the low end on price and if
0:32:53anybody gets the short end of the stick from Apple it's absolutely the people who are more
0:32:57budget-conscious. That's just the way the company is.
0:33:00Yeah. You know, the company is optimized,
0:33:03in my opinion, for people who are looking for the best products, not
0:33:07not the lowest-priced products. Yeah.
0:33:11Because the other thing, too, is in addition to
0:33:15just the fact that the regular retina MacBook
0:33:20is relatively new, it's clearly what Apple thinks the future of laptops are,
0:33:24there's also just the simple fact that they gave it the name "Macbook," right? It's like,
0:33:29it's not like we're reading into, it's not like it's hard to read into that by calling it just
0:33:35plain MacBook with no adjective, that Apple is saying, you know, maybe not now, but soon,
0:33:40this is the standard, this is what you, this is what the standard Apple laptop is.
0:33:43Yeah. And it really is weird to have ones called Air that are thicker and heavier.
0:33:52Like, it makes no sense.
0:33:53Yeah, I mean, that just seems to be why it's obvious that it seemed obvious,
0:33:58at least, that it was going away.
0:33:59Right. So, it seems very strange that there's these rumors that it's sticking around.
0:34:04Yeah. I mean, the other thing, it wouldn't be the first time that they have
0:34:07updated a model that's only been out for like six months, because they did it with the iPad.
0:34:15Yeah, they did that with the iPad 3.
0:34:183, right.
0:34:19And then the iPad 4 came out like six months later, because iPad 3 was sort of thicker.
0:34:24It was the first Retina one, I believe, right? Yeah.
0:34:27Yeah.
0:34:27I could see it. And again, with the PC stuff, it seems... I don't think that they're anywhere
0:34:35near as constrained component-wise as they are with, especially the iPhone, but probably the
0:34:45iPad 2 where they kind of need to get their ducks in a row and say, "Look, we're going to have,
0:34:52you know, 70 million of these system-on-a-chips for the next year for all these iPhone 7s,
0:34:56and they're all going to be exactly the same." Like, I don't—I think with the MacBook,
0:35:01you know, it's not anywhere near as, you know, we need to be making the exact same device for
0:35:06an entire year just to break even on the manufacturing.
0:35:10Mm-hmm. What I would like to see, which is probably not going to happen though,
0:35:16is an 11-inch MacBook, a 13-inch MacBook. I kind of do too.
0:35:22The fact that they've done a 12-inch now though, that doesn't seem like that's going to happen.
0:35:26Yeah, and I'm not sure how the—I've never actually put the 12-inch next to the 11-inch MacBook Air
0:35:32and just seen how they compare, because I think that the display does kind of go more edge-to-edge
0:35:38edge on the MacBook. Like, footprint-wise, they might be very similar.
0:35:42Yeah, I think they are. So I kind of feel... I mean, it seems like
0:35:46I've only played with one a few times, but
0:35:50it does not seem demonstrably larger than the 11-inch Air.
0:35:54Let's see what the tech specs are. Yeah, we can find that out.
0:35:58So it is 11 inches...
0:36:02The MacBook is 11 inches wide and
0:36:06seven four deep all right the 11 inch macbook air is 11.8 inches wide and 7.56 inches deep so on
0:36:16depth it's almost the same but it is right it is a eight tenths of an inch narrower
0:36:22the but the the 12 inch macbook is narrower oh yeah right yeah so the 12th the other way around
0:36:31Yeah, I'm an idiot now
0:36:33Yeah, so the 12-inch MacBook is actually smaller. Right? Well, but it's deeper, right? Yeah, but it'll just buy a little bit
0:36:40All right, so maybe with that design maybe what it would be would be a 14-inch, you know
0:36:45Maybe 12 12 inch and 14 inch 14 inch
0:36:48I could see that and then that maybe the rumors are wrong calling it 13
0:36:51I'm calling it 13 because maybe it's one of those things where it's like
0:36:55I don't know 13 point something and
0:36:57Apple's just going to it's close enough to 14 that Apple's gonna call it 14. Yeah
0:37:05Could see that as a way to square this circle as well
0:37:08If the truth is that there is no update to the MacBook Air and what they're going to do is unveil a big brother to
0:37:14The 12-inch retina MacBook. I can see that
0:37:17Maybe I'm gonna have a second USB C port
0:37:20Yeah
0:37:24And then you have laptops at 12, 13, 14, 15.
0:37:29Yeah, and that kind of makes some sense.
0:37:31Yeah, I suppose.
0:37:32Although I don't know if it makes sense for the consumer ones to quote-unquote have larger displays than the pro ones. I don't know.
0:37:38Well, I think some people seem to like that 13-inch Air.
0:37:46I've always been, I mean, I always liked the smaller one,
0:37:50but people who just want more screen real estate
0:37:55or people who don't see so well.
0:37:59- I used an 11-inch for years and many years,
0:38:02at least five years, four or five years, four years, I think,
0:38:06and loved it, but my thinking at the time was,
0:38:09if you're gonna go small and thin,
0:38:11go as small and thin as you can,
0:38:13and get like, so I got a maxed out performance wise
0:38:1511 inch air.
0:38:16And then when I switched to a 13 inch MacBook Pro
0:38:19two years ago, it was on the basis of,
0:38:21if I'm gonna carry something thicker and heavier,
0:38:24I might as well get the Pro and get the performance
0:38:28rather than the 13 inch air.
0:38:31- Yeah.
0:38:32Yeah, and I'm in that quandary right now.
0:38:36Because my, so my air is four years old,
0:38:41then my iMac upstairs. Well, I have two machines upstairs that I use for this sort of media server
0:38:47things. One is a 2010 MacBook Pro, and then the other one is a 2007 iMac. And those are definitely
0:38:55showing their age. So I'm kind of like in that space where I was like, am I going to buy another,
0:39:01like the low-end laptop just to carry around and do writing with, or am I going to split
0:39:07the difference and get the Pro and do whatever power stuff I need to do on that.
0:39:13Well, and the other thing too is that by all accounts, the Pro, I mean, of course the Pro
0:39:17is getting thinner because that's what Apple does is they make stuff thinner. And when they finally
0:39:21got, you know, the current models, when they are the first ones that you don't even have the option
0:39:26of getting a spinning hard disk in because they're actually too thin, you have to use SSD. The new
0:39:31ones are going to be even thinner. So they're getting as thin as the Airs used to be, even if
0:39:35if they're not wedge-shaped.
0:39:36I mean, they're certainly approaching that.
0:39:39So the Air is getting squeezed out to me
0:39:41in almost every way imaginable.
0:39:42It's getting squeezed out on thinness by the pros.
0:39:45It's getting squeezed out on retina screen by the MacBook.
0:39:50The name MacBook tells you that it's
0:39:53becoming the standard default laptop, everything
0:39:58other than having a low price.
0:40:00And if the whole point is to have a low price,
0:40:02don't see how it's going to get a retinin screen just because it makes the
0:40:07other ones look bad but yeah what people I guess the other thing we're talking
0:40:10around is the fact that there are tens of thousands of people listening to this
0:40:15podcast right now who desperately want Apple to just make a MacBook Air with a
0:40:19retina screen it's probably true right but I really don't think it's gonna
0:40:25happen it reminds me of the switch from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS 10 in a way
0:40:31where what diehard Mac users really wanted was a new version of the Mac OS
0:40:37that was, you know, just had the the better kernel. Just give us like a real
0:40:43operating system with, you know, preemptive or not preemptive multitasking,
0:40:47with, you know, real multitasking instead of cooperative. Oh yeah, preemptive is the
0:40:51good multitasking. Cooperative multitasking was the euphemism.
0:40:55right which is not very cooperative I would call it that prisoners dilemma
0:41:02multi-tasker oh wait about right wait I can I me I'd this I could just use the
0:41:13whole CPU but I'm just asked voluntarily not to hmm all Mac users really wanted
0:41:24of going to jail. All Mac users really wanted was a new version of the Mac OS
0:41:29that had a stable modern, you know, computer science perspective operating
0:41:34system. And instead we got a thing. Everything was different and a lot
0:41:41of stuff that used to be fast was suddenly very slow to make it fancy, etc.
0:41:44And I sort of feel like Apple is doing the same thing with the
0:41:48transition from the MacBook Air to the MacBook, which is that what many
0:41:53people. I hear from them every time I bring it up on Daring Fireball or on this podcast. I hear it
0:41:57all the time. I see it on Twitter all the time. People like the MacBook Air or love the MacBook
0:42:04Air and the only thing they don't like about it is the non-retina screen. So why doesn't Apple just
0:42:10put a retina screen in the MacBook Air and they'll just buy it? But I don't think it's where Apple
0:42:17wants to take things. Yeah.
0:42:21Well, what are you going to do? So what about, what about, uh, what about other, uh, other Macs?
0:42:29Well, let's pick that up after this break. Let me take a break and tell you about,
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0:45:44Pete: Does your dog sleep, like, in the same spot all the time?
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0:46:15- Yeah, they're mean.
0:46:16Pekingese are mean.
0:46:17Karen, my wife had Pekingese growing up,
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0:46:27I love that dog.
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0:46:38- So other Macs?
0:46:45- Yeah, so this is where everybody seems to be fuzzy,
0:46:49is what else are they going to announce?
0:46:53So the Mac Pro hasn't been updated.
0:46:57The last update, according to MacRumors, was July of 1998.
0:47:03It was the last time that the Mac Pro was updated.
0:47:08So it has been—
0:47:09When it was called the Power Mac.
0:47:13Eighteen years and counting.
0:47:18And it's unchanged in 18 years.
0:47:20Now that is unusually long for the Mac Pro.
0:47:24- I think I have that one.
0:47:26- I would say most people would agree
0:47:29that the Mac Pro is due for an update.
0:47:32- It was blue, right?
0:47:32It was the blue one?
0:47:34Yeah.
0:47:35- There are no rumors of a Mac Pro update,
0:47:40but the Mac Pro is famously,
0:47:44it's made in America or manufactured in America.
0:47:48So it's a completely different supply chain.
