00:00:12 ◼ ► It is still... I say was as though it's the past. Well, it's in the house. Our living room is on
00:00:21 ◼ ► the second floor. I don't know if you know this or not. I don't know if you follow my wife on
00:00:26 ◼ ► Twitter. My wife has a predilection for very large Christmas trees. So take a tape measure,
00:00:38 ◼ ► of a Christmas tree she wants. And it is every year. My son even said in the car ride on the way
00:01:03 ◼ ► That's all I can say. But it did get it up on the second floor is so hard. And then try
00:01:21 ◼ ► thing out of the house. And then I don't know why. And this is, this is just me being an
00:01:29 ◼ ► we had a tree that we moved to a bigger house a couple years ago, well, a house with higher
00:01:39 ◼ ► impossible. I honestly didn't see how we were going to get it out of the house. I mean,
00:01:45 ◼ ► and you get it in. And then it opens up and it's you know, it's honestly like the Christmas
00:01:51 ◼ ► Vacation movie where it's flowing and then all of a sudden it's like there's no room for anything in
00:01:56 ◼ ► the living room other than this giant tree. But then you know, how do you get this tree out? Well,
00:02:01 ◼ ► you cut it up. So we got like one of these big like hand shears, you know, it means like it's
00:02:07 ◼ ► like a jet like the world's biggest pair of scissors effectively. What you should have done
00:02:10 ◼ ► was gotten a chainsaw. That's what I was thinking. See, you're you think more like me. I thought
00:02:23 ◼ ► And again, I I will have to give her credit. She's the one who cut it up. But yeah, it's sort of like dismembering a body, you know
00:02:41 ◼ ► my wife's family's in Arkansas and so we're always traveling on the holidays and so we haven't had a
00:02:51 ◼ ► My mom decided screw it and she got a fake tree and it's gotten to the point now where they don't even take the decorations off
00:02:59 ◼ ► They just they fold up the plastic with the decorations on it stick a trash bag over it put it in the garage and then the
00:03:07 ◼ ► They just pull it out pull the trash bag off stick in the living room and it's done if you've got room that sounds so
00:03:13 ◼ ► compared to the mess that we're in so I were recording and then after we record I've got to string up the lights that's my job and
00:03:20 ◼ ► With any tree I think with a normal precise tree it takes forever to put the lights on the tree
00:03:35 ◼ ► All right you and you did something crazy. You said what you bought a circuit a surface go
00:03:43 ◼ ► You know, I just reviewed the pixel slate. I played around with the iPad Pro a little bit and I have last year's iPad Pro and
00:03:49 ◼ ► I you know, I've got a Surface Pro that I you know use every now and then although most of the time when I'm at
00:03:55 ◼ ► Home, I use a pixel book. Anyway, I was like look I wanna I want a tablet that has LTE and I have a
00:04:15 ◼ ► And then I used the the new the new 12-inch MacBook, whatever whatever we call that thing wait for the 11 it
00:04:21 ◼ ► What do you mean back in the day the power book the yeah when there was the yeah in the mini-me commercial the little guy
00:04:28 ◼ ► What was that? What was what was that? I said was that empowered or was it 11 inch? It was called a power book
00:04:35 ◼ ► Yeah, how big was that? I know which one you're talking about because I had the keyboard that went all the way to the edge
00:04:42 ◼ ► Shouldn't be drawing a blank on this but alright keep going. Anyway, that was my favorite computer. So I love tiny computers
00:04:48 ◼ ► I was like, alright, I'm gonna I'm gonna give the surface go a shot because I had I bought the LTE version
00:04:54 ◼ ► Completely incompetent at shipping the thing because it turns out that if you don't actually run a massive retail operation
00:05:04 ◼ ► Anyway, I finally got the thing and I'm really impressed with how well Windows integrates
00:05:29 ◼ ► And then they just forgot to put any furniture in it and they assumed other people would
00:05:32 ◼ ► come in and make apps for it and and nobody did. And so it's it's a little bit. I don't
00:05:39 ◼ ► know I can I can get a little bit more done on it than I can on an iPad Pro simply because
00:05:43 ◼ ► I need so much web app stuff for my job. But generally speaking, it's it's it's nice because
00:06:00 ◼ ► why I was I don't know why 12 inch threw me off. I should have known that because it that is the
00:06:04 ◼ ► computer and I'm with you on the small computers. That is the power book that I never owned one
00:06:12 ◼ ► because at the time I couldn't really afford it slash justify it because I had like a super fancy
00:06:18 ◼ ► desktop and I really really only needed a laptop occasionally so I got the the iBook instead. Yeah.
00:06:26 ◼ ► but I like side-eyed that one because it was so gorgeous. I've talked to Jason Snell about this
00:06:32 ◼ ► too. I remember just a couple years ago, I mean it wasn't that reason at this point, but maybe
00:06:35 ◼ ► like two or three years ago I was in a coffee shop here in Philly and I saw somebody with one.
00:06:41 ◼ ► Oh wow. But at a glance I couldn't quite, you know, it was just somebody at a table and I saw
00:06:46 ◼ ► it and I was like holy shit what is that laptop? That is amazing. That is the first non-Apple
00:06:51 ◼ ► laptop I've seen in years that makes me really, really jealous. And then I did the double take
00:06:57 ◼ ► and looked and I was like, "Oh, it is an Apple laptop and it's ancient." And it's super thick.
00:07:02 ◼ ► But at a glance, just looking at it top down with that keyboard, it was like, "Oh man, that is
00:07:08 ◼ ► perfect." Yeah, I was a grad student at the time and I would bike to school. And so it was small,
00:07:15 ◼ ► I had to fit my bag with the five books I had to stick in my backpack or whatever it was.
00:07:20 ◼ ► And I would always impress people when I would pull it out because they couldn't believe that
00:07:24 ◼ ► it existed. And honestly, that computer in a lot of ways was one of the reasons I dropped out of
00:07:31 ◼ ► grad school, went into technology, because everyone was like, "What is that thing?" And I'd talk about
00:07:34 ◼ ► the thing and then all of a sudden, I realized I was more interested in the computer than I was in
00:07:42 ◼ ► So you bought the surface? I did. It's about the same size recording the show on what are you using
00:07:54 ◼ ► to record this? I'm on a I'm on a 13 inch MacBook Pro with a touch bar, which I regret getting the
00:08:01 ◼ ► touch bar not just getting the escape because I really hate the touch bar but I wanted just that
00:08:05 ◼ ► little bit of extra power because I have it in my head. Because I make YouTube videos that I'm going
00:08:10 ◼ ► I'm gonna go into this world where I'm gonna shoot some stuff and do some basic editing myself and then hand it off to somebody
00:08:17 ◼ ► But I I have yet to figure out how to effectively podcast on anything else other than a Mac
00:08:26 ◼ ► But when it comes down if I don't have audio hijack, I just feel like I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah, and it's
00:08:32 ◼ ► you know, it's I've used this analogy is probably one of my favorite things I've ever written but that
00:08:39 ◼ ► More or less that it's the heaviness of the Mac that allows iOS to remain light, you know
00:08:44 ◼ ► and and you know what we and we've all in the last two months everybody in our racket has run through this entire circle of
00:09:03 ◼ ► The iPad is going at it from this sort of blown-up phone OS and it doesn't do a lot and all of these complaints are
00:09:12 ◼ ► quote-unquote real computer can do or makes easy or you don't have to think about and the iPad either can't do or you've got to
00:09:19 ◼ ► jump through a million hoops and then you know, like the Chromebooks and the Windows computers are coming from a PC and trying to put a
00:09:34 ◼ ► which is that none of them really make jump the chasm from where they started that the iPad is still fundamentally a
00:09:43 ◼ ► The the computer E ones like the Chromebooks and the Windows ones never really get the simplified thing
00:09:49 ◼ ► but one of the things you don't even think about is the way that on a Mac you've got so many audio options and like
00:10:06 ◼ ► Well, and you also you just have so much more ability to really sort of fiddle with the way it works
00:10:12 ◼ ► What's the what's the other app that rogue amoeba does that lets you squirt audio to different sources and?
00:10:35 ◼ ► Like if I want it if I played sound effects on my podcast or have yeah theme song I could play the theme song
00:10:40 ◼ ► Right now and then you would be able to hear it because it would I could if I so choose
00:10:44 ◼ ► Pump the audio through to Skype or or whatever right and back of the day if you wanted to record Skype
00:10:55 ◼ ► You didn't want to just record the output from Skype and then you'd want to like take it from one thing to the next
00:11:01 ◼ ► Yeah, the the thing about like all these different I wish there's a better term than future of computer computers
00:11:09 ◼ ► I I've been talking about like big screen computers just to try and you know admit that phones are everybody's primary device these days
00:11:20 ◼ ► Part of the up until this year, maybe last year, I was relatively forgiving, especially
00:11:29 ◼ ► It started as a blown up phone, but they've done a really good job of making the UI work
00:11:47 ◼ ► Yeah, I just I just mentioned that it's it's 2010 and so it's eight years, you know, eight and a half years really
00:11:54 ◼ ► That's a long time and like my thing that I compared it to and I it's not the first time
00:11:59 ◼ ► Other people have done this in years past but now that we're eight and a half years in but just comparing it to the Mac when?
00:12:04 ◼ ► The Mac was eight years old, which would be around 1992 or so. So it's like that was one year into the system 7 era
00:12:14 ◼ ► Totally like the cloud that was like the the the peak of the classic Mac era if anything, you know
00:12:21 ◼ ► It was like the the classic Mac had reached its apex if anything entire industries like graphic design and the print industry
00:12:36 ◼ ► Blown away and everything was based on Macintosh computers it which when I was young, you know
00:12:43 ◼ ► and that was, you know, I was like, you know, first couple years of college, and then I
00:12:46 ◼ ► came out of college and worked in the graphic design industry. It all seemed very normal
00:12:50 ◼ ► to me as like, you know, 21 year old 22 year old that Yeah, of course, all of this stuff
00:12:59 ◼ ► this some other way. But in hindsight, now that I'm in my 40s, and I think about an industry
00:13:35 ◼ ► the iPad. Yeah. If since the Mac is there, you don't have to convert everything over to the iPad
00:13:40 ◼ ► and that in some ways holds it back. Yeah, in some ways. And I think that's the fear that some
00:13:45 ◼ ► Macintosh fans have. And like I've said recently, like, if anything, I would be if I was a fan of
00:13:51 ◼ ► one of, you know, the had to, you know, had all of my chips in one of Apple's platforms. The one
00:13:58 ◼ ► that I would be the most worried about if I was all in on would be iPad, because it's the iPad
00:14:02 ◼ ► that's never gotten the love like the Mac users are the ones who are paranoid and have this fear
00:14:06 ◼ ► that Apple wants is going to abandon the Mac and have everybody you know just use iPads or stick
00:14:12 ◼ ► iOS on a laptop or big s 30 inch you know iMac style thing but if anything that you know it's
00:14:20 ◼ ► the iPad that's seen the least love over the last eight years really has yeah just in terms of I
00:14:26 ◼ ► mean they they added the split screen and there's a little slide over thing and you know there's a
00:15:57 ◼ ► that does it it i get confused which one is the surface go so the surface go is the it's the tiny
00:16:05 ◼ ► one so microsoft their whole surface line they've got the surface pro which is their their you know
00:16:09 ◼ ► thing with the kickstand and you know they've been around forever and it started off really badly
00:16:14 ◼ ► because they had it running windows rt which was an embarrassment of an operating system and that
00:16:19 ◼ ► windows 8 didn't make it much better blah blah blah blah it's come around to being a really nice
00:16:23 ◼ ► pretty flexible device and people like it. But I think most people just use it as a laptop. And then
00:16:28 ◼ ► every now and then, if you want to read a book or something, you can flip the keyboard around.
