00:00:10 ◼ ► Because I'm in the middle of doing things when... It's not like I'm just sitting here, waiting. I'm in the middle of doing stuff.
00:00:31 ◼ ► Daniel Breslin writes, "Airport Express Home app support is just for Siri integration. For example, 'play the album 'Reputation' in the kitchen and dining room.'"
00:00:47 ◼ ► "Hopefully with more features in the future, like a play/pause from the Home app, resume playback as part of automation or something along those lines."
00:00:55 ◼ ► I should have put this other one first. This is on the topic of what the heck does it mean to have HomeKit support in the Airport Express.
00:01:09 ◼ ► No, there was a period where we were like, where we were like kind of speculating like, "Wait, does it mean that it can be a HomeKit hub? And what does it mean to be a HomeKit hub?"
00:01:18 ◼ ► Yeah, but the question was asked. We just didn't have our answers, so here are the answers.
00:01:24 ◼ ► Donovan Cannon writes, "John brought up the question of what does it mean for an Airport Express to be a Home hub. This should have been first, like you said, John.
00:01:30 ◼ ► Just like some smart devices, like the Philips Hue, need a hub, a Home hub is a dedicated device to handle all HomeKit-related functions."
00:02:00 ◼ ► Now we're going to be sentenced to forever get answers to this question, because they're going to be like,
00:02:06 ◼ ► "17 shows ago, John asked what it meant to be a HomeKit hub. I'm here to tell you this is what it means to be a HomeKit hub.
00:02:11 ◼ ► We're going to be told what it means for the Airport Express to be a HomeKit hub for the rest of our lives now."
00:02:15 ◼ ► But it's hard to get people to even care about HomeKit, let alone what does it mean for the Airport Express to be a HomeKit hub.
00:02:21 ◼ ► People care about answering a question they heard asked and not answered on this podcast.
00:02:38 ◼ ► Michael Smith writes that HandyPrint runs on a Mac and serves up AirPrint services to your network or an attached printer.
00:02:48 ◼ ► Apparently there's also something called Printopia, we'll put a link in the show notes.
00:02:55 ◼ ► And this is within the context of, "Hey, I want to be able to print via AirPrint to something that maybe does not actually support AirPrint."
00:03:02 ◼ ► And so there's some options for you if you don't want to spend several hundred dollars on a new printer like I just did.
00:03:07 ◼ ► And maybe even more of those things. Lots of people writing in to give suggestions for things that could help me print to my printer wirelessly or print from iOS devices.
00:03:15 ◼ ► All useful. I was amused that there are so many things that you can run on your Mac that make it a proxy for AirPrint, basically.
00:03:26 ◼ ► Because if you have a printer thing that also has a scanner, like I was in this mode for a while where everybody could print to it,
00:03:37 ◼ ► All these things that let you wirelessly print to it, including obviously the AirPrint things, tend not to let you wirelessly scan or wirelessly fax.
00:03:44 ◼ ► So it's always, you know, if you have to unplug to do those operations, it's not much of a win.
00:03:55 ◼ ► I've looked at the links to the printers that you guys gave last week and Googling around and stuff.
00:04:05 ◼ ► I don't think that document is up at Apple. I should look at them. They have like the beta documents right in a separate section.
00:04:10 ◼ ► But anyway, once Mojave comes out, I'll check out that list and maybe shop for something.
00:04:15 ◼ ► I haven't done the thing which I really need to do, which is get out a tape measure and make my sort of facsimile printer out of, no, not that kind of facsimile,
00:04:23 ◼ ► out of a cardboard box that is the dimensions of the printer and put that cardboard box somewhere just to see what is it going to be like to have this thing.
00:04:38 ◼ ► I mean, again, I love mine so far. Although, I will say I was scanning something that was physically large,
00:04:45 ◼ ► which I would rather not disclose exactly what it was, and it did not even come close to fitting on my scanner.
00:04:51 ◼ ► So I suddenly was longing for Marco's like 40-inch scanner or whatever it was you said you had.
00:05:10 ◼ ► "In regards to Marco's comments on this week's podcast about Apple not needing to get back into the Wi-Fi router game,
00:05:17 ◼ ► I, like many, have placed almost unmitigated trust in Apple to host and service my digital life.
00:05:27 ◼ ► they have sponsored the show in the past and will probably be sponsoring it in the future,
00:05:36 ◼ ► As you know, my router, or a router, has access to a wealth of information about me and my family,
00:05:44 ◼ ► my fear is that if they will be acquired, likely by Amazon, since Amazon are fast becoming the latest tech sponge,
00:05:50 ◼ ► and picking up smaller companies from time to time, I similarly refuse to use Google's mesh routers for privacy reasons."
00:05:56 ◼ ► If, on the other hand, Apple were to acquire Eero, I'm sure you'd agree we would all be happy.
00:06:09 ◼ ► You know, I only have experience with Ubiquiti's, like, high-end gear, not their mesh gear,
00:06:14 ◼ ► and Eero's consumer stuff, and then, you know, before that, older stuff like Apple's gear.
00:06:18 ◼ ► And so, I said during the show, like, you know, go Eero if you want, that kind of thing,
00:06:23 ◼ ► because I can, you know, we can confirm we've all used it, it's super easy, it performs well, etc.
00:06:30 ◼ ► But since then, everyone else has written in saying, you know, basically vouching for all the other major systems.
00:06:37 ◼ ► We've heard people saying Google's Wi-Fi is awesome, you know, privacy thing aside, okay, I know there are other options.
00:06:42 ◼ ► We've heard people saying that the Netgear, is it the Orbi, Netgear Orbi, is that theirs?
00:06:47 ◼ ► That the Orbi is awesome, that Ubiquiti's Amplify line is awesome, like, basically, we've heard, oh, and Cisco apparently has one, too,
00:06:55 ◼ ► like, we've heard that all the major router manufacturers that all have these mesh systems, they're all pretty good.
00:07:02 ◼ ► So, this is a good argument in the sense that if Eero was the only company making good modern mesh routers,
00:07:09 ◼ ► that would be a little bit concerning, but they're pretty much always, for the history of wireless routers,
00:07:19 ◼ ► And it seems like that is still the case now with mesh networks, that there are still, like, you know, two to four major brands that all make pretty good stuff.
00:07:28 ◼ ► So, I don't think we're in that bad of a spot. I think if any one of them were to go away, we'd still be okay,
00:07:37 ◼ ► Eero is the only one that's really Apple-like, though, and physical-wise, like, the Orbi is huge, and the other ones are very ugly.
00:07:46 ◼ ► Like, I know it doesn't really mean that much, like, who cares if it's, like, a little white puck, and who cares if you could turn the little blinking lights off on them,
00:07:55 ◼ ► And we have heard negative reports from almost all the brands you've listed as well, including Eero,
00:08:00 ◼ ► where someone was saying that, like, it uses the network for configuration, so if you don't have internet access, you can't, like, boot the thing.
00:08:13 ◼ ► But this question is specifically about an advantage that none of these other companies have, which is trusting that they're not doing anything nefarious with your network data.
00:08:23 ◼ ► And I would say, secondarily, perhaps security, because Apple is usually pretty good, you know, with their security stuff.
00:08:30 ◼ ► Google Mesh Router, what are they doing with all the traffic that's flying through there,
00:08:35 ◼ ► other companies that may or may not currently or be forced to sell that information to get them out of a financial situation?
00:08:42 ◼ ► That trust issue would fall into the category of Apple-like in the modern age, where, depending on who you are,
00:08:49 ◼ ► you may or may not trust Apple more or less than other companies, but presumably if you use Apple stuff and like them,
00:08:54 ◼ ► you put them in a higher category of trust than you would another company whose incentives are not as neatly aligned with yours
00:09:02 ◼ ► when it comes to revealing or selling information about what network traffic is flowing through your house.
00:09:09 ◼ ► It's scary, I mean, how much they could know. So, it's a reasonable thing to worry about.
00:09:15 ◼ ► Finally, Kyle Putnam writes, kind of a PSA, and we'll see how this turns out next week,
00:09:29 ◼ ► log into your account now to prepay the remaining two months on your upgrade installments.
00:09:33 ◼ ► Otherwise, people are going to risk having a very bad night when they try to pre-order the new phone and find out they can't."
00:09:39 ◼ ► If you recall, the iPhone X wasn't announced, and I don't care what the actual dates were,
00:09:43 ◼ ► until like October or November or something like that, or you couldn't buy it until November.
00:09:45 ◼ ► The point is, it was later than September. That's all that really matters for the purpose of this conversation.
00:09:50 ◼ ► Well, if you're on the prepay plan, they expect you to get 11 or 12 or what have you payments out of a year's worth of iPhone.
00:09:59 ◼ ► So what that means is, if you bought in October or November, whatever the particular date may be,
00:10:09 ◼ ► And so, in order to get a day one upgrade to the iPhone XS or whatever the crap it's called, which we'll talk about,
00:10:36 ◼ ► But it's something to consider that if you want a day one iPhone X plus one, then you might want to look at...
00:10:48 ◼ ► You might want to just check that out and make sure that you are free and clear on your existing phone.
00:11:20 ◼ ► This book is about Ken's 15 years working on the software teams for the original versions of Safari and WebKit,
00:11:29 ◼ ► It's full of stories about how the software was made and why these products came out as well as they did.
00:11:36 ◼ ► It's a really good inside look at the design process at Apple during the Steve Jobs era.
00:11:49 ◼ ► There's a lot about it that's engineering specific, but a lot about it that's also product design specific.
00:11:55 ◼ ► He tells it with enough metaphors and explanations that even if someone isn't a programmer,
00:12:05 ◼ ► If you are a programmer, you'll appreciate all the engineering stuff that is also in it,
00:13:25 ◼ ► if you want to hear amazing stories about how critical parts of the iPhone were developed,
00:13:35 ◼ ► Visit creativeselection.io or just search for Creative Selection in your bookstore of choice,
00:14:41 ◼ ► I don't want to jump ahead here, but these stories seem very sure that that's the name of the phone,
00:14:46 ◼ ► which leads me to believe that they got that information from the same source that they got the pictures and stuff.
00:14:52 ◼ ► But the fact that they don't show any content from Apple that shows the name of the new phone
00:14:59 ◼ ► makes me think that perhaps the information was from a URL or a text string or some other thing
00:15:05 ◼ ► where they're not sure of the capitalization, and that leads me to Casey's inability to pronounce it.
00:15:16 ◼ ► Remember when the 5S came out, they styled the S lowercase for the first time there so it wouldn't look like SS.
00:15:36 ◼ ► I'm guessing they're going to style it in their usual way, which is put the S in a little box.
00:15:47 ◼ ► But when everyone writes about it, they're all going to write Xs right next to each other in both capitals with no space.
00:15:52 ◼ ► So as much as I like a lot of Apple's products and improvements in recent years, their naming has not been amazing recently.
00:16:00 ◼ ► So yeah, if this is called the 10s and everyone's going to call it Xs all year and everyone's going to make Xs as in excess water kind of jokes, or tennis like tennis the sport jokes.
00:16:22 ◼ ► Yeah, so it's going to be a bad name, but we'll get over it. Just like we got over iPhone X being 10.
00:16:54 ◼ ► So bad. Alright, so we already, and it's my fault, but we already got sideways on this. So what happened?
00:17:00 ◼ ► So, Garime Rambo has discovered through means that I don't believe have been formally disclosed, but there's some going theories on it,
00:17:07 ◼ ► but has discovered what appear to be two different marketing images that surely look to me to be actual Apple marketing images.
00:17:17 ◼ ► One of them is of the iPhone XS. I really had to think that through to make sure I got that right.
00:17:22 ◼ ► The iPhone XS and something that appears to be larger than the iPhone XS and something about the Apple Watch.
00:17:29 ◼ ► Now, I personally think that the Apple Watch 1 is more interesting, but I think we should cover the iPhone 1 first.
00:17:36 ◼ ► So, what this is is two iPhone X looking things with an image of a planet of some form.
00:17:44 ◼ ► I'm sorry, Jason and Steven, I don't know which planet this is. That is on it. That makes it kind of look like a hump, which is weird.
00:17:53 ◼ ► But it's two phones stacked on top of each other, one of which to my eye, and it's hard to tell, of course,
00:17:59 ◼ ► but one of which to my eye looks like a standard iPhone X and the other one looks like something considerably larger,
00:18:08 ◼ ► So, it stands to reason that this is the iPhone Y, as Marco dubbed it a few minutes ago, and the iPhone Y Plus,
00:18:18 ◼ ► which is the next version of the iPhone X, but bigger, just like the 6 Plus was the 6, but bigger.
00:18:25 ◼ ► Did you hear the thing from, I think it was yesterday, where somebody was saying, some connected person was saying,
00:18:35 ◼ ► Yes. There's a story on that going around, yeah. It doesn't seem to be as well sourced as this one is, but...
00:18:41 ◼ ► I'm hoping that that was somebody drawing too much from a URL, and it was like max resolution of the image, right?
00:19:00 ◼ ► Yeah, so let's hope it's not the iPhone Math, or let's hope it is the iPhone Math situation, and somebody's misreading this,
00:19:06 ◼ ► because, man, iPhone_XS_Max is such a weird, like, it's such a mouthful, it's going to be mis-said and mis-heard all the time,
00:19:15 ◼ ► like, I hope they have a better name than that. I don't see why they can't just do iPhone 10 Plus, 10S Plus, I don't know.
00:19:25 ◼ ► I left out a few things from the description of this. I think two salient other things about this, other than, you know, just typical phone marketing shot.
00:19:32 ◼ ► The first is that what they're emphasizing in this picture matches what they're emphasizing in the invitation that went out to press,
00:19:39 ◼ ► which is the gold finish of the metal parts on the side. These are both very shiny gold things.
00:19:45 ◼ ► And what Apple chooses to put in their glamour product shots very often is, like, whatever they're pushing.