0:47:50So any, you know, and I can't help but think that--
0:47:52- They must be churning out like five of them a quarter now.
0:47:55(both laughing)
0:47:57- Very busy, it's a very busy operation.
0:47:59Like the easiest job in the entire company.
0:48:04Easiest job in the entire company.
0:48:05- It's like one guy.
0:48:08- Imagine if it's fully stocked up.
0:48:09- Does all the soldering himself?
0:48:12- Just worn grooves on the desk
0:48:15from where his feet go up every day.
0:48:17(laughing)
0:48:20- He's all caught up on Westworld.
0:48:26- Imagine then the phone rings.
0:48:29It's Tim Cook.
0:48:32What?
0:48:33- An update?
0:48:36Oh no.
0:48:37- And all of a sudden as the phone rings
0:48:39he hears like a truck backing up with parts.
0:48:42It's all over.
0:48:46I would not be surprised.
0:48:48I have absolutely no inside info.
0:48:50Nobody has said a damn word to me about any Mac Pros.
0:48:54I just, common sense says to me
0:48:56that they've either gotta update it soon
0:48:58or they've gotta just officially say, you know.
0:49:01- We're not making it anymore.
0:49:02- We're not making it anymore.
0:49:04- Yeah.
0:49:05- But it just seems like they need to have this device.
0:49:09In my opinion.
0:49:10- I mean, it's, yeah.
0:49:11Although how many, I mean, they, you know,
0:49:14they don't, probably don't sell that many.
0:49:16They're crazy expensive, and they come with their own quirks.
0:49:21- But that they-- - It's a great-looking device,
0:49:23but-- - But I still think
0:49:24that they really want to own, or not own,
0:49:28I'm not saying that they own it solely,
0:49:30but they want to be known as the leading computer maker
0:49:34for the quote-unquote pro industry,
0:49:37whether it's professional video people,
0:49:39people who are editing movies,
0:49:41people who are professional photographers,
0:49:46who are working with 50 gigabyte raw files,
0:49:51wherever you, whatever the problem,
0:49:55developers, of course, I think even for their own use,
0:49:58it's a useful device.
0:49:59I mean, the iMac is pretty fast and has a nice display,
0:50:02but developing software is still one of those things
0:50:07where having the fastest CPU possible
0:50:09definitely make your daily day-to-day life better. So I don't think that they—it just seems unusual
0:50:17for me, and I don't think they need to ever touch the industrial design again. I shouldn't say ever,
0:50:23but a Mac Pro that looks exactly like the black cylindrical thing that we know, but just has a
0:50:31new GPU and CPU and you know all these modern ports like USB-C and etc etc just
0:50:41seems like something Apple should sell so I wouldn't be surprised at all if
0:50:44they have it ready to go on Thursday and we just haven't heard about it because
0:50:47they were able to keep it secret because it's not going through the Asian supply
0:50:51chain that looks like a sieve right yeah well I think I think it would be nice I
0:50:57mean I hope they don't I I don't know I'm not in the market for one I'll
0:51:00I'm never gonna be in the market for one, but I agree with that sentiment that it seems
0:51:07like the kind of thing that they should keep making is sort of a, even if it's just like
0:51:11putting a flag in the ground.
0:51:14I think there's some speculation that people who follow these Intel chipsets, you know,
0:51:21that maybe the timing isn't really quite right for a new Mac Pro because like the last update
0:51:27to the Xeon line of pros and CPUs was, you know, like May or something like that.
0:51:32So you'd think that maybe if they were going to do it, they would have done it in June.
0:51:36And now they're sort of like only just a few months away from like the next one, what's
0:51:40called like gravy train or something like that.
0:51:43I don't think Apple is all that.
0:51:44I think at this point when they've gone this far between updates to Mac Pros, I think if
0:51:49they're six months late on the latest Xeon processors, so what?
0:51:56I don't know that they're looking at keeping the Mac Pro within a couple of weeks of the Intel
0:52:02cutting edge. I don't know, what do you think? Well, I mean, I think if you, it depends on what
0:52:09else you're announcing with it, maybe, and if they're announcing it with new monitors, then
0:52:14maybe that becomes the bigger story than whatever processor is in it. That's exactly where I was
0:52:22I was headin' John.
0:52:23So maybe the reason that they haven't updated the Mac Pro
0:52:27in such an absurdly long time is that they really wanted
0:52:30the quote unquote next Mac Pro to work with the next
0:52:34Apple Cinema Display.
0:52:36Apple hasn't even sold a display since June
0:52:38since they discontinued the non-retina,
0:52:40whatever they called it.
0:52:41Another conspicuous absence from the Apple product lineup
0:52:46is a retina pro display, whatever they wanna call it.
0:52:51cinema display, 5K, whatever.
0:52:54But something like the big iMac display
0:52:59with retina resolution and the high color gamut range
0:53:03and a simple, it just works,
0:53:06just plug this thing into your Mac
0:53:08and you don't have to worry about plugging
0:53:11two or three cables in because you need two graphics cards
0:53:13and it's stitched together or whatever.
0:53:16Just solve all the problems of the bandwidth
0:53:18of driving a 5K retina display.
0:53:21you worry about it, Apple,
0:53:22just give me a simple thing to plug in.
0:53:24So maybe they were waiting for that,
0:53:26and maybe they thought previously
0:53:28that maybe they'd have something like that ready earlier,
0:53:31but it all kind of needs to come together.
0:53:33It seems to me like some of this stuff is a,
0:53:36it all needs to come at once,
0:53:37and that sort of has maybe been the main cause
0:53:41of this unusual dearth of Mac updates, hardware updates.
0:53:46That they kind of want to move to this world
0:53:49there's USB-C ports that do Thunderbolt and that can be connected to a 5K cinema display,
0:53:54but it all kind of needs to come at once. Maybe?
0:53:59>> Yeah.
0:53:59>> So I can see that coming up Thursday.
0:54:01>> It seems like, I mean, that's kind of their thing, right? I mean, they don't,
0:54:05where other companies are happy to introduce a technology and say, "Hey, now we have this."
0:54:11Okay, yeah, you have that, but it doesn't work with everything else. Apple wants to make sure
0:54:16that everything works, at least in general, works better together and creates a story
0:54:24that tries to make that whole package compelling. So I think there's definitely
0:54:32something to that argument.
0:54:34Dave: It's also the case—I know a ton of people who connect their MacBook Pros to a display at
0:54:43at their desk.
0:54:44And that they-- so that at work, you
0:54:49have a nice big display in front of you, maybe two displays.
0:54:52If you keep your MacBook open on the side,
0:54:54you could do it either way.
0:54:55And then at the end of the day, you can just disconnect the thing
0:54:58and take the MacBook Pro home with you,
0:55:00and you just have the MacBook Pro.
0:55:01I know a ton of people who work like that.
0:55:03I know that here in Philly, my friends at HappyCog,
0:55:07a great web development studio or web design studio,
0:55:09they redesigned their whole office around that concept.
0:55:12everybody's desk, all they have at their desk is a display.
0:55:16And then everybody gets a MacBook Pro,
0:55:20and that's how everybody works.
0:55:21You don't even have to sit at the same spot every day.
0:55:23You can just walk up to any open display and plug it in,
0:55:28and you get power in a display.
0:55:30Nobody wants, designers don't want to work
0:55:34with non-retina displays anymore.
0:55:36I mean, it actually is actually,
0:55:38you can't design retina graphics without a retina display.
0:55:41I mean, it's, you know, and developers, you know,
0:55:43I know that they were talking about an ATP this week
0:55:45where Casey List was talking about how he's trying
0:55:48to design a retina iPhone app on a non-retina display,
0:55:52and you end up, then you like run the app on your phone
0:55:55and you realize there's all these graphics that are missing
0:55:57'cause you couldn't even see 'em on your display, you know.
0:56:00You really, it's, you know, you can do it technically
0:56:04in the same way that you could do an illustration
0:56:08with your eyes closed, right?
0:56:10just may not turn out right. You don't have to wear your glasses. You can just take a
0:56:18guess as to whether it's in focus.
0:56:20And again, they'll be crazy. If they do come, they'll be crazy expensive.
0:56:26Oh, well, I don't know about that.
0:56:28Ah, I mean, I think, well, I don't know. They're way too expensive. I mean, I will not be buying
0:56:33one.
0:56:34What does the Retina 5K iMac start at? Let's see. Is that like $1,500?
0:56:40That's exactly what I was going to say. $1,500.
0:56:4227-inch iMac with Retina 5K display. Well, no, it's a little bit more expensive. That starts at $1,800.
0:56:49Okay.
0:56:50I would think that they could sell that display without the computer inside for, I don't know, maybe $1,200? I don't know.
0:56:59But the old Apple 27-inch display was $999.
0:57:04And it was kind of ridiculous about the end of its life that they were still selling it
0:57:08at $999.
0:57:10That is part of what makes this laughable.
0:57:13I understand why Apple sets a price and then keeps the price for the entire product lifetime,
0:57:17as opposed to Dell, which sort of...
0:57:20Dell's computers are sort of like the stock market, where they get repriced every day
0:57:23based on current fluctuations.
0:57:26It's true, though.
0:57:27It really is.
0:57:28It's like you can come, you know, I mean, you can configure the exact same machine at Dell like a
0:57:33week later and it's, you know, it's more like buying an airplane ticket. Like, well, if the
0:57:37plane's filled up— And lots of sales from other, like, the, when I bought my kid a PC laptop a few,
0:57:45couple years ago for Christmas and, yeah, like navigating that whole thing. Like, well, it's,
0:57:50you know, normally placed with this, but this, you know, you get this new coupon sale that we have.
0:57:53Okay, great. So, I got, you know, I got, you know, it's, you know, it's ostensibly the price was like
0:58:01$8.50 and I got it for $7.50 or something like that. I mean, it's like, Apple would never do that.
0:58:06[Laughter]
0:58:08You got a coupon on a retina display. Type in this code at the end.
0:58:21I don't know if I should tell this story or not. I guess I will.
0:58:24I'll tell you, it was one of the worst things I ever, worst I ever felt about myself in my life.
