0:00:00I've at least three episodes in a row where Skype has totally crapped out at some point.
0:00:04So that sounds like Skype.
0:00:05Yeah.
0:00:06Alright, so we'll just start the show.
0:00:09Yeah.
0:00:10So Serenity Caldwell, first time on a show.
0:00:13Welcome.
0:00:13Thank you.
0:00:14I'm excited to be here.
0:00:15Busy times.
0:00:16Yes, yes.
0:00:18Flying all over the place, looking at fancy technology.
0:00:22I'm going to, I was looking at my schedule and I'm like, I'm going to be in a different country
0:00:27and or state for the next like five weekends in a row,
0:00:30half of for my job and half for like roller derby randomness.
0:00:34And it's just like, it's too much traveling.
0:00:36I don't even have an Apple watch to keep track of it yet.
0:00:39- It's bad when you start like,
0:00:40when you have stretches like that
0:00:41and you start to get to know like certain TSA agents.
0:00:44(laughing)
0:00:45Right?
0:00:46- Yeah, yeah.
0:00:47Where you're like, hey, yep, I'm here again.
0:00:49- Like you don't remember my name, but you know me
0:00:51and they're just like, yeah, yeah, go on through.
0:00:53- Yeah, exactly.
0:00:54It's like, okay, all right.
0:00:55Well, it's like with Boston, I fly Virgin pretty much anywhere.
0:00:58And it's like, there's only-- there's
0:00:59like this one tiny little security terminal
0:01:03for Boston's Virgin area.
0:01:05Like we have our own private security terminal,
0:01:07which is really awesome.
0:01:08Because it's like, all right, quick in and out, no problems.
0:01:11But it also means that, yeah, there are like three TSA people
0:01:14total.
0:01:15So yeah, it's like maybe not by a name basis,
0:01:18but you get pretty familiar.
0:01:20Yeah, airports are so weird.
0:01:21We have like eight terminals ABCD ENF here in Philly, but there's also
0:01:26Like I think it's like a one or something. There's like a there's like in between like a and B
0:01:33There's like this little tiny thing and it's like certain US air flights go out of there and when you go up it is
0:01:39There it's like that
0:01:40It's like literally like the security thing is like three TSA people and and the funny thing is is that they still divide it between
0:01:47TSA pre and not pre and there's
0:01:50never it's there's only three people there it makes no difference but yet
0:01:55somehow they put the they put the lines in people need their status yeah the
0:01:59Virgin there's you know there's the silver and gold elevate line which I
0:02:03think I've used maybe once in my life because the line has been long but
0:02:07otherwise yeah it's like two people that's negligible so you were out in
0:02:12California last week for I was watch song and pony show what do they call it
0:02:18- Something like that, yeah.
0:02:20I like Song and Pony Show.
0:02:21- What's coming up?
0:02:22- All right, so I got Toronto this weekend
0:02:25for a roller derby tournament.
0:02:26Then Ireland, I'm going over to Ool,
0:02:29which is gonna be fun.
0:02:30It's my first time in Dublin
0:02:31and just in Ireland in general,
0:02:33other than like flying through.
0:02:35So I'm psyched for that.
0:02:36- Insert me crying here because I'm missing Ool.
0:02:39- I know, can we like Skype you in
0:02:41and have you still do your dinner?
0:02:43- We're, I don't know.
0:02:47- Yeah, yeah.
0:02:48- We're trying to figure out something.
0:02:50- It's a bummer.
0:02:51But yeah, so it's that.
0:02:52And then I think I have a one soul weekend
0:02:56where I'm in Massachusetts,
0:02:58and then I'm out in California for the Yosemite Conference
0:03:01and also to see my parents.
0:03:03And then potentially going to Oregon
0:03:05for another roller derby thing.
0:03:08So it's like, oh wait, excuse me, Pittsburgh,
0:03:11then Yosemite, then Oregon.
0:03:15It's a lot of stuff.
0:03:16- Right, Yosemite is for the...
0:03:18- The CocoConf.
0:03:20- Yeah, CocoConf.
0:03:21- Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that.
0:03:23I remember Dave was pitching at me on it a while back
0:03:26and I'm like, "This sounds amazing."
0:03:27And it's like, why not do a conference
0:03:30about technology in Yosemite?
0:03:32Like if Apple is going to go to the trouble
0:03:35of naming its OS updates after fancy California locations,
0:03:40why not hold a conference there?
0:03:41It's gorgeous.
0:03:42- It makes me cry too, 'cause that was also with,
0:03:44That's also something I wanted to go to,
0:03:46something I was planning to go to,
0:03:47and also within the Still Can't Fly.
0:03:51- Ah, Amtrak, John.
0:03:52Do an Amtrak blogging adventure.
0:03:55- I looked into that.
0:03:56I looked into that,
0:03:57and Amtrak across the country is horrifying.
0:04:00(laughing)
0:04:01Like, it's clearly better to just drive.
0:04:04- Yeah, it's a long experience.
0:04:06My buddy Rich Stevens, who does like a webcomic,
0:04:08he used to do that, I think,
0:04:10the last two years that he went to San Diego Comic-Con,
0:04:12He did that from Western Mass.
0:04:14And he really liked it 'cause he's like,
0:04:16it's basically, you know, I don't have to go anywhere
0:04:19and it's wifi the entire time.
0:04:20And I don't have to worry about driving
0:04:22and I don't have to worry about like staying
0:04:23in crappy motels 'cause I just have this like random bed.
0:04:26And then I get to go eat in big cities
0:04:28where they have like four hour layovers.
0:04:30So, but I feel like you kind of have to,
0:04:33you need to be in a certain mindset to be like,
0:04:35yeah, I'm gonna basically live on a plane
0:04:37or a train for nine days
0:04:38and be surrounded by other people constantly.
0:04:41I think the way to go is the way John Madden used to travel around the country.
0:04:46Do you remember this?
0:04:48John Madden, the football announcer, had a terrible fear of flying or just hated it.
0:04:52It just hated, hated flying.
0:04:54And so he had a, I don't know if it was, it was like a big bus.
0:04:58He just had a bus and had lots of money because he was the top football announcer.
0:05:04So he just had a crew and he just drove his bus everywhere.
0:05:08this Sunday's game is in New York next Sunday's in Dallas and the next one's in
0:05:12San Francisco they just you know after the game they just get in the bus and
0:05:15drive there. Oh man I'm sure it was a pimped out bus too. Yeah exactly right like
0:05:19with a kitchen and yeah hot tub in the back and like just that's that sounds
0:05:24kind of amazing but I feel like you need it you need a certain amount of lifestyle
0:05:27and money for you know ten thousand dollar Apple watches. Right it's not
0:05:33don't think it's worth a short term investment for a six to eight week eye
0:05:36injury. But no, that would be like a good feature though maybe Uber could look
0:05:40into that and like a temporary like rock star tour bus. Yeah exactly. Bus John
0:05:45Gruber around the country. Right. I bet you could you could do a Patreon, a
0:05:49Patreon, a Kickstarter, one of those. Get me to Yosemite. It still wouldn't get
0:05:53me to Ireland but get me to Yosemite. No. You don't want to go on a boat. Boats are scary.
0:05:57Well you know what it's funny because we looked into it. I forget if I mentioned
0:06:01on the show before, but we at least looked into, you know, it seemed ridiculous. I mean,
0:06:06I've got my kid here at school, I can't, you know, I don't want to be away for weeks, but
0:06:10even then it was hard because Ool is too close to winter. So like, there aren't any
0:06:16any real cross cross Atlantic voyages.
0:06:20Well, there are but only they only go to Great Britain. It's funny because when you're flying,
0:06:26if you're flying to Ireland, it's like if your itinerary is like Boston to London,
0:06:35what's the big one in London? Heathrow.
0:06:37Rachel Teagle And then Heathrow to Dublin, you don't think twice about it, you know,
0:06:41you know that there's a good chance you're not going to get a direct flight and you don't think
0:06:44twice about the fact but if you can't get in a plane, the fact that Ireland and England are not
0:06:51the same island, it makes all the difference in the world. It would have been terrible. It would
0:06:55not terrible but it's like you take like a Caribbean cruise and it's like you lay out
0:07:00in a deck and it's great. You take you know like the Queen Elizabeth to England in late
0:07:04March and it's you know you don't go outside.
0:07:07No you hide in your cabin and you pray that you don't hit icebergs.
0:07:13So no it's probably.
0:07:15Alright well we'll get you like a roving what are the iPad robots that just kind of glide
0:07:20around and you'd like pop into the rooms just float float your Twitter avatar
0:07:25yeah it's like that it's like a iPad on a little what's that scooter called like
0:07:32a segue segue yeah yeah I know there's an official name for it actually it's
0:07:36funny one of my former Mac world co-workers Roman Loyola reviewed one of
0:07:40these things for Mac world and I feel it was something like two months after he
0:07:44reviewed it he in it like accidentally ended up on the Colbert show because
0:07:50they used our clip of like the crazy iPad segue robot so now he's forever like
0:07:56he's infamously known as like the Colbert iPad robot guy just like he's
0:08:01gotten recognized as that and it cracks me up so let's revisit last week because
0:08:11I feel like everybody still it's funny I think now a week later people are more
0:08:17upset about the MacBook part of the announcement than the Apple watch. Yeah I
0:08:20feel like you know I was kind of expecting a lot of hoopla over the
0:08:24$10,000 to $17,000 gold watch and instead it's everybody throwing their
0:08:29hands up in uproar "one port on a MacBook how could you?" and I'm like do you
0:08:35remember in 2008 when when they pulled a computer out of a manila envelope and it
0:08:42only had two USB ports and had no no CD drive and everybody you know like I feel
0:08:48like this is the exact same argument just four or five years later. Yeah I
0:08:51remember that event I can't remember if it was WWDC or Macworld maybe it was
0:08:57back in Macworld. I think it was Macworld because I remember I wasn't working in
0:09:01the tech industry at the time but I seem to remember pictures of like the
0:09:04MacBook Air is hanging on strings. Yeah yeah I remember before the keynote the
0:09:10banners said there's something in the air and for some reason it's like the
0:09:17rumor the the the 48-hour you know there's like that that like once
0:09:21certain signs start going up at your babuena or in this case it was Moscone
0:09:27West then the rumors reach a fever pitch because people start trying to read into
0:09:32what it is that Apple is shown whereas anybody with any common sense would know
0:09:36that whatever they're showing you that's not covered up is not going to give it away.
0:09:41Rachel - Oh no. And if anything, they're outright teasing you because they know you're going to try
0:09:45and "cremilinology" it to death.
0:09:47Pete - Right. And I remember that the rumor, I remember this, I usually, the years blur together
0:09:52to me, but I remember this very distinctly. It was that the rumor du jour was that "Air" was the
0:09:58name of Apple's in-house flash killer. Rachel - Oh, I remember that.
0:10:04And that it would be called air and it was gonna be and I remember saying I don't think so because if it was they
0:10:10Wouldn't put the name of it on the banner and B
0:10:12I really think they mean it that they that they it's not just flashing but did that they don't they don't want a proprietary
0:10:18Binary blob thing on the web like they really do mean that they think HTML 5 is the way forward
0:10:26And for the web like I really think this is wrong and then people were upset when they ended up being a notebook
0:10:32They were like well what happened to the flash killer and it was like they never said they were gonna do a flash killer
0:10:38No, you you whipped it up from thin air surprise. Hmm. I was promised a flash killer
0:10:45You were promised nothing. All right play with your shiny new MacBook Air. Yeah, but the parallels to
0:10:51To to that device the first MacBook Air
0:10:57I did almost exact other than the fact that they didn't pull it out of a minimal envelope
0:11:02It's pretty much exact same scenario.
0:11:05- Oh, absolutely.
0:11:06I mean, you have something that was like
0:11:08the 2000 MacBook Air.
0:11:10I was working at an Apple store at the time.
0:11:13And I mean, it was underpowered, too expensive
0:11:17and not really designed for the general public at that point.
0:11:22And everybody just kind of poo-pooed it.
0:11:24We're like, "Oh, this computer is ridiculous.
0:11:27"How do they expect us to use it?
0:11:29"It's thin and that's cool,
0:11:30but it's impractical blah blah blah blah blah and now you know a couple years later the
0:11:37entire laptop line is based off of the the innovations and the creations that originated
0:11:43from that 2008 MacBook Air.
0:11:45Here's where my memory gets fuzzy I know that the base model still had a spinning hard drive.
0:11:51Yes.
0:11:52Was there an SSD option?
0:11:53I believe yeah there was an SSD option but it was expensive.
0:11:57And it was like 64 mega or 64 gigs.
0:12:00Yeah, maybe it was 128, I can't remember now.
0:12:03I'm like, I sold I think four of these in the like two years I was working at the store.
0:12:10And granted I wasn't on the floor a whole lot selling things, like I was like, I taught
0:12:14classes most of the time.
0:12:15But even so, it was like the only time that you got to get a MacBook Air out from like
0:12:20the back of house storage was when like somebody in a fancy suit came in who was like, Oh,
0:12:25I just need a I need a third laptop for travel.
0:12:28it was definitely a high-end businessman's like I'm sitting on a plane for a long period of time
0:12:33and I want to work on like a super light computer sort of thing. It was wicked expensive.
0:12:38Here it is. Jackie Chang had an article on it for ours back in February 2008. I'm copying this URL
0:12:48right now. The famous last words on this show is I say it's going to be in the show notes and then
0:12:53and forget to put it in the show notes but I've got it my BB edit file right
0:12:58now it costs 1,300 extra and it was 64 gigabytes oh my god so the high-end air
0:13:05and in early 2008 was alright so the regular one MacBook Air or the hard
0:13:13drive 1.6 gigahertz Intel core 2duo yep both of them only had two gigs of RAM oh
0:13:21Oh, yeah, and it had the other the spinning hard disk one only had an 80 gig hard drive an 80 gig for
0:13:27420 rpm hard drive and then the 64 gigabyte solid-state drive was an extra
0:13:33$1,300 so in other words the cost of the entire new MacBook
0:13:39Exactly the same price like for an entirely new MacBook. It was what it cost to upgrade to the SSD
0:13:46So I guess that was like
0:13:49$1,800 I want to say it was 17 or $1,800. I'm trying to pull this
0:13:56See, I'm trying to pull this up somewhere
0:13:59Of course I'm looking at an old Mac world review and of course we don't have the price anywhere that's helpful
0:14:07That's it from now on I'm just making articles that have prices
0:14:12No, it's but it was pretty here we go. Yeah
0:14:16$3,999 was the base configuration. So it was $3,100 to get it with an SSD and
0:14:21truth be told
0:14:24You really weren't getting the MacBook Air experience without an SSD
0:14:28Oh, no
0:14:29And it's clear they came out with it and the reason they had the one with the hard drive was because SSDs were so insanely
0:14:34expensive
0:14:362008 yeah 2008 that they really did not want to have the base model be
0:14:39$3,100 it just the optics would just be bad, but that really was the one to get to
0:14:46to get the experience like that was clearly where they were going and you know i think
0:14:51it was within a year they dropped the hard drives oh yeah it was well i remember the
0:14:56um the 2010 macbook airs and that was the first macbook air i owned when when they came
0:15:01out with the 11 inch and the 13 inch and all of a sudden not only were the macbook air
0:15:05is affordable but they were in super tiny you know court or uh powerbook duo style uh
0:15:11builds and I was like, all right, I can deal with two USB ports if it comes in an 11 inch
0:15:18size, sure.
0:15:19I remember, I think it was Will Shipley, I think he had the first Air, but he had the
0:15:24SSD one, and he was doing software development on it, which sounds crazy because like you
0:15:29said, it was overall, in grand scheme of things, an underpowered device.
0:15:33But I remember him, and if it wasn't the first Gen 1, he had a very early one, in the very
0:15:37early days when they were relatively expensive and relatively slow in terms of CPU performance.
0:15:44And he raved about it because the SSD was so great at like when you're compiling stuff
0:15:49with Xcode, you're touching lots and lots, hundreds of little files very quickly. And
0:15:53that's where an SSD blows a spinning hard drive away is touching lots of little files
0:15:59and right one after another after another. And so for compiling stuff in Xcode, he's
0:16:05I remember him writing about it.
0:16:06He was like, "This is a fantastic machine.
0:16:07"I cannot wait for the future when everything is SSD."
0:16:11So there were definitely people who loved it
0:16:13and it was there, but it was ahead of its time.
0:16:17- Oh yeah.
