0:00:00- [Peter] Just get it out of the way.
0:00:02Let's just start right off the bat.
0:00:03It's a big day for you.
0:00:06- Yes, absolutely. - Today you announced
0:00:08you're going solo with a YouTube channel.
0:00:13You're leaving iMore.
0:00:14You've been there 11 years.
0:00:16You gave me a heads up about a week ago.
0:00:22You know, I sort of knew you had an inkling,
0:00:23but tell me more.
0:00:24What are your thoughts behind this?
0:00:26What's going on?
0:00:29- Well, I mean, I'm more back when I first joined
0:00:32that it was still phone different
0:00:33and it was run by a very small network of people.
0:00:36And it just, it kept growing and it became Mobile Nations.
0:00:39And then a year ago, it was bought by Future PLC
0:00:43which is one of the biggest companies in media.
0:00:46They own everything like a Nantech and Tom's Guide
0:00:48and TechRadar and just almost every site you can imagine.
0:00:52And it became like a grownup big company.
0:00:54And I'd worked in grownup big companies before.
0:00:57And I had just sort of come to really appreciate
0:01:00the smaller environment.
0:01:02And everyone was doing great.
0:01:04Lori Gill had taken over iMore on a day-to-day basis,
0:01:07and she was just knocking it out of the park.
0:01:09And Al Sacco had taken over a lot of what I used to do
0:01:11around the network, and he was just so good at it
0:01:14that it felt like a year after the purchase,
0:01:17everything was solid.
0:01:18I didn't feel guilty about leaving everyone in the lurch.
0:01:21And after watching like you and Dalrymple and Snell
0:01:24just walking into events and doing exactly
0:01:27what you wanted to do with them
0:01:28and not have to worry about all the things
0:01:31that happen when you're on somebody else's dime.
0:01:34I just thought now is the time.
0:01:36If I don't do it now, I'll wake up
0:01:37and in 10 years I'll still be,
0:01:39I'll probably be part of an even bigger company by then.
0:01:41- I think it's probably surprising
0:01:43and I'm just, it's good to be busy.
0:01:47And that's all of the world's craziness right now.
0:01:51And I feel like I'm busier than ever.
0:01:53You're obviously way busier than ever now
0:01:56that you've got all of this going on.
0:01:58But just trying to catch up a little bit today
0:02:00after you went public with this
0:02:02and all of the well wishes and everything.
0:02:04One thing that caught my eye is that it surprised
0:02:09some people that you were just an employee of iMore.
0:02:14You know what I mean?
0:02:16And I know that you weren't just an employee.
0:02:18You're the editor and you're certainly
0:02:19the biggest name there and that you've been there forever
0:02:23and not forever, but 11 years is a long time ago.
0:02:27What was the name of the site originally?
0:02:29I don't even remember that.
0:02:30- It was Phone Different, and then the iPhone Blog,
0:02:32and then Tippie, and then iMore.
0:02:35- I don't remember any of those names.
0:02:37- Yep. (laughs)
0:02:39- But that is interesting.
0:02:40And again, what is the name of the parent company?
0:02:43- It was Mobile Nations, it was first Smartphone Experts,
0:02:46and then it became Mobile Nations,
0:02:47and now it was bought by Future,
0:02:49which is just an enormous British media conglomerate.
0:02:51- Right, and again, those really are,
0:02:55I mean, I don't think people realize how,
0:02:57I don't even know if I realize, and I'm in the racket,
0:03:00how consolidated they've gotten in terms of
0:03:05buying top-tier independent publications.
0:03:11And NonTech, absolutely great site.
0:03:14Tom's Hardware, or Tom's, what?
0:03:18- Tom's Guide Laptop.
0:03:19- Tom's Guide, right.
0:03:21But again, truly a great site with a long history,
0:03:24a terrific reputation.
0:03:27I'll put iMore on the list.
0:03:31It's obviously been there for a long time under that name.
0:03:35And in terms of covering just the day-to-day Apple Beat,
0:03:38it's up there.
0:03:39I mean, it's current news cycle of the COVID-19 aside,
0:03:44the media world has already been,
0:03:47It's a tremendous uncertainty for career media professionals.
0:03:53Whatever your beat, whether you're in tech or politics or music, entertainment,
0:04:00you name it, anywhere where there's journalism to be written and read,
0:04:04and consumed, and watched,
0:04:06and listened to, it's as uncertain as it's ever
0:04:10been in terms of where the opportunities are for people as a career.
0:04:15I know Dan Fromer, frequent guest now running his own thing,
0:04:20which is a theme, running his own thing at The New Consumer,
0:04:24which is doing great, and he's had some great pieces
0:04:27this week on communication between companies
0:04:32and their customers and their email lists
0:04:34in terms of what to do amidst all of this.
0:04:38And boy, there are a lot of companies
0:04:39who are not botching it, but just sort of wasting,
0:04:44I mean, it's become almost a canard at this point.
0:04:49It's a cliche, people publishing screenshots
0:04:53of the downright goofy emails they're getting
0:04:56from companies, you know?
0:04:58You know what I mean?
0:04:59Like you bought a backpack from some company
0:05:02seven years ago and you're getting a stay safe email
0:05:05from the CEO.
0:05:07- Yep, absolutely.
0:05:08- But Dan pointed out, Dan Fromer pointed out a while back
0:05:12that, boy, an awful lot of the talent right now
0:05:17is getting subsumed by the truly biggest names,
0:05:21New York Times Company, Wall Street Journal.
0:05:24A handful of the true long-standing generations old,
0:05:29in some cases, like with the Times and the Wall Street Journal
0:05:33over 100 years of history and culture
0:05:39are suddenly hiring an awful lot of talent.
0:05:44And then in our particular racket, the Apple beat,
0:05:49Apple has hired an awful lot of the people,
0:05:52the best and brightest of our colleagues
0:05:55and former colleagues.
0:05:56- Like three of mine.
0:05:59- Right, I mean, longtime frequent former guest
0:06:02of the show, Serenity Caldwell, now at Apple.
0:06:05Again, not a complaint, just an observation
0:06:08and just sort of the way the world is breaking.
0:06:11But it's fascinating to me,
0:06:13and I know Dan talked about it,
0:06:15and it's just, it's fascinating to me
0:06:18that as much as you can start to get depressed,
0:06:22not that Apple's a bad place to work
0:06:24or the New York Times is a bad place to work, the opposite.
0:06:26Those are great companies doing great work.
0:06:29Joanna Stern, now the personal technology columnist
0:06:32at the Wall Street Journal, truly doing a fantastic job.
0:06:37One of my dear friends, a fantastic guest on this show,
0:06:39but just her last couple of weeks of the stuff
0:06:42she's been doing and the videos she's producing from home,
0:06:45just knocking it out of the park.
0:06:49But it's just fascinating to me.
0:06:51It can be depressing, though,
0:06:53to think that that's the only way to go,
0:06:54is to go to these biggest of the big names.
0:06:57And to me, it's exciting when Dan starts the new consumer
0:07:01and now you are starting a brand new YouTube channel
0:07:05from the start.
0:07:06It's exciting to me that the exact opposite
0:07:09of the biggest of the big, something a little bit more
0:07:12along the lines of what I do, like, hey, one person.
0:07:14Here I am.
0:07:17- Yeah, I think there's pros and cons to both,
0:07:20and I've done the small to big media thing for a decade now,
0:07:25and everyone has its advantages and its disadvantages,
0:07:28and the ability, I watch what you do and what Jim does
0:07:31and what Jason does and what Marques Brownlee, for example,
0:07:34is another really good independent,
0:07:36a bunch of independent people who do podcasting, you know, like the Relay FM people and the
0:07:41YouTubers. And it's just, it's a very different voice. It's hard, it's more liberating in some
0:07:46ways because you can literally do anything you want. There's no corporate policies or guidelines
0:07:51or lanes that you have to stay in, but also you're taking on all the risk and there's no sort of
0:07:57safety net there if you get it wrong. Right. And there's, you know, strength in numbers.
0:08:01Yeah. In some ways. And, you know, Relay is a great example of that, where Relay is more of a
0:08:09federation of independent solo talents who are collectively working just to benefit from things
0:08:20like a unified CMS and the way that they can launch new shows and kind of get off the ground
0:08:29a little quicker with the help of the others, and there's a whole bunch of people who have
0:08:34relay shows who are good pals and bounce around each other's shows, etc. As opposed to Mike
0:08:43Hurley building a giant conglomerate and hiring all these people. And again, that wouldn't
0:08:49be bad either. There's nothing wrong with getting a full-time job at a place, but that's
0:08:55That's not what Relay is.
0:08:57Even at my scale, I don't sell the sponsorships
0:09:01for this show by myself.
0:09:03Jesse Char at Neat.fm does,
0:09:05and she also handles the sales for ATP.
0:09:09And so there's a little, it's like almost,
0:09:12you as those of you listening,
0:09:14you don't really have to know it,
0:09:15but it's sort of like a little two-show network
0:09:18with me and ATP, with Jesse handling that
0:09:21and taking an awful lot of stuff that I,
0:09:25I was terrible at on my own off my shoulders. No, it's similar for me because, you know,
0:09:29I've been working with mutual friend Dave Wiskus's standard. Never heard of him.
0:09:33No, I mean, and it's terrific. It's not like Relay. It's really a bunch of independent
0:09:41creators, primarily YouTubers. But, you know, Thomas Frank was very kind to help me out this
0:09:46week, and he had me on one of his videos, and we go back and forth, and just the amount of knowledge
0:09:51that you get from having a network of people who you get to talk with and work with is absolutely
0:09:56invaluable. It does seem to me that part of the way that the internet continues to as a whole
0:10:13resist cementing.
0:10:15It is still liquid overall.
0:10:18Just the entire, if you zoom out,
0:10:21you know, the entire quote unquote internet,
0:10:24it still isn't solidified as,
0:10:26oh, here's how you do media,
0:10:28here's how you become a publication on the internet.
0:10:32And one of the ways that the whole world is still in flux,
0:10:35and it just seems so counter,
0:10:38like when I think back to like the '90s,
0:10:41just go back 20 years, 25 years,
0:10:44and what would have been the most likely
0:10:48to support solo artists or very small teams
0:10:53of content producers,
0:10:57you would have thought video would be the hardest of all
0:11:00because it's the meta art form, right?
0:11:05That's why I consider movies to be the highest form of art
0:11:11Because movies contain all other art.
0:11:16The storytelling and character development of fiction,
0:11:21of printed fiction like novels,
0:11:24that's part of movie making.
0:11:26The acting of theater and the way that good actors
0:11:31actually can just bring a character to life
0:11:34and own the character, take it from the author
0:11:39and just sort of do something to, you know,
0:11:44yeah, everybody knows.
0:11:44- Bring it to life. - Yeah, bring it to life.
0:11:46And it's photography, right?
0:11:49Whatever photography is, cinematography is it plus motion.
0:11:53And then there's the art of cinema itself,
0:11:56the way that you cut and frame and time and pace.
0:12:01And of course, music is a huge part of movie making, right?
0:12:07It's all of these art forms at once,
0:12:09And therefore, that's why, as those,
0:12:13it's just idly occurred to me,
0:12:14as I've been watching an awful lot more
0:12:17video content recently, how long the credits are
0:12:21at the end of all of these productions.
0:12:22And it's like, I know that Netflix and other services
0:12:26default to sort of pushing you on to the next episode.
0:12:31But it's like I just paused last night,
0:12:33just on a TV, not even a movie, but a TV show,
0:12:35we're watching Ozark season three.
0:12:37and just how, like when they get to the point
0:12:39where they're like, hey, go to episode three,
0:12:41just how long the credits are.
0:12:44It's no surprise.
0:12:46Anyway. - Yeah.
0:12:48- It just seems crazy to me in some sense
0:12:51that an awful lot of the people who are doing the,
0:12:56having the most success as solo creatives on the internet
0:13:01are the video people, the people on YouTube,
0:13:04like you said Marques Brownlee.
0:13:08I mean, the list goes on and on and on,
0:13:09and you actually, the whole list is in your video today,
0:13:13announcing it.
0:13:14Justine Azarek, aka iJustine,
0:13:19who's been doing this for a long time.
0:13:21I mean, the list goes on,
0:13:22but it just seems crazy to me.
0:13:24And you're obviously on that list.
0:13:27- A lot of that is credit to YouTube
0:13:28because they didn't just make like a hosting.
0:13:30Well, the thing with podcasts is they're great,
0:13:32But if I watch the talk show at WWDC,
0:13:35nothing suggests ATP at WWDC or download at WWDC.
0:13:40I'm stuck within that show where YouTube,
0:13:43if I watch Marques' video,
0:13:45it'll suggest Justine's video to me
0:13:47and then a bunch of other things.
0:13:48And that decomposition down to the show level,
0:13:51I think is what let iTunes really take off.
0:13:54And I think that's what's let YouTube really build
0:13:57an audience generation machine almost.
0:14:00- Yeah, and I'm as guilty as anybody of complaining
0:14:05about the failings of YouTube's suggestion algorithm
0:14:10and emphasizing those and not appreciating
0:14:16and just taking a step back to just appreciate the way
0:14:19that I personally benefit from it and stumble upon videos
0:14:22that I never would have found on my own
0:14:24because I started watching A and suggested B
0:14:29and I enjoyed B and then I got C and C was even better,
0:14:34really good and it's like, wow,
0:14:36never even heard of this person,
0:14:38never would have gotten here, the algorithm works.
0:14:41And that's true, it's both, and it is when it works,
0:14:46it is, I know that it's overused phrase,
0:14:50but it's win, win, win, right?
0:14:52It is a win for the viewer if you're actually,
0:14:56if it is actually suggesting to you stuff that you,
0:14:59A, enjoy, and especially B, wouldn't have found otherwise.
0:15:03That's the magic of the algorithm.
0:15:05It is great for the creators
0:15:10who are successfully getting an audience
0:15:15that is appropriate for what they've created,
0:15:18including new people and new channels,
0:15:23that it's not too late,
0:15:24YouTube has already got it 20 billion views a day and
0:15:28It's so many successful channels and it's you know, it's absolutely positively not too late to start
0:15:37And I forget who said it you might have been Roberto Blake
0:15:41But he said like YouTube doesn't find audiences for videos
0:15:44They find videos for their audience and that either really entertains their audience or it leads to tabloids
0:15:50which is the dark side of it,
0:15:51because people will look at tablets at the checkout counter.
0:15:55That's why they put them there.
0:15:56And they'll do the same thing on YouTube,
0:15:58but at its best, anything you wanna learn,
0:16:00you can start finding videos on YouTube,
0:16:01and it'll recommend more and better them over time.
0:16:04- Yeah.
0:16:05And the last of the win-win-win is it's good for YouTube.
0:16:08Right? - Yes.
0:16:10- People watch a lot of YouTube for good reason.
0:16:13So anyway, I guess the last,
0:16:18I'm not last, but I don't wanna spend the whole time,
0:16:20and I know you, I know you so well,
0:16:22you don't wanna spend the whole show talking about yourself.
0:16:24You're probably dying right now,
0:16:26you're probably broken out in a flop sweat.
0:16:28- Canadian hives. - Yeah, Canadian hives.
0:16:30I'm the same way, I've got the Catholic upbringing,
0:16:33it's, you know, pride is a sin.
0:16:35But I'm curious, A, why YouTube first?
0:16:41And B, what your planned,
0:16:44and I know that other people are asking this,
0:16:46is what else are you planning,
0:16:48and are you willing to talk about your other plans
0:16:52other than your YouTube channel?
0:16:54Which I should mention, by the way,
0:16:55is just your name, Rene Ritchie.
0:16:56So go to YouTube, search for Rene Ritchie,
0:16:59and there's, boom, your new channel.
0:17:01- I think the search is broken,
0:17:02but if you do YouTube slash Rene Ritchie, it works now.
0:17:04I think the search still shows the old channel,
0:17:06but we'll see how long that takes.
0:17:07- Well, Google-- - Propagation is terrible.
0:17:09- Google will get good at search someday.
0:17:11- One day. (laughs)
0:17:13Yeah, I mean, so I started with YouTube
0:17:15almost exactly the reasons that you said, it's almost the hardest of the things to
0:17:20start with, and it has the most complexity and the most moving parts.
0:17:23And I figured if I start with just one thing, because YouTube has that audience generation
0:17:28capabilities, and I do it okay, I can use that to build back up again, because everything
0:17:35I had before just belongs to future.
0:17:38So I'm starting off from scratch, and it's hard to build a website on Google these days.
0:17:44I have a website. I went with renerichie.net because like, you know, daringfireball.net,
0:17:48that's just what you do as a human. And I have the YouTube channel. And eventually, I do want to
0:17:54start a new podcast. And I want to try and do some other kind—I bought all this equipment for YouTube,
0:17:59and I want to maybe try some documentaries or something a little bit more long form. But I want
0:18:06to be very careful not to bite off more than I can chew at the beginning, because just doing one
0:18:11thing well, I think, is the best way to start over.
