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232: ‘I’ll Eat My Hat’ With John Moltz

 

00:00:00   I guess I should just say, I don't think I've told anybody, but a few weeks ago or months

00:00:03   ago I guess at this point I did a Q&A episode of this show where it was just me answering

00:00:08   listener questions. And it turned out my recording was corrupted due to a USB problem. I didn't

00:00:17   know it. I couldn't hear it. And so I had to redo that whole episode. So there's actually

00:00:20   two versions of that episode. And as I was just telling Molt, I think I did better because

00:00:28   I had never done an episode without a guest before. I think I was a little awkward. And

00:00:35   I think doing it twice in a row, I guess I did it the next day. I forget if I did it.

00:00:39   I think I did it the next day. But it was better because it was like I'd worked out

00:00:44   the kinks of that a little bit. I will say this though, and this is my question to you.

00:00:50   So I think recording that thing twice was good for me. I've had times—it's been

00:00:56   a long time since I've lost data on a computer, like app crashed or some kind of mix-up or

00:01:04   you over—bad RN command on a terminal and you deleted it.

00:01:08   You just jinxed us.

00:01:10   But every time I've ever in my life lost an article or a school paper or anything,

00:01:17   I have never once felt like I did a better job recreating it. I've always felt like,

00:01:22   "Oh my God, there was something I had. I had it going on when I wrote that, and I'm not

00:01:27   getting it right." And never shake the nagging sense that, "Wasn't there a great point I made?

00:01:33   I don't have it." Like, yeah. I think maybe it's different with writing than with talking. But

00:01:39   yeah, that's exactly my point is that, yeah, there is something different about it. Like,

00:01:44   I could recreate a podcast, but I don't, I could never, I feel like I can never recreate an article.

00:01:49   Yeah, I think that's definitely true. I one time lost the audio, or I think it was badly corrupted

00:01:58   for some reason when I was recording episode of The Rebound. And so now I record with two

00:02:04   different computers at the same time. So I'm recording with two

00:02:08   Macs right now, which is my usual setup. And if something goes wrong, if something

00:02:14   eventually goes wrong with both of them I'll get a third. Just like I'm just gonna keep adding Macs

00:02:20   until until I no longer have any problems. I have enough lying around I might as well use them.

00:02:30   So I've got my 2016 MacBook Pro and a 2009 unibody white MacBook.

00:02:42   So how do you like the MacBook Pro? Which one do you have? You probably have the two

00:02:45   of the original one or the original one. I so I don't have I have not had the only problem I've

00:02:50   had with the keyboard so far is that the well other than it being that keyboard and the typing on it

00:02:56   is not necessarily my favorite experience, but I haven't had any problems with keys malfunctioning

00:03:03   really other than the right shift key is slightly squishy. And this is you know that's two years

00:03:10   basically almost two years into using it. So I don't think that's so bad.

00:03:14   I have to send it back. I mean, it's like, I'm pretty sure I'm overdue. I still have the 15-inch

00:03:19   MacBook Pro from the summer. And I don't know, at some point I stopped using it. I used it for

00:03:25   a solid month, maybe like six weeks. And it was because it was summer and we were traveling too,

00:03:30   it was actually kind of natural. I literally, I wasn't even using my iMac at home. I was just

00:03:35   using that 15-inch MacBook Pro for everything. All my writing, all the email. And I said—I

00:03:42   think it was on the podcast even. I don't think I wrote about it. Maybe I did. Or maybe

00:03:46   I tweeted it. It wasn't on Daring Fireball. But at some point, like two weeks in, I mentioned

00:03:50   that the S key or the E key—maybe it was D. It was E, S, or D. It was something on

00:03:55   my left hand. It got stuck twice. But easily was unstuck just by pressing the key again.

00:04:03   I don't know. I was just a tweet. It's like I have to be so careful, but then somebody

00:04:08   from Apple P reached out to me and they're like, Oh, we send you another one. And, and

00:04:12   it was funny because I think it was somebody who was on vacation when I did it because

00:04:15   it was like two weeks later and, and I was like, you know what, it's been two weeks and

00:04:20   I haven't had a problem since not a single, single problem. And then I used it for weeks

00:04:25   full time and never once had another problem again. So there was something, I almost feel

00:04:30   like it was a different problem. It wasn't like a reliability problem. It was almost

00:04:33   like maybe like when the keyboard was new, it was just a little more prone to that. I

00:04:38   mean, it's like I reliability problems aside because the reliability thing is a whole nother

00:04:43   ball game like when the keyboard actually fails. Like I actually do think I really wonder

00:04:51   like I don't like the low travel. I know some people love it though. It's obviously subjective,

00:04:56   But it's like the tolerance is so, there's like no tolerance between the aluminum frame

00:05:03   around the keyboard and the keys themselves.

00:05:06   Like that's partly what makes it feel so nice and premium because they don't jiggle at all.

00:05:14   But I feel like that's what maybe made it so it's possible.

00:05:17   I almost feel like with my previous generation MacBook Pro, the one I'm staring at right

00:05:21   now, you couldn't even get a key stuck, right?

00:05:23   like there's no way to make a key get stuck because it's like a bit of there's a bit of

00:05:28   a gap between the aluminum around the keys.

00:05:30   Yeah, I have a lot. I have a lot because I have a kid and you know a kid who was younger

00:05:35   back then I have a lot of MacBooks with keys that have been pulled off.

00:05:39   But like this this point one here is missing a missing a function one of the function keys

00:05:47   And for years he used my old MacBook Pro, which was like a 2010, I think. And that's missing a

00:05:56   couple keys too. Or actually, no, I think it's just... No, I know what the problem with that one

00:06:00   is. He spilled a drink on it. And the key, most of the keys just simply don't work. So I have it

00:06:05   upstairs with the keyboard plugged into it. Pete: Jonas' MacBook Pro, I think I mentioned

00:06:11   this on a show a while ago. Jonas, he needs a new MacBook or laptop. I'm not even 100% sure

00:06:17   He'll get a MacBook, but I think he will but you and I have talked about the gaming you see thing

00:06:21   Yeah, like he doesn't want a gaming laptop like he wants a gaming PC desktop, which I think makes sense

00:06:27   For his needs you get more for your money

00:06:30   Yeah, it's you know and and then who knows what so, you know, we've been waiting for this event

00:06:35   We'll get to this, you know, but this event coming up next week when supposedly there's going to be new MacBooks

00:06:39   You know, it's like he really needed a MacBook before school started in August, but it just yeah

00:06:46   It was literally the worst time ever for this.

00:06:49   It's a little weird that they have—assuming that—well, we're going to talk about it later,

00:06:55   but if they're coming, it's odd that it's so far after school season.

00:06:58   Yeah. It is not what you want.

00:07:03   Presumably, it's when they're ready. They're ready when they're ready.

00:07:07   I forget. Did you see there was an interview with Schiller—I think it was in Gadget—had

00:07:14   had a got an interview with Schiller for the iPhone XR.

00:07:17   And it's, I've talked to Schiller enough times

00:07:22   that I know what he's like, and he's always on

00:07:26   when he's talking to the press.

00:07:28   I mean, you just cannot knock him off his game.

00:07:30   But there was this one answer, and who knows if it was,

00:07:33   you never know in an article what is taken out of context

00:07:37   or just one brief sentence from a longer thing.

00:07:40   But it was like, he was asked about why did the,

00:07:43   why did the 10 R ship, you know, six weeks after the 10 S and he was like,

00:07:47   that's when it was ready.

00:07:48   And I don't know if that was just a sentence in a longer, nicer thing,

00:07:54   but I almost think maybe it wasn't, you know, they're ready when they're ready.

00:07:58   And that's, you know, it's nothing that can be done about it. But anyway,

00:08:01   Jonas, I mean, do you, do you think that that's really true though? I mean,

00:08:05   do you think that they couldn't have, because to me it seems like it's a,

00:08:11   pricing thing that they thought that if they shipped them all at the same time that they

00:08:15   would sell a metric crap ton of the 10 hours and not as many expensive ones. Yeah, that is actually

00:08:22   a good point. And I also think that product marketing wise, it would have been difficult

00:08:26   to ship them all at the same time because then which one do you advertise? You know,

00:08:29   I got right about this on during fireball that advertising wise this year. And so I mean, maybe

00:08:35   it's, you know, it's a little bit six and one half dozen together because they probably I would think

00:08:38   think they stage it out. They have to stage it out to a certain degree. And so they do

00:08:42   it deliberately that way. And so yeah, they really were only ready then. But part of that

00:08:48   was the plan.

00:08:49   Well, I think my guess, and I have absolutely no inside information on this and that supply

00:08:54   chain, that sort of stuff is like the among the holiest of holies in my experience at

00:08:59   Apple, like because the people who really know are like, you know, Jeff Williams is

00:09:03   not blabbing about. Oh yeah, we could have had that out a month ago. You know, Jeff Williams

00:09:10   is not going to tell you. But I think it's a little bit of column A and a little bit

00:09:15   of column B, where if everything had gone perfectly, I still think the iPhone XR would

00:09:19   have shipped some number of weeks after the XS. But I think maybe not as many weeks as

00:09:24   it did. I think it would have been better to ship it a few weeks earlier than it did.

00:09:32   I could be wrong. But I don't think it's a coincidence that marketing-wise, this year

00:09:39   and last year just happened to work out in the way that made the most sense for all of

00:09:45   the iPhones involved. Because last year, if the original 10 had shipped exactly alongside

00:09:53   the 8, the 8 would have been completely overshadowed. Nobody would have wanted to review it, or

00:10:01   the reviews would have been like one line. How do you advertise it? This other one that

00:10:07   looks so new and so much more exciting, right? Edge to edge, round corners, steel, shiny.

00:10:16   It's shiny. I mean literally shiny. It really would have put the eight in a tight spot to

00:10:24   ship alongside the 10 or even worse if the eight had just been the one to ship afterwards.

00:10:29   Yeah, that wouldn't have worked well at all.

00:10:32   Whereas this year, the one that shipped first is the one that literally looks exactly like

00:10:38   last year's to the naked eye, except for a second model that literally looks the same

00:10:44   but is bigger. And it looks so much the same that in the TV commercials, they're playing

00:10:51   perspective tricks to make them look the same size and then move the hands so you can see,

00:10:56   The one is bigger, you know, but they look so much the same that at first they it looks like two of the same phone

00:11:02   and the one that I think people are more excited about because you know, it's got amazing colors and it costs

00:11:09   250 less I think you can really make the case that it costs 350 less and if you want the bigger one if you want

00:11:16   You know if you're thinking about the 10 R versus the 10s max

00:11:20   I I honestly think you could make the case that it's four hundred and fifty dollars less which is

00:11:25   Exciting if you can be very happy with your phone and save four hundred and fifty dollars

00:11:29   That is really exciting and so I don't think it's a coincidence that the one that is more exciting if not

00:11:35   Better but more exciting is the one that ship later is the one that ships. Yes, absolutely

00:11:40   But anyway, we're anxiously awaiting that

00:11:43   So I guess the rumor is that

00:11:49   For max are we gonna do that now? Well, maybe we'll save that for later

00:11:54   I feel like let's go forward linking. Sure looking later

00:11:58   This week's news, of course is the well, you know what I have follow-up. Let me do the follow-up first

00:12:04   last week with Dan Fromer, I was talking about

00:12:07   Home kit and I've got these shades from a company called Lutron all around the house pretty expensive to be honest

00:12:15   But I really like them there the there, you know

00:12:20   We've got lights that are hooked up to the HomeKit stuff, and I'm not really—I don't

00:12:24   find that anywhere near as useful.

00:12:25   I don't mind using switches for lights.

00:12:30   I love having the shades hooked up to voice commands, and I love using HomeKit for it.

00:12:35   But I was talking last week about setting up scenes where I could say—I'd set up

00:12:41   a scene called "Open the Kitchen Shades," and then I could talk to my various Siri-enabled

00:12:46   devices and say something like, "Open the kitchen shades," and then she would open

00:12:52   the kitchen shades. It turns out that's not the right way to do it or not the best

00:12:57   way to do it in HomeKit. In HomeKit, you can define rooms and you can move devices between

00:13:05   the rooms once you've set them up. So it's better to just define a kitchen and put the

00:13:09   shades in the kitchen, and then you can say the same thing, "Open the kitchen shades,"

00:13:14   or open the shades in the kitchen or any formulation

00:13:18   that you think would work usually works.

00:13:19   And then it just works, it works better.

00:13:21   Like scenes are better for like saying to set up one

00:13:26   called like good morning that opens all the shades

00:13:29   in the house or something like that.

00:13:30   - Oh, okay, so it was throughout the house, right.

00:13:32   - Right, but if you really want to do it like I do,

00:13:35   like by room, it's surprise, surprise better

00:13:39   to use the actual room feature in HomeKit,

00:13:41   which I wasn't really even aware of.

00:13:44   Like I'd seen it, but I thought that that was just

00:13:47   the way they were set up because that's what they were

00:13:49   called in Lutron.

00:13:50   'Cause the long story short, we'd had these for like a year

00:13:54   but until recently we could only use it with the Amazon thing

00:13:58   because of some complicated, something where our Lutron

00:14:02   base station wasn't HomeKit compatible

00:14:04   and now we got one that is.

00:14:05   And anyway, so I wanted to clarify that.

00:14:08   A lot of people out there.

00:14:10   But the funny thing too about the followup I got on this

00:14:12   from HomeKit aficionados is it all echoes what I'm thinking

00:14:16   is that HomeKit is way underrated.

00:14:19   Like it's like it got off to a slow start

00:14:22   and the knock against it was that Apple

00:14:25   had these stringent requirements, you know,

00:14:27   for both security and both like compatibility

00:14:31   and the whole thing like hooking up to Amazon

00:14:34   is sort of like loosey goosey, you know,

00:14:36   you just make a thing and, you know, download an SDK

00:14:39   and, you know, I don't think Amazon improves anything,

00:14:42   know, you just, it's just so much better. It's ridiculous and so much more customizable.

00:14:47   I think the HomeKit app, the Home app could be better. But overall, I think it's really good.

00:14:53   And it's a lot like the shortcut app for iOS 12. In terms of just sort of being,

00:14:59   you're effectively programming these things, but doing it in a visual way that I think is

00:15:06   approachable to regular people like you're not, you don't need to use programming language,

00:15:09   but you're just dragging these things and moving icons around. And it ends up that you can

00:15:15   effectively program these devices in your house. And I think it's pretty cool. So anyway,

00:15:19   there's some follow up on that. You got any HomeKit stuff?

00:15:23   Tim Cynova I have nothing.

00:15:24   We don't have an Echo. We don't have any of that stuff. And mostly, as some of the reason that we

00:15:31   don't have the Echo, so actually, my parents bought us one at one point, and they sent it back

00:15:36   because they talk about with Karen. And we were just like,

00:15:38   Hmm, we don't really want the microphones. And we had a, you

00:15:43   know, like a security camera thing that we had gotten, it was

00:15:48   a podcast, advertise, advertiser, send it for free to

00:15:50   try out. And we had it hooked up for a long time. And then we

00:15:53   took that out too. And the reason I don't do the automation

00:15:57   stuff is I'm just sure that Hank will screw. No, he's, he's just

00:16:05   going to be doing it nonstop or he's going to, you know, like screw with the scenario, you know,

00:16:09   the scenes and whatever. So I'm just like, I'm not dealing with that right. Jonas is so lazy.

00:16:15   He doesn't do anything. He doesn't, he never tells, he never does. He's like the opposite.

00:16:19   He just, he doesn't even turn lights on. He'll just sit in the dark rather. Like,

00:16:24   not only does he not have to get up, he could like literally just talk to his phone to turn lights on

00:16:28   and he won't even do that. He won't even bother to do it. Like

00:16:32   It is funny to me how much how persistent Hank is at talking to Siri and just how many times

00:16:42   he will try whether he's like in the car and he's getting a bad connection and so Siri's not

00:16:47   connecting to you know home base to process the question or if Siri's not understanding what he's

00:16:54   saying he just he keeps trying and he keeps trying and he keeps trying and to the point where it's

00:17:00   maddening. Just like, just type it in, just open Wikipedia and type it in.

00:17:07   Jonas had saved his money, by the way, and he pre-ordered Red Dead Redemption 2 yesterday,

00:17:16   which is, looks pretty cool. I like westerns. I don't, I'm so far out of the gaming scene.

00:17:22   But it's supposed to be, that's supposed to be the new hot game. Yeah. It's like Westworld

00:17:28   Your TV it's only ps4, right? I guess yeah, I think so. We don't have the ps4

00:17:34   Or ps4 only for now. I can't imagine that it always be ps4 exclusive, but I wouldn't think so

00:17:40   I don't know how this stuff works. But anyway

00:17:42   It's also humongous

00:17:46   It is like I I think he told me it was a hundred

00:17:50   gigabytes

00:17:52   Or something. I don't know but he's his ps4 is

00:17:56   Was obtained when the ps4 was very new

00:17:59   For Christmas like whatever the first Christmas was when ps4 was available is when he got it

00:18:05   And so it's only got a 400 megabyte hard drive

00:18:08   So he's had to do an awful line and he's all in on digital download a right

00:18:13   It's an HD floppy drive so it's attached to my performer

00:18:25   Yeah, it's got a full 1.4 megabytes. So he's only got 400 gigabyte hard drive. But he's all in on

00:18:36   downloadable games. I guess every time he gets discs is from relatives at Christmas. But he's

00:18:44   had to do a lot of delete the game, delete this, whatever. But you can—

00:18:48   Even if you buy the disc, there's always downloadable content. That's the thing,

00:18:52   because Hank just got Destiny 2. And it was like, "Oh, good. You can go home and play this." And he

00:18:58   gets home and it's like, "Nope, got to spend two hours downloading something."

