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The Talk Show

281: ‘A Kryptonian Baby’ With Rene Ritchie

 

00:00:00   - [Peter] Just get it out of the way.

00:00:02   Let's just start right off the bat.

00:00:03   It's a big day for you.

00:00:06   - Yes, absolutely. - Today you announced

00:00:08   you're going solo with a YouTube channel.

00:00:13   You're leaving iMore.

00:00:14   You've been there 11 years.

00:00:16   You gave me a heads up about a week ago.

00:00:22   You know, I sort of knew you had an inkling,

00:00:23   but tell me more.

00:00:24   What are your thoughts behind this?

00:00:26   What's going on?

00:00:29   - Well, I mean, I'm more back when I first joined

00:00:32   that it was still phone different

00:00:33   and it was run by a very small network of people.

00:00:36   And it just, it kept growing and it became Mobile Nations.

00:00:39   And then a year ago, it was bought by Future PLC

00:00:43   which is one of the biggest companies in media.

00:00:46   They own everything like a Nantech and Tom's Guide

00:00:48   and TechRadar and just almost every site you can imagine.

00:00:52   And it became like a grownup big company.

00:00:54   And I'd worked in grownup big companies before.

00:00:57   And I had just sort of come to really appreciate

00:01:00   the smaller environment.

00:01:02   And everyone was doing great.

00:01:04   Lori Gill had taken over iMore on a day-to-day basis,

00:01:07   and she was just knocking it out of the park.

00:01:09   And Al Sacco had taken over a lot of what I used to do

00:01:11   around the network, and he was just so good at it

00:01:14   that it felt like a year after the purchase,

00:01:17   everything was solid.

00:01:18   I didn't feel guilty about leaving everyone in the lurch.

00:01:21   And after watching like you and Dalrymple and Snell

00:01:24   just walking into events and doing exactly

00:01:27   what you wanted to do with them

00:01:28   and not have to worry about all the things

00:01:31   that happen when you're on somebody else's dime.

00:01:34   I just thought now is the time.

00:01:36   If I don't do it now, I'll wake up

00:01:37   and in 10 years I'll still be,

00:01:39   I'll probably be part of an even bigger company by then.

00:01:41   - I think it's probably surprising

00:01:43   and I'm just, it's good to be busy.

00:01:47   And that's all of the world's craziness right now.

00:01:51   And I feel like I'm busier than ever.

00:01:53   You're obviously way busier than ever now

00:01:56   that you've got all of this going on.

00:01:58   But just trying to catch up a little bit today

00:02:00   after you went public with this

00:02:02   and all of the well wishes and everything.

00:02:04   One thing that caught my eye is that it surprised

00:02:09   some people that you were just an employee of iMore.

00:02:14   You know what I mean?

00:02:16   And I know that you weren't just an employee.

00:02:18   You're the editor and you're certainly

00:02:19   the biggest name there and that you've been there forever

00:02:23   and not forever, but 11 years is a long time ago.

00:02:27   What was the name of the site originally?

00:02:29   I don't even remember that.

00:02:30   - It was Phone Different, and then the iPhone Blog,

00:02:32   and then Tippie, and then iMore.

00:02:35   - I don't remember any of those names.

00:02:37   - Yep. (laughs)

00:02:39   - But that is interesting.

00:02:40   And again, what is the name of the parent company?

00:02:43   - It was Mobile Nations, it was first Smartphone Experts,

00:02:46   and then it became Mobile Nations,

00:02:47   and now it was bought by Future,

00:02:49   which is just an enormous British media conglomerate.

00:02:51   - Right, and again, those really are,

00:02:55   I mean, I don't think people realize how,

00:02:57   I don't even know if I realize, and I'm in the racket,

00:03:00   how consolidated they've gotten in terms of

00:03:05   buying top-tier independent publications.

00:03:11   And NonTech, absolutely great site.

00:03:14   Tom's Hardware, or Tom's, what?

00:03:18   - Tom's Guide Laptop.

00:03:19   - Tom's Guide, right.

00:03:21   But again, truly a great site with a long history,

00:03:24   a terrific reputation.

00:03:27   I'll put iMore on the list.

00:03:31   It's obviously been there for a long time under that name.

00:03:35   And in terms of covering just the day-to-day Apple Beat,

00:03:38   it's up there.

00:03:39   I mean, it's current news cycle of the COVID-19 aside,

00:03:44   the media world has already been,

00:03:47   It's a tremendous uncertainty for career media professionals.

00:03:53   Whatever your beat, whether you're in tech or politics or music, entertainment,

00:04:00   you name it, anywhere where there's journalism to be written and read,

00:04:04   and consumed, and watched,

00:04:06   and listened to, it's as uncertain as it's ever

00:04:10   been in terms of where the opportunities are for people as a career.

00:04:15   I know Dan Fromer, frequent guest now running his own thing,

00:04:20   which is a theme, running his own thing at The New Consumer,

00:04:24   which is doing great, and he's had some great pieces

00:04:27   this week on communication between companies

00:04:32   and their customers and their email lists

00:04:34   in terms of what to do amidst all of this.

00:04:38   And boy, there are a lot of companies

00:04:39   who are not botching it, but just sort of wasting,

00:04:44   I mean, it's become almost a canard at this point.

00:04:49   It's a cliche, people publishing screenshots

00:04:53   of the downright goofy emails they're getting

00:04:56   from companies, you know?

00:04:58   You know what I mean?

00:04:59   Like you bought a backpack from some company

00:05:02   seven years ago and you're getting a stay safe email

00:05:05   from the CEO.

00:05:07   - Yep, absolutely.

00:05:08   - But Dan pointed out, Dan Fromer pointed out a while back

00:05:12   that, boy, an awful lot of the talent right now

00:05:17   is getting subsumed by the truly biggest names,

00:05:21   New York Times Company, Wall Street Journal.

00:05:24   A handful of the true long-standing generations old,

00:05:29   in some cases, like with the Times and the Wall Street Journal

00:05:33   over 100 years of history and culture

00:05:39   are suddenly hiring an awful lot of talent.

00:05:44   And then in our particular racket, the Apple beat,

00:05:49   Apple has hired an awful lot of the people,

00:05:52   the best and brightest of our colleagues

00:05:55   and former colleagues.

00:05:56   - Like three of mine.

00:05:59   - Right, I mean, longtime frequent former guest

00:06:02   of the show, Serenity Caldwell, now at Apple.

00:06:05   Again, not a complaint, just an observation

00:06:08   and just sort of the way the world is breaking.

00:06:11   But it's fascinating to me,

00:06:13   and I know Dan talked about it,

00:06:15   and it's just, it's fascinating to me

00:06:18   that as much as you can start to get depressed,

00:06:22   not that Apple's a bad place to work

00:06:24   or the New York Times is a bad place to work, the opposite.

00:06:26   Those are great companies doing great work.

00:06:29   Joanna Stern, now the personal technology columnist

00:06:32   at the Wall Street Journal, truly doing a fantastic job.

00:06:37   One of my dear friends, a fantastic guest on this show,

00:06:39   but just her last couple of weeks of the stuff

00:06:42   she's been doing and the videos she's producing from home,

00:06:45   just knocking it out of the park.

00:06:49   But it's just fascinating to me.

00:06:51   It can be depressing, though,

00:06:53   to think that that's the only way to go,

00:06:54   is to go to these biggest of the big names.

00:06:57   And to me, it's exciting when Dan starts the new consumer

00:07:01   and now you are starting a brand new YouTube channel

00:07:05   from the start.

00:07:06   It's exciting to me that the exact opposite

00:07:09   of the biggest of the big, something a little bit more

00:07:12   along the lines of what I do, like, hey, one person.

00:07:14   Here I am.

00:07:17   - Yeah, I think there's pros and cons to both,

00:07:20   and I've done the small to big media thing for a decade now,

00:07:25   and everyone has its advantages and its disadvantages,

00:07:28   and the ability, I watch what you do and what Jim does

00:07:31   and what Jason does and what Marques Brownlee, for example,

00:07:34   is another really good independent,

00:07:36   a bunch of independent people who do podcasting, you know, like the Relay FM people and the

00:07:41   YouTubers. And it's just, it's a very different voice. It's hard, it's more liberating in some

00:07:46   ways because you can literally do anything you want. There's no corporate policies or guidelines

00:07:51   or lanes that you have to stay in, but also you're taking on all the risk and there's no sort of

00:07:57   safety net there if you get it wrong. Right. And there's, you know, strength in numbers.

00:08:01   Yeah. In some ways. And, you know, Relay is a great example of that, where Relay is more of a

00:08:09   federation of independent solo talents who are collectively working just to benefit from things

00:08:20   like a unified CMS and the way that they can launch new shows and kind of get off the ground

00:08:29   a little quicker with the help of the others, and there's a whole bunch of people who have

00:08:34   relay shows who are good pals and bounce around each other's shows, etc. As opposed to Mike

00:08:43   Hurley building a giant conglomerate and hiring all these people. And again, that wouldn't

00:08:49   be bad either. There's nothing wrong with getting a full-time job at a place, but that's

00:08:55   That's not what Relay is.

00:08:57   Even at my scale, I don't sell the sponsorships

00:09:01   for this show by myself.

00:09:03   Jesse Char at Neat.fm does,

00:09:05   and she also handles the sales for ATP.

00:09:09   And so there's a little, it's like almost,

00:09:12   you as those of you listening,

00:09:14   you don't really have to know it,

00:09:15   but it's sort of like a little two-show network

00:09:18   with me and ATP, with Jesse handling that

00:09:21   and taking an awful lot of stuff that I,

00:09:25   I was terrible at on my own off my shoulders. No, it's similar for me because, you know,

00:09:29   I've been working with mutual friend Dave Wiskus's standard. Never heard of him.

00:09:33   No, I mean, and it's terrific. It's not like Relay. It's really a bunch of independent

00:09:41   creators, primarily YouTubers. But, you know, Thomas Frank was very kind to help me out this

00:09:46   week, and he had me on one of his videos, and we go back and forth, and just the amount of knowledge

00:09:51   that you get from having a network of people who you get to talk with and work with is absolutely

00:09:56   invaluable. It does seem to me that part of the way that the internet continues to as a whole

00:10:13   resist cementing.

00:10:15   It is still liquid overall.

00:10:18   Just the entire, if you zoom out,

00:10:21   you know, the entire quote unquote internet,

00:10:24   it still isn't solidified as,

00:10:26   oh, here's how you do media,

00:10:28   here's how you become a publication on the internet.

00:10:32   And one of the ways that the whole world is still in flux,

00:10:35   and it just seems so counter,

00:10:38   like when I think back to like the '90s,

00:10:41   just go back 20 years, 25 years,

00:10:44   and what would have been the most likely

00:10:48   to support solo artists or very small teams

00:10:53   of content producers,

00:10:57   you would have thought video would be the hardest of all

00:11:00   because it's the meta art form, right?

00:11:05   That's why I consider movies to be the highest form of art

00:11:11   Because movies contain all other art.

00:11:16   The storytelling and character development of fiction,

00:11:21   of printed fiction like novels,

00:11:24   that's part of movie making.

00:11:26   The acting of theater and the way that good actors

00:11:31   actually can just bring a character to life

00:11:34   and own the character, take it from the author

00:11:39   and just sort of do something to, you know,

00:11:44   yeah, everybody knows.

00:11:44   - Bring it to life. - Yeah, bring it to life.

00:11:46   And it's photography, right?

00:11:49   Whatever photography is, cinematography is it plus motion.

00:11:53   And then there's the art of cinema itself,

00:11:56   the way that you cut and frame and time and pace.

00:12:01   And of course, music is a huge part of movie making, right?

00:12:07   It's all of these art forms at once,

00:12:09   And therefore, that's why, as those,

00:12:13   it's just idly occurred to me,

00:12:14   as I've been watching an awful lot more

00:12:17   video content recently, how long the credits are

00:12:21   at the end of all of these productions.

00:12:22   And it's like, I know that Netflix and other services

00:12:26   default to sort of pushing you on to the next episode.

00:12:31   But it's like I just paused last night,

00:12:33   just on a TV, not even a movie, but a TV show,

00:12:35   we're watching Ozark season three.

00:12:37   and just how, like when they get to the point

00:12:39   where they're like, hey, go to episode three,

00:12:41   just how long the credits are.

00:12:44   It's no surprise.

00:12:46   Anyway. - Yeah.

00:12:48   - It just seems crazy to me in some sense

00:12:51   that an awful lot of the people who are doing the,

00:12:56   having the most success as solo creatives on the internet

00:13:01   are the video people, the people on YouTube,

00:13:04   like you said Marques Brownlee.

00:13:08   I mean, the list goes on and on and on,

00:13:09   and you actually, the whole list is in your video today,

00:13:13   announcing it.

00:13:14   Justine Azarek, aka iJustine,

00:13:19   who's been doing this for a long time.

00:13:21   I mean, the list goes on,

00:13:22   but it just seems crazy to me.

00:13:24   And you're obviously on that list.

00:13:27   - A lot of that is credit to YouTube

00:13:28   because they didn't just make like a hosting.

00:13:30   Well, the thing with podcasts is they're great,

00:13:32   But if I watch the talk show at WWDC,

00:13:35   nothing suggests ATP at WWDC or download at WWDC.

00:13:40   I'm stuck within that show where YouTube,

00:13:43   if I watch Marques' video,

00:13:45   it'll suggest Justine's video to me

00:13:47   and then a bunch of other things.

00:13:48   And that decomposition down to the show level,

00:13:51   I think is what let iTunes really take off.

00:13:54   And I think that's what's let YouTube really build

00:13:57   an audience generation machine almost.

00:14:00   - Yeah, and I'm as guilty as anybody of complaining

00:14:05   about the failings of YouTube's suggestion algorithm

00:14:10   and emphasizing those and not appreciating

00:14:16   and just taking a step back to just appreciate the way

00:14:19   that I personally benefit from it and stumble upon videos

00:14:22   that I never would have found on my own

00:14:24   because I started watching A and suggested B

00:14:29   and I enjoyed B and then I got C and C was even better,

00:14:34   really good and it's like, wow,

00:14:36   never even heard of this person,

00:14:38   never would have gotten here, the algorithm works.

00:14:41   And that's true, it's both, and it is when it works,

00:14:46   it is, I know that it's overused phrase,

00:14:50   but it's win, win, win, right?

00:14:52   It is a win for the viewer if you're actually,

00:14:56   if it is actually suggesting to you stuff that you,

00:14:59   A, enjoy, and especially B, wouldn't have found otherwise.

00:15:03   That's the magic of the algorithm.

00:15:05   It is great for the creators

00:15:10   who are successfully getting an audience

00:15:15   that is appropriate for what they've created,

00:15:18   including new people and new channels,

00:15:23   that it's not too late,

00:15:24   YouTube has already got it 20 billion views a day and

00:15:28   It's so many successful channels and it's you know, it's absolutely positively not too late to start

00:15:37   And I forget who said it you might have been Roberto Blake

00:15:41   But he said like YouTube doesn't find audiences for videos

00:15:44   They find videos for their audience and that either really entertains their audience or it leads to tabloids

00:15:50   which is the dark side of it,

00:15:51   because people will look at tablets at the checkout counter.

00:15:55   That's why they put them there.

00:15:56   And they'll do the same thing on YouTube,

00:15:58   but at its best, anything you wanna learn,

00:16:00   you can start finding videos on YouTube,

00:16:01   and it'll recommend more and better them over time.

00:16:04   - Yeah.

00:16:05   And the last of the win-win-win is it's good for YouTube.

00:16:08   Right? - Yes.

00:16:10   - People watch a lot of YouTube for good reason.

00:16:13   So anyway, I guess the last,

00:16:18   I'm not last, but I don't wanna spend the whole time,

00:16:20   and I know you, I know you so well,

00:16:22   you don't wanna spend the whole show talking about yourself.

00:16:24   You're probably dying right now,

00:16:26   you're probably broken out in a flop sweat.

00:16:28   - Canadian hives. - Yeah, Canadian hives.

00:16:30   I'm the same way, I've got the Catholic upbringing,

00:16:33   it's, you know, pride is a sin.

00:16:35   But I'm curious, A, why YouTube first?

00:16:41   And B, what your planned,

00:16:44   and I know that other people are asking this,

00:16:46   is what else are you planning,

00:16:48   and are you willing to talk about your other plans

00:16:52   other than your YouTube channel?

00:16:54   Which I should mention, by the way,

00:16:55   is just your name, Rene Ritchie.

00:16:56   So go to YouTube, search for Rene Ritchie,

00:16:59   and there's, boom, your new channel.

00:17:01   - I think the search is broken,

00:17:02   but if you do YouTube slash Rene Ritchie, it works now.

00:17:04   I think the search still shows the old channel,

00:17:06   but we'll see how long that takes.

00:17:07   - Well, Google-- - Propagation is terrible.

00:17:09   - Google will get good at search someday.

00:17:11   - One day. (laughs)

00:17:13   Yeah, I mean, so I started with YouTube

00:17:15   almost exactly the reasons that you said, it's almost the hardest of the things to

00:17:20   start with, and it has the most complexity and the most moving parts.

00:17:23   And I figured if I start with just one thing, because YouTube has that audience generation

00:17:28   capabilities, and I do it okay, I can use that to build back up again, because everything

00:17:35   I had before just belongs to future.

00:17:38   So I'm starting off from scratch, and it's hard to build a website on Google these days.