0:58:28I was in college, and it was the middle of the day, and there's, I forget, I can't, I think
0:58:36I actually forget the name of the student union, even though I spent like
0:58:4110 hours a day in the building, because it was where the school newspaper was.
0:58:44And I was going in and out of the building for reasons that I no longer remember, but it was
0:58:49some kind of task.
0:58:50It was maybe like first day of a new semester.
0:58:53And there was something me and another colleague
0:58:56from the student newspaper at Drexel
0:58:57were doing where it required us to keep going back in and out
0:59:01of the building.
0:59:02Middle of the afternoon, nice sunny day.
0:59:04And there's some kid, also a college kid,
0:59:07obviously taking a job from somebody
0:59:09to hand out some kind of flyer to kids coming in.
0:59:14And we weren't coming in like every minute or so.
0:59:17It was maybe like every 20 minutes or so.
0:59:19And every time we went by, he would offer them to us
0:59:23as though he'd never seen us again.
0:59:24And then there's this moment of recognition,
0:59:27and it's like, oh, you guys again, and do it.
0:59:30And after like the seventh time, and he did it again,
0:59:33and he was almost like apologetic,
0:59:36I said, well, are these coupons or coupons?
0:59:39And he said, they're coupons.
0:59:42And I said, well, I only take coupons.
0:59:44[LAUGHTER]
0:59:45And I kept going.
0:59:47And my friend who I was with almost died of laughter,
0:59:50and he said, "I can't believe that guy didn't just punch you."
0:59:53And I was like, "You know, he probably should have."
0:59:56'Cause that, it was uncalled for.
0:59:59It was totally uncalled for.
1:00:01And at the time, I amused myself to death with that,
1:00:04but I'm a changed man, I've grown up.
1:00:06I no longer see others.
1:00:09Well, I do see it as funny, but I no longer see it
1:00:11as something that I would actually say.
1:00:13- It is definitely funny.
1:00:17and, you know, college. I mean, I, you know, I'm not going over the things that I said in college.
1:00:23Well, the funny thing I remember was that when I said it, I didn't expect him to give me an answer.
1:00:27I expected him, when I said it, "Are they coupons or coupons?" I expected him to give me the finger
1:00:32at that point. He didn't even hesitate. He didn't even hesitate. He said, "They're coupons." I even
1:00:38remember that he said, "Coupons instead of coupons." And I just said, "Well, I only accept coupons."
1:00:45[laughter]
1:00:48I don't know what, I don't know something about that. I haven't thought about that story.
1:00:51Matthew: Yeah, if that guy's listening, you know, contact John.
1:00:55[laughter]
1:00:56Pete: And I'll send you a free Derek Fireball t-shirt. I swear to God. I haven't thought
1:01:02about that story in 20 years.
1:01:03[laughter]
1:01:04Matthew: So, I just sent you a link. This happened while we were recording. Apparently,
1:01:12pictures of the of the of the bar leaked in Sierra
1:01:15Of the retina MacBook
1:01:19Images of new MacBook Pro with magic toolbar leaked in Mac OS Sierra 10.12.1
1:01:25Way to go Apple includes Apple pay so there is a like a fingerprint
1:01:34sensor I
1:01:37Also see that they've printed a Mac rumors logo on the return key
1:01:41I saw that. I thought that must be, now they're doing some co-branding, I guess.
1:01:48[Laughter]
1:01:48This has got to drive Phil Schiller nuts.
1:01:55Oh my God, yeah.
1:01:56Right?
1:01:57How did they do that? I mean, I guess this was in the Help?
1:02:01I guess?
1:02:02For 10.12.1?
1:02:04Well, I'll put the—everybody, by the time they hear it, will probably have seen it, but I will.
1:02:08Yeah, everyone's probably seen it.
1:02:09Putting a link into the show notes.
1:02:11And we, you know, it's nice that we talked about it before I noticed that.
1:02:15Way to go, Apple!
1:02:16Couldn't you do it like 15 minutes earlier? I guess they did, but nobody noticed it.
1:02:23Well, that brings us to the next question I was going to have,
1:02:31which is that—I did have it in the notes—which is that it has been rumored, and it does make some
1:02:37sort of, you know, simple sense that they were going to put Touch ID on the new
1:02:41MacBooks. My question was where is it going to go? Like, just the basic idea
1:02:48of having Touch ID on a MacBook, yeah sure, that sounds, it makes a lot of sense,
1:02:52especially once you get used to it on a phone, you realize how nice it is. But
1:02:55where would it go on a MacBook? Would it go on the trackpad? Would it go on
1:03:00like the J key? Would it go, and it looks like, you know, the answer is they're
1:03:07putting it up in this upper right corner of the magic toolbar yeah and my other
1:03:12thought is even if with this magic toolbar would they put it in a corner or
1:03:19put it in the middle because it seems like by putting it in it is it gonna be
1:03:22on both corners it doesn't seem like a waste of components to put two in but on
1:03:28the other hand isn't it oddly biased towards right-handed users by putting it
1:03:32in an upper right corner or am I overthink pose I think maybe you're
1:03:36were thinking. I mean, you know, unlocking with my, you know, I'm assuming the computer unlocks
1:03:42with it too. But unlocking and paying with my left index finger would be not really onerous either,
1:03:50as a right-hander. But I would guess that it's configurable, because I mean,
1:03:57that's the whole point of the thing, right?
1:03:58Pete: Yeah, but the whole thing can't be a touch ID sensor, right? I mean, you'd-
1:04:02you know I suppose not right not yeah it would seem unnecessarily I mean I guess
1:04:07it could be but it seems like that would be wait or you to one in each corner but
1:04:11right that just seems like a waste - that and I guess I guess the power
1:04:15buttons always been on the upper right corner so you know seems like
1:04:18left-handed MacBook users have been able to turn their computers on and off
1:04:22mm-hmm for a while so maybe I'm overthinking that maybe I'm over
1:04:27sensitive to my left-handed friends well maybe they sell different models of
1:04:31lefty and a righty. Like buying golf clubs. They're already selling models that have Mac
1:04:38rumors on the return key. Like golf clubs and scissors you can buy a left-handed MacBook Pro.
1:04:43At the left door, you have to go to the left-over RAM though. You know what bothers me about this
1:04:50shot? Really it does and it's it's I'm showing my age and I got to just get used to it but I look at
1:04:56this there's a picture of it's it's showing I guess it's from the idea you
1:05:01said it's from the help of how to use Apple pay so somebody is making an Apple
1:05:05pay purchase the touchscreen the little strip has a cancel button on the left
1:05:09then it says Apple pay and then something in red that I can't read but
1:05:14I'm guessing it that's as touch here yeah touch here I need a Apple 900 and
1:05:20of course it's going to 326 bucks right what can you get from Apple for 326 but
1:05:25But then you can also see what's on the display.
1:05:28Yeah, no, no, they're buying Beats headphones.
1:05:32You can also see what's on the display, and they're using Safari to buy something from
1:05:36Apple.com.
1:05:38What bothers me is that they're running this Mac with the menu bar hidden.
1:05:45I really, it really bothers me.
1:05:48Full screen mode bothers you?
1:05:51Yeah, it does.
1:05:54I think you're gonna say, doesn't the Apple Pay sheet look like it's not…
1:05:59Connected?
1:06:01Well, it doesn't… maybe it's okay. It almost looks like it's square. It's not that the…
1:06:07Perspective is off.
1:06:09The perspective is off.
1:06:10Yeah, maybe. Like, yeah, sort of. So anyway, I guess we're getting a touch…
1:06:16[Laughter]
1:06:17A touch trim on a Mac.
1:06:18[Laughter]
1:06:20Glad we settled that.
1:06:21Yeah.
1:06:23Presumably if it is OLED they're saying it Mac rumors is saying it as fact that it's an OLED touch panel
1:06:30Which you certainly can't tell from the image
1:06:32but it does make some sense that it's OLED and not LCD because
1:06:35It's gonna be black most of the time or the background is gonna be black all the time and OLED does
1:06:41much blacker blacks than LCD
1:06:44It's like I think the colors are still messed up on OLED, but you certainly can't complain about the blacks
1:06:53This is in they also say a new MacBook Air model. Well, okay same rumor, I guess yeah
1:06:59Well, there's that
1:07:03They say new iMacs are a possibility as well
1:07:08I think that I think that's true it just because I think that the iMac is still sort of the you know
1:07:15It's the the default desktop computer
1:07:19I mean, it's obviously not the Mac Pro or the Mac Mini Mac Mini has been updated in two years
1:07:24So why not? You know, it's been a year. It was October last year
1:07:27Why not just you know, just do a silent or not silent
1:07:31But you know, you know, just take the latest and greatest from Intel and stick it in the gut. I
1:07:36Can't see why they wouldn't do that
1:07:39Yeah
1:07:41Yeah, I don't know why either I mean, but I don't
1:07:44Not sure why they haven't updated them
1:07:47The Mac Pro in the Mac Mini for right several years. All right, so
1:07:52Wrapping up. I think that we will see the new Mac pros. I think
1:07:57We don't know what the hell they're doing with this quote-unquote 13-inch other model
1:08:03Doesn't make any sense to us can't wait to find out about that one. Yeah, I
1:08:09I'm I don't know if I bet on new Mac pros
1:08:12But because it seems to me like you could lose a lot of money over the last three years
1:08:16years by betting on new Mac Pros. But I would at least like to see new Mac Pros, and it
1:08:22seems like maybe if they've been waiting for a Retina display, maybe the time is right.
1:08:26And if we see one, we'll see both.
1:08:29Well, does it seem like, I mean, I'm not sure that these, just updating the laptop line
1:08:36doesn't sound like enough for an event, does it?