0:16:18Do you remember the first computer you had
0:16:19that had an SSD in it?
0:16:21'Cause I know for me it was life-changing.
0:16:23- Yeah, it was a 15-inch MacBook Pro.
0:16:27Or no, no, maybe it wasn't a MacBook Pro.
0:16:32I mean, I was gonna say a PowerBook.
0:16:34It was it was a MacBook Pro 15 inch MacBook Pro that didn't ship with an SSD I bought
0:16:41it.
0:16:42That's actually the last time I ever upgraded a Mac after I bought it too.
0:16:46But I bought like an OWC upgrade package.
0:16:51And it was like getting a new machine.
0:16:54I got it did it like two years after I bought it.
0:16:57And it really did.
0:16:58You know, I don't know what it cost me maybe like $800.
0:17:01And it felt like I just got a new $2,000 MacBook Pro.
0:17:04It was crazy.
0:17:05Like I actually I did the same thing after I bought my my 2010 MacBook Air.
0:17:10And I you know, going from I had a 15 inch MacBook Pro that was running on a spinning
0:17:16disk.
0:17:17And once I got the air was it was like night and day where it's like the pro, the pro despite
0:17:22being I think three or four times as powerful as the air felt like it was, you know, running
0:17:28in molasses.
0:17:29And I was just like, Ah, screw this computer, I'm just gonna use the air for full time,
0:17:32you know, doing everything.
0:17:34And when I started doing video development,
0:17:36I was like, all right, you know what,
0:17:38maybe I need to consider, can I put an SSD in the Pro?
0:17:42And then when I did, it was exactly how you described.
0:17:45It's like, it turns the machine upside down
0:17:48into a brand new device.
0:17:49Like it doesn't feel like you're working
0:17:52on a two or three year old computer anymore,
0:17:54despite the fact that the internals might be,
0:17:57you know, severely outdated.
0:17:58- Yeah, and it's like, and every, you know,
0:18:02probably everybody listening is,
0:18:03I mean, I wonder what percentage of people are on SSDs now.
0:18:06- Yeah, well, I think, well,
0:18:07most of the laptops now have SSD standard,
0:18:10but it's the iMacs that are still a little tricky.
0:18:14We were talking about this before the show,
0:18:16where my iMac is fixing out right now,
0:18:19'cause I think the hard drive is slowly dying
0:18:22and it's a normal spinning platter.
0:18:25And I didn't even realize that when I got the computer,
0:18:29I thought that it came with an SSD standard.
0:18:31And of course I had my company, you know, the company ordered it for me.
0:18:34And I was just kind of like, everything comes with SSDs now.
0:18:37It's 20, you know, 2012, 2013.
0:18:40Like that's no question.
0:18:42And then at some point I'm like, man, this iMac is really slow compared to my, you know,
0:18:47my tiny little laptop.
0:18:48And I finally realized, oh, it has a hard drive in it.
0:18:51So I feel like people who have the desktop computers may not like the standard configuration
0:18:56for an iMac is I believe a big hard drive.
0:19:00like, yeah, terabyte hard drive is really tempting. But like, you don't need a terabyte
0:19:05of space.
0:19:06I'm just looking now there's the standard config for every iMac is a hard drive except
0:19:11the retina 5k iMac, which still is a fusion drive, which is the the, you know, the crazy
0:19:17it looks like one volume, but it's an SSD and a hard drive combined, right, which is
0:19:23a really good, fascinating technology and really cool. And it seems, you know, a couple
0:19:29years in it seems like it works really well in practice. Oh yeah well I'm there
0:19:34so I know a couple people in the PC building industry and like that's that's
0:19:39been really popular for a while putting in an SSD and a big hard drive but with
0:19:44the PC market it was put the boot drive on the SSD and then all the other files
0:19:48on the hard drive and the fusion drive as far as I understand it it all happens
0:19:53under the hood and it and it's seamless so not only is the boot drive on the
0:19:57SSD but any files that you're currently working on get pulled over magically to
0:20:03the SSD and theoretically you shouldn't notice it so you're never you never
0:20:07really should be drawing any files actively off of the hard drive it's just
0:20:11where you know inactive files live kind of like old-school memory and I'm like
0:20:15that's that's really cool that's a like that's a great piece of technology yeah
0:20:20but it still doesn't save you from the lack of reliability oh no yeah and
0:20:24performance stuff you're eventually you know depending on what you do it the
0:20:27performance eventually but eventually you suffer and you get the performance
0:20:31of a spinning hard disk depending on what you're doing yeah exactly all hard
0:20:35drives eventually die right importing a bunch of file or photos into iPhoto or
0:20:41exporting them out or something like that anything like that where you're
0:20:44looking at you know you're gonna you know looking at a gig or two of data
0:20:47it's you you know you clearly can't make you know can't put 50 pounds of data in
0:20:54- No, it can only hold so much before it has to look
0:20:59to the heavyweight, even if the heavyweight is, you know,
0:21:01has a speed of one.
0:21:03- Right, but all you're right though,
0:21:04all the notebooks now are SSD.
0:21:06I mean, I guess you can still get, like,
0:21:08if you cheap out and get the cheap MacBook Pros,
0:21:11they still come with hard disks.
0:21:13The retina ones all are SSD and the Airs are all SSD.
0:21:18- Yeah, I haven't actually looked at the store configuration
0:21:21since last week event.
0:21:22Does the 13 inch non-retina MacBook Pro still exist?
0:21:27Is that still a configuration
0:21:29or did the new MacBook officially just kill it?
0:21:31- It still is there.
0:21:33MacBook Pro 13 inch, 2.5 gigahertz.
0:21:36It's only 1099,
0:21:37but it's a 500 gigabyte 5,400 RPM hard drive
0:21:43and four gigs of RAM.
0:21:45I'm honestly, that's to me
0:21:47sort of a baffling configuration to me.
0:21:49I can't see why anyone would buy that.
0:21:51Like if your price is 1099 and you're really kind of price sensitive and you don't want
0:21:57that $1,300 retina one, I really can't see why you don't just get the air.
0:22:02- Yeah, I suspect that that configuration must solely exist for education, maybe with
0:22:09the idea of like education folks who want to do video editing or something like that.
0:22:14But even then, like the airs are pretty good for video editing at this point.
0:22:18Like the Core i7s that they have available, like I routinely use my 11 inch for a lot
0:22:26of video intensive stuff that I'm probably not supposed to, but it's definitely like
0:22:33it's functional.
0:22:34It's not, you know, I don't know.
0:22:37My son and I went into the Apple store just the other day because I forget we had a, he
0:22:42had a weird issue with his Macbook Pro that we couldn't fix at home.
0:22:48it ended up the genius just needed to you remember the SMC reset system memory
0:22:53controller and the old way to do it in the old days was you take the battery
0:22:56out or if it was a desktop you'd unplug it doesn't work so well with no and
0:23:02there's a keyboard shortcut you hold down shift option control I think on the
0:23:07left side of the keyboard shift option control not command and restart and then
0:23:13the if you have it plugged in you know that it did the SMC reset because the
0:23:17the color will change on the mag safe
0:23:22from like green to orange or orange to green.
0:23:25But it didn't solve it for him.
0:23:26It just wouldn't turn on, the screen wouldn't turn on.
0:23:30So I thought it was bad news, like,
0:23:32God, it's gonna need to be replaced.
0:23:34It's under warranty, it's relatively new.
0:23:37But it ended up, he just needed to take it back
0:23:38in their secret lab and take the battery out,
0:23:41and then it just started right out.
0:23:43So anyway, all wouldn't well with that.
0:23:46But while we were there, I was like,
0:23:48we gotta try out this new Force Touch trackpad.
0:23:51And we went over to the table
0:23:52with the 13-inch MacBook Pros,
0:23:54and the first one we went to was the low-end one
0:23:56that doesn't have the new trackpad
0:23:58and doesn't even have a retina screen.
0:24:00And we were both like, oh, gross.
0:24:01(laughing)
0:24:03I was so proud of him.
0:24:03He was grossed out by the non-retina screen.
0:24:07- Yeah. - He was like,
0:24:07who would buy this?
0:24:09- It really is starkly different
0:24:11once you get used to the retina.
0:24:13I remember having a conversation,
0:24:15I want to say the year before we got the iPhone 4, I want to say, where I was talking with
0:24:21a friend of mine and he's like, "I just don't understand why Apple just doesn't do retina
0:24:25screens."
0:24:26Like, we didn't call them retina at that point, but I don't understand why Apple doesn't do
0:24:29high DPI screens because they have the technology and text looks terrible and as a designer
0:24:35I want to see things clearly and that's the next generation of technology and like two
0:24:40weeks after we have this conversation, the new iPhone comes out and he was like a kid
0:24:44at Christmas he was just like oh my god I can't wait until I have this in my
0:24:48iMac it's it's it really is you know it's
0:24:51stark it's it's one of the few things that I'm
0:24:53sorely kind of missing on my MacBook Air right now I don't I don't know if the
0:24:57new MacBook is currently enough for me that I would
0:25:00swap over but it's definitely tempting yeah just for right now yeah but force
0:25:04touch oh my god all right hold that thought
0:25:07let's talk about force touch and let me let me take a breakdown do the first
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0:28:07any sort of desire to build a website go check them out all right force touch
0:28:11force touch do you think that's a good name I am conflicted only if only
0:28:19because they're calling they're calling this the gestures force touch and
0:28:23and they're calling the trackpad force touch.
0:28:25And I feel like the same problem with, you know,
0:28:28having a collection of the watch just called the watch,
0:28:31it's hard to describe the gesture
0:28:34and also inadvertently describe the trackpad itself.
0:28:37You know, like we gotta figure out specific language,
0:28:39but I think that's just a, that's a journalist word problem.
0:28:44It's not a bad name overall, I don't think.
0:28:47- Right, so as a verb, it means to press a finger hard
0:28:52either on your watch or on this new trackpad to engage whatever it is that
0:28:58Forch Touch does in your current context. And the trackpad itself is called the
0:29:04Forch Touch trackpad. Here's why I bring this up because Dieter Bone at
0:29:12the Verge had an article that you know great trackpad except for the lousy name
0:29:16or something like that. What are you talking about lousy name? Number one most people
0:29:20like, have no idea what that it's not like they're really going to advertise, I don't
0:29:24think that the name force touch trackpad. It's just a way to distinguish it. And then
0:29:29like, you know, as the time goes on, if you have like a 13 inch MacBook Pro, you could
0:29:33say, is that the one with the force touch trackpad or not? It just as a way to clarify
0:29:37whether it can do it or not.
0:29:38Yeah, it's like retina display or anything, anything else that that Apple's use descriptive
0:29:43names for. Yeah, I see really no problem with it. And it's honestly it's a it I feel like
0:29:52it's a good descriptor. What what how would you rather describe it like the taptic engine
0:29:57trackpad the haptic trackpad like then you start
0:30:01The only other thing I've heard that was even plausible would be to call it the taptic trackpad.
0:30:05Yeah, it isn't bad. I bet it's close enough that it was probably like on the finalists
0:30:10list, you know, like a whiteboard and fill Schiller's office and it says like force touch
0:30:15trackpad taptic trackpad, taptic engine trackpad, t e trackpad. Yeah. And no, there's like a
0:30:21circle around force touch trackpad. Exactly with stars. I Yeah, I like it better than
0:30:27I used I think both descriptions when I was writing about it in our hands on and I like
0:30:31force touch trackpad as a as a moniker or just force touch technology in general, because
0:30:37especially, you know, we've seen it on the watch.
0:30:39Now we're seeing it on a track pad
0:30:41that's essentially the size of an iPhone 6 screen.
0:30:44I don't think it's unlikely that we'll see it
0:30:46on iOS devices in the next year or so.
0:30:50And as a result, like you're gonna need a way to describe it
0:30:54versus, you know, you've got a retina display
0:30:56with force touch, multi-touch technology.
0:30:59That's a lot of touches, but you know what I mean, right?
0:31:02- Right. - Yeah.
0:31:03- It's, and the complaint against it,
0:31:06And I'm as juvenile as anybody, I think.
0:31:09But the complaint is that it's like, har har, it sounds like rapey.
0:31:14Force touch.
0:31:15Right.
0:31:16And I kind of feel like you can't--
0:31:18anything touch can be made into that type of joke.
0:31:21Like multi-touch clearly can.
0:31:22And it reminds me of the complaints that iPad--
0:31:25iPad, yeah.
0:31:26--sounded like a feminine hygiene product.
0:31:29And it's like, really?
0:31:34I remember not being in love with iPad when they first said it but I didn't think well
0:31:38this is awful.
0:31:39Yeah it's not the worst name in the world.
0:31:41There are plenty of more terrible names that I'm sure we would be much more in arms about
0:31:46had Apple chosen to use those instead of their preformed ones.
0:31:51When we were playing the what are they going to call their tablet guessing game I didn't
0:31:56guess iPad but my only but it was one of the ones that was tossed out because it seemed
0:32:00kind of obvious. And my only brush aside of iPad was it sounds and looks too much like
0:32:06iPod, so they're not going to do that. And they just went ahead and did it and like I
0:32:11spent two years on this show calling it an iPod. So I was right that it was very similar
0:32:18but it's like they just didn't care. But that's how I feel about the Force Touch thing. It's
0:32:21like come on.
0:32:22It's not that bad a name. And it's yeah, as I said, it's a good descriptor of what it
0:32:28I mean either that or they could have called it the magical what's-it trackpad. You won't believe is actually doing
0:32:34Like I you I mean you got a chance to test it out in the store. It feels wacky, right?
0:32:39It's crazy
0:32:40You really it's just like Matthew pansarino said on my show last week that it's he didn't he didn't really wreck
0:32:46He didn't know that it wasn't clicking until they you know
0:32:49He kind of because you miss it when you're sitting there in the room watching the keynote like it's you you can't rewind
0:32:56Right. I mean that it was the one thing that like having you know getting for the first time in years getting to watch one
0:33:02Remotely instead of there you definitely it's easier
0:33:05You know - you can pause for a second and write your note and then you know
0:33:09Just fall behind by 10 seconds in the stream and go when you're in the room you miss stuff and he missed
0:33:13The emphasis that it doesn't actually move and so he went in the hands-on area and was like, this is great
0:33:19You know, it's neat the way it clicks and they're like, well, it doesn't really click and he's like
0:33:22What are you talking about?
0:33:22And then they told him and he was like that's not true and they like
0:33:25Turned the machine off for him so he could try it when the machine was off and you know, it doesn't move
0:33:29Yeah, that's uncanny
0:33:31And that's the baffling part is I didn't get a chance to try it out until until this week with with the machine completely off
0:33:38I went to an Apple store and that is when you realize oh, this is actually some high-level wizardry
0:33:44Crap like this. I know what it is doing in theory. Like I know that you know the
0:33:51It's not electromagnets, but it's something similar.
0:33:54I know that it's basically sending vibrations to my finger
0:33:58that make it feel like a click
0:33:59even though my finger is moving sideways.
0:34:01But in my brain, it feels like I am pressing down
0:34:04and the trackpad is physically depressing.
0:34:06And that's even more so,
0:34:09I don't know if they had like different apps
0:34:11at the Apple store that you were playing with,
0:34:14but like I got to play with it
0:34:16in a couple of different things, including QuickTime.
0:34:18And the QuickTime one was the really sort of crazy wacky,
0:34:21my brain is being slowly disassembled into mush thing.
0:34:24Because when you're in QuickTime with Force Touch
0:34:27and you press the fast forward button,
0:34:30as you like put a little bit more pressure on the track pad,
0:34:34it speeds up to the point where it like,
0:34:36it speeds up like 60 times,
0:34:37but you can slowly release that pressure
0:34:41while your finger is still down
0:34:42and the speed starts to slow down again.
0:34:46So it feels almost like a gas pedal worth of trackpad
0:34:49where you're like, vroom, vroom, vroom.
0:34:52Like that, I don't know, it's such a different experience
0:34:56than I've ever had on a computer.
0:34:59Like, I mean, that's a technological,
0:35:01like that's old school, right?
0:35:02Cars have had that kind of control for years.
0:35:05But being able to do that on a flat glass surface
0:35:08was really kind of mind bogglingly,
0:35:11you know, time bendingly crazy.
0:35:14- Yeah, which in turn makes me wonder
0:35:15about like the gaming implications.
0:35:17- Oh yeah, the gaming implications,
0:35:19the drawing implications.
0:35:21- Yeah, drawing.