00:16:32 ◼ ► The Surface Go is the tiny version of it. So it's, I forget the size of the screen. It's like,
00:16:39 ◼ ► I don't know, 10 inches or something. Pretty ridiculous. But it's about the size of the small
00:17:24 ◼ ► integrate well, turns out to be pretty difficult. And you have to have a whole lot of extra
00:17:28 ◼ ► parts on there, whereas on an ARM chip, you know, the whole thing can be built into the
00:17:38 ◼ ► LTE. And because when you ask them, they they they really go off the rails. I mean, they
00:17:46 ◼ ► Apple product marketing people are usually very good about even giving a non answer but the non answer on why aren't there LTE max is
00:18:02 ◼ ► But it's like talks you around in a circle and it's like you feel like you just got pickpocketed
00:18:11 ◼ ► represents like a half dozen compromises you you compromise on sales numbers because no one no one buys them really
00:18:17 ◼ ► You compromise on the system design of the thing itself because you have to put an extra Qualcomm chip
00:18:24 ◼ ► And then you have to make sure it works in there and they got to figure out how that goes
00:18:27 ◼ ► You and then you you compromise on the body of the computer because you have to have a SIM card, right?
00:18:35 ◼ ► And the other thing about the antenna is that everybody on all of these devices everybody wants to use aluminum right now
00:18:42 ◼ ► Yeah, aluminum is the material of the decade and you can't get cell signals through metal, right?
00:18:48 ◼ ► So you've got to have some you know, you got to do something to get the antenna on the outside
00:18:51 ◼ ► Yeah, and I just think that you start stacking those compromises up and I don't know Johnny Iver somebody inside Apple's just like nope
00:19:04 ◼ ► SIM card door on the iPhone, right? And they would be right to but the the way that, you know,
00:19:10 ◼ ► carriers work. So not gonna happen. So let me, this is actually a good I didn't have this in
00:19:16 ◼ ► my notes to talk about, but I should, because it's the sort of thing that I don't want to write an
00:19:20 ◼ ► article about, because I feel like I would waste two days on it. And it's a little too self survey
00:19:26 ◼ ► to be an article, but it's a good podcast rant is, all right, my family is on Verizon, and we
00:19:32 ◼ ► have a family plan. And Verizon has a pretty good deal. I think you have to pay a $30 activation
00:19:38 ◼ ► fee, which is total bullshit. And it really, really it's like $30 that feels like 300 to me,
00:19:44 ◼ ► morally, it I really hate it. But you get an iPad on the family plan. And then after that,
00:19:49 ◼ ► you just pay 10 bucks a month for the extra device. And it's just uses the shared pool data.
00:19:55 ◼ ► And you can just sort of keep track of how much data your family uses and adjust your plan. You
00:20:01 ◼ ► you know, it's like turning a dial, they make it very easy to say, you know what, let's go from 15
00:20:05 ◼ ► to 20. Because we're going away, you know, this summer, we're going to be traveling, we're going
00:20:09 ◼ ► to be on LTE all the time. It's once you're on it, it's pretty easy. And so it's only 10 bucks
00:20:13 ◼ ► more to get another device on, which is a great deal now. So actually, no, it's not. Well,
00:20:18 ◼ ► why are you paying that 10 bucks? I actually I agree with you that that is actually it is kind
00:20:25 ◼ ► of offensive after they had the activation fee. You're right. But still it for me the 10 bucks a
00:20:32 ◼ ► month it there's a moral outrage that I have to pay anything at all. But yeah, it's it's a good
00:20:39 ◼ ► deal. Yeah. So all of my LTE devices are on project fi which is Google and I'm sorry, it's called
00:20:47 ◼ ► they just changed the name to Google Fi and assign it maybe they're not going to kill it like they've
00:21:23 ◼ ► I think it's like after six gigabytes, which is 60 bucks, then you don't pay anymore until
00:21:40 ◼ ► even pay over the 60. No, it's a really good rate. Well, here's the thing I don't use I
00:21:50 ◼ ► it simply because I like the safety of having a second network, you know, especially in
00:22:02 ◼ ► in my experience, there's like, each terminal gets reception on one carrier, maybe, maybe.
00:22:08 ◼ ► And it's like, of all the places in the country that should be saturated with cell service,
00:22:12 ◼ ► it should be airports like every single person in the airport is on their phone. I don't
00:22:20 ◼ ► but even in 2018 you get terrible cellular reception in airports and it often helps you
00:22:35 ◼ ► it's like your options on a TNT and because I just got a new iPad I reviewed it I reviewed
00:22:44 ◼ ► a month that you can get something from AT&T, but it's literally like 250 megabytes or something
00:23:00 ◼ ► 600 bucks a year, but I checked and I actually like went through my account and looked and
00:23:06 ◼ ► And I use three, four, you know, last few months, three, four, five gigabytes at a time
00:23:21 ◼ ► my chances with Verizon everywhere? But anyway, here's the thing I went through is my, I had
00:23:26 ◼ ► a SIM card for my old iPad on AT&T and I popped it out and I put it in my new iPad, the iPad
00:23:35 ◼ ► and it worked and I'm I was on the account but when I went to setting cellular to like do this thing where I was like
00:23:53 ◼ ► I have to go through this crazy thing and I went through the website and they wouldn't take my password
00:24:04 ◼ ► And then I found out the password reset wasn't wasn't kicking in and then I found a second form on the AT&T website
00:24:23 ◼ ► And the SIM card number so I could get the SIM card number pretty easy, but the EMEI number it wouldn't work
00:24:28 ◼ ► It kept saying this isn't recognized. And then I realized it was it probably wanted my old iPads
00:24:37 ◼ ► And I went to the old one and that one didn't work and then I thought about it and I thought you know
00:24:45 ◼ ► iPad mini I'm like Jesus do I even still have that so I like had to go through my office
00:24:52 ◼ ► Find an old iPad mini from like 2012 the first one I had with like cellular fire that thing up
00:24:58 ◼ ► and get the EMEI number off that and it worked. Holy shit that it actually let me in. I mean,
00:25:05 ◼ ► I probably should have just called it actually probably would have taken me less time and less
00:25:08 ◼ ► aggravation to actually get on the phone and call them. But yeah, I had to go through all of that.
00:25:12 ◼ ► And then it finally worked. And I had this SIM card and I went through all that work to get the
00:25:17 ◼ ► SIM card working. And then I thought, well, what about this eSIM thing? Isn't that nice? And and
00:25:21 ◼ ► so I did the thing to switch my iPad to the eSIM. And that worked. But after I went through all that
00:26:22 ◼ ► way of saying I kind of get why device makers are aren't putting LTE into everything. Right.
00:26:28 ◼ ► Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. I don't know I deal with with switching carriers and dealing with
00:26:33 ◼ ► this crap all the time. My biggest headache recently and this is one that I prayed nobody
00:26:38 ◼ ► ever has to deal with was getting the palm phone activated on Verizon. That little thing.
00:26:51 ◼ ► around to it. All right. Yeah, hold that thought. I'm gonna do our my first sponsor. So funny.
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00:29:55 ◼ ► My thanks to Bank activity. Alright, this palm phone. Yeah. I saw this a month ago, somebody
00:30:09 ◼ ► One of the things, oh, it was the iPhone XR, when the iPhone XR came out and there were
00:30:57 ◼ ► take with you on a weekend trip or something. It should last at least a day and it can't.
00:31:02 ◼ ► And this isn't just me using it. It's me, I don't know, having it around and like turning
00:31:35 ◼ ► They you know, one of them was a former Samsung guy and he made some pretty decent devices for Samsung back in the day
00:31:42 ◼ ► And so I believe that they were like an independent company that started up but they got captured by
00:31:53 ◼ ► You just can't you can't go buy it and make it a phone. You can only buy it as an add-on device on Verizon and
00:32:24 ◼ ► Usage tracked so that they can share your information with oath AOL oath. Yeah, you know
00:32:41 ◼ ► But it's the only way to get a text message on Verizon that doesn't use the classic SMS system
00:33:16 ◼ ► a little text messaging app on the iPhone that gets numbers that are sent to my Verizon
00:33:35 ◼ ► carrier in the U.S., asking them when Rich Communication Services, RCS, is finally going
00:33:41 ◼ ► to launch because I really want to see are they going to be as horrible with RCS as they have been
00:33:48 ◼ ► with literally everything else that they do. It's really bad. And if you don't allow it to take over
00:33:54 ◼ ► as your default SMS app, it won't run. It quit. It's just, do you want Verizon messages to handle SMS
00:34:11 ◼ ► I mean and that it's it's like because I would never install the equivalent of this on my Mac because I would just assume that
00:34:25 ◼ ► Phone is so fun, even you know Android iPhone, whatever you can just install it laugh at it and then delete it
00:34:38 ◼ ► Well, we put it off long enough. Do you want me to rant about the pixel slate? Yes the pixel slate man
00:34:53 ◼ ► It's it's actually a pixel book is up to number three, right? Isn't it? Like the third I forget so they had they had
00:34:59 ◼ ► Chromebook pixels before so they had one and two and then they took a couple years off and they made the pixel
00:35:05 ◼ ► slate or the pixel book and now they're making the pixel slate which is the the full-on tablet with a detachable keyboard and
00:35:22 ◼ ► It basically feels like a pixel book like a standard Chrome OS device and you got Windows and all the stuff and you can move stuff
00:35:27 ◼ ► Around and you might have a couple of Android apps because it can run Android apps and it's okay
00:35:36 ◼ ► the the response time in tablet mode to like, you know, move a window around and go into split-screen is
00:35:47 ◼ ► Like us like it should be less than 20 milliseconds for a human not to notice anything like it could be a second
00:36:00 ◼ ► I usually do watch the videos too, but sometimes I find that the videos are spoilers. I'd rather
00:36:06 ◼ ► read the whole thing first. And if I'm going to hear something again, I'd rather hear it again in
00:36:09 ◼ ► the video than have it spoke. But anyway, somebody on Twitter mentioned something like, Oh my God,
00:36:14 ◼ ► I can't see how anybody who watches Dieter's video could, you know, not say this thing is a turd. I
00:36:20 ◼ ► was like, Oh, I gotta watch the video. And I watched the video and like your description of it as
00:36:51 ◼ ► shipped it with the quote-unquote tablet features that it has. I would have much rather,
00:36:56 ◼ ► if it had been a tablet and I had to deal with the awkwardness of windows on it, I would have been
00:37:00 ◼ ► like, well, or it only worked in full screen or something, which is the way Chrome always used
00:37:04 ◼ ► to work. I would have been like, well, this is bad, but they'll fix it next year. And in the
00:37:09 ◼ ► meantime, at least full screen works if you just want to watch a movie or something, life goes on.
00:37:24 ◼ ► It's not like Google makes any money off of these things. Yeah, like they get nothing out of selling this other than
00:37:29 ◼ ► Like a halo effect, right? It's sort of like when Microsoft first started making surface devices you'd ask
00:37:40 ◼ ► and honestly, we need to learn how to make these things so that they will learn how to make better things because
00:37:46 ◼ ► Windows laptops are actually they had a really long period where they were awful. Yeah, I mean and
00:37:58 ◼ ► Yeah, what Microsoft said at the time and and there was you know as longtime in you know
00:38:03 ◼ ► People who watch the industry it just seemed bizarre for Microsoft to be making PC hardware when they've been the company that works with every
00:38:09 ◼ ► How can you both be their partner and their competitor but it worked it raised the bar, you know for for PC laptops
00:38:16 ◼ ► Yeah, and Google's done the same thing for years with the the Nexus devices before they made this target vision started calling everything pixel
00:38:31 ◼ ► But whatever we need to learn how to develop for this new processor and we want to teach everybody that's making the $300 Chromebooks
00:39:07 ◼ ► I don't know. I don't know how that happens inside a company like how you get past that.
00:39:12 ◼ ► Hey, go or no go. And this thing is literally like the software equivalent of crumbling apart.