00:17:44   I have a website. I went with renerichie.net because like, you know, daringfireball.net,

00:17:48   that's just what you do as a human. And I have the YouTube channel. And eventually, I do want to

00:17:54   start a new podcast. And I want to try and do some other kind—I bought all this equipment for YouTube,

00:17:59   and I want to maybe try some documentaries or something a little bit more long form. But I want

00:18:06   to be very careful not to bite off more than I can chew at the beginning, because just doing one

00:18:11   thing well, I think, is the best way to start over.

00:18:14   Part of it, too, is in addition to the internet, the computerization of everything.

00:18:22   I feel like it's one of the recurring themes of my work, now spanning over a decade.

00:18:29   It's so easy to get lost when you're focused on the week-to-week, month-to-month news cycle,

00:18:37   what's so clearly obvious when you take a bigger picture

00:18:42   and start looking at years is,

00:18:45   in addition to the internetification of everything,

00:18:50   the computerization of everything

00:18:53   is such an overarching trend of our lifetimes.

00:18:58   Everything's a computer nowadays.

00:19:03   For better, often, for worse, often.

00:19:06   It's a mixed bag like anything,

00:19:08   and it is what you make of it.

00:19:10   But Apple Watch is no better example.

00:19:13   It's a full-on Unix computer running on your wrist.

00:19:18   - Well, it's that thing that PC guys

00:19:19   won't just walk in here and figure it out,

00:19:21   but it turns out.

00:19:22   - Right, it's so true, really.

00:19:24   And I often have said, and I realized that,

00:19:28   that was the phrase from the Palm CEO,

00:19:31   what was his name? - Yes, Ed Colligan.

00:19:33   - Ed Colligan.

00:19:34   And Palm was obviously a computer company.

00:19:37   They made the old Palm OS, not even talking about web OS,

00:19:42   but the old Palm OS was obviously a personal computing

00:19:45   device, and there were other, you know,

00:19:50   but to me, the key insight that the iPhone team

00:19:55   at Apple had with the iPhone, even though there were other,

00:20:00   clearly, technically, this is a computer running

00:20:02   as a phone, they were still approaching it

00:20:05   as a consumer electronics product,

00:20:07   and that consumer electronics

00:20:09   were trying to get more computery,

00:20:12   while at the same time, computers from computer companies

00:20:15   were trying to get more consumer electronically.

00:20:18   And that is, it's almost impossible

00:20:23   for consumer electronics trying to get more computery

00:20:26   to even, it's like a sandcastle standing against the tide,

00:20:30   at the beach in terms of the inevitability

00:20:34   of computers becoming more consumer electronic-y.

00:20:39   - Yeah, we saw that with Palm,

00:20:40   which was a PDA operating system.

00:20:41   BlackBerry had a Java-based operating system.

00:20:44   Windows had Windows CE on phones at the time,

00:20:47   and it was Linux through Android

00:20:48   and Unix through the iPhone that got pushed down

00:20:51   into small computing forms.

00:20:53   - Well, I just think that, and I think that part of that

00:20:56   is what is really enabled in terms of like,

00:20:59   just camera technology is really what's enabled solo and small team artists to produce truly

00:21:09   excellent, the highest quality video content.

00:21:15   When you watch iJustine and you watch Marques and you watch your videos, the sound is great

00:21:22   and the lighting is good and the pacing is good.

00:21:28   It's funny, it is an interesting contrast right now in the here and now as the real

00:21:37   quote unquote real TV industry is massively disrupted by these stay at home rules with

00:21:46   COVID-19. I'm a huge fan of the John Oliver show on this week, last week tonight on HBO.

00:21:56   Unlike 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

00:22:02   White, what do you call it a white universe?

00:22:05   You know that yeah, whatever universe whatever Apple commercials don't really take place in that universe anymore

00:22:12   But they used to I used to think of it as like the universe where Volkswagen's and Apple products live, you know

00:22:18   It's not the white room yet the infinite white expanse

00:22:21   and

00:22:24   It was like at the last minute they realized they couldn't have their regular studio and the regular student certainly not studio audience

00:22:31   But even their studio they couldn't even shoot it without their audience in the studio because they shoot

00:22:35   even though it's an HBO show they shoot in the CBS building in New York and

00:22:40   At the time, you know ten days ago eleven days ago a couple of employees of CBS News tested positive

00:22:47   For kovat 19 so they had to shut the whole building down

00:22:51   And so at the last minute, they had to shoot somewhere else.

00:22:54   And then the show that just aired last night

00:22:56   was shot in John Oliver's house.

00:22:59   Unlike some of the shows where they're sort of embracing it

00:23:02   and just sort of shooting with actual, you know,

00:23:05   like just webcams.

00:23:06   - Like their iPhones.

00:23:07   - Yeah, their iPhones.

00:23:08   And it's just, you know, typical FaceTime quality,

00:23:11   but except that it's, you know.

00:23:13   - It's Seth Meyers.

00:23:14   - Yeah, it's Seth Meyers

00:23:15   or it's Stephen Colbert in the bathtub

00:23:18   or something like that.

00:23:20   They did their best, and it's good.

00:23:21   It was a good show with John Oliver,

00:23:25   and it was very funny.

00:23:26   I highly recommend it.

00:23:27   I guess I should put a link in the show notes.

00:23:28   Really good.

00:23:30   It's terrific every week.

00:23:31   I thought that this one in particular was especially good.

00:23:34   Without changing the pace of the show too much,

00:23:39   it's so fascinating to me that he's so good at it

00:23:42   that he can do it without the audience,

00:23:43   even though he's telling jokes.

00:23:44   Like, man, that is hard.

00:23:46   And he even said,

00:23:47   he didn't even have anybody helping him out.

00:23:49   It's just him in a room with a white backdrop behind him

00:23:53   telling jokes that nobody can laugh at.

00:23:56   And his explanation-- - Zero return energy.

00:23:59   - Right, his explanation was that he grew,

00:24:03   he became a standup in Britain, so he's fully aware

00:24:06   of what it's like to do standup comedy

00:24:08   without a single sound from the audience.

00:24:11   - Accurate.

00:24:13   - But anyway, the thing that got me, it's an HBO show.

00:24:16   It's been on for years, and he's doing it by himself,

00:24:18   and the sound was nowhere near as good

00:24:20   as the typical YouTube channel I listen to.

00:24:23   - Yeah.

00:24:24   - Anyway, that's a long way of me saying,

00:24:25   it blows me away that what you do and Marques does

00:24:30   and what Justine does on a multiple time a week basis

00:24:35   has a better production quality value than an HBO show.

00:24:39   Now I bet that next week's show will improve on that, right?

00:24:43   They're gonna learn fast and they are pros.

00:24:46   But it just blew me away in between laughter

00:24:51   of watching the actual show and listening to them.

00:24:53   It just blew me away at that meta level

00:24:55   that this is not as good as most YouTube channels.

00:24:59   And it's on HBO. - I think Seth Meyer

00:25:00   was the one who leaned into it earlier

00:25:02   when he said, "I realize that what I'm doing right now

00:25:04   "is worse than what my teenage daughter

00:25:05   "is doing on TikTok upstairs."

00:25:07   - Yeah, it's really, really fascinating.

00:25:10   And I feel like the computerization of everything

00:25:12   really helps in terms of allowing one person like you,

00:25:17   like now you are a professional videographer,

00:25:21   sound person, lighting person, editor.

00:25:25   - And ironically, I learned these skills

00:25:27   by watching a ton of YouTube videos

00:25:29   and people who tried to learn them before me.

00:25:31   (laughing)

00:25:33   - You know what, I do have to say, it's great

00:25:35   there are certain things that having how-tos on YouTube,

00:25:39   it's great because you kind of have to see it,

00:25:41   But it's so overwhelming in terms of when you search the web

00:25:46   for how do I blank, how many of the answers

00:25:49   come up as YouTubes, and it's frustrating

00:25:51   'cause there's a lot of 'em where I just want

00:25:54   the goddamn answer, you know?

00:25:56   And having, you know, and if it was in print

00:26:00   on a webpage, I could find it.

00:26:02   And because it's a video, you can't.

00:26:06   And even if it's a two-minute video,

00:26:07   it feels like the slowest thing.

00:26:10   It feels in some ways like going back to the dial-up modem

00:26:14   internet, where just loading the web page took over a minute.

00:26:17   And you're like--

00:26:18   It's because you have no ability to really scan.

00:26:20   You can scan through the timeline.

00:26:21   And it's slightly better than just pure audio,

00:26:23   where you can't even see where you're going through a timeline.

00:26:26   But for things like cooking and things that are highly visual,

00:26:29   I find it invaluable.

00:26:30   But for other things like you, I would just

00:26:32   like a set of steps on a nice text page.

00:26:34   Yeah.

00:26:34   And again, some of the stuff--

00:26:38   Even if it's visual, it still would be better

00:26:41   with a photograph, or it'd be just as good,

00:26:42   and then it would be scannable.

00:26:43   In other words, here's the thing in the toilet

00:26:46   you're looking for, lift this up.

00:26:47   That's how you fix it.

00:26:49   - Like I could watch Elton Brown all day,

00:26:50   but not everyone is Elton Brown.

00:26:51   - No.

00:26:53   All right, rest of the show.

00:26:55   Special show, Q&A, taken from readers.

00:27:00   We got a bunch of questions.

00:27:01   I feel like we can easily fill the show.

00:27:02   My thanks to everybody who sent questions.

00:27:04   I don't know that we'll get to all of them,

00:27:06   even all the good ones.

00:27:08   I know you flagged a couple.

00:27:10   Hopefully it'll be fun and a nice little break

00:27:13   from the monotony.

00:27:15   Before we get started on the questions though,

00:27:16   let me ask you, what are your thoughts

00:27:19   on the two new hardware products we've gotten recently,

00:27:24   the MacBook Air and the iPad Pro?

00:27:26   - So I think they're very different.

00:27:28   I think the iPad Pro mostly exists

00:27:31   so that Apple could get LiDAR scanners

00:27:33   into the hands of developers before the iPhone gets it.

00:27:36   I think that the iPhone got it first,

00:27:38   the paucity, like the complete lack of software

00:27:41   that really takes advantage of it would,

00:27:43   they get beaten over the head with it,

00:27:44   and rightly so for weeks,

00:27:46   where this way that scanner gets put into the iPad.

00:27:50   People who really want it can go get it.

00:27:52   They can develop apps for it.

00:27:53   They can work on the technology for it.

00:27:55   And then by the time the iPhone comes out,

00:27:58   it's much better, it's much better positioned

00:28:00   to actually have interesting features,

00:28:02   including what I imagine is gonna be Apple's new camera app,

00:28:05   their AR camera app, which we've been hearing about for years, and maybe something cool

00:28:08   with maps.

00:28:10   I know people make fun of Memoji, but it was an incredibly successful way of really boiling

00:28:16   the water, getting people comfortable with having themselves with AR avatars, which is

00:28:21   not something everyone would have been agreeable to otherwise.

00:28:24   It just let them play around with it.

00:28:26   That's what we need when AR starts going to the back of the camera as well.

00:28:31   I think when people talk about, should you upgrade from the 2018 to 2020, that's sort

00:28:36   of missing the mark, because even Apple doesn't expect that.

00:28:39   They usually see, I think, people upgrading iPads every three to five years.

00:28:43   So if you've got a really old iPad and you want six gigabytes of RAM, or you're ready

00:28:47   for the new design or something, they want you to be able to get the best one at any

00:28:51   possible time.

00:28:52   They don't want you to have to have a two-year-old iPad when you buy a new one.

00:28:55   But at the same time, I really think this is the most developer-centric iPad that Apple

00:28:59   has ever launched.

00:29:01   - I think that's a good way to put it.

00:29:03   I definitely, I've long thought that that is

00:29:06   the total explanation for the weird overall

00:29:10   like quarter by quarter sales cycle of iPad

00:29:14   where when the iPad first came out,

00:29:16   it was growth, growth, growth, faster growth.

00:29:19   And even though it only came out three years

00:29:22   after the iPhone, it was like, oh,

00:29:27   and the iPad's first half year was higher sales

00:29:30   on the iPhone, its first year were faster,

00:29:32   it was faster growth than, shifted by three years

00:29:37   than the iPhone for a while,

00:29:40   peaked at around 20 million a quarter, I believe,

00:29:44   and then started shrinking consistently,

00:29:49   but then leveled off at like, you know,

00:29:51   nine, 10 million a quarter, which is good.

00:29:54   And my ballpark, just elevator pitch,

00:29:58   what the hell happened, what explains that,

00:30:01   is that the iPad debuted in a world

00:30:05   without anything like an iPad.

00:30:07   - Yeah.

00:30:09   - Was, it filled a need that nobody knew we had.

00:30:13   People raced to get them.

00:30:16   The whole, it's just a big iPhone,

00:30:21   gave millions, tens of millions of people who had,

00:30:25   and maybe were skeptical when they got the iPhone,

00:30:27   but then grew to love it and thought,

00:30:29   well, this is fantastic, I already know how to use it.

00:30:32   I can't wait to get one.

00:30:34   Then they got one and it just kept working

00:30:37   and working and working and the upgrade cycle

00:30:40   was so, is so long, still is,

00:30:43   that it's, the overall sales started tapering off

00:30:47   because people still had iPads that were great,

00:30:51   even though they were three, four, five years old.

00:30:53   And then they've leveled off at this point

00:30:55   because it's like, it's old enough platform now

00:30:59   that it's just sort of like, here's the equilibrium.

00:31:02   - Yeah, it's much more Mac-like

00:31:04   and phones are becoming that way too,

00:31:06   but it's no longer the early adoption part of the curve.

00:31:09   It's now really mainstream.

00:31:12   If Apple had called it special developer edition,

00:31:14   I think it would have been more appropriate.

00:31:16   They might've even sold more

00:31:17   by putting that sort of a name on it.

00:31:20   But it really is one of those products

00:31:22   that for a number of reasons, I think we'll look back on.

00:31:25   and I hate to jump around, but there was a time

00:31:26   when they had the iPad 3 out,

00:31:28   it was a first attempt at getting retina

00:31:29   and it had that very hot GPU in it,

00:31:32   and they replaced it six months later with the iPad 4

00:31:37   that just smoothed everything back out again.

00:31:40   I think they learned from that,

00:31:41   and they just didn't, maybe not all of these things

00:31:43   were ready when the last iPad Pro came out,

00:31:46   but they don't wanna wait until next year again

00:31:48   when they have things like mini LED screens.

00:31:51   They wanna have a good version of the iPad now,

00:31:53   and the production of those chips,

00:31:55   I know some people were complaining that the chipset

00:31:57   is essentially the same,

00:31:58   but the binning on those chips is much better now.

00:32:00   And it's just a better overall product

00:32:02   for people who want one now.

00:32:04   - Yeah, I think that that got,

00:32:05   again, I'm not a silicon expert insider,

00:32:11   but just the layperson's understanding of it,

00:32:14   it kind of makes sense where it comes to yields.

00:32:18   And so, I think people heard that news

00:32:21   that the A12Z is basically the same as the A12X,

00:32:26   except instead of having seven GPU cores,

00:32:28   it has eight GPU cores, but the A12X has eight GPU cores.

00:32:33   It's just that one's disabled.

00:32:35   People hear that and they think it was just pure spite

00:32:38   and that Apple disabled a core

00:32:41   and that they could issue a patch

00:32:43   and your 2018 iPad Pro could have a new,

00:32:46   could then be an A12Z, and it doesn't work like that.

00:32:50   It's basically if you make eight cores

00:32:54   and then they come down the line

00:32:56   and you only have to make sure

00:32:58   that seven of them pass all the tests,

00:33:00   you get a way higher percentage of the wafers

00:33:03   that are like good to go, good to go, good to go.

00:33:06   And two years later, I guess 18 months later,

00:33:10   18 months of muscle memory and expertise at making these,

00:33:15   all of a sudden the yields are high enough

00:33:17   where we can say, you know what,

00:33:18   all eight, we'll hold out for all eight of them,

00:33:22   that's progress, right?

00:33:25   That's what happens when you make the same thing

00:33:26   for 18 months.

00:33:28   - I forget which one it is, but there was an Apple TV

00:33:30   where the chip was essentially A6 or something

00:33:34   where one of the cores, where only one of the cores worked.

00:33:36   So they had a single core version of the chip.

00:33:39   And then later when they ran out of those,

00:33:41   they had to start making single core versions.

00:33:42   And then they eventually went to a newer Apple TV.

00:33:44   But that's just the realities of making silicon.

00:33:47   in anything approaching an affordable way.

00:33:49   - Yeah.

00:33:50   Editor of the show, we can start with the first question.

00:33:54   Caleb Sexton has a question.

00:33:56   So as the editor, I might as well let him go first.

00:34:00   He thinks LIDAR and the U1,

00:34:03   which is also new in the new iPad Pro, I believe.

00:34:07   Now the U1 is the ultra wideband chip

00:34:10   that debuted in the iPhone's 11 back in September,

00:34:15   which is ostensibly for hyper precise location,

00:34:20   but at the moment isn't really used for anything

00:34:26   other than helping to increase the accuracy of,

00:34:31   not AirPlay, what do you call it?

00:34:37   - Yeah, like you targeted AirDrop.

00:34:39   - AirDrop, right.

00:34:40   And so if I want to AirDrop you a link or something

00:34:44   and your phone is out and mine's out

00:34:46   and we're right next to each other,

00:34:48   it's gonna prioritize, hey,

00:34:50   why don't you send it to Renee's iPhone?

00:34:52   - Yeah.

00:34:53   - So I'm not gonna say it's sitting there inert,

00:34:55   it is being used, but the potential

00:34:58   for what something like the U1 could be used for

00:35:02   and might be used for in the plans for iOS 14

00:35:07   or something in the future is obviously bright.