0:35:22- Pressure sensitive, I love that on the MacBook website
0:35:26where they're like pressure sensitive drawing
0:35:29and then they show a picture of the preview signature
0:35:34because that's the only thing that Apple has
0:35:37in its default apps that can accurately show
0:35:39pressure sensitive drawing.
0:35:41But as soon as they started talking about that
0:35:43and I like, I quiz the Apple reps pretty in depthly
0:35:45being like, so pressure sensitivity,
0:35:48how many levels do you have?
0:35:49Like, what are we talking about here?
0:35:52And they are of course, very, very charmingly vague
0:35:54as always, but what I was able to get out is like,
0:35:57there's a fair amount of ramp built into the,
0:36:01built into the underlying software technology
0:36:03of Force Touch, which means,
0:36:05and the fact that it's available as an SDK
0:36:08for developers to hook into.
0:36:10It basically means that like developers can set
0:36:13sort of click points and pressure points at any point like
0:36:16along this curve
0:36:18uh... this this you know pressure sensitivity curve
0:36:21so in theory you could
0:36:23you could have any number of pressure points or any number of uh...
0:36:27you know multiple clicks
0:36:28and i just think about like going back to games for a second i think about
0:36:32huh
0:36:33playing wow in college and having to go get like a six button mouse to like map
0:36:37all of my
0:36:38key combos
0:36:39too
0:36:40and i'm like
0:36:41With a force touch trackpad in theory,
0:36:44you could have like a different level of pressure touch
0:36:46for each key combo or each like mouse combo
0:36:50that you'd normally need like an up button,
0:36:51a down button, a side button, a squeeze button.
0:36:54Like that is really, really nifty to me.
0:36:58- Yeah, and I think about like how
0:37:01when you get really into like the type of software
0:37:06you specialize in, like if you're an audio editor
0:37:09or a video editor and you just live and breathe in your editing software.
0:37:14And once that's force touched enabled for like scrubbing, which is clearly, like you
0:37:20said, it's already built into QuickTime, so it's clearly, that's the way things are going.
0:37:25But you'll be able, once you do it 40, 50, 60 hours a week, it's like you'll be able
0:37:31to play that scrub controller like playing a musical instrument in terms of going faster
0:37:36and slower with your touch.
0:37:38Yeah, I mean, did you see the there was an iMovie update a couple days ago that came
0:37:43out with support for Force Touch track pads.
0:37:48And it offer it came with two different things, one of which I think is a scrubbing feature.
0:37:53And the other was there's a little bit now when you kind of scroll through a clip, you
0:37:57get a little bit of haptic feedback when you come to the end of a clip or you bump at the
0:38:01end of the clip.
0:38:02So I mean, I'm like, I didn't even think about that,
0:38:06where it's again, texture as well as physical clicking.
0:38:11- Yeah, it really brings back analog sensibility.
0:38:15- Yeah, well, I mean, you remember the knobs,
0:38:19like the USB knobs that I wanna say it's Kensington
0:38:23that makes them.
0:38:24- Where it glowed blue, right?
0:38:28- Yeah, Kensington or Belkin or something like that.
0:38:31But I knew editors who absolutely relied on those knobs
0:38:35who were like, yeah, this is as close as I'm gonna get
0:38:37to a physical editing machine.
0:38:38And it's like, well, five years down the line,
0:38:40now you potentially have a track pad
0:38:42that can do all of that?
0:38:44What, what is this madness?
0:38:47- That's great, I never even thought about that though,
0:38:48but that's brilliant though to have like,
0:38:50just like a slight tick as you get between clicks
0:38:53and then you can feel it.
0:38:54And it's again, like you go back to like the analog era
0:38:57when you people, you know, like to edit film,
0:38:59you'd literally splice pieces of film together.
0:39:03And at that splice, there'd be a physical,
0:39:06like where you just pretty much just put tape around it.
0:39:09- Yeah, well, it's funny to me,
0:39:11because you think on the software side,
0:39:14Apple has been working harder and harder
0:39:16to kind of take the skeuomorphism out of the design.
0:39:20But I feel like in a large way,
0:39:21they're kind of putting that into hardware.
0:39:24So it's like, we don't necessarily need our video clips
0:39:27to look like analog video clips anymore.
0:39:30But we're gonna give you more and more controls
0:39:33on the physical side that make it feel like you're dealing
0:39:36with tangible materials, that make it feel
0:39:38like you're actually interacting with something
0:39:40besides glass.
0:39:41I don't know, it feels like the idea of the iPad
0:39:45or the iPhone as blank slate was step one,
0:39:48where it's like, okay, you can load anything on it.
0:39:50Now we're gonna let you touch anything on it.
0:39:53Now-- - God, what?
0:39:54Where else could you do that?
0:39:56Like I'm even imagining like in the future,
0:39:58if it gets more refined, like as you,
0:40:02like if you're editing text
0:40:03and you have like a red squiggly underlined word
0:40:05that's misspelled, like maybe you get like a slight,
0:40:08as you move the arrow over it, it--
0:40:10- It buzzes, yeah. - Yeah, or like
0:40:12just a little bit of friction or something.
0:40:13- Yeah, just a, well yeah,
0:40:15it makes your scroll slightly slower.
0:40:17- Right, like maybe you wanna stop here.
0:40:19- Yeah, well and the accessibility implications too are huge
0:40:23Like imagine instead of having to have a braille keyboard
0:40:26or a braille touch pad, turning on maybe accessibility braille
0:40:31or something like that and then all of a sudden,
0:40:33you're moving your cursor over words
0:40:36and it feels like the braille version of the word.
0:40:39Like obviously that's probably years down the line
0:40:41but it's still like the potential of that is really cool.
0:40:44- Right, or anytime it hovers over a button really.
0:40:47- Yeah, oh yeah, popping out buttons.
0:40:48I'm sure just like with almost every SDK
0:40:52that has weird, crazy things like this.
0:40:55I'm sure that everybody and their mother
0:40:57is going to make buttons that give you haptic feedback
0:41:00for like the first year, right?
0:41:01Where you like, you roll over it.
0:41:02It's like every single button goes like,
0:41:04bump, bump, bump, bump, bump.
0:41:06But as people kind of get more used to it,
0:41:10I feel like we can have some really,
0:41:12really revolutionary stuff.
0:41:13- Yeah, the thing that really blew me away was,
0:41:15and I've known this 'cause I've never been fully on board
0:41:19with their getting rid of the separate buttons.
0:41:22for the trackpad.
0:41:24So like, you know, like step one was they got rid of buttons
0:41:27and made the whole trackpad a button.
0:41:29- Yeah.
0:41:30- And I've never been fully on board with that because,
0:41:33and Schiller, you know, showed the mechanics of it exactly
0:41:36because it's like a teeter totter
0:41:38with the fulcrum at the top.
0:41:40- Yeah, you can't click on the top.
0:41:41- It's hard to click on the top.
0:41:42And I click at the top way more than I click at the bottom
0:41:45because the menus bars at the top, you know,
0:41:48the close button for windows is at the top,
0:41:50The tabs are at the top.
0:41:52So I've never been fully on board with that
0:41:54because the trackpad clicks better at the bottom.
0:41:57And even for years, I guess I've kind of gotten away from it
0:42:01but the way that you can still keep your thumb
0:42:04at the bottom and just do all your clicks there,
0:42:06even if you're moving it, they kind of let you treat it
0:42:08like the buttons are still there at the bottom.
0:42:11With the Force Touch trackpad,
0:42:13the click is the same everywhere.
0:42:14- Yeah.
0:42:16- And it's like this is the first one
0:42:17where not having the standalone buttons,
0:42:19There's no trade-off involved.
0:42:21- No, it is really cool.
0:42:23Like I intentionally, when I played around with it
0:42:26in the hands-on, I intentionally was like clicking
0:42:28in corners trying to like see, all right,
0:42:30well, is this really click anywhere?
0:42:33Or is it like click in the center?
0:42:34And it really is like, you can go to the top left corner.
0:42:37And I think I only got one bad click out of like 10 minutes
0:42:40of playing around with that track bad.
0:42:42- My son was really skeptical.
0:42:43So he's fifth grade and they have a bunch of Chromebooks
0:42:46at his school.
0:42:48And it's not because he's my son,
0:42:50it just is, he said all the kids hate them.
0:42:53'Cause all the kids have like Apple Slips at home.
0:42:55And they all hate them.
0:42:57And then like the one day, it was like they had like,
0:42:59everybody got in trouble because a whole bunch of them
0:43:02got like trashed.
0:43:03And I was like, that's why you guys have Chromebooks
0:43:05instead of MacBooks.
0:43:07You're a bunch of reckless.
0:43:08Anyway, but all the Chromebooks they have don't click.
0:43:11They're tap track pads.
0:43:13You move them around and then you just tap to do it.
0:43:16And he said that's and that's what he thought this was going to be like.
0:43:18And I said, No, I'm telling you, I was like, I haven't felt it yet.
0:43:21But trust me, there's no way Apple would ship it like that.
0:43:24And he was like, rolling his eyes.
0:43:25And he was like, I'm so glad I already have my trackpad that clicks.
0:43:29And then we got to the store.
0:43:30And he was, you know, he was like, Okay, you're right.
0:43:32This is nothing like the Chromebooks.
0:43:34Yeah, I mean, I've hated tap like, I have tap to click on now.
0:43:38But I this is like, after seven years of being like, tap to click is horrible, and you accidentally,
0:43:45you know, brush on it and then your cursor moves everywhere.
0:43:48And it's such an uncomfortable compromise.
0:43:52Especially if you like have it,
0:43:55like I like having my trackpad very responsive.
0:44:00I like it being very quick.
0:44:02So having tap to click on, it's like, oh, you move it once
0:44:05and then all of a sudden your trackpad's over here
0:44:06and you're selecting some texts that you never intended.
0:44:10I don't know, I like the physical buttons.
0:44:12I've always liked the physical buttons.
0:44:13And so having Apple actually be able to build something that feels like physical buttons
0:44:18but uses the technology of the multi-touch trackpad, it's really cool.
0:44:24Yeah.
0:44:25All right, let me take a break.
0:44:26I'm still not done talking about Force Touch, but let me take a break and thank our next
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0:47:16so I I I think everybody's to thinking about this so
0:47:20Usually, the last, I would say, you know, really pretty much since the iPhone came out,
0:47:27iOS has sort of been the leading edge platform for new stuff.
0:47:34And it was, you know, it wasn't like back to iPhone, it was back to the Mac when, you
0:47:39know, stuff like multi-touch and things like that.
0:47:43But here's Force Touch and iOS is last platform to the game.
0:47:48Yeah, you could argue that the watch technically led with it, but the watch isn't out yet.
0:47:54And the I mean, I guess the MacBook isn't out yet either.
0:47:57But but yeah, I'm I think it's interesting because I mean, we've heard rumors about haptic
0:48:03feedback coming to the Mac and iOS platforms for years.
0:48:08I want to say the first the first patent over this thing came out, I want to say like three
0:48:13or four months after the original iPad.
0:48:17I remember looking over in a frenzy being like,
0:48:19pressure sensitive screen,
0:48:21pressure sensitive screen drawing, oh my gosh.
0:48:24But yeah, I feel like this technology
0:48:28has been very long in development.
0:48:31And it just, it's which the platform
0:48:37that made the most sense to launch it on,
0:48:39I think is probably,
0:48:40when I think about launching it on iOS
0:48:44versus launching it on the Mac,
0:48:47I feel like there's a lot more flexibility
0:48:52on the Mac platform, if that makes sense, than iOS,
0:48:55in that iOS has so many different multi-touch controls
0:49:00at this point, especially when you translate
0:49:02over to the iPad, that introducing Force Touch
0:49:06on the phone first, being like,
0:49:09not only do you have contextual menus with Force Touch,
0:49:11but we're opening this up to app developers.
0:49:14And I feel, I'm like, I'm trying to think about
0:49:16when you would launch such a thing,
0:49:17it would probably be WWDC because you know,
0:49:19you want an SDK for this and all of that.
0:49:23And the only real time to do that would have been last year
0:49:27during the iOS 8 extravaganza explosion.
0:49:30- That's actually, that's an interesting point.
0:49:33I haven't thought about that.
0:49:34So, hmm, how do you like, so they did last year
0:49:38is a perfect example where they snuck into WWDC, not snuck,
0:49:41but they had a whole bunch of sessions, important sessions
0:49:45on the display sizes, you know, which really only made sense in the context of there are
0:49:53going to be some new screen sizes.
0:49:55Oh yeah.
0:49:57But they didn't say that.
0:49:59It was all sort of hypothetical.
0:50:00Like if you had a device that was bigger than an iPhone but smaller than an iPad, blah,
0:50:06blah, blah.
0:50:07Hypothetically.
0:50:08I'm not sure they could get away with that with Force Touch.
0:50:11I don't know.
0:50:12Yeah.
0:50:13I mean, yeah.
0:50:14For iOS.
0:50:15where they're like, oh, potentially this thing is coming down the line,
0:50:19hint, hint, nudge, nudge.
0:50:21Whereas if you lead off with force touch in the watch and force touch in the Mac,
0:50:27and you lead off in the spring with it, that gives people all of the spring,
0:50:33all of the summer, some of the fall to get used to developing properly with it.
0:50:39We were talking about Button-a-palooza,
0:50:42Like it gets, it allows developers to kind of get all of their immediate must use this everywhere kind of out of their system.
0:50:50And it allows them to get to know the Force Touch technology well enough so that when say, they come out down the line in September saying,
0:50:59"Oh, guess what? You know that iPad Pro rumor or you know the iPhone, the iPhone it has Force Touch 2 now.
0:51:05we have Force Touch across all our devices.
0:51:08And we'll release an SDK for developers
0:51:11to be able to build with it.
0:51:13Any developer who's already been playing around on the Mac
0:51:16is like, oh yeah, I know how Force Touch works.
0:51:18I know perfectly how I could implement this into my app.
0:51:21Whereas, you try and do it the other way around.
0:51:24You try and launch a brand new technology on iOS
0:51:29in advance, I don't know.
0:51:34I lost my train of thought.
0:51:35But I…
0:51:36Well, one of the things…
0:51:37I mean, you personally are like a…
0:51:39I don't know.
0:51:40I don't even know.
0:51:41Like a hobbyist level illustrator.
0:51:44You like to sketch.
0:51:45You like to draw.
0:51:46So clearly that's one of the things you're personally looking at this for.
0:51:49Absolutely.
0:51:50But it's way more interesting on iOS and especially the iPad than it is on the Mac
0:51:55for drawing because drawing on a trackpad is always going to have…
0:51:59matter how sensitive the trackpad is there's that layer of indirection where
0:52:04you're drawing on this thing that doesn't show what you're drawing and
0:52:08you're looking above it on a display where it shows what you're drawing
0:52:11whereas drawing on an iPad it's right there. It's drawing directly on the
0:52:16screen yeah it's the the contrast between anybody who's ever used a a
0:52:21Wacom tablet it's the difference between an Intuos 2 you know just sketching on
0:52:26on the static surface and having it reflect on the screen
0:52:31versus like a Cintiq, which is a monitor.
0:52:34So actually having it directly under.
0:52:36When the Force Touch first came out, I got really excited
0:52:39and I wrote an article on I'm more about, you know,
0:52:41what does this mean for the rumored iPad Pro?
0:52:43And what does this mean for iPads in general?
0:52:45And someone was like, you can't use Force Touch
0:52:48on a multi-touch screen with pixels,
0:52:51it's going to damage the pixels.
0:52:53And I got a really good laugh out of that.
0:52:56I'm like technically a MacBook trackpad is a
0:52:59There what my phone? Uh-huh
0:53:02It's fine. It's in a case
0:53:05The MacBook trackpad is a multi touch screen essentially
0:53:08They're just there are no pixels underneath it. And again, the glass doesn't move it is glass. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's
0:53:15engineering wise trickier because you've also got a display but it's sure you got a map you got a map the
0:53:22your input to specific pixels on the screen, which is also, I mean, that's something, speaking
0:53:28from putting my Illustrator hat on for a second, that's something that illustrators and stylus
0:53:34makers have struggled with a lot with the iPad, because the iPad's initial touch targets
0:53:40were very much built for finger-sized input.