00:19:02   Well, there's software updates, too. It's like, effectively, the whole game has to be

00:19:05   re-downloaded. Somebody just tweeted a screenshot last—I forget who it was,

00:19:08   but it was after midnight, Red Dead Redemption 2. It's like New Year's Eve for people who like

00:19:15   video games. And the guy had the disk. I guess he got the disk during the day, and he tweeted

00:19:20   a screenshot. He had to download like 17 gigabytes before he could play. I don't see the point of it.

00:19:28   But anyway, I finally helped him out. And see, this is the thing I worry about the kid. Why

00:19:34   didn't he come to me to ask for an external drive for his PS4? And I'm so out of touch.

00:19:41   When the PS4 originally came out, you could not use external storage for games. You could hook

00:19:47   one up, and I forget what it would be for, but you couldn't do it to play games. And at some point,

00:19:53   Sony got their act together and issued a software update where, yeah, you can just plug in a USB 3

00:19:57   drive and format it in the PlayStation, and then you can download games to it.

00:20:04   So yesterday, he was preparing to erase his entire PS4 to make room for Red Dead Redemption 2,

00:20:12   and I was like, "Look, let me help you out." And we hooked up a nice—I even got him a nice SSD

00:20:19   hard drive, so it would be nice and fast. I asked a friend of the show, Siracusa, if that was

00:20:24   worthwhile. And long story short, which I enjoyed, but long story short, yes, he said.

00:20:30   **Matt Stauffer** I think I would have guessed that he would answer that, but yeah.

00:20:34   Yeah, it involves sequential reads. Yes, would have done but I enjoyed the technical details.

00:20:43   I did. But so now he has a nice SSD external drive. But anyway, I before he came home from

00:20:49   school while I was coming down here to start the podcast. And I asked him if his game fully

00:20:54   downloaded because that's a you know, that's a real heartbreak for a kid on a Friday. Yeah,

00:20:59   like it happened. It happened like six months ago, there was some game that Jonas had been

00:21:03   been long waiting. And he thought he'd set it up to download while he was at school and

00:21:08   got home and there was like an error message. Right. And when I see error message, it was

00:21:13   like that it started the download.

00:21:15   I feel like the Xbox downloads just freeze from time to time. Because I've seen Hank,

00:21:20   you know, it would just stop it would not progress and then needed to back out and back

00:21:23   into it again. And it wouldn't lose what it had downloaded already. But yeah, it was something

00:21:28   like that. Yeah. If you just left it overnight and thought, Oh, boy, it'll be ready when

00:21:32   get up in the morning. Nope. So anyway, I texted him before or I said hello to him, but then I

00:21:38   forgot to ask. So I texted him while I'm down here recording with you. Did your game fully download?

00:21:42   And he says, Oh, no punctuation. Oh yeah. And I'm never leaving.

00:21:47   So maybe I don't have to get him a new Mac book. Yeah, really. At least not now.

00:21:59   How fast is he going to play through that? I don't know. If it's good, it'll take him a while. He

00:22:05   gets his value out of him, you know? He tends to... Well, it depends on the game too, because Hank

00:22:12   has blown through some games. I'm trying to remember what... because he did one recently,

00:22:15   he got some game recently, and it was just a few days later, he's like, "Yeah, I'm done."

00:22:19   Whoa, geez, really? Yeah, Jonas had one like that too, I forget what it was. But like Destiny,

00:22:26   Destiny is like, he's sort of fallen out of Fortnite, but for a while, I mean, in Fortnite

00:22:32   you don't even pay for it, which is ridiculous. So whatever he did spend on it to get costumes,

00:22:38   dance moves, whatever the hell he bought. I mean, it actually is what you buy, dance moves,

00:22:46   costumes. I have not seen that game. And Hank has, I think there's like a subculture that

00:22:55   that hates that game. Yeah, Jonas has told me about it. Yeah,

00:22:58   so he's into that group. Like, I got you like the when I drive

00:23:02   that because we do a carpool for the kids back and forth from

00:23:06   school. And so when I drive every once in a while here, I'm

00:23:09   somebody muttered that it's overrated. Yeah. Yeah, I Jonas

00:23:14   has filled me in on that. But anyway, but destiny which does

00:23:17   cost money. Jonas has gotten his money worth a thousand times

00:23:21   I mean, yeah, it could goddess. He's been a lot of time

00:23:25   Yeah, Hank has spent a lot of time in that game -

00:23:28   It seems fun, I mean I played a little bit of it. Yeah, the only thing I can compare it to would be Bard's Tale

00:23:34   Remember Bard's Tale

00:23:38   Man did I love Bard's Tale?

00:23:41   It was like a Dungeons & Dragons type game and it had like it sort of had like a 3d interface

00:23:47   But it was like one square at a time, you know, like think like Castle Wolfenstein

00:23:52   3d but on an Apple - you know, we'd be in yeah

00:23:55   Yeah, you'd move it was like the D&D equivalent of moving like one square on graph paper at a time

00:24:01   Right, but you'd go through, you know, you'd see the walls of a dungeon, you know, and you'd hit like up arrow to go ahead one

00:24:07   God it was a really good game

00:24:10   there was a

00:24:14   Like the most for whatever reason it's a weird number, but for whatever reason the most of a bad guy you'd ever encounter was 99

00:24:21   It seems like a weird number because you'd think it would be like

00:24:24   256 yeah or something. Yeah, you'd think it'd be like 255 or 256 or something, but it was 99

00:24:29   It was limited by the actual digit

00:24:32   And there was yeah, okay, so it was like more like a y2k problem, right and there was a room

00:24:38   There was a room you could go into and it had there were these bad guys called berserkers

00:24:44   and they're kinda I guess it's not funny but they're berserkers were just crazy

00:24:52   people with axes you know like people who had just lost their minds and gone

00:24:57   berserk and had like a fit of rage and there was a room where there were 99

00:25:02   berserkers 99 berserkers and 99 berserkers it was I think three groups of

00:25:07   99 berserkers and the first time you encounter this room it's like you I

00:25:13   I think I think you had like a party of six people. You could make a party of six people but like

00:25:20   so you were six but it was effectively you but you go in and it was sort of like Han Solo going into

00:25:24   that room with all the stormtroopers except like the George the George Lucas version the George

00:25:29   Lucas version yeah where he adds a bunch of it was like 300 of them right you first time because

00:25:34   11 is not cool 300 school right the first time you go in you do just you're like oh my god I have no

00:25:39   were dead. Oh my God, where's the last—oh my God, the last save point was all the way back

00:25:43   there. It was like the most screwed you ever are. And then you got better at the game and your

00:25:47   characters all got better. And I'm sure it happened to everybody who ever played the game.

00:25:53   It dawned on you like, "Hey, a couple weeks ago, remember that room with all the berserkers?"

00:25:57   There were two spells that were exactly the same, lightning and a fireball. And they did the same

00:26:07   amount of damage. But I had one, you know, by the time I recalled it, I was like, I had both of them

00:26:11   and it was the perfect weapon, you know, spell to do against like a group like that. So you could go

00:26:17   back to that room. And then just instead of really fighting and fighting them, you just have your

00:26:21   wizard shoot them with lightning bolt, and they'd all die. And you got massive, massive, like

00:26:28   experience points and gold and whatever else. So and then you just back out of the dungeon. And

00:26:34   once it was out of you know, the memory it was sort of like, you know, like a scene loading,

00:26:37   like you'd be outside, you'd find a place to go inside, it would like then you'd load. So you just

00:26:42   go back outside, go back in, and then they'd all be there again. And then it was like, you know,

00:26:47   it was almost like a cheat code, like where you could, you know, like, remember in SimCity,

00:26:51   you could type something and you just get like a million dollars, you just go into that room and

00:26:55   kill the kill 99% 297 berserkers over and over again, and then you could buy everything in the

00:27:02   game anyway. Bard's Tale. It was a good game. Let me take a break. Thank her for sponsor.

00:27:09   It's our good friends at Squarespace. These guys sponsor the show quite a bit. You may have noticed

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00:28:30   like a menu and stuff like that? Do you have customized logos and stuff like that that

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00:29:00   Squarespace has their own CMS built in. You do it right at Squarespace. You want to look

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00:29:13   really well designed. It doesn't just show you. It's not just fantastic in terms of what

00:29:18   type of stuff it shows you. It's how it shows it to you. Because I find personally

00:29:23   that most web analytics things are completely inscrutable. They might as well be presented

00:29:28   in a different language. I don't even—I don't—seldom understand what I'm looking

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00:30:23   com slash talk show next time you want to make a new website. iPhone 10 are I love this

00:30:33   thing. I'm still got it as my daily driver. I just posted before we started recording.

00:30:38   I don't know if you read it, but I posted my review roundup. I'm not surprised because I

00:30:43   kind of felt—I do this every time. Sometimes, like last year's iPhone 10, I thought, "Well,

00:30:51   this is going to be a hard review to write because this thing is new in so many ways.

00:30:55   There's a lot to cover. How do I make this an actual article that has a flow instead of just

00:31:00   a list of bullet points? Here's my notes." I got a note in Apple Notes with all the thoughts I've

00:31:06   had before I sat down to actually write, write. And it's like, these are all good points.

00:31:10   I look at it and think, "Wow, these are some good observations." And then I think,

00:31:13   "This is a jumbled mess. How am I going to do this?" And with the XR, I honestly thought,

00:31:19   like, "This is going to be the easiest review in the world to write." It is exactly like

00:31:22   a XS, except it has a different screen, which is still kind of awesome, and it's missing

00:31:27   the second camera. And I'm like, "Damn, how am I going to write more than that?"

00:31:31   And then, of course, the embargo is like Tuesday 6 a.m.

00:31:36   And there's no penalty.

00:31:37   Nobody from Apple comes and gives you an electric shock

00:31:40   if you miss the embargo.

00:31:41   But they want them all to come out at the same time.

00:31:46   The selfish part of wanting to hit the embargo deadline

00:31:51   for me isn't that I want to hit Apple's imposed deadline

00:31:56   to make Apple PR happy.

00:31:58   It's that I don't want other reviews to get all the links before mine comes out, right?

00:32:03   Like I know that's what I would think. I mean, I wouldn't think you would I mean, there's no reason to care what Apple right?

00:32:07   I don't I want to go to tech meme and see my review at or near the top. I don't know

00:32:12   Why do they why do they care about all the reviews coming out at the same time?

00:32:16   I don't they don't want to see how that works for them. I

00:32:19   I don't it's a lot it creates a lot of buzz and I guess maybe they figured that some people only real

00:32:26   They always have an embargo. They always have an embargo, you know, so that everybody

00:32:30   You know there has to be an embargo

00:32:33   Well, there doesn't have to be but it well, I mean I get the embargo but I don't get why would they would want everybody?

00:32:39   To publish at the same time after the embargoes. Oh, maybe they don't I don't know

00:32:43   Again, I have never even gotten the insinuation of well

00:32:47   sometimes when I blow past an embargo I will get a

00:32:53   Get like a very polite I message from somebody at Apple PR on whatever the team is

00:32:57   Like this happened with my series for watch reviews you lose the phone well everything, okay

00:33:04   You know

00:33:06   So the backstory this is you know true directors commentary

00:33:10   behind the scenes of daring fireball like so

00:33:13   Last month with the number one. I'm a terrible procrastinator. I don't think this comes as a surprise to anybody and

00:33:22   and I tend to start these reviews way too late. It's, you know, and it's just my nature.

00:33:32   But then once I get going, it's easy to keep going, but it's often too late. And so I was up,

00:33:39   literally up all night last month, writing my iPhone 10 s review. And because I was going to be

00:33:47   up at six, hopefully, to publish, even though I wasn't actually done by then. I volunteered

00:33:52   to take Jonas to school in the morning, which is, you know, like around 730, so that Amy

00:33:58   could sleep in. But I wasn't done, so I had to take him to school and then come home

00:34:03   and finish. But I think I was done by around like eight, you don't know, probably more

00:34:07   like 830, nine o'clock. But I'd been up, literally been up all night writing it. And

00:34:14   And then, and I hadn't started my series for a watch review yet.

00:34:19   I had notes, you know, I had been wearing it all week and I had copious notes, but I

00:34:24   needed to sleep.

00:34:25   And so I slept until like, I don't know, three or four in the afternoon and then had

00:34:30   to start writing the watch review.

00:34:33   But I didn't really start until like 11 at night.

00:34:35   And then it was like, I had to stay up all night again.

00:34:38   And I, I don't know what time I put, I could actually look it up.

00:34:42   Hold on.

00:34:43   I know it'll say when I updated it. I don't know. I don't think I published till like 11 a.m

00:34:47   So I was like five hours after the embargo on that one and I did get a hey every I got a hey everything. Okay?

00:34:53   But I nobody I don't know that anybody else there might be somebody did but there I don't know if anybody else wrote reviews of both

00:35:03   the iPhone 10

00:35:05   S and series for watch well, that's the thing like most of the other sites probably have more than one person working on this

00:35:12   stuff, right? Right. I don't at least my best friends in the early reviewers, the gaggle,

00:35:20   none of them did both. And it was very difficult. I don't know. I don't know if you've noticed this

00:35:28   either. But the older you get, the harder it is to pull it on either. Like, yeah, really? Yeah,

00:35:35   that's not gonna get any easier. That's for sure. There was a time when pulling an all nighter to

00:35:39   write like a newspaper article or something, or even stuff for Daring Fireball in the early days

00:35:44   was fun. And it's—

00:35:45   It is. Here's a story that's the convergence of all-nighters and procrastination and things

00:35:53   working out well is I had to write—I had a psychology class in high school, and I had to

00:35:59   write—I had this like big—we were supposed to do a big project, and we were supposed to have empirical

00:36:03   research and I didn't do anything about it until like the day before. I was like,

00:36:09   and then it hit me like, oh crap, we were supposed to like do practical research on this.

00:36:15   And so the thing I came up with was I'll stay up all night. I'll take my, my respiration and my,

00:36:22   you know, my heart rate and, and my temperature and there's my empirical research. And I got like

00:36:28   an A minus. That's actually very clever. It is. I typed it up on a typewriter too. It is sort of

00:36:37   like Inception in some ways. It feels like it after a while. Amy and I were just talking about

00:36:46   that. We went to college in the fall of 1991 and we both went to college. Oh no, I got a Mac in

00:36:56   college. But Amy went to school with her typewriter. Because Drexel University had like a program where

00:37:02   they didn't make you buy a Mac, but everybody had to quote, have access to a Mac. So you either had

00:37:07   to get one or you had to go to the you got coursework that required a Macintosh. And so you

00:37:13   did, you know, if you didn't own one, you'd have to go to the computer lab. And there were the

00:37:16   computer lab admittedly was very nice. What was it? Korman, K-O-R-M-A-N. And that was also Korman

00:37:24   was also where even if you owned one, you could go with blank floppy disks and get legally licensed

00:37:29   copies of lots and lots of apps like Microsoft Excel. They had a university-wide site license

00:37:36   to excel. When I first got a Mac and didn't really know anybody, and modems were like $10,000 or

00:37:45   something. That was really nice. By a couple months in, getting a copy of any well-known app

00:37:55   was no longer a problem for me, but it was very nice for those who were less into the "where's"

00:38:01   scene. I remember the other kid—because I didn't have a computer until I went to graduate school,

00:38:07   and I remember that the lab was the first place I saw anybody play a networked

00:38:14   game i think was um strategic conquest was like the hot game in the in the mac lab at the at the

00:38:21   university of washington what else was there in the early i played that for years bolo there was

00:38:26   bolo remember that i don't remember bolo b-o-l-o i forget uh strategic conquest you say all right

00:38:34   oh yeah all right i'll put it in the stroke show notes did you see the uh there's a book out

00:38:41   called The Secret History of Mac Gaming. Oh, no, I did not see that. Oh, I'll put that in the show

00:38:46   notes. Yeah, that sounds like I haven't read it yet. But it's like, it is such a nice book

00:38:53   that it's like, the reason I haven't read it is I'm like saving it until, until like, I can really

00:38:58   enjoy it. I it's a terrible habit. But like, the better a book is sometimes with movies, too. It's

00:39:04   like, I'm really looking forward to this movie. But I don't want to watch it if I'm not like,

00:39:10   exactly in the right mood and the lighting everything you know i i don't want to watch it

00:39:14   there's a full moon and it's too much sunlight coming through the windows you know let's wait

00:39:19   till it's darker uh secret history and mac gaming bolo uh what else did i mention do you want to

00:39:26   talk about the the reviews a little there's a couple of details that are interesting in

00:39:30   in these other reviews that you that you bring up yes yeah and the one that i think is the funniest

00:39:35   is the one that Renee noticed. Yes, the misaligned lightning port. Yeah, the lightning port is

00:39:41   slightly misaligned in the… I don't think I would probably ever have noticed either,

00:39:49   looking at it. I can't believe I didn't notice it. I really can't. Yeah, I would

00:39:53   have thought you would have noticed it, but I don't think I would have ever noticed

00:39:55   it. I cannot believe I didn't notice it. So, I wrote in the thing that I didn't…

00:40:00   Renee's was the first review I read where somebody called it out and he had a photo

00:40:04   illustrating it. But after my review went up, a friend from Apple was like, "I can't

00:40:09   believe you didn't mention the Lightning port." And I'm like, "What? What's wrong

00:40:12   with the Lightning port?" And I looked at it, and I was like, "What the fuck? Oh,

00:40:17   my God! I can't believe it!" And my friend at Apple was like, "Yeah, the display controller

00:40:22   is a bitch." So it isn't randomly placed. So for those of you who haven't read this

00:40:29   or didn't read it. The gist of it is that Apple tradition always likes to center a line,

00:40:35   everything on the bottom. So if there's like speakers or the newer phone speaker grills

00:40:40   and the screws that hold everything in and the lightning port. And there used to be a thing,

00:40:48   there used to be like a circular port where you could plug in like audio devices. It was weird.

