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239: Set This Money on Fire

 

00:00:00   All right, we shouldn't be on this tangent. We got a lot of things to talk about.

00:00:04   We can say that about almost every topic almost every week.

00:00:07   Yeah, we can mean it this time.

00:00:08   All right, so this week was our first real introduction to Apple Park and the Steve Jobs

00:00:15   Theater at Apple Park, which we've all seen many, many, many pictures, most of which are beautiful

00:00:21   of the Steve Jobs Theater and of Apple Park. I don't have the link handy, but Dan, is it from

00:00:28   or Frommer? I always get it wrong.

00:00:29   - I think it's Frommer.

00:00:31   - There you go. Well, Dan, we apologize.

00:00:32   But anyway, we will try to find wherever the link was

00:00:36   that flew by earlier today, wherein he had like

00:00:39   a little photo essay of his day at the Steve Jobs Theater,

00:00:42   and the pictures are beautiful and really well done,

00:00:45   and so you can check that out.

00:00:47   But it was a neat event.

00:00:49   It was interesting that we knew a lot.

00:00:53   We didn't know some things, and that's cool too.

00:00:56   And I guess, do we want to start with just a kind of opening remark or do we want to

00:01:02   just dive right in?

00:01:03   - We're going chronological like we always do.

00:01:05   What's the first thing that it did to Steve Jobs tribute?

00:01:07   - To Steve Jobs tribute, yeah.

00:01:08   - Oh my word.

00:01:09   - I thought, honestly, I thought it was excellent.

00:01:11   You know, they had to say something.

00:01:15   If they're dedicating the theater to him and naming it after him, they had to say something

00:01:19   and I think they did a remarkably good job of it.

00:01:23   Tim delivered it really well.

00:01:24   It was very well designed and written.

00:01:26   It was really great to hear a recording of Steve

00:01:29   saying some stuff.

00:01:31   And honestly, I did not recognize that quote.

00:01:33   And I've heard it from other podcasters,

00:01:35   didn't seem to know where it came from either.

00:01:37   That was new to me.

00:01:38   - I remember it.

00:01:38   I would have picked a different quote.

00:01:40   He said so many things.

00:01:41   (laughing)

00:01:42   That's the one I picked.

00:01:43   Anyway, no, I remember him.

00:01:45   - Yeah, no, I remember him.

00:01:46   - I know we're supposed to be talking about

00:01:48   how much we love Steve Jobs and miss him,

00:01:49   but that particular quote reminds me

00:01:53   of some of the worst aspects of Steve Jobs,

00:01:58   because it was about like how some people express their,

00:02:02   you know, their love for humanity

00:02:04   by making great things for people.

00:02:06   Tinged with a little bit like,

00:02:08   I may not do nice things, but I make really cool hardware.

00:02:13   Like as a, he said that before of like, you know,

00:02:16   when people complained to him about, you know,

00:02:18   doing things that are not nice or not giving to charity

00:02:21   or whatever, he's like, my time is,

00:02:22   I would do more good for the world by making an awesome phone, which is possibly true,

00:02:27   right?

00:02:28   But also a nice way for him to excuse himself from doing nice things.

00:02:33   And I was reminded of that aspect by that quote.

00:02:35   So I was like, please pick a different one.

00:02:36   He's got so many good quotes.

00:02:37   Don't pick the one that has a tiny touch of sort of rationalization baked right into it.

00:02:46   But it's clear that most important thing was not the quote or the pictures or anything

00:02:50   like that.

00:02:51   It's clear that Tim still does miss him and had real emotion.

00:02:55   You know, the reason that segment took longer than you would think is he paused a lot

00:02:58   between talking and I don't think that's an act. I think everybody really does miss Steve Jobs,

00:03:03   including Tim, probably every time he gets up on that stage and thinks,

00:03:07   "Boy, Steve would do this better than me," which is true.

00:03:09   Oh, poor Tim.

00:03:11   He does fine, but I'm just saying, just like he said, Steve loved days like today,

00:03:15   and he would have loved to announce this new phone and everything, right? And just,

00:03:19   that's the worst time to think about it, you know, like that's what he lived for.

00:03:22   All the hard work and all the yelling at people and driving everyone to be their best and everything

00:03:27   to get to go up there and to announce it, he loved that. And so them having to talk about like,

00:03:33   here we are in this theater, you know, that he would have loved the theater, he would have

00:03:36   loved to announce these things, but instead it's us and we'll do the best we can.

00:03:39   - I think if you were not holding back tears during that segment, you're not wired up right.

00:03:45   it was incredibly moving and very very well done and very fitting to what they were doing

00:03:50   and you know to the time and everything. I do agree with what Jason Snell said on Upgrade

00:03:55   this week which he was saying this is probably the last we're going to hear about Steve

00:03:58   from Ample for a long time and I think that's probably right. It has, he's been gone for

00:04:02   a very long time. This was a very fitting time to pay him tribute in this way but I

00:04:09   wouldn't expect them to make a regular habit of it even when doing events in this theater.

00:04:14   But it was a really, really nice thing.

00:04:16   And I'm glad they did it,

00:04:17   and I'm glad they did it the way they did it.

00:04:19   - Yeah, and I think the important point,

00:04:21   well, first of all,

00:04:22   there never is an occasion to talk about Steve Jobs.

00:04:24   Like, they can make one every single time they do anything.

00:04:26   They could, but they don't, right, to their credit.

00:04:28   And this, the intro part that I thought was fitting

00:04:33   was the explanation of, you know,

00:04:36   not explaining why they're talking about him now,

00:04:38   'cause obviously the theater is dedicated to him,

00:04:39   he's got his name on it, like that's the time to do it,

00:04:41   right, but also that enough time has passed

00:04:44   that Apple and we all in the audience

00:04:48   can have some more perspective on it.

00:04:50   So it's not as fresh as it was.

00:04:51   I don't remember, you had a good tweet, Marco.

00:04:53   I think what Tim said on stage was that we can,

00:04:56   what was it, look back, not with sadness,

00:04:59   but with whatever, what did he say?

00:05:01   Do you remember the quote?

00:05:02   - Like celebration or something like that?

00:05:04   - Yeah, right, and you tweeted, I'm still sad.

00:05:06   - Yeah, I am still sad.

00:05:08   - We are still sad, but the idea is that

00:05:11   a lot of time has passed and now hopefully

00:05:12   we all have some more perspective

00:05:14   This is a good time to be able to at least try to shift a little bit from just like it being completely raw and just

00:05:19   Being just you know forgetting and then remembering. Oh, that's right. He's gone

00:05:23   He's never gonna do that thing that he does again to shifting towards hopefully

00:05:27   Fonder memories of just like it happened long enough ago that it is not

00:05:31   You know that it's scabbed over a little bit and then we can look back

00:05:35   You know and think that you know that uh, I don't know like I think that was a it's not like putting a cap on it

00:05:43   to say we're never going to talk or think about him again,

00:05:45   but to say this is a milestone, right?

00:05:48   Especially since the whole Apple Park thing

00:05:49   was one of the last big,

00:05:51   as they noted, one of the last big projects

00:05:52   that he undertook that he didn't get to ever see completed,

00:05:56   but he definitely knew, you know,

00:05:58   had a vision for how it was supposed to go, right?

00:06:00   So it was, you know, it was,

00:06:02   as with most things, Apple, it was very taste,

00:06:03   well, I'm not going to say as of most things, Apple,

00:06:05   as we expect from Apple,

00:06:07   but as occasionally they don't live up to,

00:06:10   it was very tasteful.

00:06:10   Like if you think of the intro videos

00:06:12   they've had it other times. Sometimes they're a little bit goofy. Sometimes they miss the

00:06:15   mark. Sometimes they hit. The bad ones I think we just tend to forget. But if we search our

00:06:20   memories you can remember a lot of opening videos that are like, "Mmm, I roll, whatever,

00:06:25   get us the announcements." This was tastefully done and it was nice.

00:06:29   But it was the right amount of time. It was the right timing and the right amount of time.

00:06:34   It was long enough that it was taken seriously. I don't remember hearing it, but I saw widely

00:06:40   reported that they told the people in the audience like, "Hey, shut off your laptops

00:06:44   and pay attention for a minute, would you please?" I don't know how they phrased it,

00:06:47   but that was basically the message. And I watched bits and pieces of the keynote again

00:06:53   over the last 24 hours. And if you look, there were a couple of people with phones or laptops

00:06:58   open, but generally speaking, that theater was completely dark for that entire segment.

00:07:03   And I thought that that was tastefully done. And I'm glad that the press actually listened

00:07:08   because, you know, if we remember the "turn off your Wi-Fi" moment from years ago...

00:07:13   Jobs would have yelled at them and said, "He said close your laptops! It's gonna ruin the effect of the

00:07:17   'Just welcome to the Steve Jobs Theater' on a black background! Don't you understand?

00:07:20   Look at the black levels on this projector! It's a completely dark room and white text and the background totally blends in,

00:07:27   but we can't see it because you have your stupid laptops open!"

00:07:29   Anyway, so after that, so they moved on to the Apple Park intro video a little bit.

00:07:34   Apple Park looks like an amazing building

00:07:37   and an amazing campus and an amazing place to be.

00:07:41   However, there's kind of this reality of it,

00:07:44   which is like them showing off,

00:07:45   like here's this amazing building we've made

00:07:49   for ourselves that you're never going to see.

00:07:52   - Yeah, look at us, look at how smart we are.

00:07:53   That's a visitor center for you.

00:07:55   - Yeah, there's a visitor center

00:07:56   that's not really the main building

00:07:58   or that's not really what you wanna see.

00:07:59   You're not gonna be allowed near like the cool thing.

00:08:02   You're not gonna be in the big ring.

00:08:04   You're not gonna be in the courtyard

00:08:05   or the middle of the big ring.

00:08:07   Only the press will ever see

00:08:09   the Steve Jobs theater probably.

00:08:11   So it's just like, I don't know,

00:08:13   it has this kind of, it's like,

00:08:16   look at this cool thing we made, you can't have it.

00:08:18   Like I would love to see Apple Park.

00:08:22   - You could go there and walk around.

00:08:23   I mean you can't go into people's office pass

00:08:25   where you have to badge through stuff,

00:08:26   but I'm sure you could walk into the middle of the thing

00:08:28   and go through the Cafe Max

00:08:30   or whatever they're gonna call it in this place.

00:08:31   - I bet I can't.

00:08:33   You want to bet?

00:08:34   Well, I think you can.

00:08:35   Yeah, okay.

00:08:36   I don't think that's the case, because—

00:08:38   You've got to get some Apple employee to escort you.

00:08:40   Well, that's the thing.

00:08:41   It's less on Earth than Google, where you have to print out yourself a little badge.

00:08:44   You don't even have to do that at Apple.

00:08:46   Oh my god.

00:08:47   Uh, I'm pretty sure we needed badges.

00:08:49   I'm trying to remember when we went back—or when we went there, but—

00:08:51   I think you need stickers.

00:08:52   I mean, that's what I meant.

00:08:54   But, um, yeah, I think without an escort, you don't see squat.

00:08:57   Like, you certainly didn't see squat at Infinite Loo.

00:08:59   But if you just want to go through the food place into the middle of the ring where the

00:09:02   the trees are. I think you can pull that off.

00:09:04   - Yeah, I would love that, but even that is nearly impossible for anybody to actually

00:09:08   do.

00:09:09   - Do you just get a friend at Apple, dude? Anyway, um, I--

00:09:12   - Oh, yes, because everyone has friends at Apple.

00:09:15   - All of us have friends at Apple on this show.

00:09:17   - The three of us do, but--

00:09:18   - I visited--so I visited Infinite Loop I think about four or five times now. I've been

00:09:23   actually brought through and gone to Cafe Max one time. That's like, once I've actually

00:09:28   gone like, into the building, and not even really into the--I just walked through the

00:09:32   building to get to the food court like one time. So I'm an Apple Park thing like I remain

00:09:40   unconvinced by the utility of Apple Park. It is unquestionably a beautiful place. The

00:09:50   buildings are beautiful as sort of works of art. The views from and of the buildings are

00:09:55   beautiful but I don't know if the buildings are good places to do the

00:10:05   things they're designed for you to do is it a good place to work is it a good

00:10:07   place to commute to is it a good place to I mean you can ask the press was it a

00:10:11   good place to have a press event it seems like mostly pulled that off yeah

00:10:15   although you know because it's purpose-built for that I would hope so

00:10:19   like but this the bar is low there because if you try to do it in like an

00:10:24   an actual old theater that's not designed to have a huge amount of press in it. You know,

00:10:28   you fill theaters with an audience and a small amount of press. You don't fill an actual theater

00:10:33   like the Billy Graham Theater with, you know, giant amounts of press that every single person

00:10:40   in the audience is there because they're reporting on something. So hopefully this fulfills that

00:10:43   purpose. But even there, like the top part of this building, as amazing as it is to see a giant glass

00:10:50   cylinder with a big hat on it, you know, like how is that big thing holding up there? Is it gonna

00:10:53   to collapse and kill us?

00:10:55   How do they get the wires up to the lights?

00:10:57   Oh, it must be these little skinny--

00:10:58   it's like a magic trick, right?

00:11:00   Little spinning elevator and the cool stairs

00:11:02   that are like the ones from the Regent Street store in London

00:11:05   and all other things that you recognize from Apple retail.

00:11:08   It's so empty of things.

00:11:10   Like, where are the garbage cans and the bathrooms

00:11:13   and someplace to get a drink of water and something

00:11:16   to sit down on?

00:11:17   It's like, well, those are outside,

00:11:19   and we bring them in and have rentals.

00:11:21   And there are bathrooms there, and you can get to them.

00:11:23   But it's just I don't know I look at it

00:11:26   and I think of it more as a beautiful sculpture and less as a functional place for people to do a thing but

00:11:32   the theater I think can't afford to be weird kind of like the Sydney Opera House like it is itself a

00:11:38   Theatrical thing the rest of Apple Park is still you know

00:11:42   Nobody knows we'll have to wait until everyone moves in and then we can all talk to our Apple friends

00:11:45   We were just talking about and say how what's it like what's like to work there?

00:11:47   Is it better or worse than the weird 80s infinite loop canvas?

00:11:50   You know, is it better or worse than Google or whatever other place that you might have worked?

00:11:54   So I remain

00:11:57   slightly

00:11:59   Dubious about the utility of Apple Park as a place to work but certainly looks cool in pictures and none of us have to work

00:12:04   There so we can just enjoy it in that way

00:12:05   I mean probably as as the answer is so often with modern Johnny

00:12:10   I've creations probably the answer to all your practical needs is either wireless or dongles

00:12:16   Yeah, get a dongle to put your garbage in. Mm-hmm. Yeah, the AR installation looked pretty neat though

00:12:22   I mean, it's totally like I can't think the word I'm looking for but it's like oh, of course

00:12:26   You have to have an AR installation, but it did look cool

00:12:28   like, you know if you didn't see the video it it looks like they they did almost like a

00:12:35   monochrome

00:12:36   3d display monochrome also isn't the best word for it, but like a very very blank looking 3d display that's somewhere

00:12:42   I guess at the visitor center and then you can take your like iPad or iPhone or whatever and hold it up to this 3d

00:12:49   miniature of the park of

00:12:51   Apple Park and it will show you like the full res, you know

00:12:56   All the trees all the happy trees everywhere and everything and here's here's where here's where all the airflow is because people care about that

00:13:03   But it does look clever and use of a neat use of AR and speaking of airflow and things like that

00:13:09   Apparently the whole building is 100% renewable energy

00:13:11   Which is pretty cool because I'd like my kid soon-to-be kids to be able to I don't know have a planet to live on after

00:13:17   I'm dead. So that's kind of neat

00:13:19   Especially since it is huge. But yeah, I don't know I did there was a lot of

00:13:23   Especially around Apple Park. There was a fair dose of self-congratulation

00:13:28   Which I think some of that is to be expected

00:13:32   I think it ran a little bit long for my taste, but you know, it's their event not mine so they can do what they want

00:13:38   Yeah, I think the Apple Park and the Steve Jobs thing fine, right

00:13:42   But then when they went into the retail thing, which is the next segment I started to think all right

00:13:46   Yeah, get on with it. You're allowed a certain amount of introductory material, right but

00:13:52   You know

00:13:53   I I mean maybe it's just because I'm not that interested in retail or maybe because it didn't seem like it fit in the event

00:13:59   because this is supposed to be an event about products and

00:14:01   The reason you get to talk about jobs and Apple Park is because that's the venue and it's the introduction of it

00:14:06   But retail you could talk about any time and I I confess I mostly zoned out and when I rewatched it

00:14:12   I didn't bother watching that segment again

00:14:15   Did they announce anything new or say anything that made it worth the amount of time that it took in this presentation?

00:14:21   Of course, they did if they're not Apple Store. Yes, they're not Apple Stores anymore. They're the town centers town centers indeed

00:14:29   Which speaking like I don't know I'd block this out

00:14:33   I'd block out the segment where they try

00:14:35   to redefine vocabulary.

00:14:37   - The problem with this whole segment is that

00:14:40   it was full of retail jargon and the way

00:14:44   that their internal initiatives are probably

00:14:47   talking about these things, but there's a fundamental

00:14:50   mismatch between how they talk about this to themselves

00:14:54   and what we care about as the customers.

00:14:56   And I don't think they respected that difference

00:14:59   or understood that difference for this segment.

00:15:01   This is not the first time they've made that mistake.

00:15:04   This is actually one of the major criticisms I have

00:15:08   of generally Tim Cook's presentations about things

00:15:12   is that it seems like they often blur the line

00:15:16   or don't find the right balance between

00:15:19   internal language and external language

00:15:22   and external concerns.

00:15:24   - Would you say that your customer stat

00:15:25   is not exactly where you wish it was?

00:15:27   - Oh, it's blow away.

00:15:29   So the whole thing with the stores,

00:15:32   Angela Ahrens is going through telling how

00:15:34   they're gonna have all these great events

00:15:35   and they're making all these atriums and forums

00:15:37   and theaters and that's all, that's interesting.

00:15:40   But what people want out of the Apple store experience

00:15:45   that we have today--

00:15:46   - In and out of the Genius Bar appointment

00:15:48   in a reasonable amount of time.

00:15:49   And nowhere to line up.

00:15:50   - Yes, what people want is literally shorter Genius Bar

00:15:55   waits and make it easier to get appointments.

00:15:59   In general, Apple stores are overcrowded

00:16:02   and there's a huge burden on the staff that's there,

00:16:06   so we need more of them probably

00:16:08   and they need to have more staff.

00:16:10   And I don't think people care if they're waiting for an hour

00:16:14   and standing next to a table somewhere

00:16:16   or in something called a forum

00:16:17   with a couple plants in it.

00:16:19   That's nice and I'm glad they're doing things like that

00:16:22   for their own sake, but we the customers,

00:16:25   that doesn't really solve a problem we have

00:16:27   and the stores have real problems.

00:16:29   that seem to not be getting solved.

00:16:31   So it's hard to enjoy a segment like this

00:16:34   when it's not solving the problems we really have

00:16:37   and also full of this crazy jargon that we don't care about

00:16:40   and that's really hard to pay attention to.

00:16:43   - I think the whole Apple retail thing

00:16:44   is another great example of success hides problems.

00:16:48   It is important that the stores are nice.

00:16:51   That is important.

00:16:52   It's part of the mystique of Apple.

00:16:54   It's part of the reason people are excited to go there

00:16:56   and see the products that are on the tables.

00:16:57   And all of that is important.

00:16:59   Not to say that it should just be like a giant supermarket with a million checkout lines

00:17:03   to be for efficiency, right?

00:17:04   It has to be a nice place.

00:17:06   But the success that's hiding the problems is the reason Apple retail is worth more money

00:17:12   per square foot than any other retail place is because they sell expensive high margin

00:17:16   products and they sell a lot of them because they're really good and people want them,

00:17:20   right?

00:17:21   That's it.

00:17:22   You have a store with products that people want presented nicely in good locations and

00:17:27   and your margins on those products are good.

00:17:29   And that'll gives you this store

00:17:34   that people just wanna go to

00:17:36   and throw huge wads of money at you constantly,

00:17:39   like over and over again.

00:17:41   People are crowding in the stores

00:17:42   and you take all that success.

00:17:44   You're like, we should make nicer atriums

00:17:46   and have a living wall

00:17:47   and carve this thing out of stone and call things like,

00:17:51   you're losing sight of the purpose of this.

00:17:55   I mean, maybe they're not,

00:17:55   maybe this is for the external thing,

00:17:56   Like the purpose of the store is exchanging goods for money, right?

00:17:59   People come in with money and they want stuff to come out.

00:18:01   And again, it has to be nice, but you know, none of this stuff you're doing is

00:18:07   making it more likely that people are going to come in and buy your things or

00:18:13   making it so that you sell more of them per second, right?

00:18:16   You know, it seems like it's mostly a wash and you're just kind of like polishing

00:18:20   the tables and rearranging the decor and trying not to interrupt the flow of money.

00:18:25   But certainly if your goal was to, you know, either increase the satisfaction, then you'll be like less wait times, more staff, so on and so forth.

00:18:33   Or if you want to increase profits, then get people in and out faster.

00:18:36   And that might also increase satisfaction.

00:18:38   Nobody is clamoring for even nicer materials than an Apple store.

00:18:42   And yet they're constantly redoing things.

00:18:44   I'm not saying they shouldn't make them nice.

00:18:46   They totally should.

00:18:47   But, you know, that's, I don't know, maybe we're unique.

00:18:50   Maybe we don't spend enough time in Apple stores.

00:18:52   I think they're plenty nice.

00:18:54   I think that I think they are really nice and I think they do they should remodel them refresh them periodically

00:18:59   But all that money flowing in lets them sort of stick their head in the stands that yeah

00:19:04   Sometimes it's frustrating but the money keeps coming in. So let's you know, try to get a new material for the floor

00:19:10   yeah, you know, uh, this is a somewhat silly example, but um

00:19:14   I went for a run and I was putting my phone into my little fanny pack. Hi Brits. Hello

00:19:21   I was putting my phone into my fanny pack or whatever it's called and not that and yeah, well, it's called that here

00:19:28   It's not called that there. But anyway, bum bag. Thank you slate 401. That's what I was looking for

00:19:33   I think that's the British version. Anyway, is that real bum bag? Yeah, I've heard that several times

00:19:38   Not just a parody of fanny pack. I don't think so. I mean they're all kind of parodies of themselves, but but yes

00:19:44   Anyway, I'm gonna get through this darn it

00:19:48   So I dropped my phone on the pavement,

00:19:51   shattered my first iPhone.