00:39:18 ◼ ► Yeah. I guess that somehow you you get a, you know, they obviously wanted to announce it
00:39:25 ◼ ► alongside the pixel three. So they have this ship date, you know, announcement date in late September,
00:39:30 ◼ ► early October, whenever that was. And they somehow had this on the whiteboard that we've got to ship
00:39:35 ◼ ► this then. And you know, the hardware, I guess is clearly ready. I don't think it I don't think,
00:39:40 ◼ ► you know, because it works so well in laptop mode. It's not crummy hardware. It's Yeah,
00:39:46 ◼ ► no, it's really good hardware, actually. And I feel like that's the problem. I feel like,
00:39:51 ◼ ► you know, if the hardware is good and hardware, you know, you can't fix can't send over the air
00:39:55 ◼ ► patches to hardware, you know, the hardware has to be or not be and you can talk yourself in a
00:39:59 ◼ ► circle that well, we can always fix software later, you know. And I guess that's it. Yeah,
00:40:32 ◼ ► using an iPhone is all of those software developers working on a new version of the app,
00:40:45 ◼ ► the last at least two years, Apple's done a better job of having like a dot two or a dot three
00:40:53 ◼ ► around February or so, or February or March, that is sort of like the high point of the year for the
00:40:58 ◼ ► software. Right. But there's an awful lot of features that like, you just know that if it's
00:41:05 ◼ ► coming, we've got to wait till September. Yeah, yeah. Well, and, and if you think about it, like,
00:41:09 ◼ ► it's actually kind of nuts. Like, could you imagine if Apple wanted to update the I don't
00:41:13 ◼ ► know, the mail client on the Mac? I mean, I guess they kind of wait there. But an Android phone around
00:41:18 ◼ ► I guess, I guess on a pixel, there aren't really any apps on a pixel that ship built in just a
00:41:22 ◼ ► couple. If Google's got a new version of Gmail that they like, they just, it's just there,
00:41:54 ◼ ► or they're going to wait till the next big, you know, dot update to go out. If Apple ships
00:41:59 ◼ ► something that is subpar, it's a much bigger deal. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think that Apple is,
00:42:06 ◼ ► it has, I think it's part of the rhythm of the Apple calendar year, you know, the way that
00:42:11 ◼ ► Apple sort of does everything, you know, it, they're a very annual company. And in a way
00:42:19 ◼ ► that the real test is can we show this at WW on stage at WWDC? It does obviously doesn't have
00:42:25 ◼ ► to be ready. I mean, beta still means beta. But like, they'll never show a mock up of what it's
00:42:33 ◼ ► going to look like, like when they do a demo of iOS 13, this coming June, whatever they're showing
00:42:38 ◼ ► is actual software running on an actual device. And so if it's not in close enough form that they
00:42:44 ◼ ► could actually demo it on stage, it doesn't make the cut for iOS 13. It's, you know, you're sorry,
00:42:50 ◼ ► your your team is on iOS 14, you know, yeah, come back next year. And that gives them then three
00:42:56 ◼ ► months to get it in shape, you know, like, okay, we've demoed it, we've promised it. Let's, you
00:43:08 ◼ ► Well and apple apple is so consistent about shipping the stuff that they demo that the few times when they don't
00:43:17 ◼ ► A running joke that everybody can can reference and everybody knows about so right? I mean group face time was like face time air power
00:43:24 ◼ ► You know, I don't know like open source sync face time, I guess was like one thing but like
00:43:37 ◼ ► I think so. But I think was it WWDC was it? I don't know if it's WWDC or Mac world Expo.
00:43:47 ◼ ► I think it was probably a WWDC. But either way, it was a Monday keynote. And it was like Saturday,
00:43:52 ◼ ► and they're doing like Saturday or Sunday. So it's like the 48 hours or 24 hours before and they're
00:43:58 ◼ ► doing, you know, full dress rehearsal of the keynote. Yeah, I get to the FaceTime part. And
00:44:09 ◼ ► Wouldn't that be great? Not everybody has an iPhone. What about FaceTiming people on computers?"
00:44:17 ◼ ► And they're like, "Well, I don't know. We'll think about it." And he was like, "What if we
00:44:19 ◼ ► just open source it? We'll open source it. We don't care. We'll make it a standard." And you're
00:44:24 ◼ ► like, "All right." And the FaceTime team heard about it when they were watching the keynote
00:45:24 ◼ ► like change the code. But so there's other reasons too. But basically, long story short of why
00:45:30 ◼ ► FaceTime never went open sources. It was, it never really could. It was just something Steve Jobs
00:45:35 ◼ ► pulled out of his ass like the weekend before. So I've heard I don't know this for a fact. I don't
00:45:40 ◼ ► have I don't have a first hand report of that. I have secondhand report of that. But that's
00:45:45 ◼ ► incredible. Sounds true, right? Yeah, totally. Sounds like Steve Jobs. Right. But yeah, I think
00:45:51 ◼ ► that June WWDC tent pole in the calendar of if we can't show it, it doesn't ship in September.
00:46:05 ◼ ► are features specific to the new phone, like so face ID they didn't show. But I think internally,
00:46:12 ◼ ► it obviously had to be ready months in advance. It's not like in June you could say, well,
00:46:23 ◼ ► People just ship stuff constantly throughout the year. And so it's funny, in some ways,
00:46:40 ◼ ► "Well, we'll just announce whatever is close right now, I guess." But nobody actually holds
00:47:19 ◼ ► Because it's awesome, but it isn't duplex. It isn't telling your Google Assistant to make you a
00:47:27 ◼ ► dentist appointment. So yeah, it's launched in like a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny beta. And we've
00:47:34 ◼ ► actually managed to make a couple reservations for it. There was a thing last week where someone
00:47:39 ◼ ► at a restaurant posted a recording of it. And just last week, you just let yeah and and you listen to
00:47:45 ◼ ► it and it says hey I'm from Google something something something but it never said I'm a
00:47:49 ◼ ► robot right or never said I'm the assistant it's just that I'm calling from Google on behalf of
00:47:54 ◼ ► so and so and so like you change your disclosure this is bad and it turns out that that was one of
00:47:59 ◼ ► the duplex calls that was actually completed by a human being and so it's and the other thing is
00:48:06 ◼ ► So far as we can tell the only restaurants that it's rolled out to are restaurants that have
00:48:10 ◼ ► Uh, like already a pre-existing pretty close relationship with google through their their small business thing
00:48:18 ◼ ► I don't know. I think it's going to be a long time before this becomes a regular feature that that anybody uses people totally
00:48:28 ◼ ► uh, you know and people some people jump on the whole like they think that i'm in the bag for apple and they're like
00:49:05 ◼ ► stage and said would be shipping in a couple of weeks. And, you know, in the quote unquote
00:49:11 ◼ ► near future to like everybody, it that isn't, that isn't what they're that isn't happening.
00:49:16 ◼ ► Yeah, well, you know, there may be no other organization that could do this than Google.
00:49:24 ◼ ► I don't know, make an unforced error of not understanding how people would react to it.
00:49:35 ◼ ► one, skeptical about the, you know, whatever edits they made to the audio to like, have it fit in the
00:49:39 ◼ ► keynote, like, is this real or not? And two, that people would be like, wait a minute, I don't know
00:49:43 ◼ ► if I want to talk to a robot. Like it just they're like, they're so impressed with how cool it is,
00:49:47 ◼ ► they doesn't, they don't think about that there are people outside of the Silicon Valley bubble,
00:49:51 ◼ ► they'll be like, wait a minute, that's or no, or not that you don't want to talk to a robot,
00:49:57 ◼ ► but that you don't want to sick a robot on your hairstylist, you know, like, hey, I've been going
00:50:02 ◼ ► into her for 10 years. She knows me. I don't want to have her talking to a creepy robot on behalf of
00:50:09 ◼ ► me. And then I go in there and have to look her in the eye and say, "Oh, yeah, I did that. I sent
00:50:15 ◼ ► a robot to make this appointment for me." Even though, you know, and again, it will happen and
00:50:20 ◼ ► we will be doing it and it'll all seem normal, but it has to be introduced the right way.
00:50:27 ◼ ► I want to keep talking on some of this Google stuff. And I want to talk definitely want
00:50:42 ◼ ► you know who fractures fracture that you send them photos, they print them on glass. I told
00:50:51 ◼ ► go order your fracture prints for the holidays. As I speak to you, I don't know when you're
00:50:57 ◼ ► going to listen to this episode. But as I speak to you, they've already got a ship date in like
00:51:01 ◼ ► the middle of December. It's like December 13th if you order today, but you can order today
00:51:06 ◼ ► because you're not going to hear this episode today. So by tomorrow it might be December 14th
00:51:09 ◼ ► might be December 15th. Don't wait. This is such a great gift idea. Get them for anybody who you
00:51:17 ◼ ► have any anybody in your family, your parents send them pictures of your kids or your dog or your cat
00:51:33 ◼ ► They're terrific, terrific pictures, super high quality, printed directly on the glass,
00:51:38 ◼ ► everything you need to hang it up on the wall or put it on the mantle, whatever you need.
00:51:44 ◼ ► up. But it's such a great gift idea. But you cannot wait because it will, you know, they
00:52:03 ◼ ► It's probably nonsense. You're not going to break break the flow of this show. But make
00:52:07 ◼ ► a note to yourself put a big sticky right now, wherever you are to remind yourself that
00:52:12 ◼ ► when you're done listening to the show, take an hour, go through your photos from the last
00:52:16 ◼ ► pick out your favorites, send them to fracture, get them printed out as gift ideas. And you'll
00:52:22 ◼ ► thank me for it. It's really just the best gift idea ever. But you're running out of time.
00:52:26 ◼ ► Where do you go to find out more? Go to fracture me.com fracture me.com slash talk ta Okay,
00:52:44 ◼ ► And seriously, that's the that's your whole to do list for the rest of the day. Finish this episode,
00:52:49 ◼ ► me and Dieter talking about pixel three, iPhones, cameras, whatever else is on our agenda. And then
00:52:56 ◼ ► order your fracture prints for the holidays. Great gift idea, but you're running out of time.
00:53:01 ◼ ► Anything else on the pixel slate here? I guess the one thing here's the thing that stuck out
00:53:42 ◼ ► you know, some kind of speed bump they could get, which but probably isn't worth it. Like,
00:53:48 ◼ ► I don't think it's, it's not just Apple, that sort of is on an irregular update schedule
00:53:54 ◼ ► for their laptops based on Intel CPUs. There really is sort of a, like, when I talked to
00:54:00 ◼ ► some people at Apple about, well, look, why are the Why did it take so you know, why aren't
00:54:05 ◼ ► why doesn't why don't you get a one year update every on everything in the MacBook lineup every
00:54:09 ◼ ► year. And they're like, you know, some sometimes, you know, there's just diminishing returns on
00:54:13 ◼ ► Moore's law at this point where it's not even worth it. Yeah. But it's really it's a great
00:54:19 ◼ ► realization of what a Chromebook could be. Whereas the pixel slate is so flawed, right? And to me,
00:54:26 ◼ ► it almost is like a mar on the pixel brand. Yep. You know, and the phone and we'll get to it. But
00:54:33 ◼ ► the phone is the both phones, the big one and the small one are very, very, very good realizations
00:54:39 ◼ ► of what an Android phone can be in 2018. And it's, you know, the pixel brand is a good one,
00:54:45 ◼ ► and then they stick this turd out there. Yeah, it's it's baffling. And the there, there was a
00:54:52 ◼ ► rumor that there was going to be an update to the Pixelbook that would make it better by making the
00:54:57 ◼ ► bezels around the screen smaller. And I don't know, it may have just been, I mean, the rumors
00:55:03 ◼ ► came from like these advertisements that were popping up and people would like pixel peep them
00:55:07 ◼ ► and be like, this screen is too big. So it may have just been like an overzealous like marketer
00:55:11 ◼ ► that was like, I'm going to make this thing look better and make the screen bigger. But anyway,
00:55:15 ◼ ► there were some rumors that they're out there. And if they had done that, and you know, bumped
00:55:41 ◼ ► as a tablet if you want to every now and then, which everybody tells me when I talk to people
00:55:47 ◼ ► you have a computer with a touchscreen that you can flip around to tablet mode. Everybody who buys
00:55:53 ◼ ► it, it's like, Oh, yeah, this is great. I'm not carrying another tablet. I'm going to watch movies
00:55:57 ◼ ► on it. And then nobody ever does anything except use it as a laptop, right? Right? Because a lot
00:56:02 ◼ ► of them have it set up so you can you can turn it upside down and set it up like a like a TP almost
00:56:11 ◼ ► to watch videos. But why would you do that? Why not just watch the video in laptop mode?