00:35:10   So Caleb wants to know if we see LiDAR and U1

00:35:14   as being intended for Find My.

00:35:16   I'm not sure about how, I guess it could.

00:35:18   I guess what he's getting at is, let's say,

00:35:21   I think what he's getting at is let's say you've lost,

00:35:24   you don't know where your iPhone is

00:35:25   and it's behind a couch cushion

00:35:27   and you're using your iPad to find it.

00:35:31   The LiDAR, I guess it could help

00:35:33   'cause if you're pointing it, if you're in your,

00:35:34   if it's like, oh, it's in your living room

00:35:36   and then the LiDAR can tell there's a couch there,

00:35:39   it can even, it can really get good about, it's not just, oh--

00:35:43   - I can show you a ghost of your iPhone behind the cushion.

00:35:45   - Right, right.

00:35:47   Yeah, that would be pretty cool.

00:35:48   I believe that, that it's in, you know,

00:35:51   that getting better and smarter

00:35:53   about finding everything is in the works.

00:35:55   And I know, you know, there's a short list,

00:36:00   there's a long list of rumored Apple products

00:36:04   that who knows, you know, like just put the car,

00:36:06   just put the car on that list, you know.

00:36:08   Well, who knows where the hell that is?

00:36:09   We know there's people working on Project Titan

00:36:11   and it's a big team and they have big goals.

00:36:14   And who knows if it's, at this point,

00:36:16   if it's a car or an R2D2 that's gonna

00:36:18   come around your house and both vacuum and play music.

00:36:24   - Like the Apple Robo Vac.

00:36:25   - But then there's stuff like the tile product

00:36:30   that seemingly is close to and, you know,

00:36:35   I don't think that it's like, oh,

00:36:37   if not for this global pandemic,

00:36:40   they would have announced it at the end of March.

00:36:43   But maybe, who knows?

00:36:45   I don't know.

00:36:46   Apple's-- - It would have been

00:36:50   a good iPhone 9 one, two punch

00:36:52   the way the AirPods were with the iPhone 7.

00:36:54   - Right, and then they could have, yeah,

00:36:56   'cause then they could have demoed the iPhone 9,

00:37:00   AKA the SE2, but let's call it the iPhone 9,

00:37:03   doing something in a demo

00:37:05   that couldn't have been shown before, right?

00:37:07   'Cause how else do you demo this phone

00:37:10   that otherwise has nothing but a chip and a display

00:37:15   and a touch ID sensor and this and that,

00:37:18   that nothing is new.

00:37:20   The whole point is just it's a great phone

00:37:22   with a modern chip that sells for $550.

00:37:25   But if you could do a demo with,

00:37:28   hey, now it finds your car keys, that's pretty cool.

00:37:33   - Yeah, and I think what you mentioned is exactly right.

00:37:35   I think a lot of those special projects groups,

00:37:37   they're working on separate things,

00:37:38   that there's like a unifying theory.

00:37:40   And I think that's why Tim Cook has spoken about automation

00:37:43   and spoken about augmented reality in a way

00:37:45   that Apple typically doesn't about new products,

00:37:48   because they don't see those things as products necessarily.

00:37:50   They see them as core technologies.

00:37:52   Like your iPhone has a display, your iPad has a display,

00:37:54   your Mac has a display.

00:37:56   And what they're building now is gonna be as ubiquitous

00:37:59   to their products as displays are.

00:38:01   And all of them have to ingest through a variety of sensors,

00:38:04   like going all the way back to accelerometers

00:38:07   and digital compasses all the way forward to LIDAR sensors,

00:38:11   they have to ingest and understand the real world.

00:38:13   And the positioning chip lets them do that

00:38:15   at very small scale.

00:38:16   And then the LIDAR things lets them do that

00:38:18   in terms of seeing what's all around you,

00:38:20   the way that touch ID, sorry, face ID,

00:38:23   the TrueDepth camera does on towards you.

00:38:26   And it lets them build and understand these virtual worlds.

00:38:28   They can start placing things in it

00:38:30   and deriving functionality from it.

00:38:32   And maybe there'll be glasses one day

00:38:34   and LIDAR is much more privacy centric

00:38:36   RGB cameras are but just the technology needed to

00:38:40   Figure out what's in a world in your place in it and the place of other objects that have u1 chips in them

00:38:45   I think that's the sort of the big play they're working towards. I

00:38:48   Keep thinking about that and I keep thinking how

00:38:52   And I've been thinking about this for years and LIDAR definitely is a big step in this direction and

00:39:00   GPS was so the first step on location awareness and

00:39:06   And it all goes unfortunately hand in hand

00:39:10   with all of the various repercussions

00:39:14   related to just the catch-all phrase privacy.

00:39:17   And it's a phone book-sized deep dive

00:39:21   on all the ways that this has repercussions.

00:39:25   But basically, as smart as our devices have gotten,

00:39:29   and as good as the cameras are, and all of this,

00:39:35   they still don't know where the hell they are, really.

00:39:37   - Yes. - Right?

00:39:38   And it's like, the potential for that is there, right?

00:39:43   Like you can just, it's like Indiana Jones

00:39:47   with his fingertip on the Holy Grail, right?

00:39:50   It's like, it's so close.

00:39:52   You know, your fingertip is touching it,

00:39:54   of just, of when you ask your phone for directions to,

00:39:59   like your meeting, well, remember when you used to be able

00:40:03   to meet somebody at a restaurant.

00:40:05   (laughing)

00:40:06   If we ever get back to meeting people at restaurants.

00:40:09   And somebody, you're in a city that you're not,

00:40:11   you're visiting, you're out of town,

00:40:13   you're in a city that you're not--

00:40:14   - You're both at Dub-Dub.

00:40:15   - Yeah, and somebody says,

00:40:17   "Meet me at such and such place."

00:40:19   It's, you get directions now.

00:40:22   It's so much better than the old days before phones

00:40:24   when all we had were somebody would hopefully tell you,

00:40:28   "Go to this street, go through the next light,

00:40:31   and make a left and there it is,

00:40:34   then you'd have to memorize it or have it written down.

00:40:37   Phone directions are so much better than that,

00:40:39   but still your phone could do so much better.

00:40:42   It should be like some kind of AR view

00:40:44   where you just hold it up and it just shows you the arrow

00:40:46   and says over there.

00:40:48   Here I know where we are, we're at the corner of--

00:40:51   - Amy's at the food court and you can find the food court,

00:40:53   but you can't find the table.

00:40:55   - Right, right, exactly.

00:40:56   - And those are the problems that this,

00:40:59   I think this technology, I think it'll do way more than that eventually, you know, the

00:41:03   way screens do way more eventually, but I think that's what they're building towards.

00:41:06   Yeah, and it's definitely the LIDAR stuff. Clearly, even though right now there just

00:41:14   isn't a lot of, there aren't a lot of great demos that show it off, and even some of the

00:41:19   stuff Apple showed off from third-party developers isn't out yet, you know, I don't think, like

00:41:26   the new version of hot lava where it turns your house into lava. Cool demo, can't wait

00:41:32   for it to play with it. Not out yet. Really, we're stuck playing with the Measure app.

00:41:36   But even the Measure app, man, is it so much better than the camera-only, accelerometer-only

00:41:42   Measure app. Like, LiDAR is the real deal. And you know it when you see demos of actual

00:41:48   cars out in the street, test cars from various companies working on self-driving cars, and

00:41:52   are largely enabled by LiDAR sensors

00:41:55   pointing out in all the directions.

00:41:57   So you know, it's not like,

00:41:58   oh, I didn't really know LiDAR was a thing,

00:42:00   but boy, when you see it side by side,

00:42:03   comparing the brand new iPad Pro

00:42:05   to either the previous one or to your iPhone,

00:42:09   and it can figure out just a completely blank wall,

00:42:14   just a wall that is just white paint,

00:42:16   and it knows exactly where it is.

00:42:18   There's no way that a camera-based system could ever,

00:42:21   had no chance, what the hell could a camera do,

00:42:24   pointed at a white wall?

00:42:26   - And I'm really waiting for the time

00:42:28   when it moves from being so active to being so passive,

00:42:30   so I'm not like in LiDAR mode,

00:42:32   but as I move my phone around,

00:42:34   it's just one of the things it's detecting,

00:42:35   and then there's no more face ID or touch ID,

00:42:37   it's just like the phone sees a bit of my face,

00:42:41   it hears a bit of my voice,

00:42:42   it knows my gait when I'm walking,

00:42:44   it knows when I'm touching the screen,

00:42:46   and I don't have to worry about this whole

00:42:47   like actively unlocking it again,

00:42:49   it just says, "I'm reasonably sure it's you,

00:42:51   "I'm unlocked, oh, I don't know it's you anymore.

00:42:52   "I'm gonna challenge you for a different prompt."

00:42:55   And then we start moving beyond all these

00:42:56   sort of artificial barriers to our usage.

00:42:59   - All right, let me take a break here

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00:46:06   All right, let's start. - Sorry, I got

00:46:08   renerichy.net.

00:46:09   - renerichy.net, what a great man.

00:46:11   - Thank God nobody took it.

00:46:14   'Cause what kind of a jerk would do that?

00:46:16   - I know, I know, I got lucky.

00:46:18   I've had everything on Hover for years now.

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00:46:23   and one of my favorite successes

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00:46:45   on advertising ever again."

00:46:47   Good to know you.

00:46:48   You'll never see another nickel from us.

00:46:49   I would still tell people to go to Hover.

00:46:51   - The same, absolutely the same.

00:46:53   - All right, here we go.

00:46:55   Here's a question from Tom Woodfin.

00:46:57   He asks, "How do you think Apple sees the future of OLED

00:47:00   in their devices?

00:47:01   Will we ever see OLED MacBooks or iPads

00:47:04   that the iPhone XR and 11 have picked up

00:47:08   all the original X technology and design

00:47:10   other than OLED seems like a tell to me

00:47:13   that Apple isn't happy with the tech.

00:47:16   - Yeah, I think that's true.

00:47:18   I mean, it took Apple a long time

00:47:19   compared to Android vendors to put OLED in the phones.

00:47:22   And when you look back at some of the earlier OLED phones,

00:47:24   the Pentile subpixels were horrible.

00:47:27   I remember Sebastian DeWitt had to figure out

00:47:29   how to anti-alias them himself

00:47:31   'cause they just didn't do it

00:47:33   when he was working at Double Twist.

00:47:34   But they got better and better

00:47:37   and they got to a certain point where Apple was happy

00:47:39   because like the blue color fades faster

00:47:41   than the other colors and they burn in

00:47:43   and there's just, it looks gorgeous.

00:47:44   There's really good deep blacks,

00:47:46   really good high bright levels,

00:47:48   but you have to do so many mitigations

00:47:50   to make it a workable technology.

00:47:52   And especially on larger screens like iPads,

00:47:55   the amount of the brightness is not contiguous.

00:47:59   Like it has brighter and darker spots

00:48:01   and especially at Apple scale.

00:48:04   A lot of companies have made better panels than Apple

00:48:07   like Amazon and Samsung,

00:48:08   because they were making far fewer of them

00:48:10   and it was easier to do it at smaller scale.

00:48:12   But Apple makes a ton of MacBooks and a ton of iPads

00:48:16   and it's really hard to get OLED fabricated

00:48:20   at that sort of scale.

00:48:21   So I really think they're gonna wait for mini LED

00:48:23   on the bigger devices.

00:48:24   They're gonna just skip OLED and go straight to that.

00:48:26   - It's a good question.

00:48:27   I think it's a really good question

00:48:29   and it sort of captures the sort of gestalt

00:48:33   of Apple's display technology of the last five years

00:48:38   and the next few years.

00:48:40   And I think it's important to note Apple's first OLED device

00:48:44   and still is the Apple Watch.

00:48:47   And it's--

00:48:48   - And it's RGB stripe, it's not Pentile like the phones.

00:48:51   I mean, that's good OLED.

00:48:52   - Every Apple Watch ever made has been OLED,

00:48:55   whether it's a $250 sport watch

00:49:00   or a $20,000 solid gold Apple Watch, they've all been OLED.

00:49:05   The only difference in the displays

00:49:09   is whether it's the sapphire crystal display

00:49:14   or the ionized glass,

00:49:16   which is less expensive in the sport models.

00:49:18   But the actual underlying technology's always been OLED.

00:49:21   And the downsides of OLED that you just mentioned,

00:49:28   the subpixels and the problems with other displays

00:49:32   or certain colors and color accuracy,

00:49:35   none of that is as big an issue on the watch, right?

00:49:38   You don't watch video on your watch.

00:49:41   The deep blacks are a huge benefit.

00:49:44   I don't know that they would have launched Apple Watch

00:49:46   until something like OLED with the deep blacks was possible

00:49:50   because it completely,

00:49:53   and you just look at the watch faces that are,

00:49:56   almost all of the watch faces until the series four,

00:50:01   where they went to the rounded corner ones,

00:50:06   had these black backgrounds because it helped hide,

00:50:11   honestly, almost more than helped,

00:50:13   it almost completely hid the border

00:50:17   between the bezel and the display.

00:50:19   And it made- - The enormous bezels, yeah.

00:50:21   - Yeah, and it's only when they got better,

00:50:25   four generations in and they could make a more iPhone 10 style, bigger amount of the

00:50:34   surface area is devoted to the display and we can round the corners off, did they start

00:50:39   showing more faces, providing more faces where the actual background is a vibrant color instead

00:50:44   of black?

00:50:47   Yeah I think that OLED, I don't want to call it a stopgap, but I do think, and I don't

00:50:54   know a ton about micro LED, but I just know though that it's it sounds to me

00:51:02   like better long-term technology like OLED is amazing in so many ways but has

00:51:08   so many trade-offs. Yes, yeah I mean it's great I love watching HDR content like I

00:51:14   have a I have an LG OLED television it's phenomenal very different technology to

00:51:19   what they use on small screens and I would love to have that on an iPad I'd

00:51:24   I'd love to be able to see again, those deep blacks.

00:51:26   A lot of people, like you can show them an iPhone XR

00:51:29   or an iPhone 11 next to an iPhone XS or an iPhone 11 Pro.

00:51:34   And Apple is so good at their color management,

00:51:37   their color science and their consistency

00:51:40   that a lot of people just cannot tell the difference.

00:51:42   I'm just spoiled in that I'm used to looking

00:51:44   at HDR content so I can.

00:51:46   It's by no means a detriment at this point,

00:51:48   but I think it's just part of the natural.

00:51:50   They're making so much HDR content for Apple TV+ now,

00:51:53   and it just looks so good.

00:51:54   I think it's naturally where they wanna go,

00:51:56   but it's exactly what you said.

00:51:58   OLED is sort of a stopgap to get there,

00:51:59   and then we have mini-LED and then micro-LED,

00:52:02   and who knows whatever is after that,

00:52:04   maybe just VR displays everywhere.

00:52:06   But those seem to have all the good characteristics

00:52:10   of OLED without the detriments,

00:52:12   almost the best of both worlds.

00:52:13   - So I would expect we never get OLED Max.

00:52:16   I kind of, and this is sort of cheating

00:52:20   And basing on what seems to be coming out of the Asian supply chain, it sounds to me

00:52:27   like we might never get OLED iPads either.

00:52:31   That the next thing after what we have now will be micro LED.

00:52:36   Mini, I think, first.

00:52:37   Mini first.

00:52:38   I forget.

00:52:39   Well, but superior LED technology.

00:52:44   And like you said, like what makes OLED great for a big TV isn't really applicable to the

00:52:50   the small scale and what they're able to do

00:52:54   with their high-end iPhone Pros is expensive.

00:52:59   It's a big part of the reason why the iPhone 11 Pro

00:53:03   is more expensive than the iPhone 11

00:53:05   and the same reason why last year's phone,

00:53:08   the iPhone XS was more expensive than the XR.

00:53:11   I also think that it depends on what you watch.

00:53:15   Like I think it was Joanna Stern and I

00:53:17   who were talking about this.

00:53:19   Joanna is a huge fan, was just huge, huge fan

00:53:22   of bought one herself, the XR,

00:53:25   and I think she still prefers the iPhone 11

00:53:27   over the 11 Pro.

00:53:28   Depending on what you do with your phone,

00:53:32   if you're doing a lot of just email and reading and texting,

00:53:37   I honestly think that in some ways,

00:53:42   especially on a white background,

00:53:43   that the LED looks better than the OLED.

00:53:48   and it has a wider viewing.

00:53:50   - Especially off access.

00:53:51   - Yeah, off access, OLED, even Apple's,

00:53:54   which I think is arguably among,

00:53:56   inarguably among the best in the world,

00:53:59   possibly the best in the world,

00:54:00   can have a bluish tint when you look at it side by side.

00:54:04   And the 3X retina factor of their OLED iPhones

00:54:09   versus the 2X retina of all the LED ones

00:54:16   that they've made to date

00:54:17   looks bad, really bad on the spec chart, right?

00:54:20   And that's one of those things where people

00:54:22   who just sort of review quote unquote phones,

00:54:25   it's almost like they got it all out of their system

00:54:28   with the XR a year and a half ago,

00:54:31   and they didn't even really bang the drum

00:54:33   with the iPhone 11 this year.

00:54:35   But they really were like, hey, for $800,

00:54:37   or whatever the iPhone XR and regular non-Pro 11

00:54:42   starting prices, you should get more than,

00:54:44   you should be able to get, what do they want?

00:54:47   They want the 14, what, or 1080p, right?

00:54:51   They want 1080--

00:54:52   - Yeah, no 1080p in 2018 or whatever their thing was.

