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231: ‘It’s a Deep Notch’ With Dan Frommer

 

00:00:00   Did I tell you that I figured out what the heck that was?

00:00:02   I don't think so. No. So the backstory on this is that Dan and I were in the Steve Jobs theater

00:00:09   together sort of towards the back, maybe like five or six rows from the back. And during the event,

00:00:14   especially the first half, there was a lot of noise from seemingly like, like, I couldn't quite make

00:00:20   it out. But I thought it was like Asian language, sort of like speakerphone noise. And I thought

00:00:27   someone was on the phone and I thought so too. I completely thought it was somebody who was on the

00:00:33   phone like with you know like like like Chinese media and they were on the phone with somebody

00:00:39   at their office back in in China like to let them listen to the keynote live and I'm like dude

00:00:44   they're streaming it like you don't have to you don't have to let them listen in on speaker phone

00:00:50   you know and why are they talking um and it was a bit distracting and it was also kind of baffling

00:00:56   because I would like turn around to see who it was to maybe shoot them a dirty look and

00:01:01   and it it was like it seemed to like be moving around the theater like at first I thought

00:01:06   it was over my shoulder to the left and it seemed to be coming from over my shoulder

00:01:08   to the right anyway long story short what it is what it was is that Apple provides non

00:01:16   I don't know how many languages they support but if English is not your first language

00:01:20   they they give media like a little earpiece and they can get a live translation from somebody

00:01:26   you know, that Apple hires to translate it on the fly. And which is cool. But what happened was

00:01:33   they had them turned up way too loud. And I guess there's no volume on the actual thing that goes in

00:01:38   your ear. It's like Apple was controlling it and it was way too loud. And so what people were doing,

00:01:44   because it was so loud in their ear, is they took it out of their ear and were just sort of holding

00:01:48   it. And it was so loud. Like, it was supposed to be like an earpiece, you know, so you wouldn't

00:01:54   and distract people, but it was so loud

00:01:56   that that's what everybody could hear.

00:01:57   It was like, that's how loud it was.

00:01:59   - Oh, funny.

00:02:00   - And the reason it went away about half an hour

00:02:02   in his apple, figured out what was going on

00:02:03   and turned the volume down

00:02:04   and everybody stuck them back in their ears.

00:02:07   - I had an amazing meeting once in Tokyo with the,

00:02:12   I wanted to do a story on the evolution

00:02:14   of the Japanese vending machine.

00:02:17   And I met with the guy at Coca-Cola Japan

00:02:19   who runs all their vending machine operations,

00:02:22   which is a fascinating story.

00:02:24   and I'm not gonna get into the details now,

00:02:26   but in this meeting, and also I think

00:02:30   in a few other meetings I've had in Tokyo,

00:02:32   someone is an interpreter who sits in the room

00:02:34   and you have an earpiece where you can hear her speaking,

00:02:38   translating into English in real time

00:02:40   while you're sitting there in the meeting.

00:02:43   It's fascinating, it's very cool.

00:02:45   - Sort of like being at the UN or something.

00:02:46   - Yeah, exactly, yeah.

00:02:52   I gotta say, it was, you know, it had been a year

00:02:54   since we'd been in the Steve Jobs Theater,

00:02:56   and it's still a really impressive place.

00:03:01   I think you probably talked with Eli about this last show,

00:03:06   but the sound blew me away.

00:03:09   I forgot that they went completely all out

00:03:14   with the sound system and the projector and everything.

00:03:17   When they were playing that intro sequence,

00:03:21   Mission Impossible thing. The room was shaking. The bass was so strong. Not in an obnoxious way,

00:03:28   either, in a really, really compelling way. No, it's the best sound I've ever heard in a theater.

00:03:32   Literally no echo. It is super crisp.

00:03:35   That's all right. We love dogs on the talk show. Joanna's dog is always a problem. What's your dog

00:03:50   dog's name? Ralphie. Oh, that's a good name. Try to mute when he's that's all right. He's

00:03:55   guarding the door. So that's his job. Yeah, like it is his job. No, that's totally allowed

00:04:00   on this show. Now it is fantastic sound and I talked to some Apple people and I think

00:04:06   that they use it a little bit more internally than I was initially led to believe like I

00:04:10   heard from I wrote about how you know what a remarkable place it is combined with the

00:04:15   fact that at least publicly they only use like once a year. They do use it internally

00:04:20   a couple times a month they have team meetings and stuff there. It doesn't just sit unused

00:04:26   all year long. They do make some good use of it. I heard from a couple people that they

00:04:34   had a screening of The Incredibles 2. Employees were allowed to bring their kids and everything

00:04:41   like that. I haven't seen it yet. I love The Incredibles. I go to the theater so little

00:04:47   now it's criminal. It was sort of like a New Year's resolution for this year that I missed,

00:04:53   but I want to start going to the movies more often again because I love going to the movies,

00:04:57   and I don't know why I don't go. But I haven't seen The Incredibles 2 yet, but there's apparently a

00:05:00   scene where the little baby Jack-Jack is up in a corner, hiding—I don't know. This is not really

00:05:09   a spoiler—but he's up by the ceiling, hiding in a corner, back right, and he makes a noise.

00:05:15   and the theater, it made it sound like he was in the back corner of the theater.

00:05:18   Like my one friend at Apple was like, you know, me and my two kids,

00:05:21   we all just turned around and looked up there.

00:05:23   That's amazing. Yeah. That's cool.

00:05:26   How the promise of surround sound.

00:05:30   So what's coming up? I guess we, before we get into the news, we can, while we're talking about

00:05:35   the Steve Jobs theater, we can, we can speculate on what's coming up for Apple. Cause it,

00:05:39   everybody is expecting them to announce new iPad Pros and probably new MacBooks that are not pro

00:05:47   at an event, which I'm guessing—I honestly have no inside information about this. We're recording

00:05:53   this on October 15. Nobody has told me a damn thing. But I'm guessing it's going to be Tuesday,

00:05:59   October 30. But the question for me is where? Are they going to do it in the Steve Jobs Theater,

00:06:04   or are they going to do it like, you know, like they had that. Remember, were you there at the

00:06:10   Chicago thing? I was Yeah, yeah. had Lane tech where I took the SAT. That's exactly right. I

00:06:16   forgot about that. Right. What a small world. The place where you took the SATs was the I don't know

00:06:26   I have no idea what they're gonna do. But I feel like Tuesday, October 30 is the right day because

00:06:31   it's obviously not going to be this week. I mean, invitations haven't gone out yet. And I, in theory,

00:06:39   you know, they could send out invitations now for something next week, but I don't think they'll do

00:06:43   next week. And I don't think they ever would because next week is like this Friday is when

00:06:50   the iPhone 10 r goes on sale or pre pre order. And then next Friday is when it ships and I don't

00:06:55   don't think they would hold an event in between there because I would guess that

00:07:00   like reviews of the XR will be coming out at some point in between then and there. And

00:07:05   they're not going to have—they don't want to have reviews of a major new iPhone

00:07:08   coming out at the same time that they're announcing new things. Like, it doesn't

00:07:13   really make any sense from Apple's perspective.

00:07:15   Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Yeah, the minute you—I forgot where I read

00:07:18   that thinking first, but that made sense. I mean, there was a world in which—and maybe

00:07:23   this would have happened four years ago, they would have put out the invitations the day

00:07:28   of the Google Pixel event.

00:07:32   They did used to do stuff like that.

00:07:36   My guess is that you're right, the discipline of not messing up with the signal of the new

00:07:43   iPhone, no noise about iPads or anything else, just keep one story at a time, that makes

00:07:49   sense.

00:07:50   - Yeah, so if I had to bet,

00:07:53   I would bet that they'll have it

00:07:54   at the Steve Jobs Theater again.

00:07:56   But that's, it's simply, I don't know why I think that.

00:08:01   I really don't think that they would ever hold an event

00:08:04   at the old town hall on the old campus again.

00:08:07   - No. - Like why?

00:08:08   I mean, it would seem like--

00:08:09   - Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

00:08:10   - Even if it's not supposed to be as big a deal

00:08:13   as new iPhones, I think new iPads are pretty big.

00:08:18   - Oh man, I need one, so I hope it happens sooner than later.

00:08:23   Yeah, that's a good question.

00:08:25   Is it more work for the events team to do it on campus?

00:08:29   Or it's probably a lot less work

00:08:32   than having to do it somewhere else.

00:08:34   Even if it were in San Francisco or Cupertino,

00:08:37   even if it were in Silicon Valley,

00:08:39   it's probably a lot easier for them.

00:08:41   - I think it's a lot less work, a lot,

00:08:43   because it's less travel, obviously, for everybody,

00:08:45   because they're just doing their normal daily commute,

00:08:48   And I think for the, whatever you want to call the team

00:08:51   that does the setup, they don't have anything to set up.

00:08:53   I mean, not that they don't,

00:08:55   I mean, they put up some decorations

00:08:56   and stuff like that in the theater,

00:08:58   but it's nothing like the pop-up theaters

00:09:00   that they've been making in recent years

00:09:02   at places like the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

00:09:05   and other places.

00:09:07   - Even Lane Tech High School,

00:09:09   like that was by far the cleanest day

00:09:11   in the history of that school.

00:09:12   (laughing)

00:09:13   And forever after, like it will never be as clean

00:09:17   it was the day that Apple went there. Right. Yeah, I guess there's the argument that like,

00:09:23   oh, keep, keep the Steve Jobs theater for only the most important special events, the iPhone event,

00:09:28   but I don't that doesn't really know. I don't think that means anything. Yeah,

00:09:33   I think it made sense, maybe for the first event to be there to be for last year's iPhone, you know,

00:09:39   the biggest event of the year is the iPhone announcement. I think it sort of made sense

00:09:43   to christen the theater with that event. But now it just, to me, makes sense that you'd

00:09:48   use it whenever you have something to announce. And the reason they only used it once last

00:09:51   year is it was a year where they just didn't have anything else to announce. I mean, one

00:09:56   of the reasons that people are so excited about new iPad Pros is that the iPad Pros,

00:10:00   our current ones, are really two generations old. They sort of skip the whole A11 CPU cycle.

00:10:09   So I think people are really excited. People who love the iPad are really excited about

00:10:12   because it's--

00:10:14   I hate to use the word overdue, but they're maybe

00:10:18   a little overdue.

00:10:19   No, I think that's super fair.

00:10:21   I mean, if you look at--

00:10:22   especially not even just in a vacuum,

00:10:24   but if you look at competition, it's getting better.

00:10:27   And that's not to say that they have

00:10:29   to respond to any sort of increased cadence pressure,

00:10:33   but there needs to be a new iPad Pro now.

00:10:38   And it seems like, especially if the idea is that it won't

00:10:41   have a home button and there's probably more to the story,

00:10:46   that's not just gonna be a press release update.

00:10:49   I think that commands an event.

00:10:51   So.

00:10:52   - Yeah.

00:10:53   Remember when they did the Apple Watch and I think,

00:10:56   what was it?

00:10:58   I forget what year, when they announced,

00:11:01   there was a 2015 when they originally announced

00:11:03   the Apple Watch, maybe it was 2014.

00:11:05   But the, and they had that event on the college campus

00:11:07   in Cupertino, what's the name of that college?

00:11:11   - Yes, I don't know.

00:11:13   - But remember they built like a gigantic,

00:11:15   like a literal building out front for the hands-on area.

00:11:19   Like they built the equivalent of an Apple store

00:11:24   all temporary just to have an open air hands-on area

00:11:29   after the event, it was crazy.

00:11:33   - I mean, even the stuff they do in that convention center

00:11:37   where they have WWDC is pretty intense.

00:11:42   I think last summer they had a big demo area

00:11:46   and I don't remember, now I'm making things up.

00:11:51   But yeah, the construction they will do

00:11:53   inside of someone else's space is pretty intense.

00:11:57   So to go back to earlier, yeah,

00:12:01   I think that if there's going to be something

00:12:04   and they don't have a good reason

00:12:05   for it to be somewhere else,

00:12:06   the past they've had like events at like what the maybe I'm blending with Amazon too, but

00:12:13   like they'll have something at a library somewhere or something like that. Or, you know, the

00:12:17   education event this spring was at a public high school. But there doesn't seem to be

00:12:22   a place like that where they would have an iPad event. So and they used to have a member

00:12:26   they used to have events at the what's that place in San Francisco, your boy now your

00:12:31   Yerba Buena. It was just too small. It really wasn't that much bigger than Town Hall.

00:12:37   I guess it was a little bit bigger, but it always felt a little cramped. And the hands-on

00:12:43   area was always super cramped in there, too. I remember the one time just talking about

00:12:47   how over the top they go at Yerba Buena. It might have been the last year that Katie Cotton

00:12:52   was still there. And they knocked out a wall. The room where the hands-on thing was at Yerba

00:12:59   on thing was at Yerba Buena, they always painted—or I don't know if they used paint, but draped

00:13:05   with black, so it was sort of a very dark room with spotlights shining on the tables.

00:13:12   And they just took out a whole wall of the building so that it would be airy and sunshiny,

00:13:18   and then just paid to reconstruct it. It wasn't like a removable wall. They literally figured

00:13:25   out. They wanted open air. They did the work in advance to figure out, "Yeah, there's

00:13:32   no supporting beams in there. We could just knock this out, and then we'll just rebuild

00:13:35   it the next day." That's crazy. It's absolutely insane what they spend on these

00:13:40   events.

00:13:41   Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Yeah. It's amazing though. And it shows. It's

00:13:45   just attention to detail. And really, why spare any expense? I mean, sure, spare some

00:13:52   but not, you know, what's a couple, what's $10,000 here or there when that's like selling

00:13:59   100 iPhones?

00:14:01   Yeah. Speaking of iPad Pro, did you see that—

00:14:04   100, no, sorry, that's like selling 10 iPhones.

00:14:07   Yeah, exactly. It's like selling eight of the $1,500 ones.

00:14:11   Yeah.

00:14:12   Did you see that Adobe—I mean, it's sort of a poorly kept secret, but that today at

00:14:18   their Adobe Max conference, they preannounced Photoshop for iPad.

00:14:22   Right, which made me wonder, is this something that they announced last time there was a

00:14:27   major iOS event, or is this something that they will announce at the next major iOS event?

00:14:33   I would eat my hat if they don't have Adobe on stage at this next event.

00:14:38   Yeah.

00:14:39   And, you know what, I was actually watching some of the Adobe Max conference today live.

00:14:43   They had a great live stream. And Phil Schiller was on stage for a while. They Yeah, which

00:14:49   is I can't remember the last time. Wow. Somebody or Phil, I can't remember the last time Phil

00:14:54   Schiller was at somebody else's conference. I think it just goes to show how serious Apple

00:15:00   is about wanting stuff like Photoshop for iPad. And it's funny because the verge had

00:15:05   a really great hands on preview they got, you know, they got to play with it's not coming

00:15:09   out till 2019. So who knows if that means early 2019 or later 2019. I suspect that it

00:15:16   might be a little later. I wouldn't hold my breath for Photoshop for iPad in January.

00:15:22   Because there's definitely some, it's not just that it's beta, there's some features

00:15:27   that just aren't there yet. Like there's things you can tap on it, but it doesn't do anything.

00:15:34   But the Verge had a great hands on and they let their production staffers use it and put

00:15:39   play with it for a while and they had a great video today. I'll put it in the show notes

00:15:43   with their first thoughts on it. But the thing that keeps coming up is both from Adobe and

00:15:47   the people who are trying this pre-release version that it's quote unquote the real

00:15:51   Photoshop. It's not just an image editing app that they've put the Photoshop brand

00:15:56   name on. It really is Photoshop that we know and love from the desktop running on an iPad,

00:16:02   which is kind of crazy.

00:16:04   which makes you wonder why why they're doing it yeah I I'd add to good

00:16:12   question and I I wonder about that I I think it is a bet on you know that this

00:16:18   really is the future and I think it is a really good form factor for a lot of the

00:16:24   stuff people do in Photoshop sure there especially read you know retouching yeah

00:16:29   or well the one guy for the drawing the one guy for the verge made a great point

00:16:33   point, just a fantastic point where he was like taking an image of a sword and he just

00:16:39   wanted to get the background out, just to cut out the sword. And he said, "One of

00:16:44   the things you can do here, you just don't think about it, is you just rotate the iPad

00:16:48   as he goes around. It's like the way when you're drawing on a piece of paper, you

00:16:51   can just turn it upside down to do another part." He's just turning it around upside

00:16:55   down, turning it left, turning it right. That's something you can never do with a MacBook.

00:17:02   So I don't know. And I think a lot of the stuff with the pencil is obviously uniquely,

00:17:11   at least on the Apple platform, is unique to the iPad platform. And it looks to me,

00:17:18   from watching the Adobe Max thing, that they're doing it at a really, really high refresh

00:17:24   rate. They had a guy doing a demo with simulating oil paint. And just the way that he was swirling

00:17:32   two colors together, it was really just stunning that it wasn't—it just looked like a photograph

00:17:38   of, you know, like high-def photograph of like a Bob Ross-type guy using actual oil

00:17:43   paint. But that's really the secret. I mean, it's no good if there's latency there

00:17:49   between the pencil and the thing, but it looks to me like they're doing it right. So I

00:17:53   would guess that's the reason why.

00:17:55   - Yeah, also I guess in the era where you're,

00:17:59   if you're a creative professional,

00:18:01   you're probably paying for a subscription to Adobe now.

00:18:06   So it doesn't really matter.

00:18:08   The idea that you're not buying a $20 iPad version

00:18:12   of the app, you're subscribing to whatever

00:18:14   the yearly or monthly subscription is.

00:18:16   So at that point, they should get you using it

00:18:19   on every device you have and not just your one Mac

00:18:22   or something like that.