00:19:51 ◼ ► Like, the phones come in all sorts of different finishes and colors, and, you know, Apple chooses to highlight one or two of them.
00:19:56 ◼ ► And here's highlighting the gold, and you can tell what that gold finish is going to look like. It's going to be very glossy.
00:20:10 ◼ ► And I think this is a hint towards, we had this big discussion about the three different rumored sizes of phones, a hint towards how Apple is going to market these.
00:20:17 ◼ ► Well, first of all, it could possibly be a hint that there is no third phone and that part of the rumor is wrong.
00:20:21 ◼ ► But assuming it's not wrong, it shows that they have a photo here of these two phones, which are being promoted together,
00:20:34 ◼ ► If there is a third phone, it's not being promoted in a family photo with these other two phones.
00:20:44 ◼ ► because they get to have the, you know, infinite black background of space behind this planet and/or moon.
00:20:51 ◼ ► And I find that interesting. First of all, it's making me doubt that there might not even be a third phone.
00:20:57 ◼ ► And second of all, it's making me think if there is a third phone, it is totally kicked off the stage.
00:21:02 ◼ ► And it'll be interesting, like, if they give this presentation, I always try to think of what order they're going to show things in.
00:21:09 ◼ ► I guess you have to show the cheap phone first, but if the cheap phone looks and behaves almost exactly like this one,
00:21:17 ◼ ► how do you get people excited about this phone? I mean, here's the new phone, and it's this interesting size that's in the middle,
00:21:24 ◼ ► and we probably won't mention the screen technology, and we'll show you that it has one camera.
00:21:31 ◼ ► and then presumably you save these phones till after that, because these are the better ones.
00:21:36 ◼ ► It's really making me doubt the third phone theory. I don't know. I haven't been keeping up on the latest of the rumors,
00:21:40 ◼ ► but this picture has really rocked my world, because I was figuring, like, surely this is a great opportunity to show the three sizes.
00:21:50 ◼ ► Yeah, I agree. I think that this is... obviously we don't know what the specific genesis of this is,
00:21:57 ◼ ► like where it came from, what it represents, but it would not at all surprise me if Apple globbed the OLED phones together
00:22:05 ◼ ► as one unit, be that because they have the same or similar names, because they have any number of reasons to treat them as one.
00:22:14 ◼ ► And then this theoretical kind of odd screen size LED, LCD, whatever it is, LCD other phone is just treated separately,
00:22:25 ◼ ► in the same way that like a MacBook is treated separately from a MacBook Pro, but they're all laptops, you know?
00:22:30 ◼ ► I think that what you're seeing is exactly that, and I think you're reading a little too deeply into it.
00:22:36 ◼ ► Yeah, and also, like, part of the rumor is that the X line will still be using steel as its like outer band material,
00:22:48 ◼ ► And so the aluminum, you know, brushed finish would look so different from these, it would look like a weird sandwich.
00:22:56 ◼ ► Like it would have these two perfect glossy gold finishes, which is clearly what they want to emphasize in the marketing,
00:23:03 ◼ ► because, you know, it's an S year, they're going to do new colors to help people get excited about it and make it look new,
00:23:12 ◼ ► So anyway, having the two shiny gold things and then sandwiched between them, a phone that's kind of one of their sizes,
00:23:21 ◼ ► and then has a brushed aluminum side, and also can't depict this picture with those deep black levels as the rest of them can,
00:23:29 ◼ ► like, it would just look weird, I think. So I think this, I wouldn't read anything into this image, you know, about the third phone,
00:23:37 ◼ ► you know, confirming or denying it either way. It's probably an image that is used just to show off the new Xs and their new color.
00:23:46 ◼ ► Right, so that's bringing me to my second thing of how do you talk about the other phone, assuming there is a third phone,
00:23:59 ◼ ► If you included it with all the other phones and if they all were the same materials and finishes, then you could show them together,
00:24:04 ◼ ► that excuses you from having to go into depth about them. You just say, look, here are the phones, they're all like this,
00:24:09 ◼ ► they all have these features, and it's, you know, good, better, best, small, even larger, whatever.
00:24:12 ◼ ► But if you're going to talk about that phone separately, do you talk about that phone first or after these phones?
00:24:20 ◼ ► Absolutely first. You absolutely do it first because you say, look, we're moving the tech from the iPhone X,
00:24:41 ◼ ► I get it. Well, because like, so I mean, one big unknown that I have is like, what's the pitch here besides price for that phone?
00:24:50 ◼ ► Because with the previous generation, like with the iPhone X and then the 8 and 8 Plus, the X had these like bold, controversial new things.
00:24:59 ◼ ► It had face ID instead of touch ID, so you lost touch ID, you had to rely on this new thing called face ID,
00:25:03 ◼ ► which was different and not quite as good in certain ways. It also had the notch, which was, you know, very controversial when it came out.
00:25:09 ◼ ► A lot of people, so basically a lot of people said, you know what, I don't want to deal with this new stuff.
00:25:14 ◼ ► I want to keep the old stuff. It worked great for me. I want to keep doing it. So I'll buy the 8 or 8 Plus.
00:25:19 ◼ ► With this phone, they're getting rid of the like, I like the old stuff better angle, because it's taking on face ID and the notch, apparently by the rumors.
00:25:34 ◼ ► And so, you know, of course they're going to do stuff like, you know, cut the camera, make the cheaper bottom material, stuff like that.
00:25:40 ◼ ► But I wonder like what else are they going to do as we discussed last episode, because like they have to somehow justify the price of the X being, you know, different and higher than this new 6 inch whatever Plus phone.
00:25:52 ◼ ► But at the same time, like A, get people excited about the Plus phone. B, the Plus phone also like is at the price point that only one year ago and before you could buy the current tech, the best tech.
00:26:08 ◼ ► Like, and if you look at the 8 and 8 Plus, they have the current tech and the best tech in almost every way, especially the 8 Plus.
00:26:15 ◼ ► Like the difference in the camera between the 8 Plus and the X is very small and there's very few other differences besides face ID and you know, the edge to edge thing.
00:26:25 ◼ ► And so now, like how the heck are they going to make this like cheaper phone be worth its still high price, but differentiated enough from the X and XS Max Plus, whatever it is.
00:26:41 ◼ ► Yeah, I think your pitch before about we brought the X technology to the masses is probably the way they'll go for it if it's slotted in the beginning.
00:26:49 ◼ ► And speaking of rumors of weird names, that actually is a thing that could be used to make this seem interesting and more attractive merely by giving it a new name.
00:26:59 ◼ ► Like the rumor was that it was going to be XR like a lowercase r after the 10. I have no idea what these.
00:27:05 ◼ ► Yeah, or I think the rumor was actually just that it was going to have a surprising name or something like that.
00:27:16 ◼ ► But as I'm saying, giving it a different naming scheme, kind of like the SE where like that was a new line, a new name.
00:27:24 ◼ ► And this, if you gave this one a third line, like now it's the 10 R's or the R models or they call the 10 SE or who knows, whatever.
00:27:32 ◼ ► That's one way you could make it seem interesting because it's like, this isn't just a cheaper phone.
00:27:36 ◼ ► It's the beginning of a new line of cheaper phones. Never mind that Apple changes its mind from year to year and whatever the heck is the best thing for that year.
00:27:41 ◼ ► It doesn't seem particularly dedicated to any naming or branding or sizing or marketing theme or product line theme for its phones.
00:27:50 ◼ ► But having a different name and making it be like a democratized version of the technology from the 10, I think you can follow that up with,
00:27:58 ◼ ► "And now here are the real 10s and they're gold." And it still holds together as a presentation.
00:28:07 ◼ ► You know, we want all this cool technology and they would pitch it in a much better way than I'm about to.
00:28:12 ◼ ► But it's all this cool technology that used to be exclusive and only for super, super rich people is now available to all of you, the regular rich people.
00:28:23 ◼ ► It's like the Halo car that you've been talking about for so long, Jon, that we had the Halo car iPhone X, now that tech is moving downstream, and you can have it too.
00:28:34 ◼ ► But we want you to not have to pay an obscene price for it, so you're not going to get two cameras because it's too much money.
00:28:46 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, here's the iPhone Y and it's even better. So give us all your money.
00:28:50 ◼ ► It might be lighter than 10 too for aluminum versus steel, which might be a reasonable selling point.
00:28:59 ◼ ► I was thinking that they would give it in less colors just to punish you for buying the cheap phone, but we'll see.
00:29:03 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't understand Apple's color strategy. Like, if it were up to me, I would assume that you would want colors to be a premium thing, especially like in an SE or with this new.
00:29:20 ◼ ► This year is the gold phone year. I have someone I don't see them saying, "Also, Bumblebee Yellow."
00:29:26 ◼ ► It always annoyed me when the 5C, the 5C got all the good colors. Like, I still see, if you ever see like a white 5C, even though it's not an exciting color, white 5Cs look cool, right?
00:29:37 ◼ ► The yellow ones look cool. They all, if you've seen like the product red versions of the phones, those look pretty good.
00:29:44 ◼ ► Yeah, the product red 8 and 8 Plus look fantastic, but I didn't want to get it because, you know, not only was it a half cycle, but like it wasn't the iPhone X. I like the iPhone X.
00:29:57 ◼ ► Yeah, well, I mean, it's like a robotic core. Like, everyone puts cases on these things, so it doesn't really matter.
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00:32:03 ◼ ► I feel like we should go into predictions and yet, as with, was it last year? I guess last year.
00:32:09 ◼ ► I don't know if there's a whole lot to predict. I mean, it seems like we're getting something that's the same size as the iPhone X.
00:32:15 ◼ ► So tell me, what is going to be surprising? I mean, it seems like we all agree, and I just don't mean the three of us.
00:32:22 ◼ ► I mean, we as a community agree there's going to be an iPhone Y, if you will. There'll be an iPhone Y Plus.
00:32:38 ◼ ► Oh, it's because it's one bigger instead of 11, you're going Y. All right, I get it now.
00:32:46 ◼ ► The quick aside, my favorite interview question when I was interviewing for C++ roles was giving people a short block of code that would reverse a string and ask them what the hell it was doing.
00:33:01 ◼ ► Point being that we all agree that it's an iPhone X replacement. There's something that's like an iPhone X replacement that's bigger.
00:33:12 ◼ ► We're 50/50 on this LCD version of the iPhone X. What else is there that you're expecting, Marco, that you think is interesting?
00:33:25 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. Because I was going to say, if you look at what is likely and/or plausible to launch from Apple this fall, it's a hilariously long list.
00:33:34 ◼ ► Okay, no, no, no. I'm only talking about the phone right now. I'm sorry. Only the phone.
00:33:44 ◼ ► Honestly, I don't expect this to be a big year for the phone, but that might just be because I'm historically pretty bad at, and I think most of us are, pretty bad at predicting what kind of cool new tech will be introduced in the S year.
00:34:04 ◼ ► Historically, they've introduced things like Touch ID, 3D Touch, and stuff like that. There's always cool stuff introduced in the S years.
00:34:12 ◼ ► And so, and normally it's stuff that nobody was really predicting or asking for or had any idea, but then you get it and you're like, "Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I definitely want that."
00:34:20 ◼ ► Sometimes it's software features that are artificially limited to the new phones, but usually it's like hardware stuff kind of tied in, so usually it's pretty cool.
00:34:26 ◼ ► So, you know, they're probably going to do like special camera features, for instance, something like that, right?
00:34:31 ◼ ► But other than that, I don't have any good imagination for like what other cool tech they'll introduce for the S generation.
00:34:38 ◼ ► Because as usual at this time of year, I'm very happy with my iPhone X, and I can't imagine why I would want to lose $1200 in two weeks to, or one week to buy the new phone.
00:34:50 ◼ ► But what's going to happen probably is next week they're going to tell us exactly why I'm going to lose $1200, and then all of a sudden just want it on day one and can't be without it.
00:35:05 ◼ ► I think they're maybe a little oversubscribed on cool stuff in the X generation, because you're right that they usually do introduce the exciting stuff like the, you know, some interesting software hardware synergy that's enabled by the new power refinement or whatever.
00:35:19 ◼ ► But the X had so much of that, like portrait mode, and then the portrait mode refinements, Animoji, all those things you can do with like those seem to all come with a X.
00:35:27 ◼ ► Obviously they'll all get better this year, but I can imagine something like either portrait mode or Animoji having an enhanced version of that on the S as being a fancier feature.
00:35:39 ◼ ► But they're so old at this point, they're not like, you know, I mentioned last time I made up something about some 360 camera thing that use the front and back cameras at the same time.
00:35:47 ◼ ► That's the type of silly feature that you can imagine being enabled, but I just feel like this year, like everything that the X did, they're just going to do all that better.
00:35:57 ◼ ► And I'm also having difficulty coming up with anything other than like just they could just demo stuff like that is enabled by the advances in ARKit that you already would have seen if you went to WWDC.
00:36:09 ◼ ► But now here they are in an actual shipping phone, right? They have an ARKit thing in that topic for probably not this week, not next week, but maybe the week after.
00:36:17 ◼ ► But that's still out there as a possibility of a thing they can demo. But I'm sure Apple will come up with some way to make us think we need this phone.
00:36:24 ◼ ► But honestly, if it just comes in shiny gold and is faster, that's enough reason for most people to get it.
00:36:29 ◼ ► I mean, is there any chance that you, Marco, and probably me too are not getting this phone?
00:36:39 ◼ ► It would be kind of funny if there was a year that went by that only John got the phone and we didn't.
00:36:45 ◼ ► Could be this year. You know, Marco's going to get it no matter what. Casey probably doesn't need it.
00:36:50 ◼ ► Honestly, I'm having a hard time coming up with reasons to get the new phone. Now, not having any knowledge about it, obviously.
00:37:00 ◼ ► I got it. The way it's better is way better Face ID. Be that quicker or more reliable, that's the way it's better. Something hardware related that makes Face ID way better.