00:56:16 ◼ ► Right. It's like it does it really mar your movie viewing experience on the plane to have the keyboard in front of you as
00:56:28 ◼ ► Get a little bit more space to put your weird little you know drink and yeah, I guess tray of food there, but whatever. Yeah
00:56:41 ◼ ► it feels like the pixel slate in a lot of ways. But because nobody ever does that it doesn't matter
00:56:46 ◼ ► as much. Whereas the pixel slate is constantly like as soon as you detach that keyboard,
00:56:50 ◼ ► as soon as you flip that keyboard around, it's like, all right, I'm a tablet now. And it's just
00:56:54 ◼ ► so bad at being a tablet. It drives me crazy. So my son, it's interesting, my son's 14.
00:56:59 ◼ ► He had a broken MacBook Pro, like a four year old MacBook Pro, and it eventually gave up the ghost,
00:57:07 ◼ ► but it worked except that I think the internal USB controller was broken so his keyboard
00:57:17 ◼ ► easily had to like plug a mouse into the side to like use the mouse. And he still while
00:57:23 ◼ ► we're deciding what to get him as a replacement still used it as his YouTube machine rather
00:57:28 ◼ ► than use his iPad just because the he just he's just so used to using you know the fact
00:57:35 ◼ ► you don't need to stand right right and walk around the house and wherever he sits down the
00:57:40 ◼ ► the screen is already propped up right so even without a working trackpad he still used a macbook
00:57:46 ◼ ► to watch youtube and again you know for as many hours as he'd be allowed to uh rather than use an
00:57:52 ◼ ► ipad just because it's already propped up i mean that's how useful the the laptop form factor is
00:57:56 ◼ ► i really don't see the need for the bend around backwards thing yeah i i guess i would i have it
00:58:03 ◼ ► like on an iPad in particular like this. The funny thing is I don't like the new keyboard on the new
00:58:08 ◼ ► iPad Pro. Because I do use that flip around thing when I'm on a plane or when I'm like,
00:58:13 ◼ ► lying in bed. I'll like a flip around then you can get the screen just a little bit closer to your
00:58:22 ◼ ► And you can't do that with the new keyboard, the old keyboard you could you could put into a
00:58:28 ◼ ► sort of just like, like an easel mode or something. Yeah. And the new keyboard, you can't do that.
00:58:33 ◼ ► Like it's it's either the keyboards flip behind it or it's sitting there in front of you
00:58:37 ◼ ► And it's I get why they did it. It's better because like it's a little bit stabler on your lap in that mode
00:58:43 ◼ ► Yeah, and it also means I don't know they could move that smart connector to the back and that you know weird place
00:58:52 ◼ ► I'm sure all their you know research and all their usability testing say that people prefer it
00:59:00 ◼ ► Spent two years making fun of the original smart keyboard because it had this origami fold
00:59:05 ◼ ► And yeah, it was awkward to like fold it up, but it turns out it was actually a pretty good solution
00:59:26 ◼ ► Why do you have to fold it and learn how these funny things it was and why does it have this bulge and
01:00:05 ◼ ► So they had to go with Intel because Chrome on ARM, there's only been one good Chromebook
01:00:24 ◼ ► devices, you put them at like $100 price breakpoints, and then you just increase the storage. Well,
01:00:29 ◼ ► okay, let's do that. Well, people don't actually don't care about storage on a Chromebook.
01:00:32 ◼ ► They care about processor speed. And we really want to hit this, you know, $600 price point.
01:00:37 ◼ ► Is it six or 700? I think it's $699. Yeah, I think the low maybe it's 699. I don't know.
01:00:44 ◼ ► It's 599. And the do not buy that. I mean, don't buy it in general right now until they
01:01:17 ◼ ► But it turns out the new M3s are basically the same as the Core i5 and the Core i7y series
01:02:12 ◼ ► Chrome never says no, it never stops you from opening the tab, it'll slow it down. Right?
01:02:18 ◼ ► So people are gonna buy this thing. And they're, you know, they're gonna think it's gonna perform
01:02:31 ◼ ► the old that is not something people buying this device should be worried about, you know,
01:02:36 ◼ ► give them enough RAM, and then that's it, then they don't have to worry about it. Because
01:03:08 ◼ ► meets him. So if there were more, they'd have CPU options. And it's like, Oh, maybe because
01:03:12 ◼ ► all the other Mac books do. But none of Apple's ARM machines have CPU options. They make one
01:03:17 ◼ ► chip for the model year. And that's it. And it's that chip is good. And, you know, that's
01:03:29 ◼ ► Yeah. And for the MacBook Air, just philosophically, like, it's the mass market laptop that most
01:04:01 ◼ ► you were to throw on upsells on processor speed on the MacBook Air on top of that confusion,
01:04:06 ◼ ► nobody would know what to do. Right. And you know, to me, it's the way of the future with the to me,
01:04:12 ◼ ► inevitable move to Apple's in house ARM chips for at least for MacBooks, whether the whole Mac line
01:04:17 ◼ ► goes or not, we could do a whole episode on but clearly they're going to make mobile Macs that run
01:04:21 ◼ ► on on their own chips. And then I just don't think they're going to have CPU options. I think,
01:04:26 ◼ ► you know, I don't know if they'll call them a series, maybe they'll call them some other
01:04:30 ◼ ► letter for the Mac chips, but they'll be the M1 chip and that's it. That's the MacBook chip
01:04:41 ◼ ► So this is a huge drive and hold, but I just got to ask, assuming that they're going to move
01:04:48 ◼ ► some Macs to ARM, I also assume that they are, what is the software fix going to be? Are they
01:04:56 ◼ ► just gonna like do something like Rosetta? Are they gonna just like use marzipan apps? And you
01:05:01 ◼ ► know, sorry for your luck. If you want to tell apps, I know, it's actually not clear to me,
01:05:04 ◼ ► no, it won't be the marzipan. The marzipan thing is, is I think, a red herring. I don't know,
01:05:10 ◼ ► maybe that's the wrong term. I don't think it's related to the switch. I think it is entirely just
01:05:16 ◼ ► a developer play that that there's a, and then, you know, it is true that there's more iOS
01:05:22 ◼ ► developers than Mac developers. And there's an awful lot of services that have native iOS apps
01:05:28 ◼ ► that don't have native Mac apps, or if they have a quote, native Mac app, it's really just a,
01:05:34 ◼ ► you know, web view wrapper. It's not really a Mac app. And those things, it would be better to have
01:05:40 ◼ ► the iOS thing running like these marzipan apps. But I have a rant, I will get it out soon. I'll
01:05:47 ◼ ► get it out before the end of the month. But I think the marzipan apps are garbage. I think
01:05:52 ◼ ► they're, they're some of the worst apps on the Mac. I cannot believe Apple shipped them. I really
01:05:57 ◼ ► had bought, you know, I don't want to waste the whole rant here on the show. But I think they're
01:06:02 ◼ ► terrible apps. I think it's absolutely baffling. I it's crazy that there's a news app and you can't
01:06:08 ◼ ► double click a news article to open it in a window. Like to keep it open like, like, Oh,
01:06:13 ◼ ► here's the story I would like to keep open because it's a long story. I want to keep reading it, but
01:06:17 ◼ ► but I want to read other articles. No, you're, you're, it's, you're limited to the user
01:06:29 ◼ ► a garbage app. So I don't think that has anything to do with it. And they certainly couldn't
01:06:33 ◼ ► say marzipan apps only at this point, because, you know, they only have like these four toy
01:06:44 ◼ ► Intel switch, announce it at WWDC before there actually is the hardware and tell developers and
01:06:51 ◼ ► say, you know, I it's so funny because I watched the video again. And I just I've watched a bunch
01:06:57 ◼ ► of old Steve Jobs videos recently. Simply because I it occurred to me that we're at the point where
01:07:03 ◼ ► it's not so sad that he's dead anymore. Right? I don't mean that. That sounds callous. But it's
01:07:10 ◼ ► like enough time has gone by that it no longer feels like a fresh wound. And I can watch Steve
01:07:17 ◼ ► Jobs videos now and just enjoy them for what they are. And I watched that one. I watched the one
01:07:23 ◼ ► where he announced this switch to Intel. And it's so good. It's like five minutes. And it is like,
01:07:30 ◼ ► he conveys so much information. But it's so amazing. I tweeted it. It's like the arguments
01:07:35 ◼ ► he gives are exactly the arguments that they would give for switching to from Intel to arm.
01:07:41 ◼ ► It is entirely about not just performance, like he says, like, Look, I we promised you a year or
01:07:48 ◼ ► two ago, a g5 power book. We haven't shipped it, you know, that's on us. It's our fault.
01:07:53 ◼ ► That's our fault, because we promised it, you know, and he took the totally said, you know,
01:07:57 ◼ ► we're Apple, we're the ones who said we ship it, but we can't because it's not the chip isn't there.
01:08:10 ◼ ► machines we'd like to build, and we can't build those machines with the chips on their roadmap.
01:08:16 ◼ ► And it's not just about performance. It's about performance per watt." And then there's this chart
01:08:21 ◼ ► that shows performance per watt. And of course, the Intel chips had really high bars and the
01:08:26 ◼ ► PowerPC had puny little bars. It's like, "Wow, this is incredible performance per watt."
01:08:32 ◼ ► that's exactly what they're going to say about switching to ARM. I swear they could just take
01:08:39 ◼ ► the script and just have Phil Schiller say it instead of Steve Jobs. It is the exact argument.
01:08:45 ◼ ► So I think they announced it at WWDC. Tell developers, and here's Xcode whatever version
01:08:51 ◼ ► number makes it easy. If you've been writing independent, Swift is already, everything in
01:08:59 ◼ ► in Swift is already automatically just check a box and it'll all spit out ARM code. Your
01:09:04 ◼ ► x86 code, if you've been following our guidelines, all of your objective C code will do the same.
01:09:12 ◼ ► If you do have assembly, you're going to have, that's where you're, and it's rare these
01:09:18 ◼ ► days that people are writing assembly code, but if you do, we've got tools to help you,
01:09:23 ◼ ► whatever. But we're going to be shipping these next year and we will have some kind of developer
01:09:38 ◼ ► most and I think most modern apps will just literally just recompile. So the only problem
01:09:55 ◼ ► people who know is that as performant as these apples arm chips are for reasons that are
01:10:11 ◼ ► emulating a power PC on x 86 12 years ago, when they made that transition could fly like
01:10:19 ◼ ► you really didn't notice. I mean, if you were using something really, really performance
01:10:23 ◼ ► heavy you might notice, but regular day-to-day apps that you would use if you launched a
01:10:28 ◼ ► PowerPC app with what they call it, Rosetta was the technology. You didn't really notice.
01:10:47 ◼ ► they? And the one that everybody pays attention to, it's the one everybody's paying attention
01:11:18 ◼ ► enough like, there's enough Jenga pieces sort of yeah, stacked up here that if you look three years
01:11:23 ◼ ► down the road, you could see a lot of bizarro things popping out of the switch to arm with
01:11:30 ◼ ► with with what's going on with Adobe and a few of the pro apps on the iPad. The other thing that
01:11:35 ◼ ► Jobs did that I could see them replaying was he was like, now what about Mac OS 10? You know,
01:11:40 ◼ ► how are we going to get that running on Intel? He goes, Well, let me tell you, it's always been
01:11:45 ◼ ► been running on Intel. We've had, and he brought up like a Google Earth image of Apple's
01:12:13 ◼ ► right here. This is an Intel Mac. Like, and you know, he was like an hour into the keynote already.