00:40:54   It wasn't even digital. It was like an analog port. I vaguely remember that. Yeah. Well,

00:40:58   Well, that one was in there all center aligned with each other. Yeah, they're all center aligned on the bottom

00:41:04   My phone my phone still has that but well on the bottom of a phone

00:41:08   About that later maybe and the iPhone 10 are the lightning port is is lower. So if the phone is laying on its back

00:41:15   Screen up the lightning port is lower on the bottom of the phone than the speaker grills or the screws

00:41:24   It's not randomly placed like some the things on some Samsung phones seemingly are it's top aligned

00:41:31   So the top of the lightning port is aligned with the top of the screws and speaker grills

00:41:35   but the bottom is lower because it's not centered and it's

00:41:39   It's not but it can't it's just because it can't be pushed up any further. No, I

00:41:44   Actually think though that it's it's less noticeable than the fact that the on the 10s

00:41:52   The speaker grills are not

00:41:54   Symmetric because there's that new antenna line, you know, so there's only like three

00:41:59   Yeah, completely like three holes on the one side and seven holes or six on the other side

00:42:05   So it's way less noticeable than that, but I couldn't believe it. Yeah

00:42:09   Although that harkens back to what went the antenna lines were off on either side on the four, right?

00:42:20   Yeah, yeah, and then they fixed that in the yeah

00:42:24   Or something came up when they fixed it, but they fixed it later

00:42:28   Yeah

00:42:28   or maybe with the 4s because the 4s yeah it was and it was weird because the the iPhone 4 is the weirdest phone in

00:42:34   History because there were two of them with totally different antenna lines because the Verizon one was really more like the iPhone four and a half

00:42:41   Because it came out six months later or at least like five months later

00:42:45   It was like January and it had different antenna lines that didn't have the attenuation problem that the iPhone 4 had and and

00:42:53   It ended up being the same antenna lines that the iPhone 4s had later in the year

00:42:57   right

00:43:00   Yeah, I thought that was weird. I

00:43:02   Bet I would even bet that if you could measure how far lower the lightning port is

00:43:11   in like tenths of a millimeter from being centered that it's probably almost exactly

00:43:16   How much thicker the iPhone XR is overall than the XS like it's you know

00:43:23   They because it's I don't I guess I actually it's probably because today's Friday and the iPhone XR

00:43:29   Actually shipped today to people I fix it probably does have it taken apart. They do. Yeah, that's out already

00:43:35   Yeah, because they go to Australia I god bless him for their dedication to that. Yes. That's crazy

00:43:41   Well, I know you're not the biggest fan of flying.

00:43:44   I wouldn't do that.

00:43:46   But anyway, that's a hell of a long flight. And I would not do it for the

00:43:53   sake of getting my tear down up on day one. I would wait.

00:43:56   Well, they must have I don't know if this just didn't load fully when I loaded it the first time

00:44:02   out. They were still putting up pieces of it. I'm not going to read it while we're recording. But I

00:44:06   I just know that the display controller is under the display.

00:44:09   And it adds some serious thickness and it either prevents them

00:44:16   from adding the layer for 3d touch because 3d touch is literally a layer.

00:44:20   It's not like just a conceptual layer.

00:44:22   It is actually a layer on phones that have 3d touch.

00:44:26   So either the display controller being under the screen prevents them from

00:44:31   adding 3d touch or 3d touch would have made it even thicker and they deemed it.

00:44:35   it'd be better to just leave it off than off then make the phone even thicker and more

00:44:39   and or more expensive. Anyway, long story short, one of the things that come out of

00:44:45   this and and neil i Patel and his review in the verge had some great, great details, I

00:44:49   think with like a microscope to look at the sub pixels. And I think maxi panzerino had

00:44:56   some of these details to I kind of glossed over but there's just an insane amount of

00:45:00   engineering work that Apple did to get an LCD screen to go edge to edge. I said this,

00:45:08   I asked Apple, "Does anybody else have an LCD phone with no chin or forehead?" This

00:45:16   isn't for the record. This is just off the record talking to people in Apple product

00:45:20   marketing. Not that they're aware of was their answer, but who knows? There's a gazillion

00:45:27   phones out there. But I wrote that in my review and nobody wrote in to correct me like, "Oh,

00:45:32   the LG something something from 2015 is LCD and goes edge to edge." No. Apparently,

00:45:39   nobody else has a phone that goes edge to edge. It's just that hard with LCD. And

00:45:44   it's really hard with OLED too if you look at how many of the OLED phones out there like

00:45:48   the Google Pixels that still have the chin down at the bottom. They have the notch or

00:45:53   whatever at the top. But they still don't have to go all the way to the bottom. It's

00:45:59   just really, really hard with OLED. And with LCD, it's like, impossible, but somehow

00:46:03   Apple's done it. And they've done this crazy, crazy detailed work to make the corners,

00:46:10   the round corners look perfectly round without like jagged lines and stuff. It's insane.

00:46:15   That's what I thought was so interesting about those two. Those two notes was basically

00:46:20   that, you know, they where they could, where they could physically do an attention to detail that

00:46:25   would make it more perfect, they they do it and then in the one place where they just physically

00:46:30   can't do it, they have to do something else. Right. And I guess I don't know what else they

00:46:33   considered with the lightning port, like they could have kept them centered aligned by moving

00:46:39   the speaker grills and screw down and have everything closer to the edge. But I think

00:46:43   that would look worse. I'm sure they prototyped it and say, well, that's even uglier to have

00:46:48   everything pushed down. Yeah, but it's a small compromise. I honestly think it's less of a guy.

00:46:54   I think it's less of a compromise that we didn't notice. I think it's way less of a compromise

00:47:01   than the asymmetric antenna lines on the tennis which are there to support the quote unquote.

00:47:06   And that one kind of annoys me. I mean, who knows, maybe it's coming to Philadelphia. But as far as

00:47:14   as my speed testing shows, I don't have gigabit LTE, so I've got the ugly asymmetric

00:47:20   antenna lines and I'm not getting any benefit for it.

00:47:27   So the other thing I noted in the review, and I really thought, I just thought it was

00:47:30   – there are two reviews, like I have the quote from both of them, recent guests on

00:47:36   the show, in fact, Neelay Patel and Matthew Panzareno. Obviously, the two big compromises

00:47:41   in the XR compared to the XS are the display, which is LCD instead of OLED. And the fact

00:47:48   that it only has one camera on the back doesn't have the telephoto. And I just thought it

00:47:52   was so almost comical how perfect their comments were, where Matthew said that he likes telephoto

00:48:02   lens so much that he thinks 80% of his photos over the last year were shot with the telephoto.

00:48:06   And he wishes he could set a preference so that when he starts the camera app, it starts

00:48:11   in 2x mode and he has to hit the button to go to the wider angle lens as opposed to the

00:48:15   way it works now where you always start in the wide angle.

00:48:18   And Neil I. Patel said I almost never used the telephoto lens and really focused heavily

00:48:24   on the specific deficiencies of the LCD compared to the OLED display.

00:48:33   And again, like I wrote, neither one of them are wrong.

00:48:36   It's subjective, but it's so interesting that they both have the different opinions.

00:48:39   Different opinion. Yeah, I think I would I think I would probably go with

00:48:42   Tansarino because I just I don't mind I think it's my eyes are so bad now I

00:48:45   don't notice the difference between these kinds of you know the the finer

00:48:49   detail on the screens. Yeah, I think so I think that's part of my problem too or

00:48:53   at least you know that yeah I don't see it and I remember when the iPhone 4 first

00:49:01   came out because that was the first retina screen and it had the same

00:49:04   resolution which is a point I want to come back to that it was 326 pixels per

00:49:08   French. So that was 2010 and that was only eight years ago. But I remember, boy, that

00:49:15   feels like a long eight years. Jeez. I think I've told this story before, but that was

00:49:21   the first time I ever talked to Steve Jobs, was in the hands-on area at WWDC after the

00:49:28   iPhone 4 was introduced.

00:49:29   Trevor Burrus Was that the one where Mossberg was sitting

00:49:33   on the table?

00:49:34   No, that was the iPad. That was the original iPad event. So that would be like a year later,

00:49:39   I think. No, no, it would have been earlier that same year. Earlier in 2010.

00:49:43   I should tell this story. I think I've told it before. Maybe not. I tend to be a little secretive

00:49:49   with the... I don't have extensive experience talking to Steve Jobs, but the first time I did

00:49:56   was after the iPhone 4 2010 hands-on area in Moscone. I think it was the last phone that

00:50:04   it was definitely the last phone that debuted at WWDC. Big hands-on area. And it was more

00:50:13   pronounced back then than now, I think. But there was always this weird—and it was still

00:50:19   early in my time as somebody who has a press badge to go to these things and go to the

00:50:25   hands-on area afterwards. And it's still the case where as soon as the event is over,

00:50:30   There's this scrum to get there and start getting photos of these devices and touch

00:50:35   them and you have to wait and people are crowded around.

00:50:38   And then very quickly it empties out because so many of these people have to file.

00:50:43   It's like, "I've got to get my post up.

00:50:45   I've got to write.

00:50:46   I've got to get my pictures.

00:50:47   I've got to go."

00:50:48   It's like seeing an airplane where they all go running out and they knock her over.

00:50:50   Yeah, exactly.

00:50:51   And then all of a sudden it's empty and then you get to play with them all to yourselves.

00:50:56   But anyway, I actually talked to Scott Forstall.

00:51:01   I just saw him standing by himself and I went up and introduced myself, terribly afraid

00:51:06   that he'd have no idea who I was.

00:51:09   And instead, he knew exactly who I was and said he reads my site all the time and mentioned

00:51:15   something I'd recently written.

00:51:16   And we had a wonderful conversation.

00:51:20   And then I was talking to Katie Cotton, who I'd met her before because she, of course,

00:51:24   everybody was in the meat. She knew everybody was in the media. And then she said, Hey, would you

00:51:28   like to talk to Steve? And I literally this is my reply. I literally said, Does anybody ever say no

00:51:33   to that? And she laughed and said, actually, no, nobody has ever said that. And then she walked me

00:51:38   over and introduced me to Steve Jobs. And we talked about the fun. He was like, Well, of course,

00:51:42   his first question was, so what do you think? And I just, I did it still is one of my it's probably

00:51:49   my I'd been waiting for what Apple calls retina screens for forever. They used to call them high

00:51:56   DPI. And there were cable Sasser and I have been obsessed with this. I don't know if 10 years prior

00:52:03   to the iPhone four, but when everybody thought it would come to the Mac first, and there were

00:52:07   WWDC sessions, I forget how many years before but they used to call it high DPI. And it was like,

00:52:12   get your software ready for high DPI. And like panic had changed all of the assets in all of

00:52:18   of their apps from bitmap images to PDFs so that they'd be scalable. And it never happened

00:52:26   for the Mac until, I don't know, whenever Retina Max came out. And they did it in a

00:52:31   totally different way where Retina Max, they did this whole 2x, 3x thing where you could

00:52:36   still use bitmaps because they were precise size. Back in the day, everybody was anticipating

00:52:41   that high resolution interfaces would be PDFs where you could scale them. You could go like

00:52:46   96%, 93%, 94%. So I was super excited about the iPhone 4 because it's the first time

00:52:53   I'd ever seen a truly high resolution device. And it looked amazing. And we were talking

00:53:00   about it and we were talking about in the iPhone in addition to being retina, the iPhone

00:53:04   4 was the first one where the display was fused to the glass. And so that it eliminated

00:53:10   the sort of parallax of the distance from the surface of the glass to the screen. It

00:53:15   It was so much better in so many ways. It wasn't just like, oh, we've got two pixels

00:53:19   for every one pixel. It was just like whole. It just felt like they'd leap left 10 years

00:53:23   ahead in display technology in one year. But the the other thing about being fusing the

00:53:31   display to the glass is in addition to being better to look at and especially better to

00:53:36   look at it an angle. It also means there's no air gap between them. And I don't know

00:53:41   did you had early iPhones right? Like the like the iPhone 3g and 3gs because there was

00:53:48   an air gap very small but there was an air gap between the display and the touch the

00:53:52   glass you could get like a piece of dust in there. I don't know if that ever happened

00:53:57   to you it happened to me. I don't think it no I don't remember that happened fairly early

00:54:04   on and so I'd spent an entire year with this one piece of dust in a very prominent location

00:54:10   And so I was talking to Steve Jobs about this, the iPhone 4 and how, how much, you know,

00:54:16   all these details about the display. And I got to the air gap part. And I was like, so

00:54:20   with this, you know, the screen being fused, there's literally no air gap anymore. And

00:54:24   then he told me, yeah, no air gap at all. But they had to build their own machines to

00:54:28   do it and ship them all over to China like that, that Apple built these machines to do

00:54:33   it because no, you know, there are no other displays that didn't have an air gap. And

00:54:37   I said, so you couldn't that therefore something like this couldn't happen. And I took out

00:54:41   my iPhone three g and showed him the piece of dust. It looks at me and he just says,

00:54:47   No, that can't happen. But with no apology whatsoever. You didn't get you a replacement.

00:54:57   He's like that. But it was all in all it was. It was all about how awesome the iPhone

00:55:02   So yeah, that can't happen anymore

00:55:04   Yeah

00:55:07   That's one of my Steve Jobs stories

00:55:09   Twice how many times did you talk to him twice and then once I got an email, okay

00:55:15   But not because I wrote to him he wrote to me

00:55:18   What did you do I've never told this story either he effectively it was very strange

00:55:25   He effectively told me the iCloud strategy like 11 months in advance

00:55:31   because I had written something I had written a piece on during fireball complaining about the

00:55:37   The fact that you still had to like sync to iTunes on your Mac to get like your contacts and and certain things

00:55:45   He wrote me an email and he just it just started I read daring fireball

00:55:51   Or it started off the record. I read daring fireball and then he didn't say use the name

00:55:57   But he effectively told me they're working on it and it was you know, like holy shit

00:56:01   And I wrote back to him. It took me like a day to figure out how to write back and I

00:56:10   never heard from him again. I got the email before I met him though at the WWDC. And so

00:56:18   I actually asked him, I was like, "Hey, I just want to double check. A couple months

00:56:20   ago I got an email from you." And he was like, "Yeah." And I was like, "Okay." I

00:56:24   still never was 100% sure. Right. Somebody's spoofed his address. No, but I guess actually,

00:56:33   now that I think about it, I guess he actually, what he outlined to me as their long term

00:56:37   strategy was over a year in advance, because iCloud didn't come out till his last year,

00:56:43   2011 at WWDC. But it was effectively, you know, I don't think he used the phrase, but

00:56:49   it was effectively a in the future that, you know, the truth will be in the cloud, as opposed

00:56:53   to, you know, that it will move to the cloud will be the center of your data experience,

00:56:58   not your Mac. He just told it all to me. It was it was very strange.

00:57:08   So we have any time you take little birdies. You meant Steve Jobs? Yeah.

00:57:16   Anyway, 10 our reviews. I love this friggin fun. I just so great. I'm just blown away

00:57:21   by how much I like it.

00:57:23   I wish it was smaller.

00:57:27   That is the thing.

00:57:28   And I will say that one of the best aspects of it, it does feel smaller to me than the

00:57:34   XS Max.

00:57:35   Like the Max thing is just not for me.

00:57:37   Well, it is smaller.

00:57:40   It is, and it feels smaller.

00:57:41   And it feels to me subjectively more like a big XS and less like a small XS Max in that

00:57:50   I feel like if I had to use this phone for the next 11 months, I wouldn't be annoyed.

00:58:00   But it's funny how a little difference here and there to me makes a difference in hand.

00:58:07   Because I bought a couple cases for it and I still want to write about it.

00:58:10   I think it's so weird that Apple doesn't have any cases yet for the iPhone XR.

00:58:15   So I bought a couple of third-party cases like on Amazon.

00:58:17   I bought a leather one from a company called Bellroy who I'm a fan of their wallets and

00:58:23   stuff.

00:58:24   They sponsored during Fireball like five, six years ago.

00:58:26   It's been a while, but I should mention that they were a one-time sponsor of during

00:58:30   Fireball, but I just like their products and I bought a Bellroy case for the 10R.

00:58:36   And putting any case on it makes it feel too big to me.

00:58:40   It's like it pushes it over.

00:58:42   The way it feels with no case is like the upper limit of what I consider reasonable.

00:58:45   But the best part about it is I will stop using it because I'm not buying one.

00:58:50   I already have a 10 s and my 10 s feels so nice and small now.

00:58:56   Maybe I guess that's maybe what I should do to segue away from Yeah, the SE is like, get

00:59:01   it get a 10 s max.