0:18:14Part of it, too, is in addition to the internet, the computerization of everything.
0:18:22I feel like it's one of the recurring themes of my work, now spanning over a decade.
0:18:29It's so easy to get lost when you're focused on the week-to-week, month-to-month news cycle,
0:18:37what's so clearly obvious when you take a bigger picture
0:18:42and start looking at years is,
0:18:45in addition to the internetification of everything,
0:18:50the computerization of everything
0:18:53is such an overarching trend of our lifetimes.
0:18:58Everything's a computer nowadays.
0:19:03For better, often, for worse, often.
0:19:06It's a mixed bag like anything,
0:19:08and it is what you make of it.
0:19:10But Apple Watch is no better example.
0:19:13It's a full-on Unix computer running on your wrist.
0:19:18- Well, it's that thing that PC guys
0:19:19won't just walk in here and figure it out,
0:19:21but it turns out.
0:19:22- Right, it's so true, really.
0:19:24And I often have said, and I realized that,
0:19:28that was the phrase from the Palm CEO,
0:19:31what was his name? - Yes, Ed Colligan.
0:19:33- Ed Colligan.
0:19:34And Palm was obviously a computer company.
0:19:37They made the old Palm OS, not even talking about web OS,
0:19:42but the old Palm OS was obviously a personal computing
0:19:45device, and there were other, you know,
0:19:50but to me, the key insight that the iPhone team
0:19:55at Apple had with the iPhone, even though there were other,
0:20:00clearly, technically, this is a computer running
0:20:02as a phone, they were still approaching it
0:20:05as a consumer electronics product,
0:20:07and that consumer electronics
0:20:09were trying to get more computery,
0:20:12while at the same time, computers from computer companies
0:20:15were trying to get more consumer electronically.
0:20:18And that is, it's almost impossible
0:20:23for consumer electronics trying to get more computery
0:20:26to even, it's like a sandcastle standing against the tide,
0:20:30at the beach in terms of the inevitability
0:20:34of computers becoming more consumer electronic-y.
0:20:39- Yeah, we saw that with Palm,
0:20:40which was a PDA operating system.
0:20:41BlackBerry had a Java-based operating system.
0:20:44Windows had Windows CE on phones at the time,
0:20:47and it was Linux through Android
0:20:48and Unix through the iPhone that got pushed down
0:20:51into small computing forms.
0:20:53- Well, I just think that, and I think that part of that
0:20:56is what is really enabled in terms of like,
0:20:59just camera technology is really what's enabled solo and small team artists to produce truly
0:21:09excellent, the highest quality video content.
0:21:15When you watch iJustine and you watch Marques and you watch your videos, the sound is great
0:21:22and the lighting is good and the pacing is good.
0:21:28It's funny, it is an interesting contrast right now in the here and now as the real
0:21:37quote unquote real TV industry is massively disrupted by these stay at home rules with
0:21:46COVID-19. I'm a huge fan of the John Oliver show on this week, last week tonight on HBO.
0:21:56Unlike a lot of shows he hasn't missed one two weeks ago. They filmed like just in front of a sort of a johnny-eye
0:22:02White, what do you call it a white universe?
0:22:05You know that yeah, whatever universe whatever Apple commercials don't really take place in that universe anymore
0:22:12But they used to I used to think of it as like the universe where Volkswagen's and Apple products live, you know
0:22:18It's not the white room yet the infinite white expanse
0:22:21and
0:22:24It was like at the last minute they realized they couldn't have their regular studio and the regular student certainly not studio audience
0:22:31But even their studio they couldn't even shoot it without their audience in the studio because they shoot
0:22:35even though it's an HBO show they shoot in the CBS building in New York and
0:22:40At the time, you know ten days ago eleven days ago a couple of employees of CBS News tested positive
0:22:47For kovat 19 so they had to shut the whole building down
0:22:51And so at the last minute, they had to shoot somewhere else.
0:22:54And then the show that just aired last night
0:22:56was shot in John Oliver's house.
0:22:59Unlike some of the shows where they're sort of embracing it
0:23:02and just sort of shooting with actual, you know,
0:23:05like just webcams.
0:23:06- Like their iPhones.
0:23:07- Yeah, their iPhones.
0:23:08And it's just, you know, typical FaceTime quality,
0:23:11but except that it's, you know.
0:23:13- It's Seth Meyers.
0:23:14- Yeah, it's Seth Meyers
0:23:15or it's Stephen Colbert in the bathtub
0:23:18or something like that.
0:23:20They did their best, and it's good.
0:23:21It was a good show with John Oliver,
0:23:25and it was very funny.
0:23:26I highly recommend it.
0:23:27I guess I should put a link in the show notes.
0:23:28Really good.
0:23:30It's terrific every week.
0:23:31I thought that this one in particular was especially good.
0:23:34Without changing the pace of the show too much,
0:23:39it's so fascinating to me that he's so good at it
0:23:42that he can do it without the audience,
0:23:43even though he's telling jokes.
0:23:44Like, man, that is hard.
0:23:46And he even said,
0:23:47he didn't even have anybody helping him out.
0:23:49It's just him in a room with a white backdrop behind him
0:23:53telling jokes that nobody can laugh at.
0:23:56And his explanation-- - Zero return energy.
0:23:59- Right, his explanation was that he grew,
0:24:03he became a standup in Britain, so he's fully aware
0:24:06of what it's like to do standup comedy
0:24:08without a single sound from the audience.
0:24:11- Accurate.
0:24:13- But anyway, the thing that got me, it's an HBO show.
0:24:16It's been on for years, and he's doing it by himself,
0:24:18and the sound was nowhere near as good
0:24:20as the typical YouTube channel I listen to.
0:24:23- Yeah.
0:24:24- Anyway, that's a long way of me saying,
0:24:25it blows me away that what you do and Marques does
0:24:30and what Justine does on a multiple time a week basis
0:24:35has a better production quality value than an HBO show.
0:24:39Now I bet that next week's show will improve on that, right?
0:24:43They're gonna learn fast and they are pros.
0:24:46But it just blew me away in between laughter
0:24:51of watching the actual show and listening to them.
0:24:53It just blew me away at that meta level
0:24:55that this is not as good as most YouTube channels.
0:24:59And it's on HBO. - I think Seth Meyer
0:25:00was the one who leaned into it earlier
0:25:02when he said, "I realize that what I'm doing right now
0:25:04"is worse than what my teenage daughter
0:25:05"is doing on TikTok upstairs."
0:25:07- Yeah, it's really, really fascinating.
0:25:10And I feel like the computerization of everything
0:25:12really helps in terms of allowing one person like you,
0:25:17like now you are a professional videographer,
0:25:21sound person, lighting person, editor.
0:25:25- And ironically, I learned these skills
0:25:27by watching a ton of YouTube videos
0:25:29and people who tried to learn them before me.
0:25:31(laughing)
0:25:33- You know what, I do have to say, it's great
0:25:35there are certain things that having how-tos on YouTube,
0:25:39it's great because you kind of have to see it,
0:25:41But it's so overwhelming in terms of when you search the web
0:25:46for how do I blank, how many of the answers
0:25:49come up as YouTubes, and it's frustrating
0:25:51'cause there's a lot of 'em where I just want
0:25:54the goddamn answer, you know?
0:25:56And having, you know, and if it was in print
0:26:00on a webpage, I could find it.
0:26:02And because it's a video, you can't.
0:26:06And even if it's a two-minute video,
0:26:07it feels like the slowest thing.
0:26:10It feels in some ways like going back to the dial-up modem
0:26:14internet, where just loading the web page took over a minute.
0:26:17And you're like--
0:26:18It's because you have no ability to really scan.
0:26:20You can scan through the timeline.
0:26:21And it's slightly better than just pure audio,
0:26:23where you can't even see where you're going through a timeline.
0:26:26But for things like cooking and things that are highly visual,
0:26:29I find it invaluable.
0:26:30But for other things like you, I would just
0:26:32like a set of steps on a nice text page.
0:26:34Yeah.
0:26:34And again, some of the stuff--
0:26:38Even if it's visual, it still would be better
0:26:41with a photograph, or it'd be just as good,
0:26:42and then it would be scannable.
0:26:43In other words, here's the thing in the toilet
0:26:46you're looking for, lift this up.
0:26:47That's how you fix it.
0:26:49- Like I could watch Elton Brown all day,
0:26:50but not everyone is Elton Brown.
0:26:51- No.
0:26:53All right, rest of the show.
0:26:55Special show, Q&A, taken from readers.
0:27:00We got a bunch of questions.
0:27:01I feel like we can easily fill the show.
0:27:02My thanks to everybody who sent questions.
0:27:04I don't know that we'll get to all of them,
0:27:06even all the good ones.
0:27:08I know you flagged a couple.
0:27:10Hopefully it'll be fun and a nice little break
0:27:13from the monotony.
0:27:15Before we get started on the questions though,
0:27:16let me ask you, what are your thoughts
0:27:19on the two new hardware products we've gotten recently,
0:27:24the MacBook Air and the iPad Pro?
0:27:26- So I think they're very different.
0:27:28I think the iPad Pro mostly exists
0:27:31so that Apple could get LiDAR scanners
0:27:33into the hands of developers before the iPhone gets it.
0:27:36I think that the iPhone got it first,
0:27:38the paucity, like the complete lack of software
0:27:41that really takes advantage of it would,
0:27:43they get beaten over the head with it,
0:27:44and rightly so for weeks,
0:27:46where this way that scanner gets put into the iPad.
0:27:50People who really want it can go get it.
0:27:52They can develop apps for it.
0:27:53They can work on the technology for it.
0:27:55And then by the time the iPhone comes out,
0:27:58it's much better, it's much better positioned
0:28:00to actually have interesting features,
0:28:02including what I imagine is gonna be Apple's new camera app,
0:28:05their AR camera app, which we've been hearing about for years, and maybe something cool
0:28:08with maps.
0:28:10I know people make fun of Memoji, but it was an incredibly successful way of really boiling
0:28:16the water, getting people comfortable with having themselves with AR avatars, which is
0:28:21not something everyone would have been agreeable to otherwise.
0:28:24It just let them play around with it.
0:28:26That's what we need when AR starts going to the back of the camera as well.
0:28:31I think when people talk about, should you upgrade from the 2018 to 2020, that's sort
0:28:36of missing the mark, because even Apple doesn't expect that.
0:28:39They usually see, I think, people upgrading iPads every three to five years.
0:28:43So if you've got a really old iPad and you want six gigabytes of RAM, or you're ready
0:28:47for the new design or something, they want you to be able to get the best one at any
0:28:51possible time.
0:28:52They don't want you to have to have a two-year-old iPad when you buy a new one.
0:28:55But at the same time, I really think this is the most developer-centric iPad that Apple
0:28:59has ever launched.
0:29:01- I think that's a good way to put it.
0:29:03I definitely, I've long thought that that is
0:29:06the total explanation for the weird overall
0:29:10like quarter by quarter sales cycle of iPad
0:29:14where when the iPad first came out,
0:29:16it was growth, growth, growth, faster growth.
0:29:19And even though it only came out three years
0:29:22after the iPhone, it was like, oh,
0:29:27and the iPad's first half year was higher sales
0:29:30on the iPhone, its first year were faster,
0:29:32it was faster growth than, shifted by three years
0:29:37than the iPhone for a while,
0:29:40peaked at around 20 million a quarter, I believe,
0:29:44and then started shrinking consistently,
0:29:49but then leveled off at like, you know,
0:29:51nine, 10 million a quarter, which is good.
0:29:54And my ballpark, just elevator pitch,
0:29:58what the hell happened, what explains that,
0:30:01is that the iPad debuted in a world
0:30:05without anything like an iPad.
0:30:07- Yeah.
0:30:09- Was, it filled a need that nobody knew we had.
0:30:13People raced to get them.
0:30:16The whole, it's just a big iPhone,
0:30:21gave millions, tens of millions of people who had,
0:30:25and maybe were skeptical when they got the iPhone,
0:30:27but then grew to love it and thought,
0:30:29well, this is fantastic, I already know how to use it.
0:30:32I can't wait to get one.
0:30:34Then they got one and it just kept working
0:30:37and working and working and the upgrade cycle
0:30:40was so, is so long, still is,
0:30:43that it's, the overall sales started tapering off
0:30:47because people still had iPads that were great,
0:30:51even though they were three, four, five years old.
0:30:53And then they've leveled off at this point
0:30:55because it's like, it's old enough platform now
0:30:59that it's just sort of like, here's the equilibrium.
0:31:02- Yeah, it's much more Mac-like
0:31:04and phones are becoming that way too,
0:31:06but it's no longer the early adoption part of the curve.
0:31:09It's now really mainstream.
0:31:12If Apple had called it special developer edition,
0:31:14I think it would have been more appropriate.
0:31:16They might've even sold more
0:31:17by putting that sort of a name on it.
0:31:20But it really is one of those products
0:31:22that for a number of reasons, I think we'll look back on.
0:31:25and I hate to jump around, but there was a time
0:31:26when they had the iPad 3 out,
0:31:28it was a first attempt at getting retina
0:31:29and it had that very hot GPU in it,
0:31:32and they replaced it six months later with the iPad 4
0:31:37that just smoothed everything back out again.
0:31:40I think they learned from that,
0:31:41and they just didn't, maybe not all of these things
0:31:43were ready when the last iPad Pro came out,
0:31:46but they don't wanna wait until next year again
0:31:48when they have things like mini LED screens.
0:31:51They wanna have a good version of the iPad now,
0:31:53and the production of those chips,
0:31:55I know some people were complaining that the chipset
0:31:57is essentially the same,
0:31:58but the binning on those chips is much better now.
0:32:00And it's just a better overall product
0:32:02for people who want one now.
0:32:04- Yeah, I think that that got,
0:32:05again, I'm not a silicon expert insider,
0:32:11but just the layperson's understanding of it,
0:32:14it kind of makes sense where it comes to yields.
0:32:18And so, I think people heard that news
0:32:21that the A12Z is basically the same as the A12X,
0:32:26except instead of having seven GPU cores,
0:32:28it has eight GPU cores, but the A12X has eight GPU cores.
0:32:33It's just that one's disabled.
0:32:35People hear that and they think it was just pure spite
0:32:38and that Apple disabled a core
0:32:41and that they could issue a patch
0:32:43and your 2018 iPad Pro could have a new,
0:32:46could then be an A12Z, and it doesn't work like that.
0:32:50It's basically if you make eight cores
0:32:54and then they come down the line
0:32:56and you only have to make sure
0:32:58that seven of them pass all the tests,
0:33:00you get a way higher percentage of the wafers
0:33:03that are like good to go, good to go, good to go.
0:33:06And two years later, I guess 18 months later,
0:33:1018 months of muscle memory and expertise at making these,
0:33:15all of a sudden the yields are high enough
0:33:17where we can say, you know what,
0:33:18all eight, we'll hold out for all eight of them,
0:33:22that's progress, right?
0:33:25That's what happens when you make the same thing
0:33:26for 18 months.
0:33:28- I forget which one it is, but there was an Apple TV
0:33:30where the chip was essentially A6 or something
0:33:34where one of the cores, where only one of the cores worked.
0:33:36So they had a single core version of the chip.
0:33:39And then later when they ran out of those,
0:33:41they had to start making single core versions.
0:33:42And then they eventually went to a newer Apple TV.
0:33:44But that's just the realities of making silicon.
0:33:47in anything approaching an affordable way.
0:33:49- Yeah.
0:33:50Editor of the show, we can start with the first question.
0:33:54Caleb Sexton has a question.
0:33:56So as the editor, I might as well let him go first.
0:34:00He thinks LIDAR and the U1,
0:34:03which is also new in the new iPad Pro, I believe.
0:34:07Now the U1 is the ultra wideband chip
0:34:10that debuted in the iPhone's 11 back in September,
0:34:15which is ostensibly for hyper precise location,
0:34:20but at the moment isn't really used for anything
0:34:26other than helping to increase the accuracy of,
0:34:31not AirPlay, what do you call it?
0:34:37- Yeah, like you targeted AirDrop.
0:34:39- AirDrop, right.
0:34:40And so if I want to AirDrop you a link or something
0:34:44and your phone is out and mine's out
0:34:46and we're right next to each other,
0:34:48it's gonna prioritize, hey,
0:34:50why don't you send it to Renee's iPhone?
0:34:52- Yeah.
0:34:53- So I'm not gonna say it's sitting there inert,
0:34:55it is being used, but the potential
0:34:58for what something like the U1 could be used for
0:35:02and might be used for in the plans for iOS 14
0:35:07or something in the future is obviously bright.
0:35:10So Caleb wants to know if we see LiDAR and U1
0:35:14as being intended for Find My.
0:35:16I'm not sure about how, I guess it could.
0:35:18I guess what he's getting at is, let's say,
0:35:21I think what he's getting at is let's say you've lost,
0:35:24you don't know where your iPhone is
0:35:25and it's behind a couch cushion
0:35:27and you're using your iPad to find it.