00:19:52   It's the first time I've done that

00:19:53   since getting my 3GS way back when.

00:19:56   I made it almost 3,000 days without shattering a phone.

00:19:59   I've had some like nicks or scratches or what have you.

00:20:01   - No, is that before or after the last Mac mini update?

00:20:04   - That's a good question, I'm not sure.

00:20:06   But anyway, I went to schedule an appointment

00:20:11   on Friday mornings.

00:20:13   This was at like 6.45, seven o'clock in the morning

00:20:16   when I was done with my run.

00:20:17   And there was some availability. There was like a hair of availability Friday and some availability

00:20:23   Saturday and I ended up having to wait until Sunday and just a couple days out.

00:20:28   The times that I had were not available to me were not terribly convenient, which yes,

00:20:35   I understand that like, "Oh, I live very close to an Apple store. Don't be creepy."

00:20:39   You know, if you live an hour or two away from an Apple store, it's much, much worse.

00:20:42   So this could have been a whole lot worse. But if I had been able to schedule like a same day

00:20:47   appointment for a convenient time for me, that would have been amazing. Instead, I was like,

00:20:52   "Oh, I guess that's when I'll go in." And then when I got there, it was like, "Okay, wait 10,

00:20:57   15 minutes for somebody to come talk to you to just verify the fact that you have the phone you

00:21:02   say you have. And then wait 10 or 15 minutes for somebody else to come and grab the phone. And then

00:21:07   wait the two hours to have the phone repaired." And yes, I understand that this is a first world

00:21:12   problem to end all first-world problems, but the point I'm bringing, the reason I

00:21:17   bring all this up is because if I had had like a next-day appointment, would

00:21:19   have been in and out in an hour, which I think if the store was empty or perhaps

00:21:23   more appropriately staffed, then I could have been, that would have been amazing!

00:21:27   And I wouldn't have stopped talking about that forever! But instead it's like,

00:21:31   "Oh, well, I guess I got to go to the Apple Store." You mean you have to go to Apple

00:21:35   today? You will be today at Apple today, going into their forum,

00:21:41   atrium to be in their Genius Grove. I'm actually glad you brought that up. I

00:21:45   actually think I like Today at Apple. I think I like the name and I think I like

00:21:48   the premise. Will I ever do it? Probably not. I like the idea. Even though I don't

00:21:54   think it's for me, I think it's a good idea and I actually really really like

00:21:57   the name Today at Apple and in the little video they showed, you know, they

00:22:00   showed Today at Apple we're gonna, I don't know, do a photo walk. Today at

00:22:03   Apple we're gonna do sketching. Today at Apple we're gonna do Teacher Tuesday,

00:22:06   which I also think is really awesome.

00:22:09   So as much as I want to poke fun,

00:22:12   and I know you were joking,

00:22:13   but I want to poke fun at today at Apple,

00:22:15   I actually do enjoy that.

00:22:17   Apple Town Center, however,

00:22:18   get out of here with that nonsense, it's terrible.

00:22:21   - All right, now we've spent too much time on retail,

00:22:23   (laughing)

00:22:24   accurately reflecting the presentation.

00:22:27   (upbeat music)

00:22:28   - We are sponsored this week by Aftershokz

00:22:30   bone conduction headphones.

00:22:31   Go to ATP.Aftershokz.com to learn more.

00:22:35   Aftershocks headphones work by bone conduction.

00:22:38   Small transducers rest in front of your ears,

00:22:40   not inside or around them like most headphones,

00:22:43   and they send vibrations through your cheekbones

00:22:45   that are too small for you to feel

00:22:47   directly to your inner ear.

00:22:49   So unlike every other kind of headphone,

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00:23:03   If you, like me, can't wear earbuds

00:23:06   'cause they just hurt after a while,

00:23:07   this doesn't have that problem.

00:23:08   There's nothing in your ear.

00:23:10   They're also awesome for exercise and for hot weather

00:23:14   because you don't sweat as much without this thing

00:23:16   covering up or sticking inside your ear.

00:23:18   They also stay in place really well

00:23:19   as you move around during exercise

00:23:20   and they are IP55 certified for water resistance.

00:23:24   So if they get too sweaty or if it starts raining,

00:23:26   you don't have to worry about it.

00:23:28   And the biggest difference for me with Aftershock

00:23:30   compared to any other headphones

00:23:31   is that nothing is blocking your ears,

00:23:33   so you hear all of the sound of the world around you.

00:23:37   So this is not so good if you're in a very loud place,

00:23:39   like a subway station, but it's awesome

00:23:42   if you're doing something like running outside,

00:23:45   or doing stuff around your house

00:23:46   where you wanna be able to still hear

00:23:48   what's going on in the house,

00:23:49   or taking a call in an office.

00:23:51   It is incredible, it is like nothing,

00:23:53   it's like no other kind of headphone I've ever used,

00:23:55   and I use it for walking especially.

00:23:57   It is amazing for walking,

00:24:00   or any kind of other outdoor exercise

00:24:02   where you want to hear the world

00:24:04   and you don't want to be blocked out

00:24:06   for safety or practicality reasons.

00:24:08   The flagship model was the Trex Titanium,

00:24:10   which they still sell and it's great.

00:24:12   And it is, I think, my favorite overall one.

00:24:14   They also just announced and are taking pre-orders

00:24:17   for the Trex Air.

00:24:19   This is 20% lighter, it now has a new lightweight

00:24:22   all titanium headband, it has reduced sound leakage,

00:24:25   improved microphones, and better bass response if you want.

00:24:29   Personally, I prefer the pocketability of the original one

00:24:32   'cause the shape is a little bit different,

00:24:33   but they're both amazing.

00:24:34   You can't go wrong with either one.

00:24:35   They're both incredibly light, incredibly comfortable,

00:24:38   and I highly recommend them.

00:24:39   So go to ATP.aftershocks.com to learn more

00:24:43   about the Trek's air and the Trek's titanium.

00:24:46   Thank you very much to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.

00:24:49   (upbeat music)

00:24:52   Next up was Apple Watch.

00:24:54   This was, it started out with some new medical initiatives

00:24:58   around continuous heart rate, not full-blown monitoring,

00:25:03   but kind of like passive checks throughout the day

00:25:05   for heart rate monitoring that can do new things

00:25:08   like attempt to detect if your heart rate is elevated

00:25:11   when it shouldn't be, like if you're not exercising.

00:25:14   And they also announced a new heart study

00:25:15   that they're starting that will,

00:25:18   that the goal of which is to detect things

00:25:21   like arrhythmias and AFib.

00:25:25   And this is a really big deal.

00:25:28   This is exactly the kind of awesome thing

00:25:31   that I think the Jeff Williams-led health initiatives

00:25:34   really get right.

00:25:36   I really hope that this works out for them.

00:25:38   I'm very glad they're doing this.

00:25:40   They should be commended for doing this

00:25:42   because this is potentially life-changing

00:25:45   for a lot of people, a lot of people.

00:25:48   So that's awesome.

00:25:50   - Well, you have to opt into this, the study, though.

00:25:52   It's not, I mean, it'll be better when,

00:25:54   if everything works out.

00:25:55   I don't know what the regulatory situation is,

00:25:57   but can they just like build this in so you don't have to know anything you just put your

00:25:59   Apple watch on and then one day you get some kind of notification says hey we noticed something

00:26:05   weird maybe you should contact somebody and you know whatever versus now where you have

00:26:10   to download this app sign up to be part of the study probably sign a bunch of disclaimer

00:26:14   things or whatever so it's good for people who already know that they might be at risk

00:26:19   for this type of thing to have monitoring but no one as far as I understand this program

00:26:23   is going to passively get the benefit of this program because it's still in the sort of

00:26:26   experimental stage.

00:26:28   So it's a start, it's a start.

00:26:30   - Yeah, and I'm pretty sure you'd have to opt in

00:26:32   to being in the study and things like that.

00:26:35   But they had like their--

00:26:36   - You have to download an app and everything.

00:26:37   - Yeah, but like Apple has been building a framework

00:26:40   to do these things for some time now.

00:26:42   So like that's, and to do it at quite immense scale too.

00:26:46   So that's why these are so important

00:26:48   and why they're so impressive.

00:26:50   That Apple's doing this at scale

00:26:52   with pretty advanced resources at their fingertips here

00:26:55   or at their wrist tips.

00:26:57   And so it's, there actually is potential

00:27:00   to do pretty significant things here.

00:27:02   - Yeah, they were saying that, you know,

00:27:03   I thought it was during this keynote that they said that,

00:27:05   you know, a lot of medical studies

00:27:06   are something like a thousand people,

00:27:07   and this is potentially going to be like tens of thousands,

00:27:10   if not more than that, which is really awesome.

00:27:12   We also skipped a brief moment.

00:27:14   What did you think of the introductory video

00:27:16   for Apple Watch?

00:27:17   This is not the cellular video which comes later.

00:27:20   - Oh yeah, where they have like the guy

00:27:22   like reading his letter from his car crash and stuff.

00:27:24   Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:27:26   - My main complaint about that thing

00:27:27   is that it was not clear to me

00:27:30   whether the people in the video were actors

00:27:32   or the actual people.

00:27:34   - Well, it's funny you bring that up.

00:27:35   I wish I could, it's like we planned this.

00:27:38   Friend of the show, Kyle Seth Gray, or Kyle's the Gray,

00:27:41   he was a relay listener,

00:27:43   and I think he listens to the show, I'm not sure,

00:27:45   so if so, hi Kyle.

00:27:46   But anyway, he's definitely a relay listener,

00:27:49   and he was one of the people in the video.

00:27:51   He was the one on the bike, the stationary bike.

00:27:54   And so that is a real person that I have met, and I have shaken his hand with my hand, and

00:27:59   he is real.

00:28:00   So yeah, I don't—maybe others were actors, but I'm pretty sure not.

00:28:04   And I feel like we saw something fly by that the guy in the elevator was also a relay listener.

00:28:12   It's always kind of weird to me when—I mean, they do this all the time, but they

00:28:16   enter a segment about a product.

00:28:18   And especially with the Apple Watch, where the new one looks just like the old one, it

00:28:23   It takes a couple seconds to ramp up to say, they're just telling us how great their product,

00:28:28   existing product is, which they tend not to do.

00:28:30   Like there wasn't a big segment about how great the iPhone 7 is before the iPhone 8

00:28:34   part, right?

00:28:35   But it's like, let me just tell you about, and it was also about watchOS 4 and people

00:28:39   love their Apple watch and sales are great, even though we're not going to tell you how

00:28:42   many there are, but trust us, they're great.

00:28:45   And then the video.

00:28:47   And then of course the new, the new Apple watch on top of that.

00:28:50   But it was like, it was almost like, again, a lot of time spent on something that is not

00:28:55   the announcement of the new product.

00:28:57   But you know, I don't, I guess they feel like it's important to them to emphasize

00:29:04   the fact that the watch is a success, like, in a way that they don't feel like they

00:29:09   have to do for the phone.

00:29:10   I don't know.

00:29:11   It beats me.

00:29:13   But I thought the video was good.

00:29:14   And I think, to come back to where we were before I interrupted, I really think this

00:29:18   Apple Heart Study could be something extremely powerful and I'm pleased to see them doing

00:29:23   it. This is another example of Tim or whomever deciding that this is something that's important

00:29:28   to Apple or to them personally and then eventually Apple. And so they're making it happen and

00:29:35   really making some stark positive change or hopefully, we don't know yet, but I would

00:29:39   assume that will be the case and that's really awesome. So then after that, unless there's

00:29:43   something else we had here.

00:29:44   - Series three.

00:29:45   Yeah, exactly. So series 3, which is with LTE.

00:29:50   Well, optionally with LTE.

00:29:52   That's a fair point, fair point. It's optionally with LTE. This is pretty exciting. It sounds

00:29:57   like it will be a completely separate, of course, connection to your particular cell

00:30:03   phone carrier. You will share, however, the same phone number with your iPhone. And there's

00:30:09   been a little bit of chatter about how that's working technically behind the scenes. But

00:30:13   The net effect is, if you run out of the house and your phone is at home and you go driving

00:30:18   somewhere else or running or what have you, then if you get a phone call, your watch and

00:30:24   your phone will both simultaneously ring and you can answer on either one.

00:30:28   You can send text messages from either one, etc., etc., in a way that you can only do

00:30:32   now if you're either connected to Wi-Fi in certain circumstances or connected via Bluetooth

00:30:36   to your phone.

00:30:37   And that's extremely cool.

00:30:39   What's not cool is that at least in America, it seems that all the cell phone carriers,

00:30:44   or at least anyone who's talked about it yet, is saying it's going to be $10 a month for

00:30:48   a watch, which I think is preposterous.

00:30:50   I don't know what it is.

00:30:51   I don't know why I came to this conclusion.

00:30:53   Because the watch is small and you pay more money for big things.

00:30:56   No.

00:30:57   No, I think you're right.

00:30:58   K-man size comparison.

00:31:00   Okay.

00:31:01   I know that we are spoiled by modern cellular plans being amazing, but it's an entirely

00:31:06   separate cellular data device that is only $10 a month to have on your plan, that's a

00:31:12   good deal.

00:31:13   No, it's not more data.

00:31:16   They're selling you air like Woody Allen's father in that movie that I can't remember.

00:31:20   They're not giving you more data.

00:31:22   It doesn't cost them that much more money to have another device on their network.

00:31:28   So trust me, they're making a huge amount of profit at an additional $10.

00:31:32   - No, I know, but that is a very,

00:31:35   compared to the industry and what they do

00:31:38   and what we've always paid for,

00:31:39   to have an entirely separately activated device

00:31:42   for $10 a month is pretty good.

00:31:44   - I disagree.

00:31:46   - It's the same phone number.

00:31:48   I mean, here's the problem.

00:31:49   The problem with all this stuff is that it's not,

00:31:50   we don't know what we should actually be paying

00:31:52   for these things because so many telecom companies

00:31:55   have not a monopoly, but you have one or two

00:31:58   reasonable choices.

00:31:59   The competition is not strong in this industry.

00:32:02   Sure. Regulation is not, you know, so we don't know what this stuff would actually be worth with

00:32:07   competition. And we do know that in other parts of the world, you get more data and faster speeds

00:32:11   for less money. So the general frustration with carriers and telecom in the US underlies

00:32:16   everything. And so it's hard to say, you know, what you're saying, your argument, you have Marco

00:32:21   is the relative thing like thing thing x costs this amount and thing y is cost cost way less

00:32:28   less proportionally. I'm getting another device and it's only $10. But it just feels like

00:32:34   the bad, the doomsday scenarios of the net neutrality things where it's like every new

00:32:38   thing you want to have they can charge you money for. The carriers have always been there

00:32:42   and remain there. And now it's like, well, great, everything's going to have a cell connection

00:32:46   and I have to get not nickel and dimed, but five and 10 for every single one of these

00:32:52   new items that I add. It's untenable after a certain point, especially if it doesn't

00:32:56   come with more data, right? Especially if it doesn't. So I, you know, we all hate carriages

00:33:00   and wish they did a better job. At this point, when the number of devices starts going up

00:33:03   like this, like we fast forward 10, 15 years and everybody in the family who is an adolescent

00:33:09   or adult has a watch, a phone, a tablet, and not a laptop because Apple will never add

00:33:17   cellular to it because they're evil. That's a lot of damn devices. And you start saying,

00:33:22   "Can I just pay a huge amount of money for my whole family and just be like a flat rate

00:33:25   for a huge amount of data and not have to get additional money every time someone adds

00:33:30   a new device, but we're far from that.

00:33:33   Anyway, it's not that bad.

00:33:35   $10 seems reasonable for the kind of people who are going to buy an Apple Watch with cellular,

00:33:41   which is already a pretty expensive product, as a companion to their already expensive

00:33:46   phone.

00:33:47   So Apple's right on the money in terms of who this product is for and what they're willing

00:33:50   to pay.

00:33:51   of that later when we start getting into the phones.

00:33:53   But, you know, it looks good.

00:33:56   - I agree with you, Marco, that getting this for free,

00:34:00   and Jon as well, but Marco, I think you were,

00:34:02   I think you thought I wanted this for free.

00:34:04   I don't.

00:34:05   I don't think that a free additional connection

00:34:09   to, in my case, AT&T's network is reasonable.

00:34:11   I don't think that at all.

00:34:13   This is different, for example, than tethering,

00:34:15   where tethering is still only one connection to AT&T.

00:34:19   And how I choose to blow through my data

00:34:21   to me should be my choice. And I found it completely egregious when tethering was an

00:34:26   additional fee years ago, because it's still only one connection and it's still just my

00:34:31   data. And in fact, in some ways, they should encourage tethering because then I'm going

00:34:34   to blow through my data even quicker and then hypothetically pay them even more money. This

00:34:38   is different in that I do think it should cost a non-zero amount of money to have an

00:34:45   Apple Watch connected to your cell phone plan. The thing that bothers me though, is that

00:34:50   I don't think $10 a month is a reasonable cost.

00:34:53   I think it should be half that.

00:34:55   Now, how did I come to that conclusion?

00:34:56   No freaking clue.

00:34:57   I think it's what John alluded to earlier.

00:34:59   The watch is physically small.

00:35:00   The iPad is physically big.

00:35:02   It should be less than the iPad.

00:35:03   And I can see that, really, if you put that on paper,

00:35:06   it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.

00:35:08   Nope.

00:35:09   But it just seems--

00:35:10   it just seems bonkers to me that something that really shouldn't

00:35:14   necessarily be drawing that much data-- and even if it was,

00:35:17   it's still the same bucket of data.

00:35:19   It's not like I'm getting more data for it.

00:35:21   I just don't think that $10 a month is reasonable.

00:35:24   I think five would have been the right answer

00:35:26   and I wouldn't have blinked an eye if it was $5 a month.

00:35:29   But for $10 a month, that's making me go,

00:35:32   "Ugh, I think I want cellular, but I'm not so sure."

00:35:37   And I don't know.

00:35:39   - You want cellular, forget it.

00:35:41   - Okay, before I set you on fire,

00:35:43   this kind of like micro price anger

00:35:47   is why app developers can't charge money for apps.

00:35:49   But anyway, let's not do that now.

00:35:52   - Well, you're right, and actually--

00:35:53   - $10 a month, $5 a month even is great for apps.

00:35:57   Anyway, here's the thing.

00:35:59   The cost of this device to the carriers

00:36:01   is network capacity, right?

00:36:03   Because every device that is communicating

00:36:05   one of those towers adds, right?

00:36:06   But in the grand scheme of things, even with Apple's,

00:36:09   we have no idea how many they're selling things.

00:36:11   We know roughly how many they're selling

00:36:14   in proportion to the number of cell phones

00:36:15   that are on a cell network at any given time, and it is minuscule.

00:36:18   So there is a capacity increase for connecting these watches, but it is small, and all pricing

00:36:24   of cell data plans is in the realm of whatever carriers make up and/or collude with each

00:36:30   other for.

00:36:31   There is no market pressure to lower prices because there are so few people, and the only

00:36:36   one who's hungry is always like the one with the terrible network, or I think it was that

00:36:39   Sprint these days or whatever, or T-Mobile, right?

00:36:43   And even they pull prices essentially out of thin air.

00:36:46   So it's hard for us to know how much this stuff is worth, other than, like I said, looking

00:36:50   at the rest of the world and realizing we don't have it that great here.

00:36:53   So I don't know.

00:36:54   But anyway, if you're remotely on the fence, get the cellular one.

00:36:59   Why would you even bother getting one of these phones and not get the cellular?

00:37:03   If you were already looking at a Series 2 and you'd never had any interest in cellular,

00:37:08   then get the Series 3 without cellular.

00:37:10   if you thought I really love to have a cellular thing but that $10 month is you know I mean you know just

00:37:16   Drop one of your streaming subscriptions like this is an expensive product for your expensive phone

00:37:21   Well, but I might add a screen a streaming subscription because stupid Apple music which will get to you in a minute

00:37:25   It's cellular on your wrist. That's awesome pay the ten bucks. Oh, it is awesome

00:37:32   That's incredible what like even for this year even for this day and age even for the wonderful technology that we have

00:37:39   that is still amazing.

00:37:41   Like how is, how, you know, this is like the Louis C.K.

00:37:44   like you know, sitting in a chair in the sky thing.

00:37:46   - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:47   - How is this not amazing?

00:37:49   And like, you know, people are like,

00:37:51   I've seen some of the comments are like,

00:37:52   it's just a watch.

00:37:53   No, it's not just a watch.

00:37:55   It's a tiny little computer that lives on your wrist

00:37:57   and can talk to anywhere in the world

00:37:58   without any phone attacks to it now.

00:37:59   Like, that's incredible.

00:38:01   That is awesome.

00:38:02   - But can I run overcast on it?

00:38:04   'Cause that's really what I care about.

00:38:05   - No, I'm like-- - Amen, brother.

00:38:06   - But that's a software limitation.

00:38:08   - That is not a hard, and we'll get to that.

00:38:11   I mean, so okay, let's talk about that now.

00:38:14   So, you know, cellular on the watch,

00:38:16   what is it actually good for?

00:38:19   And the answer so far is, you know,

00:38:21   the basics of lots of times we have talked about,

00:38:25   and other people have talked about, you know,

00:38:27   do you bring your phone with you with the watch?

00:38:29   And when the Apple would add features

00:38:31   like standalone music playback from the watch,

00:38:34   like to a Bluetooth headset,

00:38:36   or when they talked about adding SOS,

00:38:38   earlier this summer, we would, a lot of us would ask

00:38:41   ourselves, like, why would I not have my phone with me?

00:38:45   'Cause a lot of people, like, even when they go out

00:38:46   for exercising, they still bring their phone with them

00:38:49   just in case there's an emergency or somebody has to reach

00:38:52   them or they need help or whatever else.

00:38:55   So there's a clear reason for lots of people who would

00:39:00   otherwise take just the watch with them somewhere.