00:59:04   Get an eight get an eight plus borrow somebody's eight plus because the eight plus and again,

00:59:09   put the the plus size, the 678 plus size phones next to the tennis max, and they they're like,

00:59:17   it's like they're about the same. It's like the 10 s is bigger, taller, but it is a little narrower.

00:59:24   But for some reason, that minimal like the millimeter or two difference in width is

00:59:31   noticeable. But get it. And I guess just looking at the phone with the seemingly antiquated forehead

00:59:38   and chin. It all just seems puffy feels loaded. It's like the best way to get used to a bigger

00:59:43   iPhone is to get the eight plus and you try using that for a while. Okay, well, so anyway,

00:59:49   well, we can we can mention my when my se dies. So you're you're using an iPhone se

00:59:54   I put this in the show notes that we share the show notes and in Apple notes and then

00:59:59   Caleb Sexton who edited the show is also on the shared note. And he usually doesn't do

01:00:04   this. He added a note. He changed the section from moltz's iPhone se to moltz and Caleb's

01:00:11   iPhone as iPhones se and he wrote the note. I'll never give it up. I'll go to the grave

01:00:19   with a tiny phone. Caleb. Yeah. That is I am. I'm not gonna go that far, but I'll use it.

01:00:27   I'm gonna use it until it goes to the grave. I think it in the long term trend. It is absolutely

01:00:33   the the the other the the the elephant in the room there's some kind of pun about

01:00:42   you know big-ass phones and elephants I guess but the elephant in the room with

01:00:46   the 2018 iPhone lineup is that all of a sudden the smallest new iPhone is

01:00:50   actually quite large which is the iPhone XS yeah even the you know you're on an

01:00:57   SE, which is just tiny compared to these phones. But even the iPhone 7, not plus, just regular

01:01:07   7, I had it out. I always end up getting them out to compare this or that when I'm writing

01:01:11   these reviews. I had it out and Amy saw it and she was like, "Oh my God, that's so

01:01:15   nice. Isn't that nice?" I was like, "Yeah, it is actually." The smallest new iPhone

01:01:23   you can get is actually quite large. And I think it's worth talking about.

01:01:29   I don't know. I'm still holding on just time, and I don't think that there's any hope currently

01:01:34   of anything getting any smaller than the 10-S.

01:01:39   I disagree. I think that there is a chance that they will—I don't know what they're

01:01:45   going to call them next year because one of the other weird things about these 10-S and

01:01:51   10R names is the 10S just tacking S is fits right along with a whole bunch of other previous

01:01:59   S phones, S iPhones where the industrial design is almost the same. Maybe they move the camera

01:02:05   around a little bit, which is annoying because then you have to buy a new case if you already

01:02:10   had a case for the other one, but they move the camera around a little bit or the, you know,

01:02:14   the 5S, I think I'm almost certain was the first one with touch ID. So instead of having

01:02:21   an old-fashioned simple home button had a touch ID button, which is obviously a visual

01:02:28   form factor change, but it was in the same position.

01:02:31   But the XR is all new, right?

01:02:34   It's literally a new size.

01:02:37   New colors.

01:02:38   It's clearly not based on any previous iPhone.

01:02:43   But I can't believe they would call a phone next year the XRS, although maybe they would.

01:02:50   I'm overthinking it, right? That they'll just come out with another one that looks like

01:02:55   the 10R and call it the 10RS because it's, I guess, I don't know. It just seems crazy

01:03:02   to me. I just can't believe though that they'd only do one year of this, that they'd put

01:03:06   all this work into this. We talked 15 minutes ago about how much insane engineering and

01:03:10   design work went into making this LCD go corner to corner. Why in the world would they do

01:03:15   do it for only one year, it doesn't make sense.

01:03:17   But I actually think, and I do this all the time,

01:03:22   and I don't even know if it's worthwhile,

01:03:23   but I spent like, I swear to God,

01:03:25   hours in a spreadsheet working out the pixels per inch

01:03:30   and dots per inch of the various,

01:03:32   all these phones in the various scaling.

01:03:34   You can go to, on these bigger phones,

01:03:36   you can go to the settings display

01:03:39   and change the scaling from standard to zoomed.

01:03:43   When you do that though and look at all the math,

01:03:46   and especially when you look at the points, not pixels,

01:03:50   where, you know, meaning the different,

01:03:52   I tried to get in this interview,

01:03:53   I hope I didn't lose people.

01:03:54   It doesn't seem like I did,

01:03:55   'cause nobody wrote to me with any confusion,

01:03:57   but maybe they just skipped over it.

01:03:59   - Lost over it, yeah.

01:04:00   (both laughing)

01:04:00   - Just look for the next subhead.

01:04:02   But it's not that hard.

01:04:05   It might be a mistake for me

01:04:09   to try to write about it in words,

01:04:11   I feel like maybe it's better illustrated visually, but basically it's like if you think of a sheet of

01:04:18   graph paper and there's like think of like the main the main sheets the main squares being like

01:04:25   the points but then you divide every one of those squares into two like a two by two array that's a

01:04:33   two x retina screen where the points are the the big squares and the pixels of the actual physical

01:04:40   display are the little squares within the square. So there are four per pixels per point. And in a

01:04:45   three X retina display like the 10 asks, you'd get a three by three array, like a tic tac toe board

01:04:51   of nine, nine per point. Right. But if you just look at the points, because like, like if you and

01:04:57   if you just think of like 16 point text, like if you just take the system font and you say,

01:05:03   give me 16-point text in the system font and write the word iPhone. The letter I rendered

01:05:11   at 16 points is going to be the exact same size whether it's 2x or 3x. It's the exact

01:05:17   same number of big squares. It's just each sub-square has finer detail because it's

01:05:22   either a 2x2 or a 3x3 within. When you look at that and you look at the phones in terms

01:05:30   of points, there's two point resolutions. There's the standard resolution of the 10S

01:05:37   and the standard resolution of the 10S Max, where the Max is just bigger in both directions

01:05:42   and has more points. But when you use scaling on the 10S Max and you say, "Give me the

01:05:49   zoomed interface," which makes everything a little bit bigger, it just uses the exact

01:05:53   same number of points as the 10S and just zooms them up. So you're getting like the

01:06:00   screenshot taken on the XS and a screenshot taken on the XS Max in zoomed mode.

01:06:06   Jared Polin Will be the same.

01:06:07   Dave Asprey Well, except that it would be physically bigger.

01:06:09   You know what I mean?

01:06:10   Jared Polin Yeah, right, right, right.

01:06:12   Dave Asprey It's a lot like, and it's like, it's like exactly like the, the iPad, iPad mini versus

01:06:18   the regular iPad of your, when they were the exact same pixel for pixel. It's just that the iPad mini

01:06:23   use smaller pixels and pack the same interface into a smaller thing. So the 10 R has the

01:06:32   exact same two scaling sizes as the 10 S Max. And so when you're in the standard zoom, just

01:06:40   the default, if you just use standard pixel for our point for point, I mean, it's the

01:06:45   exact same interface as the 10 S Max. It's just that each point is two by two pixels

01:06:52   instead of three by three. And when you zoom, it's like a scaled up 10 s pixel for pixel

01:06:59   or point for point. I mean, see, I even I get confused. But so, and the 10 s not maxed,

01:07:04   just the regular 10 act 10 s doesn't have a scaling option. So you can't there is no

01:07:09   zoom on the tennis because it already is the smaller of the modern 10 class phones. So

01:07:15   I feel like what is would naturally slot into this product array weird would be a smaller

01:07:21   10 R. Well that's yeah and I was just thinking looking at that that would I

01:07:25   mean that would be what I would like it would happen and so what I'm imagining

01:07:30   and I think it would be very natural would be it would be an LCD screen it

01:07:34   would be 326 pixels per inch exactly like the 10 R except instead of being

01:07:39   6.1 inches diagonal it would be only 5.5 inches diagonal so it would be like a

01:07:45   third of an inch smaller than the tennis body the would the body be the

01:07:51   that much smaller necessarily because one of the bezels not that big.

01:07:55   Well, it is big enough though. But the other thing that I figured out looking at all of

01:07:59   this is that the XS, I think, is actually would be more accurately described as a 5.9

01:08:06   inch display, not 5.8. I think that when you look at it, and I actually even bought a couple

01:08:12   months ago one of these, they're real cheap, I'm really glad I bought it. Like $15 on Amazon,

01:08:19   can get like a digital caliper that measures literally to like the hundredth—it claims

01:08:26   to measure to the thousandth of an inch, but I mean, I can't believe—that's like

01:08:30   microns. Using that and doing like some Pythagorean theorem based on—because Apple tells you

01:08:37   how—you can measure how wide the screen is, and they tell you how many pixels printed

01:08:41   it's supposed to be, and you know how many pixels there are. So if you just do a little

01:08:45   squared plus the square root of you know the two sides at the right angle is the length of the

01:08:52   diagonal of a triangle it actually works out to like five point eight five

01:08:58   nine or something like that like it really is it seems more like five point eight six

01:09:04   which should round up to five point nine inches whereas i the i think yeah so that's taking it to

01:09:13   the curve? No, not the curve. No, and Apple, even in their footnote, admits that their measurements

01:09:18   are taken as the hypothetical perfect rectangle of the display would be, which seems a little bit

01:09:25   questionable, but it really makes sense if you think about it. It is fair if you think about it.

01:09:32   Well, most of the screen does fit that. Right, because most of the females, you know,

01:09:36   and you don't really scroll diagonally. You scroll up and down. And it just, any, you know,

01:09:42   Long story short, it just seems like they could, you know, they would just have points,

01:09:45   it would be the same points as the iPhone XS, except they'd be, each pixel would actually be

01:09:51   a little smaller. It's 163 pixel points per inch, as opposed to 153 points per inch on the standard

01:10:00   scaling of the XS and XS Max. Everything's just a little bigger point for point on the XS and XS Max.

01:10:07   And that was true on the plus size phones too, the 8 Plus and the 7 Plus, 6 Plus, 6S Plus. Those

01:10:14   phones point for point made everything a little bigger too in addition to showing more stuff.

01:10:20   So anyway, a 5.5 inch diagonal 10R next year, it would be quite a bit smaller than even the 10S.

01:10:29   You'd notice it. You'd notice it as being smaller in the same way that you notice that the 10R is

01:10:34   is smaller than the XS Max. I think it would make a lot of people happy. I think it would

01:10:42   be very natural. It almost fits the pattern where they come out with these 10-class phones

01:10:49   the first year in one size and then come out with the second size the second year. It's

01:10:57   just that instead of starting small and going big—

01:10:59   Probably a little bit more the size of a 7, but there's the edge.

01:11:03   Yeah, yeah.

01:11:04   Yeah, whatever.

01:11:05   It might be even a little smaller than a 7 or 8. Maybe. But about that size.

01:11:12   Display on the 7 is 4.7 inches.

01:11:15   Yeah, but it's no good because it's not corner to corner.

01:11:17   Yeah, no, I know. Yeah, I know. It's just...

01:11:19   What you need is...

01:11:20   You're trying to eyeball it, but of course you can't really make it.

01:11:22   Yeah, but if you just take a piece of paper and measure off 5.5 inches and try to put it on an

01:11:28   iPhone 7 it fits it. It's not a bad comparison. It would you definitely notice it and I think

01:11:35   if the 10 are successful like you know, I think they might do that. I think it would

01:11:38   make sense to offer them in two sizes. Yeah, and that's what I would I would I would probably

01:11:43   go for that. I mean eventually I'm obviously I can't keep keep this phone for I mean Caleb

01:11:47   says he's going to do it, but I can't keep this phone forever and I feel like it's you

01:11:51   know i ios 12 has been pretty good on this device because it actually uh it it lives up to the

01:12:01   faster it is faster like craig craig fedrige said they're gonna make it faster and i they actually

01:12:06   seemingly did yeah so uh i i can at least squeeze another year out of it if i want to and don't drop

01:12:13   it but uh i suspect that when the next version of ios comes out it's not going to be so friendly

01:12:19   Would I on the vice I honestly think that anybody holding out on it with an SE like you it?

01:12:26   Would probably be best served to wait one more year because yeah

01:12:30   If they're going to make a phone smaller than the 10s a new one smaller than a 10s

01:12:35   It would be next year and it would be it like it

01:12:38   I don't know what they would call it, but it would effectively be a 10r mini, right?

01:12:41   That's what I was. Yeah, I was thinking 10r mini. Yeah, it would be exactly the same

01:12:45   Points as the 10s just smaller slightly smaller. Well

01:12:50   See you'd give me hope again. They were just so I can get crushed again next year. Well, you know, what's funny

01:12:55   what I did is I

01:12:57   Yesterday or the day before fired up my iPhone 5s and

01:13:02   wiped it and updated it to iOS 12 because I also bought a

01:13:07   Pixel 3 I bought a pixel two years ago

01:13:10   I bought a pixel 3 and I want to spend some time using the pixel 3 is my main phone

01:13:14   But I don't want to put my my real SIM card in it

01:13:20   I have like a spare SIM card from T-Mobile that I use with the

01:13:23   Pixel I had been using with the pixel and I'll just put that one in my pixel 3

01:13:27   Because I don't want to screw up my iMessage

01:13:30   Joanna Stern had a column about this just a week or two ago about house

01:13:35   how screwed up it makes everything like she put her SIM card in the pixel 3 to

01:13:42   to test it and like missed all sorts of texts from her

01:13:47   Family and friends because they were you know all going to iMessage like she opened up her Mac and then there's all these messages

01:13:53   That she wasn't getting because they weren't going to SMS

01:13:56   It's just easier. I know I'm not going to switch to the pixel 3

01:14:00   full time

01:14:03   so it's just easier, but if I'm going to

01:14:05   Still carry a second phone so I can get my phone calls and text messages

01:14:11   And I want to not be

01:14:13   Tempted you know to use it for photos and stuff

01:14:18   I'm just gonna carry the 5s around for like a week while I test the you know in my other pocket while I carry the

01:14:23   Pixel 3 is my try to use it for everything fun and I will say god damn this phone feels nice in the hand

01:14:30   Isn't it? Oh my god

01:14:32   Everyone's well, they pick up my I have a four upstairs and I picked that up and I think that's a nice feel to

01:14:37   oh

01:14:40   It is just like damn this is nice and I had to when I got the SE as a review unit

01:14:46   I never bought an SE but I got the review unit and I've

01:14:48   It was funny enough. I was staying in it, you know went to Cupertino

01:14:53   I think to get it, but I was staying in San Francisco and a friend of the show guy English was in town

01:14:58   I forgot why even though you know, he's Canadian. He he forgot which week he was supposed to be

01:15:03   Yeah, I think you forgot what week he was supposed to be there. So he was in town and we were having a

01:15:09   drink it like at a at the hotel at like six and i just stood it up i just stood the phone up i was

01:15:16   like just look at it it stands up you can just set it on the bottom and it just stands up yeah like

01:15:21   isn't that nice i think in general i like that i like the the right angle the flat edges rather

01:15:27   than the curved edges but it just it feels like you can it just feels like a phone he listens to

01:15:32   me it just feels like a phone you i hold this and i feel like i could go on like a roller coaster

01:15:36   and shoot video and I don't have to worry about this phone flying out of my hand like

01:15:40   nothing is going to make me drop this phone yeah and you put it in your pocket and it's like oh

01:15:45   you know it doesn't feel like I've got like this big thing in my pocket

01:15:48   well I got the battery replaced the Mi SE oh yeah did you was that through the uh the yeah

01:15:54   by the end of the either go prices go back up at the end of the year unless they change that

01:15:59   uh but so it was only 29 bucks that's it that's well if I'm gonna hang on to it I might as well

01:16:03   get the battery replaced. And how long did you have to wait for that? I remember at first it was

01:16:06   like a big one. It took a few days to get the appointments. Any of the appointments were booked

01:16:14   out for like three or four days. You know, just a genius appointment was booked out three or four

01:16:20   days. And so it was just a matter of getting a genius appointment and they did it in an hour

01:16:25   and a half. All right, let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor. And it's our good

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01:20:48   Anything else on the XR?

01:20:54   It's kind of funny 'cause it's the RXBAR

01:20:56   and the iPhone XR.

01:20:59   - Oh, you had mentioned, well, not on the XR,

01:21:02   but you were talking about the Pixel 3

01:21:04   And yeah, I bought one.

01:21:09   I just not even a review yet.

01:21:10   I bought it because I want, I like to have,

01:21:11   I don't want to buy one every year

01:21:12   because it's a lot of money,

01:21:14   but I feel like it's worth just to stay up to date

01:21:16   on Android.

01:21:17   - Right.

01:21:18   And they've got this night shift thing coming out.

01:21:20   - Night site, they call it.

01:21:21   - Night site, okay.

01:21:22   I think night shift's a better name.

01:21:24   Oh, but that's already taken.

01:21:26   - Yeah.

01:21:27   (laughing)

01:21:27   - That's why I thought it was that.

01:21:28   - Yeah, so they demoed this on stage at their Pixel event

01:21:32   and they compared it.

01:21:33   It was like a picture of a group of people in a park.

01:21:36   And they said, "Here's the same picture

01:21:39   "taken on an iPhone XS."

01:21:41   And it was shocking how different it was,

01:21:45   but it was Google's own photo.

01:21:46   And I have to say, it's not conspiracy,

01:21:50   but Apple is absolutely scrupulous

01:21:55   about the example photos they show

01:21:57   as having been taken with an iPhone.