0:35:31The LiDAR, I guess it could help
0:35:33'cause if you're pointing it, if you're in your,
0:35:34if it's like, oh, it's in your living room
0:35:36and then the LiDAR can tell there's a couch there,
0:35:39it can even, it can really get good about, it's not just, oh--
0:35:43- I can show you a ghost of your iPhone behind the cushion.
0:35:45- Right, right.
0:35:47Yeah, that would be pretty cool.
0:35:48I believe that, that it's in, you know,
0:35:51that getting better and smarter
0:35:53about finding everything is in the works.
0:35:55And I know, you know, there's a short list,
0:36:00there's a long list of rumored Apple products
0:36:04that who knows, you know, like just put the car,
0:36:06just put the car on that list, you know.
0:36:08Well, who knows where the hell that is?
0:36:09We know there's people working on Project Titan
0:36:11and it's a big team and they have big goals.
0:36:14And who knows if it's, at this point,
0:36:16if it's a car or an R2D2 that's gonna
0:36:18come around your house and both vacuum and play music.
0:36:24- Like the Apple Robo Vac.
0:36:25- But then there's stuff like the tile product
0:36:30that seemingly is close to and, you know,
0:36:35I don't think that it's like, oh,
0:36:37if not for this global pandemic,
0:36:40they would have announced it at the end of March.
0:36:43But maybe, who knows?
0:36:45I don't know.
0:36:46Apple's-- - It would have been
0:36:50a good iPhone 9 one, two punch
0:36:52the way the AirPods were with the iPhone 7.
0:36:54- Right, and then they could have, yeah,
0:36:56'cause then they could have demoed the iPhone 9,
0:37:00AKA the SE2, but let's call it the iPhone 9,
0:37:03doing something in a demo
0:37:05that couldn't have been shown before, right?
0:37:07'Cause how else do you demo this phone
0:37:10that otherwise has nothing but a chip and a display
0:37:15and a touch ID sensor and this and that,
0:37:18that nothing is new.
0:37:20The whole point is just it's a great phone
0:37:22with a modern chip that sells for $550.
0:37:25But if you could do a demo with,
0:37:28hey, now it finds your car keys, that's pretty cool.
0:37:33- Yeah, and I think what you mentioned is exactly right.
0:37:35I think a lot of those special projects groups,
0:37:37they're working on separate things,
0:37:38that there's like a unifying theory.
0:37:40And I think that's why Tim Cook has spoken about automation
0:37:43and spoken about augmented reality in a way
0:37:45that Apple typically doesn't about new products,
0:37:48because they don't see those things as products necessarily.
0:37:50They see them as core technologies.
0:37:52Like your iPhone has a display, your iPad has a display,
0:37:54your Mac has a display.
0:37:56And what they're building now is gonna be as ubiquitous
0:37:59to their products as displays are.
0:38:01And all of them have to ingest through a variety of sensors,
0:38:04like going all the way back to accelerometers
0:38:07and digital compasses all the way forward to LIDAR sensors,
0:38:11they have to ingest and understand the real world.
0:38:13And the positioning chip lets them do that
0:38:15at very small scale.
0:38:16And then the LIDAR things lets them do that
0:38:18in terms of seeing what's all around you,
0:38:20the way that touch ID, sorry, face ID,
0:38:23the TrueDepth camera does on towards you.
0:38:26And it lets them build and understand these virtual worlds.
0:38:28They can start placing things in it
0:38:30and deriving functionality from it.
0:38:32And maybe there'll be glasses one day
0:38:34and LIDAR is much more privacy centric
0:38:36RGB cameras are but just the technology needed to
0:38:40Figure out what's in a world in your place in it and the place of other objects that have u1 chips in them
0:38:45I think that's the sort of the big play they're working towards. I
0:38:48Keep thinking about that and I keep thinking how
0:38:52And I've been thinking about this for years and LIDAR definitely is a big step in this direction and
0:39:00GPS was so the first step on location awareness and
0:39:06And it all goes unfortunately hand in hand
0:39:10with all of the various repercussions
0:39:14related to just the catch-all phrase privacy.
0:39:17And it's a phone book-sized deep dive
0:39:21on all the ways that this has repercussions.
0:39:25But basically, as smart as our devices have gotten,
0:39:29and as good as the cameras are, and all of this,
0:39:35they still don't know where the hell they are, really.
0:39:37- Yes. - Right?
0:39:38And it's like, the potential for that is there, right?
0:39:43Like you can just, it's like Indiana Jones
0:39:47with his fingertip on the Holy Grail, right?
0:39:50It's like, it's so close.
0:39:52You know, your fingertip is touching it,
0:39:54of just, of when you ask your phone for directions to,
0:39:59like your meeting, well, remember when you used to be able
0:40:03to meet somebody at a restaurant.
0:40:05(laughing)
0:40:06If we ever get back to meeting people at restaurants.
0:40:09And somebody, you're in a city that you're not,
0:40:11you're visiting, you're out of town,
0:40:13you're in a city that you're not--
0:40:14- You're both at Dub-Dub.
0:40:15- Yeah, and somebody says,
0:40:17"Meet me at such and such place."
0:40:19It's, you get directions now.
0:40:22It's so much better than the old days before phones
0:40:24when all we had were somebody would hopefully tell you,
0:40:28"Go to this street, go through the next light,
0:40:31and make a left and there it is,
0:40:34then you'd have to memorize it or have it written down.
0:40:37Phone directions are so much better than that,
0:40:39but still your phone could do so much better.
0:40:42It should be like some kind of AR view
0:40:44where you just hold it up and it just shows you the arrow
0:40:46and says over there.
0:40:48Here I know where we are, we're at the corner of--
0:40:51- Amy's at the food court and you can find the food court,
0:40:53but you can't find the table.
0:40:55- Right, right, exactly.
0:40:56- And those are the problems that this,
0:40:59I think this technology, I think it'll do way more than that eventually, you know, the
0:41:03way screens do way more eventually, but I think that's what they're building towards.
0:41:06Yeah, and it's definitely the LIDAR stuff. Clearly, even though right now there just
0:41:14isn't a lot of, there aren't a lot of great demos that show it off, and even some of the
0:41:19stuff Apple showed off from third-party developers isn't out yet, you know, I don't think, like
0:41:26the new version of hot lava where it turns your house into lava. Cool demo, can't wait
0:41:32for it to play with it. Not out yet. Really, we're stuck playing with the Measure app.
0:41:36But even the Measure app, man, is it so much better than the camera-only, accelerometer-only
0:41:42Measure app. Like, LiDAR is the real deal. And you know it when you see demos of actual
0:41:48cars out in the street, test cars from various companies working on self-driving cars, and
0:41:52are largely enabled by LiDAR sensors
0:41:55pointing out in all the directions.
0:41:57So you know, it's not like,
0:41:58oh, I didn't really know LiDAR was a thing,
0:42:00but boy, when you see it side by side,
0:42:03comparing the brand new iPad Pro
0:42:05to either the previous one or to your iPhone,
0:42:09and it can figure out just a completely blank wall,
0:42:14just a wall that is just white paint,
0:42:16and it knows exactly where it is.
0:42:18There's no way that a camera-based system could ever,
0:42:21had no chance, what the hell could a camera do,
0:42:24pointed at a white wall?
0:42:26- And I'm really waiting for the time
0:42:28when it moves from being so active to being so passive,
0:42:30so I'm not like in LiDAR mode,
0:42:32but as I move my phone around,
0:42:34it's just one of the things it's detecting,
0:42:35and then there's no more face ID or touch ID,
0:42:37it's just like the phone sees a bit of my face,
0:42:41it hears a bit of my voice,
0:42:42it knows my gait when I'm walking,
0:42:44it knows when I'm touching the screen,
0:42:46and I don't have to worry about this whole
0:42:47like actively unlocking it again,
0:42:49it just says, "I'm reasonably sure it's you,
0:42:51"I'm unlocked, oh, I don't know it's you anymore.
0:42:52"I'm gonna challenge you for a different prompt."
0:42:55And then we start moving beyond all these
0:42:56sort of artificial barriers to our usage.
0:42:59- All right, let me take a break here
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0:46:06All right, let's start. - Sorry, I got
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0:46:33I, again, I love it, I love it.
0:46:35It's like the best thing in the world
0:46:37when you have a sponsor and you can just say,
0:46:39you know what, even if they said to me,
0:46:41He wrote me a letter and said,
0:46:42"We've committed ourselves to never spending a dime
0:46:45on advertising ever again."
0:46:47Good to know you.
0:46:48You'll never see another nickel from us.
0:46:49I would still tell people to go to Hover.
0:46:51- The same, absolutely the same.
0:46:53- All right, here we go.
0:46:55Here's a question from Tom Woodfin.
0:46:57He asks, "How do you think Apple sees the future of OLED
0:47:00in their devices?
0:47:01Will we ever see OLED MacBooks or iPads
0:47:04that the iPhone XR and 11 have picked up
0:47:08all the original X technology and design
0:47:10other than OLED seems like a tell to me
0:47:13that Apple isn't happy with the tech.
0:47:16- Yeah, I think that's true.
0:47:18I mean, it took Apple a long time
0:47:19compared to Android vendors to put OLED in the phones.
0:47:22And when you look back at some of the earlier OLED phones,
0:47:24the Pentile subpixels were horrible.
0:47:27I remember Sebastian DeWitt had to figure out
0:47:29how to anti-alias them himself
0:47:31'cause they just didn't do it
0:47:33when he was working at Double Twist.
0:47:34But they got better and better
0:47:37and they got to a certain point where Apple was happy
0:47:39because like the blue color fades faster
0:47:41than the other colors and they burn in
0:47:43and there's just, it looks gorgeous.
0:47:44There's really good deep blacks,
0:47:46really good high bright levels,
0:47:48but you have to do so many mitigations
0:47:50to make it a workable technology.
0:47:52And especially on larger screens like iPads,
0:47:55the amount of the brightness is not contiguous.
0:47:59Like it has brighter and darker spots
0:48:01and especially at Apple scale.
0:48:04A lot of companies have made better panels than Apple
0:48:07like Amazon and Samsung,
0:48:08because they were making far fewer of them
0:48:10and it was easier to do it at smaller scale.
0:48:12But Apple makes a ton of MacBooks and a ton of iPads
0:48:16and it's really hard to get OLED fabricated
0:48:20at that sort of scale.
0:48:21So I really think they're gonna wait for mini LED
0:48:23on the bigger devices.
0:48:24They're gonna just skip OLED and go straight to that.
0:48:26- It's a good question.
0:48:27I think it's a really good question
0:48:29and it sort of captures the sort of gestalt
0:48:33of Apple's display technology of the last five years
0:48:38and the next few years.
0:48:40And I think it's important to note Apple's first OLED device
0:48:44and still is the Apple Watch.
0:48:47And it's--
0:48:48- And it's RGB stripe, it's not Pentile like the phones.
0:48:51I mean, that's good OLED.
0:48:52- Every Apple Watch ever made has been OLED,
0:48:55whether it's a $250 sport watch
0:49:00or a $20,000 solid gold Apple Watch, they've all been OLED.
0:49:05The only difference in the displays
0:49:09is whether it's the sapphire crystal display
0:49:14or the ionized glass,
0:49:16which is less expensive in the sport models.
0:49:18But the actual underlying technology's always been OLED.
0:49:21And the downsides of OLED that you just mentioned,
0:49:28the subpixels and the problems with other displays
0:49:32or certain colors and color accuracy,
0:49:35none of that is as big an issue on the watch, right?
0:49:38You don't watch video on your watch.
0:49:41The deep blacks are a huge benefit.
0:49:44I don't know that they would have launched Apple Watch
0:49:46until something like OLED with the deep blacks was possible
0:49:50because it completely,
0:49:53and you just look at the watch faces that are,
0:49:56almost all of the watch faces until the series four,
0:50:01where they went to the rounded corner ones,
0:50:06had these black backgrounds because it helped hide,
0:50:11honestly, almost more than helped,
0:50:13it almost completely hid the border
0:50:17between the bezel and the display.
0:50:19And it made- - The enormous bezels, yeah.
0:50:21- Yeah, and it's only when they got better,
0:50:25four generations in and they could make a more iPhone 10 style, bigger amount of the
0:50:34surface area is devoted to the display and we can round the corners off, did they start
0:50:39showing more faces, providing more faces where the actual background is a vibrant color instead
0:50:44of black?
0:50:47Yeah I think that OLED, I don't want to call it a stopgap, but I do think, and I don't
0:50:54know a ton about micro LED, but I just know though that it's it sounds to me
0:51:02like better long-term technology like OLED is amazing in so many ways but has
0:51:08so many trade-offs. Yes, yeah I mean it's great I love watching HDR content like I
0:51:14have a I have an LG OLED television it's phenomenal very different technology to
0:51:19what they use on small screens and I would love to have that on an iPad I'd
0:51:24I'd love to be able to see again, those deep blacks.
0:51:26A lot of people, like you can show them an iPhone XR
0:51:29or an iPhone 11 next to an iPhone XS or an iPhone 11 Pro.
0:51:34And Apple is so good at their color management,
0:51:37their color science and their consistency
0:51:40that a lot of people just cannot tell the difference.
0:51:42I'm just spoiled in that I'm used to looking
0:51:44at HDR content so I can.
0:51:46It's by no means a detriment at this point,
0:51:48but I think it's just part of the natural.
0:51:50They're making so much HDR content for Apple TV+ now,
0:51:53and it just looks so good.
0:51:54I think it's naturally where they wanna go,
0:51:56but it's exactly what you said.
0:51:58OLED is sort of a stopgap to get there,
0:51:59and then we have mini-LED and then micro-LED,
0:52:02and who knows whatever is after that,
0:52:04maybe just VR displays everywhere.
0:52:06But those seem to have all the good characteristics
0:52:10of OLED without the detriments,
0:52:12almost the best of both worlds.
0:52:13- So I would expect we never get OLED Max.
0:52:16I kind of, and this is sort of cheating
0:52:20And basing on what seems to be coming out of the Asian supply chain, it sounds to me
0:52:27like we might never get OLED iPads either.
0:52:31That the next thing after what we have now will be micro LED.
0:52:36Mini, I think, first.
0:52:37Mini first.
0:52:38I forget.
0:52:39Well, but superior LED technology.
0:52:44And like you said, like what makes OLED great for a big TV isn't really applicable to the
0:52:50the small scale and what they're able to do
0:52:54with their high-end iPhone Pros is expensive.
0:52:59It's a big part of the reason why the iPhone 11 Pro
0:53:03is more expensive than the iPhone 11
0:53:05and the same reason why last year's phone,
0:53:08the iPhone XS was more expensive than the XR.
0:53:11I also think that it depends on what you watch.
0:53:15Like I think it was Joanna Stern and I
0:53:17who were talking about this.
0:53:19Joanna is a huge fan, was just huge, huge fan
0:53:22of bought one herself, the XR,
0:53:25and I think she still prefers the iPhone 11
0:53:27over the 11 Pro.
0:53:28Depending on what you do with your phone,
0:53:32if you're doing a lot of just email and reading and texting,
0:53:37I honestly think that in some ways,
0:53:42especially on a white background,
0:53:43that the LED looks better than the OLED.
0:53:48and it has a wider viewing.
0:53:50- Especially off access.
0:53:51- Yeah, off access, OLED, even Apple's,
0:53:54which I think is arguably among,
0:53:56inarguably among the best in the world,
0:53:59possibly the best in the world,
0:54:00can have a bluish tint when you look at it side by side.
0:54:04And the 3X retina factor of their OLED iPhones
0:54:09versus the 2X retina of all the LED ones
0:54:16that they've made to date
0:54:17looks bad, really bad on the spec chart, right?
0:54:20And that's one of those things where people
0:54:22who just sort of review quote unquote phones,
0:54:25it's almost like they got it all out of their system
0:54:28with the XR a year and a half ago,
0:54:31and they didn't even really bang the drum
0:54:33with the iPhone 11 this year.
0:54:35But they really were like, hey, for $800,
0:54:37or whatever the iPhone XR and regular non-Pro 11
0:54:42starting prices, you should get more than,
0:54:44you should be able to get, what do they want?
0:54:47They want the 14, what, or 1080p, right?
0:54:51They want 1080--
0:54:52- Yeah, no 1080p in 2018 or whatever their thing was.
0:54:54- Because of the, I don't wanna go too far off
0:54:57and no weeds on this, but because of the sub-pixel layout
0:54:59of OLED screens, arguably you need a 3X Retina OLED
0:55:04to compete with a 2X LED.
0:55:09- Yeah, absolutely, it's a Pentile and not an RGB stripe,
0:55:12which is much higher density.
0:55:13- And if your eyes are sharp enough,
0:55:15or you're using a jeweler's loop or a magnifying glass
0:55:19to look at it, I'm not trying to say that the 3x OLED
0:55:24isn't, for the most part, better than the 2x LED
0:55:28in terms of resolution.