00:39:03   I would love to do that, but haven't been doing that,

00:39:05   Not because of anything about the watch's hardware

00:39:08   or software, but because it just didn't have cellular itself

00:39:11   which I guess is hardware, but ignore that for a second.

00:39:14   So that was holding back a lot of people.

00:39:16   And so I mentioned last week, in our predictions episode,

00:39:20   and we had already heard the rumors last week

00:39:22   about the cellular watch because that was

00:39:23   from the HomePod leak, but we had,

00:39:27   I discussed the things I want in the watch

00:39:30   are for it to be a smarter and nicer looking timepiece.

00:39:34   But what most people use the watch for

00:39:36   is exercise notifications,

00:39:38   and that seems to be driving the sale.

00:39:39   So what Apple's doing here is very smart in that way.

00:39:42   It looks like they've done zero

00:39:45   to make it a nicer looking, better, smarter timepiece.

00:39:49   But this is a massive jump forward

00:39:52   for making it an exercise and notifications device,

00:39:55   because now there are significant times

00:39:58   when people would want to bring just the watch with them.

00:40:03   And those are times for which people are buying

00:40:06   or want to buy the Apple Watch.

00:40:08   So that's exercise, that's like going on the beach,

00:40:11   that is certain types of travel,

00:40:14   and let's be honest, it's mostly exercise.

00:40:16   But that's a big thing.

00:40:17   Like a lot of runners wanna run without having a phone

00:40:20   strapped in some weird spot on their body

00:40:22   or anything like that.

00:40:23   - Yep.

00:40:24   - It's a huge market.

00:40:25   So this is awesome for that.

00:40:27   Now going beyond the phone call in an emergency scenario,

00:40:32   I think one of the other things,

00:40:34   and they mentioned the Apple Music streaming,

00:40:36   that's cool, that should be fine.

00:40:38   I'm a little concerned about how that will affect

00:40:40   battery life, but it's probably--

00:40:42   - Wait, wait, you're underplaying that?

00:40:44   I think that's the most important thing

00:40:45   because when you take it when you're running,

00:40:47   I think a lot of people bring their phones with them,

00:40:48   they say, "Oh, it's in case I fall down,

00:40:50   "I need to call somebody,"

00:40:50   but really, they wanna play their music from it.

00:40:52   And yeah, you can play music from your watch now,

00:40:54   but it's a pain in the butt.

00:40:55   I think streaming music plus AirPods

00:40:57   is like the killer app that's gonna sell you there for me.

00:41:00   You're gonna tell them, "Oh, I can make phone calls,

00:41:01   that will make me feel better, but I think it is all about 40 million songs on your wrist

00:41:06   and AirPods.

00:41:07   Like that is the ultimate I want to run and listen to something.

00:41:10   That's why I think it should work with Spotify and all the other services.

00:41:13   I have no idea if it does.

00:41:14   I hope it's not constrained to Apple Music and I agree with your concerns about the battery

00:41:18   life and the streaming, but that is the killer and they show that in the ad.

00:41:22   Like look at me, I got AirPods and I got wrist.

00:41:24   It's the lightest way to listen to all the music in the world while you do some activity,

00:41:30   while it also tracks your workout and your pulse and everything.

00:41:32   That I think is the total package on this.

00:41:34   Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:41:35   And that's why a minute ago I alluded to, you know, I might need to get an Apple music

00:41:39   subscription.

00:41:40   I am a die-hard Spotify kind of guy.

00:41:43   I love Spotify for reasons that are not interesting for right now.

00:41:46   But the thought of being able to go for a run, like everything Marco just said, to be

00:41:50   able to go for a run with just my AirPods and my watch and not have to worry about dropping

00:41:54   my phone, but more importantly, just carrying my darn phone, that sounds amazing.

00:41:58   And if I, you know, twist my ankle or something like that, that I can call for help and get

00:42:03   help from Aaron or whomever, that's amazing.

00:42:06   And that is what I want.

00:42:08   But Casey, all this amazingness, including having all the music in the world accessible

00:42:14   via voice control on your little wrist computer that you can wear anywhere and have cellular

00:42:18   coverage is not worth 20 bucks a month, is it?

00:42:21   It's not worth 20 bucks a month.

00:42:22   He's not complaining about the price of the phone, no.

00:42:24   He's complaining about the price of the carrier plant.

00:42:26   I know.

00:42:27   like he's already paying for. Especially if he doesn't bring his phone, he's not having

00:42:30   extra network capacity. All right. No, but anyway, but the problem though, but leaving all,

00:42:34   even all my whining convention aside about the price of the cellular part, you know, it could be

00:42:40   that I'm actually in $10 to your point, Marco, $10 for the cellular, $10 for Apple Music, but,

00:42:45   and that's monthly, which adds up real fast. But all of this really comes down to, however,

00:42:50   the thing that I most enjoy listening to when I go for a run is actually podcasts. And the

00:42:57   And the particular podcast client catcher, whatever, of choice that I enjoy, happens

00:43:02   to be Overcast.

00:43:04   And all I want in the world now is to be able to leave my phone in my house, take my watch

00:43:10   and my AirPods, and listen to Overcast from anywhere.

00:43:15   That would be nice.

00:43:16   Tell me, Marco, that you're going to make this happen.

00:43:18   I'm trying, but I don't think I'm getting anywhere anytime soon.

00:43:22   I know.

00:43:23   it at that because I'm literally not getting anywhere yet, but I am trying. I told you,

00:43:29   you know, I said when I removed that feature, I'm going to try to bring it back. I am trying

00:43:33   to bring it back, but so far I haven't. But I'm not going to stop trying. In fact, this

00:43:38   has now lit a new fire under my butt because I really, really want this to be a thing that

00:43:44   people can do, that I can do also.

00:43:46   You know why that is, by the way, because I know why that is, and it has nothing to

00:43:50   do with me or any of your customers. It has to do with your newfound obsession. And you

00:43:53   don't want to bring your phone with you while you're riding your bike either, do you?

00:43:56   Nope, sure don't. Shouldn't be listening to podcasts while you ride your bike.

00:44:00   No, I actually don't. I more have been wanting this on dog walks, honestly. Biking, I'm still

00:44:05   -- and even though I -- Well, fair enough. Fair enough.

00:44:07   Even though I'm not biking on the street, I'm biking on a trail. But even on the trail,

00:44:11   I don't want to listen to things. I'm listening to the world around me because I'm scared

00:44:16   out of my mind.

00:44:17   But anyway, so also there are other reasons

00:44:20   to want a cellular watch.

00:44:22   So I thought of a couple.

00:44:23   So obviously there's a lot of app potential here.

00:44:25   The watch so far has been a pretty mediocre app platform,

00:44:28   but this changes things quite a bit

00:44:30   for a lot of different types of apps.

00:44:32   So this could be a big thing.

00:44:35   Right now, a lot of the watch has been held back

00:44:38   by the fact that the apps on the watch are pretty slow

00:44:44   compared to doing the same thing on your phone.

00:44:46   But if now more people have more reason

00:44:48   to not have their phone with them at all,

00:44:50   and all of a sudden the watch is all they have with them,

00:44:53   that opens up new potential for apps,

00:44:54   a new demand for apps.

00:44:56   I also thought about things like,

00:44:58   so they mentioned in the keynote

00:44:59   that if you leave your phone at home

00:45:01   and if you bring just your watch with you,

00:45:03   just your new Series 3 with LTE,

00:45:05   that updates your location for find friends tracking.

00:45:09   - Oh yeah, that's right, that was really cool.

00:45:11   which is not only awesome for like exercisers and things,

00:45:14   but also I thought like,

00:45:16   what if you wanted to track locations of your children

00:45:19   and you didn't want to give them a phone,

00:45:21   but you maybe could give them an Apple Watch with LTE?

00:45:24   Like, I know this is an awfully over-engineered solution

00:45:28   to this problem, but I think that's actually,

00:45:31   that's a potential use I thought of here.

00:45:33   - Give your children $300 watches.

00:45:35   You know, I just bought a GPS tracker for my dog

00:45:37   and it was much cheaper,

00:45:37   so consider that if you wanna track your children.

00:45:39   - It won't always be $300.

00:45:41   And that's less than a phone, by the way.

00:45:43   - The Apple One will always be three, well,

00:45:46   199, the Apple One will get.

00:45:48   - And $10 a month, so that kills it for Casey.

00:45:49   All right, anyway, so I do think this is pretty remarkable.

00:45:54   And they did BS the size increase a little bit, but--

00:45:58   - Oh, I noticed that today. - Yeah, that was awesome.

00:46:00   That was great judo there where--

00:46:02   - The case is the thickness. - The case is exactly

00:46:04   the same size.

00:46:05   I felt like they should have stopped there.

00:46:07   They shouldn't, but they felt like they needed to be honest.

00:46:09   And they said, technically speaking,

00:46:11   the little thing that bumps out of the case

00:46:12   is tiny bit bigger, but the case,

00:46:14   they could have just set the case the same size

00:46:16   and left it, because honestly,

00:46:17   it is bigger by a small amount,

00:46:19   and I bet nobody would notice,

00:46:20   but because they're Apple,

00:46:21   they have to cover their butts.

00:46:23   - Wasn't it like a quarter millimeter?

00:46:24   Like that's a pretty small difference.

00:46:25   - Yeah, two sheets of paper, they said.

00:46:27   - It was almost nothing, but to be fair,

00:46:29   if like Samsung had pulled something like this,

00:46:31   we would be all, well, nobody would pay attention

00:46:33   because nobody-- - No one pay attention,

00:46:34   but because Apple, someone would say,

00:46:36   "I put them next to each other

00:46:37   and you could see two pieces of paper with extra thickness.

00:46:40   No, but it is, I mean it is kind of BS though.

00:46:43   Just call it like you see it and say, "Oh, we made it infinitesimally smaller."

00:46:46   Or bigger.

00:46:47   The most amazing thing, I think, and I always have to remind myself of this when I look

00:46:50   at the Apple Watch, is that every time they talk about this, like, "Oh, you know, we've

00:46:54   essentially kept the watch the same size for many generations.

00:46:57   It's gotten a little bit thicker over time because the Series 2 was thicker than the

00:47:00   original Series 0, and this is thicker still, so fine."

00:47:04   But in general, it's the little Airstream trailer with the bulge on the bottom.

00:47:07   Then I remember it comes in two sizes and I think, how the hell does the smaller one work?

00:47:12   They have to fit all the same stuff in there.

00:47:13   The only thing that is smaller is the screen.

00:47:16   So you can get a slightly smaller battery because you have a slightly smaller screen, but everything else can't be, doesn't shrink in power usage.

00:47:21   It's not like, oh, the small one has a cell radio that uses less power.

00:47:24   If they had a cell radio that uses less power, they would use it in both of them.

00:47:27   So the small one is the miracle.

00:47:28   And maybe that also means the small one doesn't get as good battery life, which is a bummer.

00:47:32   - Well, that's always been the case.

00:47:34   The small one has always gotten noticeably worse

00:47:36   battery life.

00:47:37   - I know, but I mean, like, does it scale linearly?

00:47:39   'Cause now they add LTE.

00:47:40   Oh, it's still the same all day battery life, blah, blah,

00:47:42   blah.

00:47:43   Is the small one even worse now?

00:47:45   'Cause there's no, how, the battery must be so tiny in there

00:47:48   and I don't know what the minimum battery size is

00:47:50   to run any kind of cell radio to transmit to a radio tower

00:47:55   that is potentially far away from you.

00:47:57   Anyway, yeah, I'm reminded of that looking at the models.

00:48:02   Oh yeah, they make one that's like way smaller.

00:48:05   Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

00:48:06   - What size does Tina have?

00:48:08   - I think she has a small one.

00:48:09   - So yeah, it's a thing.

00:48:11   - She's gonna get one of these.

00:48:12   - With LTE?

00:48:13   - Yeah.

00:48:14   - Are you gonna grumble about paying $10?

00:48:17   (laughing)

00:48:18   - No, I'm not gonna grumble.

00:48:21   I'm encouraging her to get it.

00:48:22   She uses it, she uses it for the intended purpose

00:48:25   as shown in all of Apple's ads.

00:48:27   So as long as they don't make a Pokemon Go app for it,

00:48:29   then everything will be fine.

00:48:31   You know, I wonder, I've heard through various reporting that the thing, the Series 3 just

00:48:38   feels a heck of a lot quicker, like opening apps and things like that.

00:48:42   I kind of wonder, and something Marco said earlier made me think of this, if it doesn't

00:48:47   have to like, so let's say for example I'm using Lyft for the first time in forever and

00:48:51   I try to do it on my watch for whatever silly reason.

00:48:54   It has to, if I understand things correctly anyway, it has to wake up the Lyft app on

00:48:59   my phone, or at the very least wake up the phone and say, "Hey, I'd like to use your

00:49:02   internet connection," but something has to get woken up on the phone and it needs to

00:49:06   communicate with the phone, blah, blah, blah.

00:49:08   I wonder if not only obviously the processor is so much faster on the Series 3, but I wonder

00:49:14   if just having its own connection to the rest of the world on these LTE models will also

00:49:20   dramatically increase and improve performance and just make it feel a lot snappier, even

00:49:27   leaving aside the tremendous gains in the processor.

00:49:30   - Yeah, I mean, 'cause with the watch,

00:49:32   like one of the reasons why the original watch

00:49:34   was so unbearably slow is that the whole UI of apps

00:49:37   was being driven effectively by the phone,

00:49:39   like remotely over the Bluetooth connection,

00:49:40   so like every tap was basically going back and forth

00:49:43   with the Bluetooth to the phone.

00:49:45   And so everything they've done to make the watch

00:49:47   more independent in both hardware and software

00:49:51   has had a noticeable increase of performance

00:49:54   and responsiveness because anything you're doing

00:49:56   to reduce those round trips is good.

00:49:58   Now the current watch, the Series 1 and 2,

00:50:02   they were pretty fast relative to the first one,

00:50:04   the Series 0, and I'll have a rant here in a second

00:50:07   about these names, but they could go over WiFi

00:50:11   if they wanted to, but they would frequently default

00:50:16   to Bluetooth to the parent phone instead of making

00:50:19   their own WiFi connection for, I think,

00:50:22   just power efficiency reasons, that WiFi used a lot

00:50:24   of power, so it was kind of like a last resort.

00:50:25   the phone or the watch would attempt to use Bluetooth

00:50:28   for as much as it could.

00:50:29   And they made a few comments about the W2,

00:50:32   indicating that it is not only much faster,

00:50:36   but much more power efficient for WiFi and Bluetooth

00:50:39   than the W1.

00:50:40   So I'm hoping that the watch will be more aggressive

00:50:45   at using its WiFi and then when you're out using it cellular

00:50:49   instead of just like trying Bluetooth first

00:50:51   for everything to save power,

00:50:52   because that will make lots of things better.

00:50:55   If for instance, I wanted to bring Overcast

00:50:58   back to the watch, one of the big problems there

00:51:00   was file transfer speeds.

00:51:02   And that's because most of the time

00:51:03   it was going over Bluetooth.

00:51:04   Even when the devices would be plugged in,

00:51:06   they would still often use Bluetooth to transfer the files.

00:51:08   That makes no sense to me, but they would.

00:51:11   And there was no way for me as a developer to say,

00:51:13   "Look, this is a big file.

00:51:15   "Please, for the love of God, transfer it over WiFi."

00:51:17   The user is literally waiting for it right now,

00:51:19   and it's not being transferred over WiFi.

00:51:21   Like, there's no way for me to do that in the API.

00:51:23   So I'm hoping this will help push them in that direction

00:51:26   of having these new chips.

00:51:27   Now, before I forget about the naming here,

00:51:30   the first watch was called Apple Watch.

00:51:33   The second watch was called Series 1 and 2.

00:51:35   - A zero index, that's great for programmers.

00:51:39   - Yeah, right.

00:51:40   - And so is the fourth watch.

00:51:41   - As they're introducing 3 now,

00:51:44   'cause Series 1 and 2 had the same guts,

00:51:46   but Series 2 was waterproofed, basically.

00:51:49   And it was like the same chip inside,

00:51:52   like most of the same internals.

00:51:53   So it was really like series one and series one waterproof.

00:51:57   Like that's what they probably should have called that.

00:52:00   Actually they should have called them both,

00:52:02   series two and just retcon the first one, series one.

00:52:05   But instead we have series zero unofficially called,

00:52:09   we have the first one.

00:52:09   Then we have series one and two and three now.

00:52:12   But series two was discontinued

00:52:15   because the new premium model is series three.

00:52:18   So now we have series one and series three.

00:52:21   Now the casual buyer will look at that

00:52:23   and think Series 1 is two years old,

00:52:25   but in fact is only one year old.

00:52:27   And it's not two generations back, it's one generation back.

00:52:30   And if you have an original Apple Watch

00:52:33   and you're thinking about upgrading,

00:52:34   you're gonna think the Series 1 is the one you have.

00:52:37   So it's a very, very confusing name now.

00:52:40   Not the first confusing name in this event,

00:52:42   but a very confusing name. - Apple's not the best

00:52:43   at naming. (laughing)

00:52:45   The best thing is that the Series 3

00:52:46   also comes without an LTE.

00:52:48   So it's like, oh, Series 3 is the one with cellular.

00:52:50   Like, well, sort of. (laughing)

00:52:52   Right, exactly.

00:52:53   Like, these are just terrible names.

00:52:55   Yeah, well the good thing is they all look the same.

00:52:58   Like from people, they're all lined up on the table, they all look the same, so I think

00:53:01   the stigma of getting the lesser thing is like, well they all look the same to me.

00:53:05   Like they have a, like on Apple's website or something, it has a big comparison thing,

00:53:09   like what do you want out of your watch?

00:53:11   Do you care about cellular or do you not?

00:53:13   Do you care about waterproofing or not?

00:53:14   Do you care about GPS or do you not?

00:53:15   Do you care about a red dot on the crown or do you not?

00:53:18   By the way, can we talk about the red dot for a second?

00:53:21   Now, I love watches.

00:53:22   I love red.

00:53:26   I even love red watches, or red on watches rather.

00:53:29   I have a watch with red accents, it's wonderful.

00:53:32   I do not think this red dot looks good on any color watch

00:53:37   except maybe the white edition.

00:53:39   On every single, and I haven't seen them in person yet,

00:53:42   but in all the press photos and all the shop photos,

00:53:45   I do not think this looks good.

00:53:48   And again, I love red.

00:53:50   Everything I own is red.

00:53:51   I love watches.

00:53:53   I love red on watches.

00:53:54   This does not work for me.

00:53:56   - I think it works as long as all the rest

00:53:58   of the colors are neutral.

00:53:59   Like if it's based, that's why you like the white one.

00:54:01   Like you just have, everything is neutral

00:54:02   and the only accent of color is the red.

00:54:04   I mean, it doesn't clash.

00:54:05   I think it looks fine.

00:54:06   It looks okay.

00:54:07   I don't mind it.

00:54:09   But it really does limit your aesthetic choices

00:54:11   when you've got the stupid red dot

00:54:13   that you can't get rid of.

00:54:14   I mean, maybe it is changeable, I don't know.

00:54:15   Didn't I do this before with the addition

00:54:17   where you have different crown colors

00:54:19   when you bought the Hermes thing, stuff like that.

00:54:22   - Well, the Hermes was always, I think that was always black

00:54:24   but with the original gold edition line,

00:54:27   that would have, there was like,

00:54:28   if you bought the fancy little red one,

00:54:30   that would have the red dot.

00:54:32   Also, Tim Cook was spotted wearing a watch with a red,

00:54:35   wearing a regular steel watch with a red dot on his crown

00:54:38   at one of the early events for the Apple Watch.

00:54:41   So it was kind of like, ooh,

00:54:42   he gets the special one with the red dot.

00:54:43   And even at the time, I was like, ooh, I want that.

00:54:45   But now that that's offered, I'm like, ew.

00:54:47   I think I, I don't know.

00:54:49   I don't think it looks good.

00:54:50   Maybe it'll look better in person,

00:54:51   but in the pictures on the Apple website,

00:54:54   it does not look good.

00:54:55   - But it limits your choices,

00:54:56   because if you say you have a color scheme

00:54:58   that clashes with red,

00:54:59   like you have a particular band that you want

00:55:01   or like a body color,

00:55:03   like I want the gold aluminum with this color band,

00:55:05   but the red clashes with it, so it's not great.

00:55:09   Also, during the presentation,

00:55:10   I was like, did they get rid of the stainless?

00:55:11   'Cause that's the one that I like the best.

00:55:13   That's the one that I have.

00:55:13   - Yeah, me too.

00:55:14   - I like that look the best.

00:55:15   I don't like the aluminum at all, but it's still there.

00:55:17   They have limited choices.

00:55:19   I saw you can only get it with the Milanese,

00:55:22   with the white sport, but like whatever.

00:55:24   They didn't change the size of,

00:55:25   they didn't change the band compatibility.

00:55:27   So if I was to get one of these, which I'm not,

00:55:29   I would just get the stainless at tremendous expense

00:55:31   and then not use the white things

00:55:32   and use one of my other straps with it.

00:55:34   - I do not take the red dot at all.

00:55:39   I think it's really terrible.

00:55:40   And I don't know, there's a store online,

00:55:45   watchdots.com, and they are not a sponsor.

00:55:48   I have no idea if their product is any good or not.

00:55:50   However, I will seriously consider, I'm not kidding.

00:55:55   I will consider putting a sticker over it.

00:55:57   Something like completely muted.

00:55:59   - Yeah, it's that simple.

00:56:00   It's like, so you can tell you have the fancy one.

00:56:02   - Yeah, I don't know, whatever.

00:56:04   But yeah, so now, see Marco, now I'm in $10 a month

00:56:09   for the stupid cellular, and then $10 a month

00:56:12   potentially for Apple Music,

00:56:13   because it won't work with Spotify the way I want.

00:56:15   And then $10 once for the stupid watch.

00:56:18   I can't even get this out.

00:56:19   It's a straight face.

00:56:20   Yeah, you're not selling this.

00:56:23   So before we leave the topic of the watch, which we should,

00:56:26   I was trying to remember,

00:56:27   like way back when we first talked about the watch,

00:56:31   I don't remember it was like, after it was announced,

00:56:34   it must have been after it was announced,

00:56:34   'cause before we had just had all sorts of what that is.