00:18:23   - Right, we could do a whole thing.

00:18:24   we could do a whole digression on software as a service and subscription versus buying and I know

00:18:28   that there are people out there I know because I get emailed from them all the time I know that

00:18:33   there are people listening to us who hate it who just who really really really feel strongly that

00:18:39   they want to give Adobe you know $299 or whatever and then they get to use Adobe Photoshop version

00:18:47   X.0 for as long as it runs on their computer and then choose whether or not to upgrade when

00:18:52   and X plus 1.0 comes out, you know.

00:18:55   And I, you know, there's all sorts of pros and cons

00:18:58   to subscription, but a certain absolute pro

00:19:02   is if you're already in, you're already paying,

00:19:04   you know, the monthly fee for the CC, the Creative Cloud,

00:19:08   and then all of a sudden next year at some point,

00:19:10   you just get Photoshop for iPad.

00:19:13   I mean, that's pretty sweet.

00:19:16   - Yep.

00:19:17   Yeah, now I'm gonna watch, now I gotta watch this video.

00:19:20   It looks cool.

00:19:21   It really is cool. I know at least one person is working on the team. It's the real deal.

00:19:30   I mean, it's top-flight talent at Adobe, and it is the real Photoshop. They're not just saying it.

00:19:37   So that's very cool. Here, why don't I take a break and thank our first sponsor?

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00:22:32   all right speaking of tablets I don't know we got a couple of things talked about this

00:22:39   show but we could jump right into the Google Pixel event.

00:22:43   Yeah, which I was going to go to but I didn't. I did not.

00:22:48   So I was going to go and timing wise it didn't really work out that great for me. They had

00:22:55   like it was a Tuesday. Last Tuesday was the keynote but because they had it in a sort

00:23:00   of like it wasn't a very big venue. It seems like it wasn't a lot of seating in New York.

00:23:06   They had a full day of press stuff Wednesday too. So that's what I did. I went up on Wednesday.

00:23:15   And it was nice. They had a nice little setup. They had a big, huge—I don't even want

00:23:21   to call it a studio—but a big, huge open space there in New York. And then they set

00:23:24   up a bunch of kiosks and a bunch of little fake rooms. They had a fake kitchen and a

00:23:30   fake bedroom and a fake living room. And then in groups of three, they were taking—I got

00:23:36   paired up with two other people from the media. And then we just sort of round robin go from

00:23:40   each station to the next and see everything. It was a nice way to do a hands-on thing.

00:23:46   That's cool. And I watched the keynote on video. It was a typical Google keynote, way

00:23:53   too long, way too many people. I always say it's so obvious. Like the one thing Apple

00:23:58   does and to me it would be like a canary in the coal mine if it ever started going the

00:24:03   other way in terms of, well, you know, Apple's really going downhill is with like a company

00:24:08   like Google, you can see the politics of the internal politics of who gets on stage, you

00:24:14   know, like it. It's like, well, we got to get somebody from this team up on stage. So

00:24:19   here, let's find some reason for them to be on stage, as opposed to just sort of telling

00:24:24   a story straight through about the products. I thought it could have been a much shorter

00:24:29   event but the tablet yeah so they have intrigues you a little bit I just set up

00:24:38   my my pixel XL which we can talk about later but yeah well the one thing I'll

00:24:43   say this in favor in Google's favor I thought it was a very cohesive group of

00:24:47   products to be announced three things the Google the new Google pixel 3 in two

00:24:52   sizes the brand new pixel slate tablet slash keyboard cover and their their new

00:25:01   talk to it device with a screen called the home hub and one two three those are

00:25:07   the three products they wanted to talk about I thought that they fit together

00:25:10   in in a you know an event very well the slate is interesting because it is their

00:25:18   first Chrome Chrome OS tablet like but it runs Android apps you know and I know

00:25:25   that they've been working on getting Android apps running in Chrome OS for

00:25:30   years now and I kind of feel like I kind of feel like the whole I kind of feel

00:25:36   like the whole reason maybe not the whole reason but a big driving factor in

00:25:40   that is to get it you know to for tablets I think because I think it makes

00:25:45   most sense there. I don't think using an Android app on a laptop makes all that much sense,

00:25:50   but on a touchscreen tablet type thing, maybe it does.

00:25:52   Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Right. Unless they do something like the new

00:25:56   OS X, is it called Marzipan or not? What are we calling it?

00:26:00   Jay Haynes (01h00): No. Well, we have to call it Marzipan so we

00:26:02   can have something to call it, but Apple is definitely not calling it Marzipan publicly.

00:26:09   But we can call it Marzipan.

00:26:10   Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Got it.

00:26:11   Jay Haynes (01h00): Yeah. And my first thought when I picked it

00:26:14   up is, man, this thing is way too heavy. This is too heavy. And then I did, like on the

00:26:22   train ride back to Philly, I did the, I like looked up what the iPad Pros weigh and it's

00:26:27   actually only ever so slightly heavier than the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. The reason I thought

00:26:32   it was heavy is I'm used to the 10.5 inch iPad and they only have one, the Pixel Slate

00:26:37   only comes in one size, which is roughly equivalent to the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. So it actually

00:26:43   isn't heavy compared to an iPad Pro.

00:26:45   It just felt heavy to me at first.

00:26:47   Has a very nice screen.

00:26:49   They're touting it.

00:26:51   I guess Apple's are all 264 pixels per inch

00:26:54   and then the pixel slate is like 295 pixels per inch.

00:26:58   So they're bragging about having the most pixels,

00:27:00   but it's most pixels per inch, but it looks good.

00:27:04   I will say this, just tapping around though

00:27:07   with the demo apps that they had,

00:27:09   a lot of it, they had like a text editor,

00:27:13   like, you know, sort of like a BB edit, you know, like a not like a word processor, but

00:27:18   like a good old fashioned plain text text editor. I forget what it was called. And I

00:27:24   should have asked. I wasn't sure if it and I guess this is actually a good thing. I couldn't

00:27:28   tell if it was a Chrome app or an Android app. But the fonts were just tiny, just like

00:27:34   I know I've my eyes. I'm 45 and kind of crap eyes. But I mean, by anybody's standards,

00:27:42   this was like, it was like the small print

00:27:44   on a credit card application.

00:27:47   You know what I mean?

00:27:48   Like when you're signing up for a new credit card

00:27:51   and there's like all this like tiny little small print

00:27:53   or like the small print when you buy like a iPhone

00:27:56   or something and there's like, here's the warranty.

00:27:59   It was like four point type.

00:28:01   And I don't know if it's configurable or not,

00:28:03   but it seemed it was a weird thing to have

00:28:05   on a demo machine, you know, like ready to go to tap on.

00:28:08   Like this does not seem thoughtfully designed.

00:28:11   The other thing that really stuck out to me compared to an iPad, the big thing for me

00:28:17   is that the keyboard cover, that it has real keys and a trackpad. And I tried playing with

00:28:25   it like snapping it out of the case back in and as soon as you snap it out, there's like

00:28:29   a little black arrow cursor for the trackpad. As soon as you disconnect it from the keyboard,

00:28:34   the moment it's disconnected, the arrow cursor just goes away. And then as soon as you snap

00:28:38   it back in and move the trackpad around, the arrow cursor shows up again. So it's all,

00:28:42   you know, I would really like to see Apple do something like that with the iPad, even

00:28:46   though there's no indication that they are. Because I find that one of the, to me, one

00:28:51   of the things that drives me nuts if I ever try to do like writing on an iPad is it text

00:28:56   selection. Just poking around with my finger on the screen, it seems so crude compared

00:29:01   to what I could do with a trackpad, how precise I can move it and double click on words and

00:29:06   how my hand is already right there by the trackpad.

00:29:09   - Yeah, unless you have a,

00:29:12   and I guess if you have a stylus,

00:29:13   if you're holding onto the pencil thing,

00:29:15   but if you are, you're probably not typing too.

00:29:17   It's not super comfortable to hold that.

00:29:20   - Yeah, but I don't think Apple doesn't let you

00:29:22   use the pencil to like move the insertion point around.

00:29:25   It's like only really meant for drawing.

00:29:27   So there's really no good way to select text,

00:29:30   in my opinion, on iOS period.

00:29:34   It's just, to me, is just a glaring hole

00:29:37   in the iOS experience, especially in that,

00:29:40   when you have the, whether it's the Apple Smart Keyboard

00:29:44   cover or some, any of the various third-party keyboards

00:29:47   you can get to use with an iPad,

00:29:49   it's like when you have it set up like a laptop,

00:29:52   using your iPad in a rough, either very laptop-like

00:29:55   or roughly laptop-like fashion,

00:29:58   not having a trackpad, to me, is just a huge,

00:30:01   it never, I never get used to it.

00:30:03   I mean, maybe I'm too Mac-centric,

00:30:05   but it certainly seems nice on the Chromebook.

00:30:09   - Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the main reasons

00:30:11   I have not, like every time I do try to use

00:30:15   an iPad Pro for text, you know, for editing basically

00:30:21   or writing, I immediately grab my MacBook

00:30:24   and just go back to that.

00:30:25   I think you're right.

00:30:27   I don't think about it a lot, but the text,

00:30:29   The cursor insertion and just text selection is pretty bad.

00:30:33   - Yeah, and you know, it's the Surface, you know,

00:30:37   there's, I guess the, you know,

00:30:39   the battle for these tablets now is iPad,

00:30:42   the Microsoft Surface ones, and now, you know,

00:30:46   it's like a full reset.

00:30:48   Like Google is seemingly really backed away from Android

00:30:51   as anything other than a phone OS,

00:30:53   and this Chrome OS that runs Android apps

00:30:56   is their new tablet OS, and you know,

00:30:58   this is the first product that ships with that,

00:31:02   that's their entry in this.

00:31:03   The other two, Microsoft and Google,

00:31:05   all have trackpad support.

00:31:06   - Oh wow, all right, well now we're on, right?

00:31:11   It's on now.

00:31:12   Who'd you get the sense that they are building this for?

00:31:15   'Cause 12-inch screen is not a super portable tablet,

00:31:20   did you get a sense that this is a work device

00:31:23   and not a ever on the house thing?

00:31:26   - It's a good question.

00:31:28   I thought about that too. And the other thing too is it starts at $599 but it goes up to

00:31:35   like $1400, $1500, mostly dependent on, I think you can either get it with like 64 or

00:31:44   128 gigabytes of storage, but then the CPU goes up too and as you pay more for a better

00:31:51   CPU, and this is an Intel device, it is not running an ARM chip, which is to me interesting.

00:31:56   - Yeah.

00:31:57   - But it, you know--

00:32:01   - Are those Chromebooks Intel?

00:32:03   - I guess, I would guess that they are.

00:32:07   They're just--

00:32:08   - I should probably know, but--

00:32:09   - Yeah, I think that they are, but I don't know.

00:32:13   But this is, and you have a, you know, I don't know,

00:32:16   I've dropped off, you know, I just don't pay attention

00:32:19   to Intel's chips anymore, you know,

00:32:21   when I buy a MacBook, you know, I just,

00:32:24   there just aren't that many options

00:32:26   on the Apple side of things.

00:32:27   But there's like eight different CPU configurations

00:32:29   for the Pixel Slate with very different prices.

00:32:32   And you get a little bit more RAM

00:32:34   if you buy the more expensive ones, too.

00:32:37   So I do wonder who's buying a $1,400 Chrome OS tablet.

00:32:42   I mean, it's certainly not targeted

00:32:44   at that low-end Chromebook market

00:32:47   that is dominating education,

00:32:49   where there's like $199 plastic laptops.

00:32:53   It's definitely not that, starting at 599.

00:32:56   - I mean, I think this speaks to the bigger question.

00:32:59   If you zoom out and look at Google's hardware strategy

00:33:02   in general, especially for the phones,

00:33:05   and it seems like this too, you just kind of have to wonder

00:33:09   why they're doing it the way they're doing it.

00:33:12   I mean, it basically seems like they're pushing

00:33:16   for the super high end of the market,

00:33:18   they're trying to compete with, and in some cases,

00:33:21   seem to be very successfully either at Apple's level

00:33:26   of blending hardware and software or approaching it,

00:33:31   they're clearly not going mass market with these things.

00:33:36   You can see that the pixels are not flying off the shelves,

00:33:40   they're not super successful commercially,

00:33:43   even though they are really nice devices.

00:33:45   So this kind of fits in with that strange strategy.

00:33:49   I forgot who maybe it was,

00:33:53   I don't even wanna misattribute this,

00:33:55   but someone said like maybe they're just being a troll

00:33:57   by doing all this stuff?

00:33:58   Like they're--

00:34:00   - I don't think so.

00:34:01   And there was a couple of pieces.

00:34:03   I wanted to link to one,

00:34:04   maybe I'll get it by the end of this week.

00:34:06   There was a piece somebody wrote, maybe at Bloomberg,

00:34:09   kind of scoffing at the whole idea of Google doing phones

00:34:13   and why are they even bothering?

00:34:14   This is effectively like corporate masturbation

00:34:17   because they're not selling enough of these

00:34:21   to make any kind of dent in the market

00:34:23   or dent in their bottom line.

00:34:25   And I disagree with that.

00:34:26   Well, I don't disagree that it's a blip financially.

00:34:31   Somebody did the math and figured out that Apple,

00:34:34   like Apple sells as many iPhones in eight days

00:34:37   as Google sold Pixel phones in an entire year.

00:34:40   I'm almost surprised that it's not even

00:34:42   more lopsided than that.

00:34:45   But I think that there's no other Android phones

00:34:50   that are like the Pixel phones in my opinion.

00:34:52   I've described them a year or two ago.

00:34:54   I have a Pixel One, I skipped the Pixel Two generation,

00:34:57   and I've already pre-ordered a Pixel Three.

00:35:00   'Cause I like to, to me,

00:35:02   it's the most interesting Android device.

00:35:04   I've described it as an,

00:35:06   it's an Android device for people who want Android,

00:35:09   but they want an iPhone-like phone.

00:35:13   because to me the rest of the Android,

00:35:15   especially the high-end market,

00:35:17   has sort of gone in a very different direction.

00:35:20   I mean, for all the legal consternation

00:35:23   between Apple and Samsung over the early Galaxy devices,

00:35:27   the lawsuit that went on for 10 years over the look and feel

00:35:33   or whatever you wanna call it.

00:35:34   And remember there was a moment where somebody held up,

00:35:40   there was a Samsung expert witness on the stand

00:35:43   and one of Apple's lawyers held up one of the phones

00:35:45   and said, "Here, can you tell if this is an iPhone

00:35:49   "or the Galaxy Note 3?"

00:35:51   And the guy was like, "No, I can't."

00:35:53   It was seemingly a good moment.

00:35:56   But I don't think that's like that anymore.

00:35:57   There's no confusing high-end Samsung Galaxy S9

00:36:02   or the Note, whatever they're up to.

00:36:04   They look very different.

00:36:05   They have a very different design language.

00:36:07   They have both software and hardware, they look different.

00:36:12   whereas the Pixel phones,

00:36:13   I'm not saying they're iPhone ripoffs,

00:36:15   but they're definitely iPhone-like in hardware.

00:36:19   - And very nice, like I'm holding a Pixel 3 XL

00:36:22   and an iPhone XS Max in two hands,

00:36:26   and neither one of them is much obviously nicer

00:36:31   than the other one, like very, very nice devices.

00:36:34   Both have really, really impressive screens,

00:36:36   and I could, you know, I mean, to some extent,

00:36:41   it probably is helpful for Google

00:36:43   to be able to show their employees,

00:36:45   like, hey, look at,

00:36:46   we can actually make this really good stuff too,

00:36:47   and you can own this and use Android as intended

00:36:51   on this device.

00:36:52   - Yeah, the other thing they do,

00:36:54   to me, the hardware is definitely iPhone-like.

00:36:57   I wouldn't mind running iOS on one of those devices

00:37:00   just in terms of how they feel.

00:37:02   They feel really nice in hand, they've always did.

00:37:04   And especially, they've really made it better

00:37:06   in the last two years.

00:37:07   Like, my Pixel 1 is okay,

00:37:10   but there's things about it that I think were mistakes

00:37:12   like the power button,

00:37:16   they like etched like a ridging on the side

00:37:20   and it's just not pleasant.

00:37:21   I think that because they put the volume button

00:37:23   right below the power button,

00:37:25   my guess is the thinking was,

00:37:27   well, let's give the power button this rigid feel

00:37:30   so you can tell, but it's like, you don't need that.

00:37:32   You just know which one's up and which one's below,

00:37:35   and they've gotten away from that.

00:37:38   They just feel better now.

00:37:39   But the other thing that they do with their phones,

00:37:42   you said the displays are,

00:37:42   I think the displays are fantastic.

00:37:44   But they're also to me, very iPhone-like

00:37:47   in terms of color reproduction.

00:37:49   Like they're not super saturated.

00:37:51   You know, like to me, the Samsung phones

00:37:53   and the LG phones all look--

00:37:56   - Ridiculous.

00:37:57   - Yeah, to me, they're just not to my liking.

00:37:59   They're just so over the top, oversaturated.

00:38:03   And it's, you know, some people like that.

00:38:05   And I've heard from, you know, like in China,

00:38:07   there's a lot of people who really, really like that look.

00:38:09   They like that it's not really realistic.

00:38:12   It's like hyper-realistic.

00:38:14   The Pixel phones are like iPhones to me

00:38:17   in terms of having a natural sort of color landscape.

00:38:22   - Yeah, it looks great.

00:38:24   Man, the one thing that really is throwing me off though

00:38:27   are the missing gestures from iOS,

00:38:30   like not being able to swipe backwards

00:38:33   and some of this stuff.

00:38:35   I've had it set up for about half an hour or so.