0:55:30I think it probably is, but it's a lot closer
0:55:33than you would think just by looking at 2x versus 3x.
0:55:36It is definitely not 1.5 times the resolution.
0:55:39It is less--
0:55:41- No, it's also, it's also like there's good,
0:55:43it's only one factor in determining a good pixel
0:55:46for a display.
0:55:47And there are some really bad OLED panels.
0:55:49Google, in one of their pixels, I think it was a 3XL,
0:55:54they had really bad OLED panels in them.
0:55:57They would burn in and they were horrible
0:55:59with the color shifting and the banding,
0:56:00all of those things.
0:56:02So you can have good and bad implementations of these things
0:56:04and Apple is just so good at making LCDs,
0:56:07probably the best in the world,
0:56:09probably maybe with LG Ti for making really good LCD
0:56:12displays, that the sheer quality of them exceeds the resolution of them.
0:56:17Yeah, and there's also, at a philosophical level, I feel like the RGB layout fits Apple's
0:56:26institutional philosophy better, where it's just a little bit more honest.
0:56:30And I don't mean dishonest, that OLED is dishonest like it's lying, but it's like
0:56:36a cheat, you know?
0:56:38It totally is.
0:56:39If they could do RGB stripe at iPhone scale, they would.
0:56:42They can't fab good quality.
0:56:44When Apple, Apple is very forthright.
0:56:46When they said like this is the first panel
0:56:47we thought was good enough for the iPhone, they mean it.
0:56:50And yes, Samsung used their process.
0:56:52And I think Samsung's process is the best in the world.
0:56:54BCE kind of copied it.
0:56:55So, you know, they're ramping up fast.
0:56:57But Apple still said, no, we want these materials,
0:56:59not this material, we want it done.
0:57:01They designed the whole thing and then had Samsung fab it.
0:57:03And they made it the way
0:57:05that they were comfortable making it.
0:57:06- Yeah, I'm gonna take an aside here.
0:57:08And it's not even a question,
0:57:09but I'm gonna talk about this
0:57:10'cause I had to buy a new TV recently,
0:57:12and I haven't talked about it.
0:57:14But we renovated our living room,
0:57:18and we have a very, very big wall
0:57:20with room for a very large TV.
0:57:23And we had still been using a 2006 Pioneer Plasma,
0:57:28which I still have, and I've just moved
0:57:32to a lesser used room in the house.
0:57:35- Same.
0:57:36- And I don't turn it on anymore,
0:57:38and I just, I walk by and I pet it.
0:57:40'Cause it's seriously dollar for dollar,
0:57:43one of the great purchases of my entire life
0:57:46in terms of how happy it has made me over the years
0:57:50and how happy I still am with the picture and the color
0:57:54and I just, I don't wanna go off on a rant and lament.
0:57:57But I mean, at this point I realized
0:57:59that the technical limitations of plasma,
0:58:01it got killed by marketing problems
0:58:05because it was inherently more expensive.
0:58:08and LEDs got so absurdly cheap
0:58:10that it just became unfeasible
0:58:12to sell these expensive plasmas side by side with them.
0:58:16But you can't make them anywhere near thin enough
0:58:18by today's standards.
0:58:20When I got it in 2006, I was moving from a giant 35 inch,
0:58:25I think, Trinitron CRT,
0:58:29which weighed like 20,000 pounds.
0:58:32It was so heavy.
0:58:34It was like the biggest CRT Sony made for home use.
0:58:38And I love that TV too, but it,
0:58:41a big fat, heavy, thick, by today's standards,
0:58:44plasma in 2006 seemed so thin and light compared to a CRT.
0:58:48But anyway, it was time to buy a new TV.
0:58:50Hadn't bought one since 2000, into 2006, I think.
0:58:54And I knew I wanted OLED, and I thought, oh, here we go.
0:58:59I put it off and put it off 'cause I thought
0:59:01this is gonna be a nightmare, buying a TV.
0:59:03Turns out, once you decide you want OLED,
0:59:07it is actually, it's like the difference
0:59:10between deciding you wanna buy an Apple MacBook
0:59:14versus a PC, right?
0:59:16- Chromebook or something. - Right.
0:59:17And if you wanna buy a, yeah, a PC notebook,
0:59:20and you really wanna make sure
0:59:22you're making the best decision.
0:59:24You're gonna have an entire notebook filled with notes.
0:59:28Whereas if you just, you know you wanna get a MacBook,
0:59:32well, now you just decide pro or air or 16 or 13,
0:59:37and then a little bit of decision making
0:59:39on how much RAM and how much storage you need,
0:59:41and then you're done.
0:59:43Buying an OLED TV today is sort of like that.
0:59:45Number one, you are gonna pay significantly more
0:59:48for the same size TV compared to an LED.
0:59:51It is going to look way better.
0:59:53You will notice the difference.
0:59:55You don't need to be a picky, picky person
0:59:57to say, "Wow, this is brighter and the blacks are blacker."
1:00:02And if you're coming from plasma like I am,
1:00:06it's the only thing that makes it possibly bearable.
1:00:09And again, the blacks are better than they were
1:00:11on the plasma, but the overall color warmth
1:00:14of the things that I care about, like movies,
1:00:17still isn't as good as plasma,
1:00:19but it's so much closer than the cool,
1:00:21cold remoteness of LEDs.
1:00:25Basically when you want to buy an OLED today and again, I cheated tremendously and I just told had Syracuse to tell me what to buy
1:00:32I do exactly the same thing. But really you've only I think you've only got four brands to choose from you've got LG
1:00:38Sony Samsung and Vizio and
1:00:42If there are other brands, I don't know who they are what they make but Sony doesn't make their own panels
1:00:50They use LG panels
1:00:51And so at a panel level when you're deciding between
1:00:56Sony and LG
1:00:59You're just talking about the actual TV itself and which software is better and LG software. Everybody says is better
1:01:05I can't you could search the whole web and I don't know that you can find anybody who says that Sony's weird Android
1:01:11Yep, TV thing is better than LG's web OS. There we are back to web OS base. Yes interface
1:01:20They're also minimal chrome wise right like this is part of the beauty of
1:01:25The OLED revolution is that there's so little chrome
1:01:31Bezel around these TVs that none of them even Samsung who loves to put their shiny stupid ugly logo on everything
1:01:38There's no room for logos. So there's no shiny
1:01:40LG thing or badge down there. It's just a tiny black border around the screen
1:01:46So you can rule Sony out because you got the same panels as LG
1:01:50as good or better prices and better software from LG. There you go. Visio is sort of the discount
1:01:57brand. I don't, I've never heard anybody say there's any reason to get a Visio other than
1:02:01that they're cheaper. And then you're down to LG versus Samsung. And it's pretty much the same
1:02:06thing. It doesn't seem like anybody thinks the Samsung ones are better in any way. And now it's
1:02:12now... Samsung is better at small screen OLED and LG is way better at big screen OLED right now.
1:02:16And then, so very easy process of reduction.
1:02:20You're like, well, now I'm gonna buy an LG,
1:02:21which one should I get?
1:02:22And it's not, once you figure,
1:02:25this is where Syracuse really helped,
1:02:26is that they have like A series,
1:02:28which are sort of less expensive entry level,
1:02:31the, or I think, A, B, and C,
1:02:35where each one is better.
1:02:37C is better, but not too much better,
1:02:39only a little bit more expensive.
1:02:41Then the next number is a year,
1:02:43So like a C9 series means 2019.
1:02:48The way they, this is the part I'm getting to,
1:02:50the way they do the years is insane,
1:02:52where they just use one digit.
1:02:54So a C9 series OLED from LG means 2019 OLED.
1:02:59And then what are they gonna do for 2020?
1:03:03Are they gonna use a zero?
1:03:05Nope, using an X.
1:03:07They've gone to Roman numerals.
1:03:09It's insane.
1:03:12I have no idea what they're gonna do for 2021.
1:03:14Are they gonna go to XI?
1:03:16I don't know.
1:03:17I don't know why they didn't just use two digits, right?
1:03:19And again, all the trouble the world got into
1:03:21with the Y2K thing using two-digit years,
1:03:24at least with OLED televisions,
1:03:28I think we're pretty safe to assume
1:03:30that 81 years from now,
1:03:32we're not going to still be using OLED TVs.
1:03:35So I feel like they would have had so much runway
1:03:40if they had just used two years for the year number,
1:03:43and then you just pick what size you want,
1:03:46and then you're done, and there you go.
1:03:48- Yeah, I think that's fantastic.
1:03:51I listened to Syracuse too,
1:03:52and I made the exact same call, and I've been super happy,
1:03:54both with the Plasma and with the OLED.
1:03:56- Yeah, it is very good technology for TV.
1:03:58We're very happy with it.
1:04:00And it's funny because it's a new thing,
1:04:02and I still have to get a new sound system,
1:04:04and it's, this whole, (laughs)
1:04:09This whole, not that we can't order a sound system
1:04:11in the midst of being bunkered in home,
1:04:14self-quarantining, but it's just sort of lowered it
1:04:17on a priority list.
1:04:18And in the meantime, the built-in sound from this TV
1:04:22is actually better than our old standalone sound system
1:04:26for the fairly large living room that it's in.
1:04:29It's actually not too bad.
1:04:32Not that I'm gonna stick with it for too long,
1:04:33but it's actually way better than I ever had any reason
1:04:37to expect the built-in sound on a TV would be.
1:04:41So anyway. - It's really good.
1:04:41And also when you watch it with like native content,
1:04:44which I mean like the HDR
1:04:45and starting to get the Dolby Atmos,
1:04:47Disney+ has that, Apple TV+ has that.
1:04:49It's just night and day.
1:04:50- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:04:52And when you do get HDR content,
1:04:54even with my weirdo eyes at the moment,
1:04:57it's like, "Ooh, ooh, you can see that.
1:04:58"That is, ooh, that's really nice."
1:05:00- Yeah.
1:05:01- So anyway, there's my side on getting a TV.
1:05:04Next question.
1:05:05Boy, I'm bad at this question and answer format.
1:05:07- No, it's good.
1:05:08(laughing)
1:05:10- Anyway, fair warning,
1:05:12none of these questions are in any sort of order,
1:05:17so we're gonna bounce all over the place.
1:05:20Next question, Steven Morris,
1:05:21in what ways does Apple need to improve its services?
1:05:24What services do you think need the most time
1:05:27invested in them right now?
1:05:29Another good question.
1:05:30What do you think?
1:05:32- For me, it's still Siri, I think,
1:05:33'cause it's such a front-facing, customer-facing service,
1:05:36And while it does a lot of clever things,
1:05:38we talked about it on a previous show,
1:05:40it's just like one out of every nine, 10 times,
1:05:42or one out of every 20 times,
1:05:44it gives you a completely zany answer.
1:05:46Like I'll say, "Call my mom," and it'll work 19 times,
1:05:49and 20th time, it'll call a hair salon.
1:05:51Or I'll say like, "Show me photos from New York City,"
1:05:54it'll work perfectly, and then one time,
1:05:56it'll just try to search Bing for them.
1:05:59And I think that nailing the consistency
1:06:01for an assistant technology is just so core
1:06:05to building trust with that system,
1:06:07that it should be their, if not their top priority,
1:06:09then really close to it?
1:06:11- That's a good answer.
1:06:13I think it's very true.
1:06:15I think that I've repeated this numerous times.
1:06:18I'm not saying that they shouldn't have launched Siri
1:06:21when they did, and a year or two difference,
1:06:24I mean, there may or may not have been some aspect
1:06:27of a rush in terms of wanting to debut Siri in a phone
1:06:32while Steve Jobs was still alive.
1:06:34It's probably the last major feature that he lived to see.
1:06:39A year or two wouldn't have made a huge difference
1:06:42in the overall thing.
1:06:43It's probably the right time.
1:06:45Other companies were gonna have it.
1:06:46If Siri hadn't been out for another five or six years,
1:06:50Apple would have looked ridiculously out of touch.
1:06:54But all of these things are off to such a bad start,
1:07:01in my opinion, in terms of just giving everybody
1:07:04a very bad taste in the mouth as a first impression
1:07:07in terms of how reliable they are.
1:07:09And compare and contrast with touchscreen computing
1:07:14where the iPhone debuted and whatever other limitations
1:07:18you wanna talk about if you went back
1:07:21to a 2007 original iPhone right now,
1:07:26the touchscreen isn't one of them.
1:07:28the latency, the responsiveness to multi-touch,
1:07:32to pinching, to scrolling, to flicking was phenomenal.
1:07:36And I guess it's not the first touchscreen
1:07:39that most people have used.
1:07:41We've been to airports and there's a touchscreen
1:07:44for getting your boarding pass and they all stunk, right?
1:07:48The back of your airplane seat.
1:07:49- Or like the trio ones with the stylus.
1:07:50- Right.
1:07:51They all stunk.
1:07:55And having the iPhone say, here's the first one
1:07:58you're gonna wanna use and here's where we're setting the bar and people would say,
1:08:03"Oh, and now you expect everything to instantaneously respond to the touch of your fingers." Siri
1:08:11and Scala and again, sorry if I triggered, I should have said dingus and dingus and dingus.
1:08:19Hopefully I didn't set anybody's things off. Sorry.
1:08:21- [Lyle] Buy many doll houses.
1:08:23- All of these things are so terrible in the grand scheme of things, all of them. And feel
1:08:27free to rank Siri third as the third of the three, but and whichever one you, dear listener,
1:08:34think is the best, whether it's Alexa or Google or if you do think it's Siri, they all stink.
1:08:41None of them are good. They should all, you know, we know what we want them to be like.
1:08:45We want them to be genuinely conversational and they don't have to have a personality
1:08:52like Hal or Kit.
1:08:55(laughs)
1:08:56I never really realized as a kid, by the way,
1:08:57just how much Kit was a ripoff of Hal.
1:09:00- Yes. (laughs)
1:09:01- It doesn't have to have a personality,
1:09:03but you should at least be able to have a conversation,
1:09:06and we're not there yet.
1:09:06So I would, yeah, Siri has gotta be there.
1:09:09And anyway, the fact that the first impression is so bad
1:09:12just means it has to get so much better
1:09:14before it re-earns the trust of people who are like,
1:09:16I'm not even gonna bother asking my voice assistant for this
1:09:20because I just don't want a stupid answer.
1:09:22- Well, I think it's a mixed blessing.
1:09:23Like, I think Steve and Scott Forstall
1:09:25were deeply invested in it,
1:09:26but when Scott left, it sort of got handed off
1:09:29to a vice president in Eddy's org,
1:09:30and it didn't really get the attention it needed
1:09:33because no one really foresaw.
1:09:34Even now, it's gonna be critically important in an AR.
1:09:37If they're working on the AR operating system,
1:09:39it's gonna be critically important for that,
1:09:41and they have John and Jean Andrea there now,
1:09:43who's absolutely phenomenal,
1:09:44and I think his organization will be as important
1:09:47to the next 10 years as John Suruji's Silicon team
1:09:49has been to the last 10 years,
1:09:51but there's a lot of rebuilding to do.
1:09:53And because they're assistant number one,
1:09:55even if they allow default apps to be changed
1:09:57and default assistance,
1:09:58when you first install a new OS
1:10:00or you first get a new phone,
1:10:01they'll have an opportunity to like do something spectacular
1:10:03to get your attention.
1:10:05But I just think that that like just
1:10:06maybe make a whole separate Siri cloud that you can beta
1:10:10and just have people go through that over and over again.
1:10:13'Cause every beta process now,
1:10:14Siri breaks a little bit more
1:10:16because they're busy working on the backend.
1:10:18and that just makes it, it makes it harder
1:10:19to build that trust relationship.
1:10:21- I would add as a second service that I would like to see
1:10:25continue to improve is iCloud as a whole.
1:10:28And I think iCloud has done very well.
1:10:30I think that, and again, that's another thing
1:10:33where maybe it got off to a bad start
1:10:35and because it left a bad first impression
1:10:37with an awful lot of people, it's had to get better,
1:10:40even better than it would have had to have been originally
1:10:43to get people to trust it again.
1:10:46But I really do entrust most of my digital syncing life to iCloud, and it for years now has been really, really solid.
1:10:57It is up there with the best of any sync service that I've used.
1:11:02But I still think that there's room for improvement.
1:11:06I would like to see it, and it's a small thing, but I'd like to see it get decoupled further from OS releases.
1:11:15Like, it would be nice, and I get why,
1:11:19I understand the way Apple thinks
1:11:21and the way Apple approaches stuff
1:11:23like a new version of the Reminders app
1:11:25or a new version of the Notes app
1:11:27and why you have to upgrade to Catalina to get it,
1:11:30but there's no real reason for that.
1:11:33There's no, you know, like look at Safari,
1:11:35the way that Safari is still made,
1:11:37new versions of Safari are still made available
1:11:42people who are still using 10.14 and 10.13.
1:11:47It would be nice if you're upgrading Reminders to a major new version.