01:12:18 ◼ ► Yeah. And I mean, the crowd just went nuts. I mean, they just went bananas. And of course he
01:12:23 ◼ ► did that. Of course, the whole thing was running on Intel up until then. But when he said it,
01:12:31 ◼ ► So I would imagine him doing the same thing again. And just saying, Oh, by the way, this
01:12:41 ◼ ► I'm excited for it. I can't wait. I mean, you know, you've used the air. I reviewed the air
01:12:45 ◼ ► I think it's I think it's pretty good. But there's it just doesn't have could be so much better. Yeah
01:12:59 ◼ ► Desert Island for 30 days and I can only take either the iPad Pro or the new MacBook Air
01:13:09 ◼ ► If I only had one I would rather have it. I think it's great. But man when you just got the new iPad Pro
01:13:16 ◼ ► And as frustrating as this over could be the hardware is so amazing. Yeah, man the MacBook Air just seems like oh my god
01:13:30 ◼ ► And you I feel I bought of course the 11-inch iPad Pro even though I had the 12.9 inch for review my wife
01:13:39 ◼ ► absolutely loves it. My wife loves the iPad. My wife is prototypical, uses her iPad way more than
01:13:46 ◼ ► every other device, phone, Mac combined, and just loves the 12.9 inch because if it's your main
01:13:52 ◼ ► computer, it's fantastic to have that 13 inch size. Me, I just love this tiny little 11 inch
01:14:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I have last year's 11. And I don't think I'd go up to the 12. Now, if Apple with iOS 13,
01:14:11 ◼ ► you know, make some moves, you know, I would, I would think about it pretty seriously, actually.
01:14:18 ◼ ► I don't know, I would have to be for me, probably never, just because I know I'm always going to
01:14:24 ◼ ► have a Mac until they pry it away from me. But I that's why I like having the secondary, portable,
01:14:31 ◼ ► biggish big way bigger than a phone screen. That just is optimized for being crazy small
01:14:45 ◼ ► three and we went sideways. So the pixel three. Is that your main phone? Yeah, although I'm
01:15:47 ◼ ► because I so quickly determined that there's just no way I want to use Android. I really
01:16:23 ◼ ► weight. It is, I forget exactly how many grams. I actually got out my little precision kitchen
01:16:42 ◼ ► max. But it doesn't feel like insubstantially light. It feels like, oh, this is the way
01:16:50 ◼ ► Yeah, the the weirdest craziest thing for me is when I bounced from pixel 3 back to an iPhone 10
01:16:57 ◼ ► The difference here. It's it's measured on like, you know millimeters me. It's gotta be less than 10 millimeters of
01:17:11 ◼ ► Yeah, but you just there's something about it that you're like, oh, this is the iPhone 10 is wide
01:17:30 ◼ ► There's just absolutely no way to judge a watch from a photograph because you can say well like I like the style of it
01:17:44 ◼ ► I've got a watch that's twelve point seven millimeters high and it's not too high and this one's 13 millimeters
01:17:53 ◼ ► And then you put it on your wrist and it feels like it's a bubble, you know, and it's the same with these phones
01:17:59 ◼ ► It's like I forget how many millimeter it's just tiny tiny little bit difference in width
01:18:06 ◼ ► They look about the same but then you put it in your hand and it feels narrower. Yeah. Yeah completely. I don't know
01:18:16 ◼ ► It's totally fair. I'm like there are many things that bug me about Android it is hard to articulate
01:18:45 ◼ ► Instagram Instagram is I don't know if you've heard of it. It's pretty well known app. I
01:19:01 ◼ ► Dot-dot-dot, but I swear to God but the dot-dot-dot I think is I think it's wider than the M
01:19:15 ◼ ► Well, I don't have the zoom setting, but I do have the font size turned up one click because the font is tiny.
01:19:20 ◼ ► That's another thing that I don't like. Like you can turn the font size up and it still is tiny.
01:19:30 ◼ ► Yeah, it it's really there's little things. There's so many little things like that that just make me crazy.
01:19:44 ◼ ► So that most stuff is in folders. So I actually don't actually when I look at my home screen
01:20:16 ◼ ► It's better than I remember it being on the gmail app went through a period of like two three years a couple years ago
01:20:39 ◼ ► And so they finally they finally used the tech from sparrow to like fix up the gmail app
01:20:44 ◼ ► But it took them way too long to get it done. Yeah, the spiral guys had a good Mac app, right?
01:20:56 ◼ ► You know and there's other apps, you know Twitter the actual if you use the Twitter branded Twitter app
01:21:08 ◼ ► You know I could get by like I've said many many times before if I had to if you put a gun to my head
01:21:33 ◼ ► I was in handcuffs. Yeah. Yeah, I'm able to switch between iOS and Android pretty seamlessly
01:21:38 ◼ ► I I don't really run into anything. But the reason I could do that is I'm pretty militant about
01:21:45 ◼ ► Turning off iMessage because I need to use Android so often. Yeah, and that's that's the only thing that allows me to do that
01:21:56 ◼ ► wrote a column recently about you know, I think it was specifically when she was testing the pixel 3 about the pain of
01:22:39 ◼ ► Android phone is because the home screen lets me put the the icons at the bottom of the
01:23:13 ◼ ► They're used to be called TouchWiz, never made fun of it. And then they changed the name and now
01:23:18 ◼ ► they've got this thing. I think it's called One UI. And what they have done is they have made all
01:23:24 ◼ ► the headers on all of their apps, massive. And so literally everything is shifted down to the bottom
01:23:30 ◼ ► half of the screen. So like you open up messages and there's like the top half of the screen is
01:23:34 ◼ ► white space at the word messages. And then you can see like three or four of your recent conversations.
01:23:40 ◼ ► It's hilarious. I did see screenshots of that. And it's like you can kind of, I mean, maybe I
01:23:47 ◼ ► err too heavily on these companies rip off Apple narrative, but you can kind of see where there was
01:23:53 ◼ ► a meeting where they looked at like iOS 11 and they saw these big headers that Apple started using
01:23:58 ◼ ► these big bold headers at the top and they're like well if Apple went that big what if we went bigger
01:24:03 ◼ ► we can go way bigger we'll beat them let's ship this because then we'll be first and they'll be
01:24:09 ◼ ► forced to copy us and make the font 192 points and it's it is kind of funny too because we've
01:24:18 ◼ ► reached this world where everybody is sort of like yeah I guess the whole world does want you know
01:24:36 ◼ ► actually justify it before you throw that thing on there because it does like it does look silly
01:24:41 ◼ ► and we've convinced ourselves that it doesn't but it just does. What do you think on the Pixel 3?
01:24:46 ◼ ► so I have the smaller one too, and there's no notch. It just instead has symmetrical chin and
01:24:53 ◼ ► forehead. But they're small, smaller than in the old days, and I'm fine with it. But they rounded
01:24:59 ◼ ► the corners off on the display. And there's something about the way that they rounded the
01:25:04 ◼ ► corners off that I can't put my finger on, and I don't—it's like there's not enough of an inset
01:26:11 ◼ ► how much effort they put into getting the corners right on the LCD of the iPhone 10 are and
01:26:20 ◼ ► Guess this is an OLED. This isn't LCD, but you know, it's still getting these round corners is you know
01:26:27 ◼ ► There's work to be done and I know it need I didn't Eli break out a microscope with the 10 are just to show
01:26:33 ◼ ► You know and it's even more detailed than you think like yeah, literally at the microscopic level. Yeah
01:26:47 ◼ ► It just feels crowded for some reason it is a much bigger phone than I ever thought I would like
01:26:54 ◼ ► And I you know, it is a very large screen but yet because of the way they rounded the corners
01:27:05 ◼ ► I absolutely despised about Android and could I'll just never ever ever ever get used to it is
01:27:10 ◼ ► The the way that notifications get icons up there in the in the status bar. Oh, you don't like looking at the little
01:27:18 ◼ ► Stand it. I can't stand the way that if you've got three from Instagram, you've got three Instagram's up there in the status bar
01:27:30 ◼ ► Mean, I think you can do do not disturb. But yeah, you might be right that you can't turn it off
01:27:49 ◼ ► They fixed it a little bit with iOS 12, but the speed with which I can go through notifications on Android
01:27:59 ◼ ► I can I could pull that thing down see everything sort of stacked and grouped together swipe way the stuff
01:28:07 ◼ ► Just way more onerous to me in some way see and I love the iPhone ones this but now that they've added
01:28:22 ◼ ► But I totally get your take on this like I don't I don't I don't think I Android's notification thing is bad
01:28:28 ◼ ► I just don't like it. Yeah, I hate the way that you can swipe things this either way and it does the same thing
01:28:34 ◼ ► Like I don't know why and it because in some ways I kind of see how it shouldn't matter whether you swipe left or right?
01:28:41 ◼ ► Because there's nothing semantic that says, you know dismiss one way take action the other right?
01:28:46 ◼ ► There's no natural way to swipe. So why not be able to swipe both ways? Yeah, and I so I think that's less of a
01:29:09 ◼ ► a good design because you're just swiping off. It shouldn't matter whether it's left-right,
01:29:17 ◼ ► same problem but in the opposite direction. So the thing I most want to do with most notifications is
01:29:21 ◼ ► swipe them to make them go away. Just dismiss them. And the fact that on iOS, you can't—it's
01:29:27 ◼ ► always two actions to just dismiss a notification. You it's a swipe and a tap or like you it's a swipe
01:29:33 ◼ ► to open. But if you just want the thing to just go away, you can't do that. You got to swipe and
01:29:39 ◼ ► then tap clear. No, you can swipe it all the way and it'll go away. Which direction do you swipe
01:29:47 ◼ ► it left or right swipe it to the left. Oh, if you and then if you keep if you Okay, but if you do a
01:30:21 ◼ ► the density of the of the Android one makes me feel like I'm a little bit under attack.
01:30:29 ◼ ► are like, they're like a lower cognitive load. It's not about a dumb mind. It's that there's
01:30:35 ◼ ► there's less to think about when you're looking at them for sure. And so I appreciate that because I
01:30:51 ◼ ► This is baffling is why in the world did Google take this phone which is otherwise so nice
01:31:07 ◼ ► Didn't have the pixel - I had the pixel one and the pixel one did a thing where they they put like an etching on
01:31:13 ◼ ► The power button ran. I never liked that. I was like, why would you just does not feel like a nice button? It feels like
01:31:20 ◼ ► It feels industrial. It feels like something in the shop, you know, like a metal working
01:31:40 ◼ ► a nice feeling volume button. It has a smaller camera bump than the iPhone. So put aside
01:31:48 ◼ ► the single lens versus dual lens. It's just it just in and of itself, a smaller camera bump is
01:31:54 ◼ ► inherently a good thing if image quality is maintained. Yeah. And we can we can go on a
01:32:01 ◼ ► whole separate rant later about, you know, photography on the pixel three, but inarguably,
01:32:06 ◼ ► the pixel three takes good pictures for a cell phone, very good pictures for a cell phone.