00:38:39   - I'll get used to it, or maybe not, but it's super weird.

00:38:42   However, I just discovered something very, very smart,

00:38:45   which is you can, I don't know how they do this,

00:38:47   but you can squeeze the phone,

00:38:50   and it activates their assistant, which is really clever.

00:38:54   - It seems like a gimmick, but when I played with it

00:38:57   in their hands-on area, it works pretty well.

00:38:59   - Well, and they use haptic feedback to make it feel

00:39:02   like you're actually squeezing the phone,

00:39:04   which I don't think I am.

00:39:05   Like, I hope it's not.

00:39:06   (laughing)

00:39:07   I'm not actually bending the phone, but it really feels like I am, which is cool.

00:39:12   I just hit it, I agree without reading the screen.

00:39:14   I don't know what they're collecting on me now.

00:39:16   Yeah, well, everything.

00:39:18   Uh-oh.

00:39:19   Yeah, it's really nice.

00:39:22   So to me, you asked before, who is the Pixel Slate for?

00:39:26   I'm not entirely sure about that answer.

00:39:29   It's not for me, because I'm not a big Chrome user.

00:39:34   I guess if you're all in on Chrome, though, and you want a tablet, this could be really

00:39:37   nice if you're sort of living the Chrome OS lifestyle. I don't know.

00:39:42   If you live in Google Docs, it might be a compelling device. I don't know.

00:39:46   Right. And it's, you know,

00:39:48   A lot, by the way, like tens of thousands of people in Silicon Valley live in Google

00:39:51   Docs all day. So,

00:39:52   Yeah, I do see it. You know, I have an iPad, I have a Mac book and, you know, I use them

00:40:00   at different times for different things. And, but there are, I can see how it would be nice

00:40:06   to reduce it to one device in some ways. Like, let's say like, I'm a notorious tab lever opener,

00:40:12   you know, I've at any given time, I've got like, six windows, each with, you know, 20 tabs open in

00:40:18   them. And if I've, you know, I wanted to read that, that story that Dan wrote about whatever,

00:40:23   and I know I've got it open in a tab, but I'm on the iPad. It's like, you can get it out of iCloud.

00:40:28   But it's like, I don't remember which device it was on sometimes. And I don't know where to look

00:40:32   for it. Whereas if it's one less device, the tab I have open with the article I've halfway

00:40:38   read is right there, even once I've detached it from the keyboard and I'm just sitting

00:40:42   on the couch at night. So I can see that, but I don't know. But with the phones, I definitely

00:40:48   see who the market is. And the thing that really strikes me about the Pixel owners,

00:40:53   and it just hit me this year, is I think in some ways, the Pixel aficionados right now,

00:41:01   Pixel phone aficionados, remind me a lot of being a Mac user in like the late 90s. So,

00:41:10   you know, and that was the era when, you know, there were all sorts of same thing, this same

00:41:15   argument like, hey, why does Google even bother making these things or market share so low,

00:41:20   it's all irrelevant, they should just give up because the market share so low. That's

00:41:23   everything everybody said about Apple in 1995, right, that they should give it up. You know,

00:41:29   Michael Dell said, what would he do if he ran Apple?

00:41:33   He'd liquidate the company and give the money back

00:41:36   to the shareholders.

00:41:37   But if you, like me, were a Mac user in the late '90s

00:41:42   and you really were passionate about the things

00:41:44   that the Mac still did, even at a technical level

00:41:49   when the OS was really behind the times,

00:41:52   at a user interface level, they never lost that lead.

00:41:56   and it was always a nicer user experience.

00:41:59   The word beleaguered was always thrown around,

00:42:03   but that's sort of what we felt like.

00:42:05   And I was never a big,

00:42:07   remember people would spell Windows W-I-N-D-O-Z-E

00:42:12   and stuff like that, and get in,

00:42:15   every single Usenet group, whatever it was,

00:42:17   it could be about the weather, like alt.philadelphia.weather.

00:42:22   Eventually it's gonna break into a Windows

00:42:24   versus Mac flame war. Like there was, there was no news group. Hey, those were fun though.

00:42:30   There was no news group that didn't eventually break into a windows versus dos flame war,

00:42:35   whether it was computer related or not. Probably the computer groups were the least likely

00:42:39   because everybody had gotten it out of their system. Um, but I just see it like on Twitter

00:42:45   when I see that the pixel people like touting like their, their, you know, photo advantages

00:42:51   and stuff like that. Like I see that passion and I see their frustration that it's not

00:42:56   more popular, right? That they're, they're like, it just seems like Google should be

00:43:01   selling more pixels than they are because it really is a very compelling device and

00:43:06   software experience. It just doesn't seem right that it's, that it's not more popular.

00:43:11   And I think that's a really good analogy. I think Mac users had that frustration for

00:43:15   a long time. They really did. And I see it, you know, I mean, there was a lot of reviews.

00:43:19   I can't speak to it because I don't have a Pixel 2. I'm getting the Pixel 3 soon.

00:43:22   But there's a bunch of reviews, like Nilay and a few others, all said that the Pixel

00:43:28   2 from last year was still a better still camera than the iPhone XS. So who knows how

00:43:34   good the Pixel 3 is?

00:43:36   Yeah, I haven't had a chance to test it, but it seems to be great. The fact that they're

00:43:40   even in the same sentence is astounding. Whether it's 10% better or worse or even more than

00:43:49   That's pretty remarkable considering much like Apple, Google did not have much of a

00:43:56   hardware or sorry, did not have much of a camera and smartphone background before they

00:44:02   just started.

00:44:03   So yeah, there's a couple of features I wrote.

00:44:06   I wrote about it briefly on during Fireball, but there's a couple of features in the

00:44:10   Pixel 3 and it's a little confusing.

00:44:12   What's what's Pixel 3 specific and what is going to ship in a software update for

00:44:17   existing Pixel 1 and Pixel 2 owners later this year. There's a bunch of features they

00:44:22   talked about at the event. Some of them are specific to the Pixel 3 and some of them are

00:44:26   coming to supposedly coming to older Pixels later. But almost like that, who cares? But

00:44:34   the one feature that really blew me away is the one they're calling Top Shot, which is

00:44:40   like you, you don't have to go to a special mode. It's just I guess you can turn it off.

00:44:44   I don't see why you would though because it seems great you take a photo and

00:44:47   It keeps a couple of frames from before you tap the shutter button and it takes a couple of extra frames after

00:44:55   You hit the shutter button and it shoots a video in between as well. So it might take let's say five stills

00:45:03   At the full resolution with all of the everything, you know

00:45:07   They're all they get the same HDR processing everything you'd want and then in between knows there's video

00:45:14   And so the if you if you take one of the video frames you're gonna get less resolution

00:45:18   you know and it's not quite as good of a photo, but the idea is

00:45:22   Like let's say you're shooting a sporting event or or you know

00:45:27   And a whale is jump you're on a boat and whale jumps out of the water and you take a photo

00:45:32   That the absolute best image that you get might be one of those video frames even though it's a slightly lower resolution

00:45:41   Image it might be the one you want to keep because it's the perfect moment, right?

00:45:46   It's that perfect fraction of a sentence or second when the moment was just perfect

00:45:50   But it in practice it really seems to work. I again that this is something

00:45:56   I don't have a pixel in hand yet, but I only got to do it during the hands-on area

00:45:59   But what they did is they gave us each a pixel to walk around with and while they were explaining the feature to me

00:46:04   I took a picture of the the woman from Google product marketing who was telling me about it and I swear

00:46:10   As I took the picture, I actually caught her at a bad moment when she was looking down and her eyes

00:46:14   were closed. And as she's telling me about the top shot picture, I took a picture of her. It was a

00:46:20   bad, very unflattering photo because her eyes were closed and she's looking down. And it immediately

00:46:25   says, "Would you prefer to use this one?" And it went back like half a second and she looked

00:46:30   perfect. And she's looking right at me. It's like I gave myself the perfect demo of the feature.

00:46:37   And so when you take a good photo

00:46:39   and Google thinks it's a good photo,

00:46:41   it doesn't even ask you.

00:46:43   It like only is when it recognizes something like,

00:46:45   hey, there's a subject here with her eyes closed.

00:46:48   We should see if we can suggest something better.

00:46:52   And it happens instantaneously.

00:46:53   It happens right after you snap the shutter button.

00:46:56   - That's cool.

00:46:57   You can do that manually with live photos.

00:47:00   - Right.

00:47:01   Well, but the--

00:47:02   - You can scrub it a little bit.

00:47:03   - Right, so it's--

00:47:04   - The fact that this note,

00:47:05   This is like proactively recommending to you.

00:47:08   - Yeah. - That's cool.

00:47:09   - Yeah, and it really does, again,

00:47:11   I shot like five minutes worth of photos,

00:47:14   but it really does seem to only suggest it to you

00:47:18   when the photo really was taken at the wrong moment

00:47:21   and doesn't bother you

00:47:22   when you've taken a fine photo right away.

00:47:25   So it doesn't annoy you needlessly

00:47:27   and when it does interrupt, it's right.

00:47:30   That's pretty cool.

00:47:33   What was the other feature that I liked?

00:47:35   - I love how both of these come,

00:47:38   both Google and Apple though are using software

00:47:40   to make photos, you know, what, 50 to 100 times better

00:47:44   than just hardware alone would make them.

00:47:45   - Absolutely, yeah.

00:47:46   And it's great that they're pushing each other, you know,

00:47:50   and there's, you know, I'm not saying that Google's ahead

00:47:52   in every single regard, but it's great though

00:47:55   that somebody else is doing similar type things.

00:47:59   And I know Samsung has some AI features too,

00:48:02   everybody's sort of doing it,

00:48:03   but it seems to me like Google and Apple

00:48:05   are ahead of everybody else here in different ways.

00:48:08   - And who's not doing it are the camera companies.

00:48:09   Like I almost never,

00:48:11   I still love the photo that will come out from my Fuji

00:48:16   more than, it just feels like I'm taking a photo

00:48:19   in a way that an iPhone photo still does not.

00:48:23   But when you do it side by side,

00:48:26   a lot of times the iPhone photo actually does look better.

00:48:30   - Yeah.

00:48:32   Another cool feature they have,

00:48:33   I guess it's not a camera feature,

00:48:34   but it's the, did you see the call screening feature?

00:48:39   - I did, yeah, that was cool.

00:48:41   - That is really-- - It's very Googly.

00:48:43   - It's very Googly, and it really, you know,

00:48:46   and they did, again, they demoed it exactly the right way

00:48:48   where there was like a Google employee up in a,

00:48:51   you know, like in a different room who called us,

00:48:53   and we got a real phone call.

00:48:55   - In an unmarked restaurant in Silicon Valley.

00:48:59   - Well, it was the complete opposite of duplex,

00:49:02   because it was a real demo of a real feature and super useful. And it's like they said,

00:49:07   I mean, they even acknowledged that the spam phone calls are worse than ever. I get them

00:49:14   all the time. So I would love to have that feature on iOS. And it just makes so much sense that

00:49:20   it just takes… For all these years, I mean, going back before iPhone, going back to the original

00:49:28   cell phones where they had a green button and a red button. There have always been two

00:49:31   buttons for when a phone call comes in. Take it or don't take it. And now there's this

00:49:35   third option where it's like, "Okay phone, you talk to this jerk. See who it is." Right?

00:49:41   And if it turns out it's somebody you know, if it's like, you know, your accountant is

00:49:45   calling you or somebody you know is calling from a weird number, you can see it on the

00:49:49   transcript and then just jump right into the call and be like, "Oh, okay. I didn't know

00:49:52   who it was. It's a very, very cool feature and like you said, very, very googly. What

00:49:59   else? Do you have both phones as a review unit?

00:50:05   Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 9s): I do, yeah. I've only done the big one. I've

00:50:10   not taken out the… I just picked them up today, so I have not.

00:50:14   Jay Haynes (01h00m 19s): I will say I think it's a little weird and

00:50:19   it is a little, they've gone the wrong way.

00:50:22   Like one of my very, very favorite things

00:50:23   about the iPhone XS is that the XS and the XS Max

00:50:28   are the only difference is the size.

00:50:30   That the cameras are exactly the same,

00:50:33   the CPU's exactly the same, they have the same amount of RAM

00:50:36   it's just you want a bigger one, you know,

00:50:37   so the display is bigger and the battery is bigger

00:50:39   because the, you know, because it's more room

00:50:42   for a bigger battery, but that's it.

00:50:44   They look the same, you know, and I just think,

00:50:48   Anyway, this is my way of saying,

00:50:49   I can't believe they put a big ugly notch

00:50:51   on the one and not the other.

00:50:52   - Yeah, and it doesn't seem to,

00:50:55   maybe I'm not finding it,

00:50:57   but there does not seem to be the Face ID type thing.

00:51:00   - No, they don't, no, there is no Face ID type thing.

00:51:03   It's only there to have the two cameras.

00:51:06   So the other weird thing, I'm not weird,

00:51:08   but certainly different from Apple,

00:51:11   I'll just say different,

00:51:12   is that they still only have one camera on the back

00:51:14   as the main camera,

00:51:16   but now they have two cameras on the front,

00:51:19   one of which is like a normal focal length selfie camera,

00:51:23   and now they have this super wide angle,

00:51:25   almost fisheye selfie camera to get a wider field of view.

00:51:30   - Oh, weird. (laughs)

00:51:34   I can see my whole apartment in one.

00:51:36   - Right, right.

00:51:37   So you zoom, it's like you go to the selfie camera

00:51:40   and then you can zoom the other way.

00:51:41   Instead of like zooming in like a telephoto,

00:51:43   you zoom out and it's super wide in there.

00:51:46   - It seems interesting, I guess.

00:51:48   I don't know. - You know what?

00:51:49   I would use this all the time. (laughs)

00:51:52   As someone who has an embarrassing number of selfies,

00:51:54   I would probably use this all the time.

00:51:56   That's cool, all right.

00:51:59   But it looks, I mean, it actually looks

00:52:01   kind of like a person looking back at you

00:52:02   'cause there's two.

00:52:04   It looks like a smiling creature of some sort.

00:52:08   But yeah, I was surprised there was no face ID type thing.

00:52:11   - No, no, it's still--

00:52:12   - I'm now hooked on this fingerprint thing,

00:52:15   and get rid of it.

00:52:17   - Yeah, it's, I don't know.

00:52:19   I know that there are all sorts of people out there

00:52:21   who have mixed feelings about Face ID versus Touch ID

00:52:24   and who should not be holding their breath for it

00:52:28   but are secretly hoping that Apple is working on Touch ID

00:52:32   under the glass.

00:52:33   Like, I'm telling you, don't worry.

00:52:35   I don't think it's gonna happen.

00:52:37   I don't think.

00:52:37   - No.

00:52:38   - And I actually think, who knows?

00:52:40   I could be wrong.

00:52:42   Maybe it would work well in addition to Face ID,

00:52:44   but I sort of feel like there's an advantage

00:52:47   to only having one biometric ID,

00:52:51   that you don't have to choose

00:52:52   between fingerprint and face ID.

00:52:54   It's like if you've got the new phone, you use face ID,

00:52:56   and if you have an older phone, you use touch ID.

00:53:00   - I agree with you, though.

00:53:00   They definitely lose style points

00:53:02   for having the notch on one of them, but not the other.

00:53:06   So 99.9% of people will never have both of them

00:53:11   at any point.

00:53:13   And nor nor is this like iOS where they dictate how every phone looks like yeah

00:53:19   You know the whole point of Android is that it works on?

00:53:24   You know a hundred thousand different phones, so it's a weird-looking notch too, though

00:53:29   It is it's a it's the biggest notch. I've ever seen it's a deep notch. It's a deep notch and I

00:53:35   Know it's you know it's been amusing to watch like the the larger Android

00:53:42   fan droid world of people are very down on this notch.

00:53:47   To their credit, that they're being honest.

00:53:50   They're not just, oh, I love Pixel phone,

00:53:52   so I'm gonna say this notch is the best notch.

00:53:55   No, instead the consensus seems to be

00:53:56   that this notch is hideous.

00:53:59   It's just ungainly.

00:54:02   - Yeah, it's not bothering me at all.

00:54:04   Well, it is kinda weird, but I don't know, it's fine.

00:54:09   - I still don't like the notch on the iPhone X.

00:54:11   I am used to it though.

00:54:13   I am very used to it.

00:54:14   - I don't even see it anymore.

00:54:16   - But it just is weird that the two phones

00:54:19   have different foreheads,

00:54:21   'cause the one has a regular forehead

00:54:23   and the other one has a notch.

00:54:25   - Are you back to the normal 10 size now?

00:54:28   - Yes, this is a weird thing.

00:54:32   I know that when you put the XS Max

00:54:35   next to a previous Plus phone,

00:54:38   like an iPhone 8 Plus or 7 Plus, whatever,

00:54:40   They're almost exactly the same size.

00:54:42   It's like less than, I think it's like a millimeter,

00:54:46   the iPhone XS Max is like a millimeter smaller

00:54:51   in each dimension or something like that.

00:54:53   It's very, very similar.

00:54:55   But for some reason, it looks and feels smaller in my hand

00:54:59   than the plus size phones did.

00:55:01   I think it's just like an optical illusion created

00:55:03   by the fact that it has so much greater

00:55:06   screen to body area ratio.

00:55:09   It somehow feels smaller.

00:55:11   So I never liked the plus size phones at all

00:55:14   and never was tempted to buy a six plus or seven plus

00:55:17   or any of those, even though it always bothered me

00:55:20   that they had slightly better cameras,

00:55:22   with optical image stabilization and a few features

00:55:25   that the smaller one didn't have.

00:55:27   It just, the XS Max was actually somewhat tempting to me.