1:11:53And it is such a great—it's one of the great highlights that we don't talk too
1:11:56much about from last year.
1:11:58Reminders really went from an afterthought app to a really nice app, but it kind of stinks
1:12:03that it's coupled so tightly to being on the latest and greatest OS, especially on
1:12:08the Mac where, for professional reasons, there's an awful lot of reasons.
1:12:12not just vague conservatism about upgrading
1:12:15to the new version of Mac OS X,
1:12:17but just in a professional environment
1:12:19where you've got everything set up just so,
1:12:22you don't wanna be upgrading your OS without--
1:12:25- Or if you're dependent on 32-bit plugins, for example.
1:12:26- Yes, right, right, right.
1:12:29And especially the 10.14 to 10.15 transition,
1:12:31where a whole chunk of 32-bit software
1:12:35literally cannot be run.
1:12:38It's not even, oh, you have to click a warning.
1:12:41Yeah, it just doesn't run
1:12:43So I agree with that totally but I'd love to see it like a step further
1:12:47I I've been advocating for a while that Apple just not get away from
1:12:50Monolithic software releases because I think there's a lot of advantage to having that big
1:12:54WWDC announcement but instead of saying coming September
1:12:58I want them just to say coming over the next year and then there's no pressure and if I messages I mentioned sync as late or
1:13:04Airplay 2 is late. It's not like Oh Apple fail to deliver
1:13:08It's like these are the this is the road map for the next year of iOS and some of the stuff comes in September
1:13:12And some comes in in October some comes in March some comes in June before the next announcement
1:13:18And then decouple the online stuff entirely Microsoft and Google did that years ago and just that stuff gets updated
1:13:24Almost all the time. Yeah, just it allows so much more freedom
1:13:27And it just we don't have to worry about it as users either and I think it has huge advantages
1:13:33Yeah, I I think so, too
1:13:35So I would like to see Apple continued to work on that regard and and you know and be able to push iCloud
1:13:42updates off cycle
1:13:44Alright next question
1:13:46Ricardo Lamas asks very short to the point iPhone 2020 pricing
1:13:50Are we screwed with all the things going on in the world?
1:13:54I'm I'm interpreting part two of his question to are we screwed?
1:14:00getting iPhones in September, new iPhones in September,
1:14:04as opposed to the darker question of,
1:14:07are we collectively screwed
1:14:11with all the things going on in the world?
1:14:14I'm gonna take it as an iPhone question,
1:14:18but if it meant the bigger sense,
1:14:20I guess the honest answer is I don't know, but I hope not.
1:14:24I think the 2020 iPhones thing,
1:14:28I know that there was some news, I think Nick Kay had a news report that said that Apple
1:14:36was in discussions about planning discussions for whether the new iPhones, I mean, again,
1:14:47you can't cancel what hasn't been announced, but everybody knows that the schedule Apple's
1:14:51been on for years now, which is the second Tuesday of September is iPhone introduction
1:14:57Tuesday and then they you know start shipping at like the 21st of the month that are somewhat later in the month
1:15:03And that's also when iOS 14 comes out blah blah blah everybody knows that schedule
1:15:07Will that schedule hold this year with everything going on and the K reported that Apple at the highest levels as?
1:15:14Discussing well, maybe not and if so, what does that mean?
1:15:18And then digit times came out with a counter report that said no, there's they're not talking about a blah blah blah
1:15:25I think you just pause for a second and just think of course Tim Cook and Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi and
1:15:33Engineering teams and
1:15:38Everybody at Apple and in the finance teams like Lucas team and if everybody is looking everything is on the table, right?
1:15:45Is it the supply chain that might screw Apple and prevent stuff from being ready in September?
1:15:52Is it the work from home regulations that are ongoing that are keeping Apple's end software engineering teams from collaborating like they're used to?
1:16:03And hidden travel restrictions, they can't go to China and work on the prototypes.
1:16:07Exactly, right? It's all of the above. All of it. All of it factors into it.
1:16:13it. Oh, and then there's the macroeconomic question of, and the reading the room where
1:16:21the room is the world is, you know, will the world be ready for it? Will it play the way
1:16:29that Apple wants it to play as a, here, here's good news, we have exciting new iPhones to
1:16:34introduce. Will the world be ready for that in September? Who knows? So of course, of
1:16:41Of course they're considering what are the plan B, C, D, E, right?
1:16:46Yeah, and I think it's interesting in a couple ways because first, usually every year there's
1:16:53rumors that Apple's going to be late with the new iPhone.
1:16:55It goes all the way back to that old video where Jim Cramer said, "Yeah, every year,
1:17:00to protect my shorts, I call up an Apple news site and say it's going to be late, and they
1:17:04love to run with that stuff, and then the market dumps, I cover my nut, and I go home."
1:17:11So I think there's a huge amount of market manipulation
1:17:13that goes on in the best of years.
1:17:15But this year, there's no expectation.
1:17:17I don't think anyone, anyone reasonable,
1:17:19anyone of her right mind would have an expectation
1:17:21that products will come out the way they would in a year
1:17:24that didn't have everything going on now.
1:17:26But the other two pressures I see is there's rumors
1:17:28of a smaller iPhone, like the iPhone will move
1:17:31to a smaller 11 style and a normal size 11 style,
1:17:35and then an 11 sized Pro and an even bigger Pro.
1:17:40Typically the smaller ones are less expensive. The bigger ones are more expensive
1:17:44but most of them are gonna go 5g the
1:17:47Basic ones are gonna go sub 6 which is like the t-mobile
1:17:51Real kind of slightly better than LTE 5g and the pros are gonna go a millimeter wave and sub 6
1:17:59And millimeter wave is the Verizon AT&T one that I'm still not convinced will ever be a real consumer technology
1:18:05It'll might end up like WiMAX, but those are typically $100 more expensive if you look at Android vendors or like the Samsung
1:18:13though the lightest generation of Samsung phones are
1:18:15Fairly similar to what the rumors are gonna be for the rumors have been for iPhones and they're all much more
1:18:20Expensive than they were previously
1:18:23So I think if Apple like they can do what they did with the iPad where they move down the lower end ones
1:18:29people get really happy like the the iPhone 9 will be $399 and the smaller iPhone 11 will be a little bit cheaper than
1:18:36700 bucks maybe 600 bucks or something and then if they have to boost the higher-end one that's even bigger
1:18:41Because people originally already think they're gonna pay more for bigger anyway, and it has 5g on it
1:18:47I think that's how they'll they'll balance out the pricing this year
1:18:50Can I can I I'm just gonna toss in my sense here as a 5g skeptic and I don't want to go down here
1:18:57I don't want to be quoted like Bill Gates 640 kilobytes of memory ought to be enough for anyone
1:19:02which quote I believe if you actually look at the further context of
1:19:06Isn't nearly as foolish as the soundbite version makes Bill Gates seem I don't want to say that 5g
1:19:13Is never going to be an important thing and I don't want to say that we're never gonna in a handful of years
1:19:21You know somewhere between now and 2024. Let's say
1:19:26That we won't be looking back at the pre 5g
1:19:31Network performance and thinking yeah, that was that was kind of crappy maybe but I have to say
1:19:38There's a point of diminishing returns and I don't I don't I refuse to believe
1:19:45That any 5g could be that much better than the LTE
1:19:50Performance I'm getting all the time nowadays
1:19:54So that's totally true and my colleague Daniel my former colleague Daniel Bader my friend Daniel Bader
1:20:00Opened my eyes to this when he explained that for people like us there won't be much difference
1:20:04They say like at best it's a 20% improvement for sub-6, but there are vast swaths of the country that just don't have LTE
1:20:11It's never been delivered and the increase in bandwidth because they're freeing up so much capacity for it that the the what?
1:20:185g will really do is deliver on the promise of LTE for far more people
1:20:22I think like the mm millimeter wave stuff. You're exactly right. It's a fantasy
1:20:27It's just not like if you have to turn or if you turn around or it rains and you lose your signal
1:20:31That's not a consumer technology, but the sub six version which is the cheaper and more ubiquitous version
1:20:36That's just gonna make LTE real for everybody and I think that that part of it's a win
1:20:40Yeah
1:20:41So that's and that's you know
1:20:42It's I live in a big city with good LTE coverage and I don't want to be dismissive of
1:20:48people who live elsewhere.
1:20:49I have family who lives places where,
1:20:52I can't wait to go visit.
1:20:53Well, remember when you could visit your family, but.
1:20:55- Yes. (laughing)
1:20:58God, it feels like so long ago.
1:20:59- I look forward to visiting them
1:21:01and having a strong signal.
1:21:02That would be tremendous.
1:21:05So I'm not putting it down, but I do think
1:21:07that that is a much, that's compelling,
1:21:10that there are swaths, big swaths of area
1:21:14that don't get an LTE signal at all
1:21:17and could get 5G because of whatever reasons,
1:21:20you know, the bandwidth, the what, the...
1:21:24- Yeah, just all the bands that they're opening up for 5G
1:21:28and also the reliability of it,
1:21:30it looks like it's gonna be better than,
1:21:32it's more robust than LTE at least.
1:21:33- Right, so that is a huge win.
1:21:35In terms of like day-to-day for me
1:21:37and probably most people who actually do get
1:21:39a good LTE signal, I just don't see it.
1:21:42Like what, if I can already stream 4K video,
1:21:46what the hell else am I, what am I doing?
1:21:49What am I gonna be doing that needs this?
1:21:52- Even the carriers don't know.
1:21:53Their advertising is such garbage.
1:21:54It's like, oh, I forget the joke.
1:21:56It's like 8K, you'll be able to beam 8K over 5G
1:22:00to your television and none of those things are real.
1:22:02- Right, and the other thing that I would like them,
1:22:06and it has to be on their radar,
1:22:08they have to be thinking about it,
1:22:10but it's like what I would like them to be thinking about
1:22:13It's not just going from LTE to 5G
1:22:17and selling people new handsets
1:22:18and presumably somehow tacking on a 5G service feed
1:22:23to my monthly bill so they can charge me more.
1:22:26I would like to see them start looking
1:22:30at building out a capacity that would allow them
1:22:34to take on the landline-based broadband providers, right?
1:22:39- Yeah.
1:22:40That's the only chance I'm ever gonna have of getting a serious option
1:22:45Competitor to Comcast I think is going to be over-the-air
1:22:49wireless and
1:22:52Performance wise and I have a pretty good Comcast. I mean up is no good
1:22:57You know, it's the nature and maybe I can just some maybe there's somebody I can call it Comcast and get that
1:23:03change but
1:23:05You know I get about 200 megabits per second down my ero not a sponsor this week
1:23:11But my ero system that I have in the house
1:23:14Gives us you know
1:23:16Somewhere close to that theoretical maximum of 200 plus and at times you I get close to 300 down from
1:23:25The wall right over the wire
1:23:27Yeah, ero gives us Wi-Fi throughout the house that is pretty close
1:23:32You know in practical terms to what you could expect if that's what you're getting from the wire
1:23:37What could you possibly expect by Wi-Fi up isn't you know at best?
1:23:4220 but usually closer to 10 and so yes when I upload a new version of the podcast and I have to wait a while
1:23:53am annoyed
1:23:54But you know for the most part I would just like a lower bill
1:23:58Yeah, and the big reason I can't do that now performance wise my LTE upstream LTE for me on a daily basis is way faster
1:24:06Than my modem right my cable
1:24:08that the reason I can't just
1:24:11Cancel Comcast is the bandwidth the you know the limits, you know that we would shoot over it in a you know
1:24:17Probably a day with the way my son watches YouTube
1:24:20Yeah, absolutely
1:24:22I think I think about it because we go to confirm the conferences or events like the iPhone event and the hotel has crappy Wi-Fi
1:24:28and I'm trying to upload, and then I figure it'd be great
1:24:30if I could do it, but then how expensive would that be?
1:24:32And if I'm the 18th YouTuber trying to do it,
1:24:34how much bandwidth would actually be left on that signal?
1:24:36- Well, we were talking about this,
1:24:37I think we were repeating ourselves,
1:24:39but I know that it was one of those times
1:24:41where it was like last WWDC, me not being a YouTuber,
1:24:45even though I guess I sort of am at WWDC,
1:24:49normal WWDCs, because my live show does get put on YouTube,
1:24:53but I don't do it, I'm not the one uploading it.
1:24:57But like, you and Marquez, Marquez moved to a new hotel.
1:25:02- Yes, and I tried to follow him,
1:25:05but then he took the last room.
1:25:06(laughing)
1:25:08- He abandoned his hotel room.
1:25:10And again, it sounds ridiculous, but if you think,
1:25:12well, you know, for a couple hundred bucks on a,
1:25:15you know, will you pay a couple hundred bucks
1:25:18for what is your profession, yeah, it's worth it.
1:25:22But anyway, that's my thing.
1:25:24The other thing I noticed is amidst all this,
1:25:28I don't know if other carriers are doing the same.
1:25:30I don't know what the story is up your way in Canada,
1:25:32but here in the US, Verizon has given everybody
1:25:3515 gigabytes of monthly tethering,
1:25:39or what do they call it, hotspot support.
1:25:42Just tacked onto your plan, no charge.
1:25:46We know everybody's working at home in the midst of all this.
1:25:50Here's 15 gigabytes of tethering.
1:25:53Why the hell, you know, if they can do that now that everybody's using it, why, what are they doing with all that excess capacity in the normal months? Right?
1:26:05Well, I think I also heard conversely that a lot of people are vastly reducing their plans because they're not out and using data. They're all home using Wi-Fi.
1:26:13So I wonder if they're afraid that people won't up their plans again and they have extra capacity because people are using it less.
1:26:20It's almost like there's no cars on the road,
1:26:21so they're trying to do this so that you think
1:26:23they're a nice company, and when you go back,
1:26:25you go back to what you used to use.
1:26:27- Yeah, I've heard the same thing from a couple of friends
1:26:29on Slack who were just like, yeah, I just actually
1:26:31checked my usage, and it's like, yeah,
1:26:33I haven't used anything.
1:26:34And then they're like, ah, duh, I haven't left the house
1:26:36in 72 hours. - Yeah, I have like 30 gigabytes
1:26:39on my plan because I was traveling so much,
1:26:41and I reduced it down to very little and no roaming anymore.
1:26:44- Yeah.
1:26:45All right, let's take a break here,
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1:30:40All right, let's keep going.
1:30:42Let's power through this list.
1:30:44How is my series a question from Brian?
1:30:47No last name.
1:30:48How's your titanium series five watch holding up?
1:30:50Initially there seemed to be some concern about how easily it might scratch.
1:30:53Great question.
1:30:54I haven't talked about this in a while.
1:30:55I would say it is holding up terrifically.
1:30:57I picked up a scratch early on on the side facing me,
1:31:02like underneath, like I would say at about 33 minutes
1:31:08past the hour on the titanium part, right?
1:31:11So the 33 minute mark, not quite in the middle.
1:31:15And it's not really a scratch, it's almost like,
1:31:17it's like some kind of coating came off there.
1:31:22I don't know what I did.
1:31:23That's the only one that happened early on.
1:31:26I haven't seen any other marks.
1:31:28I love it overall.
1:31:29I've been a space black Apple Watch wearer until now.
1:31:33I couldn't be happier with my decision
1:31:36to go titanium this time.
1:31:37It really makes me happy as a watch nerd
1:31:39that I have this watch.
1:31:40I'm even wearing the, I didn't think about this,
1:31:43but I'm wearing the, I don't know why,
1:31:46but during this isolation thing,
1:31:48I've been digging out old Apple Watch straps
1:31:51and putting, I mean, anything to occupy my brain.
1:31:56- Absolutely.
1:31:57- I've worn Apple Watch straps.
1:31:59I haven't worn ever or before.
1:32:01I'm wearing the sport band that comes
1:32:04with the titanium model.
1:32:06It's a sort of a grayish thing.
1:32:08It has a titanium, what do you call the plug
1:32:10that pokes through the hole.
1:32:12- Yes.
1:32:13- I never really wore it.
1:32:15I'm usually a black, dark strap person,
1:32:18and this is sort of a medium one,
1:32:20but I've been wearing it the last couple of days.
1:32:22I really like it.
1:32:23- I've been wearing the gray bands.
1:32:25I was wearing one of the new ones.
1:32:26I forget what the color is called,
1:32:28but it's the gray sport loop with the orange trim on it.
1:32:31And I liked the gray ones just because if I forget
1:32:34the color chart in my videos and I hold up my hand,
1:32:37I can freeze it for one second
1:32:39and white balance off the watch band,
1:32:41which is such a nerdy thing to do.
1:32:42But it's, I've been wearing my titanium too.
1:32:45It's the brush titanium.
1:32:46I imagine the DLC is like the DLC stainless steel,
1:32:49which means it's like Batman's watch or something.
1:32:52It breaks things, not, it'll be around.
1:32:54But I have two tiny little,
1:32:55And they aren't scratches, they just look like
1:32:57the polished coating they put on top of the brushed metal
1:32:59has been dented a little bit.