0:53:44So it's also why you saw like styluses with these big round sort of rubbery nibs the first
0:53:50couple years. And also why if you have an iPad Air 2 and a stylus, all of a sudden the stylus like is cruddy. It doesn't work very well anymore. Because between the iPad Air and the iPad Air 2, they like completely changed how finger input was done. So, so on a from a finger point doesn't feel like anything but from a stylus all of a sudden, like, all the pixels are off mapped and everything's off center. And sometimes you won't even like it doesn't even connect like it's a bunch of bunch of gibberish, which
0:54:20Anyway, like the point of that is just that,
0:54:23actually having mapped pixels to pressure sensitivity
0:54:29and a pressure sensitive screen would be huge for artists.
0:54:35And like, I just, I dick around, I sketch sometimes,
0:54:38I'm not a heavy duty illustrator,
0:54:40but I talk to like, I have friends who are cartoonists
0:54:42and web cartoonists who have been wanting
0:54:45a pressure sensitive iPad screen for years,
0:54:48because the idea, especially with something like Handoff,
0:54:51the idea of being able to start a sketch on your iPad
0:54:54and have the same amount of control and precision
0:54:58as you do working on a Wacom Cintiq, it's a pipe dream.
0:55:02It's like that is the thing that artists want.
0:55:07- Yeah, and I think that it's only natural
0:55:10that the smarts go into the drawing surface
0:55:14and not the stylists.
0:55:16- Yeah.
0:55:17You know, and the only way to get any kind of pressure sensitivity up until now on iOS
0:55:21is to use some kind of pressure sensitive stylus.
0:55:24And it's just, I just feel like that's not right.
0:55:26And it's, you know, it even harkens back to the analog days where the pressure is registered
0:55:30on paper.
0:55:31It's the pen isn't smart about it.
0:55:32You know, it's the paper that absorbs the pressure if you're going to do a hard stroke
0:55:36versus a light stroke.
0:55:37Yeah, absolutely.
0:55:38And actually, that's something going back to like force touch and haptics.
0:55:43That's one of the things that got me super excited is not just that the screen is recognizing
0:55:48your pressure and whether you're making a little light thin line or a dark thick line
0:55:53based on your pressure.
0:55:54But if the haptics can provide click feedback, it's a possibility that they can provide a
0:56:01little bit of rumbling feedback while you're drawing too to give you a little bit more
0:56:05or at least feel like you're getting a little bit more resistance, which I don't know if
0:56:09you've ever tried drawing on an iPad screen, but one of my biggest criticisms has always
0:56:13the fact that like, if you're drawing
0:56:15with anything fine tipped, or even if, you know,
0:56:17even with a rubber stylus
0:56:18or one of those paintbrush styluses,
0:56:20it feels like you're drawing on glass.
0:56:22There's no pretending that.
0:56:26Like even on a Wacom tablet,
0:56:28it feels like you're drawing on glass or on plastic.
0:56:30It doesn't feel like paper.
0:56:31And like if haptics could do that,
0:56:33even to like 50% of what paper feels like,
0:56:37that could be really incredible, right?
0:56:39Like that's a completely different experience
0:56:42that we're feeling with what's otherwise a stationary glass surface. Yeah, so the
0:56:49things that come to mind for me for the future of this Taptic Engine going
0:56:54across everything Apple does for iOS, artists definitely. It also really
0:57:00makes me think about, like you know, like you brought up the rumored you know
0:57:04mythical iPad Pro, you know, which obviously is not coming out this spring.
0:57:09maybe now if people are thinking maybe that's part of the big fall you know stuff this year
0:57:14I you know everybody's been saying that for a long time and there have been rumors that apples you
0:57:19know commissioning screens and stuff like that but then it's I've always thought well who's the market
0:57:24right and artists would definitely be one right like I think and you know no question yeah right
0:57:29no question um so I think that's got to be you know if if the device exists that has to be part
0:57:36of it, I think. I feel like the iPad Pro market, the only way they're going to, like, Apple has
0:57:42developed machines that are primarily designed for the creative area before, which is to say,
0:57:48like the Mac Pro is for a long time was designed for software engineers and filmmakers and, you
0:57:56know, people who were doing high level video intensive work. But, you know, people have argued,
0:58:01well, Apple doesn't really care about creatives anymore. And I don't necessarily think that's true.
0:58:06But I think their viewpoint has broadened a little bit.
0:58:09And I kind of feel like for the iPad Pro to be successful,
0:58:12it has to aggressively target business in a way.
0:58:15And again, from an artist's perspective,
0:58:19I see Force Touch being very useful
0:58:20because of the haptics, because of the pressure, all of that.
0:58:24But from a business perspective,
0:58:26the thing that kind of caught my attention
0:58:29when we were talking about bigger screens
0:58:31and also haptic responses, digital keyboards.
0:58:36The idea, like we've seen really,
0:58:38really crappy implementations of this
0:58:40in Blackberry a couple of years ago,
0:58:42when they actually, you know,
0:58:43they made the screen click for,
0:58:45I think the Blackberry Storm and the Storm 2
0:58:47had electromagnetic responses,
0:58:49but it just didn't feel very good.
0:58:51And it was really, really sketchy.
0:58:53Didn't quite work when you're tapping on it.
0:58:56But if you had an iPad Pro, say that was,
0:58:58I don't know, 12, 13 inches,
0:59:00and you had haptics available for drawing programs,
0:59:04but then you pull up the keyboard,
0:59:05and when you're typing, you get the feeling
0:59:07that you're physically depressing keys,
0:59:10and you get the feeling of being on a key
0:59:14versus typing in between a key.
0:59:16I feel like that could potentially be a game changer
0:59:21for the iPad in regards to writing and functioning with it.
0:59:24- Yeah, I thought of that too.
0:59:25I think that would even, in theory,
0:59:27I could see how that would even help on the phone.
0:59:29- Oh, yeah.
0:59:30But the big but is that it seems like you'd only get
0:59:34that feedback after pressing.
0:59:37- Yeah.
0:59:38- So it's more, it's not like you'd know,
0:59:40I don't see how they could do it unless they could actually
0:59:42raise the screen in advance, which doesn't seem like
0:59:45that technology exists yet, especially if you're talking,
0:59:49you know, at the same time about Apple's desire
0:59:52to move from glass to sapphire, which is hard.
0:59:54Like you can't make sapphire raise up in a bubble
0:59:57on the fly.
0:59:59Some substance could, but you wouldn't get that feedback
1:00:02before you press, you'd only get it afterwards.
1:00:04It would just be a way to know that maybe you just,
1:00:07you thought you were typing a D, but ooh,
1:00:10it feels like I got the D and the F at the same time.
1:00:14- Yeah, the other thought is you use the pressure sensitivity
1:00:17to be that when you lightly brush your fingers
1:00:20against the keyboard, it doesn't actually type down.
1:00:22It just lets you feel those keys,
1:00:25and then when you press a little bit harder,
1:00:27it types for you.
1:00:28That might be a little bit of a,
1:00:30or it might be too much of an adjustment to do on an iPad,
1:00:33but I like the idea, especially,
1:00:36I was actually thinking about it after I got a chance
1:00:38to type on the new MacBook, going back to that for a second,
1:00:41because the new MacBook's keys,
1:00:44I mean, they talked a lot about the butterfly design
1:00:46and all of that,
1:00:47but the keys are significantly shorter and thinner
1:00:50than they are even on the current MacBook Air.
1:00:53And initially, it took a second for me
1:00:56to kind of get used to it
1:00:57because I was really like hammering down on the keys
1:01:01because it's what I'm used to with the air
1:01:03and like the even the older keyboards
1:01:06with like really thick manual keys.
1:01:10But with the MacBook,
1:01:12after a little bit of like tinkering with it,
1:01:14like feeling it out,
1:01:16I found that I was almost gliding around the keyboard
1:01:20when I was typing.
1:01:23So it didn't, you know,
1:01:24it wasn't like physically picking my finger up,
1:01:26tapping another thing physically, da da da da da,
1:01:27but it was moving my fingers very quickly
1:01:31and only pressing down when I felt kind of like the ridges
1:01:34onto a certain key.
1:01:37I don't know if that makes any sense,
1:01:39but it feels to me like the new MacBook keyboard
1:01:43is practically like a force touch trackpad.
1:01:47It's so small and so thin that it like, I don't know,
1:01:53It feels like that is potentially down the line
1:01:56where Apple could go with keyboards.
1:01:58- It makes me think I won't like it because I feel like,
1:02:01but on the other hand, I've never liked typing
1:02:03on any laptop keyboard ever made.
1:02:05It's all just a degree of how little I like it
1:02:09compared to a real solid clicky desktop keyboard.
1:02:12It's intriguing to me though.
1:02:15I do, and I love that slow motion video they made
1:02:18of the fingers making the whole thing go down.
1:02:20- The wobble of the keyboard, yeah.
1:02:22Well, I would call it like, not a thinness,
1:02:24but like a shallowness, that's the main thing.
1:02:26- Yeah. - It doesn't,
1:02:27it just, there's not that, there's just,
1:02:28and there physically isn't the room to press down.
1:02:30I just sent you a link, and this is way before your time.
1:02:33This is like-- - Oh no, I know,
1:02:34I know the ARRI 400. (laughs)
1:02:36- The ARRI 400 was-- - Yeah.
1:02:38- I remember wanting one, so, but I wanted every computer.
1:02:42At like in your-- - Of course.
1:02:43- I wanted one of everything, and I got none of them.
1:02:45(both laughing)
1:02:46But I remember when this came out,
1:02:47and they had demo units at like, I think it was Kmart,
1:02:50one of the stores had 'em. - Mm-hmm.
1:02:51And there was the Atari 800 too.
1:02:52The 800 had a real keyboard.
1:02:54I'll put this in the show notes, the Atari 400,
1:02:56which had, I don't even know what you would call that.
1:02:58What would you call that keyboard?
1:03:00- I feel like that was a touch type keyboard
1:03:03before touch type was a thing on Macs,
1:03:06where it's just like, it's a mat
1:03:08with slightly raised indents for where keys should be,
1:03:11but they're like little tiny buttons
1:03:15hidden underneath the keys.
1:03:17They're not even buttons, they're like dimples.
1:03:20- Right, it was so bad.
1:03:22And I remember all of my friends,
1:03:23even though I was the one, the weird one,
1:03:25who was obsessed with keyboard clickiness even at that age
1:03:28and nobody else really cared, but everybody agreed,
1:03:31my God, this computer's keyboard
1:03:32is the biggest piece of crap ever.
1:03:34Like this is insane.
1:03:36I think it was like a classic,
1:03:38I'm guessing internally at Apple,
1:03:39it was like a classic upsell,
1:03:41where the Atari 400 really only existed
1:03:44to get people to buy the Atari 800.
1:03:46- Oh yeah, where it's like, sure,
1:03:48you could have this or for X amount of dollars more,
1:03:52you could have a real keyboard.
1:03:53You want a real keyboard, don't you?
1:03:55- It was, so they advertised it
1:03:57as an advanced childproof design
1:03:59featuring a pressure sensitive wipe clean keyboard.
1:04:03- Well, I mean, I guess it would be a lot harder
1:04:05to spill applesauce on it, I don't know.
1:04:09I mean, I feel like spilling something
1:04:11on any computer in the 80s was bad news, period.
1:04:15- Yeah, but that's, you know,
1:04:16I think the new MacBook keyboard can beat that one.
1:04:18- Yeah, well, so I completely under stand
1:04:21your hesitation on it because I was deaf,
1:04:23like I don't, I'm not a huge fan of the laptop keyboards,
1:04:26especially the increasing obsession
1:04:29with thinner and shallower keyboards,
1:04:33but you need it for a computer that's so thin
1:04:36that it makes the current MacBook Airs look like giants.
1:04:42But I genuinely really, really enjoyed typing on it.
1:04:46And I don't know if it's just,
1:04:48I physically noticed the wobble of the keys
1:04:50after using that MacBook,
1:04:52like going back to my MacBook Air.
1:04:53But there is something significantly faster feeling
1:04:58about typing on it.
1:04:59Once you get used to it,
1:05:00the first five minutes,
1:05:02it feels like you're typing in bizarro land,
1:05:04or almost like you're typing on glass.
1:05:06Because when I first started using it,
1:05:10I was pounding so hard
1:05:11that I was making the entire computer shake.
1:05:14And I was really kind of surprised by that.
1:05:16'Cause I'm like, I don't feel like I'm typing
1:05:18that much harder than I do on my Air.
1:05:20And then once I sort of lightened up my pressure on it,
1:05:22I was able to go really fast.
1:05:25- That's how I type on every device.
1:05:26- Yeah, it's like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
1:05:28But no, it's, I don't know what,
1:05:31it was just a really quick learning curve.
1:05:33And I really enjoyed it.
1:05:36To the point where I'm, now that I'm using my Mac,
1:05:39But you know, going back to using my 11 inch MacBook Air,
1:05:42I'm kinda jealous.
1:05:45I really wanna use that keyboard.
1:05:47Not enough to get a new MacBook,
1:05:49but enough that I'm like, all right,
1:05:51can it be next year already?
1:05:52I would like to see this evolve into the other computers.
1:05:56- So this brings us back full circle
1:05:59to where we were half an hour ago,
1:06:00talking about a week later,
1:06:02how people seem more upset about the new MacBook
1:06:04than they were on the day of the event.
1:06:06Like as it settled in, people are upset.
1:06:08And one of the things I've detected, a recurring complaint,
1:06:13is that clearly what people wanted were the MacBook Air
1:06:17as we know it with a retina screen.
1:06:19- Oh yeah. - And they're not gonna get it.
1:06:21'Cause I think they know in their heart
1:06:22this means they're never gonna get it.
1:06:24That as prices drop on the components for this new MacBook,
1:06:29and once they can make it for like $999,
1:06:34I don't know if they'll do it all the way,
1:06:35maybe they'll keep the 11-inch Air around longer
1:06:37at $899 or something, but once they can make this $999,
1:06:41the MacBook Air goes away.
1:06:42- Yeah, I have to assume so,
1:06:44which makes me a little bummed to be honest.
1:06:47I really liked the 11 inch computer,
1:06:48but the 12 inch is not that much bigger, honestly.
1:06:52It's not that much, it's not like,
1:06:55you have a little bit of a width here and there,
1:06:58but overall it has very similarly the same footprint.
1:07:01- Yeah, it's a funny sort of way that like,
1:07:05they've expanded a lot of other things.
1:07:08Now there's two iPad sizes.
1:07:10Now there's three iPhone sizes
1:07:12and at least two at the current,
1:07:16you know, the latest and greatest.
1:07:18But now they're taking the standard MacBook
1:07:20from two sizes to one size,
1:07:22sort of splitting the difference.
1:07:24- Yeah, bringing it down to, all right,
1:07:26the Air is, if you want the light model,
1:07:28you're just gonna have to make do with 12 inches.
1:07:30And if you want more screen size variation,
1:07:33then let's look at the pro line.
1:07:36- Yeah, I think that's definitely it.
1:07:39But I think that as that settled in,
1:07:41people realize they're never gonna get an air as we know it,
1:07:45where, okay, we're gonna sacrifice a little,
1:07:47it's not gonna be the thinnest in the world,
1:07:49but it has a separate power port, it has MagSafe,
1:07:53it has a couple of USB ports,
1:07:55has a Thunderbolt, this dongle, not a dongle, a port.
1:08:01- A port, yeah.
1:08:02'cause dongle is what you wanna avoid.
1:08:04And it's just not gonna happen.
1:08:08And I feel like as people, as that settled in,
1:08:10now people are getting angry.
1:08:12But I still think though,
1:08:14like look at how different it is where in 2008
1:08:18when Apple unveiled the Air.
1:08:20- No one wanted an Air.
1:08:21- It was $3,100 to get the good one.
1:08:23And now you can get a good new MacBook for 1,300.
1:08:28The base model is actually pretty good.
1:08:29- Yeah, it's not bad at all.
1:08:31I got, you know, my most recent Air is $1,400,
1:08:35something like that for a completely maxed out.
1:08:38And I loved it.
1:08:38It was a great choice.
1:08:40- Yeah, and the other thing I feel like people
1:08:43cannot get through their head is the way
1:08:46that Apple is clearly saying,
1:08:47you're not supposed to work with a power connection.
1:08:51You're, you know, the future is not just wireless peripherals
1:08:56but wireless power, you know,
1:08:58that you're gonna charge when you're, you know,
1:09:01somewhere like overnight,
1:09:03and then you're gonna use the thing all day
1:09:05without having it plugged in.
1:09:06- You're just gonna run with it, yeah.