00:54:54   - Because of the, I don't wanna go too far off

00:54:57   and no weeds on this, but because of the sub-pixel layout

00:54:59   of OLED screens, arguably you need a 3X Retina OLED

00:55:04   to compete with a 2X LED.

00:55:09   - Yeah, absolutely, it's a Pentile and not an RGB stripe,

00:55:12   which is much higher density.

00:55:13   - And if your eyes are sharp enough,

00:55:15   or you're using a jeweler's loop or a magnifying glass

00:55:19   to look at it, I'm not trying to say that the 3x OLED

00:55:24   isn't, for the most part, better than the 2x LED

00:55:28   in terms of resolution.

00:55:30   I think it probably is, but it's a lot closer

00:55:33   than you would think just by looking at 2x versus 3x.

00:55:36   It is definitely not 1.5 times the resolution.

00:55:39   It is less--

00:55:41   - No, it's also, it's also like there's good,

00:55:43   it's only one factor in determining a good pixel

00:55:46   for a display.

00:55:47   And there are some really bad OLED panels.

00:55:49   Google, in one of their pixels, I think it was a 3XL,

00:55:54   they had really bad OLED panels in them.

00:55:57   They would burn in and they were horrible

00:55:59   with the color shifting and the banding,

00:56:00   all of those things.

00:56:02   So you can have good and bad implementations of these things

00:56:04   and Apple is just so good at making LCDs,

00:56:07   probably the best in the world,

00:56:09   probably maybe with LG Ti for making really good LCD

00:56:12   displays, that the sheer quality of them exceeds the resolution of them.

00:56:17   Yeah, and there's also, at a philosophical level, I feel like the RGB layout fits Apple's

00:56:26   institutional philosophy better, where it's just a little bit more honest.

00:56:30   And I don't mean dishonest, that OLED is dishonest like it's lying, but it's like

00:56:36   a cheat, you know?

00:56:38   It totally is.

00:56:39   If they could do RGB stripe at iPhone scale, they would.

00:56:42   They can't fab good quality.

00:56:44   When Apple, Apple is very forthright.

00:56:46   When they said like this is the first panel

00:56:47   we thought was good enough for the iPhone, they mean it.

00:56:50   And yes, Samsung used their process.

00:56:52   And I think Samsung's process is the best in the world.

00:56:54   BCE kind of copied it.

00:56:55   So, you know, they're ramping up fast.

00:56:57   But Apple still said, no, we want these materials,

00:56:59   not this material, we want it done.

00:57:01   They designed the whole thing and then had Samsung fab it.

00:57:03   And they made it the way

00:57:05   that they were comfortable making it.

00:57:06   - Yeah, I'm gonna take an aside here.

00:57:08   And it's not even a question,

00:57:09   but I'm gonna talk about this

00:57:10   'cause I had to buy a new TV recently,

00:57:12   and I haven't talked about it.

00:57:14   But we renovated our living room,

00:57:18   and we have a very, very big wall

00:57:20   with room for a very large TV.

00:57:23   And we had still been using a 2006 Pioneer Plasma,

00:57:28   which I still have, and I've just moved

00:57:32   to a lesser used room in the house.

00:57:35   - Same.

00:57:36   - And I don't turn it on anymore,

00:57:38   and I just, I walk by and I pet it.

00:57:40   'Cause it's seriously dollar for dollar,

00:57:43   one of the great purchases of my entire life

00:57:46   in terms of how happy it has made me over the years

00:57:50   and how happy I still am with the picture and the color

00:57:54   and I just, I don't wanna go off on a rant and lament.

00:57:57   But I mean, at this point I realized

00:57:59   that the technical limitations of plasma,

00:58:01   it got killed by marketing problems

00:58:05   because it was inherently more expensive.

00:58:08   and LEDs got so absurdly cheap

00:58:10   that it just became unfeasible

00:58:12   to sell these expensive plasmas side by side with them.

00:58:16   But you can't make them anywhere near thin enough

00:58:18   by today's standards.

00:58:20   When I got it in 2006, I was moving from a giant 35 inch,

00:58:25   I think, Trinitron CRT,

00:58:29   which weighed like 20,000 pounds.

00:58:32   It was so heavy.

00:58:34   It was like the biggest CRT Sony made for home use.

00:58:38   And I love that TV too, but it,

00:58:41   a big fat, heavy, thick, by today's standards,

00:58:44   plasma in 2006 seemed so thin and light compared to a CRT.

00:58:48   But anyway, it was time to buy a new TV.

00:58:50   Hadn't bought one since 2000, into 2006, I think.

00:58:54   And I knew I wanted OLED, and I thought, oh, here we go.

00:58:59   I put it off and put it off 'cause I thought

00:59:01   this is gonna be a nightmare, buying a TV.

00:59:03   Turns out, once you decide you want OLED,

00:59:07   it is actually, it's like the difference

00:59:10   between deciding you wanna buy an Apple MacBook

00:59:14   versus a PC, right?

00:59:16   - Chromebook or something. - Right.

00:59:17   And if you wanna buy a, yeah, a PC notebook,

00:59:20   and you really wanna make sure

00:59:22   you're making the best decision.

00:59:24   You're gonna have an entire notebook filled with notes.

00:59:28   Whereas if you just, you know you wanna get a MacBook,

00:59:32   well, now you just decide pro or air or 16 or 13,

00:59:37   and then a little bit of decision making

00:59:39   on how much RAM and how much storage you need,

00:59:41   and then you're done.

00:59:43   Buying an OLED TV today is sort of like that.

00:59:45   Number one, you are gonna pay significantly more

00:59:48   for the same size TV compared to an LED.

00:59:51   It is going to look way better.

00:59:53   You will notice the difference.

00:59:55   You don't need to be a picky, picky person

00:59:57   to say, "Wow, this is brighter and the blacks are blacker."

01:00:02   And if you're coming from plasma like I am,

01:00:06   it's the only thing that makes it possibly bearable.

01:00:09   And again, the blacks are better than they were

01:00:11   on the plasma, but the overall color warmth

01:00:14   of the things that I care about, like movies,

01:00:17   still isn't as good as plasma,

01:00:19   but it's so much closer than the cool,

01:00:21   cold remoteness of LEDs.

01:00:25   Basically 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

01:00:32   I 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

01:00:38   Sony Samsung and Vizio and

01:00:42   If there are other brands, I don't know who they are what they make but Sony doesn't make their own panels

01:00:50   They use LG panels

01:00:51   And so at a panel level when you're deciding between

01:00:56   Sony and LG

01:00:59   You're just talking about the actual TV itself and which software is better and LG software. Everybody says is better

01:01:05   I 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

01:01:11   Yep, TV thing is better than LG's web OS. There we are back to web OS base. Yes interface

01:01:20   They're also minimal chrome wise right like this is part of the beauty of

01:01:25   The OLED revolution is that there's so little chrome

01:01:31   Bezel around these TVs that none of them even Samsung who loves to put their shiny stupid ugly logo on everything

01:01:38   There's no room for logos. So there's no shiny

01:01:40   LG thing or badge down there. It's just a tiny black border around the screen

01:01:46   So you can rule Sony out because you got the same panels as LG

01:01:50   as good or better prices and better software from LG. There you go. Visio is sort of the discount

01:01:57   brand. I don't, I've never heard anybody say there's any reason to get a Visio other than

01:02:01   that they're cheaper. And then you're down to LG versus Samsung. And it's pretty much the same

01:02:06   thing. It doesn't seem like anybody thinks the Samsung ones are better in any way. And now it's

01:02:12   now... Samsung is better at small screen OLED and LG is way better at big screen OLED right now.

01:02:16   And then, so very easy process of reduction.

01:02:20   You're like, well, now I'm gonna buy an LG,

01:02:21   which one should I get?

01:02:22   And it's not, once you figure,

01:02:25   this is where Syracuse really helped,

01:02:26   is that they have like A series,

01:02:28   which are sort of less expensive entry level,

01:02:31   the, or I think, A, B, and C,

01:02:35   where each one is better.

01:02:37   C is better, but not too much better,

01:02:39   only a little bit more expensive.

01:02:41   Then the next number is a year,

01:02:43   So like a C9 series means 2019.

01:02:48   The way they, this is the part I'm getting to,

01:02:50   the way they do the years is insane,

01:02:52   where they just use one digit.

01:02:54   So a C9 series OLED from LG means 2019 OLED.

01:02:59   And then what are they gonna do for 2020?

01:03:03   Are they gonna use a zero?

01:03:05   Nope, using an X.

01:03:07   They've gone to Roman numerals.

01:03:09   It's insane.

01:03:12   I have no idea what they're gonna do for 2021.

01:03:14   Are they gonna go to XI?

01:03:16   I don't know.

01:03:17   I don't know why they didn't just use two digits, right?

01:03:19   And again, all the trouble the world got into

01:03:21   with the Y2K thing using two-digit years,

01:03:24   at least with OLED televisions,

01:03:28   I think we're pretty safe to assume

01:03:30   that 81 years from now,

01:03:32   we're not going to still be using OLED TVs.

01:03:35   So I feel like they would have had so much runway

01:03:40   if they had just used two years for the year number,

01:03:43   and then you just pick what size you want,

01:03:46   and then you're done, and there you go.

01:03:48   - Yeah, I think that's fantastic.

01:03:51   I listened to Syracuse too,

01:03:52   and I made the exact same call, and I've been super happy,

01:03:54   both with the Plasma and with the OLED.

01:03:56   - Yeah, it is very good technology for TV.

01:03:58   We're very happy with it.

01:04:00   And it's funny because it's a new thing,

01:04:02   and I still have to get a new sound system,

01:04:04   and it's, this whole, (laughs)

01:04:09   This whole, not that we can't order a sound system

01:04:11   in the midst of being bunkered in home,

01:04:14   self-quarantining, but it's just sort of lowered it

01:04:17   on a priority list.

01:04:18   And in the meantime, the built-in sound from this TV

01:04:22   is actually better than our old standalone sound system

01:04:26   for the fairly large living room that it's in.

01:04:29   It's actually not too bad.

01:04:32   Not that I'm gonna stick with it for too long,

01:04:33   but it's actually way better than I ever had any reason

01:04:37   to expect the built-in sound on a TV would be.

01:04:41   So anyway. - It's really good.

01:04:41   And also when you watch it with like native content,

01:04:44   which I mean like the HDR

01:04:45   and starting to get the Dolby Atmos,

01:04:47   Disney+ has that, Apple TV+ has that.

01:04:49   It's just night and day.

01:04:50   - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:04:52   And when you do get HDR content,

01:04:54   even with my weirdo eyes at the moment,

01:04:57   it's like, "Ooh, ooh, you can see that.

01:04:58   "That is, ooh, that's really nice."

01:05:00   - Yeah.

01:05:01   - So anyway, there's my side on getting a TV.

01:05:04   Next question.

01:05:05   Boy, I'm bad at this question and answer format.

01:05:07   - No, it's good.

01:05:08   (laughing)

01:05:10   - Anyway, fair warning,

01:05:12   none of these questions are in any sort of order,

01:05:17   so we're gonna bounce all over the place.

01:05:20   Next question, Steven Morris,

01:05:21   in what ways does Apple need to improve its services?

01:05:24   What services do you think need the most time

01:05:27   invested in them right now?

01:05:29   Another good question.

01:05:30   What do you think?

01:05:32   - For me, it's still Siri, I think,

01:05:33   'cause it's such a front-facing, customer-facing service,

01:05:36   And while it does a lot of clever things,

01:05:38   we talked about it on a previous show,

01:05:40   it's just like one out of every nine, 10 times,

01:05:42   or one out of every 20 times,

01:05:44   it gives you a completely zany answer.

01:05:46   Like I'll say, "Call my mom," and it'll work 19 times,

01:05:49   and 20th time, it'll call a hair salon.

01:05:51   Or I'll say like, "Show me photos from New York City,"

01:05:54   it'll work perfectly, and then one time,

01:05:56   it'll just try to search Bing for them.

01:05:59   And I think that nailing the consistency

01:06:01   for an assistant technology is just so core

01:06:05   to building trust with that system,

01:06:07   that it should be their, if not their top priority,

01:06:09   then really close to it?

01:06:11   - That's a good answer.

01:06:13   I think it's very true.

01:06:15   I think that I've repeated this numerous times.

01:06:18   I'm not saying that they shouldn't have launched Siri

01:06:21   when they did, and a year or two difference,

01:06:24   I mean, there may or may not have been some aspect

01:06:27   of a rush in terms of wanting to debut Siri in a phone

01:06:32   while Steve Jobs was still alive.

01:06:34   It's probably the last major feature that he lived to see.

01:06:39   A year or two wouldn't have made a huge difference

01:06:42   in the overall thing.

01:06:43   It's probably the right time.

01:06:45   Other companies were gonna have it.

01:06:46   If Siri hadn't been out for another five or six years,

01:06:50   Apple would have looked ridiculously out of touch.

01:06:54   But all of these things are off to such a bad start,

01:07:01   in my opinion, in terms of just giving everybody

01:07:04   a very bad taste in the mouth as a first impression

01:07:07   in terms of how reliable they are.

01:07:09   And compare and contrast with touchscreen computing

01:07:14   where the iPhone debuted and whatever other limitations

01:07:18   you wanna talk about if you went back

01:07:21   to a 2007 original iPhone right now,

01:07:26   the touchscreen isn't one of them.

01:07:28   the latency, the responsiveness to multi-touch,

01:07:32   to pinching, to scrolling, to flicking was phenomenal.

01:07:36   And I guess it's not the first touchscreen

01:07:39   that most people have used.

01:07:41   We've been to airports and there's a touchscreen

01:07:44   for getting your boarding pass and they all stunk, right?

01:07:48   The back of your airplane seat.

01:07:49   - Or like the trio ones with the stylus.

01:07:50   - Right.

01:07:51   They all stunk.

01:07:55   And having the iPhone say, here's the first one

01:07:58   you're gonna wanna use and here's where we're setting the bar and people would say,

01:08:03   "Oh, and now you expect everything to instantaneously respond to the touch of your fingers." Siri

01:08:11   and Scala and again, sorry if I triggered, I should have said dingus and dingus and dingus.

01:08:19   Hopefully I didn't set anybody's things off. Sorry.

01:08:21   - [Lyle] Buy many doll houses.

01:08:23   - All of these things are so terrible in the grand scheme of things, all of them. And feel

01:08:27   free to rank Siri third as the third of the three, but and whichever one you, dear listener,

01:08:34   think is the best, whether it's Alexa or Google or if you do think it's Siri, they all stink.

01:08:41   None of them are good. They should all, you know, we know what we want them to be like.

01:08:45   We want them to be genuinely conversational and they don't have to have a personality

01:08:52   like Hal or Kit.

01:08:55   (laughs)

01:08:56   I never really realized as a kid, by the way,

01:08:57   just how much Kit was a ripoff of Hal.

01:09:00   - Yes. (laughs)

01:09:01   - It doesn't have to have a personality,

01:09:03   but you should at least be able to have a conversation,

01:09:06   and we're not there yet.

01:09:06   So I would, yeah, Siri has gotta be there.

01:09:09   And anyway, the fact that the first impression is so bad

01:09:12   just means it has to get so much better

01:09:14   before it re-earns the trust of people who are like,

01:09:16   I'm not even gonna bother asking my voice assistant for this

01:09:20   because I just don't want a stupid answer.

01:09:22   - Well, I think it's a mixed blessing.

01:09:23   Like, I think Steve and Scott Forstall

01:09:25   were deeply invested in it,

01:09:26   but when Scott left, it sort of got handed off

01:09:29   to a vice president in Eddy's org,

01:09:30   and it didn't really get the attention it needed

01:09:33   because no one really foresaw.

01:09:34   Even now, it's gonna be critically important in an AR.

01:09:37   If they're working on the AR operating system,

01:09:39   it's gonna be critically important for that,

01:09:41   and they have John and Jean Andrea there now,

01:09:43   who's absolutely phenomenal,

01:09:44   and I think his organization will be as important

01:09:47   to the next 10 years as John Suruji's Silicon team

01:09:49   has been to the last 10 years,

01:09:51   but there's a lot of rebuilding to do.

01:09:53   And because they're assistant number one,

01:09:55   even if they allow default apps to be changed

01:09:57   and default assistance,

01:09:58   when you first install a new OS

01:10:00   or you first get a new phone,

01:10:01   they'll have an opportunity to like do something spectacular

01:10:03   to get your attention.

01:10:05   But I just think that that like just

01:10:06   maybe make a whole separate Siri cloud that you can beta

01:10:10   and just have people go through that over and over again.

01:10:13   'Cause every beta process now,

01:10:14   Siri breaks a little bit more

01:10:16   because they're busy working on the backend.

01:10:18   and that just makes it, it makes it harder

01:10:19   to build that trust relationship.

01:10:21   - I would add as a second service that I would like to see

01:10:25   continue to improve is iCloud as a whole.

01:10:28   And I think iCloud has done very well.

01:10:30   I think that, and again, that's another thing

01:10:33   where maybe it got off to a bad start

01:10:35   and because it left a bad first impression

01:10:37   with an awful lot of people, it's had to get better,

01:10:40   even better than it would have had to have been originally

01:10:43   to get people to trust it again.

01:10:46   But I really do entrust most of my digital syncing life to iCloud, and it for years now has been really, really solid.

01:10:57   It is up there with the best of any sync service that I've used.

01:11:02   But I still think that there's room for improvement.

01:11:06   I would like to see it, and it's a small thing, but I'd like to see it get decoupled further from OS releases.