1:08:38I don't think so either. I mean, we can continue with that after the sponsor break. Then maybe
1:08:43there's other stuff they could announce other than Mac hardware, but it does seem to me like if it was really just if the only
1:08:49Thing that was really new new like it. This is a new design knew is the MacBook Pros
1:08:53I don't know that they would have an event
1:08:55Right, so I don't know. I mean we certainly know everything, you know, Sierra is already out. It's not like, you know
1:09:01It's not like they have a new operating system to show. Yeah
1:09:05I mean the only other thing that well, okay you want to do a
1:09:10What you're gonna say like well do the air pods I mean that they would announce that air pods are shipping
1:09:15Yeah, but there's nothing just for sale. That's a time in an event for that
1:09:18I'm guessing that that's when they're going to say that because they did say late October and this event will be on the
1:09:2527th of October so
1:09:27So I'm hopeful I hope we are gonna see Mac pros, we'll see I'm not gonna bet the house on it I
1:09:37Would definitely not be surprised to see that we have updated IMAX that look exactly the same but just have updated components
1:09:43I mean, there's no point to up get it updating the display
1:09:46Right, yeah, I mean that displays all right, and that doesn't that doesn't make any sense, right?
1:09:51It's already got the high color gamut and all the pixels you'd want
1:09:54and then there's I guess the only thing left is the Mac mini which I don't think they're gonna I
1:09:59Don't I I don't know. I think that that might be like
1:10:03done
1:10:05You think that oh you really I don't know or maybe it's sort of on at the permanent three or four year schedule
1:10:11I don't know. I just wouldn't be surprised if you know, I did the event comes and goes and there's no news about the Mac Mini
1:10:17I just wish that they would just you know, stick new processors in them. I mean I
1:10:21Do don't you don't have to change it that much just put some new processors in it and then
1:10:25Hey, I don't know. It's all it seems like that's not that hard and you're kind of printing money doing it and
1:10:34Well, Apple's a very small company. I think that you know, I don't know that they have
1:10:38All that bandwidth, you know the internal bandwidth update
1:10:44Update a computer that doesn't even have a display or anything. I would like to see them update the Mac Mini
1:10:51I would like to see them keep it updated. I think the Mac Mini is an interesting little device where yes in many cases
1:10:57It's just the lowest price Apple
1:11:01official Mac that you can buy without, you know, building your own hackintosh thing. And it is just somebody trying to build the cheapest desktop
1:11:08Mac that they can get away with or, you know, and, you know,
1:11:11sensibly reuse existing things like the display that they've already got that's pretty if you have a perfectly fine display,
1:11:18you know, that this is a perfectly fine low-cost Mac.
1:11:21But it's also a device and I'm sure that like, you know, people who listen to my podcasts are among there,
1:11:28where it's in some ways it kind of is a power user device
1:11:31because it's the sort of thing that people who would set up
1:11:33like a media server in their house would do, right?
1:11:36Where it's not like your power user
1:11:38where you're spending a lot of money on it,
1:11:39but where you're doing things that most typical consumers
1:11:43would never even think to do, right?
1:11:46Like, you know, or build like your own, you know,
1:11:49people, I know, you know, people who sort of,
1:11:51rather than buy an Apple TV, will, you know,
1:11:54buy a Mac Mini and sort of, you know,
1:11:56select their own software that they can use to drive their home entertainment system.
1:12:01So that maybe they can watch movies that fell off a truck and stuff like that.
1:12:06There's certain things that you can do if you just have a PC that you control connected
1:12:12to your TV that you couldn't do.
1:12:13So there are power user use cases for the Mac Mini and I always like to think of Apple
1:12:21as a company that makes things that people like that would like to buy.
1:12:25would like to see it, but I'm not holding my breath for it. But maybe, you know, maybe just like in the
1:12:31one fell swoop now everything uses USB-C, you know, maybe they update the Mac Mini too just to get USB-C
1:12:37ports on it. Yeah, I wish that I would like them to do that too. I would consider buying one. I've
1:12:43never owned one. Well, actually, I mean, I have an old one that somebody gave me, but I've never
1:12:48purchased one, and I feel like I might be in the market for one. Like, if I go to,
1:12:54which I'm kind of leaning towards right now, is getting a MacBook Pro again, you know,
1:13:00that iMac upstairs and that ancient MacBook Pro aren't going to last long either, so,
1:13:07and I mostly just need a server, like a media server. And so, I would definitely consider
1:13:13getting a mini for that. Pete:
1:13:17All right, let me take a break and thank our next sponsor. It's our good friends at audible.com.
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1:15:11membership at any time it's a great sponsor for podcast because they know
1:15:16it is why they sponsor podcast because if you're listening to me tell you about
1:15:19audible calm by definition you obviously listen to spoken word content and
1:15:26therefore you're in, you know, right there in the target audience for them.
1:15:29I would wager that there's a higher percentage of talk show listeners
1:15:33who listen to podcasts than there are who sleep on mattresses. It's probably a
1:15:39better fit even than Casper, you know, because some number of you probably
1:15:43just sleep on the floor. But if you're listening to me, I guarantee you, you
1:15:47listen to podcasts. So if you have more time to fill with more audio
1:15:51content, go to audible.com/talkshow and get your free sponsorship. My thanks to them for
1:15:57sponsoring this show. What do you think? Do you think there's a higher percentage of talk
1:16:00show listeners who listen to podcasts or who sleep on a mattress? I think it's got to be
1:16:11listened to podcasts.
1:16:14I think what could skew it, do you know what your numbers are in Japan?
1:16:18No, I don't, but it's non-zero.
1:16:20zero. Right, right. Right? Uh-huh. It's non-zero. So I think as much as... I could throw the whole
1:16:27thing off. God bless Casper. I love him, and I think it's a great fit because almost everybody
1:16:32sleeps on a mattress and needs a new one eventually. Audible, I think, might be the greatest
1:16:37fit for the podcast audience of all time, because by definition everybody listens to audio. I mean,
1:16:42in theory, somebody... I don't have transcripts every week, so I mean, in theory, somebody could
1:16:47rig something up where they're making their own transcripts of the show and reading them,
1:16:50but I would guess that that number is smaller than the number of people who don't have a mattress.
1:16:55They do transcripts of your show for when you do the live one.
1:17:00I do, yeah. Well, yeah.
1:17:02Or somebody does it. Did that, was that Eimor?
1:17:05Yes, this time.
1:17:09Yeah.
1:17:10Serenity Caldwell typed it up in exchange for their being allowed to publish it,
1:17:15which was a good deal, you know, I thought that was a fine deal. And I also pay Vimeo
1:17:22for closed captions for those, so that the video has closed captions. And so I forget what it is,
1:17:31a couple hundred bucks, I don't know. It's a, you know, it's like not, it's, you know, like it's,
1:17:36it's not free, but it was, it seemed like a no-brainer in terms of accessibility.
1:17:40my Twitter bio is actually from that transcript.
1:17:44Pete: Oh, really?
1:17:45[Laughter]
1:17:45Ben: Yeah, because I can't remember what was said about me this last time,
1:17:50but there was a mention of me and then they typed in, Serenity typed in the crowd reaction,
1:17:57which was "Laughter and some awws." So, that's my Twitter bio.
1:18:03Pete; I think the context was, it was in my introduction, I said last year we had Phil
1:18:08Schiller and you know. It was, yeah, I think it was less than charitable if I remember.
1:18:13This, you know, the goal, you know, it would be nice to be able to top it, but one of these years
1:18:19we're going to run out of room to top it and, you know,
1:18:22just going to open the curtains and it's going to be molds.
1:18:25This year is not that year. I think that was it. I think that was pretty close to what I said.
1:18:34It was nice enough. I mean, it was heartfelt. I mean, I meant it.
1:18:38[Laughter]
1:18:41That someday they're going to have to put up with me.
1:18:43Yeah, and we're going to have a good show.
1:18:45Yeah. Look forward to that. I'm interested to know what, I'm assuming that this magic,
1:18:52what the hell is it called? Magic?
1:18:54What do they call it?
1:18:56Toolbar, magic toolbar.
1:18:57Toolbar.
1:18:57defaults to just function keys when there's no other thing presented.
1:19:04Yeah.
1:19:05Nothing else that's been deliberately programmed.
1:19:07Yes.
1:19:08Yeah.
1:19:09Because Owen Williams, I forget where he works now, he's jumped around a lot, was pointing out there's, you know, like if you look at it, there's no escape key.
1:19:21like, that's the one thing that you, that's on the toolbar that you would probably use
1:19:26in a regular application. And like, I think of like Minecraft. Like, there's no escape key,
1:19:33you can't play the game, but there must be, it must just default to what's normally there,
1:19:38if it's not specifically defined.
1:19:40Pete: I, it's, I, even in my days when I was telnetting into things to do my computer science
1:19:49assignments in the 90s on Unix machines, I've always been a BB Edit user, but I had to know.
1:19:56If you can't, you can't go through the old terminal and not eventually learn either Emacs or Vim to
1:20:02some degree. And Vim is effectively unused. I mean, I don't think Apple is all that concerned
1:20:08about people using Vim in a terminal, but it's, you hit the escape key roughly 700 times a minute.
1:20:15It's like, escape is how you do anything.
1:20:17Escape is like enter a command.
1:20:19Escape is switch modes.
1:20:22I just remember when somebody pointed it out
1:20:24with the smart keyboard cover for the iPad
1:20:27that it doesn't have an escape key.
1:20:29And somebody was like, well, how would you use Vim?
1:20:31And it's like, I kind of do wish that they had put the escape--
1:20:34I use the escape key just to cancel things.
1:20:38So I do wish they had an escape key,
1:20:41but I don't know that Vim users are
1:20:44on the front of Apple's mind. Probably not. It does seem weird for the Mac, though. It seems—because
1:20:49at least with the iPad, you could argue that there's no history of it because the software
1:20:53keyboard for the iPad doesn't have an escape key either, but it certainly seems unusual.
1:20:59Our friend Darth already has an image up with the Magic toolbar, and it's like it's the Times Square
1:21:13message thing, and it's just rolling across courage.
1:21:16[Laughter]
1:21:20All right, I'll put a link to it in my shirt.
1:21:22[Laughter]
1:21:28Guy is quite funny.
1:21:30[Laughter]
1:21:33I said this before to me. He's like the funniest, like, political cartoonist going today,
1:21:42And he was like, "Aw, shucks." But it's not—they're not, obviously not traditional political cartoons,
1:21:48but they are political, and they are funny, and they do express complex—
1:21:53It's the modern—it's the modern equivalent.