1:33:01- Yeah, that's right. - So titanium looks fine.
1:33:03- Yeah, and I have the same one too,
1:33:04the regular titanium, not the DLC one.
1:33:07'Cause my thinking on the darker one
1:33:09is if you're gonna go black, go all the way.
1:33:11Go to space black stainless steel.
1:33:13If you're gonna upgrade over the aluminum ones,
1:33:17then you're gonna go black, go black, black.
1:33:19Whereas I like this, and I still can't beat
1:33:24- Panzarinos description from like the day of the event
1:33:28where he described it as like a sort of DeLorean look.
1:33:33- Yeah, it's like the old QuickTime window come to life.
1:33:37- Yeah, and it does.
1:33:39And the other strap I've been wearing
1:33:41that I really like a lot is the,
1:33:44and never wore before this Apple Watch,
1:33:47is the leather magnetized one.
1:33:51I don't know what Apple calls it.
1:33:52- Yeah, the leather loop.
1:33:53leather loop. And I like the leather loop. It's a different way of looping than the
1:34:00sport band and the mesh metal one. The Milanese. The Milanese, which has like at one side,
1:34:11you can choose top or bottom, but one side it has to double over. The leather one only loops
1:34:16double over right at the bottom of your wrist, which I happen to like a lot. But that leather,
1:34:22the black leather, I don't think they call it black, it's like super dark gray or something,
1:34:26it's like near black, but the way that the leather is pebbled, I don't know that I like it in the
1:34:31abstract, but combined with this sort of 80s DeLorean look, it just goes so well with this
1:34:40watch and has sort of a DeLorean 80s Back to the Future vibe without looking kitschy at all. I like
1:34:50it. And I said it before, like if the sports loops are like sweatpants for your wrist, the
1:34:55leather loops are like yoga pants for your wrist. They're just so comfortable. They really are a
1:34:59little bit classier. They really are. Let me just say this while we're on the subject of
1:35:04Apple Watch straps. The sport bands, not the sport bands, I keep calling them sport bands.
1:35:11Sport band is the polyurethane, I don't know what they call it, the rubbery ones, and the sport
1:35:17loops are the velcro ones. The default Apple watch strap from day one clearly has been the
1:35:23sport band. The rubber one that's based on the Mark Neusen design from his, what was his watch
1:35:30called back in the day? Oh, I'm blanking on it. Yeah, whatever it was called. You know, and it's
1:35:37not like they ripped them off. Johnny Ive is pals with them and they brought him in and they hired
1:35:41them. They hired them and obviously paid them for the rights to this strap design. You see
1:35:47it everywhere. It is clearly, you know, it comes as the default strap with a lot of watches.
1:35:53Most Apple watches, you see lots of people who wear it every day. It's part of the iconic
1:35:59nature of the Apple watch, right? I mean, this is a very, but it's also, as a watch
1:36:04nerd, it is super clever. And one of the things with an awful lot of watch straps is what
1:36:10do you do with the extra part, right?
1:36:13>> IKOPOD? Sorry, I think it was IKOPOD?
1:36:14>> Yeah, that's it. IKOPOD, right? What do you do with the extra part of a watch strap?
1:36:20And there's always like a lot of watch straps have a little belt, you know, that you tuck
1:36:25it under, but then you can kind of see it over the top of the wrist, especially—
1:36:28>> And it peels back over time.
1:36:29>> And it, you know, phrase—the design of this, where it just tucks under the other
1:36:35side of the strap is so extraordinarily clever. And in the years since Apple Watch has come
1:36:42out, it's been ripped off by a whole bunch of other people because anything popular gets
1:36:47ripped off.
1:36:48Yes.
1:36:49But the other thing that I – so A, it's a very clever design and it deserves its iconic
1:36:54nature. It really does – it's comfortable, it is convenient, it looks good, it is super
1:37:00clever and has solved a problem that has plagued watches for decades as to what do you do with
1:37:05the extra part. But the other thing that I think really deserves praise is that these bands last
1:37:11forever. Like poking a hole, you know, where you poke the little knob through the hole to get it to
1:37:18fit, you would think, and with most watch straps, whether they're, especially leather, leather
1:37:24inevitably, you know, starts to get a, you know, a bigger hole over time if you're poking a thing
1:37:30through the hole like a belt. These, it's like you can never tell, like I've been wearing, you know,
1:37:36I have some of these that I've worn a lot. You take it off and kind of hold the lights up and
1:37:41you can't tell which is the hole that you use every day. Like the durability of this material
1:37:47is incredible. And if you just- The flouroelastomer, I think they called it.
1:37:51Flouroelastomer, that is the term they use. It's incredibly durable. It's really amazing. And then
1:37:57And then the other part, the top part of the strap that has the pin and has the slot that
1:38:06the other side of the watch tucks under, it gets very thin at that point, right?
1:38:12There's very little at that part where the little slot where you tuck it under, there's
1:38:18not much floral elastomer there.
1:38:20If you didn't know better, you would think, "Well, that's going to rip."
1:38:23It looks like something that would rip after time.
1:38:26It doesn't.
1:38:27seen anybody have one that rips and you work out with it you sweat with that you
1:38:32swim with it it really is a remarkable bass band for the whole system you you
1:38:36you go you know all sorts of ways that you can knock your wrist against
1:38:39something I mean watch straps you know aren't known for lasting forever or at
1:38:45least the rubber type ones aren't really Apple deserves it's another one of the
1:38:49ways that their materials engineering teams are just doing work that just
1:38:55doesn't get commented upon enough.
1:38:57Like their floral elastomer team has made these watch straps
1:39:01that I've never seen one where there's all sorts of ways
1:39:04that you can have like a belt-like watch strap with holes
1:39:07and you poke a thing through the hole
1:39:09for the size that you want.
1:39:10Those holes inevitably get bigger and wear out.
1:39:14I don't know what the hell that black magic they've done
1:39:16that doesn't happen with these,
1:39:18but it doesn't seem like they get kudos for that
1:39:21and they should.
1:39:22- It's one of those things where people,
1:39:23especially tech people love to complain that Apple's not innovating and they point to what I would describe as gimmicks on a lot of
1:39:28Other devices that don't last like a year later
1:39:31You never see them again and Apple just does these things like makes
1:39:34Interchangeable watch straps that are really durable or you see people with other phones say I try to take a picture
1:39:40But it didn't the camera app didn't load or it lost frames or the video keeps stuttering
1:39:44And Apple makes this whole performance controller just to make sure every frame gets saved to the storage and those kind of things
1:39:51I think are less
1:39:52They're less in your face, but I think a lot of it makes real difference as to how we use our products
1:39:56Yeah, I totally agree
1:39:58I also think you know that that as the years go on and more people have Apple watches and
1:40:03People who have them have worn them more and more that the basic idea of well wait everybody sort of shows their individuality
1:40:10Through what watch they pick isn't it a little weird that everybody is
1:40:16Inevitably we're having the same watch and having all of the variety or almost all of it, right?
1:40:22We were just talking about titanium versus aluminum, but for the most part
1:40:25At a glance you can't tell if titanium ones titanium or if it's aluminum
1:40:30It's the bands that really stand out at a glance and it's been successful. It's I think it's actually a remarkably successful
1:40:39Way of people still feeling individual they've individualized their Apple watch
1:40:46even though at a basic level their watch is exactly the same as everybody else's.
1:40:52Yeah, yeah, no, 100%.
1:40:55Next question, Oliver Thomas asks, "Now that iCloud folder sharing has gone live with the release of iOS 13.4,
1:41:02and whatever the new version of Catalina is, 15.4 or whatever, anyway, whatever new versions came out last week,
1:41:12Have either of you switched away from Dropbox?
1:41:15I'll answer first, no.
1:41:16Although I do use iCloud a lot,
1:41:19but I use it all for personal stuff
1:41:21and none of my collaboration stuff yet.
1:41:23- Yeah, I'm the same.
1:41:26I use, I've been slowly, like it's a big ask.
1:41:29And I think it's good because Dropbox has been doing things
1:41:32over the last few years that I would rather they didn't do.
1:41:35And there's been a bit of a movement
1:41:36to move away from Dropbox, but it works for me.
1:41:39I have almost my entire documents folder in there.
1:41:42It means I can switch between computers very easily.
1:41:45And it does things in a way that makes
1:41:48that easier than some of the ways that iCloud documents work.
1:41:52But I've been slowly using iCloud more and more.
1:41:54And as it proves reliable and as I adapt my workflows to it,
1:41:57I hope I can move more and more things over.
1:41:59It's harder to collaborate with everybody on it,
1:42:02because not everybody is using a system that has iCloud
1:42:04available for things like shared folders.
1:42:06but I would like to integrate more of it
1:42:10because I prefer Apple's overall policies
1:42:13on iCloud better.
1:42:14- Yeah, so I would say not yet,
1:42:17and it's not just because 13.4
1:42:20and the new version of Catalina
1:42:23just shipped in the last week.
1:42:24I anticipated this even when it was announced
1:42:27at WWDC last year, and even in the best case scenario
1:42:30where both of them had shipped, let's say, back in September,
1:42:35I didn't anticipate switching right away,
1:42:37just because Dropbox,
1:42:39that role in my life is so important
1:42:45that it's not something you undertake lightly, right?
1:42:48It's, so I do think maybe, I still hope eventually
1:42:52that I will switch, 'cause it would be nice
1:42:54to not rely on a third-party thing,
1:42:56and no offense to the folks at Dropbox,
1:42:57but yeah, I'm not really super happy
1:42:59with a lot of their recent decisions.
1:43:02So I still hope I will be able to switch,
1:43:05And I'm lucky that everybody I collaborate uses Apple stuff.
1:43:09I don't have a big--
1:43:10going back to the beginning of the show,
1:43:12it's not like there's a huge team here.
1:43:15But like Caleb Sexton, who edits the show,
1:43:17we bounce the files back and forth through Dropbox.
1:43:21He's working on a Mac.
1:43:22We could switch eventually.
1:43:23But for now, no, we're still using Dropbox.
1:43:25Just because it just works and when something just works,
1:43:29I don't take it lightly to take it out.
1:43:31And again, it also comes into play with stuff like, hey,
1:43:34Does everybody who I'm collaborating with,
1:43:36are they on Catalina?
1:43:37You know? - Yeah, yeah.
1:43:40What I noticed when I did the,
1:43:42I did that thing from my YouTube trailer
1:43:43where I had a bunch of people send me clips,
1:43:46and these are really nerdy, techy people,
1:43:48and there was a lot of Google Drive,
1:43:50there was some Microsoft Drive,
1:43:53probably more than I expected.
1:43:55There was a bunch of iCloud Drive,
1:43:56and that makes sense because a lot of people
1:43:58are very Apple-centric, but I didn't see much Dropbox,
1:44:00and I would have imagined the Dropbox
1:44:01would have been a much higher percentage of the user base
1:44:06for what I was asking.
1:44:08- Yeah, and it does, you know, it's taken 10 years plus
1:44:13for it to really come true, but it all,
1:44:15it comes back to that supposed discussion
1:44:18between Steve Jobs and one of the Dropbox founders
1:44:21when they were, you know, somehow Steve Jobs
1:44:24got in contact with them, I guess,
1:44:26to put out feelers about maybe an acquisition,
1:44:28and he said, "You don't have a product, you have a feature."
1:44:31And, you know, that's jobs being jobs. Of course, you know, he's going to say something
1:44:36pithy like that to put the person he's negotiating with on their heels, you know.
1:44:41Yes.
1:44:42It's classic jobs. But also classic jobs, there's obviously a huge, very large kernel
1:44:47of truth in it where ultimately what do people want? They just want a folder that syncs,
1:44:52right? And you want the reliability where you put it in and then you go to another device
1:44:59and it's there because it's synced and the sync always works and it's never it doesn't corrupt
1:45:04things and you don't wind up with seven copies of the same thing named conflict copy one conflict
1:45:10copy you just want it to work and the other thing is and it's so nice about the dropbox concept of a
1:45:17folder that syncs is you want this clarity of knowing what stuff is syncing and what stuff
1:45:23isn't right and so if you have this thing that you know you don't want to sync if it's not in your
1:45:28your Dropbox folder, then it isn't syncing, right?
1:45:31And, you know, iCloud folder, iCloud Drive sort of has,
1:45:36you know, a lot of that, right?
1:45:38Like you know when something, when you're in the Finder,
1:45:40you know if it's in iCloud or not, right?
1:45:42- And one of the things I did with Dropbox
1:45:44is for all the, my old vector videos,
1:45:46that was gigabytes and gigabytes of data,
1:45:49and I just checked the box that said,
1:45:51don't keep this folder locally.
1:45:53And then it would stay all on Dropbox
1:45:55and it wouldn't clog up my Mac.
1:45:56And there's just a lot of features
1:45:57built up over time that I think it'll take a while for iCloud to catch up on.
1:46:01Yeah. Here's a new question. Mark Plus asks another good question. We're never
1:46:05going to get through all the good questions. These are... this is great, but we
1:46:08can try. Are you worried that more and more stuff on the iPad will require an
1:46:12external keyboard and/or tracking device? I already have two things on my list.
1:46:16Using Spotlight while in an app requires an external keyboard. Two, some websites
1:46:22using drag and drop require a mouse/trackpad? I'll let you go first.
1:46:28Yeah, so this is to me the big balancing act, and I think it was a huge contention issue within
1:46:34Apple as well for a long time, and that probably explains the whole evolution of iPad to some
1:46:39degree is that a lot of people believe that Steve Jobs' vision, that it was the most important
1:46:44product Apple ever made, it was a computer for everyone else. You had your Macs, but they were
1:46:48were a bunch of people for whom the Mac was still inaccessible and
1:46:51unapproachable and off-putting and scary and this was a computer that anybody
1:46:55from you know a two years old to a hundred years old could pick up
1:46:58immediately used for the first time and they didn't want to lose that but at the
1:47:03same time you had a bunch of really vocal nerds who love Apple products and
1:47:07were used to having every Apple product made for them who just felt like it was
1:47:11limiting that it didn't do what they want they wanted to switch to it but it
1:47:14didn't do every single traditional computing thing that they did and it
1:47:17reminded me of the early Macs where like Jobs very deliberately didn't put, or at least
1:47:21anecdotally didn't put arrow keys or a terminal because he wanted people to acclimatize themselves
1:47:27to the mouse. But over time, you look down now, every Mac has terminal and arrow keys.
1:47:31And I feel that very similarly with the iPad that it should never lose what makes it the
1:47:36most accessible computing platform that we've seen yet. And I think the 10.2 inch iPad is
1:47:42a great symbol of that. If you want it, you can just get it for $329 and touch it and
1:47:50use it and it's great for a computer for everybody. But I think if they want it to progress and
1:47:57they do want to have it docked, and even if it's a small percentage, it's a very passionate,
1:48:01very vocal percentage, if you allow it to be docked, you then have to make it a first-class
1:48:05citizen and it's got to have keyboard and mouse support, the equal of any traditional
1:48:10It's got to have functional arrow keys and a functional terminal and I think that's what they're putting the final steps on now
1:48:16yeah, and Apple has emphasized both not so much in the product marketing but in the
1:48:22Discussions I've had with them, you know after the iPad Pro announcement and the announcement at least of the magic
1:48:29keyboard for iPad Pro
1:48:33They emphasize over and over and over again that iPad remains a touched first touch first platform
1:48:39And I don't think that's BS.
1:48:41I think it's true.
1:48:42Spotlight not being accessible while you're in an app,
1:48:45that is true, but I don't know how you would do it, right?
1:48:48They've already overloaded all the edges of the screen,
1:48:51right? - Yes.
1:48:52- You pull down from the top and you get notification center.
1:48:54Top corner is, I mean, they've already overloaded the top
1:48:58with control center and notification center.
1:49:02So I can't see adding a third one for the other corner.
1:49:05You know, I don't know what the, you know,
1:49:08I don't it's a good example of something that's better with a keyboard than without on an iPad
1:49:13But I don't think it's any in any way spiteful towards the it's like a right mouse click, you know
1:49:18Like they didn't used to have one so you couldn't access all these convenient things and because they've a limitation of a one button interface
1:49:24Then they have like two buttons and now they have a limitation
1:49:26They had a limitation of a directly manipulable gross gesture interface and the keyboard allows them to shortcut it or like warp
1:49:33Tunnel through it on occasion
1:49:36Yeah, and I think your comparison to the original Macintosh not having arrow keys and not having a text mode
1:49:41Was good and it was sort of like they were half right half wrong
1:49:45I think the arrow keys thing they were definitely wrong about that also feels like it might have been more personally Steve Jobs
1:49:51You know and they obviously relented on that and very few people even remember having seeing a Macintosh keyboard that didn't have arrow keys
1:49:59I mean and again
1:50:01thinking about how much time I personally complained about the
1:50:05the full height left and right arrow keys on like three years worth of MacBook keyboards and
1:50:10the amount of time I've congratulated Apple on going back to the upside down "T"
1:50:17of arrow key arrangement. It is an interesting thought to think, well, what if they went back
1:50:23to the 1984 layout where there are no arrow keys? How do you like that? I do like that, yeah, exactly.