01:11:15   Like, it would be nice, and I get why,

01:11:19   I understand the way Apple thinks

01:11:21   and the way Apple approaches stuff

01:11:23   like a new version of the Reminders app

01:11:25   or a new version of the Notes app

01:11:27   and why you have to upgrade to Catalina to get it,

01:11:30   but there's no real reason for that.

01:11:33   There's no, you know, like look at Safari,

01:11:35   the way that Safari is still made,

01:11:37   new versions of Safari are still made available

01:11:42   people who are still using 10.14 and 10.13.

01:11:47   It would be nice if you're upgrading Reminders to a major new version.

01:11:53   And it is such a great—it's one of the great highlights that we don't talk too

01:11:56   much about from last year.

01:11:58   Reminders really went from an afterthought app to a really nice app, but it kind of stinks

01:12:03   that it's coupled so tightly to being on the latest and greatest OS, especially on

01:12:08   the Mac where, for professional reasons, there's an awful lot of reasons.

01:12:12   not just vague conservatism about upgrading

01:12:15   to the new version of Mac OS X,

01:12:17   but just in a professional environment

01:12:19   where you've got everything set up just so,

01:12:22   you don't wanna be upgrading your OS without--

01:12:25   - Or if you're dependent on 32-bit plugins, for example.

01:12:26   - Yes, right, right, right.

01:12:29   And especially the 10.14 to 10.15 transition,

01:12:31   where a whole chunk of 32-bit software

01:12:35   literally cannot be run.

01:12:38   It's not even, oh, you have to click a warning.

01:12:41   Yeah, it just doesn't run

01:12:43   So I agree with that totally but I'd love to see it like a step further

01:12:47   I I've been advocating for a while that Apple just not get away from

01:12:50   Monolithic software releases because I think there's a lot of advantage to having that big

01:12:54   WWDC announcement but instead of saying coming September

01:12:58   I 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

01:13:04   Airplay 2 is late. It's not like Oh Apple fail to deliver

01:13:08   It's like these are the this is the road map for the next year of iOS and some of the stuff comes in September

01:13:12   And some comes in in October some comes in March some comes in June before the next announcement

01:13:18   And then decouple the online stuff entirely Microsoft and Google did that years ago and just that stuff gets updated

01:13:24   Almost all the time. Yeah, just it allows so much more freedom

01:13:27   And it just we don't have to worry about it as users either and I think it has huge advantages

01:13:33   Yeah, I I think so, too

01:13:35   So I would like to see Apple continued to work on that regard and and you know and be able to push iCloud

01:13:42   updates off cycle

01:13:44   Alright next question

01:13:46   Ricardo Lamas asks very short to the point iPhone 2020 pricing

01:13:50   Are we screwed with all the things going on in the world?

01:13:54   I'm I'm interpreting part two of his question to are we screwed?

01:14:00   getting iPhones in September, new iPhones in September,

01:14:04   as opposed to the darker question of,

01:14:07   are we collectively screwed

01:14:11   with all the things going on in the world?

01:14:14   I'm gonna take it as an iPhone question,

01:14:18   but if it meant the bigger sense,

01:14:20   I guess the honest answer is I don't know, but I hope not.

01:14:24   I think the 2020 iPhones thing,

01:14:28   I know that there was some news, I think Nick Kay had a news report that said that Apple

01:14:36   was in discussions about planning discussions for whether the new iPhones, I mean, again,

01:14:47   you can't cancel what hasn't been announced, but everybody knows that the schedule Apple's

01:14:51   been on for years now, which is the second Tuesday of September is iPhone introduction

01:14:57   Tuesday and then they you know start shipping at like the 21st of the month that are somewhat later in the month

01:15:03   And that's also when iOS 14 comes out blah blah blah everybody knows that schedule

01:15:07   Will that schedule hold this year with everything going on and the K reported that Apple at the highest levels as?

01:15:14   Discussing well, maybe not and if so, what does that mean?

01:15:18   And then digit times came out with a counter report that said no, there's they're not talking about a blah blah blah

01:15:25   I think you just pause for a second and just think of course Tim Cook and Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi and

01:15:33   Engineering teams and

01:15:38   Everybody at Apple and in the finance teams like Lucas team and if everybody is looking everything is on the table, right?

01:15:45   Is it the supply chain that might screw Apple and prevent stuff from being ready in September?

01:15:52   Is 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?

01:16:03   And hidden travel restrictions, they can't go to China and work on the prototypes.

01:16:07   Exactly, right? It's all of the above. All of it. All of it factors into it.

01:16:13   it. Oh, and then there's the macroeconomic question of, and the reading the room where

01:16:21   the room is the world is, you know, will the world be ready for it? Will it play the way

01:16:29   that Apple wants it to play as a, here, here's good news, we have exciting new iPhones to

01:16:34   introduce. Will the world be ready for that in September? Who knows? So of course, of

01:16:41   Of course they're considering what are the plan B, C, D, E, right?

01:16:46   Yeah, and I think it's interesting in a couple ways because first, usually every year there's

01:16:53   rumors that Apple's going to be late with the new iPhone.

01:16:55   It goes all the way back to that old video where Jim Cramer said, "Yeah, every year,

01:17:00   to protect my shorts, I call up an Apple news site and say it's going to be late, and they

01:17:04   love to run with that stuff, and then the market dumps, I cover my nut, and I go home."

01:17:11   So I think there's a huge amount of market manipulation

01:17:13   that goes on in the best of years.

01:17:15   But this year, there's no expectation.

01:17:17   I don't think anyone, anyone reasonable,

01:17:19   anyone of her right mind would have an expectation

01:17:21   that products will come out the way they would in a year

01:17:24   that didn't have everything going on now.

01:17:26   But the other two pressures I see is there's rumors

01:17:28   of a smaller iPhone, like the iPhone will move

01:17:31   to a smaller 11 style and a normal size 11 style,

01:17:35   and then an 11 sized Pro and an even bigger Pro.

01:17:40   Typically the smaller ones are less expensive. The bigger ones are more expensive

01:17:44   but most of them are gonna go 5g the

01:17:47   Basic ones are gonna go sub 6 which is like the t-mobile

01:17:51   Real kind of slightly better than LTE 5g and the pros are gonna go a millimeter wave and sub 6

01:17:59   And millimeter wave is the Verizon AT&T one that I'm still not convinced will ever be a real consumer technology

01:18:05   It'll might end up like WiMAX, but those are typically $100 more expensive if you look at Android vendors or like the Samsung

01:18:13   though the lightest generation of Samsung phones are

01:18:15   Fairly similar to what the rumors are gonna be for the rumors have been for iPhones and they're all much more

01:18:20   Expensive than they were previously

01:18:23   So I think if Apple like they can do what they did with the iPad where they move down the lower end ones

01:18:29   people get really happy like the the iPhone 9 will be $399 and the smaller iPhone 11 will be a little bit cheaper than

01:18:36   700 bucks maybe 600 bucks or something and then if they have to boost the higher-end one that's even bigger

01:18:41   Because people originally already think they're gonna pay more for bigger anyway, and it has 5g on it

01:18:47   I think that's how they'll they'll balance out the pricing this year

01:18:50   Can 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

01:18:57   I don't want to be quoted like Bill Gates 640 kilobytes of memory ought to be enough for anyone

01:19:02   which quote I believe if you actually look at the further context of

01:19:06   Isn't nearly as foolish as the soundbite version makes Bill Gates seem I don't want to say that 5g

01:19:13   Is never going to be an important thing and I don't want to say that we're never gonna in a handful of years

01:19:21   You know somewhere between now and 2024. Let's say

01:19:26   That we won't be looking back at the pre 5g

01:19:31   Network performance and thinking yeah, that was that was kind of crappy maybe but I have to say

01:19:38   There's a point of diminishing returns and I don't I don't I refuse to believe

01:19:45   That any 5g could be that much better than the LTE

01:19:50   Performance I'm getting all the time nowadays

01:19:54   So that's totally true and my colleague Daniel my former colleague Daniel Bader my friend Daniel Bader

01:20:00   Opened my eyes to this when he explained that for people like us there won't be much difference

01:20:04   They 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

01:20:11   It's never been delivered and the increase in bandwidth because they're freeing up so much capacity for it that the the what?

01:20:18   5g will really do is deliver on the promise of LTE for far more people

01:20:22   I think like the mm millimeter wave stuff. You're exactly right. It's a fantasy

01:20:27   It's just not like if you have to turn or if you turn around or it rains and you lose your signal

01:20:31   That's not a consumer technology, but the sub six version which is the cheaper and more ubiquitous version

01:20:36   That's just gonna make LTE real for everybody and I think that that part of it's a win

01:20:40   Yeah

01:20:41   So that's and that's you know

01:20:42   It's I live in a big city with good LTE coverage and I don't want to be dismissive of

01:20:48   people who live elsewhere.

01:20:49   I have family who lives places where,

01:20:52   I can't wait to go visit.

01:20:53   Well, remember when you could visit your family, but.

01:20:55   - Yes. (laughing)

01:20:58   God, it feels like so long ago.

01:20:59   - I look forward to visiting them

01:21:01   and having a strong signal.

01:21:02   That would be tremendous.

01:21:05   So I'm not putting it down, but I do think

01:21:07   that that is a much, that's compelling,

01:21:10   that there are swaths, big swaths of area

01:21:14   that don't get an LTE signal at all

01:21:17   and could get 5G because of whatever reasons,

01:21:20   you know, the bandwidth, the what, the...

01:21:24   - Yeah, just all the bands that they're opening up for 5G

01:21:28   and also the reliability of it,

01:21:30   it looks like it's gonna be better than,

01:21:32   it's more robust than LTE at least.

01:21:33   - Right, so that is a huge win.

01:21:35   In terms of like day-to-day for me

01:21:37   and probably most people who actually do get

01:21:39   a good LTE signal, I just don't see it.

01:21:42   Like what, if I can already stream 4K video,

01:21:46   what the hell else am I, what am I doing?

01:21:49   What am I gonna be doing that needs this?

01:21:52   - Even the carriers don't know.

01:21:53   Their advertising is such garbage.

01:21:54   It's like, oh, I forget the joke.

01:21:56   It's like 8K, you'll be able to beam 8K over 5G

01:22:00   to your television and none of those things are real.

01:22:02   - Right, and the other thing that I would like them,

01:22:06   and it has to be on their radar,

01:22:08   they have to be thinking about it,

01:22:10   but it's like what I would like them to be thinking about

01:22:13   It's not just going from LTE to 5G

01:22:17   and selling people new handsets

01:22:18   and presumably somehow tacking on a 5G service feed

01:22:23   to my monthly bill so they can charge me more.

01:22:26   I would like to see them start looking

01:22:30   at building out a capacity that would allow them

01:22:34   to take on the landline-based broadband providers, right?

01:22:39   - Yeah.

01:22:40   That's the only chance I'm ever gonna have of getting a serious option

01:22:45   Competitor to Comcast I think is going to be over-the-air

01:22:49   wireless and

01:22:52   Performance wise and I have a pretty good Comcast. I mean up is no good

01:22:57   You know, it's the nature and maybe I can just some maybe there's somebody I can call it Comcast and get that

01:23:03   change but

01:23:05   You know I get about 200 megabits per second down my ero not a sponsor this week

01:23:11   But my ero system that I have in the house

01:23:14   Gives us you know

01:23:16   Somewhere close to that theoretical maximum of 200 plus and at times you I get close to 300 down from

01:23:25   The wall right over the wire

01:23:27   Yeah, ero gives us Wi-Fi throughout the house that is pretty close

01:23:32   You know in practical terms to what you could expect if that's what you're getting from the wire

01:23:37   What could you possibly expect by Wi-Fi up isn't you know at best?

01:23:42   20 but usually closer to 10 and so yes when I upload a new version of the podcast and I have to wait a while

01:23:50   I

01:23:53   am annoyed

01:23:54   But you know for the most part I would just like a lower bill

01:23:58   Yeah, 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

01:24:06   Than my modem right my cable

01:24:08   that the reason I can't just

01:24:11   Cancel Comcast is the bandwidth the you know the limits, you know that we would shoot over it in a you know

01:24:17   Probably a day with the way my son watches YouTube

01:24:20   Yeah, absolutely

01:24:22   I 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

01:24:28   and I'm trying to upload, and then I figure it'd be great

01:24:30   if I could do it, but then how expensive would that be?

01:24:32   And if I'm the 18th YouTuber trying to do it,

01:24:34   how much bandwidth would actually be left on that signal?

01:24:36   - Well, we were talking about this,

01:24:37   I think we were repeating ourselves,

01:24:39   but I know that it was one of those times

01:24:41   where it was like last WWDC, me not being a YouTuber,

01:24:45   even though I guess I sort of am at WWDC,

01:24:49   normal WWDCs, because my live show does get put on YouTube,

01:24:53   but I don't do it, I'm not the one uploading it.

01:24:57   But like, you and Marquez, Marquez moved to a new hotel.

01:25:02   - Yes, and I tried to follow him,

01:25:05   but then he took the last room.

01:25:06   (laughing)

01:25:08   - He abandoned his hotel room.

01:25:10   And again, it sounds ridiculous, but if you think,

01:25:12   well, you know, for a couple hundred bucks on a,

01:25:15   you know, will you pay a couple hundred bucks

01:25:18   for what is your profession, yeah, it's worth it.

01:25:22   But anyway, that's my thing.

01:25:24   The other thing I noticed is amidst all this,

01:25:28   I don't know if other carriers are doing the same.

01:25:30   I don't know what the story is up your way in Canada,

01:25:32   but here in the US, Verizon has given everybody

01:25:35   15 gigabytes of monthly tethering,

01:25:39   or what do they call it, hotspot support.

01:25:42   Just tacked onto your plan, no charge.

01:25:46   We know everybody's working at home in the midst of all this.

01:25:50   Here's 15 gigabytes of tethering.

01:25:53   Why 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?

01:26:05   Well, 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.

01:26:13   So 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.

01:26:20   It's almost like there's no cars on the road,

01:26:21   so they're trying to do this so that you think

01:26:23   they're a nice company, and when you go back,

01:26:25   you go back to what you used to use.

01:26:27   - Yeah, I've heard the same thing from a couple of friends

01:26:29   on Slack who were just like, yeah, I just actually

01:26:31   checked my usage, and it's like, yeah,

01:26:33   I haven't used anything.

01:26:34   And then they're like, ah, duh, I haven't left the house

01:26:36   in 72 hours. - Yeah, I have like 30 gigabytes

01:26:39   on my plan because I was traveling so much,

01:26:41   and I reduced it down to very little and no roaming anymore.

01:26:44   - Yeah.

01:26:45   All right, let's take a break here,

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01:30:40   All right, let's keep going.

01:30:42   Let's power through this list.

01:30:44   How is my series a question from Brian?

01:30:47   No last name.

01:30:48   How's your titanium series five watch holding up?

01:30:50   Initially there seemed to be some concern about how easily it might scratch.

01:30:53   Great question.

01:30:54   I haven't talked about this in a while.

01:30:55   I would say it is holding up terrifically.

01:30:57   I picked up a scratch early on on the side facing me,

01:31:02   like underneath, like I would say at about 33 minutes

01:31:08   past the hour on the titanium part, right?

01:31:11   So the 33 minute mark, not quite in the middle.

01:31:15   And it's not really a scratch, it's almost like,

01:31:17   it's like some kind of coating came off there.

01:31:22   I don't know what I did.

01:31:23   That's the only one that happened early on.

01:31:26   I haven't seen any other marks.

01:31:28   I love it overall.

01:31:29   I've been a space black Apple Watch wearer until now.

01:31:33   I couldn't be happier with my decision

01:31:36   to go titanium this time.

01:31:37   It really makes me happy as a watch nerd

01:31:39   that I have this watch.

01:31:40   I'm even wearing the, I didn't think about this,

01:31:43   but I'm wearing the, I don't know why,

01:31:46   but during this isolation thing,

01:31:48   I've been digging out old Apple Watch straps

01:31:51   and putting, I mean, anything to occupy my brain.

01:31:56   - Absolutely.

01:31:57   - I've worn Apple Watch straps.

01:31:59   I haven't worn ever or before.

01:32:01   I'm wearing the sport band that comes

01:32:04   with the titanium model.

01:32:06   It's a sort of a grayish thing.

01:32:08   It has a titanium, what do you call the plug

01:32:10   that pokes through the hole.

01:32:12   - Yes.

01:32:13   - I never really wore it.

01:32:15   I'm usually a black, dark strap person,

01:32:18   and this is sort of a medium one,

01:32:20   but I've been wearing it the last couple of days.

01:32:22   I really like it.

01:32:23   - I've been wearing the gray bands.

01:32:25   I was wearing one of the new ones.

01:32:26   I forget what the color is called,

01:32:28   but it's the gray sport loop with the orange trim on it.

01:32:31   And I liked the gray ones just because if I forget

01:32:34   the color chart in my videos and I hold up my hand,

01:32:37   I can freeze it for one second

01:32:39   and white balance off the watch band,

01:32:41   which is such a nerdy thing to do.

01:32:42   But it's, I've been wearing my titanium too.

01:32:45   It's the brush titanium.

01:32:46   I imagine the DLC is like the DLC stainless steel,

01:32:49   which means it's like Batman's watch or something.

01:32:52   It breaks things, not, it'll be around.

01:32:54   But I have two tiny little,

01:32:55   And they aren't scratches, they just look like

01:32:57   the polished coating they put on top of the brushed metal

01:32:59   has been dented a little bit.

01:33:01   - Yeah, that's right. - So titanium looks fine.