1:09:07And you know what, I was actually,
1:09:09my one concern with the new MacBook
1:09:11was the lack of MagSafe, especially,
1:09:15I don't know if you saw on Twitter,
1:09:16but yesterday I had a fun accident with my MacBook Air
1:09:19where it flew like six feet out of a backpack.
1:09:23- No! - Yeah.
1:09:24So I picked up my backpack and it wasn't zipped all the way
1:09:27And as I picked it up to swing it around onto my back,
1:09:30my MacBook Air flew out of the backpack
1:09:33and slammed onto the ground.
1:09:35And it's fine, except for a corner dent,
1:09:37because SSDs are magical things.
1:09:39- Wow.
1:09:40- Yeah, and thick bezels.
1:09:42Thank God for not edge-to-edge glass screens.
1:09:45But that said, as soon as that happened,
1:09:51and I was like, after I got over the heart attack,
1:09:53and they're like, "Oh my God, my MacBook's okay,"
1:09:56I immediately thought of, oh God,
1:09:58this is what's gonna happen to 100 MacBooks
1:10:00when someone trips over the USB-C cord,
1:10:03because they're just gonna go flying through the air,
1:10:05aren't they?
1:10:07And like, I'm kind of concerned still about the USB-C
1:10:12being the power charging solution.
1:10:14But it's like you said,
1:10:15I really think that by taking away MagSafe,
1:10:18Apple is basically saying,
1:10:20yo, you don't need to charge this computer,
1:10:22you know, nine to 10 hours of battery life,
1:10:24That should be good enough for anyone using this.
1:10:26And for me, I'm like, that's right on the edge.
1:10:30I feel like I would have been a lot more comfortable
1:10:33if they had released a machine that was like 14 to 16 hours
1:10:37of battery life, light web browsing,
1:10:39because 14 to 16 hours translates probably
1:10:42into seven to eight hours of like heavy usage
1:10:45or running multiple programs or watching video.
1:10:49- Yeah, lots of Safari tabs open.
1:10:51- Exactly.
1:10:52basically how any moderate to pro user
1:10:56destroys their travel machine.
1:10:59So nine to 10 hours makes me a little bit nervous,
1:11:02especially like, so during the keynote,
1:11:04I had my 11-inch MacBook Air, which has the same,
1:11:07this is last year's model,
1:11:09has the same reported nine to 10 hours as the new MacBook.
1:11:14And I had it tethered to a Canon Mark II
1:11:19shooting the keynote.
1:11:20And the battery went from 100% fully charged to 19% in an hour and 20 minutes with that tethering.
1:11:28And I ended up having to take off the tethering and turn my screen down really low and just spend the rest of the keynote like,
1:11:36"All right, I'm just gonna write color, no more photographs."
1:11:39So I think about things like that where I'm like, "Yes, this is not the ideal use case for this new MacBook."
1:11:49But still, it should probably last more than two hours
1:11:54in high usage scenarios without needing to be plugged in.
1:12:00And for people, like maybe Apple's just saying,
1:12:03those people who need high usage, high battery things,
1:12:07maybe you should still look at a computer
1:12:09that has a MagSafe.
1:12:10- Right, for now.
1:12:11- Yeah, for now.
1:12:12- And I'm not trying to say that it's not a loss
1:12:15because like almost everybody,
1:12:17I don't know if there's anybody who hasn't had one incident over the last the magsafe era where somebody tripped over a cable and
1:12:25Magsafe just popped, you know as advertised popped right out and you were like wow that magsafe just might have saved my computer
1:12:31It's happened to me
1:12:33So I'm not under playing it. I definitely think that not having magsafe is in some ways
1:12:38It's a loss because magsafe is amazing and what a clever idea and nobody else has it
1:12:43Low these many years later
1:12:47surprisingly but I really think that the message is you shouldn't be using it
1:12:54while it's powering or at least while it's connected to a wall outlet and so
1:12:58think about it and when this when when Mark Gurman's scoop on this design hit a
1:13:03couple I think was in January mm-hmm during CES and everybody you know the
1:13:08the first thing everybody said well this is this has to be wrong because there's
1:13:12no mag safe and there's no way they're gonna get rid of mag safe and then the
1:13:15The people who obviously had the right idea were like, "Well, iPad doesn't have MagSafe
1:13:22and an awful lot of people use their iPad the way other people use a MacBook."
1:13:30And you think about that and then you also think, "Well, then what do you do with an
1:13:33iPad if you're using it all day as a writer, as a student, as whatever, and you're low
1:13:40on power?"
1:13:41Well, you don't plug it in a wall.
1:13:42use like a mophie battery pack and plug it in. So and you're gonna be able to do that
1:13:47with the MacBook.
1:13:48Mophie MacBook case.
1:13:51Well I don't know about a case.
1:13:53Yeah but no I'm totally like I people what was it last week people were like oh Apple
1:13:59is going to allow people to make battery cases for the MacBook and I'm like it's it's standard
1:14:04it's USB-C. This is the first time like this is this is a charging port that they they
1:14:10don't control or own.
1:14:12So I kind of feel the power user move is not going to be to bring your charging cable along
1:14:18with you with your USB only MacBook, but the power user move is to bring a high capacity
1:14:25Mophie style power brick with you.
1:14:29And then you have it, then you don't need MagSafe because it'll just be sitting there
1:14:33right next to your MacBook on the table with a six inch USB cable.
1:14:39Yeah, I was actually you know what who the person the person who is going to make bank on the
1:14:44USB C accessories is who's going to make a hub a USB C hub that also has like a
1:14:5010,000 milliamp battery in it. Oh yeah. Wouldn't that be great like you plug your
1:14:55USB C into something like the size of a current Apple power brick maybe a little
1:14:59bit longer and then out of that you get a 10,000 milliamp battery you get a
1:15:04you a DisplayPort hub, you get USB ports,
1:15:08that would be a killer accessory for me.
1:15:12You can charge a couple hundred bucks for that.
1:15:13- I'm looking at my Mophie, it's old,
1:15:17there's a new one now with it's much more clever,
1:15:19but I have this couple of years old
1:15:21Mophie juice back power station.
1:15:24And now I'm just looking at it thinking like,
1:15:26well, look at all these sides,
1:15:27they could just fill it with USB ports, that'd be great.
1:15:30- Yeah. - It's like if Apple can,
1:15:31you know, still fill ports while filling its laptops
1:15:34of batteries, a battery manufacturer should totally be able to do that. No problem. That's
1:15:39definitely I think that's the power user move going forward is to treat it exactly like you
1:15:44would an iOS device, where you know, the if you expect to be running low on battery by the end of
1:15:50the day, don't assume that you're going to find a seat next to a wall outlet, bring a battery pack
1:15:57- Oh yeah, bring it.
1:15:59You know, I'm trying to find this article right now.
1:16:02Chris, what's his name?
1:16:07Chris, Christopher Finn wrote a really nice sort of eulogy
1:16:11for the PowerBook Duo on Macworld a couple days ago.
1:16:14He's been doing this like old tech column,
1:16:17like celebrating the history of past Apple devices.
1:16:21And I was thinking about like the PowerBook Duo
1:16:23was my first laptop and I love it very, very fondly.
1:16:26I was thinking about, man, you know, again,
1:16:28with the cool idea of like,
1:16:30the MacBook is probably underpowered right now.
1:16:34But you know, if people wanna take it to the next level,
1:16:37wouldn't it be cool if there was a, you know,
1:16:39PowerBook Duo doc style thing for the new MacBook
1:16:42where it's like you plug it in
1:16:43and then all of a sudden you've got all of these ports
1:16:45and you've got a super huge retina monitor
1:16:47and everything's magical.
1:16:48And maybe not Apple,
1:16:49maybe Apple is not the person to make the fancy retina,
1:16:53you know, retina display adaptation for the MacBook,
1:16:57but I'm sure somebody might, right?
1:16:59- Yeah, I don't know, but I've got Christopher's article,
1:17:02I'll put it in the show notes.
1:17:04It was a cool machine.
1:17:06- Yeah, it was.
1:17:07I mostly liked it because it was not a ThinkPad,
1:17:11I'll be honest.
1:17:12- God, look at the bezel around that display.
1:17:14- I know, that's beautiful, what, five pounds,
1:17:19I wanna say? - Are those volume buttons
1:17:20on the right? - 4.2 pounds.
1:17:22- Oh yeah.
1:17:22- It had bezel so thick.
1:17:24- No, no, no, those were the screen brightness.
1:17:26- Oh, all right.
1:17:26- That's right.
1:17:27'Cause you, my trick was always like
1:17:29turn the screen brightness down really low
1:17:31and then switch from 256 colors to black and white
1:17:34so you could get like an extra hour
1:17:36of playing Escape Velocity Nova.
1:17:38I remember, I think I got like four hours
1:17:41out of that battery once
1:17:42by like keeping it on the lowest settings.
1:17:45Oh God.
1:17:46- Anything that docked was always a clever,
1:17:48look at how thick those keys were though.
1:17:50- I know.
1:17:51keyboard was so fun oh my god look at that and it had little props i'm reading i forgot about that
1:17:57i forgot about the little feet little feet to prop the keyboard up i don't i think that was before
1:18:01we understood the ergonomics of props we used to type with our palms up completely ruining our
1:18:09wrists yeah the removable battery packs that's amazing all right i gotta link it up i can't
1:18:15tempted to just read it right yeah well and an educated reading on the air with john grueber of
1:18:21of the PowerBook Duo.
1:18:22- Anything with a dock though,
1:18:24it always sounded like a great idea
1:18:26and never actually took off.
1:18:27- Yeah, unfortunately,
1:18:29see, I feel like in the handoff era,
1:18:32that would be so cool where you're just like,
1:18:35even you just plug your USB-C MacBook in there.
1:18:38Oh, I guess it does this all wirelessly at this point.
1:18:41You know, I don't have to plug anything.
1:18:43Like I don't have to plug my MacBook into my iMac
1:18:46because all of the things here,
1:18:48I can mostly get on my computer via handoff
1:18:51or I can get everything from Dropbox directly.
1:18:54Like I don't keep any files on my MacBook Air.
1:18:56My MacBook Air has like a tiny little SSD, like a 128 SSD.
1:19:00And then everything I just store in Dropbox
1:19:03and I just grab what I want.
1:19:04- And then do you have the air set up
1:19:06not to mirror your entire Dropbox?
1:19:09- It's selective sync.
1:19:10So I have like my work files
1:19:11and then occasionally I'll pull over.
1:19:13Like if I'm working on a music project or a roller derby stuff
1:19:16I have like that specific folder synced,
1:19:18but everything else is just, if I need it,
1:19:21I'll download it somewhere else.
1:19:22- Yeah, that's the killer.
1:19:24That was like the level up for Dropbox
1:19:26that made it like infrastructure.
1:19:28- Oh yeah.
1:19:29- It's because then you could use it in scenarios like that
1:19:32where you can't mirror it all.
1:19:33And conversely, you can then use it in other scenarios,
1:19:36like if you have a big iMac on your desk
1:19:39and all of your photos are,
1:19:41it's like a humongous terabyte collection of photos,
1:19:44You can put them on Dropbox and not worry about what it's going to do to your SSD and your MacBook.
1:19:49Oh, yeah, you don't you don't want to cry.
1:19:51I'm I think I moved all of my photos to Dropbox last year after they acquired Loom, which was my sort of go to cloud photo.
1:19:57So a solution that night.
1:19:59I'm not crazy about Dropbox carousel because it's kind of it's kind of wonky and it's kind of broken right now.
1:20:04But it does allow you to very quickly like go to years and dates and stuff and just knowing that all of my photos are backed up and away somewhere.
1:20:13and then also locally onto my iMac.
1:20:15So I'm like, all right, I like,
1:20:17I don't have to panic about losing five years of photos
1:20:19because hard drives start clicking or SSDs explode
1:20:23or I don't know what SSDs do when they die.
1:20:25They just turn off.
1:20:27- Yeah, I think they just go corrupt.
1:20:28I think it's like they just turned to static.
1:20:30- Yeah. - I don't know.
1:20:31I've never had one go bad, but.
1:20:34- Nor have I.
1:20:35- Yeah, I think it's just like a state of corruption,
1:20:39but they don't click.
1:20:40- No, they certainly don't click.
1:20:41I never have to hear that sound again, knock on wood.
1:20:45- Let me take another break here,
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1:23:24While back I've been meaning to talk to you about this for forever. Serenity you had a story
1:23:29This is all the way back at Macworld. You did a story on
1:23:31The Lightroom for iPad. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I don't get it. I've been a Lightroom user for years and
1:23:40I've just it's like I'm starting to turn into an old man who's afraid to use new stuff. I like Lightroom
1:23:46I've been using it since 1.0
1:23:48It was like I tried aperture and I tried Lightroom and at least back then aperture was really slow
1:23:54and Lightroom was really fast and I was like I'll go with this and I've been the Lightroom user ever since I
1:23:59Don't get I don't get the iPad version
1:24:01yeah, I'm I feel like
1:24:04it's
1:24:06It's something that you have to actively
1:24:08insert into your workflow
1:24:11and like, you know some things you just they work seamlessly with you where it's to pixel mater is a great example of
1:24:19similarly
1:24:21an app that's both available on the Mac and on iOS.
1:24:24And I felt that it was like, it was really simple
1:24:28in Pixelmator, you just, you know, you do this
1:24:30and then Handoff does that magical.
1:24:33Lightroom for iPad, I feel like it took me a good month
1:24:39to really feel comfortable with it
1:24:41and to really get used to it.
1:24:42Like Jeff Carlson wrote our hands-on, I think,
1:24:46for Macworld when it first came out.
1:24:47And he kind of encouraged me to start using it.
1:24:51And I have to admit, I still don't use it all the time.
1:24:55And I still like, I'm still going between Aperture
1:24:58and Lightroom also, to be honest,
1:25:00because Aperture has better tethering workflow for me,
1:25:04in part because Jason Snell was,
1:25:07he wrote a bunch of Apple scripts for it.
1:25:09But I don't know.
1:25:10- Tethering meaning that you're shooting.
1:25:12- Shooting live.
1:25:14So like tether, yeah, exactly.
1:25:15There's so many meanings of tethering nowadays.
1:25:17Tethering, yeah, you're connecting your camera
1:25:20via USB to your Mac so that anything that you take
1:25:24is showing up immediately on your Mac
1:25:25rather than having to take it and offload
1:25:27and put back in into a via SD card.
1:25:32I don't know, I feel like the app is really, really useful
1:25:37for kind of seeing your library
1:25:39and for editing, doing light edits.
1:25:41But it again, like a lot of these
1:25:45is dependent on your internet connection
1:25:47and dependent on the closeness of your Lightroom library,
1:25:52where like you can,
1:25:53I don't feel like you could do everything
1:25:55that I might wanna do on Lightroom
1:25:58versus on Lightroom for the iPad
1:26:00versus on Lightroom for my Mac.
1:26:02I feel like I like the iPad a lot better
1:26:07as a photo editing service or service,
1:26:10a photo editing platform.
1:26:12I really like being able to physically highlight areas
1:26:17light areas with my finger and physically be able to like color things in or change
1:26:23dials by sliding like multi-touch gestures feel like a more natural editing experience
1:26:29because they feel more tactile than just pointing and clicking.
1:26:33But I don't, I also don't necessarily think that Lightroom for iPad is the best way to
1:26:40do it yet.
1:26:42It makes me question in sort of a broader example,
1:26:47I don't know if this is where you're going with this,
1:26:48but it makes me sort of question the just companies
1:26:52in general being like, well, we have a Mac app,
1:26:55we have to be on the iPad,
1:26:56and we have to have something on the iPad
1:26:59that links to our Mac app.
1:27:01And some people do this really well,
1:27:02and I think Lightroom is a decent example
1:27:05of a good adaptation and a good linkage to its Mac app.
1:27:09But with other ones, it just, it feels kind of throwaway,
1:27:11It feels like the company is just like,
1:27:14we need to have a presence on here.
1:27:16Actually, some of Adobe's other apps
1:27:18are really good examples of that,
1:27:19where a couple of their,
1:27:22like Photoshop, Photoshop Express for the iPhone.
1:27:26I remember being really excited when that first came out,
1:27:29being like, yes, finally I'll be able
1:27:30to have a good way to edit photos.
1:27:32Like it was two or three years ago.
1:27:33And then when I opened it, I'm like, this does nothing.
1:27:36This does absolutely nothing that I want it to do.
1:27:39- Yeah, my perspective is as like a decided,
1:27:42prosumer is probably the wrong way to put it
1:27:45because it puts the word pro before consumer.