01:22:00   I think Phil Schiller even said on stage

01:22:03   during the apples event that he insists that they literally don't even not only do they

01:22:10   not use like external lights but they don't even use things I don't even know what they're

01:22:16   called but you know like those things that bounce you know they're like oh yeah yeah

01:22:20   like a big white piece of shiny cardboard and a professional photo shoot somebody's

01:22:24   holding it up to bounce a little light off the bottom like they don't use anything like

01:22:28   that you know I mean obviously they are using professional photographers who are very good

01:22:32   taking photos with whatever camera they use. But in terms of—I think the photo that Shiller was

01:22:39   talking about was a 10-hour photo of a young woman at night leaning on a taxi cab with a neon sign

01:22:47   behind her. It was like a—there was some bounce. I think the way Shiller described it is there was

01:22:53   some bounce coming from the hood of the car because she was leaning on it, but that was

01:22:56   actually where she was, so it's fair game. The Pixel 3, they're talking about, in Google's

01:23:05   example photos, about their second selfie camera. It's super wide angle, like a fisheye

01:23:11   lens almost, so you can get more of your friends in. They have a side-by-side comparison and

01:23:16   supposedly taken at the same spot, but there's a guy in the one photo who has a smokestack

01:23:21   over his head, and then in the wider angle one, the smokestack is gone. Like, I don't,

01:23:28   it's just showing how wide the angle is, and I think it's completely fair representation,

01:23:32   but apparently somebody photoshopped out a smokestack in the one. You don't photoshop,

01:23:36   you know, like, "Ah, we didn't think about that smokestack sticking out of the guy's

01:23:40   head. Well, let's photoshop it out." Don't do that. You can't do that in a photo comparison.

01:23:45   You shouldn't do that. So I have to say I take Google's example photos with a bit of

01:23:50   a grain of salt, but this night sight feature isn't yet shipping in the Pixel 3. So you

01:23:59   buy a Pixel 3, you open it up, you update the software. As of this recording, you still

01:24:03   don't have it. Google says it's coming soon. But apparently, some Android enthusiasts figured

01:24:11   out that if you just take the camera app and change one zero to a one, it's obviously like

01:24:19   a preference setting. "Is Night Sight on?" and it ships and it says zero, and you change it to one,

01:24:25   and then it's on. So people, you know, and then however, I don't even know what you do, but to,

01:24:31   you know, you install the app on your Pixel and you have this feature, it's rather astounding.

01:24:37   Vlad Savov at The Verge, I guess I should put this in the show notes, posted an article yesterday

01:24:43   with some examples he took, and it's really rather astounding. Yeah, it is amazing.

01:24:49   I mean the ones on the you know, the ones without it look like the shots that I take

01:24:53   And then

01:24:57   These other ones look like other shots that I wish I could take right effectively what it's doing and it takes

01:25:03   You know, it doesn't it it's the part that you think oh, this is too good to be true

01:25:08   Well, you can't just like open the camera hit the shutter button and have you know this shot in extremely low light limit

01:25:15   You know where a traditional cam photo with the exact same camera is almost all black with night sight

01:25:21   It almost looks like daylight

01:25:23   It's like a tremendous amount

01:25:25   But it what it does is it takes a few seconds and you have to go to a special mode you have to turn

01:25:30   you know, it's just like when you go to portrait mode or

01:25:32   Panoramic mode or something like that. It's a different mode and then before you can hit the shutter

01:25:37   it's like gathering light and what it's doing is taking a whole bunch of exposures and

01:25:42   Then it uses all of them together with machine learning to like figure out what the heck it's actually doing

01:25:48   so it you know the part that's like

01:25:50   Not magic is it takes a couple seconds to get one of these images, but when you do it's really rather staggering

01:25:58   Yeah, I should also put a link in the show notes somebody last night

01:26:03   Texted me a YouTube video from some I believe Chinese. They were definitely Asian

01:26:09   It was an academic paper that was published earlier this year

01:26:12   In like a machine imaging journal of

01:26:16   I

01:26:19   Don't know if they're using the exact same technique as night sight

01:26:22   but it's their their example results in the paper were very so had a very similar look and

01:26:27   The people who wrote this paper also published this YouTube video showing examples of their stuff and they were using like

01:26:36   Real cameras like Sony RX cameras and stuff, but then using this it's machine learning take multiple exposures

01:26:43   Put them through the magic of machine learning and out pops this image

01:26:48   And then they also compared it to like the very best high-end

01:26:52   Denoising algorithms, you know, like, you know, there's ways, you know, you take a noisy low-light photo

01:26:57   There's filters you can use in Photoshop to decrease the noise, but they there's severe, you know, they're very limited

01:27:03   They might make an image look better, but they won't make it look like it's not noisy

01:27:07   Whereas this machine learning thing gets rid of the noise. It's it's really astounding

01:27:12   Don't know what else to say about it, but it looks just I mean it's very impressive

01:27:20   I guess there are people that just people I've seen people on Twitter who are

01:27:31   Upset annoyed, you know, there's there's people who want the iPhone to be the better camera in every single regard

01:27:36   and

01:27:38   you know this night sight feature is very useful the iPhone doesn't have it and

01:27:42   You know, there's and there's other people who've used

01:27:46   You know the pixel 2 from last year who think that it still takes better still photos than like iPhone tennis

01:27:51   It's obviously close but but there are specific features that Google has in their camera app that that are you know

01:28:00   It's not there's no there's no possible way that you can say this night sight feature isn't useful

01:28:04   It's and it's only a pixel. Yeah, I don't think that's I don't think it's a reasonable expectation to think that Apple would be ahead of

01:28:11   Google in every single regard because Google the Google right people are they're just too good at this. They're too good

01:28:16   It means too much to them. It's obviously the main selling point of pixel phones

01:28:21   It's just not fair to expect Apple or not reasonable to expect Apple to be first in every single regard

01:28:28   I wouldn't be surprised at all if Google if Apple comes out with a very similar feature in a year or two, right?

01:28:33   Right, and I don't think most people make decisions like that, right?

01:28:36   No, it doesn't seem like you're not gonna go out and say well

01:28:39   I need the absolute and some people probably do but I don't think most people I mean we talk, you know

01:28:44   you talked about you in a stern talking about how difficult it is to switch platforms for various different reasons and

01:28:48   Most people are just gonna say well the camera that I'm gonna get in the iPhone

01:28:52   10s is way better than the camera than I have in my 8 or whatever you have

01:28:56   so you're gonna be pleased that you're getting a better camera and

01:28:59   You compare it to what you have and not necessarily what's?

01:29:03   Everything that's available. Yeah, Jeffrey Fowler who's now at the Washington Post as their tech columnist

01:29:09   I didn't link to his review in my review roundup, but I

01:29:12   Don't think his post review had them but on Twitter

01:29:16   He posted a bunch of comparison shots that he took from an iPhone 6 compared to 10r

01:29:23   and I think in a you know, I did a bunch of shots just comparing last year's 10 to the tennis and

01:29:28   It for most people what Fowler did comparing it to like an iPhone 6 is more reasonable because that's the phone people are upgrading from

01:29:37   Now, right? Yeah, that's and it's just staggering how much better it is

01:29:41   It low all these cameras are gonna be better than the one of my SE

01:29:43   Well, you know what the SE has a 6s class camera, right?

01:29:47   Yeah, still I mean like, you know with all the modern ones in any of these new phones

01:29:52   Yeah, they're gonna be better than what I have. Yeah, it's really staggering

01:29:56   I guess it's a I should mention this too because it was something people emailed to me about or a follow-up

01:30:03   I forgot talking to Frommer about the pixels last week. I mentioned that Google also has this picture this feature

01:30:10   Forget what they call it, but effectively when you tap on a subject in the display, you know

01:30:16   You're using the camera and you've got a cat and you tap on the cat to focus on the cat.

01:30:21   As the cat moves around, it keeps the focus square on that cat or whatever it is that you focused on.

01:30:31   It uses, again, machine learning to identify, "Oh, here's the thing and it's moving. We'll keep the

01:30:39   focus on it." It's really cool. Again, I have a Pixel 3 in the house, but I haven't even opened

01:30:46   in the box yet because I've been waiting to finish all of my XR or XR stuff and to

01:30:50   do the show and everything. So I'll open it this weekend. But just using the hands-on

01:30:54   units at the Google event, press event two weeks ago, it's really cool.

01:31:00   The thing I want to mention is that apparently some higher-end dedicated cameras have had

01:31:05   a similar feature for a while. I don't think an SLR could do it because of the way SLRs

01:31:10   actually have to have the mirror flip up. But some of the mirrorless cameras of recent

01:31:15   years have a similar feature. I don't know how well that works. My Fuji, my, you know,

01:31:20   most recent real quote unquote real camera I own, my Fuji X 100 S doesn't have that.

01:31:25   Somebody even said Fuji's, somebody actually even mentioned, I think who knows I have a

01:31:28   Fuji's like Fuji, all the good things you can say about their cameras are actually behind

01:31:33   on this feature. I think part of it is that my Fuji doesn't have a touch screen. It just

01:31:38   has like an old fashioned non touch screen display. It kind of makes sense that you'd

01:31:43   have to have a touchscreen for this to pick a subject. I don't know how well.

01:31:47   Unless you're going to have a mouse.

01:31:50   So how similar Google's implementation of this is to the implementation in Sony cameras

01:31:54   and whatever else, whoever else has them, I don't know. But it's a really cool feature.

01:31:58   And whether they're the first camera to have it or not, they're certainly the first cell

01:32:02   phone camera to have it. It's a very cool feature.

01:32:05   The other thing they have that, and again, I talked about it with Dan last week, but

01:32:10   I should mention it because people have written to me about it is they have this picture called

01:32:15   Top Photo. I forget their marketing name. But the gist of it is I take a picture of

01:32:20   you and the moment I hit the shutter, you're like looking away or your eyes are closed.

01:32:26   You blinked. And it tries to identify those moments like, "Ooh, I see this is a human

01:32:32   face and the eyes are closed." Luckily, I've captured three frames from the second before

01:32:38   and a few from this after and who here's one where his eyes are wide open and he's looking

01:32:43   right at the camera. I'll pop up and say, Hey, would you prefer to use this image rather

01:32:49   than that image? And some people have said, well, doesn't Apple have a similar feature?

01:32:55   Like when you take a burst mode or like when you take a burst mode, it puts a dot under

01:33:00   some of them. Like when you go to examine it and it sort of guesses, you know, based

01:33:05   on similar AI type features. So you shoot burst mode and you get 20 still images and

01:33:12   then you go to examine them. There's a nice little interface and it shows them all.

01:33:17   And iOS helpfully puts a dot under some of them to suggest, "Hey, this one might be

01:33:22   good." And that's cool and it does work to some regard. But with the Google feature,

01:33:29   you don't have to go into a mode and you don't have to shoot a burst. And in most

01:33:33   of the photos you take, it doesn't do anything because it doesn't trigger the, "Hey, this

01:33:38   could be better if you take the one from a second ago." The Google thing is, it's, I

01:33:45   don't know, I just, like I said a few minutes ago, there's some people who are so, suffer

01:33:50   so much consternation, worried that this can't be true that Google has better features on

01:33:55   the camera than the iPhone. This is one that it is. It's the, whatever Apple's doing with

01:34:01   the burst mode doesn't compare to the top photo picture on the pixels.

01:34:07   And it was so funny because in the hands-on area, while the woman from Google's camera

01:34:11   team was explaining the feature to me, and they'd already given me a Pixel 3 to just

01:34:16   hold while she was talking, I took a picture of her and it literally captured her with

01:34:20   her eyes closed. And I said this last week, but it just blows my mind that as she's telling

01:34:24   me how the feature works, I took a photo that triggered it and it said, "Would you rather

01:34:28   used this photo and the photo it suggested she looked perfect it was

01:34:32   absolutely crazy and then I'm like what this would be annoying if it happened

01:34:37   all the time and I started taking more pictures and it never happened again

01:34:40   because they were all they you know people without their eyes closed yeah

01:34:43   yeah of course these are all just on the pixel right this this those two features

01:34:48   I believe so yes well they are coming most of those features that were coming

01:34:52   to the previous pixels to the pixel one and pixel two and I know that the night

01:34:56   But night sight definitely is coming.

01:34:57   But Samsung's not getting them.

01:34:58   Right.

01:34:59   Samsung's not getting them.

01:35:00   It's a Google feature, which is its own can of worms.

01:35:09   The Verge had an interesting story, I thought.

01:35:11   It was funny because I had written a post last week about something that was just like

01:35:17   a shameless ripoff of the iPhone.

01:35:20   In another Verge story, I forget if it was a Huawei thing or who, but then the very next

01:35:25   today, obviously long in the works, The Verge had a long feature story from, I think, Sam

01:35:31   Biford, who I found it fascinating, like really digging into the Chinese phone company's

01:35:41   OS's. And I really, he's making, the gist of his thing is don't think of them as skins

01:35:47   anymore. You know, like the old days, you know, all these Android handset makers would

01:35:50   put their own UI skin on top of Android to give everything their own look. But like Xiaomi

01:36:00   and Huawei and LG, they all have their own—they even call them OSs, like MIUI OS and stuff.

01:36:08   It really is worth thinking of them as their own OSs based on Android. Part of it is fully

01:36:16   acknowledging that it's just completely standard amongst all of them to just utterly, shamelessly

01:36:22   copy the iOS camera app. I mean, they copy all sorts of things from iOS. They copy icons.

01:36:27   I think it was an icon. It was, it was like the music icon was like an exact, it was like

01:36:33   they just turned the gradient upside down. Yeah. And, and their, their health app was

01:36:38   just the Apple health app icon with like an EKG line underneath the heart, like a white

01:36:44   background and a pink heart with a gradient. It was even the same shape heart. There's

01:36:50   like 10 different ways to draw a heart. It's just a total copy.

01:36:56   But the phone in particular, the camera app of Apple's iOS 7 camera app, the gist of

01:37:02   what Byford wrote, might be the most influential software design of the last 10 years. They

01:37:07   copy all sorts of things from Apple, but the camera app in particular is just amazing.

01:37:13   I thought that was it. I guess I should put that in the show notes. I'm just showing

01:37:16   that's going to be long. Chinese. Oh, S's. All right, whatever. Anything else on the

01:37:27   tower? I'm trying to think about this. The case thing is weird. The fact that Apple doesn't

01:37:34   have cases and I know that is odd. I can't help but think it's it going back to what

01:37:40   we were talking about earlier in the show about how could they have been ready or were

01:37:44   they purposefully not ready? I don't know. The fact that they don't even have cases yet

01:37:47   makes me think that some of this was a bit rushed on Apple's part. It's just such an

01:37:51   unusual thing not to ship. There was a rumor 9to5Mac figured out that like, not even a

01:37:58   rumor, there were versions of the PR releases on September 12th about the new phones in

01:38:04   other countries that like it was like Apple Canada sent out a thing that said that the

01:38:09   10R would have an Apple clear case. And it seems like what happened was that there was

01:38:16   some original plan for Apple to ship a clear case for the iPhone 10R, which makes sense

01:38:21   because you know, if you're going to buy these colorful phones, right, why put them in an

01:38:25   opaque case? You know, if you have a cool blue phone, that was one of the reasons that

01:38:29   was one of the things I was thinking what maybe why they don't ship with the cases they

01:38:32   want you to put a case on it but maybe and if you remember with the with the last colorful

01:38:37   iPhones the 5c the Apple cases had holes in the back yeah to show the color through right

01:38:45   I hated those it was weird but you kind of got the thinking which I like to lick this

01:38:51   and I like that I love those phones I never I never had one but I you know every time

01:38:55   I picked one up I always just it's it was plastic but it felt really good isn't that

01:39:00   what Johnny I've said in the video. It's like unapologetically plastic. But it sounds

01:39:05   like bullshit, but it was true. It was unapologetically plastic, and it was really nice. I did not

01:39:12   have one either because I got the 5S instead, which is actually in my hand as I speak. But

01:39:19   it was really nice. You know why I saw a lot of people with 5Cs? It was at Apple, like

01:39:25   actual Apple employees in Cupertino. I forget why I was there. It was some subsequent event

01:39:35   or product briefing or something and I was at Infinite Loop and having lunch in the Cafe

01:39:42   Max. I forget who with. It was just very rare. It's unusual for Apple to invite members

01:39:50   of the media to stay for lunch. I just remember watching Apple employees walk around, and

01:39:56   an awful lot of them had the 5C. You would think, "Oh, Apple employees would have the

01:39:59   best. They'd have the 5S." But I think just the fact that it was sort of fun. There's

01:40:05   an awful lot of people at Apple who were more interested in the fun aspect of Apple products

01:40:09   than the technical bleeding edge aspect of Apple products. I just thought that was really

01:40:14   you know that yeah you just eyeballing it roughly at lunch without being a creep you know but it was

01:40:21   the thing about the five C's is it was obvious it was a fight if it didn't have a case it was

01:40:25   very obvious you know because it looked like no other phone on the market let alone yeah their

01:40:30   iPhone yeah so I mean so is easier do you wonder if maybe that they they couldn't get I think they

01:40:37   tried to make a bunch of clear cases and they didn't work out for yeah I don't know or they're

01:40:41   coming soon, you know, I'll bet they're coming soon, but it's—

01:40:44   I would think they've—eventually they have to ship something, and they're leaving

01:40:48   money on the table. Yeah, I bought one from a company called

01:40:52   Totalee, T-O-T-A-L-L-E-E. I bought a couple cases from them, actually. I guess, again,

01:41:03   here it is, another link in the show notes. There are—I'm not a case person. I've

01:41:10   never been. I've used my iPhones without a case almost all the time. Every once in

01:41:15   a while though, I kind of want to have a case like on vacation, like in the summertime.