00:37:13 ◼ ► Yeah, no, no, but to me, like, okay, you can say that the camera will be better, but it's hard for me anyway.
00:37:19 ◼ ► It's hard for me to see a tremendous difference between individual adjacent iPhone years.
00:37:24 ◼ ► Like, I look at 3GS pictures I've taken and they're terrible, but if you look at the 3GS compared to the 4, the 4 compared to the 4S, generally speaking, I personally don't see a tremendous difference.
00:37:34 ◼ ► But the camera will probably be enough for Marco or me, but I think the way we're going to get Marco, well, not we, but they'll get Marco is by saying Face ID is way, way, way better because it's either faster, more accurate, or both.
00:37:51 ◼ ► But that's not, you know, like the S generation didn't just have, or whatever time Touch ID second gen came out, that wasn't the only feature.
00:37:59 ◼ ► It was, in fact, that was the type of feature that, like, got a one sentence mention and only the tech nerds knew about, like, the distinction between first and second gen Touch ID was not a thing that Apple marketed pretty heavily.
00:38:10 ◼ ► Well, they should have. Like, that was, like, I remember it came out, it was announced, like, a few days before XOXO conference one year, and then, you know, XOXO, it was one of those years where the iPhone ordering midnight was during XOXO.
00:38:24 ◼ ► And so I remember standing on the roof bar at this hotel there, and there was somebody with me who had their review unit with them.
00:38:45 ◼ ► When I saw how fast Touch ID was, I was like, "Wait, did it even work? Did you even do it? Like, how the heck is it, like, it was so much faster than generation one that that's what really pushed me over the edge.
00:39:00 ◼ ► And so if they make Face ID that much faster, that could be something, but it probably won't be that much faster after only one year.
00:39:10 ◼ ► Because, you know, Touch ID had, I think, two or three years of it being slow, because it got faster on the 6S, right?
00:39:20 ◼ ► Wasn't it the 6S? So it came out on the 5S, right? So 5S, 6, so yeah, there were two years.
00:39:25 ◼ ► I don't know, I'll have to look it up. My recollection is it wasn't that long. Anyway, I remember when Face ID first came out last year, I think I recall predicting that it will be harder to make Face ID faster than it was to make Touch ID faster just because it's a more complicated problem.
00:39:39 ◼ ► So, despite the fact that it will surely be faster and better, I'm not sure the leap will be as big.
00:39:45 ◼ ► But I'm not sure that matters, though, because what matters for people wanting to buy it or for being a differentiating factor is not the percentage increase in speed or accuracy over last year.
00:40:02 ◼ ► So Touch ID second gen, like, wow, so much faster, we can notice it. But the real point is that Touch ID second gen crossed over a line from thing that I feel like I'm waiting for a little bit to thing that I never feel like I'm waiting for.
00:40:12 ◼ ► And it's not as if Touch ID third gen, fourth gen, and fifth gen, you know, cut the speed in half and half and half again because we were at the point of diminishing returns.
00:40:20 ◼ ► Like, Touch ID was fast enough. They didn't spend a lot of time and resources trying to make it twice as fast again and then twice as fast again because you've crossed the threshold.
00:40:28 ◼ ► Now, with Face ID, I'm not sure how close we are to that threshold of instantness because I don't use this. I don't have a 10. I don't use it every day.
00:40:36 ◼ ► I think it probably still feels, my guess is that you two 10 users can tell me, that it still feels like there is a slight delay, which makes me think there is still a finish line out there of no longer feels like a delay.
00:40:49 ◼ ► We are closer to it than Touch ID generation one was. Like, there is still a gap there. Like, I would like Face ID to be faster, but it's nowhere near as slow as Touch ID one and it doesn't fail as often.
00:41:02 ◼ ► So you feel like maybe, you know, if Touch ID got twice as fast, if this just got like 50% as fast, we might be over the line and then it's like it's fine.
00:41:10 ◼ ► Probably, yeah. I mean, I would also, I would like Face ID to just have like a bigger radius. Like, the main way that it fails for me is angles.
00:41:21 ◼ ► Like, if I'm picking it up off the table and it starts scanning before it's like facing me enough or if I'm trying to like, you know, unlock it while I'm walking or like while it's in the car dock or something, you know, like, and there's like a slight, like I'm a little bit too far out of angle.
00:41:36 ◼ ► Like, I would like to see improvements there and I want to see improvements first of all, also to just like angles.
00:41:42 ◼ ► Like, and we'll get to the iPad stuff and hopefully shortly that like, you know, you can't, right now you can't have Face ID if your face is rotated, like if you're holding the phone sideways getting out of bed or something like that.
00:41:52 ◼ ► So like improvements like that would be great, but the actual speed of recognition, like if it's going to recognize you at all, it does it fairly quickly.
00:42:01 ◼ ► I have found that with iOS 12, it has gotten a lot better at those things. I wouldn't say the speed has felt any different to me, but it has felt like the angles have gotten a lot better than they were before.
00:42:16 ◼ ► Or at least that was my experience and we'll see if others feel the same when iOS 12 really comes out.
00:42:31 ◼ ► People keep, like there's speculation, don't worry, everyone will get to the Apple Watch. It's very exciting.
00:42:36 ◼ ► There's speculation about like, you know, are there going to be two events? Are there not going to be certain products? Are they going to be delayed? Are they going to be released by press releases?
00:42:44 ◼ ► So here is a list of everything I could think of of products that will plausibly or most likely launch this fall.
00:42:52 ◼ ► The iPhone XS, the iPhone XS Plus or Max, which is a new form factor which needs more time.
00:43:02 ◼ ► The Apple Watch Series 4, which is a new screen size, probably some kind of new sensor, some kind of new health thing, needs a lot of time.
00:43:08 ◼ ► The iPad Pro with edge-to-edge screen and Face ID, that's going to be a new form factor, probably in two different sizes, the 10.5 and 12.9 equivalents.
00:43:17 ◼ ► Probably new iPad Pro accessories for that weird new connector that's on the back of these things.
00:43:22 ◼ ► Maybe a Pencil 2 with better battery life, maybe a smart keyboard update for the new sizes of these things.
00:43:28 ◼ ► The AirPower mat, new AirPods that work with the AirPower mat and maybe include things like the water resistance and always-on Hey Siri that people talked about earlier.
00:43:37 ◼ ► A HomePod software update that introduces multiple name timers and can initiate phone calls, maybe more on the HomePod, maybe a price drop, maybe a new model, who knows.
00:43:57 ◼ ► And they have to fit all of this into an event with iOS 12, watchOS 4, macOS Mojave, some kind of show-off of how awesome Siri is, a great AR demo that will be useless, a game demo, maybe two, some kind of creative app demo if iPads are involved using the new iPad with maybe the new Apple Pencil.
00:44:13 ◼ ► A retail update, a health and issues update, Tim Cook talking very slowly and maybe a musical guest.
00:44:17 ◼ ► All of that has to fit allegedly in the September event. I don't see it. That's way too much stuff.
00:44:23 ◼ ► You could cut enough stuff to make that into an event if you drop the musical guest and if you don't care about the Mac.
00:44:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, that's why people keep thinking it's going to be two events. Like, I would assume this one is just devices that run iOS watchOS or what the hell is the home thing called?
00:44:59 ◼ ► You don't mention anything about any of the Macs because you have to have a second event to show the MacBook Air replacement and the Mini and then everything else is a press release or something.
00:45:07 ◼ ► I guess. But there are enough Mac updates, allegedly, or rumored, that that could be its own event.
00:45:18 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, they probably wouldn't give the Macs that kind of event anymore. They would probably do press release kind of things and reviewers meeting in the place in New York or something like that.
00:45:29 ◼ ► It'd probably be something like that. But still, there's so much stuff on the Apple slate for this fall that is either rumored or very likely to come.
00:45:39 ◼ ► I don't see how they fit all of this into one giant event. And any way they cut it, they're leaving a lot on the table.
00:45:46 ◼ ► And it's possible that a lot of this stuff isn't coming this fall, but so much of it has been pretty strongly rumored for it.
00:45:59 ◼ ► It's a lot. It's certainly a lot. I'm glad you went through that list because I had all of that rumbling around in my head, but until you enumerated every single line item, it didn't seem insurmountable.
00:46:10 ◼ ► But hearing that, that seems insurmountable. I don't know how they do that in just one event.
00:46:15 ◼ ► And I mean, not to say that you're wrong, Jon. I mean, I'm sure that there are ways in which we could make this.
00:46:20 ◼ ► I don't know why I keep saying "we" tonight. I'm sure there are ways that could make this work. But it seems really aggressive, for sure.
00:46:41 ◼ ► After an entire show talking about watches and iPads and phones, the one more thing is the Mac Mini. The whole trailer comes out.
00:46:55 ◼ ► Oh, my word. All right, anything other than the watch that we want to discuss? Because I am actually very excited to talk about the watch. Is there anything else?
00:47:04 ◼ ► We can talk about any of this stuff. That's why it's such a big scope. So I'm going to go on the assumption, because this is such a massive list of things, I'm going to assume that Jon is right.
00:47:17 ◼ ► That basically this event will have nothing about the Mac. If for no other reason, because either A) Mojave isn't ready yet, which is some things we've been hearing from people, so maybe that's going to slip to October, and B) there's no room in this event for all this stuff.
00:47:33 ◼ ► So there probably is going to be some kind of October Mojave and Macs release, whether it includes an event or not, we don't know yet.
00:47:40 ◼ ► So even if you just say, all right, this is devices that begin with I that don't end in Mac, or I guess Apple. Oh, man, this is what a mess.
00:47:50 ◼ ► I was going to say iOS devices, but it doesn't include the watches. It's very difficult to categorize these things. Flat glass things.
00:47:58 ◼ ► Right, plus AirPower. With no keyboards. Except the iPad keyboard. That's a separate thing.
00:48:06 ◼ ► Oh my God, yeah. Anyway, the iPad Pro I think is going to be really interesting, whatever they do to that, because there is something about these skinny bezel, possibly face ID kind of things being discovered in software and everything.
00:48:26 ◼ ► So it does seem pretty strongly signaling that there's going to be a new iPad of the style of the iPhone X. Whether it has a notch, I don't know. I don't think it would need a notch, but we'll see.
00:48:36 ◼ ► Anyway, that sounds kind of boring until you think about, well, what else does that mean? It means things like face ID has to work in multiple orientations, because I can't imagine them having face ID only work in one orientation on the iPad.
00:48:52 ◼ ► That would be really weird. And then of course if it did, that would raise the question of which orientation. I think it should be landscape, but they don't market it that way or design the Apple logo on the back that way, so who knows.
00:49:03 ◼ ► Then there's the weird thing about that new connector on the back. What the heck is that showing up in all these case renderings? We speculated previously, or I did at least.
00:49:11 ◼ ► I think it would be really cool if that was some kind of magnetic pencil attachment and charging point, just like what the Surface series of devices does with theirs, because that's really nice.
00:49:23 ◼ ► The big problem with the Apple Pencil is that it's never charged and it's never with you, and this would solve both of those things, so that would be great.
00:49:31 ◼ ► But it also could be for something else. What if it's for a new kind of keyboard? What if it's for a laptop-style case? Who knows what it's for, but that's probably going to justify some kind of event in time.
00:49:41 ◼ ► First of all, and second of all, I'm just excited to see what that means. What is that thing? I guess that's probably it on the iPad front. Do you guys have any iPad thoughts?
00:49:51 ◼ ► The only thing I'm thinking about is if you make an edge-to-edge or closer-to-edge-to-edge screen or the new form factor for this, it starts to look more and more like what everyone else in the industry is doing with their big tablet-y things.
00:50:04 ◼ ► Like the Surface or the other things where they have a big thing that is mostly just screen and then a keyboard.
00:50:09 ◼ ► And Apple does that with their current keyboard setup, but because the keyboard acts as a stand and because it's just a little bit different, it starts to look more like you just ripped the screen off a laptop, a modern laptop without huge borders around it.
00:50:22 ◼ ► So I'm wondering if Apple takes this opportunity to rethink how they do their keyboards, like just how they attach and everything.
00:50:28 ◼ ► I'm not saying they're going to go full like bridge keyboard with a hinge, making yourself a makeshift iOS laptop, but Apple has shown that they're willing to change around how they do cases and covers from year to year, even when they don't really need to.
00:50:44 ◼ ► Like the generation of iPad Pro I have, the one after that, they changed the case, they stopped selling the back case, they just did the front one. Like this year, what will they do for things that wrap around and attach to the iPad with the goal of making the combination of an iPad and a keyboard be more laptop-like and less like some sort of weird floppy stand that you have to wrangle attached to your screen?
00:51:13 ◼ ► I think that's one opportunity for them to differentiate these new iPads in the mode that Apple seemed to be pushing them for a while, but it's like, "And attach a keyboard to it and a pencil and it's like a recreated workstation, but it's floppy."
00:51:26 ◼ ► I would like to see them do something. I've heard no rumors about this, I'm just entirely saying what I would like to see. It's a way that these, even though it has nothing to do with the iPad themselves, it could make these iPads seem even more differentiated and special and more pro-focused, if Apple has determined that this is actually what people want.
00:51:47 ◼ ► The other possibility is that Apple has determined most people don't want to attach keyboards to these things, so they don't even bother showing it attached to it except for in the very end of the presentation when you say, "And we have these cool accessories, get a keyboard."
00:51:57 ◼ ► It occurred to me that I can't remember the last time I've used my iPad for more than 15 minutes. In fact, I don't remember the last time it's been charged. Now, admittedly, I'm on the iPad Mini from 44 years ago, the most recently updated iPad Mini, but I haven't used my iPad in a long, long time, which is weird.
00:52:20 ◼ ► I was going to say, "Send your unused iPads here because we have kids that love them," but then you said it was a Mini and nobody wants that crap in this house.