1:21:55Right. It's updated for the modern age.
1:21:58Darth's tiny-handed Trump Photoshop chops.
1:22:03Like, when he does one for Trump, it doesn't matter whether he mentions the hands or not,
1:22:09He just always shrinks his hand.
1:22:11And the funny part is that Darth is also--
1:22:19I think he's really good at Photoshop.
1:22:21Like, at least he's good at what he does in Photoshop,
1:22:24which isn't trying to fool you into thinking this is real.
1:22:27But it's like, he must--
1:22:30It's a musical.
1:22:31It's just like--
1:22:31Yeah.
1:22:32And I think he does whip these things out in a minute or two.
1:22:35Oh my god, yeah.
1:22:36He's crazy fast.
1:22:37Right.
1:22:37crazy fast but they don't look like they would if I did it where you would know
1:22:41clearly see where the lasso is drawn around the hands like if I was doing it
1:22:47as quickly as he did you'd still see the marching ants around the selection I
1:22:50would just draw that and take a screenshot what about other stuff that
1:22:59Apple might announce this week like they could do like the some like their
1:23:06airport stuff is out of date, would they tie that together with their, you know, home stereo
1:23:13speaker Amazon Echo type thing?
1:23:18That's a good question. I mean, I've heard that thing is out there and being field tested.
1:23:28I wasn't thinking that it was ready to go yet.
1:23:31I don't know. But it seemed like maybe that would maybe help explain why they're having
1:23:35an event if they have something actually new to unveil. Right. I mean, the timing, you know,
1:23:42the timing right before the holidays would be good. Right, if they actually are able to make it. I
1:23:45mean, how they kept it from leaking, who knows, but, you know. Yeah, that's a good question. Made
1:23:52in the USA. I don't know. Probably not. Maybe that guy's been doing more than we thought.
1:23:57I don't know, but it's, you know, I would like to see it. I don't know what else to say about it,
1:24:03other than that it, you know, seems like maybe.
1:24:08My understanding was that it was not that long ago that people were given some units
1:24:20to try out.
1:24:21So that doesn't seem like quite enough time.
1:24:23Like if they found like a real problem, it doesn't seem like enough time to turn it around
1:24:27and do something.
1:24:29I mean, this seemed like real alpha sort of stuff.
1:24:35I don't know.
1:24:36Yeah.
1:24:37But it seems like, you know, even if it's a short event, it seems like they might have
1:24:39room for something like that.
1:24:42Yeah.
1:24:43I linked to a thing—have you seen this, where there was like the widespread Internet
1:24:48outage this week?
1:24:50Mm-hmm.
1:24:51I sort of slept right through it, but I mean, huge parts of the Internet were unavailable.
1:24:56It was during the morning on the East Coast, and some of the afternoon.
1:25:01It seems as though wherever Daring Fireball is hosted seemed to avoid it, because I didn't
1:25:07seem to get any complaints that people couldn't reach Daring Fireball, but a whole bunch of
1:25:12big internet sites were unavailable because there was an attack on the DNS system, and
1:25:18when DNS goes down, pretty much everything goes down.
1:25:22The gist of the attack, which is interesting,
1:25:24is that it was a bunch of internet of things devices,
1:25:28like webcams and just internet-connected cameras
1:25:33and speakers and stuff like that made by these Chinese companies
1:25:36that all have--
1:25:38The same password.
1:25:39--the same password.
1:25:40Like, literally, I'm not making this attack up.
1:25:44And there's a botnet that just slowly but methodically
1:25:48searched the internet for like, are you one of these cameras?
1:25:52Nope.
1:25:53Are you one of these cameras?
1:25:54Nope.
1:25:55You know, thousands and thousands and thousands
1:25:57of times.
1:25:57But then eventually found a yes, noted the address,
1:26:01and then kept going.
1:26:02And then when they wanted to turn on the attack,
1:26:04just told all of these cameras to do a distributed denial
1:26:10of service attack on DNS servers.
1:26:13Anyway, seems to me like a lot of these internet things--
1:26:15of things devices aren't all that secure. Apparently not. And that maybe, you know,
1:26:21I linked before the show started to a two-year or a year-old story about device makers complaining
1:26:28that Apple's HomeKit, you know, HomeKit was slow to make peripherals for because Apple has stringent
1:26:34security requirements. And maybe that makes a lot more sense now.
1:26:43Don't all use the same password. That's our stringent security requirement. Number one.
1:26:49Uh, breaking news.
1:26:52Yeah, I mean, I have a, I've got, you know, the only thing I've got is this one camera, and I
1:26:56don't think it's one of those, but, you know, I don't even know how I would tell.
1:27:01If you come in your office and it attacks you.
1:27:04Yeah, it was growling the other day, but I don't think, I think that was unrelated.
1:27:10I don't know. I don't have any other things to expect on this event.
1:27:12Do you? It's probably not gonna be that big, you know.
1:27:17I think, you know.
1:27:19- So yeah, so this is happening at the campus
1:27:21at the smaller--
1:27:23- Yes, it is at town hall.
1:27:24- Yeah.
1:27:26- It will almost certainly be the last town hall event.
1:27:29I mean, barring some kind of surprise emergency event,
1:27:33sort of like the antenna gate or something like that,
1:27:35I don't see, you know.
1:27:38They even said at the last one that this would probably,
1:27:40that the last one was probably gonna be
1:27:42the last town hall event.
1:27:45So this one I think is almost certainly.
1:27:47Maybe they'll, do you think that maybe they'll
1:27:49let us rip out the chairs?
1:27:50(laughing)
1:27:53They did that at the, I think it was at
1:27:57Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium, which is no longer there,
1:28:01it's now a parking lot.
1:28:01So built in like 1971, the Vat, as we called it lovingly,
1:28:06was the home of the Philadelphia Eagles
1:28:08and the Philadelphia Phillies for, I don't know,
1:28:1020-some years.
1:28:11know, growing up, we had, I don't even remember where these came from, but now you mentioned that
1:28:15we had a couple of bleacher seats. I mean, not bench seats, but like wooden seats from
1:28:23something. I'm thinking maybe the Jets.
1:28:25Pete: Yeah, that's possible.
1:28:26Jared; The whole stadium? Yeah.
1:28:27Pete; I'll bet. Before they built the Meadowlands.
1:28:29Jared; Right, right.
1:28:30Pete; Yeah. So, they let, I forget, I think it was a Phillies game was the last game and there was,
1:28:35I forget I actually forget if they were allowing fans to take the seats or if fans just did
1:28:41Did it on their own like?
1:28:44Guys from a South Philly game in with a ratchet set and just started taking the seat down
1:28:50Maybe they'll let us do that at town hall and take like a souvenir. Yeah
1:28:53We we not only do we so we had those seats and then the other thing that we had were when they made the movie
1:28:59the natural
1:29:01[Music]
1:29:10In order to make it look like the stands were full, they had these like,
1:29:14like cardboard people that they put in and then they just like, they'd intersperse real people
1:29:20here and there to make it look like a real crowd. And so somehow, I don't know how we got these,
1:29:25but we had like cardboard people from that movie. And they sat, we put them in those chairs from
1:29:29the metal lens or whatever from, you know, whatever was before the metal lens.
1:29:33Wouldn't it be cool? That's cool. I didn't know they had cardboard people for that. I think that
1:29:38was a common trick because isn't it the story in the metal ceremony in Star Wars that most of the
1:29:43rebels were cardboard cutouts? Were they cardboard? Was it cardboard or was it a matte painting?
1:29:51I don't know. I don't know. One or the other. It seems like it would have been a matte painting,
1:29:54but I couldn't tell you. Yeah. That's pretty cool. So maybe I should take a big suitcase with me.
1:30:04Yeah, you should. That'd be a hard carry on. Wouldn't that be funny, trying to put a chair
1:30:10from down all into the x-ray machine and trying to convince the flight crew that—
1:30:16You just nail it. You just get the concierge people to nail it for you.
1:30:20This will fit in the overhead, no problem.
1:30:23They are small seats.
1:30:24They might fit in the overhead.
1:30:25- What are they gonna, I don't know, are they keeping,
1:30:32I mean, I assume they're keeping Infinite Loop and--
1:30:36- Yes, they are absolutely, the Infinite Loop camp,
1:30:38they're so overflowing with employees
1:30:42and so in need of office space that I don't even know
1:30:45they're... they have a bunch of interim buildings in Cupertino. I mean, I don't
1:30:52know how interim interim is, but I forget what the reason was. But I know, I just
1:31:03know that there are Apple buildings in Cupertino that you would never even
1:31:07guess were Apple buildings. It's not even because necessarily they're like secret,
1:31:11like it's, you know, it's not like the Project Titan team or something like
1:31:14that. Just people working on stuff, but there's no more room in Infinite Loop, and the new campus
1:31:20isn't open, and so they're just, you know, anything, you know, I think if you own an
1:31:24office building in Cupertino, it's like salad days. No, so I think my understanding is that
1:31:31Infinite Loop will remain fully occupied. There are certainly some people there who are moving
1:31:35to the new office or the new building, but they're going to take up all this space.
1:31:39Well, it seems like they might have use for Town Hall then.
1:31:42Yeah, because I'm sure that they could still have team meetings in there and stuff like that.
1:31:46Jared: So, they might need the seats.
1:31:47[Laughter]
1:31:48Pete: I think they could have a standing meeting.
1:31:51Jared. Try it, just see what happens.
1:31:55Pete; I don't even know why I want these seats. They're very small and uncomfortable,
1:31:59so I don't even know why I want one. I just like the idea of me and Jason Snell taking them apart.
1:32:05Jared. Mm hmm, sure.
1:32:06Pete; Dalrymple could easily.
1:32:08Jared. Oh, yeah, Dalrymple, yeah. He's probably got three already.
1:32:10Almost certainly broken a few of them already. Breaking news, we've got Apple's, as we're
1:32:21recording, Apple's quarterly finance. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, I forgot about that coming
1:32:26up. I don't know that... They out of business yet? I think they're doomed. This just says doomed.