00:56:36   But after the watch was announced,

00:56:38   talking about it on one of the shows,

00:56:41   and I remember being pretty vehement about the fact that

00:56:45   even though what you see here is a watch that does the things that Apple says it

00:56:49   does, this thing is gonna have cellular. It's only a matter of time. And I thought

00:56:52   I said by the fourth watch maybe it will have cellular but maybe I'm

00:56:55   misremembering but either way like when the watch was introduced it was so clear

00:57:00   that this thing is going to have cellular and live on its own and the only

00:57:03   reason it doesn't is because they literally could not do that and I think

00:57:07   they did it on a pretty pretty good schedule like it it hasn't been that

00:57:12   long since the watch was reduced and they already got cellular into it. And they did

00:57:15   that by doing something that we had previously described as very "unapple-like," which is

00:57:22   don't actually make it thinner year after year. Don't actually change the case. Keep

00:57:25   everything gigantic, you know, Airstream Trail on your wrist and reap the benefits of that

00:57:32   by saying if we keep it the same size, we can get to where we know we're going, which

00:57:38   is cell access on our wrist, right? We can get there faster. They could have shrunk it

00:57:42   and kept similar functionality, but instead of shrinking it, what they did is add battery

00:57:46   life, let's add GPS, let's add LTE. Now, finally, in a couple years, in the next major revision,

00:57:52   now they can shrink because there's probably not that much more stuff they're going to

00:57:56   stick in there, like in terms of tech-wise, maybe some cameras, right? And maybe better

00:58:01   microphones and speakers. But now advancements in technologies don't have to be spent entirely

00:58:06   on adding important features because they finally got the feature set that the watch

00:58:09   always wanted to have.

00:58:10   It is, you know, it's kind of like when the iPod left the Nest and no longer needed to

00:58:14   be connected to your Mac to like initialize it or whatever.

00:58:17   I think the phone, same thing, didn't you have to hook up the phone to your Mac in the

00:58:20   beginning too?

00:58:21   Like all these devices want to be free of the tethers of their larger devices and the

00:58:25   watch is finally free.

00:58:26   It is no longer, you know, I guess it's still tied to your phone's cell plan, but it is

00:58:31   as free as it can be in the world.

00:58:33   You can leave your phone at home, go out with your watch, and it does all the magic things

00:58:36   that we always wanted it to do.

00:58:38   So really quick before we move off, Marco, are you going to buy one?

00:58:43   And if so, is it going to be pretty much exclusively for testing or do you expect to use it from

00:58:47   time to time?

00:58:48   Both.

00:58:49   I use the watch now fairly regularly, but I'm not wearing it all day every day.

00:58:55   I prefer to take it when I'm, as I said earlier, when I'm going on dog walks or when I'm biking.

00:59:00   I like to at least track my distance,

00:59:03   and at least use it as a remote control

00:59:06   for the overcast app on my phone,

00:59:08   even though I can't do local playback very well yet.

00:59:10   Yeah, so I am gonna buy this because I think

00:59:14   I wanna see what I can do as a developer

00:59:17   with 3G on the watch, or LTE, excuse me,

00:59:20   with LTE on the watch.

00:59:21   - Okay, so which one do you think you'll get?

00:59:23   - I'm probably gonna get steel,

00:59:26   and since I've been getting the polished steel

00:59:28   for the last two watches,

00:59:30   but I think maybe this time I'll go black DLC steel.

00:59:34   - Oh, you fancy.

00:59:35   That's one we all wanted way back

00:59:36   when the first one came out, isn't it?

00:59:37   - Mm-hmm.

00:59:38   - And then--

00:59:39   - 'Cause I already have the black bracelet.

00:59:40   I bought the bracelet separately.

00:59:42   - Right, right.

00:59:43   - And I liked the way the black bracelet looked

00:59:44   with the contrast of the steel before,

00:59:47   but now that I've become more of a watch nerd,

00:59:48   the metal mismatch bothers me.

00:59:51   And I've been wearing it more

00:59:52   on the Rainbow Sportband anyway,

00:59:54   so it's less of a problem.

00:59:55   But I wanna try the black this time,

00:59:59   'cause I do like, like the link bracelet that Apple makes

01:00:03   is one of the best link bracelets in the world ever.

01:00:07   Like it doesn't have micro-adjustment,

01:00:10   which is unfortunate, but besides that one shortcoming,

01:00:13   it's amazing, like it's a really, really good bracelet.

01:00:17   So I wouldn't mind getting more usage out of it.

01:00:20   - Fair enough.

01:00:21   Jon, what's your plan?

01:00:23   - I'm not getting one because I never wear my watch,

01:00:25   which is a shame, I would really like to have one,

01:00:27   it seems cool, but no.

01:00:29   Well, then you can I wouldn't wear it because I would love to be able to have a thing that's on my wrist that you

01:00:33   know, I wear I wear my watch like three times a year like when I'm traveling when I'm walking around city streets at WWC when

01:00:39   I'm on vacation in London and for those times it's fun to do it, but

01:00:43   that the rest of the year I don't wear it just sits on top of my dresser and if I got this new one I

01:00:47   would wear it the same amount of time and

01:00:49   and it would be cool to have cell access on my wrist, but

01:00:52   Maybe maybe I could be convinced if overcast works on it

01:00:56   But I don't know what the context is.

01:00:59   I would still bring my phone with me to work.

01:01:02   Anyway, it's expensive, I'm not gonna get it.

01:01:04   (laughing)

01:01:05   'Cause the only one I want is the $600 steel one,

01:01:09   and it's like, yeesh.

01:01:11   - And I would say too, for anybody who,

01:01:13   like you might be waiting for Overcast

01:01:15   before they get one, or might be buying one

01:01:17   hoping for Overcast to work well on it.

01:01:19   - Don't hold your breath.

01:01:20   - Yeah, I would say, because I have not made

01:01:23   any progress on that front yet,

01:01:25   I can't tell you when I'll be able to re-add that feature

01:01:28   or even if I'll ever be able to re-add that feature.

01:01:30   So don't make this decision for Overcast.

01:01:33   Make this decision for other reasons now

01:01:35   and if down the road Overcast does end up

01:01:37   getting the support again, by all means reconsider it then.

01:01:40   But that might be the next watch, I don't even know.

01:01:43   I don't know when it's gonna happen.

01:01:44   - I would absolutely love to get the gray ceramic case

01:01:49   with the gray black sports band,

01:01:50   but at $1,300 there's no freaking way that's happening.

01:01:53   So instead I will be getting the... I'm pretty sure I'm going to leave behind the space gray, even though I love it,

01:01:59   but I want to have the ability to use basically any other color band.

01:02:05   So instead I believe I'm going to get the aluminum, which does not bother me at all,

01:02:10   the aluminum one with... what is it? Like the fog white or something along those lines.

01:02:15   Basically the default cellular

01:02:19   sports, whatever, aluminum watch. And I will be getting one of those. Erin will likely

01:02:25   be getting the same thing, but I don't think she's going to want anything to do with cellular,

01:02:30   particularly once I explain to her it is a non-zero cost per month. Even a dollar, she'd

01:02:34   probably be like, "Ah, I don't need that." But yeah, that is my plan. So I will be waking

01:02:38   up at three in the morning because the world has to revolve around California. And I'll

01:02:43   be waking up at three in the morning to place my order for my two new Apple watches. And

01:02:48   That is just the beginning of me going broke this year.

01:02:51   - I will say also though, if it was my primary watch

01:02:54   that I wore most of or all of every day,

01:02:57   that white ceramic I still think

01:02:58   is one of the best looking options in the whole lineup,

01:03:01   if not the best looking option.

01:03:02   And especially if you're gonna get the red dot,

01:03:05   I would totally splurge for the white ceramic

01:03:07   if it was my primary watch.

01:03:09   - That's a lot of money.

01:03:10   Gosh, is that a lot of money.

01:03:11   - It is, it's stupid, but that's how watches work.

01:03:14   When you like the way something looks,

01:03:15   you're like, "Yes, set this money on fire.

01:03:17   I need to have that on my wrist.

01:03:19   Like, so if you don't miss the extra money,

01:03:21   the white ceramic is a pretty awesome option.

01:03:24   - Yeah, I don't know, $400 for the,

01:03:26   or I guess it would be $430 with the LTE?

01:03:29   I don't have it in front of me, something like that though.

01:03:32   Yeah, $430, so yeah, the silver aluminum case

01:03:35   with fog sport band is what I intend to get.

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01:05:42   (upbeat music)

01:05:44   - Now, we should move on to Apple TV.

01:05:47   There's new Apple TV, 4K with HDR.

01:05:50   There's still two storage tiers.

01:05:52   The remote, which I won't mention out loud

01:05:55   so I don't get flamed, really isn't that bad,

01:05:58   is not changed with the exception of a raised loop

01:06:01   around the menu button.

01:06:02   Other than that, it's all basically the same old stuff.

01:06:05   No USB-C ports.

01:06:07   I don't think any of us really care that much,

01:06:10   so let's move on.

01:06:10   - I cannot believe. - I care.

01:06:12   I care.

01:06:13   - Of all, okay, so similar to like,

01:06:15   when I said earlier how like,

01:06:17   the one thing people want in an Apple retail store

01:06:19   is like faster genius appointments and stuff.

01:06:21   Like the one thing we want with the new Apple TV--

01:06:25   - That's not true. - Is a better remote.

01:06:28   - Not all of us. - A redesign remote,

01:06:29   because this remote is terrible.

01:06:31   And I would also say, I think high on the list

01:06:34   of what people would want with the Apple TV,

01:06:35   it would be a lower entry price.

01:06:38   And we got neither of those.

01:06:40   We got, the most insulting part is that

01:06:42   they did change the remote.

01:06:44   So like, they made a change at all,

01:06:47   but it appears that it's only different

01:06:51   in that they added a white circle around the menu button.

01:06:54   That maybe there's other internal changes,

01:06:56   I don't think anybody knows yet.

01:06:59   I hope there's more to it than that,

01:07:01   but it is still a small, skinny rectangle

01:07:05   that is symmetrical in most ways

01:07:07   that you will still fall off your couch cushion

01:07:11   'cause it has a smooth back.

01:07:12   It will still slip between your couch cushion

01:07:14   and get lost because it's tiny and thin.

01:07:16   It is still too small for good ergonomics.

01:07:18   It still relies on an imprecise,

01:07:19   annoyingly accidentally inputted touchpad.

01:07:22   It is still hard to tell which way is up in the dark.

01:07:24   I don't understand how the people in charge at Apple

01:07:32   could go through the trouble of changing the Apple TV at all

01:07:36   look at that remote and decide, this is fine,

01:07:39   we don't have to change this.

01:07:39   Like, are they listening to anybody, to any customers?

01:07:44   Like, does what we think matter at all?

01:07:46   Have they lost their sense of taste

01:07:48   for shipping that in the first place?

01:07:50   And then two years later, or however long it's been,

01:07:52   shipping it almost identically again?

01:07:55   - I was reminded of when you mentioned,

01:07:57   as talking about the remote,

01:08:00   you started talking about the new remote

01:08:01   where you were going to get, as if it was a done deal,

01:08:05   And it was just a question of what the new remote would be like.

01:08:08   And I was feeling particularly snarky and I laughed and I said, "Wait a second, you

01:08:11   think there's going to be a new remote?"

01:08:12   I am so upset to have been right.

01:08:14   Because honestly, I thought there was going to be one too.

01:08:16   But I was in a snarky mood of being like, "Oh, you think they're going to change the

01:08:20   remote?"

01:08:21   We were all so confident.

01:08:22   It's like, how could they not change it?

01:08:23   Like you said, how could they not?

01:08:24   It doesn't need that much.

01:08:26   We need 4K, right?

01:08:28   You know, update the hardware.

01:08:30   They did gig Ethernet.

01:08:31   Like, that was another big one in terms of hardware.

01:08:33   Like you got to do that.

01:08:35   - It's about time, it's 2017, I mean come on.

01:08:38   - Right, and then--

01:08:39   - We're celebrating that they finally upgraded

01:08:40   the 10100 port on the old one.

01:08:43   - Yeah, and then the new remote--

01:08:46   - Was that the only device in history

01:08:48   that had a USB-C port and a 10100 ethernet port?

01:08:51   - Yeah, probably.

01:08:52   Yeah, but like, yeah, it just,

01:08:56   they didn't have time to redo the remote,

01:09:00   so all they could do was,

01:09:01   this is basically the equivalent of the little bump

01:09:03   the iMac Puck mouse where it's like, "Well, we're going to design a new mouse eventually."

01:09:08   In 2001, everyone will get an Apology mouse at the Macworld Expo.

01:09:13   But in the meantime, is there something we can do for the existing mouse to make it so

01:09:16   that people can tell which end is up?

01:09:17   How about we put a little divot in the button?

01:09:21   And so this is like, I don't even know, having not seen one of these in person, is the white

01:09:25   ring even something that you can feel?

01:09:27   Never mind that feeling around the remote.

01:09:28   I'm pretty sure it is.

01:09:29   Feeling around the remote is death because if you accidentally swipe the touchpad, then

01:09:32   and you have to remember the correct incantation

01:09:34   to not cause the play head to start playing in that position

01:09:38   or you can just like not touch it and put it down

01:09:40   and say don't touch it, it'll go away eventually

01:09:41   and it won't accept my input.

01:09:43   I hate that remote so much and they need to fix it

01:09:45   and it's terrible.

01:09:46   - Honestly, I want to see Apple

01:09:49   with new industrial design leadership.

01:09:52   - Oh God, here we go.

01:09:54   - I wanna see someone else designing these things.

01:09:56   The current team is out of ideas

01:09:58   and is prioritizing things that I don't think

01:10:01   are fully in line with what customers actually want.

01:10:05   Put someone else on these kinds of decisions

01:10:07   because this needs editing, this needs new leadership.

01:10:12   Nobody should look at that remote and say,

01:10:13   "That's so good, we should ship another one."

01:10:18   - I don't agree at all.

01:10:19   So I've blown all credibility by

01:10:22   somewhat seriously whining about a $10 a month fee.

01:10:26   But I don't, the things that the three of us care about

01:10:31   are not the things that most people care about.

01:10:33   And I personally don't really have a problem

01:10:38   with the remote.

01:10:40   Do I think it's stellar?

01:10:40   No, I don't.

01:10:41   Do I think it's amazing?

01:10:42   No, I don't.

01:10:43   Have I somehow stumbled into asking

01:10:45   and answering my own questions?

01:10:46   Yes, I have.

01:10:47   So I gotta get off this treadmill.

01:10:48   (laughing)

01:10:50   I mean, I'm not trying to say you're wrong by any means.

01:10:52   I'm not saying that this is a shining example

01:10:54   of good design, but it's functional

01:10:57   and it works just fine for me.

01:10:59   And sometimes I think it's upside, it's sufficient.

01:11:02   - It's a low bar, it's a low bar.

01:11:03   It should be better than it is, that's what we're saying.

01:11:05   - It should be, yes, yes, it should.

01:11:06   - It looks really good, right?

01:11:08   But that's the only real thing it's got going for it.

01:11:10   It's a bad remote, right?

01:11:11   And we all have bad remotes in our life.

01:11:13   And more importantly than it being a bad remote,

01:11:15   I think the most important thing about this remote

01:11:18   is that it's difficult for people to use.

01:11:21   Forget about tech nerds, people listening to tech podcasts,

01:11:24   people who are Apple enthusiasts who've been following

01:11:29   company forever who care about the industrial design and everything, you give this remote

01:11:32   to anybody, any plain old person off the street, anybody, and it is difficult for them to use

01:11:38   successfully. They have accidental inputs, it's hard for them to swipe upward and right

01:11:43   and left with their thumbs, it's hard to tell what's activated on the screen, it's not an

01:11:49   easy remote to use. In many ways, the five-way was easier, even though it had a stupid circle

01:11:55   that made it harder to tell when you were hitting up and down and left and right.

01:11:57   And all these things, all remotes are difficult to use. You're seeing anybody

01:12:01   using any kind of remote they're difficult to use. But this remote in particular, I feel like,

01:12:06   does not have good usability in the old-fashioned sense of the world in terms of how successful are

01:12:10   people, how confident are they when using it, or do they feel like it's a thing that they have to

01:12:15   be careful touching because something could go wrong. I think people like us use this remote

01:12:20   better than most people because we know all the nuances of how it works.

01:12:24   We know how we have to approach it and how to work it.

01:12:26   We have lots of experience swiping our fingers on things.

01:12:29   We do it all day on our magic mice and iOS devices using our sophisticated

01:12:33   gestures instead of just, you know, multitasking gestures and swiping from

01:12:36   edge and all sorts of things that regular people don't know how to do because they

01:12:40   don't care about this stuff that much.

01:12:41   So I think the, this remote is more usable to us.

01:12:46   We're just complaining about it more because we're picky and we want more of

01:12:48   Apple. I just think this is this is a this remote it falls down in in all ways

01:12:56   as a for what it's actually supposed to do and because we you know we in this

01:13:03   podcast and we want Apple to be you know the best at everything feel like you get

01:13:07   it wrong a couple times fine learn from your stakes revised do better this was

01:13:11   their chance to do better after a very long break and they put a ringer on the

01:13:13   menu button and so everyone is everyone is angry and I think justifiably so but

01:13:18   But, you know, there's always,

01:13:22   I was gonna say there's always next year,

01:13:23   but there's always three years from now.

01:13:27   - What annoys me so much about the Apple TV

01:13:29   is not that it's worse than the competition.

01:13:32   The sad thing is that it's better than the competition.

01:13:34   But it really, it could be so much better than it is.

01:13:39   It has always been an afterthought.

01:13:41   It has always been the lowest of low priorities

01:13:44   over things like the Mac Mini, I guess.

01:13:46   but it could be so much better,

01:13:50   and it's just so mediocre,

01:13:51   and it seems like every time they do something new to it,

01:13:54   either hardware or software,

01:13:56   it's just two steps forward, one step back.

01:13:58   It's just, things about it are so frustrating,

01:14:01   and I think all three of us are heavy users of the Apple TV.

01:14:06   For us, it is our only TV video source.

01:14:09   The only things we ever do on our TV

01:14:11   are Apple TV or the Switch.

01:14:13   That's it.

01:14:14   I just want this product to be so much better than it is,

01:14:17   and I don't think my demands are that high

01:14:20   for what I expect from a good product in this area.

01:14:23   And it just, it fails to meet them so often,

01:14:26   and it's very frustrating.

01:14:27   - So a couple more quickies before I move on with this,

01:14:30   'cause we do need to move off.

01:14:32   One good thing about the Apple TV,

01:14:33   aside from it being 4K and supporting HDR

01:14:35   and all the HDR standards,

01:14:36   is their announcement of their 4K media pricing,

01:14:40   which is the same as HD and your HDs all get upgraded.

01:14:42   So we always complain about any cues deal making or whatever,

01:14:45   but this is a pretty damn good deal.

01:14:47   Same price as HD is good.

01:14:49   And free upgrades of all your HD content is crazy good.

01:14:52   So--

01:14:53   - Yeah, I was really surprised by that.

01:14:55   - Yeah, as chat room just panned out,

01:14:57   except for Disney asterisk yada yada yada.

01:14:59   But if that deal is even remotely as real

01:15:02   as it was announced on stage,

01:15:04   that is a great deal for people.

01:15:06   And it almost makes up for being locked into their ecosystem

01:15:09   being forced to use this remote to,

01:15:11   or like I said, you don't have to use your remote.

01:15:12   you can get another remote, train it, and blah blah blah.

01:15:13   Anyway, so that's good.

01:15:15   - Yeah, that's awesome.

01:15:16   That, like, to give them full credit on the Apple TV,

01:15:19   like, the 4K content deals with the exception of Disney

01:15:23   are awesome.

01:15:24   That is unexpected.

01:15:25   I am very, very happy with that.

01:15:27   I'm even more happy about the 4K screensaver remaster.

01:15:30   I think that's a big deal. - It's your favorite feature,

01:15:32   and that comes for free.

01:15:33   - Yeah, yeah.

01:15:34   - You don't have to pay for it.

01:15:35   $10 a month for the screensaver, you'd pay it.

01:15:36   - I still don't know if I'm supposed to get

01:15:38   the 32 or 64 gigabyte model,

01:15:40   which for some reason still exist.

01:15:43   - I know people question that,

01:15:44   but it's for games and for video caching.

01:15:48   Will your movie be cached on that?

01:15:49   There's some automatic storage management,

01:15:51   and the automatic storage management has an awareness

01:15:53   of how much storage there is in the device,

01:15:55   and so if you wanna have a higher chance

01:15:56   of playing that movie or still being downloaded

01:15:58   from the last time you played it three weeks,

01:15:59   you go get the 64.

01:16:01   I'm getting the 64, that's what I'm getting.

01:16:02   - It's $20 difference.

01:16:04   Why are these two separate models?

01:16:07   - That's two months of your watch.

01:16:08   (laughing)

01:16:10   - I'm a 4.1 with Apple Music.

01:16:12   I don't understand, okay, it seems like

01:16:14   when the Apple TV 4 came out,

01:16:16   whenever it was two, three years ago,

01:16:17   the two big puzzling things about it were like,

01:16:21   oh, why are there two different storage tiers?

01:16:23   They never really explained why you'd need more storage.

01:16:27   It's not really exposed to the user at all in the interface,

01:16:30   and it just kind of seemed like, why are there two?

01:16:32   Why does that exist?

01:16:33   And then the other thing was why this remote sucks.

01:16:35   And with this one, they fixed neither of those problems.

01:16:37   They have not fixed their remote,

01:16:39   and we still have two differently priced models,

01:16:42   although they're closer in price.

01:16:44   I believe it was a $50 difference before.

01:16:46   Now it's a $20 difference.

01:16:48   The old one didn't get any cheaper.

01:16:50   The new ones are more expensive.

01:16:52   This is a theme of the Apple event.

01:16:54   The new ones are more expensive.

01:16:56   This is fine for people like me

01:16:57   who are gonna buy every Apple TV anyway

01:16:59   because we use it so heavily.

01:17:01   I don't see this really expanding their market much though

01:17:04   because everyone else in the set-top box business like this

01:17:09   is just killing them on price and features.