01:33:03   - Yeah, and I have the same one too,

01:33:04   the regular titanium, not the DLC one.

01:33:07   'Cause my thinking on the darker one

01:33:09   is if you're gonna go black, go all the way.

01:33:11   Go to space black stainless steel.

01:33:13   If you're gonna upgrade over the aluminum ones,

01:33:17   then you're gonna go black, go black, black.

01:33:19   Whereas I like this, and I still can't beat

01:33:24   - Panzarinos description from like the day of the event

01:33:28   where he described it as like a sort of DeLorean look.

01:33:33   - Yeah, it's like the old QuickTime window come to life.

01:33:37   - Yeah, and it does.

01:33:39   And the other strap I've been wearing

01:33:41   that I really like a lot is the,

01:33:44   and never wore before this Apple Watch,

01:33:47   is the leather magnetized one.

01:33:51   I don't know what Apple calls it.

01:33:52   - Yeah, the leather loop.

01:33:53   leather loop. And I like the leather loop. It's a different way of looping than the

01:34:00   sport band and the mesh metal one. The Milanese. The Milanese, which has like at one side,

01:34:11   you can choose top or bottom, but one side it has to double over. The leather one only loops

01:34:16   double over right at the bottom of your wrist, which I happen to like a lot. But that leather,

01:34:22   the black leather, I don't think they call it black, it's like super dark gray or something,

01:34:26   it's like near black, but the way that the leather is pebbled, I don't know that I like it in the

01:34:31   abstract, but combined with this sort of 80s DeLorean look, it just goes so well with this

01:34:40   watch and has sort of a DeLorean 80s Back to the Future vibe without looking kitschy at all. I like

01:34:50   it. And I said it before, like if the sports loops are like sweatpants for your wrist, the

01:34:55   leather loops are like yoga pants for your wrist. They're just so comfortable. They really are a

01:34:59   little bit classier. They really are. Let me just say this while we're on the subject of

01:35:04   Apple Watch straps. The sport bands, not the sport bands, I keep calling them sport bands.

01:35:11   Sport band is the polyurethane, I don't know what they call it, the rubbery ones, and the sport

01:35:17   loops are the velcro ones. The default Apple watch strap from day one clearly has been the

01:35:23   sport band. The rubber one that's based on the Mark Neusen design from his, what was his watch

01:35:30   called back in the day? Oh, I'm blanking on it. Yeah, whatever it was called. You know, and it's

01:35:37   not like they ripped them off. Johnny Ive is pals with them and they brought him in and they hired

01:35:41   them. They hired them and obviously paid them for the rights to this strap design. You see

01:35:47   it everywhere. It is clearly, you know, it comes as the default strap with a lot of watches.

01:35:53   Most Apple watches, you see lots of people who wear it every day. It's part of the iconic

01:35:59   nature of the Apple watch, right? I mean, this is a very, but it's also, as a watch

01:36:04   nerd, it is super clever. And one of the things with an awful lot of watch straps is what

01:36:10   do you do with the extra part, right?

01:36:13   >> IKOPOD? Sorry, I think it was IKOPOD?

01:36:14   >> Yeah, that's it. IKOPOD, right? What do you do with the extra part of a watch strap?

01:36:20   And there's always like a lot of watch straps have a little belt, you know, that you tuck

01:36:25   it under, but then you can kind of see it over the top of the wrist, especially—

01:36:28   >> And it peels back over time.

01:36:29   >> And it, you know, phrase—the design of this, where it just tucks under the other

01:36:35   side of the strap is so extraordinarily clever. And in the years since Apple Watch has come

01:36:42   out, it's been ripped off by a whole bunch of other people because anything popular gets

01:36:47   ripped off.

01:36:48   Yes.

01:36:49   But the other thing that I – so A, it's a very clever design and it deserves its iconic

01:36:54   nature. It really does – it's comfortable, it is convenient, it looks good, it is super

01:37:00   clever and has solved a problem that has plagued watches for decades as to what do you do with

01:37:05   the extra part. But the other thing that I think really deserves praise is that these bands last

01:37:11   forever. Like poking a hole, you know, where you poke the little knob through the hole to get it to

01:37:18   fit, you would think, and with most watch straps, whether they're, especially leather, leather

01:37:24   inevitably, you know, starts to get a, you know, a bigger hole over time if you're poking a thing

01:37:30   through the hole like a belt. These, it's like you can never tell, like I've been wearing, you know,

01:37:36   I have some of these that I've worn a lot. You take it off and kind of hold the lights up and

01:37:41   you can't tell which is the hole that you use every day. Like the durability of this material

01:37:47   is incredible. And if you just- The flouroelastomer, I think they called it.

01:37:51   Flouroelastomer, that is the term they use. It's incredibly durable. It's really amazing. And then

01:37:57   And then the other part, the top part of the strap that has the pin and has the slot that

01:38:06   the other side of the watch tucks under, it gets very thin at that point, right?

01:38:12   There's very little at that part where the little slot where you tuck it under, there's

01:38:18   not much floral elastomer there.

01:38:20   If you didn't know better, you would think, "Well, that's going to rip."

01:38:23   It looks like something that would rip after time.

01:38:26   It doesn't.

01:38:27   seen anybody have one that rips and you work out with it you sweat with that you

01:38:32   swim with it it really is a remarkable bass band for the whole system you you

01:38:36   you go you know all sorts of ways that you can knock your wrist against

01:38:39   something I mean watch straps you know aren't known for lasting forever or at

01:38:45   least the rubber type ones aren't really Apple deserves it's another one of the

01:38:49   ways that their materials engineering teams are just doing work that just

01:38:55   doesn't get commented upon enough.

01:38:57   Like their floral elastomer team has made these watch straps

01:39:01   that I've never seen one where there's all sorts of ways

01:39:04   that you can have like a belt-like watch strap with holes

01:39:07   and you poke a thing through the hole

01:39:09   for the size that you want.

01:39:10   Those holes inevitably get bigger and wear out.

01:39:14   I don't know what the hell that black magic they've done

01:39:16   that doesn't happen with these,

01:39:18   but it doesn't seem like they get kudos for that

01:39:21   and they should.

01:39:22   - It's one of those things where people,

01:39:23   especially tech people love to complain that Apple's not innovating and they point to what I would describe as gimmicks on a lot of

01:39:28   Other devices that don't last like a year later

01:39:31   You never see them again and Apple just does these things like makes

01:39:34   Interchangeable watch straps that are really durable or you see people with other phones say I try to take a picture

01:39:40   But it didn't the camera app didn't load or it lost frames or the video keeps stuttering

01:39:44   And Apple makes this whole performance controller just to make sure every frame gets saved to the storage and those kind of things

01:39:51   I think are less

01:39:52   They're less in your face, but I think a lot of it makes real difference as to how we use our products

01:39:56   Yeah, I totally agree

01:39:58   I also think you know that that as the years go on and more people have Apple watches and

01:40:03   People who have them have worn them more and more that the basic idea of well wait everybody sort of shows their individuality

01:40:10   Through what watch they pick isn't it a little weird that everybody is

01:40:16   Inevitably we're having the same watch and having all of the variety or almost all of it, right?

01:40:22   We were just talking about titanium versus aluminum, but for the most part

01:40:25   At a glance you can't tell if titanium ones titanium or if it's aluminum

01:40:30   It'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

01:40:39   Way of people still feeling individual they've individualized their Apple watch

01:40:46   even though at a basic level their watch is exactly the same as everybody else's.

01:40:52   Yeah, yeah, no, 100%.

01:40:55   Next question, Oliver Thomas asks, "Now that iCloud folder sharing has gone live with the release of iOS 13.4,

01:41:02   and whatever the new version of Catalina is, 15.4 or whatever, anyway, whatever new versions came out last week,

01:41:12   Have either of you switched away from Dropbox?

01:41:15   I'll answer first, no.

01:41:16   Although I do use iCloud a lot,

01:41:19   but I use it all for personal stuff

01:41:21   and none of my collaboration stuff yet.

01:41:23   - Yeah, I'm the same.

01:41:26   I use, I've been slowly, like it's a big ask.

01:41:29   And I think it's good because Dropbox has been doing things

01:41:32   over the last few years that I would rather they didn't do.

01:41:35   And there's been a bit of a movement

01:41:36   to move away from Dropbox, but it works for me.

01:41:39   I have almost my entire documents folder in there.

01:41:42   It means I can switch between computers very easily.

01:41:45   And it does things in a way that makes

01:41:48   that easier than some of the ways that iCloud documents work.

01:41:52   But I've been slowly using iCloud more and more.

01:41:54   And as it proves reliable and as I adapt my workflows to it,

01:41:57   I hope I can move more and more things over.

01:41:59   It's harder to collaborate with everybody on it,

01:42:02   because not everybody is using a system that has iCloud

01:42:04   available for things like shared folders.

01:42:06   but I would like to integrate more of it

01:42:10   because I prefer Apple's overall policies

01:42:13   on iCloud better.

01:42:14   - Yeah, so I would say not yet,

01:42:17   and it's not just because 13.4

01:42:20   and the new version of Catalina

01:42:23   just shipped in the last week.

01:42:24   I anticipated this even when it was announced

01:42:27   at WWDC last year, and even in the best case scenario

01:42:30   where both of them had shipped, let's say, back in September,

01:42:35   I didn't anticipate switching right away,

01:42:37   just because Dropbox,

01:42:39   that role in my life is so important

01:42:45   that it's not something you undertake lightly, right?

01:42:48   It's, so I do think maybe, I still hope eventually

01:42:52   that I will switch, 'cause it would be nice

01:42:54   to not rely on a third-party thing,

01:42:56   and no offense to the folks at Dropbox,

01:42:57   but yeah, I'm not really super happy

01:42:59   with a lot of their recent decisions.

01:43:02   So I still hope I will be able to switch,

01:43:05   And I'm lucky that everybody I collaborate uses Apple stuff.

01:43:09   I don't have a big--

01:43:10   going back to the beginning of the show,

01:43:12   it's not like there's a huge team here.

01:43:15   But like Caleb Sexton, who edits the show,

01:43:17   we bounce the files back and forth through Dropbox.

01:43:21   He's working on a Mac.

01:43:22   We could switch eventually.

01:43:23   But for now, no, we're still using Dropbox.

01:43:25   Just because it just works and when something just works,

01:43:29   I don't take it lightly to take it out.

01:43:31   And again, it also comes into play with stuff like, hey,

01:43:34   Does everybody who I'm collaborating with,

01:43:36   are they on Catalina?

01:43:37   You know? - Yeah, yeah.

01:43:40   What I noticed when I did the,

01:43:42   I did that thing from my YouTube trailer

01:43:43   where I had a bunch of people send me clips,

01:43:46   and these are really nerdy, techy people,

01:43:48   and there was a lot of Google Drive,

01:43:50   there was some Microsoft Drive,

01:43:53   probably more than I expected.

01:43:55   There was a bunch of iCloud Drive,

01:43:56   and that makes sense because a lot of people

01:43:58   are very Apple-centric, but I didn't see much Dropbox,

01:44:00   and I would have imagined the Dropbox

01:44:01   would have been a much higher percentage of the user base

01:44:06   for what I was asking.

01:44:08   - Yeah, and it does, you know, it's taken 10 years plus

01:44:13   for it to really come true, but it all,

01:44:15   it comes back to that supposed discussion

01:44:18   between Steve Jobs and one of the Dropbox founders

01:44:21   when they were, you know, somehow Steve Jobs

01:44:24   got in contact with them, I guess,

01:44:26   to put out feelers about maybe an acquisition,

01:44:28   and he said, "You don't have a product, you have a feature."

01:44:31   And, you know, that's jobs being jobs. Of course, you know, he's going to say something

01:44:36   pithy like that to put the person he's negotiating with on their heels, you know.

01:44:41   Yes.

01:44:42   It's classic jobs. But also classic jobs, there's obviously a huge, very large kernel

01:44:47   of truth in it where ultimately what do people want? They just want a folder that syncs,

01:44:52   right? And you want the reliability where you put it in and then you go to another device

01:44:59   and it's there because it's synced and the sync always works and it's never it doesn't corrupt

01:45:04   things and you don't wind up with seven copies of the same thing named conflict copy one conflict

01:45:10   copy you just want it to work and the other thing is and it's so nice about the dropbox concept of a

01:45:17   folder that syncs is you want this clarity of knowing what stuff is syncing and what stuff

01:45:23   isn't right and so if you have this thing that you know you don't want to sync if it's not in your

01:45:28   your Dropbox folder, then it isn't syncing, right?

01:45:31   And, you know, iCloud folder, iCloud Drive sort of has,

01:45:36   you know, a lot of that, right?

01:45:38   Like you know when something, when you're in the Finder,

01:45:40   you know if it's in iCloud or not, right?

01:45:42   - And one of the things I did with Dropbox

01:45:44   is for all the, my old vector videos,

01:45:46   that was gigabytes and gigabytes of data,

01:45:49   and I just checked the box that said,

01:45:51   don't keep this folder locally.

01:45:53   And then it would stay all on Dropbox

01:45:55   and it wouldn't clog up my Mac.

01:45:56   And there's just a lot of features

01:45:57   built up over time that I think it'll take a while for iCloud to catch up on.

01:46:01   Yeah. Here's a new question. Mark Plus asks another good question. We're never

01:46:05   going to get through all the good questions. These are... this is great, but we

01:46:08   can try. Are you worried that more and more stuff on the iPad will require an

01:46:12   external keyboard and/or tracking device? I already have two things on my list.

01:46:16   Using Spotlight while in an app requires an external keyboard. Two, some websites

01:46:22   using drag and drop require a mouse/trackpad? I'll let you go first.

01:46:28   Yeah, so this is to me the big balancing act, and I think it was a huge contention issue within

01:46:34   Apple as well for a long time, and that probably explains the whole evolution of iPad to some

01:46:39   degree is that a lot of people believe that Steve Jobs' vision, that it was the most important

01:46:44   product Apple ever made, it was a computer for everyone else. You had your Macs, but they were

01:46:48   were a bunch of people for whom the Mac was still inaccessible and

01:46:51   unapproachable and off-putting and scary and this was a computer that anybody

01:46:55   from you know a two years old to a hundred years old could pick up

01:46:58   immediately used for the first time and they didn't want to lose that but at the

01:47:03   same time you had a bunch of really vocal nerds who love Apple products and

01:47:07   were used to having every Apple product made for them who just felt like it was

01:47:11   limiting that it didn't do what they want they wanted to switch to it but it

01:47:14   didn't do every single traditional computing thing that they did and it

01:47:17   reminded me of the early Macs where like Jobs very deliberately didn't put, or at least

01:47:21   anecdotally didn't put arrow keys or a terminal because he wanted people to acclimatize themselves

01:47:27   to the mouse. But over time, you look down now, every Mac has terminal and arrow keys.

01:47:31   And I feel that very similarly with the iPad that it should never lose what makes it the

01:47:36   most accessible computing platform that we've seen yet. And I think the 10.2 inch iPad is

01:47:42   a great symbol of that. If you want it, you can just get it for $329 and touch it and

01:47:50   use it and it's great for a computer for everybody. But I think if they want it to progress and

01:47:57   they do want to have it docked, and even if it's a small percentage, it's a very passionate,

01:48:01   very vocal percentage, if you allow it to be docked, you then have to make it a first-class

01:48:05   citizen and it's got to have keyboard and mouse support, the equal of any traditional

01:48:10   It'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

01:48:16   yeah, and Apple has emphasized both not so much in the product marketing but in the

01:48:22   Discussions I've had with them, you know after the iPad Pro announcement and the announcement at least of the magic

01:48:29   keyboard for iPad Pro

01:48:33   They emphasize over and over and over again that iPad remains a touched first touch first platform

01:48:39   And I don't think that's BS.

01:48:41   I think it's true.

01:48:42   Spotlight not being accessible while you're in an app,

01:48:45   that is true, but I don't know how you would do it, right?

01:48:48   They've already overloaded all the edges of the screen,

01:48:51   right? - Yes.

01:48:52   - You pull down from the top and you get notification center.

01:48:54   Top corner is, I mean, they've already overloaded the top

01:48:58   with control center and notification center.

01:49:02   So I can't see adding a third one for the other corner.

01:49:05   You know, I don't know what the, you know,

01:49:08   I don't it's a good example of something that's better with a keyboard than without on an iPad

01:49:13   But I don't think it's any in any way spiteful towards the it's like a right mouse click, you know

01:49:18   Like 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

01:49:24   Then they have like two buttons and now they have a limitation

01:49:26   They had a limitation of a directly manipulable gross gesture interface and the keyboard allows them to shortcut it or like warp

01:49:33   Tunnel through it on occasion

01:49:36   Yeah, and I think your comparison to the original Macintosh not having arrow keys and not having a text mode

01:49:41   Was good and it was sort of like they were half right half wrong

01:49:45   I think the arrow keys thing they were definitely wrong about that also feels like it might have been more personally Steve Jobs

01:49:51   You know and they obviously relented on that and very few people even remember having seeing a Macintosh keyboard that didn't have arrow keys

01:49:59   I mean and again

01:50:01   thinking about how much time I personally complained about the

01:50:05   the full height left and right arrow keys on like three years worth of MacBook keyboards and

01:50:10   the amount of time I've congratulated Apple on going back to the upside down "T"

01:50:17   of arrow key arrangement. It is an interesting thought to think, well, what if they went back

01:50:23   to the 1984 layout where there are no arrow keys? How do you like that? I do like that, yeah, exactly.

01:50:30   So I do think, though, that the no text mode on the original Macintosh was absolutely key.