00:52:29 ◼ ► I wonder if I tried to give an iPad Mini to my kids, I think they would have rejected it. They'd be like, "No, I want an iPad."
00:52:37 ◼ ► No, I mean, the worst thing is the worst. My son, he would probably complain because it would be too small, and yet every time he watches YouTube, he doesn't maximize the window. He just leaves it. He leaves the rest of the YouTube UI around the video that he's watching.
00:52:51 ◼ ► On his regular 10-inch iPad, you're wasting half the screen. I should give him a Mini as punishment. See, now your whole iPad is the size you used to watch YouTube.
00:53:02 ◼ ► No, to be fair, I didn't use my iPads much. I would get them for testing, or I would think I would use them, and then I wouldn't use them.
00:53:09 ◼ ► What changed it for me was the smart keyboard for the iPad Pro and the speakers in the iPad Pro, which that made me now leave it out all the time as my kitchen and dining room computer so that it plays podcasts.
00:53:22 ◼ ► If I want to look anything up while I'm cooking or while we're eating, I can quickly do that. That changed the game, and that took the iPad from something that I would forget about in a drawer for months to something that I use every single day.
00:53:36 ◼ ► I still use mine every day, and I use it like an iPad. I use it like a Steve Jobs iPad. Portrait orientation, sitting down in a comfy chair. It's like a magazine with no paper. I read books on it, too.
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00:55:48 ◼ ► Guilherme also found, in one of the two images he found, a genuinely fascinating image of what appears to be the Apple Watch Series 4.
00:56:03 ◼ ► This looks to me, let me paint you a word picture, it looks to me to be a little bit thinner, although I wouldn't say dramatically so.
00:56:11 ◼ ► It does look to me to be using the same lugs or whatever it is from the bands, sorry Marco.
00:56:23 ◼ ► Thankfully, this seemingly cellular Apple Watch does not have a big red blob on the crown.
00:56:30 ◼ ► Instead, it just has a red ring. I still don't really see why that's necessary personally, but be that as it may.
00:56:36 ◼ ► It appears to have another hole in between the side button and the digital crown, which I can assume would be a microphone.
00:56:51 ◼ ► What's really fascinating is this display, because it appears to be an edge-to-edge display, and it has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight complications on it.
00:57:07 ◼ ► So, in the upper left-hand corner, it appears that a timer was started, and it's got 14 minutes 59 seconds left.
00:57:13 ◼ ► There's an icon for the timer, there's the readout for the amount of time remaining, and then there's a little graph or progress indicator in the upper right.
00:57:20 ◼ ► It is apparently 72 degrees, the low for the day is 52 degrees, and the high for the day is 89, and the 72 is highlighted in the graph in between the two.
00:57:29 ◼ ► I'm going to stop you right there and think that I'm not sure there's a location in California with a low of 52 and a high of almost 90.
00:57:52 ◼ ► I was thinking that they were just showing a range of temperature, but I suppose they don't have to be a high or low, but boy, that's rough.
00:58:26 ◼ ► In the bottom right-hand corner, it appears that sunset is at 7.30 p.m. at 9 hours and 21 minutes.
00:58:46 ◼ ► The thing with the UV index, the reason it makes me suspect these progress bars is what the hell is the UV index progress bar showing?
00:58:52 ◼ ► I guess blue is good and purple is bad, and we're almost halfway, but not quite. I'm not quite sure what that's showing.
00:59:06 ◼ ► you have--what's the term for the ring, Marco, where all the hour tick marks are and the minute tick marks?
00:59:41 ◼ ► And that's actually where the hour and minute tick marks are, which I could see being annoying, but I think is frickin' awesome.
00:59:49 ◼ ► I think that's tremendous that it shows you with text presumably what your next appointment is,
01:00:07 ◼ ► I know what the difference is between 9 and 10 and 11 and noon, so I don't really need all those tick marks.
01:00:19 ◼ ► And then within the watch face itself, because all those complications I was describing were outside of the ring,
01:00:30 ◼ ► we see Picture of the Globe for reasons, I guess, and then on the left-hand side we see a musical note with some sort of meter around it,
01:00:37 ◼ ► which I would assume means that they're playing a song and it's either almost done or has just started,
01:00:52 ◼ ► But either way, there's so much data on this display. There is so much to read and look at.
01:00:58 ◼ ► And in the way that I found--is it the modern face? What's the one that's just hideous to look at on the current one?
01:01:09 ◼ ► The modular face on the existing watch, I don't personally care for it, and I've almost never used it,
01:01:16 ◼ ► because I just think that all the data kind of blends together, and I just don't like it. I don't think it's good-looking.
01:01:22 ◼ ► This looks amazing, and I had zero interest in upgrading my Apple Watch, because I have a Series 3 cellular and I love it.
01:01:31 ◼ ► And it doesn't have battery problems yet, it doesn't have speed problems yet, and so far it's working great,
01:01:48 ◼ ► I care the opposite. I care less about watch faces, because they have new watch faces all the time,
01:01:54 ◼ ► But it's a different form. It's not an Airstream trailer, it's a slimmed-down Airstream trailer,
01:01:58 ◼ ► and to my eye it looks way thinner than the old one. Obviously it's probably only a few millimeters,
01:02:03 ◼ ► but when I look at this it looks less like a bubbulous computer watch, and more like a kind of homely, regular watch with a huge screen on it.
01:02:11 ◼ ► Yeah, to be fair, I mean, the Apple Watch kernel thickness, my eyeball in here, it's probably about 14 millimeters, something like that.
01:02:18 ◼ ► The picture of this one looks like it's closer to like 9 or 10, and it could just be a flattering angle,
01:02:25 ◼ ► but it does look noticeably thinner, and going for it, like in the watch world, something that's like 13 or 14 millimeters is pretty chunky.
01:02:33 ◼ ► Something that's, you know, 9 to 12 is considered pretty thin, and of course there's, you know,
01:02:48 ◼ ► I think the change from the giant red dot to this more tasteful, although still I agree Casey, unnecessary, red ring on the crown for this other model, that's nice too.
01:03:02 ◼ ► It's also worth pointing out, this appears to be shiny gold, just like the iPhone XS and XS Max Plus 2.
01:03:10 ◼ ► Well, it's not as shiny though. You can tell it's not a steel watch, or at least the finish doesn't look like it.
01:03:17 ◼ ► I disagree. It looks exactly like a steel watch to me, because it looks very, you know, they've made gold Apple Watches until now,
01:03:24 ◼ ► besides the editions, ignore those, they've made all the aluminum gold ones, and they all have like a very obvious, like you know, matte gold finish.
01:03:31 ◼ ► It's very clear looking at it what you're looking at. This looks like the steel model, and it looks like it is, I'm going to say that's a shiny gold.
01:03:41 ◼ ► I'm going to say you're wrong. It looks like it's the exact same finish as the iPhone XS.
01:03:45 ◼ ► I agree that they're trying to make it look shiny, like it doesn't look like the current matte gold ones,
01:03:49 ◼ ► but from looking at this picture, to me it looks like an aluminum one they're making as shiny as they possibly can.
01:03:55 ◼ ► Maybe I'm wrong, because it's just one picture, it's really hard to tell, and especially since a lot of their marketing pictures look,
01:04:00 ◼ ► I'm going to say like airbrushed, right, obviously that's old technology, but like they all look a little bit softer,
01:04:06 ◼ ► like there's a dream-like haze to all of them, which can make it look a little bit more matte,
01:04:10 ◼ ► but I looked at this picture and I assumed it was an aluminum watch they made as shiny as they possibly could,
01:04:15 ◼ ► which made me fear that they may not even make the steel watch anymore, because like the steel watch, the main reason I'm interested in it is for aesthetics,
01:04:22 ◼ ► but it does have the downsides of being heavier and making the vibrations less noticeable and stuff like that,
01:04:27 ◼ ► so I'm willing to believe that we found a way to make aluminum shiny, and we just call this the gold watch,
01:04:35 ◼ ► So Marco, as the resident watch nerd who has zero interest in digital watches, is this appealing to you at all?
01:04:44 ◼ ► Is this not appealing? Is this really just more of the same? How are you feeling about this? Knowing, obviously, very little, but just from the look of it.
01:04:51 ◼ ► Alright, I took out my digital calipers, I'm measuring my Series 3 aluminum, and if you include the bump on the back, which you should,
01:05:03 ◼ ► So, but obviously you should include the bump, because that's part of the thickness. It stands it off your wrist.
01:05:08 ◼ ► It's like a giant pillow floating there in space. So, including the bump, it's almost 14 millimeters. So my eyeballing was roughly correct.
01:05:15 ◼ ► Anyway, I just don't like wearing the Apple Watch, and I don't think that's ever going to change.
01:05:22 ◼ ► The things I don't like about it are things that are fundamental to smart watches, especially to an Apple smart watch, at least as we know it so far.
01:05:36 ◼ ► I don't like having a watch that itself needs me for things like charging and software updates.
01:05:42 ◼ ► That's a burden on me that I don't want to deal with more than I have to. I already deal with it enough with my other devices.
01:05:48 ◼ ► I don't like having a watch that is constantly buzzing or lighting up, but yet I also don't like having a watch that isn't always showing me the time in some way.
01:05:59 ◼ ► So it's like, it's kind of, you know, what I want out of a watch is something that the Apple Watch can't really give me.
01:06:05 ◼ ► And I don't, some of those things might change a little bit over time, but I don't expect the overall, you know, essence of it to change over time.
01:06:13 ◼ ► That being said, there are times when I do wear it for, usually for testing, and there are certain things about it I appreciate, and certain things about it that they could just change in software that I wish they would.
01:06:26 ◼ ► One of the things I wish they would change in software is to just make the watch faces smarter.
01:06:32 ◼ ► Give me better visualization of data, give me more data, both of which they appeared to have addressed in this new face and this image, and make it smarter about when it's showing me what things.
01:06:44 ◼ ► Like, I've been really about this for years. Like, I don't need to, I don't need the giant, like, timer widget or complication to say "Set" when I don't have a timer active.
01:06:54 ◼ ► But every time I have a timer active, I want to see it on the watch face. Even if I never told it to be in a complication, the watch should be smarter to figure out, like, you have a timer going on your watch for three minutes.
01:07:06 ◼ ► You want to know how that timer is progressing. Like, you don't need to know necessarily in that moment, the sun sets in four hours, if you just started a three minute timer.
01:07:13 ◼ ► You want to see that for three minutes, when it's over, maybe later, then tell me about sunset, you know.
01:07:17 ◼ ► There's so much more the Apple Watch faces can do to be smarter about when they show you things.
01:07:23 ◼ ► The Siri watch face does some of this. I don't like the Siri watch face much at all. It still needs a lot more control, and it still isn't quite as smart as I want it to be.
01:07:34 ◼ ► And I just, I think it looks terrible. But that's just me. A lot of people like the Siri watch face, so I can't complain that much.
01:07:40 ◼ ► But overall, I want the Apple Watch platform to become smarter, to realize it is software, and needs not comply with the restrictions of mechanical watch design when it can be smart about what it shows you and when.
01:07:55 ◼ ► And something like this, leaning into types of complications that mechanical watches can't offer.
01:08:02 ◼ ► Things like the weather and the UV index. The sunset times are almost not offered. There's one watch that offers them, and it's pretty cool, actually.
01:08:19 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, I want the watch to get better in these ways of what it's showing me, how smart it can be, taking clues from context about what's relevant to show me and what's not.
01:08:31 ◼ ► And this looks like it's fixing some of those problems. It probably isn't going to fix all of them, but it looks like it's fixing some of them.
01:08:44 ◼ ► Ultimately, I don't think it's ever going to be for me again, at least not on a permanent basis. I might wear it sometimes, maybe during certain things like exercising or walking or whatever, or traveling maybe.
01:09:01 ◼ ► So I think this new form factor could represent a significant moment in the life of the watch, potentially taking it from a big, chunky computer nerd watch that some people learn to love, even though it's a big, chunky computer-wear nerd watch, which is kind of where we've been for the past few years, where it's not as if only computer nerds buy them, but there is a barrier to be overcome.
01:09:22 ◼ ► You have to be convinced to wear this thing that looks too big for... It looks like... It doesn't seem to justify its size until you maybe get it and wear it a little bit and you're like, "Oh, it's great. I love my workouts and I love notifications."
01:09:38 ◼ ► You can be won over by it, but you have to first overcome the hurdle of, "I don't know if I want an Airstream trailer on my wrist." This may put it below the threshold where people don't immediately, instinctually say, "No, not for me," because it just looks too ridiculous.
01:09:55 ◼ ► The farther they can get away from it looking like a computer watch, the better they are. I think this still looks a little bit like a computer watch, and it's hard for me to tell from this picture exactly how thin it really is.
01:10:05 ◼ ► But I think that that is the most important feature of this watch in terms of attracting new buyers that's thinner and attracting buyers who maybe love their watches and use them all the time, but they wish it was a little bit thinner, especially women or people with small wrists.
01:10:20 ◼ ► Because even though they make the smaller size, which is great, it starts to dominate. It starts to look like you're wearing one of those ankle tracker things that they put on you when you're not supposed to flee, you're out on bail or something.
01:10:33 ◼ ► It looks big, and the closer they can get this to looking more like a piece of jewelry, it's not going to satisfy Marco, however, but more like just a traditional watch and less like a computer watch, that is huge.
01:10:47 ◼ ► Now, as for the computer watch parts of it, there was a good parody image floating around Twitter or somewhere, I wish I'd known who made it.
01:10:54 ◼ ► It showed the shots that they show in the Iron Man and Avengers movies of the inside of Tony Stark's helmet when he's Iron Man. It's a shot that doesn't really make any sense if you think about it for two seconds.
01:11:05 ◼ ► But anyway, it's Robert Downey Jr.'s face, and surrounding it are all these sort of heads-up displays of glowing lights everywhere, and someone just swapped in the watch face from this picture.