1:50:30So I do think, though, that the no text mode on the original Macintosh was absolutely key.
1:50:37And if they had added it, I think it would have been devastating to the taking root of an actual
1:50:46third-party ecosystem of, you know, okay, you want to write, you want to port your spreadsheet to the
1:50:53Mac, you've got to do a Mac version. You cannot just take the text version that you're running
1:50:58on the Apple II or on IBM PCs and just have it run in text mode on the Mac. You've got to,
1:51:05to some degree, and you know, in 1984, '85, '86, some developers were better than others at getting
1:51:12what a real Mac app was. And again, compared to what we complain about today, you know,
1:51:18with Electron apps and stuff, some of the apps from like 1985, you know, their idea of a Mac
1:51:24version was a real stretch. But for the most part, people got it. And the fact that it wasn't even
1:51:31there as an option to like, oh, just reboot your Mac and hold down the option key and it opens in
1:51:36text mode like an Apple II really, really might have, I think, made the GUI era be stillborn.
1:51:44You know, that Apple would have had their apps, but everybody else just ported their
1:51:47Apple II versions and told you to reboot with the option key down or something.
1:51:50- Yeah, absolutely.
1:51:52Well, we saw that with Windows.
1:51:53Microsoft took-- - Yeah.
1:51:54- There were those facetious articles
1:51:56where like, I don't know what,
1:51:57but they said like, you know,
1:51:58this proves that Microsoft was right.
1:51:59And I think, you know, in large part, no,
1:52:01the dominance of the iPad in the market shows
1:52:03that it was like Steve Jobs and Apple were exactly right
1:52:06about what the large market wanted,
1:52:08but Microsoft understood what the,
1:52:09like the tech nerd market wanted,
1:52:12but the way they implemented it,
1:52:13starting it with Windows and bringing it down
1:52:15and having the keyboard and mouse there immediately,
1:52:17they're still struggling to be fully touched base.
1:52:20they're still working on getting there,
1:52:22where Apple is now just working on adding functionality.
1:52:24And I think that's a better position for Apple to be in.
1:52:27- Yeah, and it's very Microsofty, and it's in their DNA.
1:52:30I mean, I was doing nerdy college student internships
1:52:35in the early '90s, working in the IT department
1:52:40over the summer servicing PCs.
1:52:43And an awful lot of the software,
1:52:45even if they were booting into Windows,
1:52:47an awful lot of the software back then
1:52:48was still DOS software that just ran in a window.
1:52:51- Yeah, for a long, long time.
1:52:53- Yeah, a long, long time.
1:52:54Let's see, next question.
1:52:58New, oh, it's a good question.
1:53:01Tom Woodsworth asks, "New MacBook Air versus Mac Mini
1:53:04"for novice audio podcast work.
1:53:07"Any Mac buying advice really?"
1:53:09On the surface, I wanna say
1:53:12that's almost like a silly question,
1:53:14like do you need a portable or not?
1:53:17But maybe going deeper, I feel that there is something,
1:53:22there is something good about a desktop that's a desktop.
1:53:28I have a friend who just bought a MacBook, Mac Mini.
1:53:31Hadn't had a desktop in a while, and he's setting up,
1:53:34you know, reinvesting in his home office
1:53:38for obvious reasons, and he's like,
1:53:39"You know what, I forgot how nice it is to have a desktop."
1:53:42- Yeah.
1:53:44- So it depends what you wanna do.
1:53:46How much do you really need to move your computer?
1:53:49I know that sounds stupid. - I'd also argue
1:53:50that it's like, if you're more technical,
1:53:52the Mac Mini, it has a lot of benefits.
1:53:54You do have to add a mouse and a keyboard and a display,
1:53:57which adds to the price of the Mac Mini,
1:53:59and it all comes included in the MacBook Air,
1:54:01but you don't have Y-class processors.
1:54:04You have the full U-class processors.
1:54:06They're older, they're eighth generation,
1:54:07not 10th generation, but you have a ton of ports.
1:54:10You have a ton of capability, a ton of storage.
1:54:13It just has, if you intend to grow, it has a lot of,
1:54:15and you're technically minded,
1:54:17it has a lot more opportunity for you to grow than an air,
1:54:19and air is almost like an all-in-one solution.
1:54:21Like would you get a Keurig or an espresso machine?
1:54:24Sort of work on it that way.
1:54:25- Here's a question I have,
1:54:30and this is not from anybody who's submitted it,
1:54:34but maybe somebody did, but I didn't get to it yet.
1:54:37I'm looking at the list here.
1:54:38But I have a question for you.
1:54:40What do you think of the theory
1:54:42that multiple people have espoused?
1:54:44but I'll mention that the first person I heard espouse,
1:54:46it was our mutual friend Dave Whiskus,
1:54:48who I'll stop pretending, I don't know,
1:54:50that if and when Apple announces
1:54:56that the Mac is transitioning to ARM,
1:54:59that the iPad Pro might be the developer machine,
1:55:03and that perhaps this June, Apple might say,
1:55:08okay, we're moving the Mac to ARM starting next year,
1:55:12announcing it now so developers can, Mac developers can build all their software to be fat binaries
1:55:19for Intel and ARM. And to test them, you can now boot, you know, you can download a developer
1:55:25thing and if you're in the developer program and boot your iPad Pro into Mac OS X for ARM.
1:55:32Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. I think, especially if we see a new Apple TV
1:55:37that has the USB-C port unhidden,
1:55:40like it was the previous generation.
1:55:42Then you have the sort of MacBook equivalent
1:55:45and the sort of Mac Mini equivalent,
1:55:47and you just download a developer-specific OS,
1:55:51flash it onto the machine,
1:55:52and it seems far more elegant
1:55:54than making a developer-only machine
1:55:55like they did with the Marclar, the Intel Mac transition.
1:55:58- Yeah, I don't wanna rule it out.
1:56:01It's an intriguing idea,
1:56:03and I feel like it's good food for thought
1:56:06because I can't rule it out.
1:56:08It seems like it is possible,
1:56:11but then there's a bunch of reasons where I think,
1:56:13eh, no, I don't know.
1:56:15I kind of feel like it's less technical.
1:56:19Like technically I don't know that there's anything
1:56:21that would prevent them from doing it,
1:56:22and more philosophical where that in Apple's mind,
1:56:27collective corporate mind, iPads and Macs
1:56:34are not anywhere near, they're different beasts.
1:56:39And never the twain shall meet, you know?
1:56:42So I don't know.
1:56:43And again, and then there's little things.
1:56:45Like even if it's just a developer thing.
1:56:48And for those who don't remember,
1:56:50when Apple announced the switch from PowerPC to Intel
1:56:53in I believe 2005, the first machines came out in early 2006
1:56:58ahead of schedule, it was a bunch of what were then
1:57:03renamed from the PowerBook to MacBooks.
1:57:06A, I think they just wanted to change the name.
1:57:09B, the power in PowerBooks, ostensibly, was for PowerPC.
1:57:13And right after WWDC 2005,
1:57:18they announced these developer dev kits,
1:57:21and from the outside, they looked like PowerMacs,
1:57:26the aluminum PowerMac towers.
1:57:28And then inside, it was just like a bog standard PC
1:57:31in a setup that Apple had vetted as,
1:57:35sort of like the first Hackintosh, really.
1:57:37I mean, it was like an officially sanctioned Hackintosh.
1:57:40They didn't sell them at all,
1:57:42they only leased them or something to developers,
1:57:46and then as soon as the developer transition was over,
1:57:48I wanted them back.
1:57:50And so instead of doing that,
1:57:51and the scale was different, right?
1:57:53The number of Mac developers who needed dev kits in 2005
1:57:59in comparison to the amount of developers
1:58:02who might need it now.
1:58:03Even though it's a Mac thing only,
1:58:05it's with catalysts raising the interest
1:58:08in previously not Mac developers
1:58:12who are only writing for iOS, writing stuff for the Mac,
1:58:15it's just, there's just a bigger number of them.
1:58:17If you could just say, just buy an iPad Pro
1:58:19and download this developer profile from our website
1:58:24and you can reboot in a special version of Catalina
1:58:29or I guess whatever 10.16 is or something like that.
1:58:32I get it, but then on the other hand,
1:58:34it just would be weird that you have this screen
1:58:36that you know is a touchscreen,
1:58:38but it doesn't work as a touchscreen
1:58:39when you're booted into the Mac.
1:58:41And then of course it's gonna make people out there,
1:58:43you know, if somebody wants to jump into the podcast
1:58:45and say, "Ah, but doesn't that mean maybe 10.16
1:58:47"will add touchscreen support to macOS?"
1:58:49Well, they're not gonna introduce that at WWDC
1:58:54a year ahead of the actual machines that would support it.
1:58:56And would there be a long-term expectation
1:59:01that even after the developer transition is over
1:59:04that iPad Pros are dual-boot machines
1:59:07that you can choose to boot into macOS 10?
1:59:10Or would it go back to iPad only,
1:59:12but then everybody would think, well, wait, I want,
1:59:14I know it can, 'cause you let me do it over the summer
1:59:17and the developer transition,
1:59:18let me reboot this thing into macOS now.
1:59:21- Yeah, no, very fair.
1:59:22- So, you know, I have mixed feelings about it.
1:59:25I don't know.
1:59:26I could see it, but I could not see it, I don't know.
1:59:29- Yeah, the question is if they don't go that route,
1:59:31what do they do?
1:59:32Do they make a sort of a simple clamshell
1:59:34that developers can pick up and return later at some point?
1:59:37But the quantity that they would probably want
1:59:39for the developer community now,
1:59:41they used to have to call people
1:59:42and ask them to come to WWDC,
1:59:44and now they have to have a lottery
1:59:46to try to pick the few that can go.
1:59:48- Yeah, the other technical thing is RAM,
1:59:50where the new 2018, or not 2018, 2020 iPad Pros
1:59:556 gigabytes of RAM. The 2018 iPad Pros only had 4 gigabytes, except, oddly, the asterisk
2:00:01that goes next to the 1 terabyte storage module, which also had 6 gigabytes.
2:00:05Yeah, they needed it to access the greater storage.
2:00:08Right, they needed more RAM to access the higher amount of storage. The lowest amount
2:00:17of RAM you can buy on any Mac today is 8 gigabytes. And is 6 gigabytes, is it prohibitive from
2:00:24you know, are the, no, it wouldn't prohibit it from booting,
2:00:28but if you're actually doing the development
2:00:31on the machine running Xcode,
2:00:33which isn't really known for, you know,
2:00:35being resource light, I don't know, you know.
2:00:40- That's also a greater question for iPad Pro in general,
2:00:42because, you know, people are trying to bring Photoshop
2:00:44to it, and the RAM is a limitation,
2:00:47the way it was in ancient computing times,
2:00:49and I think as we get more sophisticated software,
2:00:52- More sophisticated iPads are gonna have to look
2:00:54at the difference, the disparity in RAM levels
2:00:57between the Mac and the iPad.
2:00:58- Yeah, so I don't know.
2:01:01So my interceding question, ultimately,
2:01:04my answer is I don't know.
2:01:05Maybe, I could see it, but let's see.
2:01:08Dave asks, this is a good question,
2:01:13the new Magic Keyboard doesn't appear to fold back
2:01:16on itself like the Magic Keyboard Folio does.
2:01:19In other words, the way you can,
2:01:20It's like a book that you can open all the way around
2:01:22to hold single panel.
2:01:24This could have significant usage implications
2:01:27because it means you have to remove the iPad
2:01:28each time you use it in tablet mode.
2:01:31It will be two pieces rather than one.
2:01:34Do you have any thoughts on that?
2:01:35Yeah, I think it's pretty clear
2:01:38that a significant difference between,
2:01:41again, not having touched the Magic Keyboard in person,
2:01:45it's clearly more than just a better smart keyboard cover.
2:01:50The smart keyboard cover is sort of like
2:01:53a little middle ground between a regular iPad cover
2:01:57and well, why not put a keyboard on the cover
2:02:01while we're at it, right?
2:02:02And the Magic Keyboard is way more of a,
2:02:07hey, we're turning your iPad Pro into a laptop
2:02:10when it's in this thing.
2:02:12- It's more like a dock.
2:02:13- Yeah, it really is more like a dock.
2:02:16And again, can't judge it personally
2:02:18because we haven't touched it,
2:02:20but at least in many of the Apple shots of the thing,
2:02:23their minute-long commercial showing people using it
2:02:26and their introduction,
2:02:28they show people removing it with one hand
2:02:31and that the cantilevered back stays more or less
2:02:35where it was when you take it off.
2:02:37And so that the magnets that hold it in place
2:02:40are somehow strong enough to keep it suspended
2:02:42and keep it sturdy enough to actually use it on your lap,
2:02:45literally as a laptop,
2:02:47and yet are convenient enough
2:02:50that you can take it off with one hand.
2:02:52But I think that the basic idea is that
2:02:55for however many people use the smart keyboard cover
2:02:58folded over and just leave the iPad in it
2:03:01when they're using it as a handheld tablet
2:03:04without using the keyboard,
2:03:05you're not supposed to, you're not,
2:03:07may not even be able to do that with the Magic Keyboard.
2:03:09There's no way, there's no way that,
2:03:11in fact, I know, they even tell you
2:03:13that the thing doesn't fold back that far.
2:03:16- And it kind of bugs me the way the current one does.
2:03:18Like it is convenient, but it covers the camera.
2:03:20So if you're just folding it back
2:03:21and they want to take a photo, you can't.
2:03:23And also now they have the keys on the outside
2:03:25instead of the inside.
2:03:26It feels like I'm touching bubble wrap
2:03:27and I just want to keep, like it's distracting almost
2:03:29when I have my hands on it.
2:03:31So I mostly take it off now
2:03:32when I want to use it like a tablet.
2:03:33And then I remark about how light it is each time.
2:03:36And it does sort of take a little bit of the vibe
2:03:37off the convertible nature of it.
2:03:40But like you, I'm waiting to see it.
2:03:42All the videos, especially that video of Craig,
2:03:44He comes up and slaps it down like a dock and then pulls it off like a dock. Yeah. He's not
2:03:48Yeah, around at all. Yes. Yeah, I should say that that among the videos was was craig federighi using it
2:03:54so i'm optimistic that they've designed it and that that
2:03:57You know and so the the scenario where you wouldn't want to use it is somewhere where you don't want to leave the keyboard behind
2:04:03Right, like I don't know what that scenario would be, but you're not going to be sitting
2:04:08You're not going to be sitting in the library
2:04:10take it off and walk around to another section
2:04:13of the library and leave the keyboard behind
2:04:14unless you trust that your keyboard's
2:04:16going to stay there, right?
2:04:18- Yeah, yeah, or you can just float it flat
2:04:20and take the whole thing like a book,
2:04:22the dust fold closed.
2:04:23- Yeah, Daryl Baxter asks, now that Trackpad support
2:04:26is on iPad, do you see a scenario where there could be
2:04:30an Xcode for iPad, especially to simulate tests
2:04:33and compile apps natively?
2:04:35- I think their question with Xcode for iPad
2:04:40is the same as Adobe's with Photoshop for iPad,
2:04:43and that is, what is the important set of features
2:04:46that we can deliver to the iPad,
2:04:47given its interactive model and its constraints,
2:04:50like things like RAM, and once they determine that,
2:04:54then I think that we'll see it.
2:04:56It's just a question of that,
2:04:58Apple's like one of those companies
2:04:59that they don't show their work.
2:05:00They measure 99 times and then cut once,
2:05:03and I think they're still in that measurement phase.
2:05:05- Yeah, I almost feel that Trekpad support,
2:05:07even though it's welcome and I feel like
2:05:09I'm so addicted to it already,
2:05:10and it's great for text editing and various other things.
2:05:14It certainly helps and what doesn't hurt,
2:05:16but I don't think that that's what's kept it
2:05:18from being there until now.
2:05:20I'm a little surprised that we're 10 years into iPad
2:05:23and we still don't have something,
2:05:26whether they call it Xcode or not.
2:05:28You know, like they call iMovie iMovie,
2:05:30whether it's on the Mac or the iPad,
2:05:31even though it's clearly not the same app
2:05:34and it's more meant for touch,
2:05:35and I'm with you that I don't think we ever would,
2:05:38In fact, you couldn't.
2:05:39It's just Xcode does so many low-level developer
2:05:43file system type things that,
2:05:46with build scripts and stuff,
2:05:48it just doesn't even make any technical sense
2:05:49to have the whole of Xcode on iPad.
2:05:52It would be some native to iPad version of it,
2:05:55whether they call it Xcode or not.
2:05:56But something, as Daryl asks here,
2:05:59something that you can simulate, test, and compile--
2:06:01- More than Playgrounds.
2:06:02- Yeah, more than Playgrounds.