00:55:30   It was the first time Apple made a larger phone

00:55:32   that I was like, hmm, maybe.

00:55:35   And there were times when I was testing it

00:55:36   when I forgot which one I had.

00:55:38   I was like, wait, is this the bigger one or the smaller one?

00:55:40   But I did end up buying the smaller one.

00:55:44   - Yeah, I haven't, I'm still in the review unit stage.

00:55:47   I was a plus guy for the three years

00:55:51   or whatever it was during that era.

00:55:54   And now I'm testing out this Max

00:55:57   and boy, that screen is gorgeous.

00:56:01   And to me, the most underappreciated thing

00:56:03   about the bigger phones is that typing is much more accurate

00:56:07   'cause the keys are wider.

00:56:09   But I'm not really using the whole screen for anything.

00:56:12   I still find myself reading in the top third

00:56:16   of the screen almost or top fourth of it.

00:56:18   And this thing just feels big in your pocket.

00:56:21   Although having the new Apple Watch Series 4

00:56:27   makes it kind of a different game

00:56:29   because the, and we can talk about the new watch for a bit.

00:56:32   I mean, it is a really damn good device.

00:56:36   it feels like a computer on your wrist now

00:56:39   in a way that it just did not previously.

00:56:41   And I would say that's 80% just speed.

00:56:45   Like it actually responds to your clicks

00:56:48   and doesn't get caught up in a series of commands.

00:56:53   But the software is starting to get really good too.

00:56:57   I mean, especially the watch face like that.

00:56:59   - Well, hold that though.

00:57:00   Let's save it for a different section.

00:57:03   I got the feeling at the press thing

00:57:04   And I feel like I'm clearly in the minority.

00:57:07   I don't know, and it's the sort of thing

00:57:09   Apple doesn't like to talk about.

00:57:11   They'll give unit sales for iPhones,

00:57:13   but they don't like to break it down by model.

00:57:15   I would love to know what percentage of people

00:57:18   are buying the regular XS and who are buying the XS Max.

00:57:21   I really don't even know how to guess how that's going.

00:57:24   But at least among the enthusiast crowd,

00:57:28   like the sort of people who go to a Google press event

00:57:32   to see the new phones,

00:57:33   The bigger size is clearly the more popular.

00:57:38   It's like, 'cause, and you know, it's a funny thing

00:57:42   because like you go to the Apple event

00:57:44   and almost everybody's carrying an iPhone around.

00:57:46   Like at the Google thing, most of the press

00:57:48   who I was there looking around with were carrying pixels,

00:57:51   you know, 'cause they're sort of Google,

00:57:52   you know, it's gonna draw Google-oriented

00:57:54   members of the media.

00:57:56   - Totally.

00:57:57   - But it really looked to me,

00:57:57   just doing a quick eyeball survey,

00:57:59   that almost all of them had the Pixel 2 Plus

00:58:02   or whatever, what do they call the big one, Plus?

00:58:04   XL, XL, yeah, Pixel 2 XL.

00:58:08   Whereas I like the smaller one better, for sure.

00:58:12   But it is weird, it does look a little dated,

00:58:14   because it has a forehead and a chin.

00:58:15   I mean, here I am knocking the notch on the other one, but.

00:58:18   - Yeah.

00:58:19   - And it seems, it's just one of those things

00:58:21   that Apple does better than anybody,

00:58:24   but, you know, and Google as sort of hardware

00:58:28   being not their forte.

00:58:30   The fact that even the one with the notch

00:58:33   still has the chin down below at the bottom,

00:58:35   it just is, it's not a premium look.

00:58:41   - Yeah, you wonder why they kept it,

00:58:46   whether they had to or they chose to.

00:58:50   - Yeah.

00:58:51   - I don't know.

00:58:52   - It does feel last year.

00:58:56   - I think they had to.

00:58:57   I think that it's technically super, super hard to go edge to edge.

00:59:03   Even though they're OLED, which makes it easier and not LCD, but everything I've heard from

00:59:10   people at Apple is that getting the iPhone X and XS to get as close to corner to corner

00:59:16   as they are is technically very hard.

00:59:19   and the XR, which we can get to, is even harder because it's an LCD screen, not an OLED. It

00:59:27   just looks weird. It just is sort of a weird look for the pixels, in my opinion. I also

00:59:33   thought that they were a lot lighter. I don't know what they weigh compared to a XS, but

00:59:38   I don't mind how much the XS weighs, but it is true. I mean, steel weighs more than aluminum,

00:59:43   So it is a heavier device.

00:59:46   I feel like the Pixels really compare better to the XR because they're more just off the

00:59:53   top of my head.

00:59:54   They're both glass on the front, glass on the back, aluminum on the sides, and then

00:59:58   a single camera on the back.

01:00:00   So it's sort of the XR is the one and the starting price is around the same, around

01:00:05   $750, $800.

01:00:06   It's like the XS is sort of a different class device than even the best Pixel.

01:00:11   It's true. We're entering a 10-R world. I need to recalibrate all my analysis now.

01:00:19   Yeah. I can't wait to find out more about it. Like the 10-R was sort of… it's like

01:00:26   they announced it and it was interesting. And you know, it was kind of rumored and here

01:00:29   it is. And it's this, you know, it's just so strange in so many ways because it's

01:00:34   like it's not the same size as the 10-S or the 10-S Max. It's in between. It's

01:00:40   size and it's in between which is a weird third size and it only has one camera but

01:00:45   it's the same great camera you know that the 10s has and it comes in a bunch of fun colors

01:00:53   which Apple hasn't done with an iPhone since all the way back at the 5c you know it's different

01:00:58   in so many ways and I kind of feel and I just feel like most people feel like 800 bucks

01:01:06   is already a ton of money to spend on a phone and so I just can't help but think that the

01:01:10   is going to be an incredible seller, you know,

01:01:14   'cause it has the look and it has the performance

01:01:17   of an iPhone 10 and, you know, saving 250 bucks

01:01:21   for a, you know, primarily missing out

01:01:24   on a 2X telephoto camera that I'm guessing

01:01:27   a lot of people never use.

01:01:29   It's, you know, seems like, it seems like a lot of people

01:01:31   are gonna go into the Apple store and be like,

01:01:33   why would I even think about buying the more expensive one?

01:01:35   - Yeah, that's gonna be really interesting

01:01:39   because once you divide it into the monthly payments,

01:01:43   it's not as drastic a dollar difference,

01:01:48   'cause now very few people

01:01:49   are actually buying the phone outright.

01:01:51   But even on a monthly basis, it's probably,

01:01:55   I don't know, what, 10, 20 bucks cheaper a month?

01:01:57   So maybe.

01:01:58   - And I just don't think typical people

01:02:02   are going to see the difference.

01:02:03   I mean, not like they wouldn't be able to tell them apart.

01:02:05   I mean, certainly the colors tell you that, you know.

01:02:08   But I really don't think that a typical person

01:02:11   would look at an iPhone XS and XR side by side

01:02:14   and think that the XS is that much better.

01:02:19   - Especially inside.

01:02:22   If you're outside, I would never wanna not have,

01:02:26   well, I don't know, I haven't tried the XR outside.

01:02:28   Maybe it's amazing.

01:02:29   But you can tell OLED outside in a way that

01:02:37   LCD just was not as good before.

01:02:40   - Yeah, and you know, I mean, you see it when you play games

01:02:43   and watch movies or something like that too,

01:02:45   where OLED has these richer blacks,

01:02:46   but I, to tell you the truth,

01:02:48   I don't really watch movies on my phone.

01:02:50   I mean, I either watch on TV or if I am on an airplane

01:02:53   or something, I want a bigger screen than the phone.

01:02:55   So, you know, I kind of miss out on that.

01:02:58   - Do you think this new, what is it, liquid retina?

01:03:01   Do you think that's what they're gonna call

01:03:03   the iPad Pro screen too?

01:03:04   - I wonder, that's a good question.

01:03:06   I guess I would guess so. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the exact same technology. I do have

01:03:14   another theory, by the way, because the other feature that's missing from the XR is 3D touch.

01:03:20   And it has been widely reported, you know, and this was one of those things that Ming

01:03:24   Qi Kuo had leaked a report back in February or something. So it's a long time ago it came

01:03:30   out that Apple's 6.1-inch mystery phone was going to lack 3D Touch. And it's all been reported as

01:03:38   like a cost-saving measure because this is the lower cost new iPhone. But it's not really a

01:03:43   lower cost new iPhone. It starts at $800 or $750. Like that's the normal price for a new flagship

01:03:50   iPhone. Like the XS and the iPhone X, it's created a new super tier above the normal price. And,

01:03:59   And when they first introduced, I just looked it up last night

01:04:03   for the show, actually.

01:04:04   But 3D Touch debuted with the iPhone 6S.

01:04:08   And that was a phone that started at $699.

01:04:12   That was the entry level price back then for the 6S.

01:04:15   And they all had 3D Touch.

01:04:16   So it's not cost, per se.

01:04:19   If a $699 phone four years ago could have 3D Touch,

01:04:24   then cost-wise, surely the $750 10R could have 3D touch.

01:04:29   I think it's a technical problem

01:04:31   that whatever shenanigans and technical wizardry

01:04:37   they had to pull to get an LCD screen

01:04:39   that comes as close to corner to corner as they did.

01:04:42   I mean, the whole reason that LCDs

01:04:43   have always had foreheads and chin

01:04:45   is for the backlighting stuff.

01:04:48   I think that whatever they had to do to get,

01:04:53   they sacrifice 3D Touch to get it to look like an iPhone X that goes corner to corner.

01:04:59   And I'm betting that it's an engineering problem, not a cost problem. And if it saves seven

01:05:03   bucks per phone, I'm sure that makes Tim Cook happy too. But it is weird for the product

01:05:09   experience though that they work in different ways for stuff like turning on the flashlight

01:05:13   and stuff like that.

01:05:14   Yeah, that was one of the things I just noticed on this Pixel 2 is not having... Because I

01:05:21   I basically only use it for cursor movement,

01:05:25   moving the cursor, but that alone to me

01:05:27   pays for the feature, so not having it--

01:05:31   - All right, this might blow your mind.

01:05:32   This might blow your mind.

01:05:33   Did you know, I think it's an iOS 12 feature.

01:05:36   I don't think it was there in iOS 11,

01:05:37   but Apple has added, and I think it was specifically

01:05:40   with iPads and the XR in mind.

01:05:44   You can now get that cursor move around feature

01:05:47   on a non-3D touch iOS device

01:05:49   by holding down on the space bar.

01:05:51   hold down on the space bar for a little bit

01:05:53   and then you get the same thing.

01:05:54   - Oh, okay.

01:05:56   - So you can buy a XR and you don't miss out on the--

01:06:01   - Oh yeah, look at that, wow.

01:06:04   - And for those of you listening

01:06:05   who don't know what I'm talking about,

01:06:06   'cause one time a couple episodes,

01:06:08   six months ago I mentioned this

01:06:10   and I got so much email from people saying,

01:06:11   "Oh, holy shit, that's the greatest tip ever."

01:06:14   I had no idea.

01:06:15   Is that on a modern iPhone with 3D touch

01:06:18   when you're typing,

01:06:19   this actually gets to the point we were talking about earlier with the trackpad support where

01:06:22   you can 3D touch anywhere on the keyboard and it turns the keyboard into a trackpad

01:06:27   where you can move the insertion point around whatever text it is you're editing. And if

01:06:32   you touch again while you're moving it, it'll select text. Once you know to do it, it is

01:06:40   a truly, I know it's a cliché, but it's a game-changing feature. You can do it now on

01:06:46   non-3D touch iOS devices by holding down on the spacebar for a fraction of a second, and

01:06:50   it's a fantastic feature.

01:06:51   Well, there you go.

01:06:55   We just paid for the…

01:06:57   Before we go on, here's the other feature I wanted to mention with the Pixel cameras,

01:07:02   and it seems very cool.

01:07:03   It's called motion autofocus.

01:07:05   So you compose your shot, and you tap and hold on the subject.

01:07:09   Let's say it's a dog or somebody at Google actually went to a concert the night before

01:07:14   and shot, it was a great little video, really cool,

01:07:19   but you can tap on the subject,

01:07:22   and then once you tap on it, if the subject moves around,

01:07:25   the focus stays on that person as they move around,

01:07:29   using artificial intelligence to identify what it is.

01:07:33   So for a moving subject, it's absolutely,

01:07:36   it seems absolutely amazing, and once you see it,

01:07:38   you think, oh my God, every camera should have this.

01:07:41   And again, like you said, where it's Google and Apple

01:07:44   were inventing these things and the camera companies seem to be just leaving, leaving,

01:07:50   leaving all this stuff on the table.

01:07:52   Yeah, this is exactly what I need on my Fuji. So right, cool. All right. Great. Fuji is

01:07:59   probably the closest in my opinion. I'm not really, I can't say I'm a camera expert, but

01:08:03   I think Fuji of the major camera companies is the company that seems to me to be most

01:08:07   taking seriously the world of computational photography. Maybe I'm biased because I have

01:08:13   Fuji X100s, which is now a couple years old. I'm sure the newest ones do even more, but

01:08:18   it just seems to me like Fuji is doing more, more, more confidently moving towards the world

01:08:27   of computational photography. And whereas like Canon and Nikon to me still seem to be treating

01:08:33   digital sensors as like, it's like a 35 millimeter strip of film.

01:08:41   I guess I'm looking in the wrong spots then. I need to do some more research on that because

01:08:47   I buy Fuji for the glass and for the look and feel of the camera and also the amazing image

01:08:57   quality. I have not noticed much of the computational photography, but I will have

01:09:01   to do some reading on it now. I think compared to Google and Apple, they're still light years behind.

01:09:08   And this motion focus tracking is just mind-blowing.

01:09:11   But once you see it, it's very cool.

01:09:14   You can do it.

01:09:15   You don't even have to be a person.

01:09:16   Like somebody at the hands-on area last week just did it, like showed their watch and then

01:09:22   it like moved their hand around the frame.

01:09:23   And as they move the hand around the frame, the little white square stays on the watch.

01:09:27   It's really cool.

01:09:28   I mean, and the best part of all this, it just seems intuitive.

01:09:30   Like this is how photography should work.

01:09:33   you know, ignoring all the technical constraints

01:09:36   of the actual process of using sensors

01:09:39   to take a digital image, like, you know,

01:09:42   even the simplest thing of being able to zoom

01:09:45   by pinching on the viewfinder screen on an iPhone,

01:09:48   like, yeah, duh, of course that's how

01:09:50   a photo feature should work, so.

01:09:53   - What else is Google doing?

01:09:54   They had a cool feature, I don't know how well this works,

01:09:56   I mean, 'cause they obviously knew,

01:09:57   they had like a pair of Nikes, and you point,

01:10:00   I think it's a different mode you put the camera in,

01:10:02   but you put it like in ID mode, show the Nike's

01:10:06   and then it immediately says,

01:10:07   oh, these are the Nike Air Max, whatever, whatever.

01:10:11   I have to, you know, I hope Panzareno doesn't listen to this

01:10:14   but you know, whatever model of Nike this is,

01:10:18   you know, it tells you exactly what model it is

01:10:20   and gives you options for where you could go buy them

01:10:22   right now and stuff like that.

01:10:24   How widely that works with, you know,

01:10:27   all brands of shoes and shirts and whatever else

01:10:30   you might identify, who knows?

01:10:31   but apparently it works great with like movie posters.

01:10:33   So you pointed at a movie poster

01:10:35   and tells you everything you wanna know about that movie.

01:10:38   It's a pretty cool feature.

01:10:39   All right, let me take another break here.

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01:13:43   - Kind of want to start bribing and or forcing all restaurants to just move over to Squarespace.

01:13:55   - When there is a bad website for a restaurant, I think the exact same thing.

01:14:00   - It's like half an hour out of my day just to find the menu or the reservation link or

01:14:05   whatever.

01:14:06   - Right.

01:14:07   - Flash still?

01:14:08   - Flash still?

01:14:10   - I feel like restaurants always had,

01:14:13   they were always flash.

01:14:15   I would say there was no industry in the world

01:14:17   that was more likely to have a flash player website

01:14:20   than restaurants.

01:14:21   I feel like they've gotten their act together

01:14:23   in recent years.

01:14:24   I feel, especially in new places,

01:14:25   at least here in Philly, it seems like a lot of new places

01:14:28   have pretty good websites.

01:14:29   - Well, it's 'cause if you view source,

01:14:31   they're pretty much all Squarespace now.

01:14:33   There are a couple other tools that exist,

01:14:35   but they're not as good.

01:14:36   So, and you know, and I also feel like website, websites,

01:14:41   it was like you could just do like a talk

01:14:43   at like a web design conference

01:14:44   about how bad websites for restaurants were.

01:14:47   People want the exact same thing.

01:14:49   For every time they go to a website for a restaurant,

01:14:52   they want like three things.

01:14:54   They wanna see the menu, they wanna know the hours,

01:14:58   and they wanna know how do you make a reservation?

01:15:00   You know, it's, and usually now it's open table,

01:15:04   but just put a big button there so they can tap it

01:15:06   and shoot them right over to OpenTable

01:15:07   to make the reservation.

01:15:08   But that's all people want,

01:15:10   and websites used to hide all of those things.

01:15:14   Like how could you have a restaurant

01:15:15   and not put the menu up?

01:15:16   That's what people want to know.

01:15:17   Is there something here to eat that looks good to me?

01:15:20   - Yeah.

01:15:22   It's nuts.

01:15:25   - All right, the Home Hub,

01:15:27   that's the last thing from Google that I didn't talk about.

01:15:29   It's like a little, you know,

01:15:31   they've got a whole bunch of these,

01:15:33   they're little speaker type things,

01:15:35   and this one has a screen.