01:11:17 ◼ ► The joke is that this is a lot of information. It looks like movie technical mumbo jumbo gobbledygook, lots of lines and gradients and words and things.
01:11:28 ◼ ► If you made up this watch face as a mock-up, especially before the Apple Watch came out, they'd be like, "Apple would never make something like this because it's garish information overload, trying to wedge information into every small..."
01:11:40 ◼ ► The one step forward from this parody would be like, "And if you zoom in, the tick marks for the hours, those are tiny words."
01:11:47 ◼ ► Each one of those is a contact name, and if you tap on it, it will send a message to that contact. It's like, "Why don't they just put your next appointment on the minute hand because it's the long one and it can fit?"
01:11:57 ◼ ► There's a lot of information. Now, I totally agree with everything Marco said about how this watch face could be smarter, and to that end, this is part of that.
01:12:04 ◼ ► Now they have more room to put things, and if they dynamically swap them, it's not the end of the world because you have so much room to put stuff.
01:12:10 ◼ ► Of course, this is not going to be the only watch face. There will be a million watch faces, probably most of the existing ones, and new ones and modified ones and all that other stuff.
01:12:18 ◼ ► I think the software watch face story is significant, especially to experienced users, but this story is 100% about, "Apple Watch, now it's thinner. It's not as gross as it was before. Take a look at it again."
01:12:31 ◼ ► We'll see in the months and weeks to come what the conversations surrounding the Apple Watch are, but if I had to tell anyone a reason they should go into an Apple Store and look at an Apple Watch, I would say, "It's thinner now."
01:12:47 ◼ ► That would be what I would open with, and I wouldn't mention anything about watch faces or red dots or color finishes or anything like that.
01:12:56 ◼ ► Related to all this, I have the Series Zero or whatever in the shiny stainless steel because it's the one I like. I never use it. I wear it two times a year, and I'm considering getting this watch.
01:13:10 ◼ ► Because when I wear it two times a year, it's big and fat and heavy, and this one will be thinner and presumably more attractive and will actually work with all the new features.
01:13:21 ◼ ► It's the Series Zero. I can't use watchOS 5. I can't use overcast on the watch. I have AirPods. If I go for a long walk, it's nice to be able to go for a long walk with just my watch and my AirPods instead of having to have my phone with me, especially if I get a cellular one and I'm not out of touch.
01:13:36 ◼ ► They've come far enough, technologically speaking, that it's not like it's going to make me wear this watch every day, but the few times a year when I do wear the watch, this will be a better watch to wear, obviously, and it may encourage me to wear it one or two more times a year.
01:13:51 ◼ ► It makes me feel bad because this is going to be really expensive. How can I justify buying this stupid watch for all this money that I wear five times a year instead of three? I don't know.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. I'm working on it with myself. I'll have to see what the prices are. I'll have to see if they make a stainless steel one. If I don't like how many of them look, maybe I'll just continue to wait. But anyway, my wife is getting one 100% for sure.
01:14:13 ◼ ► One thing too about the watch faces that like, another massive paper cut that annoys me about the Apple Watch is when they introduce cool stuff to watch faces, usually it's like one face that gets it. And sometimes that's just like a cool new thing, you know, some new ability.
01:14:30 ◼ ► Sometimes it's something fairly important. Like on the cellular models, as far as I know, the only watch face that supports showing you whether you are connected to cellular and how strongly is the Explorer face that was added last year. The other watch face, like it's not a complication that you can just add to the other faces. Why not?
01:14:49 ◼ ► Or why didn't they integrate it into the faces as a thing you can turn on or that's just always there? Or why isn't it part of the status bar? I don't know. Like, why, you know, so looking at this new face in this leaked image or found image, whatever it is, there's all these cool diagonal complications.
01:15:06 ◼ ► Is that going to be an API for developers to integrate with? Because right now that's not a complication type that we have. Maybe we can, maybe we can't. If it is, is it going to be something that we can actually animate like the timer or not? Is it going to only work with this watch face? Or are they going to go and update all the other watch faces?
01:15:23 ◼ ► If the face of the watch is larger, if you know, I mean, sorry, if the screen is larger, are they going to update all the previous watch faces to be larger? Or are they going to look like the way they do now, which is basically like a small round face in the middle of this giant black expanse of nothing?
01:15:39 ◼ ► Oh no, they'll be updated. And another thing I wanted to ask you, so the rumor is that the Series 4 watch is 384 by 480. That's points, not pixels, I assume. How big is the current one in points? Do you know offhand? It's like 160, something like that, or no, it's, so that's right pixels then. Oh, you think that's pixels? Yeah.
01:15:56 ◼ ► Anyway, my question was, they give this number, I don't know how much bigger that is. Obviously the pitch and the picture. It's 384, 480, and currently it is 312, 390. So what's the difference? That's part of the reason that they're able to jam all the section information is, is now they have enough room to maybe make them read. Although I have to say, reading how much time is left on that timer, that may be difficult, especially on the smaller watch, given what size that is.
01:16:24 ◼ ► But that's why they have the progress bar, it's the little curvy progress bar. So I think it's a reasonable compromise for including more information. But part of the reason people like modular is that you can have really big numbers for text. People who don't like reading analog watches, people who just want to have a few pieces of basic information.
01:16:40 ◼ ► And once again, I agree with Marco that more flexibility about what you can include would be better. I think we talked at a WWDC show this year, how they were adding all these features, but they were only available on the Siri watch face, which I also think is not a nice watch face. And it's terrible to be forced to use it because that's the only place that the features you want are available.
01:16:56 ◼ ► The advantage of the Apple watch and all smart watches should be, A, smartness, so contextual awareness, only showing you things that are relevant and hiding them when they're not, things like that. Not doing things like having a hand that goes over the date window because it's software.
01:17:12 ◼ ► But also B, the flexibility of watch face choice, like the individuality of watch face choice. It still kills me that third parties can't make watch faces and I think it's a waste of the platform. I know why I think Apple wants to keep that all to themselves, but I don't agree with that decision.
01:17:29 ◼ ► We have computers on our wrist now. They can be smart. They can show whatever we want them to show. It drives me nuts that I'm stuck with these eight designs that are increasingly getting dated and I would say almost none of which are classics that are worth keeping around as the only eight or ten watch choices.
01:17:48 ◼ ► I want more. I want someone else's take on what this face should be. Whether it's mine or whether it's other more talented watch designers who have a chance at it, I just want more from this. It's already bad enough that everyone in the room has the same watch.
01:18:01 ◼ ► When you also have only two or three faces that are worth using, it just makes it feel old. In this market, you need to keep things fresh. Apple is not going to make the next Submariner or Speedmaster or Aquanaut, even though their hands are very similar to the Aquanaut hands.
01:18:17 ◼ ► But they're not going to make the next iconic watch face. The odds are against them. There are very few iconic watch faces and they tend to happen fifty years ago and not a lot of new ones being created now.
01:18:30 ◼ ► So they need flexibility. They need to keep it fresh. Similar to how they are adding new straps and new colors fairly frequently to keep up with fashion, they need to also add face flexibility and different styles of faces. And they're just not doing that fast enough or not building the foundation necessary to let other people do it fast enough.
01:18:59 ◼ ► I mean, I obviously deeply disagree, but that's why opinions are opinions. I love my Apple Watch. It's not perfect. I'm not trying to say it's perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I love it.
01:19:09 ◼ ► And like I said before, I had no intention of upgrading it this year. I've been on a two or three year cycle. I forget how long it was between, I guess it was two years, because I went series zero to series three.
01:19:21 ◼ ► It doesn't really matter though. My point is just that I never treated the Apple Watch as a yearly upgrade sort of thing, but man, this one looks real good. Looks real, real good. So we'll see if I can resist.
01:19:34 ◼ ► The only thing I'm worried about is, so it's much thinner. I love that. But we just got, I feel like with the series three, like they added cellular and that's a big battery drain. How's the battery life going to be on these?
01:19:45 ◼ ► Presumably, obviously everything in it takes less power, but the screen is bigger and it was already OLED. So I'm wondering how battery life will stack up versus the comparatively massively thick current series three cellular, particularly for the cellular model to see how it shakes out.
01:20:03 ◼ ► Battery wise, I wouldn't be surprised to see its battery life in certain real world situations be not as good as the series three. Not that Apple will ever say that. They'll probably say it has the same battery life, even though it's thinner, which plus or minus marketing fudging is probably true.
01:20:17 ◼ ► But I do worry a little bit about like, like the very thin laptops that true on certain, you know, tests and use cases. But if you're doing something heavy duty or using cellular a lot, you get way worse battery life.
01:20:34 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm not I'm not arguing against it. I think it's probably the right turn off to make like this. This is the thing with the watches. It's been that Airstream trailer for a long time. It actually even got thicker, which is nearly unheard of. Right. But we excuse the business like, well, you're probably making it slightly right. They spent a long time. I think we've talked about this for adding every feature we knew the watch should eventually have to it, except for perhaps the camera, which they've never added.
01:20:56 ◼ ► And during that time, they said, we're not going to the Apple thing. We're not going to fight to make it thinner. We're going to add battery life. We're going to add features. We're going to add performance and we're going to keep it more or less the same size.
01:21:05 ◼ ► Finally, after many years of that, they're at the point now where they're ready to bite the bullet and say, time to go thinner. And I think it has shown abnormal restraint restraint that they've waited this long.
01:21:16 ◼ ► But I think the first really thin one is the most likely to sacrifice something or be compromised in some way for the thinness. And I think it's fine.
01:21:26 ◼ ► I think that's if you wait until you can do the thin one with zero compromises, you probably will have waited too long.
01:21:32 ◼ ► And as I said earlier, I think thinness is the major selling point of this watch. And that's why I think everyone at Apple is probably expecting it to sell pretty well.
01:21:40 ◼ ► Also, I mean, three things. Number one, the Series 3 battery life is almost too good. It's better than it needs to be for most people. So I think they have some budget they can spend there.
01:21:50 ◼ ► Number two, I would not consider the additional screen size to be a major draw because the Apple Watch is so aggressive about not using its screen more than it has to.
01:22:01 ◼ ► I'm guessing most of the power draw on the Apple Watch is like, you know, just keeping the processor and stuff alive while it's awake to run the apps.
01:22:10 ◼ ► Using the exercise sensor, which is mostly that giant light on the back of it and then the continuous processing of that.
01:22:16 ◼ ► And the cellular radio if it's on or the other radios if it's not. Like that seems to be the major power draw.
01:22:21 ◼ ► I don't think the display is doing that much because it just is hardly ever on relative to the entire day.
01:22:27 ◼ ► And then third, cellular. Honestly, cellular to me has been a disappointment on it. Now I don't use it as heavily as Casey does.
01:22:34 ◼ ► But what I have found is that the power saving measures on the cellular radio are so aggressive that most of the time I am not at like,
01:22:45 ◼ ► if I leave with just the watch, I miss calls, I miss messages because I'm not always connected.
01:22:51 ◼ ► Like I'm connected about half the time maybe. And I know because I look at the Explorer face, even though it's ugly as sin and it's the only reason I'd ever want to look at it.
01:22:59 ◼ ► I would look at the Explorer face to see am I really connected right now? And sure enough most of the time I get, you know, four or whatever it is, five empty dots.
01:23:06 ◼ ► Because I'm not actually connected. Or I get no dots because the radio isn't even on because it's trying not to be on.
01:23:11 ◼ ► I find the power saving nature of that radio is way too aggressive. And I know why they do it.
01:23:18 ◼ ► They do it because it's a huge battery drain. And it is remarkable that we have it at all. But to me, an unreliable cellular radio is worse than not having one at all.
01:23:27 ◼ ► You bring up the final thing that we're not ready for yet, but it's the next thing out there on the horizon.
01:23:31 ◼ ► They added all the features they could think of to add to the watch. All the obvious features when they first introduced it that weren't there.
01:23:37 ◼ ► The final one is always on watch face. Right? And we don't have the tech for that yet. Right?
01:23:42 ◼ ► But that is out there looming in the distance. Because once you can get to some technology that lets you have that face on all the time, either because you go from emissive to reflective.
01:23:52 ◼ ► Or you have an emissive one that can literally be on all day. Or some combination of the two that transparently switches between them.
01:23:58 ◼ ► That's the next big feature. And I will probably have to wait at least four or five years for them to even have that.
01:24:05 ◼ ► For us to even know what kind of technology they would use to do that, let alone have it released.
01:24:09 ◼ ► But there's always an infinite appetite for battery. And having a screen on all the time, that's the next big consumer.
01:24:22 ◼ ► Yeah, having some kind of always on screen would go a very long way to get me to go back to the Apple Watch.
01:24:30 ◼ ► Because one of the biggest things I love about regular watches is when you look at your wrist, the time is always showing.
01:24:37 ◼ ► With Apple Watches, even the Series 3, the Apple Watch, still you need to make that exaggerated motion sometimes.
01:24:46 ◼ ► And it still makes you look like an idiot. Like you're sitting there turning your wrist.
01:25:01 ◼ ► And regular watches, you just look at your wrist. You don't have to wait. And it's always showing the time.
01:25:18 ◼ ► So it's plausible Apple could do that sometime in the next few years. That would go a long way to get me back on that team.
01:25:34 ◼ ► And so I've already explained to Erin that I will be a ghost starting at 1 o'clock in the afternoon.
01:25:43 ◼ ► Unfortunately, I don't think any of us will be live tweeting because guess what? Twitter sucks.
01:25:51 ◼ ► Like, it isn't... So not only have they ruined livestreaming by removing the streaming API from good apps,
01:26:12 ◼ ► this is not news to a lot of people on Twitter who have had much worse experiences than me for much longer.
01:26:21 ◼ ► Like, it's so... It's just... It's such a crappy place. It's nasty. It's just not fun. It's horrible.