1:27:48It's more like a--
1:27:49(Karen laughs)
1:27:51- Consumer with occasional pro dabbling.
1:27:54- Cons-fessional. (laughs)
1:27:56But I'm into photography enough
1:27:58that I still like to buy real cameras.
1:28:02I don't just shoot everything on my iPhone
1:28:03and I'll spend $1,000.
1:28:07I have a Canon 5D.
1:28:08It's years old now, the Mark II, but I have like a nice,
1:28:11the 50 millimeter F1.2 lens, which was, I don't know,
1:28:15I think it was like 1500 bucks.
1:28:16- It lasts forever.
1:28:17- All right, the glass definitely lasts.
1:28:20But you know, I have a couple thousand dollars of cameras,
1:28:23which is nothing compared to a serious photographer,
1:28:25but it's a lot more than most people.
1:28:27- It's an investment.
1:28:28- Which, where should I be editing my photos,
1:28:32has been a dilemma forever.
1:28:34and iPhoto was never right for me.
1:28:37And Lightroom at first really hit a sweet spot,
1:28:41but the problem I've run into with Lightroom
1:28:45is just that it ties my photos to my Mac,
1:28:49and they're not everywhere.
1:28:50Picture life doesn't really, I haven't really,
1:28:57they have a new thing for Lightroom,
1:28:58but it's like because I shoot in RAW
1:29:01and a lot of the photo upload sites
1:29:04want everything in JPEG, you have to like,
1:29:06you have to like export manually,
1:29:08which is way too much work.
1:29:09Like I'm not gonna do that.
1:29:10I just kind of, you know, I don't spend that much time.
1:29:13I just go through, throw out all the ones that are garbage,
1:29:15keep the ones that aren't garbage,
1:29:17find the ones that are actually really good
1:29:19and then maybe spend a couple minutes, you know,
1:29:22tweaking them to make them perfect, you know?
1:29:24So there's really like, I'll shoot, you know,
1:29:28like over a holiday or a vacation,
1:29:30I'll shoot like 300 photos.
1:29:31I'll throw 100 out, maybe 150 out,
1:29:35'cause they're garbage or duplicates,
1:29:37equally good as another shot taken at the same moment.
1:29:40And I'll find maybe a dozen that are really good,
1:29:42and then I'll take those dozen and apply filters
1:29:45and tweak the exposure to make it perfect,
1:29:48and then that's it, that's all I do, and then I'm done.
1:29:50I don't wanna sit there and have to pick
1:29:52which ones to export and stuff like that.
1:29:54So I'm hopeful.
1:29:55I guess where I'm going with this whole thing
1:29:56is that I'm kind of secretly hoping
1:29:58that the new photos for Mac will be good enough
1:30:02for all of that, that it'll make me wanna switch
1:30:04from Lightroom, even if I miss some of Lightroom's
1:30:07expert controls, that the overall flow
1:30:10of having my photos sync to iCloud,
1:30:14and then all I have to do is star them,
1:30:16and then the starred ones will show up
1:30:18on all my devices and stuff like that,
1:30:21is kind of what I'm hoping.
1:30:23- Yeah, so I've been testing the photos beta
1:30:26since I think the first developer beta on the phone
1:30:30and the first developer beta on the Mac,
1:30:32which was last month, I wanna say now.
1:30:34And Photos isn't perfect, but it feels,
1:30:40so I used Loom last two years ago when it showed up.
1:30:45I wanna say it started in 2013
1:30:46and then Dropbox bought it last year.
1:30:48And I really liked Loom for exactly the reason
1:30:51that you were describing,
1:30:52where it's like your photos are everywhere,
1:30:53although Loom didn't have photo editing features.
1:30:55So anytime I wanted to edit something,
1:30:57I had to pull it down and edit it in like Photoshop
1:31:00or something and then throw it back up.
1:31:01And that was messy.
1:31:04It didn't have the seamless experience that I really wanted.
1:31:08And photos comes closest, I think,
1:31:11especially like talking about what you really want
1:31:13out of a photo editor.
1:31:15The thing that really impresses me in photos
1:31:20is how easy it is to get a really nice edit from it.
1:31:25where like their editing controls are super simple.
1:31:28If you want them to be super simple,
1:31:30it's just, you know, it's three sliders.
1:31:32It's like the light, the color
1:31:36and the black and white slider.
1:31:38If you wanna tint your photo into black and white.
1:31:41But there's a lot of hidden stuff in there
1:31:44if you drop it down.
1:31:45Like if you drop down the light exposure,
1:31:47you've got exposure, highlights, shadows, brightness,
1:31:49contrast, stuff like that.
1:31:51And on Photos for Mac, there's even some more stuff
1:31:54that you can add like a histogram if you want,
1:31:57you know, more in depth about what your color's doing.
1:32:00You can add like sharpening and definition
1:32:02and noise reduction and white balance and levels.
1:32:05So you got a lot of controls there,
1:32:08which is not, I mean, it's not as good as aperture
1:32:10and it's not as good as Lightroom,
1:32:12but I also feel like this is a 1.0 product
1:32:14and it feels to me very much iMovie 08,
1:32:17or not even iMovie 08, iMovie 11,
1:32:19where it's like there's enough in there
1:32:21for the con professional,
1:32:24that you won't feel like you're just using baby tools
1:32:28the way that iPhoto was.
1:32:30My current struggle with photos for Mac
1:32:35is that I love the syncing, I love the editing tools.
1:32:39Favoriting is really easy,
1:32:40albums are syncing, which is really cool.
1:32:43Still no smart albums on iPhone,
1:32:45which I'm kind of bummed by.
1:32:47I feel like smart albums would be a really great way
1:32:49to organize certain things like screenshots, for example.
1:32:52But maybe it's too complicated on iOS right now.
1:32:56Maybe it's like a back project.
1:32:58But my problem is I already pay 10 bucks a month for Dropbox
1:33:03for having a terabyte of storage.
1:33:06And I have all my photos in Dropbox.
1:33:08And now I'm currently paying four bucks a month
1:33:12for iCloud Photo Library and the iCloud services,
1:33:15but I'm sure I'm gonna have to upgrade to the next tier
1:33:17as soon as I integrate my entire photo library
1:33:21into Photos for Mac.
1:33:21Right now I have about 5,000 photos
1:33:23and I think I have like 35, 40,000 photos
1:33:26sitting in Dropbox that I still have to integrate
1:33:30into this new library.
1:33:31And I'm a little afraid about how much money
1:33:33I'm gonna have to pay Apple every month
1:33:35to store all of those.
1:33:37And also there's the, Apple has,
1:33:41you know, Apple wants to make it really, really simple
1:33:43when it comes to optimizing photos.
1:33:45I had a big conversation with some of the Apple reps
1:33:47about like how that checkbox that says,
1:33:50optimize only like a certain subset of the photos
1:33:52on your hard drive and how that works.
1:33:54And basically it's dynamic.
1:33:59So it depends on how much space you have free
1:34:01and how much space you have on your hard drive total.
1:34:04And it chooses the photos automatically for you
1:34:08based on like what photos you've opened recently,
1:34:11the photos in your favorites
1:34:12and any photos that you're editing
1:34:14immediately get pulled down from the cloud.
1:34:17which is like, that's nice.
1:34:19And I like the idea of having to take it
1:34:21out of the user's hands, but at the same time,
1:34:24it makes it a little hard to be like,
1:34:26all right, well, I know I want a specific album
1:34:29to show to people.
1:34:31Do I have to star each one of those photos individually?
1:34:33Like, do I have to copy all of those photos
1:34:36and put them into a Dropbox album
1:34:38to make sure that they stay locally on my machine
1:34:40versus getting vanished up into the cloud?
1:34:43Do I have to open all of them?
1:34:46Apple tries to make things super easy and for the majority of people they're super easy
1:34:50and it's great and then there are the weird use cases where you're like I just I really
1:34:54just want to know that my photos are here so that I can use them.
1:34:59It's a really hard problem.
1:35:02It is.
1:35:03Because it is really wide-ranging.
1:35:06Once you start thinking about everything that you need in a complete photo system everything
1:35:13from import and reading all the various raw formats
1:35:18of all the various cameras and doing a good job of that,
1:35:20which in and of itself is like an underappreciated thing
1:35:24that Apple is doing.
1:35:25How many times do you get like a Mac OS X update
1:35:27that includes updates to--
1:35:29- Support for raw cameras, yeah.
1:35:31That's like 40 new raw cameras.
1:35:33And you think, I didn't know that there were that many
1:35:36raw cameras in existence. - Starting from that
1:35:37to all the editing and the smarts of that that you want,
1:35:41But then you get into the syncing stuff and it's so complicated.
1:35:44You know, it's, you know, like this thing about like with Apple Watch, like, I know
1:35:49that there's some people who are like, I think that they've said they've, you know, it's
1:35:53officially documented that there's only 75 megabytes of storage for photos, photos.
1:35:57Yep.
1:35:58And everybody's like, well, that's crazy.
1:35:59Because it's like, no, they're not going to give you're not going to put your full size
1:36:02photos, they're going to scale them because it doesn't make any sense to have a tiny retina
1:36:07screen.
1:36:08Why would you have full size photos, 20 megapixel photos?
1:36:11Right, even like eight megapixel photos right off the iPhone doesn't make any sense. It's only a it's a 42 millimeter screen
1:36:18Yeah, you know you're gonna be able to fit a lot of photos in 75 megabytes
1:36:23But how do you do that scaling though? Where does that where does that happen? And
1:36:27You know, it's just so complicated
1:36:29yeah, and I well, I feel like they've gotten they've gotten some of that kind of figured out already because
1:36:36When photos aren't stored, so I have optimization turned on
1:36:39for both my MacBook Air and my iPhone
1:36:42because I don't want 5,000 photos worth of space
1:36:47taken up on my computer.
1:36:48And for all of the photos that aren't stored locally,
1:36:53you still see like low res previews.
1:36:57And I have to wonder if those low res previews
1:37:00happen to be the same size as our nice little retina screen.
1:37:03I feel like the 38 millimeter is something like 212
1:37:08by 300 something.
1:37:10So those are pretty small pictures to begin with.
1:37:14So it may just be that like all of those low res snapshots
1:37:17that photos for Mac and photos for iOS stores by default
1:37:22may be the perfect size for retina on
1:37:25and those don't take up very much space at all.
1:37:27I think those are probably like kilobytes.
1:37:30- Yeah.
1:37:33So anyway, what is your overall verdict so far
1:37:35on I found the beta for Mac?
1:37:39- It's surprisingly solid actually.
1:37:41I am, especially even from the first beta.
1:37:43I had a couple of problems initially
1:37:46with iCloud photo library randomly turning off
1:37:48where I turn it on and then I'd relaunch photos for Mac
1:37:51and it would be off and I turn it on again.
1:37:53But aside from that, it's really fast.
1:37:57Even I've got 5,050 photos in it right now.
1:38:00And the thing scrolls ridiculously fast.
1:38:03Like I'm in the big,
1:38:06I'm scrolling through it right now while I'm talking to you.
1:38:08And again, I'm on a MacBook Air.
1:38:09It's not like I have a hundred cores at my disposal
1:38:14or a really high level video card,
1:38:16but it's speedy opening up photos that aren't stored.
1:38:21Like I'm gonna go back, I don't know,
1:38:23here's something from CES
1:38:24that's almost definitely not stored.
1:38:26And it took two seconds to load up from online.
1:38:29It does like it's super fast.
1:38:32Also, I really appreciate how well it syncs with iCloud.
1:38:37iCloud has always been one of those things
1:38:40where it can either work really well
1:38:42or it can just completely wet the bed.
1:38:45And especially I noticed this,
1:38:51I was bored on a flight back from San Francisco
1:38:54and the internet was completely failing
1:38:58because Google Air is either great or it's terrible.
1:39:00So I was just sitting on my iPhone
1:39:04and playing a bunch of like Altos adventure
1:39:05and then going into photos and being like,
1:39:07you know what, I'm just gonna go through all the photos
1:39:10I have on my phone and like delete and organize accordingly
1:39:15because I've got nothing else to do
1:39:16and I've got all of these photos
1:39:18and I know I've got like duplicates and things like that.
1:39:20And I did all of this with no internet access
1:39:23and in the back of my head,
1:39:25and this includes like photos that aren't stored locally
1:39:27on the device that have like the little processing symbol
1:39:29on them and in the back of my head, I'm like,
1:39:31is this gonna accidentally screw over my entire library?
1:39:34Well, it might as well find out it's a beta, right?
1:39:36And it synced everything perfectly and all the favorites
1:39:40that like I queued while I was offline,
1:39:42it pulled all of those down as soon as I got off the plane
1:39:45and like reconnected to LTE.
1:39:47And something like that is really,
1:39:49really a big market change for Apple, at least for me,
1:39:54where I basically did all of that having implicit trust
1:39:58that my photos wouldn't either disappear
1:40:01or accidentally triplicate.
1:40:03And I was right.
1:40:05Granted, that may not be 100% of the time.
1:40:10It worked for me, maybe it won't work for other people.
1:40:12I'm kind of hoping that it's better though.
1:40:15Like I haven't really run into any photo loss problems
1:40:19with iCloud Photo Library.
1:40:20And that was my biggest concern
1:40:22'cause your photos are precious.
1:40:23That's the one thing that I'm always super concerned about.
1:40:26Your photos are potentially your life.
1:40:29You know, they are, I mean, they are.
1:40:30They're snapshots of your life.
1:40:31- Well, it's true.
1:40:33And it's like when you talk to people who've worked,
1:40:35I mean, you even did.
1:40:36So you've probably, maybe you have firsthand experience,
1:40:38but you talk to people who work at Apple stores.
1:40:39It's like the worst part of the job
1:40:42is somebody who comes in and has a dead hard drive
1:40:45and it can't be resuscitated.
1:40:47And then they start to cry and they say,
1:40:49my husband died a couple months ago
1:40:53and I have my last year of pictures with them,
1:40:55they're only on that hard drive or something like that.
1:40:58And it truly, you know, you can't even overstate
1:41:02how devastating it can be.
1:41:04It really is like probably the most important data
1:41:07that Apple keeps.
1:41:10- Yeah, it's incredibly vital digital data.
1:41:12And we think about, you know, old analog photos.
1:41:16Oh, I've got, you know, boxes and boxes of snapshots
1:41:18that maybe I'll never look at again.
1:41:21But those boxes are there unless they get burned down
1:41:23in a fire, you know.
1:41:24- Which is a lot less, it's a real issue.
1:41:27I mean, and it's definitely happened or water damage,
1:41:29you know, I'm sure, you know, water damage and fire
1:41:32are two huge things for, you know,
1:41:35archive boxes or albums of photos.
1:41:37- Yeah.
1:41:38- But those things are less common
1:41:40than hard drives going belly up.
1:41:41- Yeah, exactly.
1:41:42And you could argue, well, digital data is a lot easier
1:41:45to replicate, which is true.
1:41:47And it's like the more copies you have of something,
1:41:48the better. But there's still that that fear. I mean, I lost
1:41:52when my my last big hard drive crash and the one that kind of
1:41:56forced me to think very seriously about good backup
1:41:59solutions. I did an art project with a friend where we went
1:42:03across the country and did a made comedy and tragedy masks
1:42:06and like, took pictures in front of various historic landmarks.
1:42:10So we had these wonderful photos of like hanging over the Niagara
1:42:15falls with tragedy like looking and potentially like oh what how far down is
1:42:20it and we had like a we had a digital camera and we took 80% of those photos
1:42:26and all of them were lost in that hard drive crash and I did I was lucky that
1:42:30we also were taking some backup photos with like a really crappy like 24
1:42:35exposure instacamera because we just thought well that might be fun have some
1:42:38like real media with the digital media when we do our exhibition and those are
1:42:44the only records that I have that that trip even existed.
1:42:47I mean, it's not nearly as heartbreaking
1:42:51or as sad as like losing photos of a loved one.
1:42:54- Like a loved one or something.
1:42:55- Yeah, exactly.
1:42:56But it's still a mark in your life.
1:42:58Photos are one of the, photos and Twitter at this point
1:43:01are like the mark points of where I can be like,
1:43:05yes, this is how my life is going.
1:43:06This is what I did last week.
1:43:09Because sometimes things are so crazy
1:43:12that you stop and you forget the day-to-day,
1:43:14you forget the funny little moments
1:43:16that happen in the in-betweens.