01:15:36   I kind of-- - What do you think

01:15:39   of these things, these screen speakers?

01:15:41   Amazon has one, you know,

01:15:43   we don't need to get into detail about Facebooks, but--

01:15:46   - One of the things they mentioned very, very prominently

01:15:50   was that they deliberately did not put a camera

01:15:52   in this device.

01:15:53   And I thought that's pretty interesting coming from Google.

01:15:56   You could see Apple bragging about making a thing

01:16:00   without a camera for privacy's sake,

01:16:01   but I thought it was pretty interesting

01:16:04   that Google did. I don't know about these things with the screen. I guess I kind of

01:16:12   get it. I think that the Home Hub though is too small. That's my take because it's

01:16:20   sort of like this, I don't know what the diagonal measurement of the screen is, but

01:16:24   it's sort of like either a very, very small tablet, even smaller than an iPad mini or

01:16:30   like the world's biggest phone, like the biggest phablet ever made. But if you're

01:16:36   going to have it in your kitchen and it has a screen, I feel like people want to use that

01:16:40   as a TV at some point. They want to watch video. They own YouTube and they definitely

01:16:46   mentioned YouTube in terms of like, "Hey, you can talk to the thing and get it to show

01:16:51   YouTube videos." But I feel like it's too small of a screen in a kitchen to be that.

01:16:56   I feel like you want something more like the size

01:16:58   of a regular iPad as a minimum.

01:17:01   And then the other area where they showed it off

01:17:03   was like as a bedside table dingus.

01:17:08   And I don't feel like that makes any sense at all

01:17:10   because everybody charges their phone next to their bed

01:17:12   so they don't need a device that size.

01:17:14   And in fact, Google even came out

01:17:16   with their own little Qi charging pad stand

01:17:19   that stands your iPhone up

01:17:21   so it can serve as a bedside clock/picture viewer.

01:17:26   So I don't get the home hub.

01:17:29   I get the idea of having a screen on these talking devices,

01:17:32   but I feel like if you're gonna have a screen,

01:17:33   you want it to be at least like 10 inches,

01:17:36   at least for use in a kitchen.

01:17:38   I just feel like this one is too small.

01:17:40   - Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

01:17:42   I've watched many '90s Cubs games

01:17:45   on a four-inch tube TV in my kitchen,

01:17:48   but you don't have to do that anymore.

01:17:51   - I watch my iPad a lot.

01:17:54   When I do watch video, it's often in the kitchen,

01:17:57   'cause we only have one TV,

01:17:59   and so I'll often watch baseball games on the iPad,

01:18:03   and I just can't imagine doing it on a smaller screen

01:18:06   than a 9.7-inch iPad.

01:18:07   It's nice for me, and it's certainly, at 9.7 inches,

01:18:11   it isn't something that you would be,

01:18:15   it wouldn't be great for a communal viewing, right?

01:18:18   It's sort of personal.

01:18:19   It's like a nice size for you to watch one thing.

01:18:22   You wouldn't really wanna have a group of four people

01:18:24   staring at an iPad, but.

01:18:26   - Yeah, and it's ambient, especially these kitchen things.

01:18:29   I'm kind of interested in these.

01:18:31   I don't own any of them, but in the Facebook one

01:18:33   is its own kind of can of worms,

01:18:36   but which does have camera that will track you around

01:18:40   if you wanna do video conferencing on it.

01:18:43   I think the idea of having kind of a purpose-built device

01:18:48   that's just on in the kitchen,

01:18:50   you don't have to go find the iPad.

01:18:54   maybe don't have your phone with you.

01:18:57   I think it's interesting, especially for ambient TV,

01:19:00   like a sports game where you're gonna ignore 75% of it,

01:19:05   but then maybe lean over and watch the at-bat

01:19:08   or the field goal.

01:19:11   But for looking at recipes or playing music or whatever,

01:19:17   it's an interesting genre to me.

01:19:19   I haven't spent my own money on any of them.

01:19:21   I don't know if I will.

01:19:23   To me it's like, okay, I have an old iPad

01:19:26   that does a lot of that already.

01:19:28   But I can see why Amazon and Google and Facebook

01:19:32   are making them.

01:19:34   They don't have to be the thinnest thing imaginable.

01:19:38   They don't have to, in many cases,

01:19:40   they're plugged into the wall,

01:19:41   so they don't even have to have a good battery life.

01:19:44   So it's kind of interesting.

01:19:47   Kind of serves the purpose that the home PC

01:19:50   may have once had, like the living room,

01:19:53   computer where the family can each check their email or do things. You're not going to do

01:19:58   your homework on it.

01:19:59   Right. No, and the interface is interesting exactly along the lines you're talking where

01:20:04   instead of being, I don't even know what OS it's running. I don't know if it's running,

01:20:08   if it's Android under the hood. I guess I should have asked. That's a question I guess

01:20:11   I could have asked. I guess it might be Android, but it's not Android like, it's not like a

01:20:17   phone. You know, there's no home button and a screen full of apps and text that is meant

01:20:23   to be held 18 inches from your eyes. Everything on it is big. The text is big and it's, in a way,

01:20:32   even an iPad is still sort of, it can't do everything. You can't have an interface that

01:20:40   works both 18 inches in front of your face and five feet away. And so for things like

01:20:48   cooking instructions and stuff like that. The text is comically large compared to a

01:20:53   phone, but it actually seems exactly right for something that might be well over an arm's

01:20:58   reach away while you're making whatever it is you're making. I just feel like it

01:21:03   should be bigger, I think. I don't know, though.

01:21:07   I just don't know if this is the device that people all of a sudden decide they love

01:21:13   and need. But I probably would have said that about the first Echo devices too and the smart

01:21:19   speakers. And here we are and everyone has one now. So, and I use mine every day.

01:21:24   Yeah, I, you know, that's funny. I digression, I guess, but we have like smart shades.

01:21:35   Ooh, I need those.

01:21:38   Oh, they're great. They're from Lutron and they're super quiet. And for a long time,

01:21:44   we have buttons, little remotes that control them and they're okay. But it's really better when you

01:21:52   issue voice commands and you can raise all of them like on our main living floor all at once.

01:21:57   But we had it for a long time where we had the only integration that ours supported was Amazon.

01:22:05   So we had to do it through the echo. And you had to give these exact commands. So to open

01:22:14   the kitchen shades, it was, "Hey, dingus, turn on kitchen shades up." So the name of the scene

01:22:21   was "kitchen shades up." And to make it happen, you had to say, "Turn on." So grammatically,

01:22:27   that's a mess. Turn on kitchen shades up and then turn on kitchen shades down.

01:22:32   And there was also this weird rule,

01:22:34   and again, I'm not blaming Amazon.

01:22:36   It might have been Lutron whose fault it was,

01:22:39   and maybe with other things it would be better with Amazon.

01:22:44   But not only that, but in your scene names,

01:22:46   you couldn't use the words on and off.

01:22:50   (laughing)

01:22:52   And it's just, it was, and it's so much,

01:22:55   so we got like the base station for the Lutron thing.

01:22:59   It's just looks like a little like Wi-Fi router.

01:23:03   But we got that swapped out

01:23:06   with one that's HomeKit compatible.

01:23:08   And I like doing this stuff through Siri so much better.

01:23:12   And I know that all sorts of people think Siri's garbage

01:23:16   and Alexa is so much better, but you can,

01:23:19   in the Home app, you can like, it's so much easier to,

01:23:22   A, it's way easier to program and to adjust it.

01:23:26   And you can give it whatever name.

01:23:27   And it's like with the Amazon thing,

01:23:29   I could never, I honest to God couldn't figure it out.

01:23:31   It was like, it's like once we had it set up, that was it,

01:23:34   but I didn't know how to change it.

01:23:36   But it still is sort of confusing.

01:23:38   And Siri lets you speak to it so much more naturally.

01:23:41   You can just, you know, name it, name something,

01:23:44   kitchen shade, open the kitchen shades,

01:23:47   and just say, you know, hey, dingus,

01:23:49   open the kitchen shades.

01:23:51   And you can say all sorts of things like,

01:23:54   just, you know, open up the shades in the kitchen

01:23:56   and it'll do it.

01:23:58   It doesn't have to be the exact right command line style incantation.

01:24:02   It understands natural language.

01:24:05   But it was funny.

01:24:06   I was confused and thought it was broken because I programmed it so that both our living room

01:24:12   and our kitchen are on the same floor.

01:24:14   And I made a scene called "Open all shades and close all shades."

01:24:18   And then I would say, "Hey, Dingus, open all shades."

01:24:20   And sometimes it would work and open them all.

01:24:22   And then other times it would open every shade in the house, including our bedrooms.

01:24:27   And it was because I named it was like I gave it a bad scene name because sometimes Siri

01:24:31   would interpret it as this is the exact name of a scene you defined. I'll do it. And other

01:24:37   times it was like, I'll open every shade I know about because you said open all the shades.

01:24:43   Which is actually, it was almost like it was too clever. So I changed the name of the scene

01:24:46   to like main floor shade, open main floor shades and close main floor shades. And now

01:24:51   there's no more confusing. But I have to say that editing that stuff in the home app and

01:24:55   iOS is so much nicer to me, way nicer and way more sensible and very visual in terms

01:25:02   of, "Oh, I see. Here's the icons for all the shades that'll go up when I turn this

01:25:06   scene on." It's super, super visual and really nice, and I almost feel like Apple

01:25:12   doesn't get enough credit for how nice that is.

01:25:14   Tom Bilyeu: Yeah, especially now that—and I haven't actually spent much time in the

01:25:19   Siri, whatever the automator thing is called,

01:25:23   the workflows.

01:25:24   - Yeah, shortcuts.

01:25:26   - Shortcuts, yeah, but being able to stitch

01:25:28   all those things together really makes HomeKit compelling

01:25:32   if you already have all the devices.

01:25:34   - Yeah, it's a big if, but once you do,

01:25:36   it's really pretty sweet.

01:25:38   - Yeah, but even just like the Home app,

01:25:40   being able to toggle that stuff without saying anything too

01:25:44   can be useful.

01:25:46   - Yeah, totally, absolutely.

01:25:49   just open it up, hit a button, there it goes.

01:25:51   - Yeah, much like live photos,

01:25:54   I can imagine HomeKit being one of those things

01:25:57   that just becomes quietly more and more popular and useful

01:26:01   and the kind of thing that,

01:26:03   I only have one smart light bulb,

01:26:06   so that doesn't do anything,

01:26:07   but when we move, we'll probably have a bunch of stuff.

01:26:10   - Yeah, and I have to say, it was really pretty cool too,

01:26:15   because at some point when we first bought these shades,

01:26:18   we had to set up this Lutron app

01:26:20   and we got an account with Lutron.

01:26:22   But I haven't opened that Lutron app in over a year.

01:26:26   In fact, I'll bet that on my iPhone XS,

01:26:29   I'm not even logged in because I don't think

01:26:31   I've, I haven't opened it since I got a new phone.

01:26:33   But once you've got it configured,

01:26:35   when you open the iOS Home app,

01:26:38   it already knows about all these things

01:26:39   'cause the Lutron app uses the APIs to say,

01:26:42   okay, I'll report to HomeKit,

01:26:43   here's everything I know about.

01:26:44   And so you open the Apple Home app

01:26:47   and all of the stuff that it can control,

01:26:49   it's all just there.

01:26:50   You don't have to add devices to home

01:26:54   once you've configured them

01:26:55   in whatever the app is for the thing.

01:26:57   It's really, really pretty nice.

01:26:59   And I feel like exactly what you said,

01:27:01   that it's sort of, everybody was like,

01:27:04   ah, you know, and there was that whole thing

01:27:05   when HomeKit was first announced where,

01:27:07   because they had sort of a lot tighter review process

01:27:12   and security concerns,

01:27:15   that there were hundreds and hundreds of things

01:27:17   that you could control through the Amazon devices

01:27:22   and there were a lot fewer for HomeKit

01:27:24   because Apple had these more stringent things,

01:27:26   but I feel like quietly they've gotten a lot of these things

01:27:31   into the system.

01:27:31   I don't know, it's something that if anybody blew it off

01:27:36   years ago, it's worth another look

01:27:37   if you haven't looked at it recently

01:27:39   is what I'm trying to say.

01:27:40   What else do we got here?

01:27:44   We didn't talk about it. We were saving it. We were saving the Apple Watch Series 4.

01:27:48   Yeah. Why don't we...

01:27:50   Yeah, let's talk about it. It's like you said. We can fit it in with the new Palm phone that came out.

01:28:01   Which is basically an Apple Watch with no band on it, right?

01:28:05   Right. I linked to it on Daring Fireball. I guess I'll put it in the show notes. Dieter

01:28:09   Bone, of course, who's the the palm guy, the palm guy. Love it. It's a it's so weird that

01:28:18   somebody bought the name palm and put this on this because there's nothing palm like about it. It just

01:28:24   says palm but it's not web os. It's android. It's mostly stock android. It's a little phone that

01:28:31   Verizon is selling very heavily. Verizon, I guess, is a big part of it. I don't think it's even on

01:28:38   any other carriers. It even has a little Verizon thing on the glass on the front, sort of subtle

01:28:43   down at the bottom.

01:28:45   Which in itself is, like as Dieter points out, is kind of messed up because Verizon

01:28:50   arguably like sunk the Palm by not selling the Pre or whatever.

01:28:56   Right. When Palm was worth saving and really was making very interesting products that

01:29:05   just couldn't get traction for some reason, Verizon definitely helped sync them. And now

01:29:12   they're selling a device.

01:29:13   And now they're back with Steph Curry.

01:29:15   Yeah, so it has a 3.3 inch screen, which is actually smaller than even the original iPhone.

01:29:21   The original iPhone is 3.5. It's a tiny little phone. It obviously has smaller bezels than

01:29:26   an old iPhone 2, so it's not quite corner to corner, but it's pretty small. It's certainly

01:29:32   one of the smallest touch screen phones I've ever seen. And it looks adorable. But to me,

01:29:39   the thing that is just like, what are they thinking, is that it's designed as a secondary

01:29:44   phone. In the same way that with the cellular Apple Watch, you pay 10 bucks a month to Verizon

01:29:50   so that you can have this second phone that technically has its own SIM card and phone

01:29:56   but instead because it's paired with your main device, you're, you know, if you put your main

01:30:03   phone away and you go out with your little new palm phone and somebody calls your regular number,

01:30:07   the palm phone will ring and you'll talk to it on there and you'll get your text messages there,

01:30:12   etc. It's like an alias to your phone as opposed to a second phone. Right. But what it's like,

01:30:19   Like to me, having the cellular Apple watch is pretty cool in that regard.

01:30:25   And especially now with the new watchOS, and now that third-party apps like Overcast can

01:30:34   actually do podcasts from the watch, when I go jogging now, I don't have to put my phone

01:30:41   in a ridiculous fanny pack underneath my shirt.

01:30:45   I can literally just leave the house with just my watch and AirPods.

01:30:50   And it's such a great AirPod feature, the way that if the AirPods are paired with my

01:30:54   phone but I leave the house without them with my watch, they just automatically go to the

01:30:59   watch.

01:31:00   And it's like, "Okay, I'll just play the audio from the watch."

01:31:02   And you don't have to fiddle around with anything.

01:31:04   It just works.

01:31:05   And I go to Overcast, play a podcast, and I'm listening to it.

01:31:09   It's fantastic.

01:31:10   And I know that if somebody calls me, I'll get the phone call.

01:31:13   It's really a great feature, but I can't see I can't like having it on a watch having your watch be a secondary phone

01:31:20   It seems like a great feature and I really do like it. It's definitely worth ten bucks a month to me

01:31:25   Having a second phone not so much like it just doesn't make any sense to me. I

01:31:32   Wish that they had just made a phone at this really tiny adorable size and made it good enough that it could be your main

01:31:41   phone, that it has a great camera. That to me would be more of a statement in terms of,

01:31:48   "Hey, how about we focus less on these 5.5-inch screens that absorb so much of our attention

01:31:54   every day? How about you take a tiny little 3.3-inch phone and spend less time on it?"

01:31:59   That would be more interesting to me. This idea of a secondary phone, it goes back to

01:32:04   at Dave Morin from what was it? Path with his day phone and night phone. Anyway.

01:32:13   Yeah. No, I, I have, I mean, I have no interest in this at all. I, I've found there's another

01:32:20   company that it's called punked or punked that makes like, you know, uh, Android powered,

01:32:26   essentially like candy bar phones, like all these things that, that are trying to, to like force you

01:32:33   off of your phone, either for convenience

01:32:36   or for time well spent, quote unquote.

01:32:40   The idea that people are gonna spend another $350 for that

01:32:44   just doesn't make any sense to me.

01:32:45   Like it does not seem like, I don't know.

01:32:49   The watch, I guess that's how much my problem,

01:32:52   I think my new watch actually costs like $500,

01:32:54   so here I am, a huge hypocrite.

01:32:57   But that, again, to me, has different utility.

01:33:03   Like it's a purpose-built device as opposed to having just a second smaller phone that doesn't have I

01:33:09   Guess if you're on Android, maybe it's like if you're on an iPhone

01:33:13   I don't know how you what just switch over to Android at nighttime or something

01:33:17   I guess it's clearly meant for people who have an Android phone. It's not yeah, it doesn't it won't do I message either

01:33:23   So, oh, yeah true, right? Yeah, that's why I was scared to put my SIM card into this pixel 3

01:33:29   I don't want to mess up my iMessage.

01:33:32   - Oh, I forget how that works now.

01:33:33   That's why I bought a second SIM card years ago.

01:33:37   - I'm gonna get a second SIM card for that.

01:33:39   - Yeah, I got it at T-Mobile and it's great.