01:26:30 ◼ ► Like, I just... I really... It seems like it's in a really bad place community-wise and mood and culture-wise.
01:26:38 ◼ ► And I don't think communities tend to recover from that no matter what the leadership does.
01:26:43 ◼ ► Yeah. But we've spoken about that in plenty of places and plenty of times, and yeah. And suffice to say, Twitter sucks.
01:26:57 ◼ ► So, JD Lewin writes, "What advice would you offer to someone trying to get from no backups to the bare minimum of local and off-site backups?"
01:27:08 ◼ ► My opinion is, the very first thing you do is get a reasonably cheap hard drive that is at least as big as the one that is inside your computer,
01:27:18 ◼ ► and plug that in and make it a time machine volume. So this way, your computer backs up to that regularly.
01:27:26 ◼ ► And even if you leave it plugged in all the time, which has risks, it's better than nothing.
01:27:33 ◼ ► And then step two, if you want to take it to the next level and do something that is off-site, like you said,
01:27:38 ◼ ► then what I'd do is I would buy a portable hard drive that is at least as big as the hard drive in your machine,
01:27:44 ◼ ► and I would also buy Super Duper, and I would clone your computer to that drive at least once a month.
01:27:53 ◼ ► And then if you're really smart, you will store that hard drive at work or something like that.
01:27:59 ◼ ► And this way, if your entire house, God forbid, goes up in flames, that portable hard drive is still sitting at your office or whatever,
01:28:08 ◼ ► That is my personal opinion, and then if you really want to go triple down, you could do back laser crash plan or something like that.
01:28:18 ◼ ► I think you're overcomplicating it because realistically, people will not bring that hard drive back and forth from their office.
01:28:24 ◼ ► They'll forget about it, they won't do it as often as they want, and it will be terrible.
01:28:27 ◼ ► So my advice would be, step zero is use and pay for the iCloud backup feature on your iOS devices.
01:28:39 ◼ ► iOS devices, enable the iCloud backup, and when it tells you you don't have enough space, pay for it.
01:28:50 ◼ ► Just do it because people have tons of important stuff on their phones, and iCloud backup is way better than nothing.
01:28:56 ◼ ► And once you set it up and pay for it, you don't really have to think about it anymore.
01:29:02 ◼ ► Second, time machine, just what Casey said, because it's built into the OS, assuming you have a Mac.
01:29:15 ◼ ► I don't say this often, but Jon is 100% right, and I agree with everything you just said.
01:29:23 ◼ ► Alright, Stephen Kim writes, "I recall you guys saying that part of preordering an iPhone requires you to go through your carrier, AT&T or Verizon or whatever.
01:29:32 ◼ ► I'm on a prepaid plan. Does Apple simply not offer preorder on a carrier-free unlocked iPhone?"
01:29:38 ◼ ► And I wanted to publicly call out that the reason I'm answering this question is because Stephen's avatar photo is tremendous.
01:29:44 ◼ ► Anyway, the thing with preordering an iPhone is that they really do, like you said, want you to verify with your carrier that you're able to do this.
01:29:55 ◼ ► And I think this is, in many ways, a holdover from back when Americans did this on a two-year contract.
01:30:04 ◼ ► And so what I would recommend, and I don't know if they offer this for preorders on day one.
01:30:11 ◼ ► I have this vague recollection that this is not usually offered until a couple weeks later.
01:30:15 ◼ ► But see if they offer a T-Mobile phone, because T-Mobile doesn't give a crap whether you have a plan or not.
01:30:22 ◼ ► And typically you can order a T-Mobile phone unlocked, and it won't be a problem, and you don't have to verify with T-Mobile.
01:30:34 ◼ ► Also be very aware that there are different versions of, say, the iPhone X, because there are certain versions that work with certain bands of certain cellular networks.
01:30:45 ◼ ► So the AT&T one on the inside actually has a different radio or whatever than the Verizon one.
01:30:57 ◼ ► It's true on some models. Like some years it's true, some years it's not true. So do your research.
01:31:03 ◼ ► Yeah, do your research, but I would at least look at T-Mobile and also, again, verify it against whatever your particular carriers are.
01:31:10 ◼ ► My thought is don't worry about having to go through your carrier stuff, because you don't have to worry about that if you don't try to buy the phone right away.
01:31:20 ◼ ► Wait until everyone else bought the phone. Wait until everyone else finds out that they've been.
01:31:26 ◼ ► And just stroll into an Apple store a couple months later and pick up your nice shiny new phone.
01:31:30 ◼ ► That is the easiest way to do it. I'm not sure if that's the quickest, obviously, but that's the easiest way.
01:31:35 ◼ ► It's the quickest once you make the decision to buy and just leading up to you say, "I'm not going to buy it, because that's probably what I'm going to do.
01:31:44 ◼ ► It's like because I wanted the Jet Black and people were having contention for the Jet Black.
01:31:47 ◼ ► Don't stay up late at night. Try to order it. Don't try to order it the first day. Just wait a while and just get it whenever.
01:31:56 ◼ ► Then a stunningly attractive person by the name of Casey Liss wrote in and asked, "What is the cheapest Apple product?"
01:32:10 ◼ ► All right. Well, I kind of felt like this was a segment, but I knew we would be busy in the main part of the show.
01:32:16 ◼ ► And I wanted to imply that this should not go on for three hours. So everyone, look at your glocks.
01:32:21 ◼ ► I was thinking at, I think it was either dinner or maybe when we went on our walk today, if you were to define cheapest as best value for money.
01:32:31 ◼ ► So I understand that you don't have to agree with that definition, but for the purpose of this conversation, we'll say looking at you, Jon.
01:32:44 ◼ ► Yeah, we did. Because I'm pretty sure I said the cheap iPad Mini and the iPhone 7 and the 15-inch base model.
01:32:50 ◼ ► Okay, so let me rephrase my question a little bit because the genesis of my question was me thinking of all the Apple devices that I own, what do I think gave me the most amount of joy for the least amount of money?
01:33:14 ◼ ► Yes. So the Lightning to headphone adapter is the cheapest hardware product Apple sells.
01:33:18 ◼ ► You could think about maybe, you know, do iTunes songs count? Those are a dollar or less in certain other currencies.
01:33:25 ◼ ► But the Lightning to headphone adapter is the cheapest. It's cheaper than the MagSafe 2 to MagSafe 1 adapter by 99 cents at $9 exactly instead of $9.99.
01:33:35 ◼ ► The cheapest hardware product Apple has ever sold to my knowledge is the developer Apple TV, which they sold for $1 to developers.
01:33:43 ◼ ► I bought one, but that was not publicly available to everybody, so maybe it doesn't count and it isn't currently for sale.
01:33:50 ◼ ► And if you're looking at what is the cheapest hardware computing device that is like a full standalone computing device that they sell, it's the iPod Touch, which is $200.
01:34:02 ◼ ► Unless you want to go refurb, in which case you can get a refurb iPod Touch for $139. That is the cheapest standalone computing device Apple currently sells.
01:34:13 ◼ ► The cheapest computer that is like a typical Mac is a refurb Mac Mini for $419, which by the way I think is still the current model.
01:34:22 ◼ ► It is so us that the one time that you do homework was to answer the question that I asked in the show notes, but not at all the question I was trying to ask.
01:34:32 ◼ ► Oh, answering the question in the show notes, one more thing. I put on my old Manhatten, but I couldn't remember the details of this, so maybe you can someone write in and tell me even if it doesn't make it into the fall because Marco demands to cut it.
01:34:43 ◼ ► The programmer switch for the original Mac and many models after it, if that was sold separately, that may have been cheaper than a dollar.
01:34:50 ◼ ► I know you two don't know what the programmer switch is, it's fine. We'll just move on.
01:35:03 ◼ ► It's a very important piece of hardware. I used it all the time on the old Macs, you don't want to know why.
01:35:08 ◼ ► Alright, so what I was trying to say is, what Apple product brings you the most joy, preferably for the least amount of money, because I was debating with myself, like the iPhone is very, very expensive and I use it constantly.
01:35:23 ◼ ► But I don't know if I would say it brings me joy, and this kind of relates to our conversation about whimsy, but I was thinking about it and I think that the AirPods for me, which were something like $150, $180,
01:35:37 ◼ ► I don't remember how much they are now, I bought them two years ago, but for between $150 and $200, the AirPods I have used pretty much every day since I bought them.
01:35:46 ◼ ► And even though they have their quirks and foibles, they still make me extremely happy.
01:36:00 ◼ ► So, my question is, in that vein, phrase it however you would like, what do you think is the best perhaps value for money, whimsy per dollar, however you want to phrase it, what is your favorite Apple product in that regard?
01:36:16 ◼ ► So, I should clarify that one of them, which I have never used, would have to be the cheap iPad.
01:36:28 ◼ ► But I'm not that much of an iPad person, as we said earlier, so my personal choice would probably have to be a Mac of some kind.
01:36:37 ◼ ► I don't think any of the Macs are great values right now, except maybe the MacBook Air.
01:36:42 ◼ ► But for the most part, I don't think any of them are great values, which is why it's hard to answer this.
01:36:56 ◼ ► So, if you're looking at what Mac I enjoy the most, it's the iMac Pro, which is not cheap or a good value.
01:37:06 ◼ ► But if you're looking at actual best value, in my opinion, in the Mac lineup, I'm going to still have to say either the Air or the base model 15 inch, and the old one if you can get it.
01:37:20 ◼ ► No, I mean, I think in your case, I'm doing a poor job phrasing the question, but I think the answer for you is the iMac Pro.
01:37:34 ◼ ► I'm not saying that's right or wrong, it's just that to you, that is the best tradeoff.
01:37:46 ◼ ► That's actually another really great answer, given how you were talking about it earlier.
01:38:11 ◼ ► And I thought it was ridiculous to buy myself a leather case because I had other cases and it was fine.
01:38:26 ◼ ► And it makes me so happy that I'm very tempted to, the day before the event, order another one.
01:38:34 ◼ ► On the assumption that it might fix the iPhone XS to whatever, it might fit that phone if they don't change the camera bump shape.
01:38:50 ◼ ► And your existing one is kind of in the position that you would like another or you just want a new one because of the new phone?
01:38:56 ◼ ► If it fits the next phone, I'm probably going to want to keep it on for a whole other year.
01:39:19 ◼ ► You're still my answer with the AirPods because I feel like they've made the biggest change in my life for the amount of money that they are.
01:39:27 ◼ ► Again, mostly because of these small things. It shouldn't cost them much money and they're so tiny.
01:39:35 ◼ ► And the change from having to deal with cords to having to deal with these is just life-changing.
01:39:57 ◼ ► And every day I think about it, I'm like, "How much more than $160 would you pay for these AirPods?"
01:40:20 ◼ ► I love these things. And I thought that they were obscenely expensive when I bought them.
01:40:24 ◼ ► And I kind of bought them on a lark because at the time, you know, they were hard to come by.
01:40:28 ◼ ► And somebody local had them and was willing to sell them to me for face value, so to speak.
01:41:59 ◼ ► He had a very important experiment in which he tried for 18 hours what it might be like to be a single car household.
01:42:35 ◼ ► Here's the thing. Marco has a tendency to cut things that are boring or useless, which is very useful.
01:42:53 ◼ ► And the thing I needed him to cut was me talking about how I should really remain a one-car family, which all was true and probably still is.
01:43:01 ◼ ► But that was recorded and my time between nine and midnight on Wednesday the 29th of August...
01:43:18 ◼ ► At five o'clock the evening of the 30th, I drove away from Lindsey Volkswagen in the Washington, D.C. area in a Gulf R.
01:43:40 ◼ ► No, but here's the thing though. You have to remember that we have effectively been a one-car household with asterisks since WWDC.
01:43:59 ◼ ► Because after that I borrowed my dad's Jeep for a couple weeks long enough to get me through the end of regular work.
01:44:07 ◼ ► And then we all went to London and then I didn't have any other car until almost a week ago now.
01:44:15 ◼ ► So yes, in a literal sense, you are absolutely right and you should be making merciless amounts of fun of me.
01:44:23 ◼ ► But in a literal sense, yeah, we were a one-car family for like eight hours, not even six hours.
01:44:48 ◼ ► Because otherwise I would have to load up the car seats and that's not an insignificant amount of effort.
01:44:52 ◼ ► And so, I mean, I hadn't moved the BMW more than about ten feet since June until the time that I prepared to sell it.
01:45:05 ◼ ► The only other asterisk I have is that on and off we did have a Golf R, we had a GTI, we were borrowing a friend's car for a little while, which will eventually be a KC on cars.
01:45:18 ◼ ► But in terms of, you know, any time we didn't have a pressed or friend's car or family's car, we were a one-car household.
01:45:32 ◼ ► This is quite an explanation of how tons of cars being at your house means you're effectively a one-car family.
01:45:41 ◼ ► Especially if you don't count the car that I own that runs that is in my driveway but that I refuse to drive.
01:46:09 ◼ ► It is not a, oh my god, you're lucky the kids are asleep. It is not a light shade of blue.
01:46:14 ◼ ► It's not light. I'm just saying like the trend in cars in recent years has been to be a little bit more bold with the primary colors and not like mix in, not make them sort of darker and subdued.
01:46:32 ◼ ► A lot of cars come in that more, like the Teslas like that too. They come in a very, I'm not going to say a playschool blue. Yours is kind of more of a metallic blue.
01:46:40 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that. I mean the actual name of the color is lapis blue. But yes, it is not.
01:46:48 ◼ ► Yeah, so I've dropped a picture in the private chat room, which is why Marco's reacting. It's really not a bad blue at all. I quite like it.
01:46:56 ◼ ► It's not as good as the Le Mans blue that BMW did that I love, but it's actually pretty darn close. And I am very, very pleased with it.
01:47:05 ◼ ► The car is great. I love it. It does have, it is to some degree a compromise machine. You know, there are compromises.