01:50:37   And if they had added it, I think it would have been devastating to the taking root of an actual

01:50:46   third-party ecosystem of, you know, okay, you want to write, you want to port your spreadsheet to the

01:50:53   Mac, you've got to do a Mac version. You cannot just take the text version that you're running

01:50:58   on the Apple II or on IBM PCs and just have it run in text mode on the Mac. You've got to,

01:51:05   to some degree, and you know, in 1984, '85, '86, some developers were better than others at getting

01:51:12   what a real Mac app was. And again, compared to what we complain about today, you know,

01:51:18   with Electron apps and stuff, some of the apps from like 1985, you know, their idea of a Mac

01:51:24   version was a real stretch. But for the most part, people got it. And the fact that it wasn't even

01:51:31   there as an option to like, oh, just reboot your Mac and hold down the option key and it opens in

01:51:36   text mode like an Apple II really, really might have, I think, made the GUI era be stillborn.

01:51:44   You know, that Apple would have had their apps, but everybody else just ported their

01:51:47   Apple II versions and told you to reboot with the option key down or something.

01:51:50   - Yeah, absolutely.

01:51:52   Well, we saw that with Windows.

01:51:53   Microsoft took-- - Yeah.

01:51:54   - There were those facetious articles

01:51:56   where like, I don't know what,

01:51:57   but they said like, you know,

01:51:58   this proves that Microsoft was right.

01:51:59   And I think, you know, in large part, no,

01:52:01   the dominance of the iPad in the market shows

01:52:03   that it was like Steve Jobs and Apple were exactly right

01:52:06   about what the large market wanted,

01:52:08   but Microsoft understood what the,

01:52:09   like the tech nerd market wanted,

01:52:12   but the way they implemented it,

01:52:13   starting it with Windows and bringing it down

01:52:15   and having the keyboard and mouse there immediately,

01:52:17   they're still struggling to be fully touched base.

01:52:20   they're still working on getting there,

01:52:22   where Apple is now just working on adding functionality.

01:52:24   And I think that's a better position for Apple to be in.

01:52:27   - Yeah, and it's very Microsofty, and it's in their DNA.

01:52:30   I mean, I was doing nerdy college student internships

01:52:35   in the early '90s, working in the IT department

01:52:40   over the summer servicing PCs.

01:52:43   And an awful lot of the software,

01:52:45   even if they were booting into Windows,

01:52:47   an awful lot of the software back then

01:52:48   was still DOS software that just ran in a window.

01:52:51   - Yeah, for a long, long time.

01:52:53   - Yeah, a long, long time.

01:52:54   Let's see, next question.

01:52:58   New, oh, it's a good question.

01:53:01   Tom Woodsworth asks, "New MacBook Air versus Mac Mini

01:53:04   "for novice audio podcast work.

01:53:07   "Any Mac buying advice really?"

01:53:09   On the surface, I wanna say

01:53:12   that's almost like a silly question,

01:53:14   like do you need a portable or not?

01:53:17   But maybe going deeper, I feel that there is something,

01:53:22   there is something good about a desktop that's a desktop.

01:53:28   I have a friend who just bought a MacBook, Mac Mini.

01:53:31   Hadn't had a desktop in a while, and he's setting up,

01:53:34   you know, reinvesting in his home office

01:53:38   for obvious reasons, and he's like,

01:53:39   "You know what, I forgot how nice it is to have a desktop."

01:53:42   - Yeah.

01:53:44   - So it depends what you wanna do.

01:53:46   How much do you really need to move your computer?

01:53:49   I know that sounds stupid. - I'd also argue

01:53:50   that it's like, if you're more technical,

01:53:52   the Mac Mini, it has a lot of benefits.

01:53:54   You do have to add a mouse and a keyboard and a display,

01:53:57   which adds to the price of the Mac Mini,

01:53:59   and it all comes included in the MacBook Air,

01:54:01   but you don't have Y-class processors.

01:54:04   You have the full U-class processors.

01:54:06   They're older, they're eighth generation,

01:54:07   not 10th generation, but you have a ton of ports.

01:54:10   You have a ton of capability, a ton of storage.

01:54:13   It just has, if you intend to grow, it has a lot of,

01:54:15   and you're technically minded,

01:54:17   it has a lot more opportunity for you to grow than an air,

01:54:19   and air is almost like an all-in-one solution.

01:54:21   Like would you get a Keurig or an espresso machine?

01:54:24   Sort of work on it that way.

01:54:25   - Here's a question I have,

01:54:30   and this is not from anybody who's submitted it,

01:54:34   but maybe somebody did, but I didn't get to it yet.

01:54:37   I'm looking at the list here.

01:54:38   But I have a question for you.

01:54:40   What do you think of the theory

01:54:42   that multiple people have espoused?

01:54:44   but I'll mention that the first person I heard espouse,

01:54:46   it was our mutual friend Dave Whiskus,

01:54:48   who I'll stop pretending, I don't know,

01:54:50   that if and when Apple announces

01:54:56   that the Mac is transitioning to ARM,

01:54:59   that the iPad Pro might be the developer machine,

01:55:03   and that perhaps this June, Apple might say,

01:55:08   okay, we're moving the Mac to ARM starting next year,

01:55:12   announcing it now so developers can, Mac developers can build all their software to be fat binaries

01:55:19   for Intel and ARM. And to test them, you can now boot, you know, you can download a developer

01:55:25   thing and if you're in the developer program and boot your iPad Pro into Mac OS X for ARM.

01:55:32   Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. I think, especially if we see a new Apple TV

01:55:37   that has the USB-C port unhidden,

01:55:40   like it was the previous generation.

01:55:42   Then you have the sort of MacBook equivalent

01:55:45   and the sort of Mac Mini equivalent,

01:55:47   and you just download a developer-specific OS,

01:55:51   flash it onto the machine,

01:55:52   and it seems far more elegant

01:55:54   than making a developer-only machine

01:55:55   like they did with the Marclar, the Intel Mac transition.

01:55:58   - Yeah, I don't wanna rule it out.

01:56:01   It's an intriguing idea,

01:56:03   and I feel like it's good food for thought

01:56:06   because I can't rule it out.

01:56:08   It seems like it is possible,

01:56:11   but then there's a bunch of reasons where I think,

01:56:13   eh, no, I don't know.

01:56:15   I kind of feel like it's less technical.

01:56:19   Like technically I don't know that there's anything

01:56:21   that would prevent them from doing it,

01:56:22   and more philosophical where that in Apple's mind,

01:56:27   collective corporate mind, iPads and Macs

01:56:34   are not anywhere near, they're different beasts.

01:56:39   And never the twain shall meet, you know?

01:56:42   So I don't know.

01:56:43   And again, and then there's little things.

01:56:45   Like even if it's just a developer thing.

01:56:48   And for those who don't remember,

01:56:50   when Apple announced the switch from PowerPC to Intel

01:56:53   in I believe 2005, the first machines came out in early 2006

01:56:58   ahead of schedule, it was a bunch of what were then

01:57:03   renamed from the PowerBook to MacBooks.

01:57:06   A, I think they just wanted to change the name.

01:57:09   B, the power in PowerBooks, ostensibly, was for PowerPC.

01:57:13   And right after WWDC 2005,

01:57:18   they announced these developer dev kits,

01:57:21   and from the outside, they looked like PowerMacs,

01:57:26   the aluminum PowerMac towers.

01:57:28   And then inside, it was just like a bog standard PC

01:57:31   in a setup that Apple had vetted as,

01:57:35   sort of like the first Hackintosh, really.

01:57:37   I mean, it was like an officially sanctioned Hackintosh.

01:57:40   They didn't sell them at all,

01:57:42   they only leased them or something to developers,

01:57:46   and then as soon as the developer transition was over,

01:57:48   I wanted them back.

01:57:50   And so instead of doing that,

01:57:51   and the scale was different, right?

01:57:53   The number of Mac developers who needed dev kits in 2005

01:57:59   in comparison to the amount of developers

01:58:02   who might need it now.

01:58:03   Even though it's a Mac thing only,

01:58:05   it's with catalysts raising the interest

01:58:08   in previously not Mac developers

01:58:12   who are only writing for iOS, writing stuff for the Mac,

01:58:15   it's just, there's just a bigger number of them.

01:58:17   If you could just say, just buy an iPad Pro

01:58:19   and download this developer profile from our website

01:58:24   and you can reboot in a special version of Catalina

01:58:29   or I guess whatever 10.16 is or something like that.

01:58:32   I get it, but then on the other hand,

01:58:34   it just would be weird that you have this screen

01:58:36   that you know is a touchscreen,

01:58:38   but it doesn't work as a touchscreen

01:58:39   when you're booted into the Mac.

01:58:41   And then of course it's gonna make people out there,

01:58:43   you know, if somebody wants to jump into the podcast

01:58:45   and say, "Ah, but doesn't that mean maybe 10.16

01:58:47   "will add touchscreen support to macOS?"

01:58:49   Well, they're not gonna introduce that at WWDC

01:58:54   a year ahead of the actual machines that would support it.

01:58:56   And would there be a long-term expectation

01:59:01   that even after the developer transition is over

01:59:04   that iPad Pros are dual-boot machines

01:59:07   that you can choose to boot into macOS 10?

01:59:10   Or would it go back to iPad only,

01:59:12   but then everybody would think, well, wait, I want,

01:59:14   I know it can, 'cause you let me do it over the summer

01:59:17   and the developer transition,

01:59:18   let me reboot this thing into macOS now.

01:59:21   - Yeah, no, very fair.

01:59:22   - So, you know, I have mixed feelings about it.

01:59:25   I don't know.

01:59:26   I could see it, but I could not see it, I don't know.

01:59:29   - Yeah, the question is if they don't go that route,

01:59:31   what do they do?

01:59:32   Do they make a sort of a simple clamshell

01:59:34   that developers can pick up and return later at some point?

01:59:37   But the quantity that they would probably want

01:59:39   for the developer community now,

01:59:41   they used to have to call people

01:59:42   and ask them to come to WWDC,

01:59:44   and now they have to have a lottery

01:59:46   to try to pick the few that can go.

01:59:48   - Yeah, the other technical thing is RAM,

01:59:50   where the new 2018, or not 2018, 2020 iPad Pros

01:59:55   6 gigabytes of RAM. The 2018 iPad Pros only had 4 gigabytes, except, oddly, the asterisk

02:00:01   that goes next to the 1 terabyte storage module, which also had 6 gigabytes.

02:00:05   Yeah, they needed it to access the greater storage.

02:00:08   Right, they needed more RAM to access the higher amount of storage. The lowest amount

02:00:17   of RAM you can buy on any Mac today is 8 gigabytes. And is 6 gigabytes, is it prohibitive from

02:00:24   you know, are the, no, it wouldn't prohibit it from booting,

02:00:28   but if you're actually doing the development

02:00:31   on the machine running Xcode,

02:00:33   which isn't really known for, you know,

02:00:35   being resource light, I don't know, you know.

02:00:40   - That's also a greater question for iPad Pro in general,

02:00:42   because, you know, people are trying to bring Photoshop

02:00:44   to it, and the RAM is a limitation,

02:00:47   the way it was in ancient computing times,

02:00:49   and I think as we get more sophisticated software,

02:00:52   - More sophisticated iPads are gonna have to look

02:00:54   at the difference, the disparity in RAM levels

02:00:57   between the Mac and the iPad.

02:00:58   - Yeah, so I don't know.

02:01:01   So my interceding question, ultimately,

02:01:04   my answer is I don't know.

02:01:05   Maybe, I could see it, but let's see.

02:01:08   Dave asks, this is a good question,

02:01:13   the new Magic Keyboard doesn't appear to fold back

02:01:16   on itself like the Magic Keyboard Folio does.

02:01:19   In other words, the way you can,

02:01:20   It's like a book that you can open all the way around

02:01:22   to hold single panel.

02:01:24   This could have significant usage implications

02:01:27   because it means you have to remove the iPad

02:01:28   each time you use it in tablet mode.

02:01:31   It will be two pieces rather than one.

02:01:34   Do you have any thoughts on that?

02:01:35   Yeah, I think it's pretty clear

02:01:38   that a significant difference between,

02:01:41   again, not having touched the Magic Keyboard in person,

02:01:45   it's clearly more than just a better smart keyboard cover.

02:01:50   The smart keyboard cover is sort of like

02:01:53   a little middle ground between a regular iPad cover

02:01:57   and well, why not put a keyboard on the cover

02:02:01   while we're at it, right?

02:02:02   And the Magic Keyboard is way more of a,

02:02:07   hey, we're turning your iPad Pro into a laptop

02:02:10   when it's in this thing.

02:02:12   - It's more like a dock.

02:02:13   - Yeah, it really is more like a dock.

02:02:16   And again, can't judge it personally

02:02:18   because we haven't touched it,

02:02:20   but at least in many of the Apple shots of the thing,

02:02:23   their minute-long commercial showing people using it

02:02:26   and their introduction,

02:02:28   they show people removing it with one hand

02:02:31   and that the cantilevered back stays more or less

02:02:35   where it was when you take it off.

02:02:37   And so that the magnets that hold it in place

02:02:40   are somehow strong enough to keep it suspended

02:02:42   and keep it sturdy enough to actually use it on your lap,

02:02:45   literally as a laptop,

02:02:47   and yet are convenient enough

02:02:50   that you can take it off with one hand.

02:02:52   But I think that the basic idea is that

02:02:55   for however many people use the smart keyboard cover

02:02:58   folded over and just leave the iPad in it

02:03:01   when they're using it as a handheld tablet

02:03:04   without using the keyboard,

02:03:05   you're not supposed to, you're not,

02:03:07   may not even be able to do that with the Magic Keyboard.

02:03:09   There's no way, there's no way that,

02:03:11   in fact, I know, they even tell you

02:03:13   that the thing doesn't fold back that far.

02:03:16   - And it kind of bugs me the way the current one does.

02:03:18   Like it is convenient, but it covers the camera.

02:03:20   So if you're just folding it back

02:03:21   and they want to take a photo, you can't.

02:03:23   And also now they have the keys on the outside

02:03:25   instead of the inside.

02:03:26   It feels like I'm touching bubble wrap

02:03:27   and I just want to keep, like it's distracting almost

02:03:29   when I have my hands on it.

02:03:31   So I mostly take it off now

02:03:32   when I want to use it like a tablet.

02:03:33   And then I remark about how light it is each time.

02:03:36   And it does sort of take a little bit of the vibe

02:03:37   off the convertible nature of it.

02:03:40   But like you, I'm waiting to see it.

02:03:42   All the videos, especially that video of Craig,

02:03:44   He comes up and slaps it down like a dock and then pulls it off like a dock. Yeah. He's not

02:03:48   Yeah, around at all. Yes. Yeah, I should say that that among the videos was was craig federighi using it

02:03:54   so i'm optimistic that they've designed it and that that

02:03:57   You 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

02:04:03   Right, like I don't know what that scenario would be, but you're not going to be sitting

02:04:08   You're not going to be sitting in the library

02:04:10   take it off and walk around to another section

02:04:13   of the library and leave the keyboard behind

02:04:14   unless you trust that your keyboard's

02:04:16   going to stay there, right?

02:04:18   - Yeah, yeah, or you can just float it flat

02:04:20   and take the whole thing like a book,

02:04:22   the dust fold closed.

02:04:23   - Yeah, Daryl Baxter asks, now that Trackpad support

02:04:26   is on iPad, do you see a scenario where there could be

02:04:30   an Xcode for iPad, especially to simulate tests

02:04:33   and compile apps natively?

02:04:35   - I think their question with Xcode for iPad

02:04:40   is the same as Adobe's with Photoshop for iPad,

02:04:43   and that is, what is the important set of features

02:04:46   that we can deliver to the iPad,

02:04:47   given its interactive model and its constraints,

02:04:50   like things like RAM, and once they determine that,

02:04:54   then I think that we'll see it.

02:04:56   It's just a question of that,

02:04:58   Apple's like one of those companies

02:04:59   that they don't show their work.

02:05:00   They measure 99 times and then cut once,

02:05:03   and I think they're still in that measurement phase.

02:05:05   - Yeah, I almost feel that Trekpad support,

02:05:07   even though it's welcome and I feel like

02:05:09   I'm so addicted to it already,

02:05:10   and it's great for text editing and various other things.

02:05:14   It certainly helps and what doesn't hurt,

02:05:16   but I don't think that that's what's kept it

02:05:18   from being there until now.

02:05:20   I'm a little surprised that we're 10 years into iPad

02:05:23   and we still don't have something,

02:05:26   whether they call it Xcode or not.

02:05:28   You know, like they call iMovie iMovie,

02:05:30   whether it's on the Mac or the iPad,

02:05:31   even though it's clearly not the same app

02:05:34   and it's more meant for touch,

02:05:35   and I'm with you that I don't think we ever would,

02:05:38   In fact, you couldn't.

02:05:39   It's just Xcode does so many low-level developer

02:05:43   file system type things that,

02:05:46   with build scripts and stuff,

02:05:48   it just doesn't even make any technical sense

02:05:49   to have the whole of Xcode on iPad.

02:05:52   It would be some native to iPad version of it,

02:05:55   whether they call it Xcode or not.

02:05:56   But something, as Daryl asks here,

02:05:59   something that you can simulate, test, and compile--

02:06:01   - More than Playgrounds.

02:06:02   - Yeah, more than Playgrounds.

02:06:04   I feel like it has to happen eventually,

02:06:07   but then on the other hand, if it has to happen eventually,

02:06:09   why hasn't it happened in 10 years?