01:17:12   You know, other, like Amazon or Roku have 4K boxes

01:17:16   for $100 or less, and Apple's is now 180

01:17:20   for the small tier, or 200 for the big one.

01:17:23   The old one is still 150, where it launched two years ago.

01:17:26   I don't understand why.

01:17:28   I think that's a mistake, and whatever is causing them

01:17:31   to keep the price high, even on the old low-end one,

01:17:35   I gotta imagine there's cost in the market share.

01:17:38   And I don't know if that calculus is right.

01:17:41   - They're the premium brand.

01:17:42   I don't mind the pricing,

01:17:43   especially in the grand scheme of things.

01:17:44   The streaming services that you're gonna pay for

01:17:46   to watch on the thing are gonna swamp the price

01:17:49   of this device pretty quickly.

01:17:50   But this is a catch-up device.

01:17:52   Like, there was a bunch of stories in the show notes

01:17:55   for many weeks about people complaining

01:17:58   how behind the Apple TV is.

01:17:59   This is a catch-up device.

01:18:00   It's catch up on 4K, it's catch up on all the other things they're adding, and maybe

01:18:03   it's a little bit ahead in some areas in terms of the content deals or the 4K pricing or

01:18:08   the live sports and live news.

01:18:11   I'm not aware of what all the offerings are.

01:18:13   I guess you got YouTube TV and a bunch of other stuff like that.

01:18:15   It's behind on Amazon Video and YouTube TV, which apparently aren't still on this thing.

01:18:22   But this is basically a catch-up product, but it's a good catch-up product.

01:18:24   So I think they maintain their position.

01:18:26   They are the premium brand because they have fancy expensive hardware and their interface

01:18:31   looks pretty nice and their remote looks nice as long as you don't touch it.

01:18:36   People had a lot of content in iTunes and so this was the Keep the Lights On product

01:18:43   and they did it.

01:18:44   I like the fact that they offered the big one because this is what I always ask for,

01:18:49   make one that has more stuff that's really expensive.

01:18:53   Most people shouldn't buy it, but the people who care about it will buy it if there is

01:18:57   some benefit.

01:18:58   And I think there is, because every once in a while I will play a movie that the kids

01:19:01   watched three weeks ago and it's gone and it has to re-download and if the network is

01:19:04   wonky or if iTunes is wonky, it'll spin for a while and I would rather just have it play.

01:19:09   It would be great if I could actually pin movies to the thing and say just keep it on

01:19:12   here, but anyway.

01:19:13   So I'm getting this, we do have to move on, but two quick questions for the people out

01:19:17   there listening.

01:19:18   Does this have a fan?

01:19:19   I asked people, no one told me.

01:19:20   It has holes in the bottom of it that the other one didn't have, but those could just

01:19:23   be for passive cooling, I have no idea.

01:19:25   I would love to know if this thing has a fan in it.

01:19:27   If it does, I suspect it'll be as quiet as the one in the Tower airport base station,

01:19:33   which is so quiet I literally cannot hear it unless I put my ear up to it.

01:19:36   I'm just curious if it has a fan.

01:19:37   Probably not, because it's the same chip as an iPad, and this is bigger than an iPad,

01:19:41   but who knows?

01:19:42   And then the other question is, does this do 24 frames per second cadence?

01:19:47   it show 24 frames per second video where it shows each of the 24 frames for the same amount

01:19:51   of time, which is what you need to do to show a movie shot in 24 frames per second without

01:19:56   screwing it up.

01:19:58   And no Apple TV that has existed before could do this, except for maybe the one that ran

01:20:03   Mac OS X Tiger.

01:20:05   That could probably do it.

01:20:06   I forget.

01:20:07   I don't know what the video output was like on that.

01:20:08   But anyway, none of the little black pucks can show 24 frames per second video showing

01:20:11   each of the frames for an equal amount of time.

01:20:13   I don't know if this one can either.

01:20:15   I asked a bunch of people.

01:20:16   no answer. So next week, Apple people who work on Apple TV, tell me, 24 frames per second

01:20:20   cadence and is there a fan?

01:20:23   So you said both of you guys are going to be getting one?

01:20:26   Yep.

01:20:27   Yeah.

01:20:28   Even though, do you, both of you have 4K TVs or neither of you?

01:20:32   I don't.

01:20:33   I do and I'm getting it for that reason, but I'm also really interested to see how fast

01:20:37   that new CPU is. The current Apple TV is kind of inexplicably slow during some common interactions

01:20:43   that I have. So any CPU speed improvement would be welcome if that isn't the bottleneck,

01:20:50   if it's not some kind of weird software thing. And going from the A8 in the current one,

01:20:56   going from that, whatever it is, to the A10X, that's a pretty big jump. They have really

01:21:02   spec'd this new one well. I still don't know why it comes in two storage capacities that

01:21:07   are $20 different and why the old one is not cheaper, but they have spec'd this one well.

01:21:12   So I hope it's a lot faster.

01:21:15   So I would say even if you don't have a 4K TV,

01:21:17   it might be worth it for some people just for that.

01:21:20   Also because the old one didn't get cheaper,

01:21:23   it's still 150, and this one's 180,

01:21:27   just get this one for future proofing.

01:21:28   If you're buying new today,

01:21:31   if you already have a fourth gen,

01:21:33   maybe the upgrade is a bit of an iffy question

01:21:36   if you don't have a 4K TV.

01:21:37   But if you're buying a new one, get the 4K one,

01:21:40   because it'll be probably useful for longer.

01:21:43   - And so John, why are you getting it then?

01:21:45   Just because it's better?

01:21:47   - Yeah, it's better.

01:21:48   It's faster.

01:21:50   It's faster, it's gonna slot right in.

01:21:52   The best thing with the Apple TV,

01:21:53   with the internal power supply, is when I get new ones,

01:21:55   I don't even have to go back on the TV

01:21:57   and unplug a bunch of crap.

01:21:58   You just pull it out and plug it right back

01:21:59   into all the same cables.

01:22:01   - Oh yeah, mine's still plugged into a PS3 power cable.

01:22:03   - I don't even know what power cables are.

01:22:04   It's just the ones that are attached to the thing.

01:22:06   I mean, I don't recommend people get one.

01:22:07   If you have the old one and it works fine for your thing

01:22:09   - And you don't have a 4K TV, there's no reason to get it.

01:22:13   But I'm totally gonna get it.

01:22:14   And one of the other reasons I buy the big one is

01:22:17   'cause I want Apple to keep improving this product

01:22:19   and by buying the most expensive one,

01:22:21   I'm trying to encourage them with my money.

01:22:22   Please, keep going.

01:22:25   Take another shot at it, try again.

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01:24:00   (upbeat music)

01:24:04   - All right, so iPhone 8, big changes are glass back

01:24:08   with better glass supposedly,

01:24:10   although I feel like we've heard that almost every year.

01:24:12   - And that should be great for gripability too.

01:24:14   Like if, like the reason that I like the jet black so much

01:24:17   is that the back kind of feels like glass,

01:24:19   so it's very tacky and grippy on my fingers

01:24:21   without using a case.

01:24:22   So having glass backs on that, that's a pretty big deal.

01:24:25   - Yeah, like I tweeted, it's jet black,

01:24:27   but without the scratches,

01:24:28   because glass is very resistant to scratch

01:24:30   compared to whatever the hell

01:24:31   the jet black thing is made out of, I don't know.

01:24:34   some kind of chalkboard material.

01:24:35   So yeah, it's all the benefits of jet black

01:24:39   without the downsides.

01:24:41   Speaking of, I wish I could look these things up in my past.

01:24:43   I had to use the podcast search,

01:24:45   but back when the iPhone 4 came out

01:24:48   and still my favorite physical iPhone design,

01:24:51   glass front and back looked awesome,

01:24:53   but now you had a back that could shatter too.

01:24:55   And then the back shattered is not as big deal

01:24:58   as the front shattering, but people didn't like it.

01:25:00   It was cheap to replace the back, cheap-ish,

01:25:03   it's just a piece of glass but anyway after two generations of that the 4 and the 4s uh i remember

01:25:08   talking on some podcast maybe it was this one had to be this one or maybe someone was like

01:25:12   apple's gonna come up with a new phone and you can bet it will not have a glass back

01:25:16   and of course the 5 didn't have a glass back and neither did the 5s and neither the 6 and neither

01:25:21   the 6s and neither the 7 but they found their way back to it because i think they like i like that

01:25:27   design i love the 4 design with the glass front and back it just had a couple of downsides it

01:25:31   It took them this long, took them like five phones,

01:25:34   five whole years to say,

01:25:36   can we get the glass back on this phone?

01:25:39   And they went through all like the laser welded mesh

01:25:41   of copper and steel and blah, blah, blah.

01:25:44   Like they clearly like they wanted to go somewhere.

01:25:48   They went there and they backed off and regrouped

01:25:52   and they eventually got where they wanted to go again,

01:25:55   which is a glass back because there are so many vendors.

01:25:57   Scratch proof is good for grip.

01:25:59   You can make it look really pretty.

01:26:00   It's a radio transparent-ish more so than metal, right?

01:26:05   You don't have to have that glass window

01:26:07   like the 5s had on the back for the radios

01:26:09   and stuff like that.

01:26:10   So this iPhone 8, I was more impressed

01:26:13   by the industrial design than I thought it would be

01:26:14   because I had, honestly, I hadn't been keeping up

01:26:15   with the iPhone 8 rumors that had all been about the,

01:26:17   you know, the edge to edge screen one and everything.

01:26:19   I thought, yeah, these will just be like the 7s,

01:26:21   it'll be fine.

01:26:22   They'll have faster internals.

01:26:23   I'm actually kind of excited about these

01:26:25   because I think the physical design,

01:26:26   despite being almost the same dimensions, it's cool.

01:26:30   It looks cool in pictures,

01:26:31   and I think physical properties-wise,

01:26:34   it will be a better phone for people

01:26:37   than the other phones that were also shaped like this.

01:26:39   So I give the D8 a pretty big thumbs up.

01:26:42   - Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate

01:26:45   that it's gonna be kind of buried

01:26:46   in the news cycle for the most part,

01:26:49   and in the year, in the attention cycle by the iPhone X,

01:26:52   because it does look like a pretty good release.

01:26:56   - I was impressed by it,

01:26:57   But of course, I was only paying half attention to it

01:27:01   because I was just like, okay, whatever, whatever, whatever.

01:27:03   Get to the iPhone X, get to the iPhone X,

01:27:05   get to the iPhone X, except not.

01:27:07   - I think you mean 10.

01:27:08   - Oh, no, no, no, I said that deliberately.

01:27:10   (laughing)

01:27:11   - No, no, we'll get there.

01:27:12   We'll get there.

01:27:13   - Yeah, we're getting there, we're getting there.

01:27:14   - All right, anyway, more good things about this one.

01:27:16   So, I mean, we assume this would be the case,

01:27:18   but it's worth reemphasizing.

01:27:20   It's got the same chip as the fancy phone, right?

01:27:22   It's not like it's got a lesser chip.

01:27:23   This is not like, oh, this is last year's model

01:27:25   and it has the A with one lower A.

01:27:28   It's got an A10, no, it's got an A11 in,

01:27:30   and the A11 is nuts, as usual.

01:27:32   Like people posted the benchmark showing it,

01:27:35   beating a 13-inch MacBook Pro in Geekbench benchmarks

01:27:39   in both single and multi-core.

01:27:41   - Yeah, if those are real, by the way,

01:27:42   that means that they have now beaten Casey's computer,

01:27:44   which is awesome.

01:27:45   (laughing)

01:27:46   - I mean, it's pretty amazing.

01:27:47   And you get that in the 8,

01:27:48   like you don't have to buy the fancy phone for that.

01:27:50   It has wireless charging,

01:27:52   which I didn't think it would have

01:27:53   for differentiation purposes,

01:27:54   but it does have it.

01:27:56   And even though Apple's not ready with its charger thing,

01:27:59   I love the fact that they use that Qi charging standard.

01:28:02   A friend of mine has that charging thing.

01:28:04   He bought wireless,

01:28:05   he bought like a wireless charging case for his iPhone.

01:28:07   Like you put, like I forget which phone it was,

01:28:09   it was like a six or something.

01:28:10   You put this case in it

01:28:12   and it wirelessly charged your iPhone with this standard

01:28:14   by like essentially having a case

01:28:16   that makes it do the thing.

01:28:17   And it was like, oh, that's great,

01:28:18   but you just bought yourself into a dead end

01:28:21   because when Apple comes out with wireless charging,

01:28:22   it sure as hell is not gonna be this Qi stuff.

01:28:24   when they came up with that slide, I'm like, "They did it! They used someone else's standard

01:28:29   because they recognized that they didn't want to have to fight that same battle they did

01:28:32   with carplay because they're putting these chargers in cars and stuff now." And it's

01:28:36   so hard to, in the same way the stupid 30-pin iPod port went to every hotel room, and if

01:28:42   you were another manufacturer and wanted to get in there, it's like, "Sorry, we already

01:28:45   picked the thing that we're going to put on our nightstands, and it's this stupid thing."

01:28:49   The Qi charger—am I pronouncing it right? Qi?

01:28:51   I believe that's right.

01:28:52   chargers are, I don't know if they won the market, but I've seen them around in a couple

01:28:57   of places. I've read reports of them coming in cars or whatever, and so Apple getting

01:29:00   on board with that, but also finding a way to like add its own twist and influence the

01:29:04   standard to charge multiple devices with that air power thing. All that being on the "lesser"

01:29:10   iPhone 8 makes this a pretty darn good phone. Like the only reason people should, you know,

01:29:16   the only reason we're all going to start ignoring it is because we're tech nerds and we care

01:29:20   about all the stuff we're gonna talk about for the iPhone 10.

01:29:23   But this is an eight, it's one bigger than seven.

01:29:27   It looks really cool, it has great features.

01:29:30   If I had a friend or relative who was looking for a phone,

01:29:34   I would not say, oh, just ignore the eight.

01:29:36   I would ask them what they're looking for in a phone

01:29:37   and I think a lot of people should get the eight

01:29:41   instead of the 10 and I think it will be great for them.

01:29:44   What's the other thing, Mark, are you gonna tell me

01:29:46   the camera, did they add optical image stabilization

01:29:49   for the zoomed in one on this or only on the 10?

01:29:51   - No, only on the 10.

01:29:53   But I mean, these are, the camera,

01:29:57   we'll see how it is in practice.

01:29:59   The specs sounded pretty good.

01:30:00   It's still 12 megapixel, but they said

01:30:02   it's an all new sensor, more light, better color, et cetera,

01:30:06   kind of the usual suspects there, which is awesome.

01:30:08   There's a whole bunch of custom silicon sounding things

01:30:11   or custom processing steps kind of things

01:30:13   that they gave fun marketing names to

01:30:16   or that they glossed over.

01:30:17   They mentioned that, first of all,

01:30:20   I think it's interesting noting that the A11 Bionic,

01:30:23   like they gave it a name, the Bionic afterwards,

01:30:25   like to kinda-- - It was like the Fusion

01:30:28   made even less sense, but whatever.

01:30:30   They won't have names, they can have their names.

01:30:31   - Yeah, but anyway, so they have a lot of names

01:30:34   for these things now, but they also have pointed out

01:30:37   in the presentation of a lot of these things

01:30:40   that they have custom things.

01:30:42   So they mentioned, first of all, this is a six-core chip.

01:30:46   That's awesome, like that's, and I have no idea, you know,

01:30:51   what the performance characteristics of this will be,

01:30:53   but it seems like the answer's going to be fast.

01:30:58   It does seem like there is a more than usual

01:31:02   of a focus on power efficiency gains

01:31:04   over straight performance gains,

01:31:07   but it seems like they also got straight performance gains,

01:31:09   so that's pretty cool.

01:31:10   Again, we'll see how this does in practice,

01:31:12   but I have a feeling it's gonna be kind of awesome.

01:31:15   One of the things that caught my attention

01:31:17   is that they now say they have an Apple designed GPU.

01:31:20   The specs don't sound amazing at first.

01:31:24   They said in the presentation that it is 30% faster

01:31:28   than the A10's GPU.

01:31:30   And for a GPU performance for an iPhone year over year,

01:31:32   that actually isn't that amazing.

01:31:35   They've had bigger gains before.

01:31:38   They also said it can offer the same level of performance

01:31:40   as the A10 at half the power as an alternative, I guess.

01:31:43   So that's interesting.

01:31:45   So again, focus on power efficiency.

01:31:48   This is the first Apple designed GPU core in there

01:31:51   that I would expect based on how they did

01:31:54   when they took CPU core design in house with the iPhone 5,

01:31:59   where they had their first core,

01:32:00   which is code named Swift,

01:32:01   inconveniently now, it's very hard to search for that.

01:32:04   But if you look at those performance graphs

01:32:07   that they used to show,

01:32:08   but curiously didn't show this time,

01:32:10   where it had performance of the original iPhone

01:32:12   and then this big ramp up to performance of today's iPhone,

01:32:15   there's a pretty noticeable acceleration

01:32:17   right after the iPhone 5.

01:32:20   That's when they took it in-house.

01:32:22   So taking GPUs in-house as well,

01:32:26   probably is significant long-term

01:32:28   and will probably result in pretty impressive gains.

01:32:31   Like they mentioned during the presentation

01:32:33   that this is a custom design optimized

01:32:35   for Metal 2 and Core ML, their APIs.

01:32:39   And that's the kind of thing they can do

01:32:41   when they take designs in-house,

01:32:43   and when they can specialize the hardware

01:32:45   to their software needs,

01:32:47   and they can do things like analyze every app

01:32:49   in the App Store and its performance characteristics,

01:32:51   and what kind of instructions it needs,

01:32:53   and what kind of optimization they need and practice.

01:32:56   They can do some really cool stuff

01:32:57   with some really impressive performance gains

01:33:00   when they take silicon design in-house.

01:33:02   They have in the past,

01:33:03   and they're doing more and more of that,

01:33:04   so we're gonna see benefits of that

01:33:07   continuing down the road.

01:33:08   That's pretty great.

01:33:09   - For the GPU thing, we knew this was coming

01:33:11   because of the whole imagination lawsuit or whatever thing,

01:33:14   like in that Apple had preannounced,

01:33:16   we're not gonna be using your tech anymore.

01:33:17   So they kind of telegraph that themselves.

01:33:20   But for the speed gain,

01:33:23   it seems to me not having seen a floor plan view

01:33:26   of this chip that they spent their die space

01:33:28   and transistors more on the six cores and the neural,

01:33:33   whatever thing and everything else and less on GPU

01:33:37   because GPUs, honestly, aside from what they said,

01:33:41   custom tailoring it to the APIs that know they're going to get called and making sure it's sufficient for those things and figuring out the

01:33:46   right balance of execution units and stuff

01:33:48   As they as they say GPUs are embarrassingly parallel and essentially you can make them as fast as you want

01:33:54   with you know

01:33:57   Just die space and power budget, right?

01:33:59   And so the iPads obviously they have more pixels to push and they have more die space and more power

01:34:05   And so it's the iPad GPUs that are the big monsters most of the time on the phone

01:34:10   You don't have as many pixels to push around and you just don't have the die space and

01:34:15   the power to, you know, it's not like, oh, we couldn't make it.

01:34:18   They could have made it 300% faster by just, you know, adding 10 times as many transistors

01:34:24   and sucking up 10 times as much power.

01:34:26   But like the trade off they're picking is four tiny CPU cores, two big ones, the neural

01:34:31   thing, the image processor, right?

01:34:34   And then GPU, I think is like a distant third because as much as people are going to game

01:34:39   on their phone, it's more important for the Apple TV to have a good powerful GPU for gaming

01:34:46   than it is for the phone.

01:34:47   The phone GPU is, like I said, it's like tertiary.

01:34:51   It's like primary and secondary is the camera and image processing and the CPU, and I'm

01:34:55   not even sure what order those should be in.

01:34:57   And then third is the GPU.

01:34:59   So I wouldn't worry about it.

01:35:00   I think this GPU is not like Swift where they're like, the CPU, not the language, where it

01:35:07   was just their first try and they weren't that good at it.

01:35:09   I think they're already awesome at it and this is just a trade-off they made and the correct trade-off

01:35:13   For the phone and we haven't gotten to the battery life yet

01:35:15   of the the 10 but you know this that's the weird thing about this being

01:35:20   The same system on a chip in both of them as far as we're aware like there's no differences

01:35:25   But the whole neural processing thing for face ID

01:35:28   iPhone 8 doesn't have face ID doesn't have the depth camera doesn't have any of that stuff

01:35:31   But I think it's still got the neural processing thingy in there

01:35:35   Otherwise they're making a custom version of it just for the iPhone 8 that doesn't have that or it's like well

01:35:40   It probably has animoji support. Yeah, I

01:35:42   Don't know anyway

01:35:45   There's a little bit of weirdness there

01:35:46   But I think they're choosing to spend their transistors where they want and I think when you see the a11x

01:35:51   You will see

01:35:54   the graph

01:35:56   continue

01:35:57   Just as before because they'll just have more room and more power

01:36:00   the

01:36:02   32 gigs is gone. It's 64 and 128 is gone, right? So it's now and now they all cost more to hit 64

01:36:09   256 continuing that continuing the theme of

01:36:12   price price hikes throughout the line

01:36:15   Explanation for that is that flash storage

01:36:19   cost more money

01:36:21   Across all their products and it does well

01:36:23   But I mean that's the estimate they gave it in their earnings call before where they're not gonna be making up BS because they're held

01:36:28   To that their statements there by the SEC and everything. So they're basically saying hey

01:36:32   our component costs have gone up and and the rest across the rest of the industry component costs are gone up and

01:36:36   Because of the magical capitalism they pass on that lack of savings to you the customer

01:36:41   They could have eaten it, but they didn't and it explains why everything is more expensive why you know there

01:36:48   The price hikes across the board because all these things include lots of flash storage and especially because they got rid of the 128

01:36:55   so it's like

01:36:57   64 is entry-level. I think is acceptable now finally we can forget the days of like 16

01:37:01   top tier devices of entry level and the fact that it's jumps all the way to 256

01:37:07   that's not as granular as you would want but I like the fact that that you know

01:37:11   that it doesn't top out at 128 which hasn't for a few years now so anyway

01:37:15   that's typical Apple move the big big one cost you tons and tons of money and

01:37:20   even more money because of their component prices what can you do I think

01:37:24   I'm pretty happy with it with the the storage choices here because I honestly

01:37:28   I think 64 is good for almost everybody and if you feel like you want more you should

01:37:34   have the mostest and that is 256.