01:33:41   I forget what I pay per month,

01:33:42   but it really is like no nonsense.

01:33:45   It's like 40 bucks a month or something like that.

01:33:47   And the bill really is like 40 bucks a month.

01:33:50   It's not like--

01:33:51   - I kinda wanna try the Project Fi.

01:33:52   - Oh, that's another Google too.

01:33:53   - Google's thing.

01:33:54   - Yeah, especially if you're gonna be popping it

01:33:56   into Android phones.

01:33:57   It's probably a good thing to try.

01:33:58   - I don't know how easy that is to start and stop.

01:34:02   - Yeah.

01:34:03   - I don't really wanna keep paying for it.

01:34:05   - Yeah, the T-Mobile one is great 'cause it's prepaid

01:34:08   and you can sign up to automatically renew every month,

01:34:12   but if I ever do wanna cancel,

01:34:14   I would just go to their website, say I wanna cancel,

01:34:19   and then at the end of the month,

01:34:21   my SIM card will just stop working.

01:34:23   So there's no contract, no funny business.

01:34:26   It's really a great way,

01:34:27   If you're gonna get a, it just seems so much easier

01:34:30   than getting a sim, like a secondary quote unquote sim card

01:34:33   from like the AT&T or Verizon.

01:34:36   - Yeah, totally.

01:34:37   Yeah, anyway, so the watch, yeah, so the Palm,

01:34:43   I don't really have much to say about the Palm

01:34:46   other than that, as someone who loved, loved, loved Palm

01:34:50   for I don't know what, 15 years,

01:34:52   like sad to see this era, but this too will pass.

01:34:57   pass, I guess? I don't know.

01:34:58   Yeah, it's such a, it's the saddest story in the entire,

01:35:03   I'm gonna, to me, the iPhone marks the beginning of like a new era of personal computing. And it's

01:35:10   very, it just seems so clear in hindsight that there's pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.

01:35:14   And that is just, it's every bit as big a deal as like the Mac was for computing. And in the

01:35:22   In the post-iPhone world, to me, the greatest tragedy is that Palm didn't make it because

01:35:27   they were doing such interesting stuff with their user interface.

01:35:29   I mean, Dieter never misses an opportunity to point out how many of the things, the new

01:35:36   features of the iPhone X with the swipe up from bottom to go to a card view of running

01:35:42   apps and all sorts of things that Palm's webOS was doing in 2008, 2009.

01:35:49   It was.

01:35:50   They deserve so many kudos.

01:35:51   And it was a super attractive OS.

01:35:54   It looked great.

01:35:55   It was really, really well done.

01:35:56   And I know there were a bunch of ex-Apple people at Palm.

01:36:00   And I always said, like the Palm Pre,

01:36:05   you could easily have gone back,

01:36:07   if you took like a 2008 Palm Pre

01:36:10   and went back 10 years to like 1997 in time

01:36:14   and showed it to people and said,

01:36:16   this is, you know, covered up the logos

01:36:17   and said, this is Apple's cell phone from 10 years ago.

01:36:20   everybody would say, oh yeah, definitely,

01:36:21   oh my God, that's amazing, I can't wait to get it.

01:36:23   And you could totally sell it as the Apple phone

01:36:26   from 10 years in the future.

01:36:28   'Cause just in terms of the system design

01:36:30   and what it looked like, it just was so copacetic.

01:36:34   - Curve corners. - Yep, curve corners.

01:36:36   It just, you know, if you like Apple stuff,

01:36:40   it was hard not to like the Palm stuff.

01:36:42   And if anything, it was almost more of a classic

01:36:46   pre-Steve Jobs Apple look and feel

01:36:49   than the post Steve Jobs look and feel.

01:36:52   There was, you know, it was almost more like

01:36:54   the classic Apple, which I loved,

01:36:57   and in many ways, you know, I was just looking.

01:37:01   Somebody actually reported a typo on Daring,

01:37:04   over the weekend, somebody reported a typo

01:37:06   from October 11th, 2002 on Daring Fireball.

01:37:10   - Excellent.

01:37:11   (laughing)

01:37:12   - So I said-- - What was it about?

01:37:13   - It was just, I missed the word A.

01:37:14   It was just like this, I don't, it was like this,

01:37:18   this should have said like, "This is a big deal," and it just said, "This is big

01:37:22   deal," or something like that. So I fixed it and said to them, "You've just broken

01:37:27   the record for oldest typo ever," because I only started the site in August 2002, so

01:37:32   it was like 10 weeks into Daring Fireball, and I just fixed it now. But I remember, and

01:37:41   then it sucked me into reading old 2002 Daring Fireball articles. And a big theme back then

01:37:47   all the various ways that Mac OS X was crummy compared to Mac OS 9. And to me, the Palm

01:37:53   Pre sort of had that Mac OS 9 niceness in terms of no weird, fiddly things. I don't

01:38:05   know. It's a sad story.

01:38:07   I think 8.5 for me was the one closest to my heart.

01:38:12   Yeah, probably for me too.

01:38:14   - Could have just been the point of my life

01:38:16   that I was at, I don't know.

01:38:17   - I don't know, I also have a soft spot for system 7.5.

01:38:22   I thought 7.5 was a really sweet one.

01:38:25   Although it was the current version for so long

01:38:29   that maybe it was like Stockholm syndrome.

01:38:34   7.5 was like-- - That's true.

01:38:36   - 7.5 was the classic Mac OS that was like

01:38:41   at the time when Apple was flailing with these,

01:38:45   eventually all these efforts for quote unquote

01:38:47   next generation OSs that never really even came close

01:38:51   to seeing the light of day.

01:38:52   And so therefore it just sort of sat around

01:38:55   as the current version of Mac OS for a long time.

01:38:58   But that's neither here nor there.

01:39:01   Apple Watch Series 4.

01:39:06   - Well, so to me the most interesting thing I've seen,

01:39:09   - Well, and you posted the good links

01:39:11   to the 9to5Mac story on making the Infograph face

01:39:16   more useful, and I've got a couple of those utility apps

01:39:20   that I had never heard of before, which is kinda cool.

01:39:23   But to me, the most exciting thing is just this idea

01:39:27   of the UI playground that is the Apple Watch face

01:39:30   now that there's enough space to poke around

01:39:35   and Steve, was it Steve Trout and Smith?

01:39:40   Is that how you say his name?

01:39:42   - Yeah, so I'll put a link to this in the show notes.

01:39:44   I think I've got it here already, yeah.

01:39:45   But Steve Trout and Smith, who is hacker extraordinaire,

01:39:49   he's one of the, you know his name,

01:39:51   he's one of the guys who sometimes finds things

01:39:55   in beta OS releases of iOS that reveal

01:39:58   upcoming hardware products and stuff like that.

01:40:00   He's also a very, very talented programmer.

01:40:03   But he's been on a kick since, if anybody is,

01:40:05   by the time you listen to this,

01:40:07   he'll be maybe closer to a week.

01:40:08   But for the last maybe half a week or so,

01:40:12   he's been, a recurring theme with Apple Watch

01:40:15   is how come they don't allow third-party watch faces?

01:40:19   There's apps, and then your app can provide complications

01:40:23   that fit in these predefined, okay,

01:40:26   there's a corner complication, monochrome,

01:40:31   for the certain watch face,

01:40:32   and then there's a corner complication on the utility face

01:40:35   that is color and you provide,

01:40:38   you get to use these APIs to make a complication

01:40:41   for your app that provides data that fits

01:40:44   in these little complication areas

01:40:46   that are predefined by Apple,

01:40:48   but you don't get, nobody's allowed,

01:40:50   nobody but Apple is allowed to make watch faces.

01:40:53   And that's been a source of controversy or debate

01:40:56   ever since the Apple Watch shipped is,

01:40:58   what is Apple thinking in this regard?

01:41:01   Is it something they haven't gotten around to yet?

01:41:02   Is it something they're on the fence over or are they like, "Hell no, we're never going

01:41:05   to let people make watch faces."

01:41:09   And if so, why not?

01:41:10   But so rather than just talk about it, Stephen Troughton Smith just started making them.

01:41:16   And it's not even like a hack.

01:41:17   It's not really a watch face.

01:41:18   What he's done is he's making apps and then he turned on the setting in the Apple Watch.

01:41:23   I think you have, I don't know if you can do it on a watch itself or if you have to

01:41:26   use the phone app.

01:41:27   But there's a setting for last used app.

01:41:32   And it's like, I think by default, it'll, you know, like when you raise your wrist,

01:41:36   does it show you your watch face?

01:41:37   Or does it show you the last app you were using?

01:41:39   And I think by default, it's like after two minutes, it goes back to your watch face.

01:41:44   So like if you're using, you know, a weather app or something like that on your wrist,

01:41:49   and you tap around, you don't have to like quit it or go back to home, you can just lower

01:41:53   your wrist and go about your day.

01:41:55   five minutes later when you go to check the time it just goes back to your watch face.

01:41:59   But what he's done is set it so that it always goes back to your last running app. And he's

01:42:05   made these apps that look like watch faces. And so every time he raises his wrist, it

01:42:10   just shows his custom app that shows a watch face. And he's literally, you're going to

01:42:18   think I'm making this up, but he's made like a system where he can generate, he's got like

01:42:24   a bunch of options for color schemes and dial schemes. He's generated like 65,000 of these

01:42:32   things algorithmically by randomizing the colors and the options. Most of them look

01:42:39   really cool.

01:42:40   It is amazing. It is super cool.

01:42:42   I'll put a link in. If you haven't looked at these things, it is really, really cool.

01:42:47   One of the options he has is something that emulates the very clever—I've never seen

01:42:53   anything like it just because it could only happen on a digital face. But the Hermes watch faces for

01:42:58   Series 4 have an option where half the screen is one color and the other half is the other color,

01:43:06   and the dividing line between them is based on the minute hand of the watch. So as time changes,

01:43:13   the color scheme slowly changes over the course of 60 minutes. So he's replicated that and has

01:43:20   literally like, I think that's how this started. Yeah. He was just trying to clone that maybe. I

01:43:24   don't know. Yeah, but it's, it's, it's really awesome. I love it. Yeah. And the other thing

01:43:30   he's doing, and they do look plausible because the one thing about Apple watch faces branding wise,

01:43:37   and we're talking about analog style ones, ones with an hour hand and a minute hand.

01:43:41   The one thing all Apple watch faces to date share in common is they use the exact same style of

01:43:48   of hands, which I've actually asked around.

01:43:52   When I was on the Houdini podcast a couple of weeks ago

01:43:55   talking about Apple Watch, and I actually asked,

01:43:57   'cause those guys know more about watches than anybody,

01:44:00   I asked if there was a name for this style of hand.

01:44:02   Like there's all sorts of watch lingo

01:44:04   for like different style of hands.

01:44:05   Like there's some that are called like fence post hands

01:44:09   because they're like straight

01:44:10   and then they have like a triangle at the end.

01:44:12   Think about like a traditional Americana fence,

01:44:15   you know, a picket fence.

01:44:17   There's sword hands, like certain kind of hands

01:44:20   that look sort of like a sword.

01:44:22   But this style of hands doesn't really have a name.

01:44:25   It's used, a couple of high-end watchmakers

01:44:28   use hands like this, but everybody knows the look.

01:44:30   It's sort of like a capsule with a little skinny thing

01:44:33   at the end to connect it to the center,

01:44:35   like an oval, these oval-shaped hands.

01:44:38   He's, Stephen Troughton Smith's faces

01:44:39   use Apple Watch's hands.

01:44:41   Like he's somehow, genius that he is, fished out.

01:44:44   He figured out where on the Apple Watch OS

01:44:46   the hands are stored, and so he's not replicating

01:44:49   their hands, he's using Apple's hands.

01:44:50   - I didn't realize that, that's awesome.

01:44:52   - Yeah, it's really cool.

01:44:53   And then I actually play this very small role in this,

01:44:57   I actually, 'cause I know him and I pinged him

01:45:00   over the weekend, is his first ones,

01:45:04   the proportions were slightly off,

01:45:06   like his second hand stuck out over the,

01:45:10   you know like on the, if you have a round watch,

01:45:12   and Apple Watch, and there's little tick marks

01:45:15   to mark the seconds, a bunch of the faces have them.

01:45:17   The second hand should be exactly the radius

01:45:21   of those tick marks so that the tip of the second hand

01:45:24   exactly touches the tick marks as it goes around.

01:45:28   His hands were a little bit too small

01:45:30   and I helped him with a little bit

01:45:32   of proportion sizing on that.

01:45:34   It's just the sort of thing you don't really notice

01:45:35   but then once he fixed it, he was like,

01:45:37   "Holy crap, that looks so much better."

01:45:38   It's exactly right.

01:45:39   But these are amazing.

01:45:42   - So the bigger question then is,

01:45:44   Is this the kind of thing that Apple ever opens up

01:45:48   or is that on purpose?

01:45:50   - Yeah, I don't think they will.

01:45:52   I think that they don't

01:45:53   and I think it is definitely on purpose

01:45:55   for a couple of reasons.

01:45:57   And it's not gonna make Apple Watch users happy

01:46:00   to hear me say that, but I don't think it'll ever happen.

01:46:03   What do you think?

01:46:04   I can give you what I think the reasons are.

01:46:06   - Yeah, what do you think they are?

01:46:07   - I think one, they don't want people

01:46:11   to make ugly watch faces.

01:46:12   And if they opened it up,

01:46:14   there's pros and cons to opening it up

01:46:18   because some of them would obviously be beautiful.

01:46:20   I mean, we can see from Stephen Troughton Smith's work

01:46:23   that some of them are really beautiful.

01:46:25   And it would be so much more,

01:46:27   so much greater variety in choices,

01:46:30   but a lot of them, most of them would be ugly.

01:46:33   And I don't think they want to allow that.

01:46:35   I actually, I kind of know that the one watch face

01:46:40   that is on Apple Watch that they are deeply ambivalent about

01:46:43   is the photo's face, the one that lets you pick a photo

01:46:45   of your own to put on a watch.

01:46:47   And the reason they're sort of like,

01:46:49   is that a lot of people's pictures

01:46:52   they put up on their watch are ugly, and they don't like it.

01:46:55   But they kind of knew, like, that's just the one thing

01:46:57   that the story I heard is that knowing how people

01:47:00   set their wallpapers on their phone and stuff like that,

01:47:02   and how many people wanna have a picture of their kids,

01:47:04   or their spouse, or their dog,

01:47:07   and that's what they've done.

01:47:09   It's the wallpaper on their computer.

01:47:11   It's the wallpaper on their phone.

01:47:12   It's just what people do.

01:47:14   And so they go, "Oh, we gotta do it.

01:47:17   "We gotta let people put a picture of their kids

01:47:18   "on their watch if that's really what they wanna do."

01:47:20   But that's the one face that can be ugly.

01:47:22   Otherwise, and as many gripes as we've all had,

01:47:26   Marco Arment had a great story this week

01:47:28   talking about why all of, effectively,

01:47:31   he started talking about Infograph.

01:47:34   Like you said, with the "9to5" article,

01:47:36   it was sort of like,

01:47:36   "Hey, Infograph is overwhelming by default,

01:47:38   but if you turn everything off and then just slowly start adding stuff back, you can kind of keep it sane.

01:47:43   But ultimately... I'm very happy with how I have mine set up right now.

01:47:47   Marco makes a very convincing argument that all of the analog faces for Apple Watch are dissatisfying in some way.

01:47:53   Yeah. And, you know, you could solve that if you could open it up to third parties.

01:47:59   But I don't think Apple wants to do that because they don't want to allow ugly watch faces.

01:48:03   And I think the second reason is...

01:48:08   It's probably even gonna be even less popular among people who are hoping to see custom watch faces on Apple watch is I

01:48:14   Think marketing wise it's a huge they see it as a huge advantage that Nike and Hermes watches have watch faces that other

01:48:22   watches don't have

01:48:24   And that is true

01:48:25   You know and some people said oh, it'll be a copyright nightmare because somebody's gonna make a knockoff Rolex watch face

01:48:31   And then Rolex will sue Apple and stuff like that

01:48:33   Like I don't think copyright's the issue because it's like people could make a fake Rolex

01:48:38   Watch face for the phone. I mean you could do anything on the phone, you know, I mean, I I don't

01:48:43   I don't think the watch is special in that regard

01:48:45   But I just but I do think though that like the they don't want people like Steven Troughton Smith making these watches that give you

01:48:53   the Hermes look and feel

01:48:55   without

01:48:56   Spending the money on an Hermes watch

01:48:58   Yeah

01:49:00   It's interesting like that the copyright stuff

01:49:04   Yeah, every once in a while you see something in the App Store

01:49:07   That's a clear copyright violation, but it seems to police itself pretty well like the App Store is not

01:49:13   Terrible in terms of well, I don't know. I'm in the high side if you look for it. Sure

01:49:21   You'll find stuff wherever but yeah, it's not you know, the way that things work is the

01:49:27   What rises up?

01:49:30   If you search I'm sure you can find Disney knockoffs or whatever, but it's not like it

01:49:36   Those things can't become very popular before they get taken down. So yeah

01:49:40   Yeah

01:49:42   The Mickey Mouse face is another good example of that where there's obviously some kind of financial arrangement between

01:49:47   Apple and Disney for the Mickey Mouse and the Pixar one and they're you know, they I think I think they enjoy I

01:49:54   Don't know who's paying. I don't even know who's paying whom they're

01:49:57   Like, who is paying? Is Apple paying Disney or is Disney paying Apple? I honestly—

01:50:05   That's an excellent question.

01:50:06   I don't know, but I feel like they don't want Universal making one for the minions without

01:50:14   Apple's involvement. Just, you know, here you go, here's your minion's watch face. You know,

01:50:18   they like having that control. So I don't think it's going to happen.