2:06:04I feel like it has to happen eventually,
2:06:07but then on the other hand, if it has to happen eventually,
2:06:09why hasn't it happened in 10 years?
2:06:10It's a very long time for a very capable computing platform
2:06:15to not be able to create software for itself.
2:06:17- But everything takes so long on the iPad,
2:06:19and I think that's mainly because there was
2:06:21that disagreement about its nature,
2:06:22but also because the iPhone is still at most,
2:06:25it has to be just based on earnings.
2:06:27It gets the majority of resources,
2:06:29and when you think about how long it took,
2:06:31just for trackpad support, it was 10 years.
2:06:33So I can understand, I don't understand it,
2:06:35but I can see how Xcode can take that long.
2:06:37- General question, discussion about,
2:06:41this is from David Eli about, quote unquote,
2:06:43serious iPad software, what's the landscape looks like?
2:06:47Examples of good Pro apps.
2:06:49He's been using Ferrite exclusively
2:06:51to record and edit spoken audio.
2:06:53I know, I've heard a lot of things about Ferrite.
2:06:55I know Jason Snell uses it.
2:06:57That seems like a shining example of terrific Pro software.
2:07:03I certainly know some of the pencil-oriented drawing software
2:07:07is tremendous on iPad.
2:07:09- Yeah.
2:07:10I mean, Star Trek is, famously,
2:07:11Rob McCollum does Star Trek Discovery on an iPad.
2:07:15- Hmm, well, there you go.
2:07:17- Jonathan Morrison has done,
2:07:19he's edited on iPod Touch,
2:07:20so I mean, he's an extreme example, but he's edited.
2:07:22Serenity Caldwell used to be a better editor on the iPad
2:07:24than I ever was in Final Cut Pro,
2:07:26just because she's a classically film-trained editor.
2:07:29- Yeah, yeah.
2:07:30It's a mixed bag, you know,
2:07:33And I know that I raised some attention
2:07:36at the 10th anniversary of the iPad
2:07:38for complaining about the state of iPad software
2:07:41and the state of the iPad multitasking interface.
2:07:44It's a mixed bag to me.
2:07:46I mean, there's shining examples.
2:07:48It's probably too long for this Q&A format.
2:07:52I probably need a whole show about it.
2:07:53But there's certainly some great examples.
2:07:56I think it's interesting.
2:07:57I still can't find a great text editing app.
2:08:00I use IA Writer when I do write on my iPad,
2:08:03which I like, but I don't love.
2:08:05And just some of the things that just irk me is I still,
2:08:09I just find it so strange that there's no consistent way
2:08:12to close a document when you are.
2:08:14And I get it that like Apple Notes is a great example.
2:08:17And that's the type of app that is great on iPhone and iPad
2:08:20where they don't, they're not files.
2:08:22There's no correlation to the file system.
2:08:24The notes are these abstract things that live in a library.
2:08:27And so you don't have to close them.
2:08:28But when you know you are working with files,
2:08:31and it's in Dropbox or iCloud Drive or something,
2:08:34and you have a file and you're editing a file,
2:08:37there's no way to close it, no consistent way to close it.
2:08:41And I don't, it leaves me,
2:08:44and I don't even think I'm being superstitious.
2:08:47If I'm going, I wrote it on my iPad,
2:08:48but I wanna finish it on my Mac and BB Edit,
2:08:52I don't wanna leave it open on my iPad,
2:08:55'cause I'm afraid that the iPad's going to wake up
2:08:57and then say, here, let me just save it again.
2:09:00- Yeah. (laughs)
2:09:01Well, it's that thing that Marco mentioned a long time ago
2:09:03when his desire to not have settings
2:09:05led him to do so many backflips
2:09:07that was worse than having settings.
2:09:08And I think Apple's desire to,
2:09:10I think they looked at a lot of the computer science things
2:09:13and saw them as artifacts
2:09:14that were too complicated for humans,
2:09:15but in their desire to avoid them,
2:09:17they ended up creating more complexity than less.
2:09:20- Yeah.
2:09:20So I don't know, I feel like it ties into the Xcode question
2:09:25of professional software on the iPad period
2:09:27where even though it's 10 years old
2:09:29and it's phenomenally popular and phenomenally successful,
2:09:33it's still somehow a toddler, you know?
2:09:35Like it is-- - It's ridiculously powerful,
2:09:37too, it's like a Kryptonian baby.
2:09:39- Yes, I was just gonna say that.
2:09:41It's baby Superman.
2:09:44- Yes. (laughing)
2:09:46- It's like, oh, it's faster than the MacBook Pro, yeah.
2:09:50It doesn't have a consistent way to close text files, yes.
2:09:55Doesn't know how to talk yet.
2:09:57So I don't know, but I certainly think,
2:09:59I certainly think that in addition to the fact
2:10:02that I absolutely love the trackpad mouse support
2:10:05that they just added in 13.4,
2:10:07love it just in and of itself,
2:10:09and the delightful feel and everything about it.
2:10:12- And they didn't just port it,
2:10:13they didn't just take the Mac model
2:10:14and throw it on, slap it on the iPad,
2:10:16they really thought about it.
2:10:17- It's also a tremendous sign from the outside
2:10:22that inside Apple they're taking this stuff seriously
2:10:24and they're really thinking about it.
2:10:25So I'm optimistic, however pessimistic I am
2:10:29about the overall state right now,
2:10:32I'm more optimistic than I've been in years, many years,
2:10:35about this going forward.
2:10:37- For me, it was the iPad OS that was like the big C change,
2:10:41maybe even more than just the iPad Pro,
2:10:43because it signaled that once you put an OS label on it,
2:10:46they have to get up and present,
2:10:47like obviously not this year,
2:10:48but they have to get up and present every year.
2:10:50It can't be two or three years
2:10:51between significant iOS features, sorry,
2:10:54iPad features as a subset of iOS.
2:10:56Now it has to get its own segment every year
2:10:59and that puts a pressure on them to level out the resources
2:11:02between the two devices.
2:11:03- Yeah, I know you don't wanna talk about yourself, René,
2:11:05but there's too many questions here
2:11:07that are about your professional move.
2:11:09Aaron Vague has a good question.
2:11:11I'd like to know more about the timing of this move.
2:11:13Was it something you planned for a while
2:11:15or did this global pandemic force your hand?
2:11:18- So it wasn't a result of the pandemic.
2:11:20I had been thinking about it for years.
2:11:21Like you and I have had discussions about it
2:11:23going back years, Yumi and Ben Thompson,
2:11:26I think Whiskas as well at a Japanese whiskey house
2:11:29in San Francisco is one of my most vivid memories.
2:11:31But it was just, it was a year after the future acquisition
2:11:34that I really started thinking about,
2:11:37what's next for me?
2:11:38Am I gonna do this for another 10 years?
2:11:39And once I decided probably not,
2:11:41I didn't think waiting would be an advantage.
2:11:44- Yeah, I feel like the nature of this pandemic
2:11:48is anybody who makes any kind of change is gonna be asked.
2:11:50Naturally so. - Yes.
2:11:51Is it because of this or is it a coincidence?
2:11:55- I actually gave my notice well before any of this happened.
2:11:57It was like much earlier in the month.
2:11:59- What app, here's a question from Dainius Blindness.
2:12:05What app would you like Apple to make first
2:12:07if it would start prioritizing first party app making again?
2:12:12I feel like, I don't know that they've stopped prioritizing
2:12:14first party app making again, but what app
2:12:17would I like Apple to make as a first party app?
2:12:20Hmm.
2:12:21- I honestly, I'm drawing a blank in terms of.
2:12:23- Yeah, same.
2:12:24- I can't really think of something.
2:12:27- I think they should just have a good base,
2:12:28like all baseline functionality
2:12:30should have a decent built-in app
2:12:31and then leave a lot of space for developers on top of that,
2:12:34but don't have any functionality.
2:12:36I would like them to get better at digital zoom
2:12:39because of so many of the Android phones now
2:12:41not only have periscope lenses,
2:12:43but really good digital zoom.
2:12:44And anyone who has, like I have little God kids,
2:12:46but anyone with kids and they're running around,
2:12:48maybe not now, running around the field,
2:12:50You know how valuable that Zoom can be,
2:12:53and I think they've got Smart HDR now,
2:12:55and Google's Zoom technology is based off of their
2:12:58HDR+ technology and their,
2:13:01I forget the other one they're using,
2:13:03but I would love Apple to just round out the feature set
2:13:06more than make new apps.
2:13:08- Yeah, I would say the same thing.
2:13:09I really do.
2:13:10I would, and I mentioned this on my last show
2:13:14with "Panzerino," but I really do think
2:13:17there's an opportunity here if the lack
2:13:19of collaboration between Apple's teams that they're used to
2:13:24can't happen for an extended period of time here
2:13:27with this stay at home stuff,
2:13:30that there's an opportunity here to rejigger priorities
2:13:33and turn this into a snow leopard style bug fix year.
2:13:38'Cause that's the sort of thing I feel like engineers
2:13:41can work on in isolation a little bit more.
2:13:44Almost the opposite of working on new front end
2:13:48first-party apps is work at the other end,
2:13:51work at the foundation and clean up some things
2:13:54that have long needed cleaning up.
2:13:57- Yeah. - All right,
2:13:58here's a question from Ian.
2:13:59I hope I'm getting your last name right, Umatio,
2:14:03but if it's not, I'm sorry, Ian.
2:14:05I know I'm pronouncing Ian right.
2:14:07If ARM Macs are coming in 2021, this is a great question.
2:14:11Should both casual users and power users be worried
2:14:14about potentially buying the last set of Intel Macs?
2:14:17I'm wanting to upgrade my old MacBook Pro,
2:14:19but I'm worried about being in the same spot
2:14:21as the person who bought a PowerBook G4 in 2005.
2:14:24- So my thing with this is,
2:14:28I go back to Don Melton where he says,
2:14:31Gramps never buys Rev A boards.
2:14:33And it's sort of like any bit of technology.
2:14:36There's gonna be early adopters who just wanna have it.
2:14:38They wanna have the latest thing right away.
2:14:40But for many people, I would typically advise,
2:14:42wait a year, wait two years for everything to shake out.
2:14:45And then you're not waiting,
2:14:45when's my software gonna be ported?
2:14:47and this is a little bit kludgy
2:14:48and Apple needs to fix this and wow, this is buggy.
2:14:51And I think when you look at it from that lens,
2:14:53that those, it's the same with 5G.
2:14:55Like everyone was complaining last year,
2:14:57Apple didn't have 5G when technology was terrible.
2:15:00And even this year, if you don't get it,
2:15:02it's not like, like these are first-generation devices.
2:15:05It's gonna be two or three years
2:15:06before they have really good quality stuff.
2:15:09Just buy your Mac when you need it
2:15:10and then be super happy
2:15:11and wait until you need the next thing.
2:15:13But don't feel like in a rush
2:15:14to base your purchase on maybe future product developments.
2:15:19- Yeah, and I would say the same thing,
2:15:20where I would be more, I know that as a tech podcast,
2:15:24the enthusiasm is all about the new thing,
2:15:26and I'm very excited about the potential of Arm Max,
2:15:29but I would honestly say that it's the opposite,
2:15:33that you should feel more confident
2:15:34that the last round of Intel Max,
2:15:37if this is it or if there's another,
2:15:39is almost certainly going to be the best round
2:15:41of Intel Max they've ever made,
2:15:44And that's always the case.
2:15:45There's a term for it and I'm gonna forget it,
2:15:47but I know, I believe Horace Dedue
2:15:51has talked about this repeatedly,
2:15:53and a couple other analysts have,
2:15:55but it's the way that disruptions happen.
2:15:57Like a big one was the move in the airline industry
2:16:01from propeller-based passenger planes to jet planes.
2:16:06And the last round of propeller-based ones
2:16:11was way better than the first round of jet ones.
2:16:14They were quieter and smoother
2:16:17and just had these phenomenal interiors.
2:16:19They were the best planes
2:16:20the airline industry had ever made.
2:16:21And of course, eventually they got,
2:16:23it seems ridiculous now to think of a giant passenger
2:16:26playing with propellers instead of jet engines.
2:16:28- It's like a transition tax.
2:16:31- Yeah, and if you miss the first,
2:16:34if you're gonna miss a round of arm-based MAX,
2:16:37the first round is the one to miss.
2:16:38And that's guaranteed.
2:16:40and that if you need a new computer now,
2:16:42I wouldn't hesitate.
2:16:43The only MacBook I wouldn't recommend right now
2:16:46is the 13-inch MacBook Pro,
2:16:48because it just seems, is crying out
2:16:51for a replacement with the new keyboard,
2:16:54and probably in the way that the 15-inch went to 16
2:16:58by just making the screen go closer to the edges
2:17:01without increasing the footprint,
2:17:03something like that, to go to 14 inches,
2:17:05which matches with the rumors,
2:17:07that there's probably gonna be an update
2:17:08to the 13-inch MacBook Pro,
2:17:10called a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a new keyboard
2:17:12and et cetera, et cetera.
2:17:15Probably soon, I would wait for that.
2:17:17But if you're in the market for a MacBook Air
2:17:19or a 16-inch MacBook Pro,
2:17:21I would buy right now if you need one.
2:17:23- Yeah, absolutely.
2:17:24- And sure, there might be ARM ones
2:17:26that come out next year
2:17:27and there might be some amazing things about 'em,
2:17:29but you will be fully supported for years to come.
2:17:32And then when you do update,
2:17:33you'll be going to the second or third generation ARM ones
2:17:36and it'll just be a silly, silly fantastic upgrade for you.
2:17:40So I would honestly think I'd ask the question around,
2:17:43should you be afraid of the first round of ARM-based Macs?
2:17:47Not afraid of the last round of Intels.
2:17:49- Yeah, no, absolutely.
2:17:51- Here's one.
2:17:52Now that we're all furiously washing our hands with soap
2:17:54for 20 seconds multiple times a day,
2:17:56what's your routine to stop your hands
2:17:57from cracking into a million pieces?
2:17:59I don't have a secret.
2:18:00I don't know what I'm doing right.
2:18:02I haven't been using any moisturizer or anything,
2:18:05but my hands are holding up well,
2:18:07even though all joking and theme song gags aside,
2:18:11I'm washing my hands like a fiend, and somehow,
2:18:14I think perhaps because the weather's warming up here
2:18:18and it's not coming in the middle of winter
2:18:20when I typically suffer from dry hands.
2:18:23Oliver Thomas asked that, I don't have a secret for you.
2:18:28But if you do have the problem,
2:18:30I'd invest some moisturizer.
2:18:32Yeah.
2:18:32Are you going to be doing a blog, René? Jared Blunde wants to ask, in addition to your switch to Indy.
2:18:41So I think I will be, just because, you know, I spent the last 10 years blogging, and it's in my
2:18:47bones, and I think I would not be able to not do it. So the way I set up reneiritchie.net, it works
2:18:52as a blog. Right now I've only posted the one video that I've done, but it's—I've gotten the
2:18:58habit of Twitter blogging now, too, and I think a lot of us do that. We just see something and
2:19:01and we tweet it, where in the old days we would have blogged it. But I like the idea of not giving
2:19:06all my content to Twitter, especially because I don't trust their management as much as I used to.
2:19:11Not that I ever did, but I've gotten to the realization that I can't necessarily trust the
2:19:14way they run that platform. So the idea to me eventually will be anything that I would normally
2:19:19tweet, I would do as a small blog post instead, and I'll just see how my time goes and whether I
2:19:24can do that. Yeah, so I don't know. I guess that's it. My thanks to everybody who asked
2:19:30these questions. They're great. I wish we could have gotten more of them, but we've already
2:19:33filled up more than our allotted time. Right now, it's very easy to tell people where to get there,
2:19:41Rene Ritchie. You go to YouTube/ReneRitchie and on Twitter, ReneRitchie, and that's it.
2:19:47I'm very happy for you, Rene.
2:19:50**Ezra Klein-Mannes-Hicks** Thank you so much. I really appreciate
2:19:52your support over all the years. It's meant a lot to me.
2:19:53**T
2:19:53- Yeah, well, and you know,
2:19:56I doubt it's the last we'll hear from you.
2:19:58Anyway, any idea, do you know, are the YouTube channel,
2:20:01how live are the subscriptions?
2:20:04Like how many people have--
2:20:05- I think they're real time.
2:20:07- How many subscriptions are you up to on your new channel?
2:20:10- Let's look.
2:20:10It's loading and--
2:20:14- I think we're about nine hours since you announced it.
2:20:17- It looks like about 11 and a half thousand.
2:20:19- Oh my God, that's fantastic.
2:20:21You're getting over a thousand an hour.
2:20:2311.9 thousand, it just refreshed, awesome.
2:20:26Yeah. Well, my thanks to you. I'm very happy for you. I think it's going to be a great success.
2:20:31Thank you so much.
2:20:32I'm sure you'll be back on the show sometime soon.
2:20:35Oh, I'm looking forward to it.