01:37:37   Yeah I mean I don't love that they had to randomly increase prices across all their

01:37:41   products including the iPad Pro weirdly.

01:37:43   Yeah well that's what convinces you that it's component cost because that's not a strategic

01:37:46   move like they don't want to have to do that but they have to to maintain their margins.

01:37:50   They're the only company that going into the holiday season increases their prices.

01:37:53   (laughing)

01:37:55   - I mean, we should look.

01:37:56   I mean, if component cost is really arguing out

01:37:57   for everybody, I think this will hit everybody.

01:37:59   Maybe other companies are not in a position

01:38:02   where they can pass that right onto the customers

01:38:06   and say that they'll take it, but Apple is,

01:38:08   and so they're doing it.

01:38:09   - Yeah, I'm guessing Apple's hand was not forced here.

01:38:12   I'm guessing they're doing it because they know they can.

01:38:14   - Also, that's an important part of,

01:38:15   we're gonna go to the iPhone X in a second,

01:38:17   but all of these price increases,

01:38:19   like, I don't know what the correct term for this is.

01:38:22   Someone who's an economics major who has read anything about it would know, like,

01:38:27   pricey elasticity or whatever.

01:38:28   Like, bottom line is, like, if you charge your customers more, if you increase the price

01:38:33   of your product, how much does the demand go down?

01:38:36   Right?

01:38:37   And Apple has always been in this weird position, especially with its top-end most popular products,

01:38:42   where it's like a game of chicken against itself.

01:38:44   It's like, if we add $100, how much fewer of these will we sell?

01:38:49   and they add $100 and they sell more than like, hmm.

01:38:53   Did we just sell more but we would have sold even more

01:38:56   if we hadn't increased the price?

01:38:57   And so they keep running this experiment.

01:38:59   If we had $50, will anybody mind?

01:39:02   Right, and they're learning for the most part,

01:39:04   especially on the high end,

01:39:06   they can keep creeping that price up

01:39:09   and people, I mean the Mac Pro is the perfect thing.

01:39:11   They don't even ask the question of the Mac Pro,

01:39:12   like how much can we charge this?

01:39:14   I don't know, just like make up a number, $10,000?

01:39:16   Sure, ship it, like whatever.

01:39:18   because they can, they absolutely can.

01:39:20   And towards the top end of the iPhone,

01:39:22   especially now that they have this Ferrari of iPhones,

01:39:24   they can just add a couple hundred bucks for that.

01:39:27   I mean, they're already doing it with like,

01:39:28   oh, you go up in storage and it's extra hundred bucks.

01:39:31   Like they discovered they can do that.

01:39:32   We're gonna add $5 in component prices,

01:39:35   but the price the customers increase by $100.

01:39:37   And we'll keep, we'll pocket the 95,

01:39:39   like it is a great deal.

01:39:41   And so this, you know, the component price,

01:39:43   which I totally believe is a real thing,

01:39:46   they should have been pretty confident to say,

01:39:49   "Our component prices are going up.

01:39:50   We can either take a hit in our margins

01:39:52   or we can just increase our prices."

01:39:53   And in fact, maybe we can increase our prices

01:39:56   more than our component costs increase.

01:39:58   So maybe our margins can actually increase.

01:40:00   And so they're going to try it.

01:40:01   And I think they're right.

01:40:02   I think, especially, this will not deter customers.

01:40:05   I don't, and it scares me because I'm like,

01:40:07   if they doubled the price of the iPhone,

01:40:09   how much would they sell?

01:40:10   Half as many?

01:40:11   Or would they sell like 20% fewer?

01:40:14   Right?

01:40:15   how they toy with their demand, right?

01:40:18   I mean, it's another way to keep people out of Apple stores.

01:40:20   You know, just keep increasing the price of your products.

01:40:21   - Wow.

01:40:22   - Become even more and more premium, right?

01:40:25   And, you know, I don't think this is

01:40:28   a good long-term strategy.

01:40:29   I think they should be cautious

01:40:30   because you don't want to leave a price umbrella,

01:40:33   as Tim likes to say,

01:40:34   like leave the loan available to everybody else.

01:40:37   And it makes people angry,

01:40:39   even the people who can afford it,

01:40:40   as evidenced by all of us, or Casey and I,

01:40:42   anyway complaining about $10 a month,

01:40:44   we can go forward. So it is a dangerous game, but I think Apple is actually right that,

01:40:51   you know, as the high end of their phones starts to get higher end, as I think it should,

01:40:58   because they should be expanding their line, like, and, you know, having more diversity in their line

01:41:02   and going for all different things, they can add lots of money to the price because they have a

01:41:07   product that people want, and it's really cool, and it's fancy. And, you know, just crank up the

01:41:13   price and sell people a $100 case and a $130 charging pad. That's why they make all the

01:41:23   money. They're not dumb, and we are willing to pay for it. So unlike the $10 thing, which

01:41:32   happens I'm mad at the carriers, I can't even be mad about this because unlike the carriers,

01:41:35   Apple has products that people want, and I want them, and we're willing to pay for them.

01:41:40   And if we can't pay for them, we will buy the lesser ones because they're still pretty

01:41:43   cool.

01:41:44   Yeah.

01:41:45   But we have one more thing, gentlemen.

01:41:48   Pretty appropriate use, I feel like.

01:41:50   They save it.

01:41:51   I don't think they should have retired it.

01:41:54   I think it's fine for them to use it.

01:41:55   I think it is an homage, an honor, and they do save it for the important ones.

01:41:59   And this was an important one.

01:42:01   Mm-hmm.

01:42:02   I agree.

01:42:03   I agree.

01:42:04   I think it is worth—like, they're allowed to use it if they use it sparingly and appropriately.

01:42:10   And so far they have.

01:42:11   Yeah, yeah, I agree.

01:42:13   The iPhone X, which I did call X earlier deliberately because I still think it should be called

01:42:20   X.

01:42:21   I will not call it the iPhone X anymore, but my point earlier was that I was just waiting

01:42:24   for this iPhone X to show up, and then sure enough, we are immediately told, "No, no,

01:42:30   no.

01:42:31   It is not the iPhone X.

01:42:32   It is the iPhone X."

01:42:33   Wait, were you reading it?

01:42:35   Were you in the Gruber camp where you thought they were actually going to pronounce that

01:42:38   X is a 10?

01:42:39   or that X is an X rather.

01:42:41   - I thought it was gonna be X.

01:42:43   - Yeah, so we saw the strings from the firmware

01:42:45   and that's the problem with all of us having read it

01:42:49   before anyone ever said it,

01:42:50   'cause we all read it in the leak, right?

01:42:51   And there's no pronunciation guide in the leak, right?

01:42:54   If the first time we had ever experienced this was on stage,

01:42:56   I think there would have been a fighting chance,

01:42:58   like not a big chance honestly,

01:42:59   but a better chance that we would all be saying it internally

01:43:04   in our minds as 10.

01:43:06   But now we had like a week or two of saying it in our head

01:43:10   as X, and then they come out and say 10.

01:43:12   And if I had to bet, I would have bet against Gruber.

01:43:16   I spent several years opening all my Mac OS X reviews

01:43:19   by saying, and by the way, this is another reminder,

01:43:21   the X is pronounced 10.

01:43:23   Because no one knew what the hell Mac OS X was, right?

01:43:26   So I had to say, hey, you're reading your review

01:43:28   right up there, there's an X,

01:43:28   I know you're probably reading this,

01:43:29   but just so you know, it's 10.

01:43:30   Didn't work, people still call it X,

01:43:32   that's all you can do.

01:43:33   Couldn't stop them from calling it an iTouch,

01:43:35   You're not gonna stop people calling this iPhone X.

01:43:37   - Or iWatch, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:43:39   - I will continue, I will try to do 10.

01:43:42   I will never do 10.

01:43:43   - No, no, no, and all kidding aside, I will too.

01:43:46   When I was saying it earlier, it was in the mindset

01:43:48   of 20 minutes earlier in the keynote,

01:43:50   I expected to see the iPhone X.

01:43:51   But now we know it's the iPhone 10,

01:43:53   and if I slip up from now on, don't let me tell you

01:43:57   it was deliberate, because it isn't.

01:43:58   But earlier that was deliberate.

01:44:00   - When they released one of the S models,

01:44:03   I believe it was the 5S, and they gave it a lowercase S,

01:44:07   and it just looked like the iPhone 5s,

01:44:09   and nobody, like immediately,

01:44:11   even like in the initial reviews of it,

01:44:14   everyone just capitalized the S,

01:44:16   because it was really weird without it.

01:44:18   So like everyone just went against Apple's wishes,

01:44:20   and eventually I think Apple just kind of gave up,

01:44:21   and you know, it got normalized everywhere as capital S.

01:44:25   I think this is the kind of thing where like,

01:44:27   I have a feeling a lot of people

01:44:29   are going to call this the iPhone X,

01:44:31   no matter what, no matter how Apple says it,

01:44:34   this is gonna be the iPhone X to most people,

01:44:37   and we're just gonna have to deal with that.

01:44:38   We're gonna have to be okay with that,

01:44:39   because that's how it's gonna be.

01:44:42   Calling it 10, yes, there is that history with Mac OS X,

01:44:46   which everybody screwed up,

01:44:47   but that was such a smaller scale than this.

01:44:51   - Yep.

01:44:52   - The iPhone is so much bigger than the Mac ever was

01:44:55   or will be that most people who are gonna be calling it

01:44:59   the iPhone X are probably not Mac owners.

01:45:02   - I think, see, if the first time you hear the name of it

01:45:05   is in an Apple store, the Apple people are all gonna say 10,

01:45:07   and you won't even know that it's an X.

01:45:08   If the first time you see it as an ad on TV,

01:45:10   maybe you'll start saying X,

01:45:12   but most people aren't reading about this,

01:45:13   you know, in reviews like that.

01:45:14   So percentage-wise, I think the breakdown

01:45:16   will be about the same.

01:45:17   It's just that the numbers are bigger.

01:45:18   - I mean, most people are gonna be calling it the new iPhone.

01:45:21   - Yeah, we had to be reminded by a listener, MT Walker,

01:45:24   I had to be reminded anyway,

01:45:25   that we had to show episode 172,

01:45:28   the title of which was iPhone space capital X.

01:45:31   Do you remember that show?

01:45:32   - No. - You remember that discussion?

01:45:33   - I didn't until I'd heard it because of that link.

01:45:35   - So perhaps Margo should click the link in the show notes

01:45:37   and here are very-- - We have show notes.

01:45:40   - Impression discussion, yes.

01:45:42   At 58 minutes and six seconds into episode 172,

01:45:46   we will put the link to this in the show notes,

01:45:47   we have a discussion where we jokingly say

01:45:49   that the next iPhone should be 10

01:45:51   but it should be an X like a Roman numeral.

01:45:54   - Well, and so here's the problem with this.

01:45:56   Like, if this was the only iPhone released this year,

01:46:01   they could plausibly just call next year's 11

01:46:04   and be fine with it or move on.

01:46:06   - This one does not go to 11.

01:46:07   - So here's the problem.

01:46:09   They have two iPhones that they released

01:46:11   that are very similar in many of the specs.

01:46:13   One of which is called 8 and one of which is called 10.

01:46:16   So similar to the watch series one versus series three,

01:46:20   this makes the 8 seem older than it really is.

01:46:23   It really makes it hard to talk about these phones

01:46:25   We can't just say like, oh, it's the eight family

01:46:27   or whatever else or, you know, like.

01:46:28   So it makes there appear to be much more of a difference

01:46:32   than there really is.

01:46:33   That also is going to age badly.

01:46:35   If you start thinking about what might they do

01:46:37   in the next couple years for the product naming.

01:46:40   Like, what are gonna be the phones next year?

01:46:42   Nine and 11? - No, no, no.

01:46:45   - Like, this naming scheme, like this,

01:46:47   they're gonna have to like mess up the names again next year

01:46:50   and it hurts their message this year

01:46:52   of trying to make a lot of people

01:46:54   still want to buy the 8s, because it makes them sound even older than they are.

01:46:59   That's why people thought they were all going to be called 8, but I think Apple's willing

01:47:03   to eat that because most people will shop based on the product, not the name.

01:47:08   I think they have a plan in kind of the same way that when they went Mac OS 7.6, and then

01:47:15   eventually Mac OS 8, which wasn't Copeland, even though it stole the name, and then they

01:47:20   They did Mac OS 9 and they did Mac OS 10 with a Roman numeral and that Roman numeral did

01:47:27   not ever change.

01:47:29   Eventually it just went away and now we're just back to plain old Mac OS.

01:47:31   But we had a Mac OS 10 with names and version numbers and year after year after year of

01:47:37   Mac OS 10.

01:47:38   Someone being reminded again, but someone sent me a link to my five years of OS 10 review

01:47:43   at Ars Technica and I mentioned starting the reviews with a section saying what is Mac OS 10,

01:47:51   so because people didn't know what it was and the pronunciation tips. And I noted that even

01:47:57   Steve Jobs had said X instead of 10 on stage, like because you know he's a human being and I also

01:48:04   know that he said PowerBook instead of MacBook because MacBook is a gross name and he knows it

01:48:07   too. But it is a difficult name, but it is a system that has been proven to work. You just

01:48:15   don't increase the number. You never go to 11. You just do the iPhone 10. And this iPhone 10,

01:48:23   they didn't lean on this as much as I thought they would, but it is like two better than the eight,

01:48:30   right? They didn't say, "Oh, and we skipped the nine and it's like living in the future," and so

01:48:34   and so on and so forth, but that's the message,

01:48:35   that this is not just one better than the eight,

01:48:38   it's two better than the eight.

01:48:40   It is the next generation of product,

01:48:42   they did say this is the,

01:48:43   in the same way the MacBook Air was the future of laptop,

01:48:46   this is the future of phones.

01:48:47   And it seems clear to me,

01:48:49   fast forward a couple of years,

01:48:52   they'll all be iPhone 10s.

01:48:54   Like they'll all be like this phone, right?

01:48:56   The notch, the edge, the edge screen, the physical design.

01:48:59   And I don't think they're going to change the 10

01:49:03   or they'll just drop it entirely and the whole,

01:49:05   this is what all future phones will look like eventually.

01:49:08   Not this year, because the eights look like the sevens,

01:49:11   look like the sixes. - On an infinite time scale.

01:49:13   - No, but this is, no, but it's pretty, not infinite,

01:49:15   like within a couple of years.

01:49:17   As these things go down market,

01:49:19   they're gonna move this design down market,

01:49:22   'cause they said it themselves,

01:49:23   this is the future of the phone,

01:49:24   and they have a name because it uses a letter

01:49:27   and not a number, and because people don't know

01:49:29   how Roman numerals work after a certain point,

01:49:31   I don't think there's a temptation to go Super Bowl LMVXIZ.

01:49:35   (laughing)

01:49:36   There's no temptation to do that.

01:49:38   So they either just keep the capital letter X

01:49:41   or they just drop it entirely like they did in Mac OS.

01:49:43   But it's an extensible naming scheme just about the time

01:49:47   when the numbers are about to get unwieldy on iPhones.

01:49:50   - Yeah, no, that makes sense.

01:49:52   But the other thing to consider though is that,

01:49:54   and this is one of the weirdnesses about

01:49:57   that the line is now bifurcated,

01:49:59   that as you think about how the names scale,

01:50:02   don't assume that the bifurcation of the line

01:50:05   into the regular phone at the regular prices,

01:50:09   plus 50 bucks, and the new phone that's $300 more

01:50:14   or whatever, that's gonna keep beating there.

01:50:17   They're not gonna sell a phone for $1200 massively this year

01:50:22   and have a huge hit rate with that,

01:50:24   and then next year say, "Let's make it cheaper."

01:50:27   there's no way that's going to happen.

01:50:30   Once they get used to selling phones

01:50:32   at these two different price points

01:50:34   and selling a ton of the higher one,

01:50:36   they're not gonna give up that profit in the future,

01:50:38   but they're also not gonna wanna give up the market share

01:50:40   of having the slightly less expensive ones

01:50:43   also in the lineup at the base level.

01:50:45   So they're going to keep having two lines for a long time.

01:50:49   - No, it's not gonna be two lines.

01:50:50   They're all gonna look like that.

01:50:51   They're just gonna be three phones, three sizes.

01:50:53   We, not so we, and freaking huge.

01:50:55   That's SNL references everywhere.

01:50:59   - Was that Austin Powers?

01:51:00   - That was SNL, right?

01:51:02   Maybe it was Austin Powers.

01:51:03   It's Mike Myers.

01:51:04   Mike Myers doing his impression of an Irish gentleman.

01:51:09   Oh, no, Scottish, Scottish.

01:51:11   - Did you know, John, that if it's not Scottish, it's crap?

01:51:15   - Yes, I think it's the same thing.

01:51:17   I hope it's Mike Myers.

01:51:18   Might not be any story.

01:51:19   Anyway, whole point is, yeah, like,

01:51:22   The diversification of the iPhone line has not recontracted.

01:51:27   They've only gone more.

01:51:28   We've got the SE hanging out down there,

01:51:30   which is kind of hanging out where the 5C was.

01:51:32   And we got the little phone and the big phone,

01:51:35   the 6 and the 6 Plus,

01:51:36   and now we have this kind of in-betweeny size.

01:51:39   And price range going down market with the SE,

01:51:42   which is now like 350 or something,

01:51:43   like the cheapest iPhone there's ever been

01:51:45   in terms of just what the price is, right?

01:51:47   And the most expensive one.

01:51:48   They're not gonna give up that range.

01:51:50   I'm just saying tech-wise, right?

01:51:52   What distinguishes the X now is that it's got the edge to edge screen, it's got the notch,

01:51:56   you know, it doesn't have a home button, like it is a new phone design, an Apple set explicitly,

01:52:01   this is the future of the smartphone.

01:52:02   So within I think a couple years, two, three years, the whole --

01:52:08   they're going to come a September event and all three or four, depending on how they deal

01:52:13   with the SE, all three or four new phones are going to be notch-bearing,

01:52:17   edge to edge, non-home button having things.

01:52:20   One of them is going to be 1,300 bucks, right?

01:52:22   and one of them is going to be whatever the cheapest one here is, 400 to 500 or whatever.

01:52:25   But that's what I mean. And once they all start being eduteted on a home button,

01:52:32   notch bearing, watchamoosies, you can name them as a family, you can market them as a family,

01:52:37   it is a family that spans the range. And it will be more cohesive than it is now where they show

01:52:42   the family, you've got the SE design, and then the 6S and 7 and 8, and then you've got the 10.

01:52:48   It's a little bit of a motley crew, but we're in transition.

01:52:51   We're in transition the same way we were when we were transitioning to Retina, when we were

01:52:53   transitioning to Touch ID.

01:52:56   But things will flow downwards.

01:52:59   And I have some confidence that their product line will be much more coherent in a few more

01:53:04   years, even if their names aren't necessarily.

01:53:06   Because let's be honest, Apple is a little bit weird with the names.

01:53:09   There's a possibility for a brighter future for naming, but Apple's really good at screwing

01:53:14   it up.

01:53:15   So I don't put anything past them.

01:53:16   Like as many people said, this is the new iPhone.

01:53:19   One year they're going to drop the 10 and just they're all going to be the new iPhone

01:53:22   and we're not going to have any way to talk about them.

01:53:23   Who knows, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

01:53:26   So we knew a lot about this phone.

01:53:27   We didn't really acknowledge tonight that there was a tremendous leak of the iOS 11

01:53:34   GM specifically for this phone, among other things.

01:53:36   And Steve— In between the last show and now, the leaks

01:53:39   came so fast that we, on our regular weekly schedule, we missed an entire gigantic leak.

01:53:45   So we knew a lot of this.

01:53:48   We certainly didn't know everything.

01:53:50   We didn't know that they were going to call this OLED display "super retina."

01:53:53   It's super retina.

01:53:54   Such important things we didn't know.

01:53:55   On that point of us not knowing everything, I think we knew the most about this Apple

01:53:59   event than I've ever known about any Apple event.

01:54:03   We had mock-ups of this phone that are indistinguishable on video from the actual real thing, probably

01:54:08   down to the millimeter perfect, right?

01:54:10   We knew so much about the software from the software leak, which has never happened before.

01:54:14   Now that I'm, you know, like, I think a little bit about what would have been like in the

01:54:18   era when people didn't pay attention to Apple and Apple didn't accidentally leak things.

01:54:23   And we saw the iPhone intro and the 8 came out and we're like, "Oh, the 8s are okay.

01:54:26   They're pretty good."

01:54:27   And then out of nowhere came this one more thing and it was this phone.

01:54:30   We would have, this show would have been 900 hours long, just about the 10.

01:54:33   But luckily we had like months talking about this.

01:54:37   We were talking about the phone and every single thing was, even the late-breaking German

01:54:42   leak about the swipe up for home button and all that stuff, even though it was phrased

01:54:45   in kind of a wishy-washy way, it's pretty much on the money. That's what was there,

01:54:49   right?

01:54:50   Yeah.

01:54:51   So we knew so much. This is the new high watermark for how much can you know about an Apple event

01:54:54   before it happens.

01:54:55   Oh, yeah. We knew the Apple TV 4K deals.

01:54:58   We knew -- we had a picture of the watch over the weekend from the software.

01:55:02   Yeah, yep. That was tough.

01:55:03   We had the picture of the red dot with the LTE watch.

01:55:05   Like we -- oh, man.

01:55:06   The new AirPods, right?

01:55:08   We had the cute Face ID face.

01:55:11   - Yeah, oh God, it was, you know, so this,

01:55:13   I mean, it's a shame and Apple will work on it,

01:55:18   but honestly, it's really fighting against the tide here.

01:55:21   Like, for products this popular, for a company,

01:55:26   for so many people who are so motivated

01:55:28   to find out this information,

01:55:29   it is a really Herculean task to keep anything secret.