01:50:22   - To me the argument would be out of functionality's sake,

01:50:26   now that this watch face is basically becoming

01:50:30   the equivalent of the panic activity monitor screen

01:50:34   or whatever that, you know.

01:50:36   - Status board.

01:50:38   - Status board, yeah.

01:50:39   I guess the info graph and the digital info graph

01:50:44   provide enough of a canvas that you're more limited

01:50:48   by what Apple allows you to do functionally

01:50:50   than by how it looks necessarily or how it's laid out.

01:50:54   But I could see a world of different possibilities

01:50:59   of different configurations and features

01:51:04   that a built-in watch face would never really support

01:51:08   out of the box that could be potentially useful

01:51:10   or interesting.

01:51:11   But it's been interesting to see over the years

01:51:16   what they allow you to customize and what they don't.

01:51:19   Like on the iPhone, first you couldn't even set

01:51:22   the background, now you can.

01:51:24   So you can make your phone as ugly as you want it to.

01:51:26   But you still can't custom configure icons.

01:51:31   Apple is still the only, I mean, sort of,

01:51:34   like Major League Baseball Apple let you change

01:51:36   the icon to your favorite team.

01:51:40   But I believe Apple is still the only calendar app

01:51:43   that has the correct date in their icon.

01:51:46   - Right, and the way that their clock app

01:51:49   has an actual moving second hand.

01:51:51   - Yeah, and is that just a battery and CPU consideration,

01:51:56   or do they just not want to see,

01:51:58   the way that Twitter stopped letting you use an animation

01:52:02   as your avatar, do they just not want to imagine a world

01:52:06   where every app icon is moving all the time?

01:52:09   - Right.

01:52:10   - So I could see them being, I could see a case where,

01:52:13   obviously they haven't gotten to it yet.

01:52:15   There seems to be not much,

01:52:18   they definitely seem to be aware

01:52:20   how useful the watch face is.

01:52:22   Like it is clearly the most useful screen.

01:52:25   So they're onto that.

01:52:28   As to whether or not they let you as a developer

01:52:33   decide how the things are laid out

01:52:37   or the size or the functionality of them,

01:52:41   you're right, it probably seems,

01:52:43   That seems like two or three steps beyond where we're going.

01:52:47   - And again, I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer here on this.

01:52:51   I just don't think they want to do it.

01:52:53   And if I, like as an outsider,

01:52:56   somebody who just is a customer and has an Apple Watch,

01:53:00   I kind of wish they would allow it because I would,

01:53:04   I am vaguely dissatisfied with every single Apple Watch face

01:53:08   and I feel like if third-party developers

01:53:12   could make their own, I could get one that I think is perfect. And so, me as a user kind

01:53:18   of wishes they would open it. But if I worked at Apple and it was my decision to make whether

01:53:23   Apple Watch would open to third parties, I'd probably say no because I would selfishly—I

01:53:29   would enjoy the fact that we have complete control over the watch faces. And I do think

01:53:34   that it's because Apple sort of sees itself as a "real watchmaker," you know, that

01:53:41   treat the watch a little differently than they treat other devices and they're a little

01:53:45   bit more protective of what it looks like. Every single watch face that they provide

01:53:53   is like they think that this is copacetic with the Apple Watch brand. And if they opened

01:53:59   it up to all third parties, they'd lose that. So maybe the best case scenario—and

01:54:04   I know Stephen Trouton Smith even said this on Twitter at some point over this thread—is

01:54:08   is that what he hopes would be like a middle ground,

01:54:11   where instead of like the app store,

01:54:13   where there's 10,000, 10, 20,000 developers

01:54:16   and they're all submitting watch faces,

01:54:17   if Apple just picked a hand-selected limited third parties

01:54:22   to be able to bless them with the ability

01:54:24   to provide third-party faces,

01:54:27   that that's an interesting middle ground.

01:54:29   And Steven said that he'd be happy with that

01:54:31   because if that was even possible technically,

01:54:34   he could hack it and make his own.

01:54:38   Like all he needs is for them to allow it at all,

01:54:42   and then he could just make his own watch faces

01:54:44   and it'd be fine for him.

01:54:46   - That's funny.

01:54:46   - Which cracked me up, really.

01:54:49   So I could see them doing that, but I don't know.

01:54:53   - You know, I also thought there would be more

01:54:55   partners in the way that Nike and Hermes

01:55:00   are partners by now.

01:55:01   - Yeah, I did too.

01:55:02   - I'm actually a little surprised

01:55:03   how few official band partnerships there are

01:55:06   and that kind of stuff.

01:55:07   So I don't know, maybe they're keeping it tighter than before, but I also would not be shocked

01:55:11   if next year, watchOS, what was it, five, six?

01:55:15   Six will be next year.

01:55:16   Has face kit or something like that.

01:55:18   And even if it's limited in certain ways, like for example, I would be shocked if they

01:55:23   didn't, if you make an analog face, I'm nearly certain they would force you to use their

01:55:28   hands.

01:55:29   Like their hands are the brand.

01:55:31   Way more than, you know, typically typography is how you establish a brand.

01:55:36   But like the Nike watch faces use Nike's font,

01:55:40   Futura Condensed Bold, and they look very, very Nike,

01:55:44   but they use Apple's hands.

01:55:46   And it's just very, very interesting to me.

01:55:49   And I even talked to someone that Apple,

01:55:52   on the watch team who even talked about it,

01:55:53   that they were super, they love their Mez partnership

01:55:57   and the Nike partnership.

01:55:58   And they're even inside the Apple Watch design team,

01:56:01   they're just blown away by how,

01:56:03   and so happy with the way that these,

01:56:06   like the Nike faces can look both Nike and Apple watchy

01:56:10   at the same time and that their Mez faces look so or Mezi,

01:56:13   with their distinctive weird,

01:56:16   but very distinctive typefaces

01:56:19   that they use for the numerals.

01:56:21   And yet because of those hands,

01:56:22   it still looks very Apple watchy.

01:56:24   - Yeah. - So I don't know.

01:56:29   I wouldn't hold my breath on this,

01:56:30   but it is this exercise that people are doing,

01:56:34   making these apps that just act like watch faces

01:56:36   is fascinating to watch.

01:56:37   And it's just funny the way it just burst onto the scene.

01:56:40   And now if you look on Twitter

01:56:41   and look at like Stephen Trout Smith replies,

01:56:43   David_Smith is making some too.

01:56:45   Did you see the one he made?

01:56:47   It was really, it made me laugh.

01:56:49   Well, A, he made one that uses Roman numerals,

01:56:52   like tells it, like a digital watch

01:56:54   that uses Roman numerals.

01:56:55   It just seemed like it was mentioned.

01:56:57   - Just for you. - Just for me.

01:56:58   I tweeted at him, I said, "You should be arrested."

01:57:01   But he also made one that looks like the classic,

01:57:05   going, just talking about classic Mac OS,

01:57:07   that looks like the classic Mac OS stopwatch cursor.

01:57:10   - Ooh.

01:57:11   - It's just this super fat 32 by 32 pixel grid

01:57:14   of black pixels on it.

01:57:15   - Oh, nice.

01:57:17   Ooh, I like that.

01:57:18   - Super cool. - Yep, I like that.

01:57:21   And so, I mean, hey, look,

01:57:23   this is one of those situations where like, you know,

01:57:26   the community could inspire Apple to change their approach.

01:57:31   If they see the UI, I hate to steal your term

01:57:36   for I don't know what, Twitter apps,

01:57:37   the UI playground right now is in watch faces.

01:57:41   So maybe they'll see them and go crap,

01:57:45   I guess we gotta figure something out.

01:57:47   - Ken Cascenda, who adds that the book

01:57:49   that just came out recently, the Creative Selection,

01:57:53   which is a great book.

01:57:55   But he even tweeted, more or less in favor

01:57:57   of allowing third-party watch faces,

01:57:59   which is that the story isn't that much different

01:58:02   than it is with apps with the phone.

01:58:04   You get your brand new Apple iPhone and you open it up,

01:58:07   and every single app is there, is from Apple,

01:58:11   and it all meets Apple standards

01:58:12   for how apps should look on an iPhone, and that's it.

01:58:16   And then if you wanna go get third-party apps

01:58:19   and you think that there's ugly apps,

01:58:21   but you wanna use them, that's up to you.

01:58:23   of, you know, and it'd be the same way with the watch face. We're here. We give you, you know,

01:58:27   15 or 16 of these watch faces and they have a bunch of configurations and they're all approved

01:58:32   by us. But if you want to go outside that box and start downloading third-party ones, that's up to

01:58:37   you. We'll ship you a watch that meets, that we're happy with every, every single watch face, but

01:58:42   we'll, you know, why not let people do it? And in the meantime, there is the complications themselves

01:58:50   are—it's tricky. It's not really—this discoverability is pretty bad, actually, of

01:58:57   good complications, which is why that 9to5Mac article was so useful. And really, there could

01:59:02   be a whole micro website of just cool iPhone or Apple Watch complications, but it's a

01:59:10   start.

01:59:11   Yeah. What watch face are you using?

01:59:15   I have infograph right now. I'm going to admit to something embarrassing. I still have a

01:59:21   hard time figuring out what time it is with just the hands. That's actually very common

01:59:27   though that's actually not unusual. I'm I get that because I remember as a kid, my grandparents

01:59:35   had a clock in their kitchen that didn't have numbers and I was like, mind blown. How does

01:59:40   anybody know what time it is? I was very proud of myself that I was able to tell time. I

01:59:46   feel like I could tell time on a clock at a fairly early age and it seemed like an accomplishment.

01:59:54   And then I'd go to my grandparents' house and I'd be like, "I have no idea what

01:59:57   time it is. I have none at all." Without the numbers, I had no idea.

02:00:01   Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 10s): In school, we had the round clock, but it

02:00:05   had the numbers on it. And a lot of these faces just don't have it. But a lot of these

02:00:10   just don't have it.

02:00:10   By the way, I just noticed that the iPhone SIM tool

02:00:13   looks exactly like the watch.

02:00:15   - Oh, it does.

02:00:16   - Hand, interesting, all right, good to know.

02:00:18   - That is awesome.

02:00:19   - So I'm using Infograph, is that what it's called?

02:00:23   - Yeah.

02:00:24   - And I have the middle,

02:00:27   I still have the little calendar thing in the middle.

02:00:29   I turned off the white background,

02:00:30   I don't know why that's the default, that's terrible.

02:00:32   - It is terrible, that is baffling to me.

02:00:35   And it's so funny that it's the default,

02:00:36   but Apple's, all of their product marketing shots

02:00:39   and show it with the black.

02:00:40   - Yeah, I don't get it.

02:00:42   - I don't get that either.

02:00:44   I almost feel like there must have been an argument

02:00:47   inside the company and somebody won the argument

02:00:50   and got the white one as the front face

02:00:52   and the product marketing people were like,

02:00:54   well, we lost that argument,

02:00:56   but we're still not putting it on the box

02:00:58   and we're not putting it on the billboards

02:00:59   and we're not showing it in the commercials.

02:01:01   (laughing)

02:01:03   - Imagine the meeting.

02:01:04   - Yeah.

02:01:05   - Yeah.

02:01:06   - So I have most of the stuff turned off, however,

02:01:10   so I can, and there is an option to make the center

02:01:13   a digital time, but the curse, it's with the second,

02:01:18   it's not just the minute, it's the seconds,

02:01:21   and the colons blink, and I'm not into that.

02:01:25   (laughing)

02:01:26   It was too flashy, too blinky, it made me feel like

02:01:30   there was a blink tag on a website.

02:01:31   - I appreciate, though, that you're,

02:01:34   'cause it's true that once you start fiddling with it,

02:01:36   Just the littlest thing like a blinking colon

02:01:38   will drive you nuts on a watch.

02:01:39   - I would actually pay five bucks for a watch app

02:01:43   that has a complication that has a non-blinking

02:01:46   or configurable digital clock.

02:01:48   In the meantime, I'm using the world clock

02:01:53   in the lower right corner with New York City.

02:01:56   And so I can see what,

02:01:58   the other thing is my sleeve usually covers my watch.

02:02:02   So if I just creep the sleeve open over the right corner,

02:02:06   I can catch the time without having to unsheathe

02:02:10   the whole watch, which is kind of a nice little thing.

02:02:13   I used to use the color face on the old ones.

02:02:17   And that was the one, I had that similar setup

02:02:20   where I could just peek out the kind of the far corner

02:02:23   of the watch and see what time it is

02:02:24   without having to pull my whole arm out of my sleeve.

02:02:27   And then, you know, pretty simple.

02:02:29   I still have the calendar thing on.

02:02:31   I kind of like it, I kind of hate it.

02:02:33   I don't really, like the showing your next appointment thing.

02:02:38   It's sort of useful when I'm at the office

02:02:42   and I want to see like what conference room

02:02:43   I'm supposed to be in next, but it also is stressful.

02:02:47   So I might lose that at some point.

02:02:48   - I think that replacing like the 10, 11, 12, one, two,

02:02:53   our tick marks with the text right along the outer rim

02:02:57   is clever, but it's like too clever for me.

02:03:01   I'm like, I got tired of that after a day.

02:03:04   I was like, that's too much.

02:03:05   - Yeah, I might lose that.

02:03:08   Otherwise, I love the new weather thing

02:03:11   where it shows you the range of temperature for the day.

02:03:14   - Absolutely.

02:03:15   - I do miss the, on the three, I used the Explorer face

02:03:20   'cause it would show you the cellular signal.

02:03:23   I do miss having a good description of the actual weather,

02:03:27   whether it's raining or not.

02:03:30   Some third, I don't know, I imagine like Dark Sky

02:03:34   will do that, but I had trouble getting that to work.

02:03:36   So I don't know.

02:03:37   - Yeah, if you haven't tried it yet,

02:03:39   an app that I would really recommend is Carrot Weather,

02:03:42   C-A-R, like what Bugs Bunny eats.

02:03:44   - Oh, I haven't tried that.

02:03:45   - Carrot Weather is sort of a, it's very hard to describe,

02:03:49   but it's a very, it's sort of a sarcastic weather app,

02:03:52   and you can dial up, like, it's not really,

02:03:55   the sarcasm thing, I probably would have really loved

02:03:58   when I was a teenager, and it seems a little too cute

02:04:01   by far now, but it is also a great weather app

02:04:04   if you turn off the thing that makes it talk

02:04:08   to you sarcastically.

02:04:09   But the complications it offers are tremendous.

02:04:15   The watch stuff, it's just, oh my God,

02:04:17   it's really fantastic.

02:04:19   So the 9to5 Mac guy had the humidity on his infograph.

02:04:23   That's, he got that from Carrot,

02:04:25   and it does the same thing as the weather

02:04:26   where it gives you the range for the day.

02:04:29   - Oh, cool.

02:04:29   - So anybody's looking for some cool weather-oriented

02:04:32   watch complications, check out Carrot.

02:04:34   It's like, I think it's a free app,

02:04:36   and you have to pay-- - Looks like it's five bucks.

02:04:37   - You pay five bucks a year for a subscription

02:04:40   to unlock all the watch stuff.

02:04:41   It's a great, five bucks, Jesus.

02:04:43   - Yeah. - It's really great.

02:04:44   And it gives you so many options.

02:04:46   You go to your phone, and it's just like, oh my God.

02:04:48   You can set it up so that it's like,

02:04:51   so you can have two of them, and it's like on Infograph.

02:04:55   and if it's the lower left corner, it's humidity,

02:04:57   and if it's the lower right corner, it's something else.

02:05:00   - So cool. - You can specify it

02:05:02   to the utmost if you wanna fiddle around with it,

02:05:06   which of course I do.

02:05:07   - Yeah, and to me, this is now inspiring a lot of ideas.

02:05:11   Could I do a chart beat complication

02:05:14   that shows the traffic on recode for the day

02:05:17   or something like that?

02:05:18   - Right. - How many of these little,

02:05:20   and remember spark lines were a thing for five minutes?

02:05:24   How many spark lines could I configure on this thing?

02:05:28   And that can be really interesting.

02:05:29   So I'm just getting started with that.

02:05:32   I really love the possibilities that it allows.

02:05:36   - And it is funny.

02:05:37   It's funny how many ways you can configure just the,

02:05:39   we're talking about wanting thousands

02:05:41   of third-party watch faces,

02:05:42   but it's funny how much time you can spend,

02:05:44   especially to me, it just seems like on series four

02:05:48   with the Infograph stuff,

02:05:49   it's like you can really just sync 90 minutes

02:05:52   into screwing around with your watch faces easily.

02:05:55   And some of them have like 40 different colors

02:05:59   to choose from.

02:06:00   - Yeah, yep.

02:06:01   - There's like 18 different shades of blue.

02:06:04   - Yeah, it's-- - And I don't mind that,

02:06:05   but it is, you end up, you do kind of end up scrolling

02:06:09   with the Digital Crown an awful lot

02:06:11   to go through every single color combination.

02:06:12   - I think they're trying to match every band

02:06:14   they've ever shipped or something like that.

02:06:16   - Yeah, I think so.

02:06:17   I think it's like, and it's like,

02:06:18   they may only be selling 20 bands right now,

02:06:21   but they have like color options from, you know, the spring 2017 collection. Yeah. Yeah.

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02:09:09   making excellent coffee and for sponsoring this podcast. Oh, anything else on the watch?