02:06:10   It's a very long time for a very capable computing platform

02:06:15   to not be able to create software for itself.

02:06:17   - But everything takes so long on the iPad,

02:06:19   and I think that's mainly because there was

02:06:21   that disagreement about its nature,

02:06:22   but also because the iPhone is still at most,

02:06:25   it has to be just based on earnings.

02:06:27   It gets the majority of resources,

02:06:29   and when you think about how long it took,

02:06:31   just for trackpad support, it was 10 years.

02:06:33   So I can understand, I don't understand it,

02:06:35   but I can see how Xcode can take that long.

02:06:37   - General question, discussion about,

02:06:41   this is from David Eli about, quote unquote,

02:06:43   serious iPad software, what's the landscape looks like?

02:06:47   Examples of good Pro apps.

02:06:49   He's been using Ferrite exclusively

02:06:51   to record and edit spoken audio.

02:06:53   I know, I've heard a lot of things about Ferrite.

02:06:55   I know Jason Snell uses it.

02:06:57   That seems like a shining example of terrific Pro software.

02:07:03   I certainly know some of the pencil-oriented drawing software

02:07:07   is tremendous on iPad.

02:07:09   - Yeah.

02:07:10   I mean, Star Trek is, famously,

02:07:11   Rob McCollum does Star Trek Discovery on an iPad.

02:07:15   - Hmm, well, there you go.

02:07:17   - Jonathan Morrison has done,

02:07:19   he's edited on iPod Touch,

02:07:20   so I mean, he's an extreme example, but he's edited.

02:07:22   Serenity Caldwell used to be a better editor on the iPad

02:07:24   than I ever was in Final Cut Pro,

02:07:26   just because she's a classically film-trained editor.

02:07:29   - Yeah, yeah.

02:07:30   It's a mixed bag, you know,

02:07:33   And I know that I raised some attention

02:07:36   at the 10th anniversary of the iPad

02:07:38   for complaining about the state of iPad software

02:07:41   and the state of the iPad multitasking interface.

02:07:44   It's a mixed bag to me.

02:07:46   I mean, there's shining examples.

02:07:48   It's probably too long for this Q&A format.

02:07:52   I probably need a whole show about it.

02:07:53   But there's certainly some great examples.

02:07:56   I think it's interesting.

02:07:57   I still can't find a great text editing app.

02:08:00   I use IA Writer when I do write on my iPad,

02:08:03   which I like, but I don't love.

02:08:05   And just some of the things that just irk me is I still,

02:08:09   I just find it so strange that there's no consistent way

02:08:12   to close a document when you are.

02:08:14   And I get it that like Apple Notes is a great example.

02:08:17   And that's the type of app that is great on iPhone and iPad

02:08:20   where they don't, they're not files.

02:08:22   There's no correlation to the file system.

02:08:24   The notes are these abstract things that live in a library.

02:08:27   And so you don't have to close them.

02:08:28   But when you know you are working with files,

02:08:31   and it's in Dropbox or iCloud Drive or something,

02:08:34   and you have a file and you're editing a file,

02:08:37   there's no way to close it, no consistent way to close it.

02:08:41   And I don't, it leaves me,

02:08:44   and I don't even think I'm being superstitious.

02:08:47   If I'm going, I wrote it on my iPad,

02:08:48   but I wanna finish it on my Mac and BB Edit,

02:08:52   I don't wanna leave it open on my iPad,

02:08:55   'cause I'm afraid that the iPad's going to wake up

02:08:57   and then say, here, let me just save it again.

02:09:00   - Yeah. (laughs)

02:09:01   Well, it's that thing that Marco mentioned a long time ago

02:09:03   when his desire to not have settings

02:09:05   led him to do so many backflips

02:09:07   that was worse than having settings.

02:09:08   And I think Apple's desire to,

02:09:10   I think they looked at a lot of the computer science things

02:09:13   and saw them as artifacts

02:09:14   that were too complicated for humans,

02:09:15   but in their desire to avoid them,

02:09:17   they ended up creating more complexity than less.

02:09:20   - Yeah.

02:09:20   So I don't know, I feel like it ties into the Xcode question

02:09:25   of professional software on the iPad period

02:09:27   where even though it's 10 years old

02:09:29   and it's phenomenally popular and phenomenally successful,

02:09:33   it's still somehow a toddler, you know?

02:09:35   Like it is-- - It's ridiculously powerful,

02:09:37   too, it's like a Kryptonian baby.

02:09:39   - Yes, I was just gonna say that.

02:09:41   It's baby Superman.

02:09:44   - Yes. (laughing)

02:09:46   - It's like, oh, it's faster than the MacBook Pro, yeah.

02:09:50   It doesn't have a consistent way to close text files, yes.

02:09:55   Doesn't know how to talk yet.

02:09:57   So I don't know, but I certainly think,

02:09:59   I certainly think that in addition to the fact

02:10:02   that I absolutely love the trackpad mouse support

02:10:05   that they just added in 13.4,

02:10:07   love it just in and of itself,

02:10:09   and the delightful feel and everything about it.

02:10:12   - And they didn't just port it,

02:10:13   they didn't just take the Mac model

02:10:14   and throw it on, slap it on the iPad,

02:10:16   they really thought about it.

02:10:17   - It's also a tremendous sign from the outside

02:10:22   that inside Apple they're taking this stuff seriously

02:10:24   and they're really thinking about it.

02:10:25   So I'm optimistic, however pessimistic I am

02:10:29   about the overall state right now,

02:10:32   I'm more optimistic than I've been in years, many years,

02:10:35   about this going forward.

02:10:37   - For me, it was the iPad OS that was like the big C change,

02:10:41   maybe even more than just the iPad Pro,

02:10:43   because it signaled that once you put an OS label on it,

02:10:46   they have to get up and present,

02:10:47   like obviously not this year,

02:10:48   but they have to get up and present every year.

02:10:50   It can't be two or three years

02:10:51   between significant iOS features, sorry,

02:10:54   iPad features as a subset of iOS.

02:10:56   Now it has to get its own segment every year

02:10:59   and that puts a pressure on them to level out the resources

02:11:02   between the two devices.

02:11:03   - Yeah, I know you don't wanna talk about yourself, René,

02:11:05   but there's too many questions here

02:11:07   that are about your professional move.

02:11:09   Aaron Vague has a good question.

02:11:11   I'd like to know more about the timing of this move.

02:11:13   Was it something you planned for a while

02:11:15   or did this global pandemic force your hand?

02:11:18   - So it wasn't a result of the pandemic.

02:11:20   I had been thinking about it for years.

02:11:21   Like you and I have had discussions about it

02:11:23   going back years, Yumi and Ben Thompson,

02:11:26   I think Whiskas as well at a Japanese whiskey house

02:11:29   in San Francisco is one of my most vivid memories.

02:11:31   But it was just, it was a year after the future acquisition

02:11:34   that I really started thinking about,

02:11:37   what's next for me?

02:11:38   Am I gonna do this for another 10 years?

02:11:39   And once I decided probably not,

02:11:41   I didn't think waiting would be an advantage.

02:11:44   - Yeah, I feel like the nature of this pandemic

02:11:48   is anybody who makes any kind of change is gonna be asked.

02:11:50   Naturally so. - Yes.

02:11:51   Is it because of this or is it a coincidence?

02:11:55   - I actually gave my notice well before any of this happened.

02:11:57   It was like much earlier in the month.

02:11:59   - What app, here's a question from Dainius Blindness.

02:12:05   What app would you like Apple to make first

02:12:07   if it would start prioritizing first party app making again?

02:12:12   I feel like, I don't know that they've stopped prioritizing

02:12:14   first party app making again, but what app

02:12:17   would I like Apple to make as a first party app?

02:12:20   Hmm.

02:12:21   - I honestly, I'm drawing a blank in terms of.

02:12:23   - Yeah, same.

02:12:24   - I can't really think of something.

02:12:27   - I think they should just have a good base,

02:12:28   like all baseline functionality

02:12:30   should have a decent built-in app

02:12:31   and then leave a lot of space for developers on top of that,

02:12:34   but don't have any functionality.

02:12:36   I would like them to get better at digital zoom

02:12:39   because of so many of the Android phones now

02:12:41   not only have periscope lenses,

02:12:43   but really good digital zoom.

02:12:44   And anyone who has, like I have little God kids,

02:12:46   but anyone with kids and they're running around,

02:12:48   maybe not now, running around the field,

02:12:50   You know how valuable that Zoom can be,

02:12:53   and I think they've got Smart HDR now,

02:12:55   and Google's Zoom technology is based off of their

02:12:58   HDR+ technology and their,

02:13:01   I forget the other one they're using,

02:13:03   but I would love Apple to just round out the feature set

02:13:06   more than make new apps.

02:13:08   - Yeah, I would say the same thing.

02:13:09   I really do.

02:13:10   I would, and I mentioned this on my last show

02:13:14   with "Panzerino," but I really do think

02:13:17   there's an opportunity here if the lack

02:13:19   of collaboration between Apple's teams that they're used to

02:13:24   can't happen for an extended period of time here

02:13:27   with this stay at home stuff,

02:13:30   that there's an opportunity here to rejigger priorities

02:13:33   and turn this into a snow leopard style bug fix year.

02:13:38   'Cause that's the sort of thing I feel like engineers

02:13:41   can work on in isolation a little bit more.

02:13:44   Almost the opposite of working on new front end

02:13:48   first-party apps is work at the other end,

02:13:51   work at the foundation and clean up some things

02:13:54   that have long needed cleaning up.

02:13:57   - Yeah. - All right,

02:13:58   here's a question from Ian.

02:13:59   I hope I'm getting your last name right, Umatio,

02:14:03   but if it's not, I'm sorry, Ian.

02:14:05   I know I'm pronouncing Ian right.

02:14:07   If ARM Macs are coming in 2021, this is a great question.

02:14:11   Should both casual users and power users be worried

02:14:14   about potentially buying the last set of Intel Macs?

02:14:17   I'm wanting to upgrade my old MacBook Pro,

02:14:19   but I'm worried about being in the same spot

02:14:21   as the person who bought a PowerBook G4 in 2005.

02:14:24   - So my thing with this is,

02:14:28   I go back to Don Melton where he says,

02:14:31   Gramps never buys Rev A boards.

02:14:33   And it's sort of like any bit of technology.

02:14:36   There's gonna be early adopters who just wanna have it.

02:14:38   They wanna have the latest thing right away.

02:14:40   But for many people, I would typically advise,

02:14:42   wait a year, wait two years for everything to shake out.

02:14:45   And then you're not waiting,

02:14:45   when's my software gonna be ported?

02:14:47   and this is a little bit kludgy

02:14:48   and Apple needs to fix this and wow, this is buggy.

02:14:51   And I think when you look at it from that lens,

02:14:53   that those, it's the same with 5G.

02:14:55   Like everyone was complaining last year,

02:14:57   Apple didn't have 5G when technology was terrible.

02:15:00   And even this year, if you don't get it,

02:15:02   it's not like, like these are first-generation devices.

02:15:05   It's gonna be two or three years

02:15:06   before they have really good quality stuff.

02:15:09   Just buy your Mac when you need it

02:15:10   and then be super happy

02:15:11   and wait until you need the next thing.

02:15:13   But don't feel like in a rush

02:15:14   to base your purchase on maybe future product developments.

02:15:19   - Yeah, and I would say the same thing,

02:15:20   where I would be more, I know that as a tech podcast,

02:15:24   the enthusiasm is all about the new thing,

02:15:26   and I'm very excited about the potential of Arm Max,

02:15:29   but I would honestly say that it's the opposite,

02:15:33   that you should feel more confident

02:15:34   that the last round of Intel Max,

02:15:37   if this is it or if there's another,

02:15:39   is almost certainly going to be the best round

02:15:41   of Intel Max they've ever made,

02:15:44   And that's always the case.

02:15:45   There's a term for it and I'm gonna forget it,

02:15:47   but I know, I believe Horace Dedue

02:15:51   has talked about this repeatedly,

02:15:53   and a couple other analysts have,

02:15:55   but it's the way that disruptions happen.

02:15:57   Like a big one was the move in the airline industry

02:16:01   from propeller-based passenger planes to jet planes.

02:16:06   And the last round of propeller-based ones

02:16:11   was way better than the first round of jet ones.

02:16:14   They were quieter and smoother

02:16:17   and just had these phenomenal interiors.

02:16:19   They were the best planes

02:16:20   the airline industry had ever made.

02:16:21   And of course, eventually they got,

02:16:23   it seems ridiculous now to think of a giant passenger

02:16:26   playing with propellers instead of jet engines.

02:16:28   - It's like a transition tax.

02:16:31   - Yeah, and if you miss the first,

02:16:34   if you're gonna miss a round of arm-based MAX,

02:16:37   the first round is the one to miss.

02:16:38   And that's guaranteed.

02:16:40   and that if you need a new computer now,

02:16:42   I wouldn't hesitate.

02:16:43   The only MacBook I wouldn't recommend right now

02:16:46   is the 13-inch MacBook Pro,

02:16:48   because it just seems, is crying out

02:16:51   for a replacement with the new keyboard,

02:16:54   and probably in the way that the 15-inch went to 16

02:16:58   by just making the screen go closer to the edges

02:17:01   without increasing the footprint,

02:17:03   something like that, to go to 14 inches,

02:17:05   which matches with the rumors,

02:17:07   that there's probably gonna be an update

02:17:08   to the 13-inch MacBook Pro,

02:17:10   called a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a new keyboard

02:17:12   and et cetera, et cetera.

02:17:15   Probably soon, I would wait for that.

02:17:17   But if you're in the market for a MacBook Air

02:17:19   or a 16-inch MacBook Pro,

02:17:21   I would buy right now if you need one.

02:17:23   - Yeah, absolutely.

02:17:24   - And sure, there might be ARM ones

02:17:26   that come out next year

02:17:27   and there might be some amazing things about 'em,

02:17:29   but you will be fully supported for years to come.

02:17:32   And then when you do update,

02:17:33   you'll be going to the second or third generation ARM ones

02:17:36   and it'll just be a silly, silly fantastic upgrade for you.

02:17:40   So I would honestly think I'd ask the question around,

02:17:43   should you be afraid of the first round of ARM-based Macs?

02:17:47   Not afraid of the last round of Intels.

02:17:49   - Yeah, no, absolutely.

02:17:51   - Here's one.

02:17:52   Now that we're all furiously washing our hands with soap

02:17:54   for 20 seconds multiple times a day,

02:17:56   what's your routine to stop your hands

02:17:57   from cracking into a million pieces?

02:17:59   I don't have a secret.

02:18:00   I don't know what I'm doing right.

02:18:02   I haven't been using any moisturizer or anything,

02:18:05   but my hands are holding up well,

02:18:07   even though all joking and theme song gags aside,

02:18:11   I'm washing my hands like a fiend, and somehow,

02:18:14   I think perhaps because the weather's warming up here

02:18:18   and it's not coming in the middle of winter

02:18:20   when I typically suffer from dry hands.

02:18:23   Oliver Thomas asked that, I don't have a secret for you.

02:18:28   But if you do have the problem,

02:18:30   I'd invest some moisturizer.

02:18:32   Yeah.

02:18:32   Are you going to be doing a blog, René? Jared Blunde wants to ask, in addition to your switch to Indy.

02:18:41   So I think I will be, just because, you know, I spent the last 10 years blogging, and it's in my

02:18:47   bones, and I think I would not be able to not do it. So the way I set up reneiritchie.net, it works

02:18:52   as a blog. Right now I've only posted the one video that I've done, but it's—I've gotten the

02:18:58   habit of Twitter blogging now, too, and I think a lot of us do that. We just see something and

02:19:01   and we tweet it, where in the old days we would have blogged it. But I like the idea of not giving

02:19:06   all my content to Twitter, especially because I don't trust their management as much as I used to.

02:19:11   Not that I ever did, but I've gotten to the realization that I can't necessarily trust the

02:19:14   way they run that platform. So the idea to me eventually will be anything that I would normally

02:19:19   tweet, I would do as a small blog post instead, and I'll just see how my time goes and whether I

02:19:24   can do that. Yeah, so I don't know. I guess that's it. My thanks to everybody who asked

02:19:30   these questions. They're great. I wish we could have gotten more of them, but we've already

02:19:33   filled up more than our allotted time. Right now, it's very easy to tell people where to get there,

02:19:41   Rene Ritchie. You go to YouTube/ReneRitchie and on Twitter, ReneRitchie, and that's it.

02:19:47   I'm very happy for you, Rene.

02:19:50   **Ezra Klein-Mannes-Hicks** Thank you so much. I really appreciate

02:19:52   your support over all the years. It's meant a lot to me.

02:19:53   **T

02:19:53   - Yeah, well, and you know,

02:19:56   I doubt it's the last we'll hear from you.

02:19:58   Anyway, any idea, do you know, are the YouTube channel,

02:20:01   how live are the subscriptions?

02:20:04   Like how many people have--

02:20:05   - I think they're real time.

02:20:07   - How many subscriptions are you up to on your new channel?

02:20:10   - Let's look.

02:20:10   It's loading and--

02:20:14   - I think we're about nine hours since you announced it.

02:20:17   - It looks like about 11 and a half thousand.

02:20:19   - Oh my God, that's fantastic.

02:20:21   You're getting over a thousand an hour.

02:20:23   11.9 thousand, it just refreshed, awesome.

02:20:26   Yeah. Well, my thanks to you. I'm very happy for you. I think it's going to be a great success.

02:20:31   Thank you so much.

02:20:32   I'm sure you'll be back on the show sometime soon.

02:20:35   Oh, I'm looking forward to it.