1:32:36I was just reading Tim Cook's remarks. Tim Cook says—
1:32:41Tim Cook could not be more excited, quote, quote, about iPhone 7, 7+ demand,
1:32:46which outstrips supply. That's, you know, no numbers applied to that.
1:32:51Yeah. Yeah, it's—
1:32:54So, iPhones above estimates.
1:32:57Yeah, it looks like they're a little bit above, but they're still down year over year, 45 million.
1:33:02But I think that the consensus was 43 million, so they sold an extra 2 million.
1:33:06Mac sales were 4.9 million down from 5.7,
1:33:11but it's just like the whole reason,
1:33:14part of the reason that I was willing to record
1:33:18this show before this results is I didn't expect
1:33:20these results to be that exciting,
1:33:22and part of it is just like we've just spent 90 minutes
1:33:25talking about how every single Mac in the lineup
1:33:27is outdated and anybody, you know,
1:33:31so I don't think it's a shock,
1:33:32I don't think it's a sign of problems with the Mac
1:33:34that sales are slightly down.
1:33:36I think it's almost shocking that they weren't down more.
1:33:39- Yeah, definitely.
1:33:41- He says that Tim Cook says they're thrilled
1:33:45with the customer response to Apple Watch Series 2
1:33:48and the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
1:33:50But the other reason that this quarter
1:33:51is not that interesting is this quarter ended
1:33:53at the end of September, so the only iPhone 7 sales
1:33:56that are even counted are the initial
1:34:00opening weekend sales more or less.
1:34:04I don't think there's anything all that interesting here. Average selling price for the iPhone is up,
1:34:09but down for both the iPad and the Mac. Hmm. Well, I think that makes sense because I think it makes
1:34:16sense because I think most of the people who are buying a Mac are the people who are,
1:34:19I'm not even gonna say uninformed, but that they don't even care, you know, about whether it's a
1:34:23year-old chipset or something like that. I would expect that average selling price of the Mac is
1:34:30is going to go up next time we hear from Apple.
1:34:34Because I think there's a lot of people waiting.
1:34:36Here, let me just take a break here.
1:34:40This is a good time.
1:34:41And thank our third and final sponsor.
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1:34:45They've been with the show for a long time.
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1:37:51What else we got?
1:37:52I got a Google Pixel.
1:37:54- Oh yeah, yeah, you wanna talk about that?
1:37:56- Yeah, a little bit.
1:37:57Do you have any questions?
1:37:58What questions do you have for me?
1:37:59I've been using it for about a week.
1:38:00- Well, you were doing a little Siri
1:38:04and Assistant comparison, weren't you?
1:38:06- I have been, yes.
1:38:08- You wanna talk about that,
1:38:09or are you saving that for a blowout?
1:38:12- No, it's hard to do.
1:38:15I don't know if I'm gonna do a big, massive comparison,
1:38:17but I have to say, just keeping both devices with me
1:38:21and doing the same things on both devices.
1:38:24I do admit, I think that overall, I
1:38:27think Google Assistant is a little bit ahead of Siri
1:38:32in some ways.
1:38:33And the main way that I think it's ahead
1:38:35is just in the way that Google web search is the best web
1:38:40search, that they're still ahead of Bing and DuckDuckGo
1:38:44and other search engines.
1:38:45But just things that you expect to find
1:38:47through traditional Google, where you just type
1:38:49in a browser and type a thing in a box and you expect to get the right answer from Google.
1:38:55Google Assistant can answer those type of things in general better than Siri.
1:39:02But for the things I actually ask from Siri and Google Assistant, they're a lot closer
1:39:07than to me that the conventional wisdom would have you think.
1:39:12That the conventional wisdom to me is that Google is kicking ass in this area and that
1:39:17that Siri is a piece of useless garbage.
1:39:20(laughing)
1:39:22I'm saying it sounds like hyperbole,
1:39:24but I mean, I see this all the time.
1:39:26I see people writing this.
1:39:27This just seems to be the assumption
1:39:29that a lot of people have.
1:39:30And it just isn't backed up in real life.
1:39:33I did an example on Saturday.
1:39:37I know that it was Saturday, and I couldn't remember,
1:39:40I don't know if you know this or not,
1:39:41I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan.
1:39:42- Oh, I hadn't heard that.
1:39:45- I couldn't remember when Dallas played again.
1:39:47It was an honest question.
1:39:48I was pretty sure.
1:39:50But I asked both devices, when does Dallas play?
1:39:54And I didn't say the Dallas Cowboys.
1:39:56I just said, when does Dallas play?
1:39:58And if I'm recalling correctly, Google Assistant
1:40:06gave me a Dallas Cowboys score from two weeks ago, which
1:40:14was not the answer to the question.
1:40:16Even though, and it shows you what it thinks it heard.
1:40:18It heard me say, "When does Dallas play?"
1:40:20Siri, on the other hand, I said, "When does Dallas play?"
1:40:23Said, "Which team?"
1:40:24And offered me the Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Cowboys,
1:40:28and whatever their ice hockey team is.
1:40:30And I tapped Dallas Cowboys, and then Siri correctly told me
1:40:34that Dallas plays the Philadelphia Eagles next Sunday
1:40:37at 8.30 on Sunday Night Football.
1:40:40Correct answer.
1:40:42I mean, and a lot of my examples that I find
1:40:45where Siri works better than both Alexa and Google now,
1:40:49seem to be sports-based.
1:40:51It seems like--
1:40:51Yeah, I was going to say, it does
1:40:53seem like they have spent a bunch of time making sure
1:40:56that sports stuff works well.
1:40:57Yeah, and part of it is that the--
1:41:00I don't know, part of it is Siri and what Siri says to you.
1:41:02And part of it is that Apple has partnered
1:41:04with Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Sports
1:41:06seems to have not just good information,
1:41:08but it seems to have it structured in a way
1:41:12that Siri can really take advantage of it.
1:41:15So maybe my perspective as somebody
1:41:19who's a relatively big sports fan
1:41:21is maybe better suited to Siri's sports focus
1:41:25than people who aren't,
1:41:26but I just think that the general idea
1:41:28that the Google Assistant is way, way, way ahead of Siri
1:41:31is just not true.
1:41:33And then the other thing that I just linked to
1:41:34the other day was MKBHD, Marques Brownlee,
1:41:39who does these amazing--
1:41:41- Yeah.
1:41:42Yeah, I saw that he's like, you know when I hear about people who are like professional youtubers and I see some of their videos
1:41:46I'm like, I cannot believe that this is a professional and then I see his and I'm like, well, he's like
1:41:51He was like born to be on TV. Yeah. Yeah, and he does all the video work himself
1:41:58I've seen him doing it in the hands-on areas at the Apple events and it's amazing. It's like he's a one-man studio
1:42:03It is absolutely amazing watching him work. But anyway, he had a comparison of
1:42:08Siri versus
1:42:10Google Assistant. And it was remarkable to me how many of them were exactly the same,
1:42:16both in response time and accuracy. Yeah, I thought, you know, and I think overall,
1:42:23I was surprised. And you know, what I found very interesting was I assumed that Assistant was much
1:42:28better at the contextual questions where you ask it one question, then you ask the following
1:42:32question that plays off that previous question. I always, I just assumed that Assistant would be
1:42:39much better. Actually, I think it is better, but what I was really surprised about was that
1:42:44Siri got any of them at all. I just assumed that it wouldn't, from question, because I've never
1:42:50actually experienced that personally, but I haven't tried it recently. And it seemed like
1:42:56every time I tried it before, it's like, you know, it's being hit on the head each time. It doesn't
1:43:00remember what the previous question was. Pete: Right. And what we're talking about would be
1:43:04sequences of queries, like if you said, "Hey, what is the—hey, Dingus, what's the Dallas Cowboys
1:43:11record?" And then after you get the answer, then if you said, "When do they play next?" So your
1:43:16query is, "When do they play next?" And you're assuming that the assistant can pick up the "they"
1:43:21means the team you just asked about 10 seconds ago. Yeah, I think it was he was talking about
1:43:27presidents or something like that, and you know, like, "When was so-and-so born, and how tall,
1:43:32and then how tall is he?
1:43:34Who's the president of the United States?
1:43:35How tall is he?
1:43:36Yeah, that's right.
1:43:38And I think Google Assistant got that one right,
1:43:40and Siri did not.
1:43:43I think Siri humorously--
1:43:45Google Assistant said Barack Obama is 6 foot 1 inches tall,
1:43:48and Siri gave him the height of the United States of America.
1:43:52Not perfect.
1:43:57But there were some basic ones, though,
1:43:59like, you know, what's the weather? Where they — the exact same speed was almost striking. You'd
1:44:08almost think that they were hooked up to the same back end, given how similar the response times
1:44:13were. And Apple provided — Siri provided a little bit more, like, charts and graph kind of stuff.
1:44:22Yeah. And maybe that stuff comes from, well, from Alpha, I'm not sure.
1:44:28Yeah, well, there's one thing that MKBHD
1:44:32missed in his comparison.
1:44:34And I wasn't fully aware of it either.
1:44:36I kind of knew this vaguely, especially
1:44:41because I've been using AirPods for the last month.
1:44:43But then somebody on Twitter called it out.
1:44:45I don't know who, so I'm sorry for not giving you credit.
1:44:47But which is that Siri responds differently
1:44:52based on how you invoke it.
1:44:54And so if you do it purely by voice with a hey dingus,
1:44:58you get more back through audio than you
1:45:04do if you use the Home button.
1:45:06If you use the Home button, Siri makes the assumption
1:45:09that you're ready to touch things.
1:45:11So just for example, my example from the other day
1:45:14when I asked about when, quote, "when does Dallas play,"
1:45:17unquote, it gave me an on-screen listing
1:45:21of which Dallas and the three teams, and I could tap it.
1:45:24But if I was doing it through AirPods, it would be an audio prompt.
1:45:29Oh, OK.
1:45:31How would it-- it would just ask you?
1:45:33Like, it would name them out?
1:45:34I think so.
1:45:34I could try it and get back to you.
1:45:37But--
1:45:37Yeah, don't do it right now.