02:09:17   The only thing I had on the list to talk about was the big hack, which I don't know. Why

02:09:21   don't we, why don't we, uh, why don't we do that? Yeah. I haven't done a show since this

02:09:26   big hack thing came out. And I guess, sorry, I do have one more thing in the

02:09:30   marriage. All right. We'll just get it out of the way. Yeah. I gotta say it,

02:09:35   this idea that the cellular, you know, having, having LTE on your watch will

02:09:42   let you leave your phone behind. Um, the first year of that, it didn't really

02:09:47   work for me because I'd go walk the dog and realized three minutes in that,

02:09:53   "Oh, it's actually kind of boring

02:09:54   "to not have your phone with you."

02:09:56   Like, "Oh, it would be nice to have Instagram

02:09:59   "with me right now."

02:10:01   But now that you can do podcasts

02:10:03   and it just feels like the new Series 4 is fast enough

02:10:08   that you really do have a responsive device on you.

02:10:12   And not every app works.

02:10:14   I don't know, half the time the Uber app

02:10:16   doesn't look like it's working.

02:10:18   I don't know if it's gonna work now or not.

02:10:19   But it feels like we're finally getting to a place

02:10:22   several years in now where this is a compelling device

02:10:27   that is not going to replace your phone,

02:10:29   but it's certainly part of the,

02:10:32   whatever the quote unquote,

02:10:35   this is kind of a silly jargon term,

02:10:37   but like the personal cloud of whatever you're gonna have

02:10:39   in the future, whether it is your watch and your glasses

02:10:43   or your watch and your AirPods and some other sensors,

02:10:46   like this is definitely, we're getting to a place

02:10:49   where you can see the shifts happening

02:10:52   It's a remarkable combination with AirPods. It really does feel that, and to me, it's

02:11:00   exactly what you said. It's this watchOS 5. Maybe? I still have my personal Apple watch

02:11:05   is still a Series 3, and I don't know how much a Series 4 definitely feels faster, you

02:11:10   know. But my Series 3 still works just as well. I think it's mostly watchOS 5 and

02:11:18   a somewhat recent Apple Watch, whether it's this year's new one or last year's.

02:11:22   But yeah, the performance is there. I no longer, and again, maybe it goes app by app. I actually

02:11:28   don't think I even have the Uber app on my watch, but like with Overcast, like it never happens

02:11:32   anymore. Well, I'll go to launch Overcast and I get a spinner and it just spins and spins. And

02:11:37   it's not like Overcast fault. It's like the system is just like, uh, the, I don't know,

02:11:43   you know, that just doesn't happen anymore. It just launches and you hit play and it just pumps

02:11:47   through your AirPods right away. And it just feels, it does feel like the future.

02:11:51   Tom Bilyeu (01h00): And you go for a run, you start the Nike app,

02:11:55   you start your run, you play a podcast, you change a podcast, you use Siri to download or stream a

02:12:02   new podcast over the air, you get back, you stop your run, and nothing is lost. Like it hasn't

02:12:08   accidentally knocked you offline or, and your battery still has the whole day's charge left. So

02:12:16   I don't know, it just feels like we're getting somewhere

02:12:19   with this and it's gratifying.

02:12:22   - Yeah, the one thing I sometimes miss

02:12:23   is not having a camera because it just seems,

02:12:26   it's like sort of like the Murphy's Law type thing,

02:12:29   like, you know, the way that if you drop buttered toast,

02:12:32   it's always gonna land butter side down.

02:12:34   It just feels like if I go for a run,

02:12:35   something interesting is gonna happen

02:12:37   that I wanna take a photo of. (laughs)

02:12:38   - That did happen to me yesterday, yeah.

02:12:41   - It's like, oh my God, I wish I had a camera.

02:12:42   And then if I take my phone with me,

02:12:44   nothing happens, absolutely nothing of interest.

02:12:46   I don't spot any interesting things to take a photo of.

02:12:48   But as soon as I leave without my iPhone,

02:12:50   there's some ridiculous scene or something

02:12:53   that I wish I could take a picture of.

02:12:55   - Yeah, and I don't think that's coming.

02:12:57   - Yeah, just form factor wise, it seems really difficult.

02:13:00   - Just feels weird, but.

02:13:02   All right.

02:13:04   - All right, the big hack. - The big hack.

02:13:06   - So that's Bloomberg's truly blockbuster story

02:13:12   alleging that these servers from a company,

02:13:17   what was the name?

02:13:18   I have, who?

02:13:19   - I don't know.

02:13:21   - Elemental Technologies.

02:13:22   And they're using, they make the servers

02:13:25   and they're, they've formed--

02:13:27   - Super Micro.

02:13:28   - Super Micro, which sounds like such a made up,

02:13:30   (laughs)

02:13:31   sounds like such a made up name.

02:13:33   - Well, it sounds like it was made up in 1987,

02:13:36   which it probably was.

02:13:37   - Right.

02:13:37   I always thought Microsoft sounded like a made up name.

02:13:40   Right?

02:13:41   Microsoft was such a typical, just a typical 1979 company name in our industry, but Super

02:13:51   Micro makes these boards and according to Bloomberg was shipping, somehow the supply

02:14:00   chain got compromised and the Chinese, the government got them to put these tiny little

02:14:08   grain of rice-sized chips on the motherboard that enabled all these superpowers where they

02:14:13   could phone home and then they could effectively backdoor all these servers that were used

02:14:17   on Amazon and Apple's data centers. Then the story got really weird because Apple and

02:14:25   Amazon both said adamantly, "No, this didn't happen. We've been telling them. We've

02:14:30   been working with them on this story for over a year and we've been telling them this

02:14:33   didn't happen. We don't know of any incident like this and it's very, very strange. And

02:14:42   nobody really knows what to make of it. The cynics, the people who are cynical about companies

02:14:45   like Apple and Amazon are, you know, and I get it, but they're, they're, they're, they,

02:14:50   I've seen so many people read Apple's and Amazon statement and try to find loopholes

02:14:55   and be like, well, here they say, you know, a, b and c, but they don't say d. So maybe

02:15:00   you know, that's their little wiggle room. But I don't think that's the case. Like if it turns out

02:15:04   that the story is true, or mostly true, that it's fundamentally true, Apple and Amazon look terrible

02:15:10   because they denied it, you know. And they even said things like, and we're not under a gag order

02:15:15   because of that. Right. That was the one thing where it was like, No, we're not under a gag

02:15:20   order. And they just denied it in a way that they never deny anything, right? They put posts on their

02:15:27   their websites.

02:15:28   And I've never seen them deny anything on the record in public like that before.

02:15:38   And I think the situation calls for it.

02:15:43   Not only are they being accused of being compromised, but in a way that makes it seem like they

02:15:49   could be compromised again.

02:15:52   This thing got snuck in under their watch

02:15:55   and they're dummies and they fell for it and whatever.

02:16:00   But I've never seen them deny it.

02:16:04   Now, to me, the one thing is like,

02:16:07   and it's kind of strange 'cause they were like,

02:16:10   "Oh, more than 30 companies were affected by this."

02:16:13   But I haven't seen much about any other companies

02:16:17   since then. - No, and nobody,

02:16:19   right, and nobody has come up with,

02:16:21   it's been a couple weeks now,

02:16:23   nobody independent security researcher

02:16:25   has gotten their hands on one of these and said,

02:16:27   "Aha, here's the chip."

02:16:29   And part of what makes it,

02:16:30   I think there's some egg no matter what on Bloomberg's face

02:16:34   'cause I think it was a journalistic crime

02:16:37   to illustrate the story the way they did.

02:16:40   They have like the cover of the magazine that it shipped in

02:16:45   had a fingertip with a little tiny chip on it.

02:16:48   And it makes it seem as though that's the chip

02:16:51   And then there's pictures of a motherboard

02:16:52   and they show a little tiny chip on it.

02:16:54   But that's, it's all just like hypothetical.

02:16:58   - Right, yeah, fantasy basically.

02:16:59   - Right, like these, but every,

02:17:01   so many people reasonably and reasonably so

02:17:04   came away thinking, oh, they even have a picture

02:17:06   of one of these compromised motherboards

02:17:08   with the chip on it.

02:17:09   But that's not, it's just like,

02:17:10   this is what it could look like, you know.

02:17:13   It's very strange and to me, it's very telling

02:17:15   that nobody has come up with one yet

02:17:17   because they're even, you know,

02:17:18   they even said 30 companies were hit,

02:17:21   the company was selling thousands of these servers, so they're out there. And apparently,

02:17:26   according to the story, they didn't even, the FBI didn't even tell everybody who was

02:17:30   involved. Like, like they, they because they didn't want to, you know, it was an American,

02:17:35   you know, that, that, according to Bloomberg, part of the story was that this elemental

02:17:39   and super micro are American companies, and they didn't want to cause irreparable harm

02:17:44   to their reputations or something. I don't know, it's all, but it's very, very telling

02:17:49   to me that nobody has come up with aha here I'm you know, because some independent if

02:17:53   some independent security researcher could come up and say here I found the chip on this

02:17:58   board that you know, this company who you know, hired me, you know, I found it. And

02:18:05   a lot you know, a lot of people have made the case that what they're saying they did

02:18:08   maybe is technically possible, but it would be like the hardest possible way to do this.

02:18:13   And that companies like Apple and Amazon really do things like photograph and their motherboard

02:18:19   that come in and make sure that there's no funny business on them. Like it would be so much harder

02:18:24   to detect if they did something like this in firmware, meaning the software that runs on an

02:18:30   embedded chip so that the mother, right, so like you've got an uncompromised motherboard, and I've

02:18:36   got a compromised one, but they're physically the same. The only difference is mine has bad firmware

02:18:42   and yours has the right firmware, you know, that would be a much harder detect way to do it and

02:18:47   would be easier. I would think it's just super weird that that because the story quotes three

02:18:56   quote unquote Apple insiders who you know, that is one of those officials. It's very curious that

02:19:05   they quote, quote unquote, Apple insiders, but that is also a very weird way to say it. Are they

02:19:10   employees? Or are they some, you know, who are these people? Who are their sources that they

02:19:14   blog for appleinsider.com. Right. It's very strange. So I have a theory about what is

02:19:20   actually going on. Oh, I'd love to hear it. Well, my theory is that it is effectively

02:19:25   just part of what's the word agitprop, A-G-I-T-P-R-O-P. It's just propaganda from the Trump executive

02:19:35   branch who are trying to stoke the flames of the Chinese trade war, which is actually

02:19:40   underway. It's not like a conspiracy theory to say that the U.S. is trying to engage in

02:19:45   a trade war with China. If they say it, they come out and say, "Yes, we would like to start

02:19:50   a trade war with China." Making China look bad and making it look like China is hurting

02:19:55   good U.S. companies like Apple and Amazon all fits in the narrative that the Trump administration

02:20:02   is trying to provide. People have asked me, "Do you think these Bloomberg reporters made

02:20:08   the whole thing up. I mean, are they committing fraud? No, I don't think so. I mean, Bloomberg's

02:20:12   a super reputable publication. I'm sure they did talk to national security officials and

02:20:18   that the national security officials told them these things or, or said, Yeah, yeah,

02:20:22   that's it. Because there was like a podcast that the one guy who was a named source came

02:20:27   out on last week and said that he was talking to the Bloomberg report. He doesn't know anything

02:20:31   about the specifics of this case. He was just giving them background information on what

02:20:34   might be possible in a hardware hack. And then the story like everything he said that

02:20:39   they might do like the story says they did do and he was like that's either I'm really

02:20:42   prescient or something weird is going on here. So I think it was sort of like they got information

02:20:48   from national security people who were just trying to get that story in the press that

02:20:52   China is screwing around with Apple and Amazon and other companies servers and bad China

02:20:59   and didn't really give him specifics and they tried to get specifics and then I got like

02:21:03   some hypothetical things, ran it by them. And they're like, Yeah, yeah, that's it. Sure. Whatever.

02:21:08   Because they just wanted the story out there. That's my theory. And to me, everything that's

02:21:12   happened since fits with that. And knowing and this is the one thing I was thinking, like,

02:21:19   there's, there's basically no situation in which Apple can publicly bad mouth China. Right. Because

02:21:28   And that stokes the cynicism of people. That's why people are so cynical about Apple's reply as,

02:21:34   "Well, of course Apple's going to say it didn't happen because they can't piss off China."

02:21:37   Yeah. Not only as a place where a lot of people buy phones, but also with everything they have

02:21:45   is made. If for some reason Apple had to stop doing business in China, there would be no more

02:21:51   Apple for a long time. Right. It would be devastating to Apple.

02:21:56   it's probably the single biggest danger Apple faces, or certainly uniquely to Apple, you know,

02:22:01   that, that, you know, you know, the Chinese government is an authoritarian communist regime

02:22:06   that can really do whatever they want at any moment, you know? So it's truly at this point,

02:22:13   an existential threat to Apple, because, you know, at least, you know, maybe not existential,

02:22:19   but it would be devastating, profoundly devastating, right? They would have to

02:22:23   figure out how to move everything to Brazil, India,

02:22:26   where, you know, in a matter of days,

02:22:29   which is probably impossible, or at least super hard.

02:22:33   - Or it would take years to rebuild.

02:22:36   Years and billions and billions of investment,

02:22:39   it would be very difficult, but--

02:22:41   - So it's interesting how strongly they denied it

02:22:44   while also not saying anything remotely bad

02:22:49   about Chinese government or anything like that.

02:22:53   It's weirdly specific about certain things

02:22:57   that either are pure fantasy or had to have happened,

02:23:02   or I guess there's a middle ground,

02:23:05   but it just seems very weirdly specific

02:23:10   about certain things.

02:23:11   It's interesting to me that none of these bylines are,

02:23:15   I don't think from their tech desk either.

02:23:17   Like I think this is the DC desk or something like that.

02:23:21   - Yeah, I think so too.

02:23:22   - I don't know if the tech editors were involved in editing.

02:23:26   I haven't been to a good New York media cocktail party

02:23:30   in a little while.

02:23:31   So I don't have the gossip on like who actually edited this.

02:23:35   But still Business Week is arguably

02:23:39   one of the highest standard publications that exists.

02:23:42   So they're not, I would be really surprised

02:23:45   if they kind of flubbed the,

02:23:48   I don't know if they have fact checkers,

02:23:50   but if they flubbed the diligence on it.

02:23:53   - I just think it all comes down to the,

02:23:55   they took, they bought a bill of goods

02:23:57   from these national security sources

02:23:59   whose goal was specifically just to fan the flames

02:24:02   of a trade war.

02:24:03   So they've got sources who told them

02:24:05   the things they're saying sources told them,

02:24:06   but I think the sources are the ones who were full of shit

02:24:09   or exaggerating or were vague upfront.

02:24:12   And then when asked, could it have been like this,

02:24:15   that they were like, yeah, yeah, sure, whatever.

02:24:18   You know, they just wanted to see the story in print

02:24:20   because it makes China look bad.

02:24:22   - Terrible, yeah. - Anybody who believes

02:24:23   the story, it makes China look absolutely terrible.

02:24:26   And of course, China's official statement was so cryptic.

02:24:29   (laughing)

02:24:32   Like they didn't do themselves any favors

02:24:34   by issuing a statement that was sort of a non-denial denial.

02:24:39   Like who knows what's going on in cyberspace?

02:24:42   I think the Chinese statement

02:24:44   literally used the word cyberspace.

02:24:45   - Awesome.

02:24:46   By the way, you have to look at the supermicro.com

02:24:50   homepage. It looks like it was made on Adobe fireworks. This is a very 2002 homepage.

02:25:00   Oh, I would say 1998. It's not even retina. It's all rendered in graphics and none of

02:25:04   the graphics are retina resolution. So everything looks blurry.

02:25:08   Has an amazing drop shadow that is cropped so you can see the hard edge on the shadows.

02:25:14   I will put a link to the Supermicro website in the show notes. Boy, Supermicro, I don't

02:25:19   if they've recovered when I checked it, they lost like their stock price took like a 50%

02:25:23   hit. All right. I got, I'll put a link to that recode story in there too. All right.

02:25:26   I guess we should wrap it up. We've gone on long enough. I don't really have much more

02:25:30   to say about this big hack other than that. It's crazy. I don't either. We'll see. I mean,

02:25:35   I'm surprised there hasn't been anything corroborating it or, or, you know, adding it. And they supposedly

02:25:43   were reporting this for a year. So I don't know. Well, the thing that to me, you can't

02:25:48   prove a negative, but it's very, very suspicious to me that we don't still have corroboration

02:25:53   because supposedly it was thousands of servers and they're out in the real world for anybody

02:25:58   who knows their shit around a motherboard to say, "Yeah, here it is. Here's one of these

02:26:04   motherboards and here's this rogue chip." The fact that we haven't gotten that yet is,

02:26:09   to me, very suspicious. Again, it doesn't prove anything, but as time goes on and if

02:26:13   if it continues that nobody can show one of these compromised boards,

02:26:17   it sure looks like a bogus story.

02:26:19   Agree. Yeah. Dan, thank you for your time. Everybody can read your work.

02:26:25   Your team's fine work at recode.net.

02:26:29   Dot net dot net is where all the best domains are. Frankly, that is correct.

02:26:33   And of course they can follow you on, on Twitter at from dome F R O M E D O M E.

02:26:38   It's always good to see him. If I might plug one thing, of course you can plug.

02:26:42   anything. I took the summer off because I was very busy at work,

02:26:46   but I'm relaunching my travel slash credit card points

02:26:51   newsletter slash blog at points party.com. Please sign up if you

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02:27:20   that you've got your reinvigorated to do points party calm because I back at it

02:27:25   it's it's the sort of thing that I really really care about but I don't

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02:27:32   what to do that's the plan I'm gonna do the research and yeah I should have a

02:27:37   new newsletter out within a week or so. I can't wait. Well, everybody, I'll put that in the show

02:27:42   notes as well, but at pointsparty.com, I highly recommend it. And Dan really does. He really does

02:27:47   know this stuff. And so what I fall asleep reading every night.