01:41:23   I tend to have sweaty hands and hot weather. All the modern iPhones get a little slippery

01:41:32   if your hands are wet, in my opinion. So I would like to keep a case in my backpack,

01:41:39   and then just if I feel like my phone is slippery, I like to, you know, when I'm on vacation,

01:41:43   maybe I'll put it in a case for the day because then it won't be slippery. But I'm

01:41:49   general, I'm not a case person, so maybe I shouldn't be writing reviews of iPhone

01:41:53   cases. But anyway, it's overwhelming. I just read a thing the other day about, you

01:42:00   it it's literally like a billion dollar industry selling phone accessories, you know, and

01:42:04   Yeah, I would guess easily. I think 95% of people put their iPhones in cases, maybe more I

01:42:12   Yeah, very very rare when you don't see somebody with an iPhone case

01:42:16   Yeah, I think it immediately once you drop and break this

01:42:21   Break it

01:42:23   You're a little gun-shy after that. I think people who've never broken it do it

01:42:27   It just, I think people are so worried about breaking it.

01:42:30   - I can't imagine there's nobody left

01:42:31   who hasn't broken it.

01:42:32   - You know, I've only-- - At least one.

01:42:34   - So I've, I was just telling someone,

01:42:36   so I've never really used a case.

01:42:38   And I've had every, you know,

01:42:40   I've been using an iPhone since day one.

01:42:41   I've only ever cracked the screen on two.

01:42:44   And both were the iPhone 6, not the 6s, the 6 specifically,

01:42:49   which I thought was, there was something with the aluminum

01:42:54   that it was slippery as hell.

01:42:56   So I dropped my six, I forget how many months in,

01:42:59   on a sidewalk, and it was just,

01:43:03   it was like, I didn't even have to check.

01:43:05   It was like, oh, that shattered the screen.

01:43:07   Like, that was bad.

01:43:08   And then, and I went to the Apple store and got it fixed.

01:43:13   It was only like 100 bucks, I don't know.

01:43:16   It was very reasonable.

01:43:17   I just checked the prices.

01:43:18   I think it's still only like 129 bucks

01:43:20   for like the iPhone 6, S or 7 or something like that.

01:43:25   The iPhone 10s though are very expensive.

01:43:29   They're like 300 bucks to replace the screen.

01:43:31   So maybe I should put a case on that.

01:43:33   I don't know.

01:43:34   I also never buy AppleCare.

01:43:35   I haven't bought AppleCare for any product since the,

01:43:38   the only Apple product I've ever bought AppleCare for

01:43:40   in my life was my Mac LC that I bought, again,

01:43:44   to reference earlier in the show in 1991

01:43:46   when I went to college.

01:43:48   I haven't bought AppleCare since for anything.

01:43:50   And I'm way ahead.

01:43:52   So if I ever get a lemon that dies a day after the one-year warranty expires and I have to

01:44:01   buy a new one, whatever it is, I'm still ahead.

01:44:04   I've saved thousands of dollars in the last 20, what would it be, 27 years.

01:44:09   I've saved a lot of money by never buying Apple Care.

01:44:13   But on the other hand, I like to play Blackjack too.

01:44:15   So don't – I wouldn't take this as advice.

01:44:20   I did not I did not get it on the sissy. I don't know why I didn't I

01:44:25   Just but I dropped I saw I dropped that six and it cracked the screen and I got it fixed and I thought you know

01:44:31   What I've been thinking this goddamn phone is slippery

01:44:33   I got to be careful and then like a couple of weeks later

01:44:36   I wanted to take a picture of something in a store and I held it up and it wasn't like taking it out of my

01:44:41   pocket and I just held it up to take a picture of like a shirt in a store and the phone just slipped right through my

01:44:47   fingers and the store had carpeting even it wasn't like a hard floor and I didn't

01:44:51   even think for a second that the screen would have broken and I picked it up and

01:44:54   it was like the worst break I've ever seen like completely unusable like you

01:45:00   couldn't even like hope to get you know to read what was on carpeting yeah but

01:45:05   well I think it wasn't like shag carpet though yeah yeah right but it was just

01:45:09   it was that yeah right and so I had to get fixed it was the same phone I had so

01:45:12   the same phone my iPhone 6 I had to get the screen replaced twice but all other

01:45:16   phones combined since 2007. Not a single cracked screen. So I don't know. Maybe I'm lucky. Maybe

01:45:25   I'm careful. Whatever. I'm not a case person. But I remember we were at the fair, standing the line,

01:45:31   standing in the long line to do one of the rides and Hank's iPhone had the battery had drained.

01:45:39   And so he's like, "Can I play with your iPhone?" I was like, "Mmm, okay." I think it was a six as

01:45:44   well. And I was like, but don't drop it. Of course, like less than a minute later, smash.

01:45:52   And you didn't have a case?

01:45:54   Oh, come on, really? There was no, yeah, I didn't have a case on it.

01:45:58   So anyway, what I'm trying to say is there's a million cases out there,

01:46:02   literally. I mean, there's like a million different companies and it's overwhelming.

01:46:04   And so I did what any sane person would do is I just went to the wire cutter and

01:46:10   like they of course had like best cases, best iPhone cases of 2018. I just I don't know what

01:46:16   we would do without the wire cutter. Like, like honestly, the why I guess they dropped the the

01:46:21   I wish they hadn't because I think that was a better name. But now they're just wire cutter.

01:46:24   But they have such good roundups of things like this. And they break their cases into such

01:46:32   sensible categories like super protective cases, you know, like the Otterbox style things that are

01:46:38   like, you know, you can like put it on a rink and hockey game and use it as the puck and it'll

01:46:42   survive. Super thin cases. And, you know, there's all sorts of, you know, any way you'd want to

01:46:51   separate it, you know, best letter case if you want to do it. And so I just went to their thing,

01:46:58   and it was like best thin case for iPhones, and they recommended this brand total Lee,

01:47:03   T-O-T-A-L-L-E-E. I mentioned this on a Slack that you and I are both on and somebody was like,

01:47:09   "I can't believe you bought a phone from a company with that name." And it was true. I saw the name

01:47:13   of the company and I was just like, "I'm not buying from these people." But they don't print

01:47:18   the name on the cases. Even in small print, the cases are completely unlogoed. They are expensive.

01:47:27   They're like $25 cases at Amazon which makes see I'm an idiot. I I there's so many like $8 cases

01:47:33   I see. Oh, these are 25 or 26 dollars. They must be good

01:47:37   And I think well I can justify this I can justify buying three of these it's for work

01:47:42   And I thought I bought like three of these cases that I'm have no intention of actually using I

01:47:48   Bought ones for the 10 are which I'm gonna send back to Apple

01:47:54   But I just feel like without Apple branded cases. It might be helpful for me to say hey, here's some good ones, but I bought total Lee's

01:48:01   clear case for the 10r and it's nice it is I

01:48:06   Can't help but think that clear cases are going to be a big thing. Oh, yeah for the 10r

01:48:11   Yeah, it definitely is clear. They the total Lee people claim that their clear case

01:48:19   Doesn't yellow over time and it doesn't crack. Apparently that's a problem with a lot of clear cases

01:48:24   So I will put a link to the show note. I guess I'll link to the Amazon page

01:48:29   I can't verify that it won't yellow after a year because I've had it for a couple days

01:48:35   But it has a nice feel it is grippy. It increases the grip

01:48:40   I feel like it is a nice amount of grippiness without being

01:48:46   tacky coming out of your pocket. You know, I feel like there's a fine line there. I actually feel

01:48:50   like Apple's polyurethane or whatever they call their plastic rubbery cases are a little too

01:48:57   frictiony coming out of a jeans pocket. My son swears by them though. He loves the Apple rubber

01:49:03   cases, whatever they call them. So it's, but it's, you know, it's nice and it is truly clear. It is

01:49:10   not yellow at all. And it really likes it.

01:49:12   [Music]

01:49:12   JAYLEE: Hank has a red leather case for his 7S. It's actually one of the first ones that he keeps

01:49:20   on most of the time. I mean, he used to have plastic ones, because I would always just get

01:49:25   him the cheapest one on Amazon. And he would constantly be just taking it. He didn't like

01:49:31   having that on, and he would take it off all the time, and then he'd drop the phone and break it.

01:49:35   It was like, "You have a case! Leave it in the case!" And this is the first one where I haven't

01:49:39   had to argue with him about it. He seems seemingly likes the letter.

01:49:42   Yeah, well that's the other thing. Apple's cases are really good and it's weird, I guess,

01:49:47   because they are relatively expensive, you know, compared to third-party cases. That's why people

01:49:53   don't buy them because it also seems to me like eyeballing it at airports or wherever I go where

01:49:58   I just my mind wanders and I start looking like who's using an iPhone without a case.

01:50:04   Nobody, just me. But I also noticed that nobody uses Apple cases. But I think the Apple cases are

01:50:09   by far the nicest. They fit. I had one of their leather cases for something, I can't remember,

01:50:15   I think it was the 6, and I have it like a knockoff one for my SE. And the only reason I

01:50:20   actually have it in a case, I would probably go without it, but my car mount is a magnetic

01:50:25   car mount. And so if I want to put it on that, I have to have that plate in there and I'm not

01:50:31   going to attach it to the iPhone, for sure. Yeah, my favorite cases by far are the Apple

01:50:37   leather cases. Jonas does not like them, though. He likes the rubber ones. He genuinely prefers it.

01:50:41   But the Apple leather cases are so perfect. I mean, they're obviously not the thinnest,

01:50:50   but it's obviously like a middle ground between being pretty protective compared to no case at all.

01:50:57   not like one of these, you know, once it's almost like a sticker, you know, but I like that. I bought

01:51:02   some of these for my 10 s from totally that are so they're so thin that that the camera bump still

01:51:10   sticks out. That's how thin they are. Like one of the nice things about a case and I actually think

01:51:15   it not to ramble all over the place. But I actually think you know, we I used to bitch about

01:51:21   camera bumps when Apple first introduced it with the iPhone six. It's like, what is this bump? Why?

01:51:26   You know, this is terrible. It feels like a pimple on the back of the phone and it's you know

01:51:29   I'm used to it now and

01:51:32   But I also feel like one of the reasons Apple

01:51:36   Has these bumps and is accepted that there's going to be a

01:51:40   significant ever bigger camera bump on all these iPhones going forward is that

01:51:45   Most people never notice because they use a case and with the case with almost every case the bump

01:51:50   You know that the case is thicker than the camera bump so you know, right is it?

01:51:55   Whereas these super thin cases from totally the clear one is not super thin. The clear one is like the sort of regular rubbery thickness

01:52:03   But they've got these super thin ones that are that the camera bump still sticks out

01:52:08   Anyway

01:52:13   Anyway, the leather I think the Apple leather ones are so nice and to me

01:52:16   One of the things about it is that when you press the buttons like the volume and the power button

01:52:20   It doesn't feel like you're pressing a button that is pressing a button. It just feels like you're pressing a button

01:52:26   Yeah, well, it's just a bump right? I mean this one I think as a knockoff doesn't the same way as the real one, right?

01:52:31   Yeah, the only thing that to me the only thing that really really I always annoys me on

01:52:36   Using the case of any sort is the getting the volume toggle aren't are the mute toggle the mute thing. Yeah

01:52:44   Yeah, I never try never

01:52:46   That's that I've mentioned this before and that's what other people tell me other people are like you turn your phone off mute and it's like

01:52:52   Yeah, sometimes I do. I never do. I still think it's the weirdest thing that that's not copied by Android makers

01:52:59   The weirdest thing to me. I love having a mute button. I

01:53:03   Think I used to use it, but I you'd switch. I just do not I do

01:53:07   But it's I mean particularly because I'm with the watch now. I just look at my watch

01:53:12   I know when I'm getting a call. It's not like I mean, I still have it on

01:53:16   Vibrate I think it's just crazy that Android makers don't copy that from the iPhone

01:53:21   I don't know why maybe I'm just you might be the only one using only one use

01:53:25   It's like me and Johnny I've you and Johnny

01:53:28   All right anything else on the iPhone front I can't think of anything no

01:53:34   What else do we have here

01:53:38   I guess I can thank our third and final sponsor before we continue on and talk about next week's event and our third and final

01:53:44   Sponsor it's from an up-and-coming startup

01:53:48   called Amazon and

01:53:51   Apparently this Amazon company has a bunch of

01:53:55   They're sort of a large company it's very surprising when you research it well one of their services is called prime video

01:54:05   And here's the deal when you're a member of Amazon Prime, I'll drop the joke

01:54:08   You know what Amazon Prime is you give them do you sign up and then you get the main thing it all started you get free

01:54:13   Shipping you sign up for Amazon Prime and then when you buy anything on Amazon, you don't pay for shipping

01:54:17   It just all shows up for free

01:54:19   I don't know how that works because I get hundreds of packages a year and

01:54:23   Somehow, you know the cost of shipping all that has to be more than what I pay in Amazon Prime

01:54:28   well, the other thing you get with Amazon Prime in recent years is you get

01:54:34   Prime video and if you have prime and prime video you can sign up for a subscription to what they call prime video channels

01:54:42   and

01:54:45   When you do this you get access. This is for cord cutters. In other words cable TV super expensive

01:54:51   It's like ten thousand dollars a month for cable TV

01:54:53   And it's what do you get with cable TV you get hundreds of channels that you don't even watch

01:54:58   Well with prime video channels you get real channels

01:55:02   This isn't you know, you get all of their regular original content from Amazon Prime all the shows and movies and stuff that you get

01:55:09   From the regular prime video you all you already get that this is on top of that you sign for a subscription

01:55:14   subscription to prime video channels and

01:55:16   You can pick the channels you want and then you pay based on what you pick

01:55:20   They have over a hundred of these and they're real channels Showtime stars HBO

01:55:25   Cinemax

01:55:27   CBS all access plus a ton of specialty channels

01:55:31   British TV fitness stuff all sorts of sports horror the whole channels dedicated just a horror perfect for Halloween

01:55:38   and

01:55:40   You can watch them anywhere that you watch prime

01:55:43   So you go to Amazon's website and sign up for this and you can get a free all of these channels come with like a seven

01:55:49   Day free trial so you don't even pay for seven days

01:55:52   You can sign up add the channels you want see how it works, but they work

01:55:57   Everywhere that prime video works so I you know, I do it on my Apple TV because that's what's connected to my TV

01:56:03   But you know you get the app. I swear to God there the notes they gave me

01:56:07   I they say there's 650 different devices that you can watch this on

01:56:11   I mean every side that's got to be like all the hundreds of Android phones

01:56:16   I don't know but any iPhone iPad anything that you can get prime video on

01:56:20   You can if you if you sign up for prime video channels

01:56:23   you can watch the Prime Video channels there. So you can watch HBO on your phone, on your iPad,

01:56:28   on anything. And you don't have to get, this is the thing, you don't have to get all these

01:56:34   different apps like a Showtime app and an HBO app and the CBS All Access app and all of that. And

01:56:40   then every time, you know, like to use those apps, you go and then you have to sign in to your cable

01:56:46   account. And it always, you know, times out after a couple of weeks and two, this is all through the

01:56:51   the Prime Video app. So it's one app. You sign up for the subscription and all these

01:56:56   channels are just there in the Prime Video app on all of your different devices. So everything

01:57:01   on HBO, you can watch all the old episodes of Game of Thrones. You can watch one of my

01:57:05   favorite HBO shows, the John Oliver This Week Tonight, Last Week Tonight. I love that show.

01:57:11   God, I love that show. If you're interested in current events at all and like a daily

01:57:15   show type show, John Oliver's Last Week Tonight is like, it is like one of the few shows that

01:57:20   our whole family is religiously attuned to. We drop into a group depression when he takes

01:57:29   weeks off. You get it for free. Well, not free, but you get it when you sign up for

01:57:34   HBO through the Prime video channels. It really is. It's terrific. It is absolutely a terrific

01:57:42   service. If you don't have cable or you'd like to get rid of cable, it is a terrific

01:57:46   way to watch channels that traditionally you had to get through cable.

01:57:49   Like I said, you create your own TV lineup based on the ones that you want to watch.

01:57:56   If you don't like sports, you don't sign up for the sports channels.

01:58:00   That's it.

01:58:01   Where as opposed to cable TV, guess what?

01:58:02   You're paying like $10 a month for ESPN whether you watch sports or not, which is crazy.

01:58:10   All channels start with a free trial.

01:58:12   Get a seven-day free trial of any of the channels that you haven't tried yet.

01:58:18   It just couldn't be better.

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01:58:23   the seven days are up and you don't pay for it. It's really great. Watch them anywhere,

01:58:28   anytime, any device. It sounds too good to be true, but honest to God, this is like the

01:58:32   future of watching TV channels. It's just terrific. I watch on Apple TV, but they have

01:58:38   their own Fire TV box, the Rock You, anything. All these smart TVs today, you can't buy a

01:58:44   TV that doesn't come with the Amazon Prime thing built in. So all sorts of good shows.

01:58:49   That CBS All Access, I've been meaning to watch their new Star Trek Discovery thing.

01:58:52   I do this thing in recent years where I don't want to watch a show the first year because

01:58:57   I'm afraid I'll get into it and then they'll cancel it. But apparently Star Trek.

01:59:02   **Matt Stauffer** They have a lot invested in that one, so I think you're probably okay.