1:43:18And I really, I love that Apple is putting
1:43:20such a big emphasis on photos.
1:43:23I think that if they manage to make this work,
1:43:28I mean, they have such a wonderful camera
1:43:31in the form of the iPhone.
1:43:32Being able to actually have those memories stored
1:43:35in an easily accessible place
1:43:38and being able to share them very easily
1:43:41is so much better than what it's been so far,
1:43:44which is dumping them in folders and syncing them
1:43:46with Dropbox and praying that like,
1:43:48oh, I'll organize these eventually
1:43:50when someone has a photo organization service
1:43:52that I don't hate.
1:43:53- And strategically, it becomes a powerful form of lock-in.
1:43:57And the cynical out there can say
1:43:59that that's the primary reason they're doing it.
1:44:01I don't think so.
1:44:01I think that their first goal is
1:44:03let's build a complete workflow.
1:44:06Everything from sucking in the photos
1:44:09from your iPhone and iPad to the photos you import
1:44:13from any standalone camera you might have
1:44:15to where do you store them, which copies are where,
1:44:18and how are they so that you can get them anywhere,
1:44:21anytime from any of your devices,
1:44:23and do a good job editing them.
1:44:25I think that it's really about the customer experience,
1:44:27but then once they have that in place,
1:44:28and once people can trust it,
1:44:30man, when would you ever wanna switch to any other device
1:44:34if that's part of your workflow?
1:44:38- Yeah, it's not just about, oh, I like iPhone
1:44:41or I like iOS more than I like Android.
1:44:43It's, well, my iPhone has all of my photos on it.
1:44:47It has iCloud and it has my, you know,
1:44:49it has the heartbeats that I've sent to my husband
1:44:51on my Apple Watch.
1:44:52Why would I wanna give that up?
1:44:55And especially, I didn't even talk about, you know,
1:44:57the project side of Photos for Mac,
1:45:00which like they've carried over the same things
1:45:02that you can do for my photo,
1:45:03but they added a bunch of other prints and dynamic prints now
1:45:08so that you don't have to,
1:45:09instead of having to crop photos for a certain size,
1:45:12you can print photos no matter what size or shape they are.
1:45:17So you can print square photos,
1:45:18or you can even print panoramas,
1:45:20and Apple will automatically print any size photos for you.
1:45:24And being able to not only store them digitally,
1:45:27but also have the option of having those physical copies,
1:45:30and you never have to worry about going to a Walmart,
1:45:32or a Rite Aid, or anything like that.
1:45:35It's just there.
1:45:37That leads me to a serendipitous segue.
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1:48:41So here we are, we're an hour and 40-some minutes
1:48:46into the show, hour and 50 minutes,
1:48:48and we haven't even talked about Apple Watch yet.
1:48:52I have been thinking about the timing of the event,
1:48:55and I'm still confused why they held it when they did.
1:48:59'Cause March 9th is just so far in advance
1:49:02of them taking pre-orders a month later,
1:49:05and six weeks ahead of them shipping.
1:49:07And I can't help but think that,
1:49:11and I've been talking with your colleague at IMA
1:49:13or Renee Ritchie about some of this,
1:49:14and the consensus seems to be that Apple kind of got locked
1:49:18into that date because they expected maybe like when they locked in near Bubwena and
1:49:23started making the plans for the event that they were sort of expecting to ship the watch
1:49:29sooner than they're going to maybe like an early April thing instead of a late April
1:49:33thing.
1:49:34Sarah; Yeah I'm kind of I'm two minds on that on on that because on one hand I think that
1:49:42yeah, they were timing to go for a specific date
1:49:45and a specific time and say like,
1:49:47hoping that we'll launch for a good solid spring.
1:49:52But then I think as that kind of slipped a little bit
1:49:55when we got Tim Cook saying April
1:49:57in the last financial call, I wanna say,
1:50:00for the watch's launch.
1:50:01And then they're like, well, we've got this.
1:50:03But honestly, my real thought is
1:50:08it gives the appropriate buildup
1:50:11for sort of the anticipation of the watch,
1:50:13gives them time to roll it out in magazines.
1:50:16And it also gives them the time
1:50:19to showcase them in the stores,
1:50:21not only to build and put in the tables
1:50:25that they're gonna need to show off the watches,
1:50:27but also, I mean, starting April 10th,
1:50:29they're gonna have appointments
1:50:31for people to be able to come in and try on the watches
1:50:33and play with them and really get a sense for how they,
1:50:37up till now, like I've played with some,
1:50:39and you were at the September event, right?
1:50:41and you've played with some.
1:50:42But the majority of the public,
1:50:44all they've seen about the watch is a ton of news articles
1:50:48and a couple of maybe like 15 second,
1:50:50very dark and blurry hands-on with the watches.
1:50:55They really haven't had a chance to experience it themselves
1:50:57in their hands.
1:50:58And it's what makes the Apple stores magical
1:51:01and has always made them magical
1:51:02is that people can come in and actually like get to see
1:51:05how this product might change their life.
1:51:07And I think giving people two to three weeks
1:51:11to really get a chance to have some hands-on time
1:51:14and to see what, you know, not only see, all right,
1:51:17what kind of band combination do I want?
1:51:19Do I want the sport?
1:51:20Do I want the watch?
1:51:22Do I wanna like ogle the edition
1:51:23'cause I'll never in a million years be able to afford it?
1:51:27You also really get a chance to see what it's good for
1:51:30and what it might actually do for your life versus,
1:51:33you know, all of us assholes in journalism were like,
1:51:36this is what the Apple Watch is going to do for you,
1:51:38or this is what the Apple Watch absolutely won't do,
1:51:40and this is why the Apple Watch is useless,
1:51:42this is why the Apple Watch is wonderful.
1:51:45But being able to sort of have a little bit of time
1:51:48to play with it yourself and be like,
1:51:50oh, oh, I see how useful this is.
1:51:53Oh, Siri actually works?
1:51:56- Yeah, I mean, it's definitely multi-variable.
1:52:01I mean, retail's definitely part of it,
1:52:03hype is definitely part of it,
1:52:04Publicity is definitely part of it.
1:52:06I think even the editorial schedule of fashion magazines
1:52:12is part of it, 'cause they have a longer lead time.
1:52:15But I've been thinking about it,
1:52:17and I definitely detect,
1:52:20I mean, I wasn't at the event last week,
1:52:22but just from what I can tell from the outside
1:52:25and from the small bits of communication I've had with Apple
1:52:32in the last few weeks about the lead up to Apple Watch.
1:52:34And just from what I've seen is that
1:52:37they're doing a full court press on Apple Watch
1:52:44that to me they only really bring out this level
1:52:49of publicity and hype and PR emphasis
1:52:54for brand new products.
1:52:57And they don't really do brand new products that often.
1:53:00I mean, the last 10 years, there's only three,
1:53:03the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010,
1:53:07and now this, the watch in 2015.
1:53:10And I just, I get the feeling that the difference is
1:53:13that they, when you already have momentum,
1:53:17and iPads are already selling,
1:53:18and iPhones are already selling,
1:53:19then you can just say new iPhone,
1:53:22and you can assume they know what an iPhone is,
1:53:24and you just tell them, well, here's the stuff
1:53:25that's new and better in the new one.
1:53:27Whereas with something altogether new like Watch,
1:53:30they really feel like they have to do
1:53:34an extra amount of effort just to get the baseline level
1:53:39of consumer interest up and peaked at the right time
1:53:44for when they're gonna start taking orders
1:53:47and start letting people into the stores.
1:53:49- Absolutely, I mean, you look at the sheer amount of press
1:53:52that Tim Cook alone is doing
1:53:54and the interviews that he's given.
1:53:56every single interview there's at least one moment where someone's like are you
1:53:59wearing the Apple watch?
1:54:00and he's like yes I am and then proceeds to do a quick like
1:54:03two-minute demo of something cool on it and it's every time it's a slightly
1:54:07different
1:54:08you know demo it's not he doesn't do the same like I can check my calendars
1:54:13I can Apple Pay you know I think about the first one
1:54:16I think the first one was Charlie Rose is that was that right the PBS one
1:54:19yeah where he spent like two or three minutes and he did show off
1:54:23Apple Pay in that one and then each subsequent one like Goldman Sachs he talked about like
1:54:28why it was useful for him and there was that most the Fast Company article that came out
1:54:32what yesterday or this morning that where he's talking about the watch glances and every
1:54:37it always feels I really admire Tim Cook in that way for the very subtle way he's able
1:54:44to do product marketing demos without making them feel like product marketing demos.
1:54:48I don't know whether it's the way that he presents himself or just the the like it's
1:54:52It's a very casual way of like, oh, I'm taught, you know, oh, the watch this old thing?
1:54:58Yeah, let me talk about this.
1:54:59And before you know it, I've given you a three minute demo and you you just think I'm talking
1:55:03about myself and like what I'm doing.
1:55:06It's it's really smart.
1:55:07I don't think it's any coincidence that johnny Ive has done more press in the last two, three
1:55:13months than in the rest of his year combined the rest of his career, I should say combined.
1:55:18Of course, I well, I mean, you think there are a lot of things riding on this, right?
1:55:22the first major post Steve new product launch.
1:55:26I mean, I think that Tim Cook and his team
1:55:29has done an incredible job in, you know, in jobs as absence,
1:55:32but it's still like, this is their first product.
1:55:35And I'm actually like, I'm proud of the press
1:55:39for not being like the first post jobs, you know,
1:55:43like making such a big deal of it.
1:55:46But I definitely like,
1:55:47it's gotta be weighing on them a little bit
1:55:49to be like, we have to make this a success.
1:55:51and we have to be sure that this really,
1:55:53this launches out the door like gangbusters.
1:55:56And it's also the, you know, how many,
1:55:59I haven't worn a watch in 10 years.
1:56:02A lot of people I know are, you know, watches,
1:56:05watches are not a daily wear item like they used to be.
1:56:10And smartwatches especially, I have not, you know,
1:56:14up until I tried on the 38 millimeter Apple watch,
1:56:17there was not a single smartwatch on the market
1:56:19that would fit my wrist.
1:56:20Like smartwatches just weren't targeted towards women at all.
1:56:25Not even like in a misogynistic like,
1:56:29"Ha ha, no women for smartwatches."
1:56:30But it's just like, no one was thinking about small wrists
1:56:34and how a smartwatch screen might work on a small wrist.
1:56:39And Apple was the first one,
1:56:41the Apple Watch is the first one, at least for me,
1:56:43where I'm like, "Oh, this not only fits on my wrist,
1:56:46but it's still functional, I can still do things on it."
1:56:49It's not like they've squished the screen down so far
1:56:51that it's now impossible to use,
1:56:54even though it looks semi-nice.
1:56:56So it's, I think they're facing the wearable issue too.
1:56:59Like everybody needs a phone.
1:57:01Everybody was gonna need a smartphone.
1:57:03A tablet's a bigger one, but.
1:57:05- I know it's just a few millimeters,
1:57:07but a few millimeters here, a few millimeters there,
1:57:11and at this size, it makes a big difference.
1:57:14I think that the highest praised design
1:57:18for a smartwatch to date, at least one that got a lot of mass market attention, is the
1:57:23Moto 360, aka the Moto 270, because it has the flat bottom on the round screen.
1:57:30And I don't really particularly care for it, but I think that a lot of people have praised
1:57:35the design.
1:57:38But in the grand scheme of things, it's a relatively large watch.
1:57:42Yes.
1:57:43And the first person who I've seen wearing it was Andy Annette.
1:57:49Did you see it at the at the September event because that's when I saw Andy's
1:57:52watch was actually right right before we went in the doors for the Apple event
1:57:56and I was actually like hey Andy I've heard good things about this can you
1:58:00take this off and can I put it on for a second and he gives the moto to me and I
1:58:05put it on my wrist and the watch face itself the 360 to 270 you know is
1:58:10is actually physically larger than the diameter of my wrist.
1:58:14Like there were, there are parts hanging off each side.
1:58:18And at that point I was just kind of like,
1:58:21yeah, it's a pretty watch on you Andy,
1:58:23but like this would basically look like
1:58:26I'm carrying around half a handcuff.
1:58:28- I think the bottom line is that the more we learn
1:58:30about Apple Watch and the more we kind of get a sense of it
1:58:35is that it's like you,
1:58:40I feel like you can't overstate just how ambitious it is as a platform. It's not just
1:58:47telling the time and getting your text notifications on your wrist at the same time.
1:58:52It's a real platform, and there is an inherent complexity to anything that ambitious.
1:58:59And I don't know that it's a problem, because I feel like the main things you're going to want to
1:59:04do, you'll be able to figure out. You're going to be able to figure out how to adjust your watch face
1:59:10and pick the one that you want and you're gonna be able to pick out the complications you want on the watch face, but I don't think it's
1:59:15Quite as simple as the iPhone was in 2007 the iPhone you hit the home button and there were I think it was 13 apps
1:59:23That were right there on the home screen and those 13 apps on the home screen gave you a quick one screen
1:59:30Overview of the scope of what you could do with the app and just the names of the apps would let you know what they
1:59:35were
1:59:36I don't think Apple watch has that many more apps
1:59:38But it's more and there are a couple of other contextual modes that the original iPhone didn't have like glances and
1:59:45Notification Center that give you a little bit of extra complex complexity in terms of where are you and how do you get back?
1:59:52to where you were
1:59:53and I in some sense, I think it's almost more like a Mac in that sense of not being a
1:59:59problem insofar as that you can be a Mac user and not have
2:00:04explored the entire system and used every app.
2:00:08And it doesn't mean that the Mac is too complex
2:00:10or too complicated because you're able to figure out
2:00:13the things you really want to do.
2:00:16- Absolutely.
2:00:16So I went to the Apple Watch page out of curiosity
2:00:19and I was like, all right,
2:00:20how many default apps are there?
2:00:22And if you're not counting the clock functions,
2:00:25there are 16.
2:00:26And if you count the alarm stopwatch timer and world clock,
2:00:29you get 20 total.
2:00:32So you've got seven more apps off the bat.
2:00:35Still, I mean, overall, you've got a very similar,
2:00:39similar build to the original phone
2:00:43in terms of like messages, SMS, phone, mail, calendar.
2:00:47But you've got two apps dedicated to the exercise portion,
2:00:50which you were just talking about,
2:00:51and I think that's gonna be really key for the watch,
2:00:53especially, we didn't really touch on research kit,
2:00:56but that's something that really sort of
2:00:58made an impression to me during the event.
2:01:01The idea that Apple's not only gonna build
2:01:03this revolutionary technology,
2:01:05but they're actually going to put
2:01:06this revolutionary technology to work at making our lives,
2:01:11not only better, but potentially longer
2:01:13by using all of this integrated stuff
2:01:15that they've been putting together
2:01:16over the last two or three years.
2:01:18But yeah, you've got Maps, Passbook and Siri,
2:01:22which of course are new in the last couple of years.
2:01:26Camera remote, which hooks directly into your phone.
2:01:29Apple TV remote, which I'm excited to actually see and play with.
2:01:34Like there's, there's so much more, it's such a more mature, as you were saying, it's a more mature product.
2:01:39I think that it's, Apple has, Apple's learned from its successes, its failures, its mistakes, its, its, you know, wins.
2:01:49The fact that they're, you know, watch kit is still very rudimentary and it is built, you know, they're extensions, basically.
2:01:57extensions basically they're not full apps and I don't even know yet whether
2:02:02or not like third-party apps will be able to really run on the app if or on
2:02:06the on the watch if your phone is not in Wi-Fi range. I don't know if that's
2:02:11that's something that you can do with current watch apps, watch kit apps but
2:02:14but the fact that there are watch kit apps at all for the first generation of
2:02:17the Apple watch is huge. The fact that people have been able to develop for
2:02:21them since November is huge and the fact that Phil Schiller basically said this
2:02:26is step one and full native watch apps are going to be coming soon. Like that they're
2:02:33there clearly. I mean, there's there's a lot of thought that's been put into this this
2:02:38launch.
2:02:39Yeah, just today in the Fast Company article, the interview with Tim Cook with the authors
2:02:44of becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlander and Rick Tedzelli. Tim Cook specifically mentioned
2:02:52the difference between iPhone launching without an app store, a year out from an app store, and
2:02:59Apple Watch launching with an SDK that came out months in advance and maybe not full-fledged apps,
2:03:09but watch with third-party developer support right there on day one. And they're already
2:03:16promoting these apps, third-party apps, before the watch is even out. And just how different that is,
2:03:21how much more fully formed this platform is at this point than iPhone was in in 2007.