01:32:13 ◼ ► So the fact that it does it with a smaller camera bump is a good thing. But why in the world did they
01:32:18 ◼ ► do this laser etching thing on the glass on the back? What this photographs do not do justice to
01:32:27 ◼ ► this what they've done to the glass. It you can't you have to feel it to understand it and it is
01:32:35 ◼ ► to me it is not pleasant to the touch. It is it is not pleasant. At times sometimes depending on
01:32:43 ◼ ► the texture of my skin. And we're at that time of the year on the East Coast where my hands will go
01:32:48 ◼ ► from dry to sweaty, you know, because I've got gloves on and my hands get real sweaty. Or I've,
01:32:55 ◼ ► you know, it's just cold and I don't have gloves on and my hands get real dry, you know. So my hands
01:33:00 ◼ ► are all over the place skin-wise. And there are times when it has plenty of grip, but there are
01:33:05 ◼ ► times when it is the slipperiest goddamn phone I've ever owned in my life. Yeah. Now, Dan Seifert,
01:33:15 ◼ ► one plus phones do it and i don't know man like the the this like window shade thing they call
01:33:23 ◼ ► it where the top is glossy and the bottom is matte has been like the identifying feature of
01:33:28 ◼ ► pixel phones for a while if they just made it glossy glass people would have assumed it was
01:33:32 ◼ ► a samsung but you can see what the glossy glass part feels great and looks great and and it's
01:33:39 ◼ ► Obviously what the glass started at before they laser etched it so it could have just been the glossy back
01:33:50 ◼ ► Or they could have etched it on the inside so that it's like that like some kind of the color
01:34:00 ◼ ► So every phone that comes out every flagship phone that people pay attention to always has a bunch of gates
01:34:32 ◼ ► Scratches more easily than the glossy part of the glass because if you take a key and rub it up against the phone
01:34:40 ◼ ► It is the most terrifying thing you've ever seen because it's just you get these massive things that look like horrific gashes
01:34:51 ◼ ► And so it's actually you know, it's just like you're you're filling it in with the rattle and then you can rub it off
01:34:56 ◼ ► and so people did a bunch of videos showing that and then there was a YouTube fight and blah but
01:35:01 ◼ ► At the end of the day. I do think this thing scratches like I've got scratches on this thing
01:35:06 ◼ ► I don't think I would have had otherwise and it's not because I was like taking a diamond to it
01:35:23 ◼ ► And and I get so frustrated when I see articles like why does why does Google even bother with hardware?
01:35:29 ◼ ► they're, you know, their pixels never going to amount to anything in the world in terms of
01:35:34 ◼ ► marketing share, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, if you're only going to get into hardware, if you
01:35:38 ◼ ► have 20% market share, or something like that, it's, there's only going to be three hardware
01:35:42 ◼ ► makers, right? I think it's a great, I think it's great that Google is doing hardware. I think it's
01:35:48 ◼ ► great that Microsoft is doing hardware regardless of whether they are industry Titans in terms of
01:36:12 ◼ ► like, just 1015 years behind Apple in certain ways. And one of them is like Apple made the
01:36:18 ◼ ► same mistake. 15 years ago, there was an iPod nano. Yes. That was made of a crosswise. Right.
01:36:28 ◼ ► You could actually scratch it by staring at it hard enough, like a good hard stare. And it would
01:36:35 ◼ ► scratch the the polycarbonate whatever the material was of this of this iPod nano. And I remember I
01:37:17 ◼ ► After after a thing like that and no product ever comes out again that doesn't go through
01:37:38 ◼ ► They used to Nexus phones and they were basically they'd work with some company like Samsung or HTC or Huawei and make it
01:37:48 ◼ ► And so this hardware is good and it is Google made hardware. You know, they did design it top to bottom blah blah blah
01:37:55 ◼ ► So it's not like those old the first pixel phone or the old Nexus phones were really it was technically like a Huawei phone or whatever
01:38:05 ◼ ► It takes a minute to integrate a whole damn company that you bought into your systems and into your processes and into your product roadmap
01:38:13 ◼ ► And so I think that next year's pixel will be the first phone hardware from Google that actually takes
01:38:19 ◼ ► Full advantage of the fact that they bought a phone company. Well, I'm not just a phone company
01:38:36 ◼ ► You know and it was funny because I I don't know how I remember this because I wasn't really I'd never really cared about
01:38:43 ◼ ► Windows Phone but back when Windows Phone was a thing HTC was far and away the number one Windows Phone maker
01:38:58 ◼ ► something to stay in it and then you turn around and realize that you're on this Windows Phone boat and you
01:39:13 ◼ ► Sidestepped from being the number one Windows Phone maker to being a top or maybe for a while the top Android handset maker
01:39:20 ◼ ► Really? Well, I thought that that was a sign that boy. That's a that's a well-run company
01:39:26 ◼ ► That is it, you know is you know keeping their eyes on the horizon not just looking down at what they're doing right now
01:39:32 ◼ ► And then all of a sudden they're gone. Yeah. Well, so I mean they've been they they made the very first Android phone
01:39:37 ◼ ► The g1 and they made a bunch of really good Android phones later and they they were really good with materials
01:39:53 ◼ ► Samsung's marketing budget right and like that's that's kind of the whole story is with a lot of Android manufacturers, especially in the West is
01:40:00 ◼ ► Nobody could compete with with Samsung and marketing and Samsung was good enough high end quality
01:40:06 ◼ ► That you know if you walk into a carrier store, which is what everybody did back in the day to buy a phone
01:40:12 ◼ ► They would just push you to Samsung and that was the end of it. Yeah. Yeah, that's but that makes sense
01:40:21 ◼ ► The other thing I like I bought the the Google I don't know I you I know from your tweet where you showed the unfortunate
01:40:28 ◼ ► Scratch on your your pixel 3 that you don't you weren't using a case at least but I bought the Google case
01:40:55 ◼ ► They the only time they ever touch it without a case is when they take it out of the box after
01:41:03 ◼ ► You know and people are you know, they're very expensive devices that are easily broken when dropped and so I understand that
01:41:16 ◼ ► a heart surgeon treats the heart as they move it from the icebox into the transplanted patient.
01:41:24 ◼ ► Until they get that iPhone into a case, they act like they're handling a raw egg or something.
01:41:44 ◼ ► kind of stand. And I would say it's up there with the very best iPhone cases I've seen.
01:42:03 ◼ ► at the New York office at The Verge who has a Pixel swears by that cloth case. They all
01:42:08 ◼ ► I like it. And I kind of wish it was available for iPhone because the thing I do like having
01:42:12 ◼ ► an iPhone case for and I keep one in my backpack, but I like it when I'm like on vacation, or
01:42:18 ◼ ► we go to Disney World or something like that. And when I'm using my phone as a camera most
01:42:22 ◼ ► of the time, so I'm on vacation, and I'm in tourist mode, and I'm taking lots of snapshots.
01:42:26 ◼ ► I like having a case for grippiness because when I'm using my phone when I'm, you know,
01:42:31 ◼ ► doing that, you know, Twitter and email and stuff like that, I never feel like I'm going
01:42:35 ◼ ► to drop it. It's the times when I you know, I've had very few drops over the years, but
01:42:54 ◼ ► This case to me is like the cloth is really nice for grippiness because it's not sticky
01:43:02 ◼ ► But if you have like, if your hands are sweating because it's hot or something like that,
01:43:08 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah, honestly, the reason I don't like it is hitting the fingerprint sensor on the back.
01:43:14 ◼ ► There's just like an extra little angle that drives me crazy, which is silly, but there it is.
01:43:20 ◼ ► Trenton Larkin Well, and I will tell you, as I tell you also why I can't really bear to use this
01:43:24 ◼ ► as my main phone, I cannot go back not to having face ID. That's another factor. Yeah. And I kind
01:43:29 ◼ ► of knew that going in. Because back in June, when iOS 12 betas came out, I my habit for years has
01:44:06 ◼ ► I was like, all right, now I put my sim in there. I'm going to use this as my main phone
01:44:10 ◼ ► as I get used to iOS 12. And like an hour later, after the 10th time of just staring at it and
01:44:16 ◼ ► like, Hey, why isn't this unlocking? I was like, I can't use this. I, you know, took, I spent more
01:44:21 ◼ ► time installing the beta on it than I did actually using it before I realized I I'm ruined forever.
01:44:27 ◼ ► Yeah. And I have to say that having a fingerprint sensor on the back, it's not horrible,
01:44:33 ◼ ► but it's not. It's like a separate thing, right? Because you can't unlock, well, you can unlock
01:44:38 ◼ ► the phone with it, but when you're dealing with notifications on the notification screen, it's
01:44:42 ◼ ► an entirely different thing. Yeah. Well, and also like you just have to pick it up. So there's a
01:44:49 ◼ ► little, just like if it's sitting in a charging stand or something and you want to unlock it
01:44:52 ◼ ► without taking it off the charging stand, you know, you can't, you got to like tilt it forward,
01:44:56 ◼ ► you got to punch in the code and that's super frustrating. Yeah. And I, the thing, I'm sure
01:45:02 ◼ ► people who listen to my show are mostly all on iPhone 10 already. Well, not mostly. I know,
01:45:07 ◼ ► you know, I, majority, I'm sure are, you know, surprise, surprise, it's an early adopter crowd.
01:45:13 ◼ ► But for those who aren't, and I know that there's like a natural skepticism of people who like,
01:45:19 ◼ ► or even love touch ID, who are just so skeptical about switching, you know, that, that the,
01:45:26 ◼ ► that the new way forward from the iPhone 10 forward is not touch ID plus face ID. It's,
01:45:31 ◼ ► you've touch away, touch ID is gone. Now you have face ID. The thing I can't emphasize enough is
01:45:36 ◼ ► that once you get used to it, it's like your phone isn't locked at all, right? You just pick it up,
01:45:41 ◼ ► and it's raised awake, or tap to wake, right? You just tap it if you need to. And then you see a
01:45:46 ◼ ► notification and you're like, Oh, I would love to read that news story. I this headline is very
01:45:51 ◼ ► enticing. And you just, you know, open the notification and now you're reading the article.
01:45:56 ◼ ► It was like you never even thought about the unlock part. And going back to something where
01:46:11 ◼ ► when they're gonna—if they're gonna switch the in-screen fingerprint sensors that are out there
01:46:16 ◼ ► are pretty slow relative to what you can get if you just have a separate one. So maybe they can
01:48:42 ◼ ► very useful if you're the sort of person who takes a lot of pictures of themselves in it and wants to
01:48:47 ◼ ► see the background or takes a picture of yourself with friends and family right next to you. It
01:48:52 ◼ ► it it does exactly with it. Google says it does you know it is a good camera for getting more
01:49:04 ◼ ► Well, it's a weird focal length at all sorts of other areas in the way that why super wide angle
01:49:11 ◼ ► fisheye. I mean, I wouldn't quite call it a fisheye lens, but it's close because it's so wide.
01:49:16 ◼ ► And there's all sorts of stuff that looks bad if you get it at the wrong distance, but it's,
01:49:21 ◼ ► you know, it's surprise, surprise optimized for arm's length. It is weird, though, that they have
01:49:26 ◼ ► two pictures on the to me, the lesser side, not the greater side. I mean, two cameras on the lesser
01:49:32 ◼ ► side. Well, I think that, I mean, it's weird to me as well, but I'm also not a millennial. Right?
01:49:40 ◼ ► I mean, it's easy to make jokes about millennials, but I do think that in a lot of ways,
01:49:44 ◼ ► the selfie camera is the most important camera on a lot of phones. And I say that with no judgment.
01:49:52 ◼ ► Right. You know, I've even budged. I went a long time. I used to be, my other pet peeve years ago,
01:50:00 ◼ ► nobody even talks about blogs anymore, period. But for a long time in the early years of
01:50:04 ◼ ► Daring Fireball, I went out of my way to always use the word web blog instead of blog. Because
01:50:16 ◼ ► But I went out of my way for a long time to not use the word selfie. I still do sometimes. I will
01:50:25 ◼ ► use, there's a lot of places in Daring Fireball where I will use the term self-portrait, where
01:50:36 ◼ ► I feel like if even Apple calls them selfies and every time Phil Schiller says the word selfie,
01:50:47 ◼ ► if he's using the word selfie, then I should be using it too. It's give it up. It's a word.