1:45:39But I think I've seen that too, where I have another--
1:45:46at least one other Amy in my context.
1:45:48And so it's like, if I say text Amy, blah, blah, blah.
1:45:53If I'm doing it through the AirPods, I can answer just audially that I want my wife,
1:46:00not the other one.
1:46:03So that's an interesting difference.
1:46:05But I really do think that the conventional wisdom on where Siri stands compared to the
1:46:11state of the art is way off.
1:46:13It may be behind.
1:46:14I probably wouldn't dispute that overall.
1:46:17But it's so multivariate in so many different areas.
1:46:21are clearly some areas where Siri is actually ahead that I do think that they're all in the
1:46:25same ballpark at this point. Yeah. Yeah. I think, and I don't have a device currently that
1:46:32will do that assistance. I haven't played around with it in a long time. And, you know,
1:46:40just relying on what everybody says, but it sure really is like conventional wisdom that
1:46:46Google is so much far ahead, and it does not seem to be really that far ahead.
1:46:51Yeah, I would almost say that, if anything, the conventional wisdom isn't so much underestimating
1:46:57Siri, it's overestimating Google Assistant. And again, for trivia questions, it is a little better
1:47:04because it's just, you know, like if you just treat it as a vocal input for the Google search
1:47:09box. But for a lot of contextual stuff, it's not. And it doesn't know things like
1:47:15like I couldn't figure out how to take a screenshot on my Pixel
1:47:20and asking Google Assistant was absolutely no help.
1:47:23I'm not shocked that it wasn't a help,
1:47:28but it does seem like if you're supposed
1:47:31to be able to talk to your device,
1:47:32it seems like the device--
1:47:34eventually, it should be the case that if you have a phone
1:47:38that has a Google Assistant, you should be able to say,
1:47:40how do I take a screenshot?
1:47:41And it should be able to tell you, don't you think?
1:47:44yeah, definitely. I mean, that's—it seems like that's exactly what it should get right, because
1:47:52that's what they have complete control over. I mean, that kind of, you know, it's like,
1:47:56you know, spotlight for—but by voice.
1:47:59Pete: Yeah. The trick with taking a screenshot on the Android devices is that you press the
1:48:05power button and volume down, but you have to press them at the same time. Maybe not quite,
1:48:12you know, like a hundredth of a second same time, but if you press one before the other,
1:48:16it doesn't work. Like, if you press volume down even slightly before the power,
1:48:20you immediately start changing the volume. And if you turn power and don't quite hit volume down
1:48:27within a very small fraction of a second, it powers, you know, brings up the "do you want
1:48:32to turn your phone off" thing. Yeah. I wasn't sure how to reboot the iPhone 7, because when Karen and
1:48:41Hank both got theirs, I was setting theirs up, restoring their backups to their phones,
1:48:46and at one point one of them froze and I had to force restart it and, you know, because now it's
1:48:55the power—what is it? No, it's the volume button and the power button. Yeah. I think you hold down
1:49:02both volume and power or something like that. Yeah, and I think I ended up just doing it by
1:49:06accident because I was just trying everything in someone because I couldn't understand why it
1:49:09wasn't working when I was doing the home button and the power button.
1:49:14What other? Do you have any other Pixel questions? I will say my—
1:49:21So, you know, everybody seems to think that it looks—I don't think it looks that great,
1:49:25but how does it feel in real life?
1:49:29I got the smaller one. I got the five-inch one, and I realized that—I forget how many
1:49:33Android phones I've had over the last few years, but they've all been way too big for
1:49:38for my taste, and this is the first Android phone
1:49:40I've ever purchased that is either not a piece of junk
1:49:45and not too big.
1:49:46It is clearly a little bigger than the iPhone,
1:49:50the 4.7-inch iPhones.
1:49:52I mean, not just looking at it,
1:49:55but it feels a little bigger.
1:49:56It is a little wider, which is the biggest difference,
1:49:58but it's nowhere near as wide as an iPhone 7 Plus,
1:50:01and so I could live with this as the size of my phone.
1:50:05So I appreciate that a lot.
1:50:06So that's the small one, and it's bigger than the iPhone 7.
1:50:10Yeah, it's exactly as much bigger
1:50:11as you would think given that the display is 5 inches instead
1:50:16of 4.7 inches.
1:50:18And when you just look at it, and you can kind of
1:50:20see that it has a chin and forehead of roughly
1:50:23the same proportions as an iPhone.
1:50:25Just that basic-- the fact that looking at it front on,
1:50:30clearly, I don't even--
1:50:32I think it's almost admirable that they're not denying it,
1:50:34that it looks like an iPhone.
1:50:35It feels exactly as much bigger as you would think,
1:50:38given that the display's a little bigger.
1:50:40- Yeah.
1:50:40Interesting that that's the stage,
1:50:45that's what's going on in that market,
1:50:47because we have some friends,
1:50:49and her father recently bought his first iPhone
1:50:54after having Android for years,
1:50:57because he got the SE, 'cause he wanted a smaller phone,
1:51:00and he simply could not get one in the Android market.
1:51:03- Right, well, it's nowhere near SE-sized,
1:51:05there's still a gaping hole in the Android market at that size. But, you know, this is to my…
1:51:12I think Sony has had some phones roughly this size that are considered high-end Android phones,
1:51:18but I've never used one. So… Yeah. But what I find that really funny,
1:51:21because that's always one of the things that people say, is the advantage of the Android
1:51:25ecosystem is that you have so many different manufacturers that you can get a phone, any kind
1:51:31kind of phone that you want and any kind of phone that you want as long as it's not a
1:51:36four inch screen.
1:51:37Right. As long as it's giant.
1:51:40Yeah, right. As long as it's huge.
1:51:44I don't know quite what the, you know, I don't know. I've always, I think part of that is
1:51:48too, is that they need it for battery life. That battery life is in general worse on Android
1:51:53than iOS.
1:51:54Okay.
1:51:55And I'm not quite sure though. I will say battery life on this device is fine. It seems
1:52:00exactly equivalent to the iPhone 7 with extended use. Well it's a little bit
1:52:06thicker at one end right because it doesn't have a camera it doesn't have a
1:52:09camera bump it's like wedge shaped. Right I can't believe that nobody commented on
1:52:14this at the original debate but we're not debate the event product
1:52:18introduction event where I was like if it doesn't have a camera bump but the
1:52:21it's thicker on one end than the other is it a wedge shape or is it like a step
1:52:26design where the glass part is thicker and the other part is thinner and there's a step in
1:52:31between? And the answer is it's a wedge shape. It's obviously not quite as wedge-shaped as like
1:52:37a MacBook Air, but there is a wedge shape to it. I don't love that.
1:52:41Tim Cynova Yeah, well, people were saying, "Oh, look,
1:52:43there's no camera bump, ha ha ha." And they thought, "Well, wait a minute, there has to be..."
1:52:47Either people were wrong about the fact that there had to be a camera bump because of physics,
1:52:55or it has to be thicker, one or the other.
1:52:57Pete: It's a, you know, it's sort of unapple-like, but I think camera bumps are unapple-like. I can't
1:53:03decide what would be more unapple-like. The camera bump or a wedge shape. It does feel a little,
1:53:10a little top-heavy in my hand because it's thicker at the top than the bottom, but not too much,
1:53:15and even when I, and maybe it's my imagination almost, because when I balance it on my finger,
1:53:20the balance point is only slightly towards the top instead of the center point.
1:53:23- Yeah.
1:53:24- And the fact that it doesn't have a camera bump is nice.
1:53:28I will say.
1:53:31- I mean, I don't have a camera bump either, but.
1:53:33- The touch ID sensor is extremely fast.
1:53:35If it's not as fast as Apple's, it's close to as fast.
1:53:40It takes suspiciously shorter time to train than Apple.
1:53:46And I just reset another iPhone the other day
1:53:50and went through it again.
1:53:51So the memory, it is fresh.
1:53:53It definitely takes fewer lift and put it back down
1:53:57to get your finger registered
1:53:58with the Pixel fingerprint sensor.
1:54:00So either they're actually training it a lot faster
1:54:04than Apple or they're--
1:54:06- They're looser about it.
1:54:07- Right.
1:54:09I don't know, but I can't, I certainly haven't had,
1:54:11I've tried using other fingers
1:54:13and it never falsely unlocks the phone,
1:54:15so it seems all right.
1:54:16Camera's good.
1:54:20They have one.
1:54:20- Yeah, so it seems like,
1:54:21I mean, some people were questioning.
1:54:25I mean, everybody seemed to think
1:54:26that it was at least as good as the iPhone wanted,
1:54:29and some people maybe thought it was even better.
1:54:31And then the other people were saying,
1:54:32"How can you say that?
1:54:33"Look at how yellow this picture is."
1:54:34And I was like, "I don't see any yellow in that picture.
1:54:37"I don't know what you're talking about."
1:54:38- You know, I've taken some side by side.
1:54:40I've gone out sometimes in the daytime
1:54:42and had both phones with me,
1:54:44and there was a theater around the corner from our house
1:54:46that just got just blown up.
1:54:50I guess they didn't blow it up,
1:54:51but they ripped it apart.
1:54:52Now it's a big hole in the ground, which I,
1:54:54for some reason, find an interesting thing
1:54:56to take pictures of.
1:55:00And they both look very good to me.
1:55:04I can't say that one is better than the other,
1:55:06but they both look good.
1:55:07Every once in a while, one will look a little better
1:55:09than the other.
1:55:10I find that the pictures are way closer between the two
1:55:13than in a lot of the examples I linked to last week.
1:55:16I linked to a whole bunch of Google Pixel reviews,
1:55:18and most of them had side-by-side comparisons
1:55:21with the iPhone 7 camera.
1:55:22And some of them made the iPhone 7 pictures
1:55:25look very washed out to me,
1:55:27where I would just say the color,
1:55:28it just seemed like they were much brighter,
1:55:30like if somebody took a picture of a field of grass
1:55:32side by side, that the Pixel 1 looked bright green
1:55:35and very nice, and that the iPhone 1 looked a little drab,
1:55:38which doesn't match my experience
1:55:41with the iPhone camera at all,
1:55:42and it really makes me wonder whether,
1:55:44what processing they were doing with the images
1:55:48to get them from here to there.