01:55:34   So that's why we should all concentrate entirely

01:55:36   on the Mac Pro, which no one will care enough about to leak

01:55:38   and we will all be totally surprised by it.

01:55:40   Once again, the Mac Pro wins.

01:55:42   Anyway, I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

01:55:44   You're gone, Casey, back to the phone.

01:55:46   I just wanna contest the narrative

01:55:48   that we didn't know much about this.

01:55:50   We knew the most we have ever known.

01:55:52   - Yeah, yeah, it was somewhat disappointing in that regard

01:55:57   because we did know so much,

01:55:59   but there were certainly some things that we didn't know.

01:56:03   And so they pitched the super-ended displays

01:56:06   being brighter with wide color and better color accuracy

01:56:09   and so on and so forth.

01:56:11   Still is 3D Touch.

01:56:12   A lot of people I saw on Twitter anyway asking,

01:56:14   "Wait, what happened to 3D Touch?"

01:56:16   They never really talked about it.

01:56:17   I'm actually looking at the keynote right now

01:56:19   and there's a slide that says 3D Touch right on it.

01:56:21   - And they said it's now built into the display.

01:56:24   I guess that's just like a construction detail

01:56:27   about where it is mechanically.

01:56:28   - Yeah, I didn't quite understand that part,

01:56:30   but anyway, it's still there.

01:56:32   - Yeah. - Yep.

01:56:32   So now before we get into Face ID,

01:56:36   which we'll talk about momentarily,

01:56:38   The home button is indeed gone.

01:56:39   There's been a lot of back and forth as to whether or not

01:56:42   the home button would be gone.

01:56:42   It is gone.

01:56:43   Well, I guess not after the leak.

01:56:45   But until the leak, there was a lot of back and forth

01:56:47   about the home button.

01:56:48   To get back to the home screen, to get back to screen board,

01:56:52   you just swipe up from the bottom.

01:56:54   There's a little-- not notch-- a little grabber handle,

01:56:58   if you will.

01:56:59   Not a physical one, mind you, a software one.

01:57:02   At the bottom of the screen, generally speaking,

01:57:04   that you grab and slide up.

01:57:06   I noticed that when, I think it was an iOS 11 beta,

01:57:10   they got rid of the force press on the left edge

01:57:14   of the screen to multitask.

01:57:15   And I saw a few people who really worked up about that.

01:57:19   And now, as it turns out, you just swipe,

01:57:21   not even force press, I don't believe,

01:57:22   but just swipe the little knuckle at the bottom

01:57:27   that represents the like home grabby thing.

01:57:30   What is the right term for this?

01:57:31   I'm failing all over the place.

01:57:32   - Like a drag handle.

01:57:33   It's called a gripper.

01:57:34   It's not a question of where he grips it.

01:57:36   drag indicator?

01:57:37   Yeah, a drag indicator, whatever, a gripper, let's go with gripper.

01:57:40   So if you swipe laterally on the gripper, you can just swipe between apps.

01:57:45   If you go halfway up, you can get into multitasking.

01:57:49   If you go the whole way up, like I said, you're going back home.

01:57:52   To get to notification center versus control center, it depends on where you're swiping

01:57:56   from the top, which I'm not a tremendous fan of.

01:58:00   I don't think that's going to be...

01:58:01   Oh, that's the best.

01:58:02   Honestly, this sounds awful.

01:58:03   No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:58:04   - The swiping from the top, I think that is--

01:58:07   - This sounds like they're, so yeah,

01:58:09   so you basically, so now the top has those two ears

01:58:13   on each side of the notch.

01:58:14   You basically pull down on the left ear

01:58:16   from notification center.

01:58:17   - No, not the left. - And you pull down

01:58:19   the right ear for control center.

01:58:21   - The right ear is control center,

01:58:23   everything else is notifications, including the middle.

01:58:26   So if you pull down from the middle like you normally do.

01:58:28   - But like, so basically this now puts control center

01:58:32   in the hardest to reach corner of the phone

01:58:33   if you hold your phone in your left hand.

01:58:35   - Oh yeah, this is bad.

01:58:36   This is totally bad for people, for lefties.

01:58:38   I totally admit that.

01:58:39   - This is, I mean, it's bad for everybody,

01:58:41   'cause reaching the top corners is already hard

01:58:43   for almost anybody.

01:58:43   - The way I hold my phone, I think, I don't know,

01:58:48   I'll have to see.

01:58:48   This is the thing about the phone.

01:58:49   We can all speculate on what it's gonna be like,

01:58:51   but as everyone who's designing software for it has said,

01:58:54   it's really difficult to do anything

01:58:55   until you physically get one of these in your hand.

01:58:57   I have to say that I was super doubtful, cautious, worried

01:59:02   about based on the rumor,

01:59:04   but seeing them use the home swipey thing,

01:59:07   I started to believe, I started to believe two things.

01:59:11   One, that the home swipey thing

01:59:14   could be a thing I can get used to.

01:59:15   I'm not sure about control center.

01:59:17   I will have to like, I'm holding my phone now trying to see,

01:59:19   can I get to that corner?

01:59:20   Is it gonna be, I don't know.

01:59:21   I'm not quite sure what the deal is there,

01:59:23   but Apple has some options, but the home swipey thing,

01:59:24   certainly that is something that we're gonna use all the time

01:59:26   and I feel like that's gonna be pulled off.

01:59:28   And the second thing is,

01:59:30   I think this phone, the iPhone X and the presentation of it, worked its magic on me at least to

01:59:35   the point where I even just started thinking about my phone, which has a section of the

01:59:41   bottom which is not a screen, and the only thing in that is a giant circle that I press

01:59:47   to do something and it seems barbaric.

01:59:49   There's a section of like, that is just like this blank area of my phone with a button

01:59:55   on it.

01:59:56   And even it's not like a button that moves anymore, it is still like a button.

01:59:58   It's like, what is that?

02:00:00   It's like when you had to connect the trackballs to PC laptops on the side with those little

02:00:04   hooks, right?

02:00:05   Like Max had trackballs built in where the trackpad is now, like underneath the keyboard,

02:00:10   and PC's laptops were then made where the entire bottom part was keyboard from front

02:00:15   to back, so they had no place to put a trackpad, so you could clip it on the side.

02:00:18   And now I look at my phone, I'm like, "This has this weird dead area appended to it where

02:00:23   we have to put a physical button that's like steam powered or something."

02:00:28   just barbaric when the whole thing should be screened. I don't know, maybe the screen will

02:00:33   be terrible, maybe I'll hate the gestures, maybe I'll long for the button, setting aside Face ID

02:00:37   just in terms of like what it's like to go back home or to activate multi-asking or whatever.

02:00:41   But I came away from that keynote a pretty big believer in the correctness of the whole front

02:00:50   of the phone being a screen and believing that pull up from the bottom or some kind of thing

02:00:57   that is like I dedicated an entire edge of the screen to important common actions is better and

02:01:03   requires less precision than finding that little button. Again, setting aside Touch ID, setting

02:01:09   aside Face ID, just the part of like I'm using the home button to go home and do all the other stuff,

02:01:12   I was pretty convinced. I went into this being skeptical that if I was going to buy a phone,

02:01:18   which I'm not this year, whether or not I would get the fancy edge to edge one, and I came out of

02:01:21   it saying if I was buying a phone this year, 100% I would get that one because I just, I need to try

02:01:25   that and I am now optimistic that they're right about this future, that they're right

02:01:32   about the fact that all screen is the way to go and we will look back on these phones

02:01:36   that had these dead sections above and below that weren't screen and they will seem messed

02:01:40   up.

02:01:41   Now for the record, I am all in on the swipe up home gesture thing.

02:01:46   I think that's going to be great.

02:01:48   I really honestly do.

02:01:49   I think that's going to be way more convenient and it's going to be very natural, very fast.

02:01:54   What I just don't entirely love is having to be more precise to get to notification

02:02:00   center versus command or control center.

02:02:02   And it may end up that it's no big deal at all.

02:02:04   But I use control center constantly and I use notification center frequently.

02:02:10   And so I'm a little worried, again, not having tried it, that that's going to be a little

02:02:15   bit frustrating.

02:02:16   But I am totally with you that I am all in on the all screen front.

02:02:20   I am all in on the no home button.

02:02:22   I am right there with you on that.

02:02:24   Marco, what do you think?

02:02:26   - I'm basically with you, Casey.

02:02:27   The swipe home button thing sounds totally fine.

02:02:31   That seems sensible to me.

02:02:32   Like, you know, if you're gonna get rid of the home button,

02:02:34   that seems like a pretty okay way to handle it.

02:02:36   Having to pull down on the right ear

02:02:39   to get to control center,

02:02:40   I think that's a very hard place to reach

02:02:42   no matter which hand you're holding your phone in,

02:02:44   especially 'cause this phone is now taller than the 7.

02:02:46   So I think that's gonna be a problem for a lot of people.

02:02:50   Also, keep in mind,

02:02:51   when you're making size comparisons,

02:02:53   which I'll get to in a minute,

02:02:54   I have a lot to say about this, about the screen,

02:02:55   but keep in mind that now because you aren't having

02:02:58   that top and bottom chin,

02:03:00   if you're thinking about whether certain parts

02:03:02   of the screen are gonna be reachable for you,

02:03:04   keep in mind that you're actually gonna have

02:03:05   to reach higher on this one,

02:03:07   because you're reaching into the area that used to be,

02:03:10   the earpiece bar, you know, the forehead area.

02:03:13   So that's gonna be a hard place to reach.

02:03:16   Maybe one way to solve this,

02:03:17   I haven't played with the software like in the simulator yet

02:03:20   so maybe they can do this,

02:03:22   maybe there's some reason why they can't,

02:03:23   but maybe a shortcut to control center could be

02:03:26   if you do the home gesture swipe up

02:03:28   when you're already at the home screen,

02:03:31   maybe you can open up control center.

02:03:32   I know that's not perfect, but I don't know,

02:03:35   having to pull down from that right ear area,

02:03:37   that seems like it's gonna be really hard to reach

02:03:39   for something that people not only frequently use,

02:03:42   but frequently use when they're one-handed.

02:03:44   So that seems like something that needs to be fixed.

02:03:47   - On the iPad, remember, on iOS 11,

02:03:49   do the thing where you pull up from the bottom and the dock appears but if you keep pulling

02:03:53   control center appears they kind of did the same thing on the phone but now it's like

02:03:57   if you pull up part way you get multitasking and if you keep pulling it's home.

02:04:00   I feel like they have some options if reachability turns out to be a concern but the main thing

02:04:03   I thought was really clever about control center is it is one instance where they made

02:04:10   you know got some lemons which is the notch which I'll talk about a bit later and they

02:04:13   made lemonade but it's like well we do have this notch here and it conveniently physically

02:04:18   and prominently divides that bar into sections that are clearly understandable. Like, if,

02:04:23   imagine the status bar was just straight across and the top of the screen was flat. This kind

02:04:26   of thing where it's like, well, you have to know that if you swipe down on like the rightish third

02:04:30   of the single continuous thing, that it does a different thing than if you swipe down on the

02:04:35   other two thirds. But because the notch is there, it gives them like, essentially a button, like a

02:04:40   physically outlined thing that says this place is different than the other place. And people can be

02:04:46   forgiven for thinking that it's right ear versus left ear, but it's really right ear

02:04:50   versus anything else in the entire bar is notifications, which lets people continue

02:04:54   their muscle memory of swipe from the top and your right Marco that the top is toppier

02:04:57   than it used to be. So we'll see how that goes. But that still works because I don't

02:05:01   know how many, I mean, I pull notification down from the center middle of my phone and

02:05:05   if you continue to do that, it will keep working. And since I can reach the center middle of

02:05:08   my phone to get notifications, I feel I can probably get to the ear. I guess we'll all

02:05:13   find out. But they do have, like they have options because it is all screen, they've

02:05:17   got a bunch of multiple edges, they could even somehow work it into the bottom, give

02:05:22   them some time to work it out, but I'm mostly optimistic about how this is going to work.

02:05:28   Especially for poor people with the giant plus. Like I hope this phone brings people

02:05:31   down from the ledge that is the plus. It says, "Look, you can get not as many pixels, but

02:05:36   more. How do you feel about this? Is it better?" I don't know. Maybe it won't work. People

02:05:40   like their giant phones.

02:05:41   - Well, and so, on that part though, like--

02:05:46   - Wait, hold on, really, really quickly.

02:05:47   Do you feel like this is going to be difficult

02:05:50   for more novice users?

02:05:53   And maybe the answer is no, novice users

02:05:55   don't even really know what control center is,

02:05:56   or notification center for that matter.

02:05:58   But I don't know, it's just, one of the things

02:06:00   that I think was so great about the iPhone

02:06:03   was that you always had a physical button to press

02:06:08   when you needed to get out of jail.

02:06:09   Like you needed a parachute, maybe is a better analogy.

02:06:12   And I've noticed on Aaron's car, just bear with me,

02:06:16   on Aaron's car, which has a touchscreen,

02:06:18   there are occasions, or certainly when we first got it,

02:06:22   especially, there were occasions when we got in some screen

02:06:25   somewhere in the navigation, and I was like,

02:06:26   I have no idea where I am.

02:06:29   And it was nice to be able to find,

02:06:31   I could see this physical button

02:06:32   that I could just mash down on, and I went back home.

02:06:36   I'm probably overblowing the issue here. Well, I don't even know that it's an issue,

02:06:43   but I wonder—I can't help but wonder—if this is going to be difficult. So say you're like

02:06:47   70- or 80-year-old, you know, grandparent who maybe is just now getting an iPhone for the very

02:06:53   first time. Like, you need to explain to them, "Well, if you want to go home, you need to swipe

02:06:58   up." But don't swipe up only an inch or so, because then you're going to multitask, and you need to

02:07:02   swipe all the way up and where do you swipe from? Well just from the bottom.

02:07:05   Well where on the bottom? Just from the bottom. You know what I mean? Like I feel

02:07:08   like this is... it's a... it's... the home button was already so overloaded where

02:07:13   single tap does this except when it doesn't. Double tap does that except when

02:07:16   it doesn't. Double... double touch but not tap is something else entirely, which by

02:07:22   the way is going away. It... it just seems like there's a lot here and I'm a little

02:07:26   worried that for... for not us it's going to be a little more challenging. But

02:07:31   But am I just being a big baby?

02:07:34   - Well, Apple's doing the thing.

02:07:35   Apple's doing something that I think is smart,

02:07:37   where they have been shedding the previous conventions

02:07:41   as the bulk of their user base has become more sophisticated

02:07:46   because they grow up with phones or have used a lot of them.

02:07:49   So in the same way, they got rid of slide to unlock,

02:07:52   and like, oh, now there's not an obvious thing

02:07:54   with the giant animated arrow saying,

02:07:56   slide here, dummy, to unlock your phone.

02:07:58   Now the whole screen's thing, but how will people tell?

02:07:59   Can they see that subtle symbol?

02:08:01   people figured it out.

02:08:02   Like I'm mostly convinced of the fact

02:08:05   that this will be successful by seeing people in the wider

02:08:09   world use Android phones, which very often have basically

02:08:13   soft buttons, like buttons that don't press in,

02:08:15   but they're just symbols that you can press,

02:08:16   which are pretty awful, I think, because there's not

02:08:19   even any sort of good haptic feedback in a lot of cases.

02:08:21   And lots of swipey gestures.

02:08:23   And I see people navigating these things with no problem.

02:08:25   They're just basically a minefield

02:08:27   of touch-sensitive icons and back buttons and home things

02:08:30   and swipe gestures that are all different from phone to phone,

02:08:33   depending on what carrier crapware is on there

02:08:35   and what version of Android you're using.

02:08:37   A huge variety of fairly complicated swipes.

02:08:39   And you're right about it being more difficult action

02:08:41   than pressing a button, and that is a problem.

02:08:43   But for the bulk of the market, I

02:08:44   think the market has become more sophisticated

02:08:48   because they're spending more times with phones.

02:08:50   And appropriately, phone vendors are shedding the affordances

02:08:55   that were required in the past to let people understand

02:08:58   how the hell you use a phone that

02:08:59   doesn't have a physical keyboard

02:09:00   and doesn't have physical buttons,

02:09:01   it doesn't have number keys,

02:09:03   that becomes less and less necessary.

02:09:05   And so, you know, Apple is,

02:09:08   I feel they're mostly catching up with the Android world

02:09:10   in terms of how featureless and swipey

02:09:13   the front of the phone is.

02:09:15   And net-net, I think it's the right thing to do.

02:09:19   It would be good if they could come up

02:09:20   with some kind of better, more comfortable,

02:09:24   safer system for people who have difficulty

02:09:26   with swipe gestures, which includes me a lot of the time.

02:09:29   But I think it's going in the right direction.

02:09:33   I think this step-by-step progression is the right thing to do.

02:09:37   Did they overstep this time by a little bit?

02:09:38   I think it may just be in the details, like Marco was saying.

02:09:40   Like, okay, well, maybe the idea is right, all screen is right, but you have to rejigger

02:09:45   things to figure out what's reachable and what's commonly used and stuff like that.

02:09:49   So, Marco, tell us about the screens.

02:09:52   All right.

02:09:53   We have kind of jumped through a million hoops with the iPhone 10 in order to get

02:09:59   this edge-to-edge screen and the reason we wanted an edge-to-edge screen with

02:10:04   asterisks on some of that but the reason we wanted that is because we wanted to

02:10:08   fit a bigger screen into a smaller phone but if you look at how big the screen is

02:10:14   versus how big the phone is and if you consider the amount of space you're now

02:10:21   losing in that big screen to things like the new status ears and the home indicator and

02:10:27   the margins around these things. The gain I think is less compelling than I would have

02:10:33   wanted it to be. The important thing to realize, and I think this is going to bite a lot of

02:10:38   plus fans, I think a lot of plus fans are going to upgrade this phone thinking that

02:10:42   it's going to give them the plus size screen in a smaller phone. But it isn't that much

02:10:47   smaller and the screen is not plus sized at least not the way you might think so

02:10:54   the iPhone 6 7 & 8 screens are 375 points wide so is the X sorry 10 the

02:11:06   plus is 414 so it's 375 versus 414 and width the iPhone 10 is the same width we

02:11:13   did not gain any width, which means things like

02:11:16   if you're scrolling, for example, in Instagram,

02:11:19   or any kind of photo stream thing,

02:11:21   your photos aren't going to be any bigger.

02:11:23   You'll be able to fit more than one on screen maybe,

02:11:25   but it's gonna be the same width

02:11:27   as the small phones have been.

02:11:30   That also means the keyboard is presumably

02:11:32   going to be the same width.

02:11:34   So if you're one of the people like me

02:11:35   who found it more comfortable to type on the Plus,

02:11:38   you won't get that here with the iPhone 10.

02:11:40   It is the same width as the 6, 7, and 8.

02:11:43   The height is substantially bigger than the plus.

02:11:47   So the height of the 678 is 667,

02:11:51   and these are all points, not pixels.

02:11:53   The plus is 736, and the 10 is 812.

02:11:57   That is awesome.

02:11:57   So you're gonna have much taller lists.

02:12:00   However, you're also losing some height

02:12:03   due to the home indicator, the drag indicator thing,

02:12:06   due to the margin around it,

02:12:08   and due to the now taller status ears/status bar.

02:12:11   So if you actually consider, if you run the numbers,

02:12:13   and if you see the size of what I would call

02:12:17   the application content area,

02:12:19   if you assume an application that includes

02:12:21   displaying the status bar on all phones,

02:12:24   then how big is the area between the status bar

02:12:28   and either the bottom of the screen

02:12:30   or in the case of the iPhone 10,

02:12:32   where you can go before you hit the home indicator?

02:12:36   And so basically how much area

02:12:37   does an app have for its content?

02:12:40   And the difference there is pretty small.

02:12:43   So again, we're the same width between the old 6, 7, and 8

02:12:46   and the iPhone X.

02:12:48   The height though is 647 for the smaller screens,

02:12:53   716 for a plus, and 734 for the X.

02:12:58   So it is the tallest, it's taller than the plus

02:13:01   in usable area, but not by that much.

02:13:05   So what you're basically getting is the same width for sure

02:13:09   as the smaller screen phones,

02:13:12   a little bit taller usable area than the Plus phones

02:13:16   in a phone that is bigger than the small phones,

02:13:21   but smaller than a Plus.

02:13:22   In order to get that, we had to change and give up a lot.

02:13:28   We had to lose touch ID,

02:13:30   we had to engineer this entire Face ID system,

02:13:33   we had to change the way apps use the screen.

02:13:36   Developers have tons of design changes to do.

02:13:39   Also now those corners are now very rounded,

02:13:42   so we have to stay away from the corners

02:13:44   or design around that.

02:13:45   We have to design around the notch

02:13:47   and we have to use the ears

02:13:49   and scroll content weirdly around it.

02:13:51   Full screen things have a lot of work to do

02:13:53   to either avoid the notch or go around it

02:13:56   in a way that doesn't look weird or suck.

02:13:59   This has been a lot of work and a lot of effort.

02:14:02   And the phone, and for the people

02:14:04   who use the small phones like me,

02:14:06   the phone is getting larger for a screen

02:14:09   that is not wider at all and is pretty tall,

02:14:12   which is nice, but I don't know.

02:14:18   Is that good enough for all,

02:14:19   like all the sacrifices that had to be made,

02:14:22   all the workarounds, all the hacks,

02:14:24   all the UI changes and all the developer effort

02:14:27   that's going to be required, both in Apple and outside,

02:14:30   to accommodate all this craziness in this new phone.

02:14:33   Is that worth a screen that isn't any wider

02:14:36   and is just taller?

02:14:38   I don't know if this size is the right set of compromises, but this design, all screen

02:14:44   gesture blah blah blah, like I said, I am optimistic that this design will actually

02:14:49   in the end be a better overall design.

02:14:52   And when there's an entire family of phones, including the big one and the smaller one

02:14:56   that are all like this with the ears, then there's less pressure on this one phone to

02:15:01   be the right trade-off, which you know, change UI paradigm and all these sacrifices for not

02:15:07   that much more screen. Well, you make something the size of a plus with edge to edge screen,

02:15:11   there's way more screen there, right? Because you're getting rid of a very large chin and

02:15:17   forehead on that phone because they're just so darn big, you know, comparatively. And the

02:15:21   yet diminishing returns is you go smaller because the chin and forehead are smaller on the smaller

02:15:25   phones. This may be not a great compromise, especially if the width is the same but the

02:15:30   phone is actually wider, which I believe is the case. The phone is physically wider, but the

02:15:33   the screen has the same number of points on it.