01:51:05 ◼ ► actually state a question what really when they misuse the phrase beg the question that's
01:51:11 ◼ ► I I'm big on people who say that they're nauseous when they mean that they're nauseated because
01:51:38 ◼ ► a descriptivist rather than prescriptivist, the language evolves and it's, you know, using
01:51:44 ◼ ► nauseous to mean nauseated is so common that it's actually accepted in some places. But
01:52:02 ◼ ► All right, let me take a final break here and thank our third and final sponsor of this
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01:52:47 ◼ ► And they work on on things like breathability so that you sleep cool and your body temperature
01:52:53 ◼ ► Stays consistent through the whole night. It's a big deal. You get too hot you get too cold. You're gonna wake up
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01:53:25 ◼ ► say that's their way of saying it's the lower price one, but it's great. It is a terrific
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01:54:23 ◼ ► you're not satisfied. No questions asked. They will take it back. And I've had readers say to me,
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01:54:31 ◼ ► back and they're going to try to, you know, you know, talk you out of it. They're like, Oh,
01:54:35 ◼ ► no problem. When, when can we pick it up? It's it could not be easier. That's how confident they are
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01:55:14 ◼ ► yeah, there it is. Yep, I use it. Love it. I have one. I love it. Another sometimes sponsor
01:55:19 ◼ ► of the show is hello, who sells these buckwheat pillows that my wife and son adore. Yeah,
01:55:25 ◼ ► absolutely adore. I don't I like it. I you know, I'm not going to speak poorly of them as a
01:55:29 ◼ ► former sponsor of the show. My wife and son love I like the just the sort of regular pillow that
01:55:59 ◼ ► 3 camera. It is an excellent camera. But before I get to the camera, I have to say this. Here's
01:56:07 ◼ ► the other thing about the Pixel 3 that I just, as an iPhone user, I cannot believe. I can't
01:56:20 ◼ ► Which of the ones does it default to? Does it default to the super adaptive crazy camera?
01:56:31 ◼ ► don't even know if you're just a typical user and you think, ah, advanced, I, I, you know,
01:56:43 ◼ ► options, natural, boosted and adaptive. And they have a photo of like a hummingbird and
01:56:53 ◼ ► the difference is. The default is the last one adaptive. And I think it's crazy. I don't
01:57:00 ◼ ► know what the hell they're, I don't know what it's adapting to other than making everything
01:57:04 ◼ ► look bad. It is so super saturated. I have no idea why they don't call that one boosted.
01:57:13 ◼ ► Yeah. Okay. So natural is supposed to be straight RGB or sRGB, right? Boosted is supposed to
01:57:21 ◼ ► be straight SRGB, but they boost it like 10%. And then adaptive is adaptive to the colors
01:57:46 ◼ ► history is fascinating. So number one, the context to know, and by the way, none of this
01:57:52 ◼ ► is like an apologia. None of this is saying that these are the right decisions. I'm just
01:57:57 ◼ ► like the con—I'm trying to explain the decisions I think they've made. So number one is if
01:58:00 ◼ ► you look at any other Android phone, and especially a Samsung phone, it makes the even the adaptive
01:58:07 ◼ ► super vivid mode on the Pixel 3 look washed out and muted. It is the most insane colors
01:58:13 ◼ ► you've ever seen on a screen in your entire life. Then Samsung has always tuned its colors that way.
01:58:18 ◼ ► And so I think that there is a context for in the Android world where if they don't have the default
01:58:24 ◼ ► presentation of the screen be bonkers, then people will think it looks washed out in the store
01:58:28 ◼ ► relative to a Samsung phone in the same way that like all the wrong settings are on the TVs at
01:58:33 ◼ ► Best Buy. Right. Right. And it's like a blue state, red state America where it's like, you know,
01:58:38 ◼ ► there's parts of the country where it's totally, you know, very typical to have like 10 guns in
01:58:42 ◼ ► your house and other parts of the country where it's like, it's shocking if you own a gun,
01:58:47 ◼ ► you know, and it's like, wow, what a difference, you know, and it's like, we've sort of gotten
01:58:50 ◼ ► like, that's, it's not political. It's obviously aesthetic. But Apple adheres to this very, very,
01:58:58 ◼ ► very to me, absolutely pristine color space that is realistic. And yeah, and not really,
01:59:04 ◼ ► just almost with scientific, literally, maybe not even almost like with scientific rigor,
01:59:11 ◼ ► trying to be realistic. And yeah, Samsung and other Android makers have pushed the Android world to
01:59:17 ◼ ► this vivid nightmare escape. And that leads me to the second part of the context, which was last
01:59:23 ◼ ► year's Pixel 2 XL had such a terrible horrific screen that they are probably overcompensating
01:59:31 ◼ ► with the way that they handle reds in particular on the screen. So we actually pulled our review
01:59:36 ◼ ► for a while because we were worried about burn-in, brought it back, but the screen was like cast off
01:59:46 ◼ ► like you were looking at it through a sheet of parchment paper, and it was just, it was
01:59:51 ◼ ► a terrible screen. And so I think when they got better suppliers here for these two screens,
02:00:01 ◼ ► is which now. Anyway, I think they, when they tuned the adaptive colors, they turned it
02:00:09 ◼ ► up relative to what they had on the Pixel 2 to like show that there was a clear difference
02:00:13 ◼ ► in the screen. Because their defense of the original Pixel 2 screen was, hey, no, these
02:00:17 ◼ ► are actually color accurate. We scientifically tested the colors, but it just looks terrible.
02:00:23 ◼ ► And so well, it's funny because displays are displays are a funny thing to review. Because
02:00:29 ◼ ► you can't show you can't really show a display because you're whoever's watching your video
02:00:35 ◼ ► or looking at the photos on your review is looking at those on its on a display, right?
02:00:40 ◼ ► Yeah, you can't really show a display on a display. You know, I mean, you can and there
02:00:57 ◼ ► pixel one, I didn't really use it a lot. Maybe I should just get one every other year. And
02:01:00 ◼ ► I went into a Verizon store. And I remember reading the reviews, and I picked one up and
02:01:29 ◼ ► I just can't believe that this defaults to this adaptive thing and that it's not a first run setup
02:01:37 ◼ ► thing. And I totally get that like maybe Apple airs on the side of too many steps in the first
02:01:44 ◼ ► run, you know, and I know that it's it's a tricky balance because you don't want to make it feel
02:01:49 ◼ ► like you're taking a the SAT before you get to use your new device, you know, nobody likes setting up.
02:01:56 ◼ ► But you have to ask some questions. And if you're even thinking about making the default
02:02:00 ◼ ► so such a polarizing decision, I can't believe that they don't even bring it up as an option.
02:02:07 ◼ ► I really can't believe it. I thought and Matthew Panzorino of TechCrunch, he got a review unit of
02:02:14 ◼ ► the Pixel 3 around the same time. And so we both had them when we were in New York recently for the
02:02:24 ◼ ► And we're both very at the time we're very very new to the pixel three. No, it wasn't for the 10-hour thing
02:02:31 ◼ ► It was for the iPad event because I remember I saw you I was when we saw you guys in the green room then
02:02:38 ◼ ► Panzerino and I are both new to the pixel three and we're taking pictures and we're both like what the hell are all these people
02:02:43 ◼ ► Saying that this is a great camera. This is the worst camera I've ever seen that doesn't get any of the colors, right and
02:02:54 ◼ ► Maybe it's the display and I like sent one to myself and I looked at it on my iPhone and I was like, oh
02:03:03 ◼ ► Right. Yeah, and we were like, oh my god, and then we started digging around and you know
02:03:25 ◼ ► a lot of indoor areas, I'll hold up an iPhone hold up the pixel three indoors. And I'm you know,
02:03:32 ◼ ► so I'm looking at the same scene on an iPhone through the camera on the pixel three through
02:03:36 ◼ ► the camera and with my eyes, looking at the actual scene. And the colors on the iPhone look exactly
02:03:46 ◼ ► picture, send it to my iPhone or look at it on a Mac and they look, the colors are perfect.
02:04:00 ◼ ► - So part of my gripe about the argument that the Pixel 3 is the best camera phone in the
02:04:09 ◼ ► have a good viewfinder because the colors aren't right. Like you kind of have to trust what you see,
02:04:16 ◼ ► you have to just trust that it's going to get the camera right, because it's not going to look right
02:04:19 ◼ ► when you look at the screen. Right? Yeah, I mean, that's fair. But I mean, I guess, for me, it's,
02:04:26 ◼ ► you know, the reason for me to take a photo is to send it to somebody and nobody owns a pixel
02:04:31 ◼ ► three. So they're gonna have a better display. It is it was it was shocking. And it is it shows
02:04:38 ◼ ► how spoiled I am and maybe how insular I am to the Apple world where I'm just so used to perfectly
02:04:45 ◼ ► calibrated displays that I never have to worry about that it didn't occur to me for days that it
02:04:50 ◼ ► was the display and not the camera. I really thought that guys like you, the rest of the guys
02:04:55 ◼ ► at the verge like Vlad, I thought you guys were like pulling the biggest punk in the history of
02:04:59 ◼ ► the world. I'm like, I wasted it. I spent like 700 bucks on this phone because the bird said it was
02:05:32 ◼ ► range. But the camera is good. I do see why people who are fans of the Pixel 3 don't really talk
02:05:41 ◼ ► about video. Video is not bad, but it's not good. It's not great. And it's definitely a place where
02:06:22 ◼ ► thing. I think it's an image signal processing performance thing is video is always a crop of the
02:06:30 ◼ ► sensor. Like you don't get the full you know, when you switch if you ever know, you know,
02:06:34 ◼ ► just in case if you're not a big fan, just open up your iPhone or whatever phone you have. Look at
02:06:40 ◼ ► the still photos at one x magnification switch to video and it zooms in a little is what it looks
02:07:54 ◼ ► It's close but it's certainly in the ballpark and in certain ways. It's you know, it's it's better
02:08:14 ◼ ► I do think that they tend to look a little bit more dramatic. They're a little bit more contrasty. Yeah
02:08:25 ◼ ► A little more yellow a little bit less dramatic and a tiny little bit less contrasty compared to the pixel 2
02:08:31 ◼ ► So Google actually moves the aesthetics of its images and its image processing a little bit closer to what the iPhone does
02:08:41 ◼ ► But you know, and I told you, we did the family Christmas tree thing today. And I took I had
02:08:46 ◼ ► both phones with me and I have some photos and I was looking at them just before we started
02:08:49 ◼ ► recording and there was a couple I took of my son and you know, he's surrounded by green
02:08:54 ◼ ► Christmas trees. And I had to say that I like the pixel one better because it was more contrasty
02:09:00 ◼ ► and the green was very like a rich, vibrant green of these trees. Whereas the phone the
02:09:47 ◼ ► That's gonna lead to like one's gonna win some situations one's gonna win in other situations. Yeah cases
02:09:57 ◼ ► I don't know why but and I've taken a ton of photos with that. I forget how many I took at least 600
02:10:08 ◼ ► Decide asks you if you'd like to take a different frame because the subject was looking away
02:10:15 ◼ ► And the other thing is in over a month with hundreds of pictures taken it has never once
02:10:27 ◼ ► Really? Yeah. Oh, that's yeah. I've had a couple that were a little bit a little bit off
02:10:43 ◼ ► Yeah, there was it's and it's sort of spooky that that the machine learning is so good at identifying a
02:10:50 ◼ ► Hmm your could the subject of this is clearly a human being and this human being doesn't really look good. Yeah, what's
02:11:30 ◼ ► And somehow they managed to avoid that for the most part on this camera, the stuff that they do
02:11:37 ◼ ► feels pretty well integrated. And when you use it, it's, you know, it seems like it's worth using.