2:03:28Sarah
2:03:28Especially Tim Cook's Fast Company article, I just it really it really spoke to me Cook throughout the article really emphasizes that the watch couldn't have been made without Apple's culture and without Apple's sort of big picture focus on what what did you say that not living in a small box.
2:03:51box and he says it's a thing from Steve about putting your debt in the universe.
2:03:57But that comes up repeatedly throughout the article about not limiting – like operating
2:04:02as if you do not have limits.
2:04:04And if you run into limits, acknowledging them and then moving past them and really
2:04:10believing that you can work and live and build in a world where you're not boxed in, you're
2:04:18not limited by outside factors.
2:04:22I feel like that's a philosophy that can occasionally go a really bad way.
2:04:29But with the watch, it really does feel like they, like always, Apple took their time.
2:04:35They stepped back and they said, "All right, let's really machine this thing within an
2:04:40inch of its life.
2:04:41Let's make sure that what we're releasing is the absolute best product that we are most
2:04:46proud to put you know our names on because yeah you're absolutely right
2:04:49they could have released a watch last year and it could have been bare bones
2:04:52and it probably you know it probably would have outsold the pebble two to one
2:04:56but you talk about you know we look at you know the the most recent Samsung
2:05:01Galaxy the s6 phone right it's at this point Apple has Apple has become a
2:05:06company that everybody looks to whether or not they put out a gangbuster
2:05:10blockbuster product or just a incremental revision people look to them
2:05:15people copy, innovate, build off of their ideas.
2:05:20And if they had put out,
2:05:22if they had put out Apple Watch version 0.5
2:05:25with no app store and with limited apps,
2:05:28they probably still would have had the basic design down.
2:05:30They would have had the digital crown,
2:05:31they would have had the button.
2:05:32And then they'd have to not only deal
2:05:36with their own internal struggle of being like,
2:05:38all right, well, we need to make this super,
2:05:40we need to make this even better.
2:05:41We need to figure out a way to elevate this.
2:05:44But then they also would have to deal with the competition trying to copy the few things that made it unique in the first place
2:05:50Do you see this article last week?
2:05:53Greg Koenig wrote it how
2:05:57Apple makes the watch
2:06:00It's
2:06:02Just great speculation
2:06:04I mean he admits that speculation just but based on those three
2:06:07videos that Apple put out with how they work with the aluminum how they work with stainless steel how they work with gold and
2:06:13looking at the processes that they're used the the milling the
2:06:18smelting whatever you want to call it and
2:06:21Just talking about the details and Greg knows what he's doing
2:06:25He's I've known him for years through he works with my friend Duncan Davidson on Luma loop these great custom-made high-end
2:06:33Camera slings, you know and you put them around your chest and you can attach your camera to them
2:06:38and Greg's the guy who designs all the little pieces,
2:06:43the connectors, the O-rings,
2:06:44everything that goes on it, the metal.
2:06:47So he knows what he's talking about
2:06:48when it comes to working with metals like aluminum and steel
2:06:50and stuff like that and making high quality stuff.
2:06:53And I thought one of the points,
2:06:56his whole article's great, I'll put it in the show notes,
2:06:58but the point that he makes that I thought really stood out
2:07:01is that the smaller the device,
2:07:04the more the attention to detail matters in the market.
2:07:09And I've thought that firsthand,
2:07:12having seen these watches in September,
2:07:14that no matter how good Apple's product photography is,
2:07:17and their product photography is top of the line,
2:07:20it's as good as anybody's,
2:07:22no product shot really does justice
2:07:24to how good these Apple watches look in person.
2:07:29When you feel them in your hand
2:07:31and you look at them in your own eyes close up,
2:07:34the attention to detail is really, really great.
2:07:36And I think you need that firsthand experience,
2:07:39which means going into an Apple retail store
2:07:42or some other place where they sell them to see it
2:07:44and to get excited about buying it.
2:07:46And I think Apple knows this.
2:07:47- It's just as beautiful a piece of jewelry
2:07:51as it is a smartwatch.
2:07:53And I think that, I mean,
2:07:54you take Marc Newsome and Joni Ivan,
2:07:56you put them in a room together,
2:07:58obviously they're going to make something gorgeous,
2:08:00something that you'd be proud to wear on your wrist.
2:08:03But the fact that they were able to do this and include, you know, watchOS, you know,
2:08:11include iOS, include all of this, all of the extra stuff, and make it look just as beautiful
2:08:16in your hand as it is when you're actually physically interacting with the display.
2:08:21It's absolutely incredible.
2:08:22And those bands, that was another thing that I really noticed in April is I didn't get
2:08:25a chance to play with a lot of the bands in September.
2:08:27I think I, you know, I tried on the sport and I had two, maybe two minutes with it,
2:08:32that so I was like pink sport band okay this is really nicely built for a sport
2:08:36band but um in April I got a chance or in April in in March I got a chance to
2:08:41play with I got a chance to see the leather band and the the both the modern
2:08:47buckle and the classic buckle and I got a chance to try the Milanese loop which
2:08:51I thought I was going to absolutely hate because I'm not a I'm like I'm not a fan
2:08:55of metal bands they're cold you know they get caught in your your hair and I
2:09:01I put that on and I'm like, oh my God, I like I was planning on getting a leather band and now
2:09:05I have to completely reevaluate my whole my whole plan because they're those bands are beautiful.
2:09:11I mean, yeah, I got to try the Milanese back in September. And I remember thinking I wouldn't
2:09:15like it because I like to wear my watch not tight, but snug. And it seemed to me given that it was
2:09:21magnetic, that if I close the Milanese loop to be snug enough to be pleasant, then when I'd flex my
2:09:28wrist, the fact that it was only connected magnetically, it would slide, you know, the
2:09:32magnetic closure would slide along the band and then it would be too loose. But that wasn't the
2:09:36case at all. It's once you have it on somehow the magnet for lateral forces, it's very, very tight.
2:09:42And if you flex your wrist, it doesn't change. But yet it's not so strong that if you want to
2:09:47take it off that if you get your finger underneath it and pick it straight off that it's hard to get
2:09:51off. No, it you really have to try it to believe it. Yeah, it's it's exactly like the force touch
2:09:57trackpad. It's one of those things that I mean, I really sometimes I wonder if Apple intentionally
2:10:02makes products where they're like, you have to come and try it out before you purchase it,
2:10:07because we really want you to see just how ridiculously good it is.
2:10:11Yeah, I don't I think the retail stores are important to everything Apple sells small,
2:10:16big Mac, iOS, whatever. It's been important to the whole success for story over the last 15 years.
2:10:22I mean, people don't talk about the halo effect anymore. But I think that definitely was what
2:10:27fueled it where people would come in because they wanted to buy an iPod and back in the early days
2:10:32they'd even call it the iPod store and eventually they'd say hey I like this store I like this
2:10:36people discombing these products maybe I'll try one of their computers and I'll try one of their
2:10:40phones and etc etc. So I'm not trying to underplay the importance of Apple's retail stores in any of
2:10:46their products but I really do think that the hands-on nature of a watch and the personal
2:10:51nature of it and the attention to detail that's only visible at real life distance and size
2:10:58that the watch is the first Apple product where their stores their retail stores are
2:11:03essential to the success of the product.
2:11:06I don't think they could be doing this without retail without their own retail.
2:11:11Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
2:11:12I honestly don't think they would have been able to sell the iPhone or the iPad the way
2:11:16they did without the Apple stores and just that the displays are one of the like the
2:11:22multi-touch display when you try to explain to people oh yeah you can do this and you
2:11:26can pinch and you can zoom and people would say oh yeah I've used quote unquote multi-touch
2:11:32displays before those are those awful things you use at the movies and they scroll and
2:11:37they lag and they're terrible and then you actually you know you'd go into a store and
2:11:42try one and you realize oh this was you know this is so fast this is instantaneous.
2:11:48I really do kind of feel like the experience with the watch is going to be very similar
2:11:52where you know again with the with Force Touch with with the with the digital crown with
2:11:59you know just all the interactions that you can use on the on the watch.
2:12:03I did this week in tech last week and one of the commenters like during the show they
2:12:07I have the live chat, one of the commenters was like,
2:12:10you know, I was talking about how I'm really excited
2:12:13to use the watch as a driving tool
2:12:16because I hate mounting my phone.
2:12:18'Cause it's just like, it's a big giant screen
2:12:20and it's like, it's distracting you
2:12:22even if you're trying to get directions or something.
2:12:24And I'm like, oh, well, the watch is gonna be really cool
2:12:26because it's gonna buzz you while you're,
2:12:28to tell you to take a left or a right
2:12:30and it's gonna do different buzzes.
2:12:31So you're gonna know like which direction you need to turn.
2:12:36And I really think that I was like,
2:12:41oh yeah, and you can use it to Siri to dictate.
2:12:45And someone says, oh, you're crazy.
2:12:47You're gonna use a watch?
2:12:48Why would you, you're gonna do something
2:12:51while you're driving?
2:12:52How dare, you're being an unsafe person.
2:12:54And I'm like, how is that more unsafe
2:12:57than looking at a built-in screen in your car
2:13:00or looking at your phone mounted to a thing?
2:13:02It's like being able to go to Siri
2:13:04and pull your wrist to your mouth and say,
2:13:08tell my boyfriend that I'm going to be 10 minutes late
2:13:13because there's traffic on the highway.
2:13:15And then it either sends that via,
2:13:18it dictates it or you can send it as an audio message
2:13:21if the Siri dictation screws up.
2:13:23It's like, I don't even have to look at the watch.
2:13:26It just does it automatically.
2:13:27I don't have to look at a screen.
2:13:28It's just stuff like that.
2:13:31I feel like it's not,
2:13:33There are scenarios you can't experience or envision
2:13:36unless you go into the store and you try it.
2:13:38- I just don't understand how they're going to handle
2:13:42the crush of people that are gonna be coming into the stores
2:13:45to look at the watch.
2:13:47There was a report last week
2:13:49that you were going to need an appointment.
2:13:51I know they're definitely taking appointments
2:13:53where you can make one and come in
2:13:54and get some time scheduled
2:13:55where you can try on various versions.
2:13:58And now they're saying you don't need an appointment,
2:14:00but if you don't have one, you might have to wait.
2:14:02And so I get the feeling that it's sort of like a hair salon
2:14:05where it's like, they'll take you if you're walking,
2:14:07but appointments are highly recommended.
2:14:10And I think apartments are highly recommended here.
2:14:13- Yeah, well, I imagine it's gonna be very similar
2:14:16to the press demo hands-ons,
2:14:19where it's a crush of people in that demonstration area.
2:14:23And the reps were basically like,
2:14:24all right, we're gonna, you know,
2:14:26those of you who are just plebeians
2:14:29who happen to be writing for random tech blog,
2:14:32you'll get five minutes and if you happen to be from the Wall Street Journal, maybe
2:14:35you'll get like 10 minutes and if you're a celebrity, we'll give you like a full 15 minute
2:14:39tour of the watch and several different bands and like what you can do with it.
2:14:43Were there celebrities there?
2:14:45Well Christy Turlington was walking around in the hands-on area and there were definitely
2:14:49it was a fun game to play during the event being like, all right, press, Apple engineer
2:14:54or fashion model.
2:14:55There were definitely a lot of people from the fashion industry there who were VIPs and
2:15:01weren't like there weren't any overt celebrities there that I could that I
2:15:04could recognize but I'm also very bad at the celebrity face game so back in
2:15:10September there were definitely celebrities oh yeah like I remember I
2:15:14mean what Stephen Fry was there is that right yeah and a couple couple other
2:15:19people so it's like I'm not I'm not surprised by that at all but in terms of
2:15:25yeah how the how the tables are I mean they had the the retail store tables at
2:15:29at the event, which is actually really cool.
2:15:31They have tables that can only be opened
2:15:34by like an employee badge.
2:15:35So all of the watches are like hidden
2:15:37and built into like secure safes
2:15:39that if you have an employee badge,
2:15:40you just like badge it in and then the table like rolls open
2:15:43and you have this beautiful jewelry store hidden counter
2:15:47of like all of the watches
2:15:48in their little nestled containers.
2:15:51It's very, very chic and very cool.
2:15:55But also, you know,
2:15:58I am going to be interested to see
2:16:00how they can manage the crush of people.
2:16:01You're absolutely right.
2:16:03It seems like the day that, you know,
2:16:05that April 10th that people are going to flood.
2:16:08And maybe I'm overestimating the demand for the watch.
2:16:11But I mean, you saw like that Reuters,
2:16:13who had the like 65% of people
2:16:16don't wanna buy an Apple watch.
2:16:17And I'm like, so what you're saying is 35% of people do?
2:16:22- Yeah, it wasn't quite 69% not interested,
2:16:2731% interested, it was I think 69% not interested
2:16:30in buying it, 25% interested in buying it,
2:16:34and 6% undecided.
2:16:36But even so, even though it wasn't a full 31%,
2:16:38the fact that it was 25% is astounding.
2:16:40In other words, one out of four people that they polled
2:16:43said they were interested in buying Apple Watch,
2:16:45which is a product none of them have ever
2:16:46actually seen in person, none of them have used,
2:16:49they're probably under informed about what it can do,
2:16:52and it requires an iPhone 5 or iPhone 6.
2:16:55So with all those things, if one out of four Americans
2:16:58wants, is interested in buying an Apple Watch,
2:17:01if anything, I mean, for them to spin that
2:17:04as bad news for Apple, or as they called it,
2:17:07a sign that it might be a tough sell,
2:17:10it's astounding because I think it's,
2:17:13if the poll is accurate,
2:17:14it's jaw-droppingly good news for Apple,
2:17:17maybe the best news in the company's history.
2:17:20- That's a blockbuster product.
2:17:22One in four, like, can you imagine,
2:17:24Can you imagine one in four people
2:17:25buying the original iPhone?
2:17:27- So anything else you wanna talk about?
2:17:31- No, I mean, I think we've covered most of the bases.
2:17:33I don't know, I'm just really excited for this year
2:17:37in terms of Apple products.
2:17:39Like Apple has so much on its plate right now.
2:17:41I was talking about this with Renee Ritchie the other day,
2:17:45where we're just like, when we were trying to decide,
2:17:48like we knew that something else was coming
2:17:50at the Spring Forward event.
2:17:52And we were like, all right, what of the potential like 12 products?
2:17:57Like there's the Apple TV thing.
2:17:58I guess we didn't talk about the Apple TV thing, but there's not there's not much to talk about other than HBO.
2:18:02And also like clearly this proves that an Apple TV update is coming sometime down the line.
2:18:08Yeah, the tell was that there was the slide at the event where they said starting at $69.
2:18:16Starting at $69?
2:18:18starting at $69 for a device
2:18:21that there's only one configuration.
2:18:23But that wasn't a mistake.
2:18:24I mean, that to me is just a clear sign
2:18:27that they know that there's new hardware coming
2:18:29and that they just wanted to get this out
2:18:31for the HBO Game of Thrones promotion.
2:18:36- Yeah, let's get them off the shelves
2:18:38and into people's living rooms in time
2:18:39for them to watch Game of Thrones.
2:18:41And then they're gonna be so hooked on the service
2:18:42and using AirPlay that when we launch our new device,
2:18:45You know, there's been rumored SDK for the Apple TV
2:18:48for God knows how many years,
2:18:50but like this is probably the year to do it.
2:18:53You know, when you think about like,
2:18:55now you have the watch as a potential controller too,
2:18:57in addition to your iPhones, your iPod touches, your iPads,
2:19:01like this is the year to probably launch games
2:19:04on the Apple TV.
2:19:06- So let's wrap it up.
2:19:07Serenity Caldwell, you can read her writing at iMore
2:19:12where she is a senior editor.
2:19:16What's your title?
2:19:16- I am the managing editor for iOS over at iMore.
2:19:20- Managing editor for iOS at iMore.
2:19:23Great stuff over there.
2:19:25And on Twitter, you are a Saturn.
2:19:29- Yep, Saturn, Saturn.
2:19:31- S-E-T-T-E-R-N, great Twitter account,
2:19:36highly recommended follow.
2:19:37And my thanks to all of our sponsors.
2:19:40Let's see if I can remember them all.
2:19:42This week we have Squarespace, Foremost, Harry's,
2:19:47and Fracture, so my thanks to them,
2:19:51and my thanks to Serenity for all of your time.
2:19:55- Thank you, Jon, this was a lot of fun.