01:47:12 ◼ ► It doesn't have a sunroof. It doesn't have some of the other things I like. But it does do the things that I care about most really, really, really well.
01:47:19 ◼ ► Which is allow me to drive in the way in which I want, both in terms of having a six-speed and having all-wheel drive.
01:47:27 ◼ ► It allows me to do the things I want the way I want to. And again, I really think the color is really, really good.
01:47:32 ◼ ► And so I got it for what I think was a pretty darn good deal. I'm not going to get into the particulars about it, but I think that I got a really good deal on it.
01:47:41 ◼ ► I am not leasing. And you know, the financing worked out really nicely. And it has a six-year warranty.
01:47:48 ◼ ► So, you know, if anything within reason goes bad in six years, it's covered. I mean, obviously not a wear item, but anything else, if it goes bad in six years, it's covered.
01:47:57 ◼ ► So the only problem I have with it is that I've only put something like 200 miles on it in the last week, and about 100 or so of them were bringing it home from the DC area.
01:48:12 ◼ ► I'm hopeful, yes. But I did say to Aaron that, you know, just for what it's worth, this is the most you will ever like this car.
01:48:21 ◼ ► Because I'm limiting myself to, you know, keeping it under 4,000 RPM. I'm trying not to, you know, just sit on cruise control if I'm ever on the highway.
01:48:32 ◼ ► And so I told Aaron, you know, if you like this car now, that's wonderful, but if you don't like it, it's only going to get worse from here when I can use the rest of the rev range and generally drive like the BMW driver, I probably still am.
01:48:46 ◼ ► Well, she's not a big hatchback person. And truth be told, I'm not generally either. But this was the best compromise I could make with myself.
01:48:55 ◼ ► And so, yeah, I think you're right. It's more about the squishy bits behind the wheel that bother her than the car itself.
01:49:08 ◼ ► I'll tell you what. When I was unloading from some large trips over the last week or so, I would back into the garage to do it because I was unloading into like the room behind the garage that made the most sense to have the trunk right there.
01:49:21 ◼ ► And I really hated backing into the garage, but I really love pulling out of the garage after I had backed in. Like that was really, it was really nice.
01:49:32 ◼ ► Yeah, like there was like for a few brief minutes there. I'm like, you know, Casey's onto something here. But then I realized, you know, that's terrible to do all the time.
01:49:41 ◼ ► It sucks. Yeah, like it sucks to do it on the way out, but it's really nice in the way. Yeah, vice versa.
01:49:45 ◼ ► The thing I understand your perspective, and I'm not here to change your mind, but I think what most people and I'm not just picking on the two of you, what most people don't realize is over time you get used to it.
01:49:56 ◼ ► And I can I can have made the speech to you two before, but I can back into a parking spot or into the garage extremely, extremely, extremely quickly and surely not as quickly as pulling in forwards, but nearly as quickly.
01:50:11 ◼ ► And so I much prefer it because when I'm ready to leave, I just leave. I don't have to, I mean, not that I don't feel look. That was what I was about to say. That's a terrible.
01:50:21 ◼ ► Not that I doubt your skills, Casey, but your garage is cavernous. If you ever visit me again, I should ask you to try backing your car into my garage.
01:50:29 ◼ ► I will absolutely do it. But I agree with your point that my garage by comparison is cavernous.
01:50:38 ◼ ► I mean, I could do it. It would not be fun, but I could do it. There's actually a garage case. You can almost fit a third car like that's how much that is not true.
01:50:45 ◼ ► You could definitely fit a motorcycle. And if you got rid of the stairs, you could probably fit like a third smart car. If you park close, you could fit a few five hundred between those two.
01:50:58 ◼ ► Oh, that's yeah. This thing is tiny compared to even the BMW in terms of footprint, although on the inside, I don't feel like it's it's particularly smaller.
01:51:08 ◼ ► You're on the inside of this TARDIS blue. I haven't even seen Doctor Who and I get that reference.
01:51:13 ◼ ► So you want to give us any back story behind this because on the show, you just I just listened to it.
01:51:17 ◼ ► We listened to the episode and I was hearing what you were saying at the end and you said you covered all bases.
01:51:22 ◼ ► You're like right now, I don't think I think we're going to be one car family. See how that's going to be.
01:51:27 ◼ ► But then you also said, but who knows, maybe by the time it's out, I'll have a new car.
01:51:30 ◼ ► So it seems like you had all the possibilities go in your mind, but you are still coming down on the idea that that you had basically decided that you're you're not going to get a car.
01:51:39 ◼ ► And you said you were depressed about it. So my question is coming out of that show, what happens coming out of the show?
01:51:45 ◼ ► Do you, you know, talk it over with Aaron some more and say, you know, I'm feeling depressed about it.
01:51:50 ◼ ► And she encourages you and says, oh, I don't want you to feel depressed. You should just get the car.
01:51:54 ◼ ► Do you convince yourself that you should just get the car and then convince Aaron that you think it's going to be like, what is the what is the decision making process?
01:52:01 ◼ ► How do you get from the headspace you were at the end of the show to the point where you're plunking down harder and cash for a new car?
01:52:13 ◼ ► Even sitting here now with a car and with two cars in my garage, I think the smarter decision would have been not to buy it, but.
01:52:23 ◼ ► Aaron was on board. Aaron was on board with being a two car family. She just didn't necessarily she wasn't necessarily on board with the idea of getting that particular car or really any car at that particular price point as the second car.
01:52:40 ◼ ► I mean, in her in her world, I think she would have, you know, in a figurative sense, she would have handed me a five thousand dollar wad of cash and said, go buy a Civic or something like that.
01:52:51 ◼ ► You know, in other words, you know, we have the Volvo for when we want to be spoiled and then we would have some sort of, you know, I don't want to say beater because I mean, a five thousand dollar Civic is not a beater.
01:53:02 ◼ ► But you know what I mean? Like something that is considerably less fancy for when we need it.
01:53:07 ◼ ► And unequivocally, that is the more prudent thing to do because Aaron is in every measurable way, a more prudent person than I am.
01:53:41 ◼ ► In fact, just earlier today, somebody tweeted at me that the new GT500 or whatever the equivalent thereof, that the new Mustang will apparently will not have a stick, which is mind boggling to me.
01:53:51 ◼ ► But more than anything else, like generally speaking, I would just sit there and wait for used cars to appear that matched what I wanted.
01:54:08 ◼ ► The problem though is that I really wanted that six-year warranty, and I basically wanted it up front.
01:54:14 ◼ ► I mean, I believe it may be transferable, but I wanted to use all six years of that warranty because I keep a car for a long time.
01:54:26 ◼ ► And what I was basically, I think I'd said on the show, I'd already started negotiating with this dealer out of DC.
01:54:53 ◼ ► By that I mean it wasn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but I am satisfied with the price I paid for it.
01:55:01 ◼ ► And in my experience, having spoken to a few dealers, pretty much no one deals on Golf Rs.
01:55:10 ◼ ► This particular dealer claims, and I have reason to believe they're right, that they get something like 50 or 60 copies of this car in a year.
01:55:27 ◼ ► Additionally, I had resolved my woes with the BMW and got what I thought was a reasonable price for the BMW.
01:55:35 ◼ ► And so all the stars kind of aligned and said, "If you really want to do this, you can do this."
01:55:51 ◼ ► But I am slightly ashamed given what I had said last episode, because I really did believe it at the time.
01:56:16 ◼ ► I was trying to convince you to buy more expensive cars. He already bought the car, Marco.
01:56:43 ◼ ► As much as we talked last episode about it being practical to have a one-car family, there was no way that you were going to be a one-car family.
01:57:19 ◼ ► You are choosing to spend money on something that makes you really, really happy, that you care very deeply about.
01:57:33 ◼ ► Price-wise, you're in not a cheap car, but for a car that a successful 36-year-old programmer would buy who loves cars, you did okay.
01:57:49 ◼ ► You shouldn't feel bad about doing something nice for yourself sometimes, especially in an area that is so important to you and that gives you so much joy.
01:58:06 ◼ ► There was no way you were ever going to not have a car that was yours, that was the car you really wanted for you.
01:58:20 ◼ ► I think part of my crisis about all of this is that when I was looking at a future of having no car to call my own, even though legally speaking, both of us own both of these cars.
01:58:37 ◼ ► And I mean, Erin was very, very good about letting me drive the Volvo, which I consider to be her car and I think she mostly considers to be her car.
01:58:46 ◼ ► She was very good about letting me drive it a lot when it was clear that I basically didn't have a car to drive anymore.
01:58:51 ◼ ► But it caused a little bit of a crisis, an internal crisis within me when I got really and truly deeply upset about the thought of not having a car of my own.
01:59:12 ◼ ► That's what you said on the last show, that's what I was saying. You said the word depressed.
01:59:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and I was kind of depressed about it. And then it's like this self-fulfilling cycle. Now we're getting deep into analog territory.
01:59:23 ◼ ► But then it's like this self-fulfilling cycle of like, "Grow up, you baby. It's a frickin' car. Like, why are you hanging so much of this on a frickin' car?"
01:59:31 ◼ ► And then I was getting annoyed with myself about the fact that I was getting kind of depressed.
01:59:36 ◼ ► And so it was this kind of cycle that I still think I have some unresolved feelings or thoughts or issues to get through.
01:59:44 ◼ ► But all of that is to say that I think you hit the nail on the head, Margo, that a lot of my identity is wrapped up within this.
01:59:55 ◼ ► And so one way or another, a lot of my identity is wrapped up in having a car that I enjoy.
02:00:01 ◼ ► It doesn't necessarily have to be the fanciest car on the block. It doesn't necessarily have to be the fastest or the most expensive or whatever.
02:00:11 ◼ ► And so, and occasionally white, for the record, for the record, ladies and gentlemen, I announced this in the relay slack the day after it happened, or maybe the day it happened, I don't recall.
02:00:23 ◼ ► And Margo's response, I would like to read to you, it is as follows, "That's an unusual shade of white," which annoyed me so deeply because that was such a perfect thing to say.
02:00:38 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. Margo comes with, "That's an unusual shade of white." I laugh, I'm still laughing about that.
02:00:43 ◼ ► So here's the thing. So you're justifying this as though, like, you know, you're just, you know, it's about personality, that's good.
02:00:51 ◼ ► You should have a car because you can afford it, it makes you very happy, and you know what, this is going to get briefly very dark for a moment, and this might give you more of an issue.
02:01:09 ◼ ► I think about this, no, I think about this stuff more than I probably should. You're like halfway through your life.
02:01:17 ◼ ► Maybe a little less, if you're lucky, less than halfway, but in the ballpark of halfway.
02:01:23 ◼ ► And you're only, we, you, we are only going to be young for so long, you know, we're not, I mean, by kids standards, we're already not young, like, you know, our kids think we're the boring old people, but like, you're only going to be able to enjoy cars and drive cars for a certain number of years in your life.
02:01:41 ◼ ► And you are probably, you know, halfway through that number of years where you're going to be driving cars. And additionally, as you said, the kind of cars you like to drive are going away.
02:01:53 ◼ ► There aren't a lot of years left where you will be able and motivated to buy those cars where it will make sense or even be possible to own them, where it would even be legal to drive them on the roads. Like, these all have end dates that we can kind of see looming on the horizon.
02:02:11 ◼ ► Maybe not soon, but not, you know, not 50 years from now, probably less than that, right?
02:02:17 ◼ ► So, for God's sakes, enjoy this time. You are like, like, this is kind of like the peak of everything, like, your body still doesn't ache getting into cars like this.
02:02:30 ◼ ► Your left leg still functions enough that you can use a clutch without causing like, you know, RSI in your leg or soreness or having bad knees or arthritis or anything like that.
02:02:41 ◼ ► Enjoy this time because you can, you have it now, and it's not going to last forever. And maybe it's going to last 40 more years. That'd be great if you actually are able-bodied and alive for 40 more years in order to drive six shift cars that are still available and legal.
02:02:58 ◼ ► That'll be great, but it's probably going to be less than that. So, enjoy this time while we have it.
02:03:04 ◼ ► Yeah, I think you're completely right. And it was funny, somebody tweeted at me earlier today, and I don't have the tweet handy and I apologize, but it was the tweet about the Mustang going automatic in the future.
02:03:15 ◼ ► And this individual said, "We're on the wrong side of history," which admittedly is like a very, very overblown way to phrase this. But I think it's true.
02:03:24 ◼ ► Like it occurred to me that this is something that I believe devoutly that driving a stick is more fun and to me is better. Yes, you can make plenty of arguments that I'm wrong.
02:03:34 ◼ ► And clearly, it seems that that is the case, that I am wrong. But it was an odd realization when this person on Twitter said this to me that I kind of am on the wrong side of history.
02:03:43 ◼ ► I like to think I am on a lot of, I'm on the right side on a lot of other things. And we've talked about a lot of these things on this show.
02:03:50 ◼ ► But on this one, I think Jon and I are on the wrong side of history. And that's an uncomfortable and unfortunate realization to come to.
02:03:57 ◼ ► That's the wrong phrasing. That phrase is used when people are like, "prejudice," and that prejudice goes away. This is not an attitude thing. This is just merely we are, I think we are appropriately aged.
02:04:07 ◼ ► Like we're entering an anachronism, right? Because when we were growing up, that was the thing. But that's true of everybody. People like old music, old songs, and you don't say you're on the wrong side of the history because you like the hits of the 70s because you grew up in the 70s.
02:04:19 ◼ ► I'm sorry, you're on the wrong side of history. People like different music now. Yeah, they do like different music now, but I'm not on the wrong side of history because I like R.E.M., U2, and Bruce Springsteen. So I reject that characterization, and I think you're fine.
02:04:31 ◼ ► Well, that's because you and I agree. But you and I are screwed though, because I mean, I really genuinely, and I think I said this about the BMW, but I really think this is the last time I'll buy a stick shift car. Not because I want to, but...