02:11:43 ◼ ► It's a very well done app. It's not just that the features are there and the machine learning
02:11:49 ◼ ► and the AI and what you know, the this ignorant image chip that they have, whatever. It's not just
02:11:54 ◼ ► the engineering. It's to me, it's by far and away, my favorite app on the device. It's a
02:12:00 ◼ ► really nice app and you know in some ways you know there's there's a it's not that different
02:12:06 ◼ ► from using the iphone camera app i mean you know like i don't know they put like the button to
02:12:11 ◼ ► switch from the front to the back on the left instead of the right and well you know that's
02:12:15 ◼ ► just a choice but uh i don't know it just it it doesn't get in your way and like you said it sounds
02:12:21 ◼ ► like ah there's a bunch of features how much how annoying are they going to be uh and not they're
02:12:25 ◼ ► not annoying. There's an interesting philosophical difference between Google and Apple that I
02:12:32 ◼ ► thought about as I've used this because I've I didn't get I didn't I'm not enough of an
02:12:38 ◼ ► Android nerd. I didn't want to screw the phone up. So I didn't get the night sight thing when it was
02:12:49 ◼ ► And I got it and I you know, it's obviously it you know, because it's the only phone in the world
02:12:54 ◼ ► that has this feature. It's, it's, you know, super exciting. And it, you know, at times is,
02:13:00 ◼ ► it's often amazing. And at times, it gives you a picture that you just simply couldn't get
02:13:07 ◼ ► otherwise. Yeah. That's what a picture worth keeping. There are other times where it takes
02:13:13 ◼ ► pictures. And I, you know, even in the example pictures that people have posted, where it's like,
02:13:18 ◼ ► that's technically amazing, but it, I don't like it, because it looks like daytime. It's so it's
02:13:23 ◼ ► Yeah, it gets such a good exposure that it doesn't look it doesn't look true to the scene like, you know
02:13:32 ◼ ► Well, that's why I'm really glad they made it a separate mode if they had tried to build that into like something that happens
02:13:38 ◼ ► Automatically in the main camera. I would have flipped a lid because I want I want consistency and like I want to get know what?
02:13:46 ◼ ► I'm gonna get when I click the camera shutter, but with night sight you kind of don't know
02:13:53 ◼ ► Situation to try and take a photo. Let me give this a shot. Yeah instead of just replace the main camera function
02:14:08 ◼ ► If you don't want to you can just take your picture as usual take your chances holding your hand still and then if you want
02:14:14 ◼ ► To go night sight it's you know, just tap that button that pops up only when the phone thinks it might be useful
02:14:21 ◼ ► Yep, and so you're not surprised, you know, you're in night sight and therefore, you know, you have to take three or four seconds
02:14:29 ◼ ► I think you know, maybe two three seconds, whatever it is to hold the camera while it's
02:14:38 ◼ ► So the thought that I had at first was well, this is interesting and it's obviously useful
02:14:42 ◼ ► And so, you know, it'll probably spread to other phones including the iPhone in some way whether it's next year or two years whenever
02:14:50 ◼ ► But now now that I'm using it and thinking about the way the iPhone works and looking at the difference between the portrait modes on
02:14:56 ◼ ► The two phones it occurs to me that maybe not maybe the iPhone wouldn't ever do this because there's clearly a philosophical difference between Apple and
02:15:11 ◼ ► Maybe they could always change their mind in the future but so far they only do things that they can do live in the viewfinder
02:15:19 ◼ ► Google will do things that happen afterwards. So in Google's portrait mode, portrait mode
02:15:25 ◼ ► is the perfect example. When you're doing portrait mode on the iPhone, you see the portrait
02:15:40 ◼ ► Google phone, when you're in portrait mode, it doesn't look any different than the regular
02:15:44 ◼ ► mode. And then you take the picture. And it applies the portrait mode in the next maybe
02:15:50 ◼ ► second or two. Yeah, you can even see it sometimes. Yeah, like in night mode. If you like,
02:15:55 ◼ ► you hop into the picture right away. You like see the garbage and the sun that resolves. Right?
02:15:59 ◼ ► It's exactly right. Night sites. Perfect like that. Because you take it and of course, I'm super
02:16:04 ◼ ► excited to be taking night sight pictures. So I'm like, Oh, here's a good time. Oh, I'll take it and
02:16:09 ◼ ► it's like up. This isn't that great. And then say, Oh, no, wait. Oh, that's interesting. You know,
02:16:14 ◼ ► but it takes that much time. Yeah. And night sight now so portrait mode obviously can happen
02:16:20 ◼ ► in real time because it Apple does it in real time. Right. But night sight by definition can't
02:16:26 ◼ ► happen in real time. You can't right. You can't in real time preview what three seconds worth of
02:16:31 ◼ ► exposures algorithmically stitched together into a cohesive sharp still image will look like by
02:16:38 ◼ ► definition because you need the three seconds. And so I wonder if Apple will do it. I mean,
02:16:44 ◼ ► maybe they, if it becomes popular enough and other phones pick it up, they might have to,
02:16:49 ◼ ► quote unquote. Yeah, I hadn't thought of the idea that Apple philosophically doesn't want to do
02:16:54 ◼ ► anything that you can't preview live in the viewfinder. And I'm trying to think of like,
02:17:03 ◼ ► I don't know, if you think that's really like a philosophical thing that they want to believe in.
02:17:13 ◼ ► It's why the 10 R that you know, the 10 R has portrait mode and 10 R does everything in real
02:17:23 ◼ ► time to even with a single camera, but the 10 R in portrait mode doesn't have the stage lighting
02:17:27 ◼ ► effects, which I don't really find useful. I've never once I almost never even apply them, frankly.
02:17:34 ◼ ► Yeah, so you don't want to have tried to apply them. They don't look like the ones Apple has that look good
02:17:45 ◼ ► Huh with the just with the one, you know, obviously it has the same chips. So it's not the chips
02:18:04 ◼ ► It's not marketing spite like oh we're gonna we want you to pay to get the new phone to get it
02:18:22 ◼ ► Like every single one of those things that that seems like it could be marketing spite as I call it is
02:19:22 ◼ ► distance I wanted to. You know, it's it. And and you'd find out, you know, what kind of
02:19:30 ◼ ► depth of field you really had when you got your film developed. So right, you know, having
02:21:15 ◼ ► But I got to think there's other stuff that they think can be machine learned or whatever.
02:21:19 ◼ ► And so then at some point, will that philosophical difference of what is a "true picture" of
02:21:27 ◼ ► a thing going to be and what counts and what doesn't might be a bigger rift between Apple
02:21:39 ◼ ► because at the end of the day there's no such thing as like a true image right and i think
02:21:43 ◼ ► apple's you know excitement over the um the fake bokeh in portrait mode shows that they're not
02:21:51 ◼ ► adamant about that either because it's right you know you know there are you know purists if you
02:21:58 ◼ ► will, who are offended by the idea of fake bokeh. And, you know, I'm, you know, I was always a fan,
02:22:14 ◼ ► me too. I thought that was great. And, you know, I think it was this thing of the times, you know,
02:22:19 ◼ ► and it wasn't going to last forever. But it was a fun, it was a very effective way, in my opinion,
02:22:25 ◼ ► to patch over the fact that the camera phones of the time were still kind of camera phony and not
02:22:32 ◼ ► real camera camera-y. You know, that they were still kind of, you know, we're getting to the
02:22:38 ◼ ► point where a camera phone was actually just a good camera in any way, period. Applying those
02:22:49 ◼ ► So I'm cool with that and I'm cool with portrait mode and sometimes I get portrait mode shots. I
02:23:23 ◼ ► double tap it to give you a like and they move on to the next thing. No one's actually,
02:23:30 ◼ ► Right. So I mean, you know, ideally, you want it to look good as big as it can get. And
02:23:34 ◼ ► you know, an Apple famously for the last three or four years now has spent a gazillion dollars
02:23:48 ◼ ► printing iPhone photos very large. But I think it's okay to add features that work best when
02:23:58 ◼ ► Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I wonder what else AI can do. I feel like I'm not I'm not imaginative
02:24:09 ◼ ► Yeah, well, it is literally just imagination, right? The method for this white balance thing
02:25:23 ◼ ► And Google's got their chip, and the Pixel 3 one is way faster. The one year, just wait a year,
02:25:30 ◼ ► this stuff gets so much faster. And when you have those cycles and you can throw that many
02:25:35 ◼ ► iterations of the machine learning thing at an image, you can really, really do amazing things.
02:25:44 ◼ ► I feel like the portrait mode stuff is going to get so good so fast that this anybody who's skeptical about it still is
02:25:55 ◼ ► I mean I have to imagine every time a phone ships and people that are working on this stuff
02:26:03 ◼ ► Are just gritting their teeth because they know they've got something ten times better sitting in the lab. You know, I
02:26:09 ◼ ► I think so, too. And I but I also wonder then too about like the people who are working on those things
02:26:22 ◼ ► They're stuck with this crummy camera when they when they know that they've got they've got one in the lab
02:26:37 ◼ ► I'm just sort of glad hardware seasons over. Yeah, I wish that my last review hadn't been on the pixel slate and all the palm phone
02:26:47 ◼ ► it's it's been a unusually busy review season for me personally because I I did the phone I did the iPad and the
02:27:02 ◼ ► Because I it's like I'm glad Apple is doing the Mac mini, but it's like probably the least likely Mac that I would buy
02:27:09 ◼ ► Yeah, it's it's such a it's so interesting because a lot of people still still think of it as like that entry-level consumer Mac
02:27:24 ◼ ► There's the whole thing about why they still calling the MacBook Air the air when it's thicker and heavier than the regular MacBook
02:27:33 ◼ ► Like the air is the one that looks like that and there's 13 inches and the Mac Mini is the one that's a square
02:27:39 ◼ ► That's this big even though it's actually not that many compared to a lot of these NUC computers and it's downright
02:27:50 ◼ ► But it's actually a nice size for what they're doing now, which is putting like pro components into it. Yeah
02:27:57 ◼ ► Well, anyway, it was good to have you on the show. I really enjoyed the last and you know true to form
02:28:13 ◼ ► Feel like I've taken up enough of your time. So my thanks to you everybody can follow you
02:28:47 ◼ ► Yeah, so I was the editor-in-chief, and I also founded it, and at the time it was called
02:28:52 ◼ ► pre-Central, now it's called. Well, now it's gone, but it was webOS Nation for a minute.
02:28:57 ◼ ► But yeah, so we had this model where it was called, now it's called WebO nations, but it was
02:29:03 ◼ ► smartphone experts. So I founded Windows Central and iMore, although at the time it was called
02:29:08 ◼ ► Phone Different because we didn't know what we were doing. Android Central, a few others. Anyway,
02:29:32 ◼ ► It would be great for a huge topic on the show, but it is very funny because I was always
02:30:01 ◼ ► That's the one thing, you know, like everybody has come to this user interface that is kind
02:30:05 ◼ ► of basically the palm card interface where you swipe up from the bottom and you go side
02:30:16 ◼ ► And just this year, Apple and Google got around to implementing the idea that you should be
02:30:28 ◼ ► So with Siri shortcuts and whatever they're called on Google, I guess it was called actions.
02:30:34 ◼ ► I'm still waiting for somebody to to put the notifications at the bottom, which I thought
02:30:44 ◼ ► I think it's perfect until you have a software keyboard and then it's probably a disaster.
02:31:03 ◼ ► and Android, or at least the pixel version of Android than it ever has been in the past,
02:31:08 ◼ ► just because so many of the interactions are similar now. And I don't I don't think it's
02:31:14 ◼ ► a case of copying, I think it is sort of water seeking its own level and the best ideas.
02:31:21 ◼ ► You know, everybody kind of arrives at these good ideas, you know, I mean, without question,
02:31:31 ◼ ► notification display system for a long time. And it's gotten a lot more like Android, where they're
02:31:36 ◼ ► grouped together by app, and you can deal with them as a group if you want or expand them,
02:31:52 ◼ ► that the multitasking system and the core card switching system on the Pixel feel like they're
02:32:29 ◼ ► just better. It's just like swiping up is way more natural. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back on Twitter,
02:32:35 ◼ ► The Verge, where it says where your fine work can be read and viewed. And I thank you for your time.