01:59:05   **Trevor

01:59:07   I like Star Trek shows. I just wanted to wait and see if there'd be more than a year.

01:59:13   So anyway, I want to get the CVS all access just for that.

01:59:18   It's really great.

01:59:20   So if you're already a Prime member, you can just sign up and add this.

01:59:24   If you're not a Prime member and you use Amazon, you should be.

01:59:29   If you're going to shop at Amazon, you might as well have Prime.

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01:59:34   So here's a special offer for listeners of the show.

01:59:38   Only pay for the channels you want with Amazon Prime channels.

01:59:41   your free trial of over 100 channels by visiting try prime channels.com/talk show. That's try

01:59:52   prime channels.com/talk show and you can start them all with a free trial. My thanks to Amazon

02:00:02   Prime channels for sponsoring the show. Very cool. All right, next week's event. Let's

02:00:08   figure this out. Okay. Well, I think the surprise thing we can start with that is that Ming-Chu

02:00:16   Kuo says there'll be a new iPad mini. But not next week or he does say there's gonna be next week.

02:00:22   Maybe I'm wrong about that. I thought that he said, I thought he said that it's in the works,

02:00:28   but it's early 2019. Oh, okay. Okay. I don't think it's next week. And that, you know, it would,

02:00:35   it would in theory be aligned with if they do like a one-year revolution of the regular iPads too,

02:00:40   like if they do like a March or April event. But anyway, I think just any sign of life that the

02:00:45   iPad mini is not dead is news. Because the mini was something that maybe wasn't updated every year,

02:00:51   but it was updated most years until all of a sudden it wasn't updated at all. And I loved

02:00:58   talking, you know, again, tying to something we talked an hour ago about and my declining eyesight.

02:01:04   I loved the iPad mini when it came out loved it. I was like I would never buy a big iPad that thing is huge

02:01:10   I'd used an iPad mini for everything and

02:01:12   Now I feel like it's too small. Like I can't yeah, I I never took to it

02:01:17   I mean I use them a little while for writing books and writing. I mean reading books

02:01:21   But but I you know for the gaming and watching TV shows and stuff like that. I'd rather have in writing

02:01:28   I'd rather have the big one

02:01:31   Yeah, and that's the other thing for me that I do a lot more of than I did six seven eight years ago

02:01:36   Is I watch a lot more TV on my iPad, especially baseball

02:01:40   and

02:01:42   Baseball in particular just because the balls, you know kind of little

02:01:47   Having a bigger screen you can actually see a little bit more like yeah

02:01:51   Like in a pinch. I'll watch it on my phone

02:01:53   But it's really it's almost like watching baseball on a phone is almost like oh, yeah listening to baseball

02:02:01   So yeah for watching stuff. I like the bigger one, but still I know there are fans of the iPad mini and

02:02:06   You know, I I'd like to think that it sells enough that it's not gonna be dropped

02:02:12   So that's cool. But who knows?

02:02:16   Yeah, I don't think I mean actually prized

02:02:18   I was sort of I couldn't really figure out exactly why they would get rid of it

02:02:22   But I mean just if I mean I guess because the phones are getting bigger

02:02:25   They're approaching that size, but they're not there yet

02:02:28   and it seems like there's enough people who still like that device that it's worth making one.

02:02:33   Yeah, and I did that. I actually dug my iPad Mini. The one that I own is actually an iPad Mini 2,

02:02:39   which I think is also a 5s class device in terms of, I think, the same A7 processor.

02:02:46   It is totally… I don't think… I think the idea that a big ass 6.5 inch 10s max is, you know,

02:02:57   Just no need for iPad mini anymore. The iPad mini is so much bigger than a 10s max. It's ridiculous

02:03:01   Like you can't put an iPad mini in your pants pocket

02:03:04   Well, I could barely put a tennis max on my pants pocket but still yes

02:03:09   Anyway, the rumors are the iPad pros seem like a lock for next week

02:03:16   Yeah, it seems like that but the bet the bet the house on that because they haven't been updated for an entire generation

02:03:23   There were no a11. Well, who knows maybe these will have a 11s, but I don't

02:03:27   would guess they'll have A12s, but there was no, you know, the current iPad Pros are all A10 devices

02:03:32   haven't been updated in a while. Supposedly, you know, and shocker, I don't think you even need to

02:03:40   follow the rumors. I think you just need to look at what Apple's doing with iPhones and, you know,

02:03:44   the idea that the screens will go more corner to corner and have rounded edges at the corners.

02:03:49   The other rumor—

02:03:52   **Matt Stauffer** And Face ID instead of touch ID.

02:03:54   Yeah, Face ID instead of Touch ID. And I forget if it was Steven Trotton Smith or

02:03:59   Guillermo Rambo or both of them, who poking about iOS 12.1 betas concluded that the camera would

02:04:08   work in both landscape and portrait, which the iPhone camera or Face ID still doesn't.

02:04:14   But that you would think that would, you know, maybe that's not important for the iPhone,

02:04:19   because when you're unlocking it, it's always in portrait, whereas iPads are equally used

02:04:25   both ways. So it would really suck if it didn't work both ways. Hopefully, that would be cool.

02:04:33   And the one that, to me, is more interesting, most interesting, is supposedly they're switching to

02:04:42   USB-C instead of Lightning, which in turn would also mean that I guess they'll need to make a

02:04:48   a new Apple Pencil because the Apple Pencil charges by sticking it into the Lightning

02:04:53   port on your iPad Pro. But that kind of sucks if you're like, let's say you're a big iPad

02:05:02   Pro user and you have an Apple Pencil. It kind of sucks that you've got to spend another

02:05:05   hundred bucks on an Apple Pencil just so you can charge it with the iPad. I mean, I guess

02:05:10   you could just not…

02:05:12   Jon Streeter Pencil dongle.

02:05:14   Well, there's a pencil dongle though so that you can charge it into the, you know,

02:05:20   you know, there's there is a little dongle that ships with the pencil that lets you use

02:05:23   the turns it into a female lighting connector instead of a male lightning connector. Yeah.

02:05:29   But anyway, presumably if the iPad is USB C, then the pencil would have to be USB C.

02:05:36   supposedly new Mac books, but this is the part that to me is the most exciting is that

02:05:40   nobody really knows what the hell is going on with the MacBook. So yeah, there's you

02:05:44   know, German we seem and it's reported that there's a supposedly lower cost MacBook Air

02:05:49   replacement with a retina screen, but there's really no deep even from German. There's no

02:05:53   details. And is it just one is it you know, who knows I've had it's terribly exciting

02:06:01   and is, knock on wood, on Friday the, what the hell's today's date? 28th? 29th? 26th.

02:06:08   26th. Have I mentioned my eyesight is next? No leaks about what the hell is coming up

02:06:17   with Macbooks. I mean, very, very exciting. And the event is in New York at the Brooklyn

02:06:26   Academy of Music. Yeah, it's better for you, right? Yeah, way better for me. I mean, I

02:06:29   even hate flying, but it sure as hell is. A $61 Amtrak train that takes 80 minutes and leaves from

02:06:37   a train station I'm 10 minutes away from is an awful lot better than a transcontinental flight.

02:06:43   I'm terribly excited about that. Yeah, it feels downright luxurious. What else? I don't know.

02:06:55   So you mentioned the MacBook, but then also like Mac Mini and new iMac.

02:07:00   Yeah. Yeah. So the iMac, I just looked up the regular non-pro iMacs are over 500 days since

02:07:08   the last update. And, you know, I think I tweeted about this and somebody was like, well, you know,

02:07:12   guess what? That's, that's the way Apple rolls these days. But the iMac, however much you want

02:07:17   to criticize Apple for letting certain products in the Mac lineup languish for well over a year

02:07:23   or two years or three years or—how old's the Mac Pro? Ten years? It's very old.

02:07:31   **Matt Stauffer** No. It seems like it's ten years.

02:07:34   **Ezra Kleinman** The iMac is not a device that Apple has let languish. Even if you want to argue

02:07:40   that their focus is on MacBooks and portables instead of desktops, the iMac has never lost favor

02:07:45   with Apple. So 500 days is unusual. I almost feel like it's 500 days not because they've

02:07:53   taking her eye off the ball, but that the last update to the iMac 5k was so good that it could

02:07:59   go over a year without an update. I mean, obviously it's fallen behind the state of the art and Intel

02:08:03   chips. But I still have my desktop is the original 5k iMac. And then I don't know how long out here,

02:08:11   a year plus later, they came out with one that looks the same from the outside.

02:08:16   But the display adds, you know, the the, the greater color gamut, etc. It's even better display.

02:08:23   So I don't know but it's you know, everybody just says they might come out with new iMacs

02:08:27   But nobody really knows what is it really just a speed bump?

02:08:30   Are they just gonna look the same and have the same display and they're just updating to newer

02:08:34   CPUs or is there going to be more to it than that? I don't know. Yeah an update to the Mac Mini now

02:08:41   There's there that would be I I can't wait to see what the reaction is

02:08:45   In a room, you know, like it if that actually and it's weird like people are saying that might happen under a supplies

02:08:52   But it's not it hasn't really leaked, you know, they get nobody knows and again

02:08:56   Is it going to be the exact same form factor and they've just here's a new one with a new chip?

02:09:01   Because I I honestly feel I've written this several times compared to some of these

02:09:05   Nux, I don't even know what it stands for. Well, do you know what that yeah, I don't either I know

02:09:11   I've looked at them several times and I don't

02:09:14   compared to some of these and you see computers like Intel has

02:09:20   The iPad mini is not many at all. I'm the Mac mini. I mean the Mac mini is no longer many at all compared to those

02:09:26   Yeah, and it's slightly unfair because the Nux don't have an internal power supply

02:09:31   They they have an extra power supply and so, you know

02:09:35   But you could you could put that external power supply next to it and it still is smaller than the Mac mini

02:09:41   The Mac mini really is not many

02:09:43   So it would be exciting if it's like the next and the next use don't the next use flash

02:09:50   I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And these, I mean, like most of the current Mac mini still have

02:09:57   like spinning drives, right? Right. Well, to me, the comparison, and I've made this

02:10:01   before, but it, and I really think that the benchmark even shows that, you know, like

02:10:05   a Apple TV 4k is like, I don't think there is a version of geek bench for Apple TV for

02:10:11   some reason, but I, you know, I think it's a faster computer than the current Mac mini

02:10:16   And if not, it's certainly on par.

02:10:18   And it's obviously using ARM, not Intel,

02:10:22   and it has SSD, not a hard drive.

02:10:24   But it doesn't have an external power supply,

02:10:27   and it is a computer, and it is fast, and it is mini.

02:10:33   So it would be--

02:10:34   Yeah, I would certainly hope that it's

02:10:35   an updated form factor.

02:10:37   Right.

02:10:38   I mean, at this point, take what we can get, I guess.

02:10:41   It's just bizarre that the Apple TV is a smaller, better

02:10:44   computer than the Mac Mini. I mean, it just doesn't seem right at all.

02:10:48   Right.

02:10:50   So that, you know, and I know, again, is it, you know, is it essential to Apple's bottom line? No,

02:10:56   of course not. But there are a lot of people who like the Mac Mini.

02:11:00   And I want to get I want to get one as a Plex server, just as immediate for a media server.

02:11:05   I've been holding off for years. Not quite that one.

02:11:09   Who knows if he's right or not. But the thing that stuck out to me was that Gurman

02:11:14   In his article, I think Ermin said something about a new Mac Mini and said that it would,

02:11:17   you know, it didn't have any details about what it would look like or what else, but that it would

02:11:21   be somehow geared towards enthusiasts. And I can't help but think that what you're, you know, using

02:11:26   it as a Plex server or something like that is exactly, you know, the thinking, you know, that

02:11:31   why not sell have Apple sell something to Mac nerds who want to buy a Mac and have it running

02:11:38   all the time to do something like that? Like, why make Mac nerds go to other vendors? Why,

02:11:43   Why break them out of the Apple universe? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, like Jason Snell went to the

02:11:51   trouble to Frank and Mac, whatever you call it, and he got a NUC and installed OS X on it.

02:12:00   Yeah, I saw that.

02:12:00   Mac OS, sorry.

02:12:01   Yeah, Hackintosh is what they call it.

02:12:04   Hackintosh, there we go.

02:12:05   Yeah. You know, I was thinking, I guess I could Google it. But I was wondering, it seems like

02:12:14   everybody makes a Hackintosh, it's always like a desktop. It doesn't seem like anybody makes one

02:12:18   out of a laptop. And I just got to thinking about it, like, I'm worried about these MacBook

02:12:23   keyboards. Like Casey Johnston, who writes for the Outline now and has written a bunch, a series of

02:12:33   pretty good articles, really good articles, I should say, on the MacBook keyboard saga.

02:12:37   Yeah.

02:12:38   You know, and it started with her taking her MacBook Pro in and the genius told her,

02:12:44   "Well, it's obviously broken. You got a speck of dust under the key. What were you doing?"

02:12:50   You know, like literally, it was like, "What do you expect? There's a speck of dust in there.

02:12:55   Of course the key's going to get stuck." Anyway, she's written a bunch of articles,

02:12:59   And her most recent one was about, you know, does this new third generation MacBook Pro

02:13:06   keyboard with this membrane, does it solve the problems?

02:13:08   And sort of an unsatisfying article in a way because the answer is sort of maybe, it's

02:13:14   like we don't know.

02:13:16   She talked to like Apple Store employees and they said yes, like, yeah, this was a big

02:13:22   problem with MacBook Pro keyboards and now it's not.

02:13:25   that the cynic in you wants to say,

02:13:29   well, Apple Store employees, of course they're going to say

02:13:31   that they're towing the company line,

02:13:34   but they're not being quoted by name by her.

02:13:35   It's not like Apple Store genius John Moltz

02:13:39   is, you know, says Apple.

02:13:41   - That's a quick trip to being fired.

02:13:44   - Apple products are great

02:13:46   and they don't have a keyboard problem.

02:13:48   I don't even know if she identified herself as a reporter.

02:13:52   I think she just went in and just said,

02:13:54   hey, are these keyboards working?

02:13:55   In my experience Apple employees store employees will tell you, you know, if they don't know you're the guy who ready to use it fireball there

02:14:01   They'll they'll give you their honest advice, you know

02:14:06   I mean there's no better example than that

02:14:08   Some of them will give you the honest advice that you should quit your apps on your iPhone

02:14:12   I mean, they're not all you know, it's not all good advice, but it's honest advice. Well, they're not all reading off the script

02:14:19   Yeah, this is what I say

02:14:21   Yeah, but on the other hand she's pointed to a Mac rumors forum post where there are people with new MacBook pros

02:14:27   Who are saying their keys are stuck or repeating and a couple of tweets from people?

02:14:31   But it doesn't seem to be as widespread. But anyway, yeah, it seems like it's gotten better at least

02:14:36   Anyway, the thing that made me think of her series was at her latest article

02:14:40   She said that somebody you know, a couple people have said to her like don't worry about these keyboards

02:14:44   They're moving towards all glass keyboards that don't have moving keys at all and we'll use haptic feedback

02:14:50   And I I know Syracuse has mentioned this you know that if the keyboards are always getting thinner

02:14:56   Eventually having a keyboard that doesn't literally click at all is the end goal and at that point I might be out

02:15:02   Like I

02:15:05   Am too old to learn how to type on something like that like yeah, I don't know if I could handle that either

02:15:12   I've seen people you know I've seen geniuses actually it's the typing on

02:15:17   iPads

02:15:19   At the store and typing incredibly fast. Oh, yeah, absolutely and I've just been like blown away that anybody could do that

02:15:27   I've definitely seen it at the Apple Store because they use iPads for all sorts of things

02:15:30   I've definitely seen it there and I've seen it with kids, you know, like and yeah

02:15:35   There's kids who use their iPad and they type faster than I type on a real keyboard on the iPad keyboard

02:15:41   Way faster. I mean so it's definitely a thing but it ain't for me

02:15:46   Even with even with you know haptic feedback. It's yes. I think that's not gonna be good. I

02:15:53   Need my clicks

02:15:56   You need a you know, you need a steampunk steampunk keyboard is what yeah, but anyway, I'm intrigued

02:16:03   It's obviously whatever Mac books they come out with next week. I'm intrigued what the keyboard story will be

02:16:08   I mean, I would guess the betting money is it's going to be the you know, third generation butterfly switches with the membrane

02:16:15   But it sure would be exciting if they were a little clickier. I don't like I

02:16:24   wouldn't I wouldn't expect that that's gonna happen but yeah is the air power going to come

02:16:32   out it's a little it would be a little weird if it came out next well that was the other thing

02:16:37   that cool said I think at the same I think he was predicting that would be so I think he was didn't

02:16:45   say that the he was thinking maybe the airpower in the iPad mini might be late

02:16:50   this year early next year yeah so who knows if they would come out at the

02:16:54   event I think it would be a little weird if it came out next week because next

02:16:57   the airpower only works as well at least last we heard about it yeah a year ago I

02:17:04   thought it was never gonna come out but it only works with iPhones the Apple

02:17:11   and a still as yet hasn't appeared new AirPods charging case. So maybe AirPods

02:17:22   are coming too? Maybe new AirPods are coming this week? Because then at least

02:17:26   there would be a... Well, Karen just bought some so that would make sense.

02:17:31   It would make perfect sense if she just bought them. Because I just think it would be a little

02:17:37   weird to introduce, "Hey, here's the AirPower finally." I don't expect them to

02:17:41   to say finally, but it certainly implied, and maybe they would. Maybe they'll even address

02:17:46   the fact that, yeah, this is a little ridiculous, and maybe they'd even put up a finally slide.