02:04:43 ◼ ► But yeah, but you've all totally abandoned me, right? Because you no longer buy cars. Marco no longer buys gas cars. I am the sole...
02:05:03 ◼ ► Casey made a joke in the Slack saying, I asked him, did you get it with a stick shift? He's like, well, about that. And I was 100% convinced that he had gotten the PBK or whatever the automated...
02:05:14 ◼ ► I was totally convinced. Why? Because you had it on the GTI, which I'm sure we'll see a video about someday, and you've driven so many cars like that, and you're like, oh, even the automatics are fine, and I liked it in the Giulia and this, that, and the other thing. I totally believed it.
02:05:34 ◼ ► You already said this, but it's going to be the last one you're going to buy, and I've literally never owned a car that was not a stick, and neither is my wife.
02:05:39 ◼ ► It's not because that's what I want. I just don't think I'll have an option anymore unless I go to something that's effectively vintage at that point.
02:05:46 ◼ ► If I continue to want new-ish cars, and again, I didn't expect to buy, well, actually two new cars in as many years.
02:05:53 ◼ ► I was... Aaron and I both were perfectly happy on the used car train, but for various sundry reasons, maybe excuses, we ended up on a brief new car train for a minute.
02:06:02 ◼ ► And I think the next time, presumably in five or six or ten years, probably six or less, I will probably end up in a used car because it's a much better value for money.
02:06:15 ◼ ► And that is the only way I'll get a stick shift, I think, because I really think in the next five to ten years there will be no affordable new cars that have a stick.
02:06:25 ◼ ► I mean, I've heard rumors that BMW is dropping it from the 3 Series, and they seem to me to be like the last holdout.
02:06:31 ◼ ► No, it's coming back. A couple car makers have reversed their decision and they're bringing the sticks back.
02:06:36 ◼ ► Well, I'm curious, Jon, do you think... so you're currently a few years into your Accord. You're probably going to keep it for at least another five years at least, right?
02:06:50 ◼ ► I don't know. It's hard to tell. Maybe. Because Honda, as we... well, if you're a Honda customer, you know this. Honda moves slowly. Like, they move slowly into hybrids.
02:07:02 ◼ ► They haven't really moved into electrics at all. Look at the interiors of their cars. Look what they do. They're not on the cutting edge of any trends.
02:07:10 ◼ ► So it's possible they could still be selling them, but we'll see. But someone will be. I don't think they'll be gone from cars that are in my price range.
02:07:19 ◼ ► They may be gone from cars that I want to buy because I don't want to spend that much money on a car. So we'll see. But Casey was making it sound like he would choose not to get a stick.
02:07:30 ◼ ► No, no, no, no. That's not what I'm... that may have been what it sounded like, but that was not at all what I was trying to say. I will forever and always choose it.
02:07:37 ◼ ► I think you... I totally believe you would choose not to get a stick. Especially like if you got electric. You'd be like, well, you know, stick is now not relevant anymore and I'm excited about electric car.
02:07:45 ◼ ► In six years, it could be that there are electric cars that are in a price you want to pay. That have the performance you want.
02:07:51 ◼ ► That's fair. I could see myself weighing the pros and cons and landing in an electric car because I feel like overall that is better. So I agree with you there.
02:08:01 ◼ ► But as long as I'm buying internal combustion engine cars, unless there's just nothing that's either in my price range, this is what you were just saying.
02:08:09 ◼ ► It's not in my price range or maybe it's just nothing but Econo crap boxes that I'm not interested in.
02:08:15 ◼ ► And so this kind of middle of the road between the quote unquote, or I guess I should say like the M3s of the world. I was going to say like Ferraris.
02:08:22 ◼ ► But like the M3s of the world and the like, I don't know, what's the really tiny Chevys of the world? I don't even know what they're called.
02:08:29 ◼ ► But you know, if there's nothing in the like normal area, then maybe I wouldn't buy a stick because there's just nothing available that I'm interested in.
02:08:36 ◼ ► But as long as there's at least one car that I'm interested in that offers a stick, then that's what I'll be buying.
02:08:41 ◼ ► Well, congratulations. You're giving yourself a bunch of crap about this. But ultimately this is cause for celebration.
02:08:50 ◼ ► You've gone through a long, horrible period of car drama with your car breaking and failing, having a brief flirtation with Jeep Wranglers and other horrible other options.
02:09:03 ◼ ► Oh, I have news about this. I apologize for interrupting your summary. Guess what happened? I think it was two days after I bought my car.
02:09:15 ◼ ► So I get a text from my brother-in-law. This is Aaron's older brother. And he says, how did it start? I don't remember.
02:09:24 ◼ ► But it was something along the lines of, "Hey, is there any chance you can give me a ride to DC?" And I said, "Why?"
02:09:31 ◼ ► "Oh, well, I think I'm going to buy a car there." And he said, "Okay, where?" "Oh, at Lindsey Jeep."
02:09:36 ◼ ► And this is the same conglomerate that I bought my Volkswagen from. Long story short, I did not need to give him a ride there, but it turns out my brother-in-law, within 48 hours of me buying my Volkswagen, he bought himself a brand new Jeep Wrangler.
02:10:07 ◼ ► He had a four-runner that was fairly old that he traded in, and so it fits. He himself has a four-runner.
02:10:27 ◼ ► Oh, my word. But yeah, when he pulled up in it, because he swung by the house the day he got it, and pulled up, and I was like, "Oh my God, it's a white Wrangler. Marco's going to lose it."
02:10:35 ◼ ► So in the family, in the family, the extended family, I should say, this is again, Aaron's brother, my brother-in-law.
02:10:45 ◼ ► But it's very nice. I took a small ride in it. I haven't driven it yet, but I took a ride in it.
02:10:49 ◼ ► And again, it's a box on wheels, so you have to take everything with a grain of salt, or everything's relative. But it is quite nice.
02:11:04 ◼ ► I'd forgotten that Aaron's car wasn't white, because looking at this picture, it looks like a white car next to a blue car, but it's not technically white, is it?
02:11:12 ◼ ► It's a very light silver. This picture, it does look somewhat white, but it is a very light silver.
02:11:25 ◼ ► No, but ultimately, look, even though you were a little on the fence about hatchbacks, and even though I recognize that part of the reason you chose this was because of the combination of features it offered and not necessarily the look of it, you're still a car person.
02:11:38 ◼ ► Hot hatches are a major category of cars that lots of car enthusiasts very much love. You should know what it's like to own one.
02:11:45 ◼ ► This is totally in line with being a car enthusiast and being the kind of car enthusiast you are. You should own a hot hatch at some point.
02:11:54 ◼ ► Even if you decide in three to five years it's not for you and you want a different kind of car-shaped car or something worse, then you can do that. That's fine. But you should get this out of your system.
02:12:06 ◼ ► Yeah, I think that's fair. In a final piece of miscellaneous car-related things, the Volkswagen allows you to put in an SD card to read music off of, which is funny because one of the things that I thought I might be losing leaving the BMW was my onboard 10-gig platter hard drive. It's a miracle that thing still worked.
02:12:32 ◼ ► And I actually really enjoyed it because most often than not, there's a list of, I don't know, maybe 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 albums or whatever that I listen to on and off generally. Or I'm listening to a podcast. It's one or the other.
02:12:45 ◼ ► Well, I thought that all of that was going to have to go away, that I wouldn't be able to load any music onto the car itself. But it turns out there's SD card slots in the glove box so I can put music on.
02:12:57 ◼ ► And so I've been enjoying over the last day or two amassing. I bought a 64-gig, what is it, a micro SD card that has the regular SD caddy, you know what I'm talking about?
02:13:10 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. And so I've been loading that up. And it's pretty neat. It's fun to go through because I usually use Spotify all the time. And so I've been going through my actual iTunes music where I actually own it and finding all of my music that I haven't really listened to in a while and loading it up to have in the car. So I'm excited.
02:13:31 ◼ ► It'll be cool. The dashboard had a USB-C slot and you could hook up an adapter for a SD card reader.
02:13:38 ◼ ► There's not really enough room on the car to have anything more than just two small USB-C ports. And really with an adapter you can make that into anything so it's actually better that there's not an SD card slot there.
02:13:50 ◼ ► Well yeah, I hopefully will be able to see you guys sometime this year and you can check it out and tell me and make fun of me for my blue car. How does that feel?
02:14:03 ◼ ► I'm very happy. Well, I'm happy it's not white in the name of good taste. I'm actually kind of sad it's not white for the joke potential.
02:14:26 ◼ ► I got your number, Casey. I know what you're up to all day just sitting there washing that car over and over again.
02:14:32 ◼ ► Meanwhile, my car has an entire summer of upstate mud and beach rain dirt on it because it has not been worth washing it.
02:14:42 ◼ ► Because I've been home for a few days and then going to park at the beach for three weeks.
02:14:46 ◼ ► I'm not going to wash my car only to go park it out in the rain for three weeks immediately afterwards.
02:14:53 ◼ ► I need Casey to come to my house because I normally wash my car once a year whether it needs it or not.
02:14:59 ◼ ► Yes. Usually right before I go to Long Island. So I go to Long Island with a very clean car.
02:15:11 ◼ ► Wait, why would you do a big car wash right before a long road trip? Because on the road trip it'll get covered in bugs and stuff.
02:15:26 ◼ ► I'm not driving in the ocean. There's more salt that gets on my car during the winter than when I go to the island.
02:15:35 ◼ ► I was looking for car detailing places around here, but I can't find any good ones. I'm still looking.
02:15:40 ◼ ► Does it matter if it's good? Like if you're only getting a car wash once a year, does it really matter how good it is?
02:15:47 ◼ ► No, it's detailing. I go into the interior too. The interior we vacuum out. I just want to do the whole work.
02:15:53 ◼ ► It's not really for my car because my car is actually pretty neat because I'm not a slob and I don't eat in my car and I try to keep the kids under control.
02:16:00 ◼ ► But I do wash the bird poop off my car. I can't have that acidic bird poop sitting there for a long time.
02:16:10 ◼ ► If you really want to hear Casey die, one of the best decisions I ever made with car cleanliness was to decide for myself,
02:16:16 ◼ ► you know what? I'm not going to care about the swirl marks that automatic car washes make on my car.
02:16:23 ◼ ► I'm just going to go to automatic car washes whenever I need a car wash and I'll pay the twelve bucks or whatever it is and I'll go through the stupid rollers.
02:16:30 ◼ ► And if my car gets all swirly in the sun, I don't care because I'm never going to clean it any other way.
02:16:39 ◼ ► And I never want to be scared to go through automatic car wash to the oh no, it's going to scratch my clear coat.
02:16:44 ◼ ► Oh no, no. Like, no, I just want an occasionally clean car that I can get anywhere for twelve bucks.
02:16:52 ◼ ► I'm with Casey on this one. I've never even been in an automatic car wash while driving on my own car.
02:17:00 ◼ ► Was it during the M5 era or during the golf, sorry, the Tesla era that you briefly got into doing your own hand washing and then decided that you hated it?
02:17:10 ◼ ► It was the M5 era and it was, I was, first of all, I'm just terrible at hand washing like that, as you know, because you were there and you had to like fix my work.
02:17:23 ◼ ► You get really short arms like a T-Rex. It's hard to reach the top of the middle of the roof.
02:17:26 ◼ ► It's like one of those long stick things to get to the middle of the roof. So does Casey for his giant car. You need a ladder to get on top of that thing.
02:17:36 ◼ ► And also just like hand washing it. I'm not very good at it. I might be able to get better if I really tried hard and cared really a lot, but I don't. I'm not going to try that much harder.
02:17:47 ◼ ► It takes a lot of time. It fills my driveway with suds and makes a huge mess. Then my shoes and my pants get all wet.
02:17:57 ◼ ► For like a few minutes, but I'd rather just turn the sprinkler on and have him run through it and then I can stay and the pork stay dry.
02:18:02 ◼ ► You know what Adam also loves? Going through a car wash. That's actually way easier and way better.
02:18:11 ◼ ► So yeah, it's just hand washing. If you're like super into it like you are, Casey, if it's like a thing you enjoy, that's one thing.
02:18:19 ◼ ► For me, it's not a thing I enjoy. It was a means to an end. Like, oh, I need to wash my car and I can't go through a car wash because my car is too nice and people like Casey will be unhappy if I go through a car wash.
02:18:30 ◼ ► And I just decided, you know what, I'm not going to care about that anymore because I'd much rather have a swirly clear coat car than to have a car that's always dirty because I'm afraid to bring it to a car wash.
02:18:43 ◼ ► You know, I'm going to blame Mike for my car not being washed this year, I've decided. Because the mental energy of the London trip really took out of me the excess mental energy I had to do.
02:18:53 ◼ ► Because I would wash and wax. Like I would do both before my long-round trip. And this year, just the London trip just took too much out of me. I was like, I can't bring myself to do that. We're just going to go down there with a dirty car.
02:19:07 ◼ ► I feel deeply guilty that I've only been washing cars like once a month. Whereas I used to do it pretty much every weekend before kids.
02:19:16 ◼ ► Before kids. Before kids. And now, if I'm lucky, I get through it once a month. And even that is a stretch.
02:19:26 ◼ ► Sometimes. Probably once every two or three. Because even with the kids, usually it's not terrible.
02:19:31 ◼ ► They get messier. I feel like the interior needs it more than the exterior on my car. My wife's car. I don't know what they do in there. They bring in rocks and dirt and sand and papers.
02:19:43 ◼ ► And I don't even know. The best is the kids push the door open with their dirty shoes. So you get footprints on the doors.
02:19:54 ◼ ► And then they have disgusting fingers on the window. The window looks like someone has sneezed onto it a thousand times and smeared it with their hands. Because literally that's what they've done.
02:20:03 ◼ ► Why can't I sneeze through this window anymore? Oh, children are in the backseat. It's so gross.