1:55:50In my use, side by side, the colors are very, very similar
1:55:54between the two cameras.
1:55:55I mean, I'm not--
1:55:58They have a nice shortcut.
1:56:00I'm also definitely not enough of a camera person to--
1:56:05I mean, I've said this before, but I
1:56:07feel like the camera topped out for me at the iPhone 4.
1:56:12My favorite feature of the whole phone, I think,
1:56:15is that there's a system-wide shortcut where
1:56:18if you double tap the power button,
1:56:19it puts you in camera mode no matter what you're doing.
1:56:22So if the phone is off and locked, double tap it,
1:56:25and you're in that quickly.
1:56:26I just did it, and then you're in.
1:56:28- That's cool.
1:56:29- If you're using the phone,
1:56:30like you're just reading your email,
1:56:32and you wanna take a picture of something,
1:56:34quick double tap that button,
1:56:35and you jump to camera mode.
1:56:37And the camera mode does start up
1:56:38about as fast as you could reasonably expect,
1:56:41ready to take a picture.
1:56:42That's a really cool feature.
1:56:45And I think on the iPhone,
1:56:48I've just started getting used to the lift to whatever they call it.
1:56:54Oh yeah, raise to wake.
1:56:56The thing where you raise to wake the phone.
1:56:57Wake, yes.
1:56:58And my favorite aspect of raise to wake with the iPhone 7 is you raise to wake and if you
1:57:02want to take a picture, you just slide the lock screen to the left and you're in the
1:57:06camera.
1:57:07Yeah.
1:57:08And so I've really gotten used to that.
1:57:09So when my phone, if I see something I want to take a picture of quickly, I can take it
1:57:13out of my pocket.
1:57:14wake almost always turns on when I take it out of my pocket and just start sliding to
1:57:18the left anywhere. I don't have to aim for like a little camera icon in the corner or
1:57:23anything anymore. Love that feature. I actually think that that's probably a little better
1:57:30than the double tap the button that this Pixel has, but when you're actually already in the
1:57:34phone and unlocked, I think that the Pixel shortcut is actually quicker.
1:57:38Yeah, having something universal. I mean, I guess you can swipe up and then...
1:57:43But that's not as quick as double tapping that button.
1:57:45No, no. And it's also, you know, sometimes doesn't work right.
1:57:49Right. Double tapping this button always works.
1:57:51I can't remember which app it is, but there's an app that I use. Oh, it's actually Notes.
1:57:56I have a, like if I'm in a note, now it seems to be working. Maybe, maybe because maybe,
1:58:04maybe that got fixed in the most recent update, but I was having a hell of a time
1:58:09invoking the control center thing, whatever that thing is called at the bottom.
1:58:12and notes. I did the thing where you can connect the pixel to your iPhone through
1:58:21a cable in the initial setup and it'll slurp over what it can. And you know this,
1:58:26I put it in a Slack that we're both members of, but it makes the
1:58:32pixel look like a PC to the iPhone. And that's what the adapter is. The
1:58:38adapter is like a USB A theme.
1:58:40So the iPhone will give you the,
1:58:41do you trust this computer prompt that it's supposed to
1:58:44to make sure you're not getting hacked, you know.
1:58:47- So is this just for pictures?
1:58:49- No, it will do all sorts of things,
1:58:52including your SMS messages and iMessages.
1:58:55- Wow.
1:58:56- If, well, here's the, there is a catch.
1:58:59The catch is while you're going through the setup,
1:59:01I have my iPhone backups encrypted.
1:59:07they tell you that if you'd like to slurp over all that stuff,
1:59:10you have to connect your iPhone to iTunes
1:59:13and turn off backup encryptions or encrypt your backups.
1:59:18And then it'll be able to do it.
1:59:20Otherwise, it will only be able to get your pictures and maybe
1:59:24something, one or two other things.
1:59:26I was like, thanks, but no thanks.
1:59:28I'm not going to--
1:59:31I'm not that interested in it.
1:59:32So I did have it slurp over all my pictures.
1:59:35And it didn't get them all.
1:59:37I don't really know what the hell happened.
1:59:40But part of it, I think, is the fact that I've got--
1:59:43obviously, this is what I think is the problem,
1:59:45is that I have iCloud Photo Library on.
1:59:48So however many tens of thousands
1:59:50of photos I have in my overall iCloud library,
1:59:52they're not all on my iPhone.
1:59:54So it only grabbed some of the ones that are actually present.
1:59:57And then the worst part was it took 1,590 of them.
2:00:04And the day that I did this was October 20th.
2:00:08And it gave all 1,590 of my photos
2:00:11the date of October 20th, 2016.
2:00:15And most of them were--
2:00:16I think what happened--
2:00:17I haven't done a full investigation,
2:00:19but I think what happened is that these were images
2:00:21where they didn't have the date in the EXIF data,
2:00:25that the date was only the file date, the file system date.
2:00:29My phone-- my iPhone knows exactly what date they
2:00:31were picked on my Mac everywhere.
2:00:34I've had these photos, like they were in my iPhoto library
2:00:39from back when iPhoto was a thing.
2:00:41I've had these photos, most of them were like 10 years old.
2:00:43A lot of them were the images that,
2:00:46from until like 2006 or so, I think around 2006,
2:00:50I still shot a lot of images on 35 millimeter film
2:00:53with an SLR, and then what I would do
2:00:56is when I got those photos developed,
2:00:57I would have the photo developed
2:00:59and place scanned them to a CD.
2:01:02And a lot of them were those images.
2:01:04And I just think that they didn't put XF data in them,
2:01:06I think, but the dates just came from the dates on the CD.
2:01:09The files had dates, they just weren't official.
2:01:12Anyway, Google gave me 1600 photos on that date,
2:01:16and that wasn't good.
2:01:18I think I would have been better off.
2:01:24I don't know.
2:01:26To me, the upgrade from your phone
2:01:27is a little bit of a gimmick.
2:01:29I don't know. I think I would have been better off setting it up fresh.
2:01:32But it took it from a backup?
2:01:35Or you just had to connect, you just had to turn off the encryption?
2:01:39Oh, because it was probably the phone, your iPhone was thinking,
2:01:42"I'm only going to give anything an encrypted backup."
2:01:45Yes, exactly. Right, exactly.
2:01:48So you have to, yeah. I didn't know, I never really thought about how that worked,
2:01:51but that's apparently how it worked, and I had no interest in that.
2:01:54I wasn't curious enough about how it worked to do that.
2:01:56Yeah, I didn't realize that anything other than iTunes could get your, I mean, I guess it makes
2:02:01sense if it's not encrypted, but I mean, that I've just never had any experience with that,
2:02:05anything other than iTunes getting stuff. I mean, obviously, there's other camera apps that can grab
2:02:12the photos. But I didn't know that things like SMS messages were also possible.
2:02:20What else? Fingerprint sensor on the back. No good. It's inconvenient as you would…
2:02:27**Matt Stauffer** Oh, no. I didn't… Yeah, there's one on the back.
2:02:29**
2:02:29**
2:02:29**Ezra Kleinman** Yeah, it's where the Apple logo is on an iPhone.
2:02:31It's not the worst, but you do have to fish around for it sometimes. And I can't figure out why
2:02:41sometimes I can wake the phone by doing it, and sometimes I can't. It just is not as good as
2:02:47as having the fingerprint sensor where Apple put it.
2:02:51Now, could be that I've got a couple of years of iPhone
2:02:54experience, and it's a little subjective,
2:02:56but I don't think so.
2:03:01What else?
2:03:02Material.
2:03:03The aluminum is actually more of a matte finish than Apple's.
2:03:08It doesn't really feel as nice, but I
2:03:10think it's less slippery, so there's a practical advantage
2:03:12to it.
2:03:14I think it's very--
2:03:15I got the black one, of course.
2:03:17I think it's very strange that they named the color
2:03:19quite black, which is a very googly, cutesy thing,
2:03:23when in fact it's not quite black at all.
2:03:25In fact, honest to God, the better name for it
2:03:28would be not quite black, because it's very, very clearly
2:03:31just a dark gray, and the display is black.
2:03:35So when you look at it, especially in sunlight,
2:03:37both on the front and the rear,
2:03:39it is definitely dark gray, not black.
2:03:42So it seems very funny to me
2:03:45they named it quite black. Yeah, I mean not quite black would be even funnier. Yeah. I mean, you know,
2:03:51it'd be like a funnier joke and more accurate. Uh, what else? And other than that, it's a very nice
2:03:58phone. I do think that this OLED display, I've compared it, the best comparison I can think of
2:04:02is looking at Instagram, and I look at the same photos on both phones on Instagram, uh, and
2:04:08especially in in kit, to me, in incandescent lighting, meaning photos that are taken indoors,
2:04:14at night time.
2:04:17I don't think it's not the camera because these images are from Instagram.
2:04:22It's the display. It makes people look sort of yellowy.
2:04:26The OLED display to me gets, it's a very orangey,
2:04:31yellowy color that looks, it doesn't look like to me what a room looks like in
2:04:36indoor lighting, whereas the iPhone does. So I'm still skeptical about OLED
2:04:41as a replacement for LCDs on these devices. And then last but not least, I still really
2:04:49dislike Android. Well, I hope my pictures look good on my magic
2:04:56toolbar. I'm kind of worried about that. I will say this. I would summarize it like
2:05:03this. If I could run iOS on this device, I would not be as happy as I am with the iPhone
2:05:09But I this is the first Android device I've ever used where I think I'd be fine
2:05:13And I wouldn't hate my life every day that I had to do it if I could run iOS on this device
2:05:17It would be fine. It is by far and away the nicest Android phone I've ever used
2:05:21That's pretty and I could you know
2:05:24I would need an entire three hour episode of the show to go through what I don't like about it, right? Yeah
2:05:29Well, have a good time on Thursday, all right pick up a couple of Mac books for me
2:05:36I will try to get you a chair.
2:05:38We in a chair.
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