02:17:51   But it would be a little weird to me stagecraft-wise to say, "Okay, our power is finally here,"

02:17:58   but not have any new products that actually charge with it.

02:18:00   Dave Asprey We'd use this.

02:18:01   Dave Asprey Because the iPhones just came out a month

02:18:03   ago, and the new Apple Watch just came out a month ago, and they don't tend to talk about

02:18:08   products they announced six weeks ago at a second event. So the only thing they could

02:18:14   say and here's the new charging case for the AirPods would actually be something they could

02:18:19   say here's a new thing that actually charges with the AirPower. But then the other thing

02:18:23   that would be weird is if they don't announce the AirPower on Tuesday, then when the hell

02:18:28   is it coming out? I mean, I don't know. It's such a weird story. So anyway, weird stories

02:18:37   make for intriguing Apple events. Isn't that what they say?

02:18:43   Yeah, that's what they say. This week, that's what they say.

02:18:48   Anything else? I haven't listened to Jason and Mike Hurley's—they do that draft thing.

02:18:55   They do a lot more advanced thinking about what might be coming in an Apple event than

02:19:00   I do. I just wait and find out what they say. I don't know if I'm missing—am I missing

02:19:04   anything that people are predicting for the event? I feel like—

02:19:07   I don't think so. Not anything that is likely to show up.

02:19:13   Yeah. I think the X factor would be if they've done something—iPad stuff, software-wise,

02:19:25   could there be some major new improvements to multitasking and stuff in the iPad version

02:19:30   of iOS that they've kept under wraps. Is there a—what's the keyboard story for

02:19:37   the iPads? Are they still not going to have a trackpad? I feel like the lack of a trackpad

02:19:43   on the iPad is—again, I'm old and I've got these habits and I want it to work more

02:19:48   like my Mac. I just think it's really, really weird that Apple says we don't want to—we're

02:19:55   going to make touchscreen Mac books because it's a bad form factor for reaching out and

02:20:00   touching the screen to have this perpendicular screen that you reach out and poke at. And

02:20:06   here's an iPad that you can use like a laptop with a keyboard that we make. And if you want

02:20:12   to do anything, you have to reach out and poke at the screen in this way that we've

02:20:16   said is ergonomically unpleasant. Like I think it's a really weird story that would go away

02:20:23   if they just put a trackpad on the keyboard cover.

02:20:27   And then--

02:20:28   And you've talked about--

02:20:29   I mean, so you've talked about this previously,

02:20:31   or written about it, rather.

02:20:32   Endlessly.

02:20:32   And you don't mean-- yeah, you don't mean like a--

02:20:35   it wouldn't have a cursor.

02:20:37   Well, I don't think so.

02:20:40   It could.

02:20:43   Should it?

02:20:44   I don't know.

02:20:45   But it could.

02:20:46   And I played-- like, Google has a new tablet.

02:20:49   They call this Pixel Slate that runs Chrome OS.

02:20:52   and they have a keyboard cover.

02:20:54   And the keyboard cover is really pretty nice,

02:20:56   and I think it's kind of a shame that it has better keys

02:21:00   than a new MacBook.

02:21:02   Although they made them round.

02:21:03   Did you see this?

02:21:04   They made them round like dimes.

02:21:06   - Yeah, I like that.

02:21:08   - It's too cute by far.

02:21:09   It's like, oh, you should have,

02:21:10   if you would have just made them squares,

02:21:12   you'd have a killer keyboard.

02:21:13   But they made them round to be cute,

02:21:15   and it's not great, but they do click nice.

02:21:18   But they have a track pad,

02:21:20   and I sat there at the Google Hands-On thing,

02:21:22   and it has a very similar smart connector to the iPad

02:21:27   where you don't have to stick anything

02:21:29   into the USB-C or anything, it's magnetic.

02:21:32   And you connect it and an arrow cursor appears

02:21:35   and as soon as you disconnect it,

02:21:37   the arrow cursor just disappears.

02:21:39   So there's no confusion.

02:21:42   My best example, Philadelphia's airport is just chock full,

02:21:46   it's American Airlines, actually nationwide American,

02:21:50   which is where I fly all the time.

02:21:52   their check-in kiosks are all the same which I guess is good because they're

02:21:56   all the same and they're all obviously running Microsoft Windows and they are

02:22:00   touch screens but there's a white arrow cursor that's always visible and that

02:22:05   whenever you touch I mean it's 2018 and they they have these touch screens that

02:22:10   have you know you're just you're touching you completely useless cursor

02:22:15   yeah well it moves it moves under whatever you touch so you can't read it

02:22:19   It's you know there's ways to do this right. I don't know that it should be an

02:22:24   arrow cursor. I don't know if it would always be there. I mean it just seems

02:22:28   weird that you can't it just seems weird to me that you ever have to reach up and

02:22:31   touch the screen when it's docked. I mean I I would most want it just for text

02:22:36   editing you know and and in the way that you get that trackpad support on iPhones

02:22:41   and iPads by touching the keyboard and moving around. I would like it if you had

02:22:47   trackpad support just for text editing, if that's the only thing they enabled it for.

02:22:52   But why not allow it for other things? And I think they could do it without a cursor

02:22:56   too. I've talked about this. Is by following the Apple TV design. So you could go to the

02:23:03   home screen. Number one, you can't go to the home screen on the keyboard now. So I think

02:23:07   they should do that. They should have like a go home button. And then what you could

02:23:13   do is move around the trackpad and it would pop the icons up like the icons on Apple TV

02:23:17   when you move around on the Apple TV.

02:23:19   So it would be more like swiping than like a—

02:23:20   Yeah. It would just be like Apple TV. I forget what the name of that interface is, but it's

02:23:27   called 3D something. I don't know. But it was already running on iOS. There's no reason

02:23:33   it couldn't work on an iPad with a keyboard attached. So you wouldn't have a mouse cursor

02:23:38   move around. Instead, you'd have an implicit selection that you would move around, and

02:23:43   it would just move around the icons. I think it could be very nice, and I think it, ergonomically,

02:23:47   it would be great because it really is ergonomically unpleasant when you're in a laptop form factor

02:23:52   to reach up and poke at the screen. So anyway, that would be my hope, that there's all

02:23:57   sorts of goodies like that. It's not just new iPad hardware with smaller bezels and

02:24:03   round corners and it works exactly like the old iPads.

02:24:07   I don't know why I can separate this in my mind because it doesn't really make that much

02:24:13   sense, but if someone touches my screen—I never touch my Mac screen—if somebody else

02:24:18   touches my Mac screen, I get unreasonably angry about it. But I will happily keep working

02:24:25   on my iPad if there's a bunch of fingerprints on it. I shouldn't say happily, but I will.

02:24:29   I will ignore them and keep working, and then eventually when it gets really bad, I'll

02:24:33   it up and I'll wipe it off with my sleeve and go back.

02:24:35   Dave Asprey When somebody, you know, I've had, I've told

02:24:38   you before, I've had this MacBook Pro for four years, so the screen has been touched. But the

02:24:43   first time somebody touches my Mac screen, I really want to just take the computer back and buy a new

02:24:48   one. I just, it's like, all right, you know, you touch my screen, get me a hard drive, super duper,

02:24:56   clone the drive, go buy a new one, restore the drive, open it up, and now I've got a screen that

02:25:02   has never been touched by greasy humans. I really, I, nothing, my computer could be half functioning.

02:25:10   I, I, Karen used to, Karen used to pick up, I don't think she, she's got an error. She's got

02:25:16   11 inch error now. And I don't think she does it at this device anymore because it doesn't,

02:25:19   but it doesn't seem like the form factor is right for it, but not that this was right,

02:25:25   but she used to constantly pick up her laptops by the lid, by the top of the lid.

02:25:30   [laughter]

02:25:32   She would just be sitting on the couch or something like that,

02:25:35   she'd go over and grab it by the top of the lid and lift it up.

02:25:37   And just like put her thumb right over the screen?

02:25:39   Oh yeah!

02:25:40   Oh my god, what are you doing?

02:25:45   Because your thumb would naturally go right over like the prime real estate of the screen, right?

02:25:49   Like one or two inches down from the top, right in the center.

02:25:52   Right. Right in the sweet spot.

02:25:55   Right in the sweet spot.

02:25:56   Oh god.

02:25:59   trying to think anything what else next week i don't know why is it at the

02:26:03   brooklyn academy of music i mean i i that's a good question

02:26:06   all right i i i mean i don't i assume it's not related to that it's just the

02:26:10   venue but yeah somebody told me there there was a

02:26:12   cool thing they did with the invitations where

02:26:15   there are hundreds hundreds of different variations of the apple logo in various

02:26:19   artistic interpretations um i didn't follow along closely somebody

02:26:23   was trying to gather them all and there's yeah there's names and they went

02:26:26   to somebody went to the apple server and i thought somebody figured out that

02:26:29   there were 236 variations. But then somebody on Twitter was telling me that they think everybody

02:26:34   got a unique one. Because I don't know how many press invitations did they send out. If we know

02:26:39   there's 236 unique ones, there might be one for everybody. I don't know. Mine certainly doesn't

02:26:47   look like it was commissioned for me. It doesn't look like anything. Even if they did make one for

02:26:54   everybody. I think they assigned them randomly, but I did see something where somebody—there's

02:26:59   some kind of speculation that there are—that they've sent illustrators—there's illustrators

02:27:04   from around the world who've been brought to New York, you know? Which would be a very

02:27:09   appley thing to do. If there's a new pencil coming, that would make sense.

02:27:12   And Adobe debuted Photoshop for iPad. It's not out; it's coming in, quote-unquote, 2019.

02:27:22   but at their Adobe Max conference a week or two ago. And Phil Schiller actually was there,

02:27:27   appeared on stage, to say how happy he was about it and how closely Apple and Adobe are collaborating

02:27:34   on this. So we'd expect to see that again, probably. I would eat my hat if we don't see—I,

02:27:40   honest to God, would eat my hat if Apple does not have Adobe come on stage and debut and demo

02:27:46   Photoshop for iPad. As long as it's not another AR demo. And there's got to be some new angle

02:27:52   to it too. It can't just be what they showed at max. Maybe it's just some kind of new feature

02:27:56   in the pencil, you know, because obviously Adobe Max, it was on the existing iPad Pro with the

02:28:00   existing pencil. Maybe there's some kind of new features that are enabled by this. There's some

02:28:06   speculation that the switching to USB-C is about support for external displays with Thunderbolt.

02:28:12   So maybe it's something like that, like you can plug in an external display with your iPad and

02:28:18   you can have your Photoshop on a big screen. Who knows? But it's got to be—I will eat my hat if

02:28:25   Adobe is not on stage to demo this because I think it is—of all the apps in the world that Apple

02:28:30   would want to have a third party come up and demonstrate on an iPad Pro, I think Photoshop is

02:28:35   number one. I literally don't think there's another app in any category that Apple would rather

02:28:41   say there's—here it is on the iPad Pro. I really mean that. And it would fit in with the Steam

02:28:48   of illustrators, actual artists doing stuff. I think it's exactly the sort of thing that

02:28:55   the iPad is just way better than a Mac for. If you are the sort of person who can illustrate

02:29:03   and being able to draw right on the screen with a really high refresh rate, accurate

02:29:09   stylus type thing is way better on an iPad than it is on a Mac with a Wacom thing off

02:29:14   to the side. So I think that's coming.

02:29:18   That's interesting. That's an interesting blade. If you're doing it on a big screen,

02:29:22   how do you see… there's no cursor.

02:29:25   Well, I don't know what the pitch would be, but I'm just totally spitballing here

02:29:29   because somebody said that that would be… maybe it even comes from Ming-Chi Kuo, that

02:29:33   that's part of the USBC story, that it's Thunderbolt 3. I would guess that you, the

02:29:38   artists are looking at the iPad screen and then somebody, it could be put on a bigger

02:29:46   screen for somebody else to look at while you work for collaborative, collaborating

02:29:50   with somebody.

02:29:51   Tim Cynova Well, that seems less exciting, but—

02:29:52   Dave Asprey Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. I'm

02:29:55   just spitballing.

02:29:56   Tim Cynova Yeah, yeah.

02:29:57   Dave Asprey But I feel like they have to show something

02:29:58   new. It can't just be the same thing they showed at Adobe Max with Photoshop.

02:30:01   Tim Cynova Yep. Right.

02:30:02   Dave Asprey I don't know what else, but I'm excited

02:30:04   about it because almost none of this has leaked. And I just hope it doesn't leak.

02:30:07   before. The night before. The stupidest thing was when the Panzerino, I was staying in San

02:30:16   Francisco for the Apple event and Panzerino was staying up there too and has a car. So

02:30:22   I just rode down to Cupertino with him and it's like while we're driving down is when

02:30:28   the thing leaked that all the site map for Apple.com included all the new products.

02:30:37   We were just like, "What the hell? How does this happen?" So I hope there's no boners

02:30:45   like that in the lead up to this. I would like to have an event where there's a bunch

02:30:49   of surprises. We've got the Bloomberg thing. I don't have much to say about it other than

02:30:56   that. I think, yeah, I think the minutes not that much. I mean, they, they're, they're

02:30:59   out on a limb there and now Tim Cook has called for them to retract the story. Right. And

02:31:03   that is it. You know, I don't want to get too inside baseball, but that's unprecedented.

02:31:07   And there was somebody in addition to his retraction, there was somebody—one of the

02:31:12   articles about the retraction had an anonymous comment from presumably somebody in Apple

02:31:19   PR, you know, somebody close to the situation said that Apple had given long consideration

02:31:25   to officially demanding a retraction.

02:31:27   I guess they didn't demand it, but stating that Bloomberg should retract because they

02:31:32   didn't want to come across as bullying. It is not a good look in general for the world's

02:31:40   largest company by share value to tell a respectable news publication to attract a story. It is

02:31:50   just not a good look. But the first and second biggest companies in the world, Apple and

02:31:55   Amazon, have both come out and done that. It is unprecedented. It's not something

02:32:00   companies do. It's certainly not something reputable companies do. Yeah, I think Bloomberg

02:32:05   really screwed up. I think—

02:32:07   It certainly seems like it. I mean, nobody else is backing them up on us.

02:32:11   No. And that's the other thing that people have pointed out. And they even said, like

02:32:16   the Washington Post put a team on this, the New York Times put a team on this, and none

02:32:20   of these other publications have come up with anything to corroborate this, let alone the

02:32:26   fact that the thing that if the story were true or mostly true, somebody by now would

02:32:31   have found one of these super micro motherboards with a chip on it and said, "Here it is.

02:32:37   Here's the chip.

02:32:38   Here's the," you know, because nobody's found it.

02:32:40   And you know that security researchers are looking for it because it would be a huge

02:32:43   feather in their cap.

02:32:45   If there are such boards out there, the first security researcher who can publicly find

02:32:49   one and point it out and, you know, analyze, you know, do the, you know, say, "Here's

02:32:54   how it works.

02:32:55   it was going to be famous. So I think Bloomberg screwed on that. I think Bloomberg is sort

02:33:00   of hoping that this just washes over. Rather than retract, I feel like they're just like…

02:33:06   They're running the clock out. [whistling]

02:33:14   Midterms are coming up. How about that Trump fella?

02:33:23   (laughing)

02:33:24   What's he done with it? - Look over there.

02:33:27   - Anything else, I think that's about it.

02:33:29   We've gone on pretty long anyway.

02:33:31   - Yeah, yeah. (laughing)

02:33:32   - All right, I'm hopefully going to do a show next week.

02:33:35   After the event, we'll see if we were right

02:33:37   about any of this stuff.

02:33:38   John, it's always good to have you on.

02:33:40   I think it's been a record-breaking long stretch

02:33:42   between you appearing on this show.

02:33:45   - Well, I went to jail.

02:33:46   (laughing)

02:33:48   - Well, I'm glad you're out.

02:33:50   [LAUGHTER]

02:33:53   Me too.

02:33:54   People can enjoy you on various podcasts.

02:33:59   That is correct.

02:34:00   Turning this car around with some other dads

02:34:02   and The Rebound, which we talk about this same stuff.

02:34:07   And the Speedy AeroCast--

02:34:08   But not as well.

02:34:08   You saved your best stuff for your--

02:34:10   Well, of course.

02:34:11   Well, sure.

02:34:11   [LAUGHTER]

02:34:13   The Speedy AeroCast-- guy gets upset when I don't mention

02:34:15   the Speedy AeroCast, so I'm mentioning it here.

02:34:17   What is happening?

02:34:19   It's about the TV show Aero.

02:34:20   other now we also talk about some other superheroes with the guy English yeah

02:34:24   with guy we have guy English of yeah okay the Canadian English is yeah and

02:34:32   Dan Warren all right that's great and you are you you you have a good voice

02:34:37   you should do a lot of podcasts oh thanks my thanks to our sponsors we've

02:34:43   got a Amazon Prime video channels which is just amazing you just pick the

02:34:48   channels you want to watch and that's all you pay for. We've got RX bar, not to be

02:34:53   confused with R10 bar. RX bar, just really, really good food in a little bar and they

02:35:00   got the butter spreads now too. Really good food. They taste great. They're good for

02:35:04   you. And Squarespace. So my thanks to all of them. Thank you, Jon.

02:35:10   Jon Moffitt Thanks.

02:35:11   [ Silence ]