02:15:35   Then again, it could be that just,

02:15:37   what's the, is this a 3x?

02:15:39   This is the thing that wasn't clear to me.

02:15:41   - Yes, and to give them full credit,

02:15:44   it is a true 3x.

02:15:45   The Plus never has been true 3x.

02:15:47   The Plus has been 3x pixels rendered down to a 1080p panel.

02:15:52   And this actually is real 3x,

02:15:54   so it is 458 dots per inch instead of 401.

02:15:58   So it's going to look incredible.

02:16:01   And OLED has benefits too.

02:16:03   like OLED's gonna have a better contrast and everything.

02:16:05   So it is going to look incredible,

02:16:07   but I just can't believe we didn't gain any width

02:16:11   by making the phone bigger and going edge to edge.

02:16:13   - If you made something 100 points wide

02:16:17   and you measured it with a ruler,

02:16:18   is it wider on this phone than it is on the 67?

02:16:23   - I don't know the answer to that.

02:16:24   I don't think so, but I don't know.

02:16:27   - The other important aspect of making a phone

02:16:30   that is physically larger while the number of points

02:16:33   is the same is that things are bigger for people with poor vision.

02:16:36   So slightly anyway.

02:16:38   And I know you have the zooming in all the text sizing and stuff like that.

02:16:41   Anyway, I am less concerned with whether this exact size is the right compromise because

02:16:48   I truly believe that this design will spread across all of them.

02:16:51   And once it does, this problem goes away because then you don't have to worry about like, like

02:16:54   first of all, I think the changes in the sacrifices plus or minus the notch, which I will still

02:16:59   get to are worth it if this is a better way to interact with phones than having dedicated

02:17:04   buttons on it.

02:17:05   If face ID is actually better than touch ID, and overall, despite the edge cases where

02:17:11   one might be the other, if arbitrarily swiping from the bottom is better than having to find

02:17:16   home button in the middle, like if all this turns out to be true, then I think it'll all

02:17:22   come out in the wash because they're not going to just make one size of this or whatever.

02:17:25   And I would assume that they have some experience with sizes now.

02:17:31   They could have made this phone any size, right?

02:17:34   They could have chosen to make it wider or shorter or taller, and this is what they came

02:17:37   up with.

02:17:38   And I'm hoping that the size is a reasonable compromise.

02:17:42   I think they did a good job with the 7, the 6 size, right?

02:17:45   That it is a pretty good compromise when you have more screen, but it's not as big as the

02:17:49   Plus.

02:17:50   The Plus, of course, is ridiculous, but that's what people want.

02:17:52   so they want a ridiculous phone and they got one.

02:17:55   So I think I'm less worried than you, Marco,

02:17:59   but even if this one is the wrong size for people,

02:18:02   give 'em a couple years, I hope they'll work it out.

02:18:07   - And honestly, I would be,

02:18:08   I would caution people who really love the Plus,

02:18:13   this might not be the phone for you.

02:18:15   - Oh no, this is not,

02:18:16   for Plus lovers who absolutely need the Plus,

02:18:18   like that's why I'm telling my wife to get it,

02:18:20   even though she is a Plus lover,

02:18:22   to have to talk to her about the fact like you realize there's going to be less stuff on the

02:18:26   screen like it's a smaller phone and it's not going to look like your plus does it's not going to have

02:18:31   all that stuff on it so but yeah if you love the plus this is probably not the phone for you because

02:18:37   it's just it's going to feel like using a big seven a tall seven right because that's what it is

02:18:41   you're not going to get all that all that extra room which like i said i think is fine because

02:18:45   I know that there's a giant monster aircraft carrier version of this phone coming in a

02:18:52   year or two, or three, and so the Plus people will have their day and they'll have so much

02:18:57   damn screen they won't know what to do with it.

02:18:59   Yeah, it can be called the 10L.

02:19:00   It'll come with a stylus, it'll be great.

02:19:04   I agree with Marco, though.

02:19:05   I think it's going to be very interesting and very funny to watch many of our mutual

02:19:10   friends who swore up and down, "Oh, it's Plus Club or nothing, Plus Club or nothing."

02:19:15   And I think they're going to have some really conflicting thoughts and some really uncomfortable

02:19:19   thoughts about this.

02:19:20   Yeah, but they'll have to get it so they can talk about it on their tech podcast, right?

02:19:23   But I think there will be grumbly.

02:19:24   I think there will be lots of – I bet a lot of them will say, "I wouldn't buy

02:19:31   this phone if it wasn't for the fact that I need to be informed about it and talk about

02:19:36   it," and like, you know what I mean?

02:19:37   Like that they're taking one for the team because they have to, right?

02:19:42   And some of them will just buy three phones and just use that one to play with or whatever.

02:19:47   Yeah, we're going long.

02:19:48   So on the notch, I have a little bit, there's probably way more that we can say about the

02:19:54   notch and maybe we'll save something for a future episode.

02:19:57   But the one thing I want to say about the notch is this is my time to say exactly the

02:20:01   same thing that I alluded to earlier about the LTE on the watch.

02:20:06   The notch, Apple doesn't want the notch.

02:20:10   The notch is there because it has to be to get the job done.

02:20:14   Apple wants nothing more than to make this exact foam with no notch on it.

02:20:17   Apple is going to do everything that it possibly can over the next five years or so to get

02:20:21   rid of that damn notch so the screen can go edge to edge.

02:20:25   They are doing the sort of hang a lantern on it thing where we had to do this notch

02:20:29   thing, we couldn't figure out a way not to have it, so we have to embrace it.

02:20:33   We have to say we're not trying to hide the notch, we acknowledge that it's there, we're

02:20:36   going to do all sorts of things and incorporate it into the UI and make it an aesthetic and

02:20:40   super totally embrace the notch in the ways we all discuss here, but Apple make no mistake

02:20:45   Apple wants to get rid of that notch

02:20:46   They want it to be top to bottom left to right edge

02:20:50   Johnny I've wants to not retire or die before he can do that. He might not make it but they don't want that notch there

02:20:56   So the clock begins now and Apple's teams working two or three phones out are

02:21:00   already trying to figure out how the hell they can get rid of that notch so

02:21:04   Where people may hate them on the notch and hate all the stupid compromises that it requires for software and it's gonna be painful

02:21:10   And it's gonna be annoying and it'll have varying degrees of ridiculousness

02:21:14   But I am very very confident. This is not a thing that Apple did not set out to make a phone with a notch

02:21:20   This is just what they had to do and I think it's the right trade

02:21:24   I don't think they should have waited until they could have done this phone without a notch

02:21:27   To to do it. I think they should do it now

02:21:31   Whether they should have embraced the notch as much as they did is arguable, but I

02:21:35   remain confident that we will have

02:21:38   Top to bottom edge edge screens probably from Android makers first, but eventually also from Apple

02:21:42   I'm still bummed about embrace the notch like I

02:21:45   Haven't seen it. I haven't held it. I haven't played with it, but it just I don't know I from everything

02:21:52   I've seen when people have mocked up the you know kind of hide the notch approach where the where the top bar

02:21:58   adjacent to the notch is just black.

02:22:01   It still to me looks better, but ask me again in,

02:22:06   well, I was gonna say in a month,

02:22:07   but I won't have one in a month, but ask me again.

02:22:09   - The nice thing is the humor interface guidelines,

02:22:11   which many people are quoting from,

02:22:13   the section that says,

02:22:14   "Do not attempt to hide the devices around a corner,

02:22:16   sensor housing," sensor housing, it's not a notch,

02:22:18   "or indicate if you're accessing the home button."

02:22:20   They're telling you, "Don't try it, you must embrace notch."

02:22:22   But guess what?

02:22:23   App developers can do whatever the hell they want.

02:22:25   So I think it'll be interesting to see

02:22:27   how people decide to do that.

02:22:28   Do they follow the Apple advice and say totally embrace the notch or do they decide to make the status bar black and not embrace

02:22:34   The notch it's a thing like I have a pretty big problem by now playing screen

02:22:37   Yeah, I mean, but it's all it's all

02:22:41   Programmer addressable. There's no trickery to make it seem like the screen is smaller than it is like

02:22:46   applications it seems have the ability to draw

02:22:49   Pretty much anywhere on the screen

02:22:51   I'm not sure if they can draw over the little home indicator under the home indicator thingy

02:22:55   But lots of the by the way, I've already said tons of sort of like

02:22:59   W2C videos not a W2C of how to do this

02:23:01   They're all about like here's your margins and your safe area and stay away from the rounded corners all with insets

02:23:07   With the idea that you know, I haven't watched these videos yet, but looking at the diagrams I'm thinking

02:23:12   Oh, that means developers have to program all these insets in which is work for them

02:23:17   But it also means that if they don't do that like on the watch

02:23:19   They could draw right to the edge and look stupid, right?

02:23:22   And have it be all you know the watch is the opposite we supposed to draw the edge anyway

02:23:26   They could draw right up against these rounded corners and look bad in fact

02:23:30   I believe during the keynote or one of the commercials

02:23:33   I think it was during the keynote video they showed that AR game

02:23:35   That they were doing the demo from it was like I think it was like in a commercial with the AR thing

02:23:39   And one of the status indicators on the screen in the AR game was clipped by the notch

02:23:43   Because it was too far to the left. It was outside the safe area. It was a circle

02:23:48   It was like the flat tire Android phone speaking of things with screens cut off

02:23:51   It was clipped by the notch because they just hadn't updated it to move everything over and in fact if they had moved it over

02:23:56   I think I just got to shrink those circles, right?

02:23:58   So

02:24:01   in a way

02:24:03   Software developers are going to decide this as much as Apple Apple can tell you what they want everybody to do

02:24:08   But if the sort of consensus of software developers is yeah, we're not gonna brace the notch

02:24:13   Then they won't and it will be fine. I've only heard sporadic reports from people who use these phones in real life

02:24:21   The impression I get is that the notch is less onerous when using the phone then when watching it on video

02:24:27   I guess where eyes are just drawn to it when you're using the phone

02:24:29   You're not looking at that part kind of like Marco's not looking at the back of his phone. That's all scratched up

02:24:33   Right, you kind of looking where the content is and you kind of get over it

02:24:36   but it is a lot of work for developers and there are

02:24:39   lots of awkward slash funny things related to this

02:24:43   one of the two best ones I'll put these links in the show notes Ben Packard had

02:24:49   interesting bit where like the scroll bar, you know when you scroll in iOS that little line appears to kind of the proportional scroll bar

02:24:55   That you can actually grab and scroll like shows you where you are

02:24:57   With that hiding underneath the notch when you're a landscape lots of fun stuff happens when you're a landscape like you'd scroll

02:25:02   It's like where's the scroll thumb?

02:25:03   Oh, it's under the notch and you scroll and you don't see anything up it popped up on the top

02:25:06   it popped up on the bottom and the other one was uh

02:25:08   both just a vic did a

02:25:11   A joke posted look I fixed the notch where he had scrolling going by the notch amazing

02:25:18   It's like a bunch of names and they're up against it's the Beatles names and they're up against the edge of the screen

02:25:22   But then when they hit the notch they look like a bump around it. No it landscape the notch is a disaster

02:25:27   It's not a disaster

02:25:28   If you don't if you don't embrace it if you just black it off now

02:25:31   You just have a screen that is slightly offset and people are worried about like they kept showing in the presentation

02:25:36   Here's video with the notch cut out of it

02:25:38   Which as many people?

02:25:39   Guessed based on my last complaints about like the slightly rounded corners of a quicktime player years ago pissed me off now

02:25:46   Now this phone has super rounded corners that you have no choice because literally the screen

02:25:49   is rounded like there is, they're not just not lighting up those pixels like there's

02:25:53   nothing there, forget it.

02:25:54   And now you're going to show video with a notch intruding into it?

02:25:57   No, never.

02:25:58   But the thing is, that's not, not only do you not have to do that, that's not even the

02:26:01   default.

02:26:02   When you play video, it will play as a rectangle and you will see every part of it.

02:26:06   It will be inset because it's got to stay away from the rounded corners and it's got

02:26:10   to stay away from the notch.

02:26:12   But it's fine.

02:26:13   as far as I'm aware is the default on the built-in video players like in

02:26:17   Safari and Apple videos. If you double tap it, it will zoom to full screen and

02:26:22   then you'll be playing video behind a notch and you'll be losing all the

02:26:24   corners. But if you zoom to full screen on an iPhone today, unless your video is

02:26:29   exactly the same aspect ratio as your phone, which it probably isn't, if it's

02:26:33   like a movie or something, if you zoom to full screen you're already cutting off

02:26:37   sides too. So I'm not that annoyed about the notch in the rounded corners in

02:26:41   in terms of video playing, I think it will probably be okay.

02:26:46   But Apple's big push to embrace the notch is kind of,

02:26:51   I mean, I mentioned hanging a lantern on it before,

02:26:55   which is a narrative device where there's something

02:26:57   that doesn't make sense.

02:26:58   I hope I'm getting this right, God,

02:26:59   or I was waiting a million corrections,

02:27:00   where something doesn't make sense in a movie

02:27:02   and you know it doesn't make sense

02:27:05   and you don't want people to saying,

02:27:06   "Oh, that scene was messed up

02:27:08   "because that wasn't plausible to me."

02:27:10   So all you do is you have a character in the movie say out loud what the audience is thinking.

02:27:15   So like, you know, "We shouldn't be getting readings like this.

02:27:18   They're impossible, but we are."

02:27:19   And as soon as you have them say that by hanging a lantern on the thing

02:27:21   that the audience knows is impossible, suddenly it seems okay because then the people

02:27:26   in the movie are acknowledging the thing that you're all thinking.

02:27:28   So by Apple hanging a lantern on the notch, like, "We should be able to light up all the pixels

02:27:33   on the screen, but there's this giant thing there."

02:27:34   And Apple says that, "Yeah, there's a giant thing there, and we're going to emphasize it."

02:27:38   They're kind of, you know, they're making the best of a bad situation because nobody wants the notch

02:27:43   but if there's gonna be a notch they are embracing it and they want you to embrace it too and

02:27:48   It is an interesting aesthetic

02:27:51   It kind of reminds me of those little cards from Rolodexes which are actually before my town

02:27:58   I'm not actually that old but like, you know the little like cards with little notches

02:28:02   Right. It kind of reminds me of that. It's kind of an interesting aesthetic

02:28:06   It does look a little bit like rabbit ears.

02:28:09   It does look a little bit weird in landscape, and I feel bad for all the software developers

02:28:13   who have to deal with it.

02:28:14   But you know, you dealt with size classes and going from fixed layouts to auto layout,

02:28:20   and this is why you get the big bucks, right?

02:28:22   Or don't get them, unless you know how to exploit people with free-to-play gambling

02:28:26   mechanics.

02:28:27   But anyway, I think it will work out, but I am already awaiting the day when the notch

02:28:33   goes away.

02:28:34   - How long do you think that that is away from now?

02:28:37   'Cause if I had to guess, I honestly don't know.

02:28:40   They might just stick with us because if you look

02:28:43   at the problem they're trying to solve here,

02:28:45   they have a whole bunch of sensors and cameras

02:28:49   and speakers and stuff that for the phone,

02:28:51   for these things to work at all,

02:28:54   they pretty much need to be facing forward.

02:28:56   And they clearly want the screen to go to the top edge

02:29:00   and the bottom edge.

02:29:02   So how would they get rid of the notch exactly?

02:29:04   Would they somehow just make those things so small

02:29:09   they would fit within the current bezel?

02:29:11   Like that's above the screen?

02:29:13   - You got it.

02:29:14   - Like they're not very good at making cameras small.

02:29:17   Like if you look, they have this giant camera bump

02:29:19   in the back because to make a decent camera

02:29:21   you need a little bit of size.

02:29:23   I don't see how they get,

02:29:26   how they retain the super thin bezel

02:29:29   around most of the screen area

02:29:31   while also fitting those front sensors,

02:29:34   and by the way, now there's more of them with Face ID,

02:29:36   so while also fitting those front sensors into that.

02:29:39   I don't know, I don't see them getting rid of the notch

02:29:43   as long as they have this general borderless design.

02:29:46   I think the only way they can get rid of it

02:29:48   is to basically backtrack on part of this design

02:29:51   and make something that looks more like the S8,

02:29:54   where it's like just thin top and bottom bezels.

02:29:58   - So as people have pointed out,

02:30:00   - This screen's not really edge to edge.

02:30:02   I can see where it doesn't go to the edge.

02:30:03   There's a big black pen.

02:30:05   Like, there are margins on this thing.

02:30:07   And like you said, they could go notchless next year

02:30:09   by just putting a very thin forehead on it.

02:30:11   They don't want to because then they'd feel the need

02:30:13   to do a very thin chin as well,

02:30:15   and then it'd be giving up on the edge.

02:30:16   - You know where they could put a home button

02:30:18   in a very thin chin because if it doesn't need

02:30:21   touch ID anymore, then it can be a little skinny button.

02:30:24   - No, I don't think they're going back on that.

02:30:26   I think they're rolling on the gestures.

02:30:27   - You're right, they're not.

02:30:28   But if you look at the Galaxy S8,

02:30:31   I have never said anything nice about an Android phone

02:30:33   for good reason.

02:30:34   However, that's a very attractive design

02:30:37   for a edge-to-edge screen phone,

02:30:39   and that's a different set of trade-offs.

02:30:41   And yeah, the stuff on the back,

02:30:43   the fingerprint on the back is dumb,

02:30:44   but if you look at just the front of the Galaxy S8

02:30:48   compared to the iPhone X,

02:30:49   I have a hard time picking the iPhone X in that comparison.

02:30:54   - I think the iPhone X looks better,

02:30:55   But the way you get to the notchless without even

02:30:59   the thin forehead is, yeah, like the march of progress

02:31:03   can make some components smaller,

02:31:05   and other components can be under the screen.

02:31:07   That's how you get there.

02:31:09   No one would have thought that cameras could

02:31:11   be as small as they are now.

02:31:12   You can make lesser quality cameras even smaller.

02:31:15   Say the one front-facing camera is replaced by seven pinhole

02:31:19   sized cameras dotted along the top,

02:31:21   and the images are combined from that company

02:31:24   you have the friend who works for that light camera thing.

02:31:27   Like we're not saying this is, you know, technology is available now.

02:31:30   You couldn't make a watch with LTE on it when the Apple Watch came out, and you can't make

02:31:34   a notchless phone like this.

02:31:36   But I think you will be able to eventually.

02:31:38   I think there's nothing about the array of sensors that makes me think they can't hide

02:31:42   them in an edge.

02:31:44   You know, it's somewhere around the edge of this phone in the space that's already provided

02:31:49   because they don't go all...

02:31:53   Galaxy S8 goes way farther to the edge right and left than this phone does. There is actually room around it and

02:31:58   you know if they're willing to compromise a little bit add two more pieces of paper with to the top right to to wedge things

02:32:05   in and get a couple like at the IR sensor underneath the screen somehow or the the you know the dot spreader underneath or like I

02:32:12   Feel like it will eventually happen and this design will become viable. I you said you asked me how long I thought

02:32:19   five years is my best guess. I think it could come sooner. It depends on what appetite Apple

02:32:28   has for it. If they don't feel pressured to do it because everyone loves the notch and their whole

02:32:33   line is notch bearing and it's just like they're sailing and it's like, "Why do we... We didn't

02:32:37   want the notch, but now that we've got it, everybody loves it and everyone's software

02:32:40   is written for it and why would we even change it?" That could delay it just because they don't

02:32:44   want to go for it, but I think technically plausible in five years.

02:32:47   I couldn't even wager a guess. I mean, five seems reasonable, but oi.

02:32:53   All right, so we are running long. Face ID seems to be mostly what we expected. I think

02:33:00   we certainly got a lot more information about the mechanics behind it. I thought it was

02:33:06   really fascinating that Schiller had talked about how they went and got Hollywood, like,

02:33:13   makeup artists or prosthetics artists in order to make these eerily realistic masks that

02:33:19   apparently employees would put on to try to fool Face ID.

02:33:23   It's apparently considerably more secure than Touch ID, which seems weird to me because

02:33:29   any face identification I've ever heard or seen anything about seemed very easy to defeat,

02:33:34   whereas fingerprints seemed much harder.

02:33:37   But I'm sure that's just because of crummy technology, and if Apple says it's better,

02:33:41   I'm inclined to believe it's better.

02:33:43   The reason it's better is because faces are so much bigger.

02:33:45   So the problem with fingers is that the feature size down there,

02:33:48   like the number of points they could sort of match up on your fingerprint,

02:33:52   like the features are so small

02:33:53   and there's not that many things to sort of hang on to.

02:33:55   Whereas if you look at the number of dots that they're a little dot sprayer,

02:33:58   assuming those diagrams are even remotely accurate,

02:34:00   there's just more data points.

02:34:01   So there's more places where things can vary than on fingerprints.

02:34:05   Plus, people's fingers don't even fit entirely.

02:34:06   Like the sensor doesn't even cover your whole finger.

02:34:08   So you're just getting like a window snapshot of a finger.

02:34:11   So it's not as if, oh, my fingerprint is the same

02:34:13   as someone else's that I can unlock my phone.

02:34:15   No, it's one tiny little square shaped region of your finger

02:34:18   maybe close enough in the few areas

02:34:21   that the Touch ID sensor can identify as distinguishing

02:34:25   to a potentially totally different point

02:34:27   on someone else's finger.

02:34:28   So I totally believe that because I mean,

02:34:30   Touch ID makes us, you know,

02:34:32   oh, it unlocks my finger and it's great

02:34:33   and no one else in my family can do it.

02:34:34   And so it must be perfect

02:34:35   'cause we have this mystique around fingerprints.

02:34:37   But when it comes down to it,

02:34:38   It's a bunch of little ridges and skin and it's not even that many of them because the sensor is small

02:34:42   Whereas this thing is spraying our entire face with tons and tons of data points of you know

02:34:46   Not just what it looks like but you know all the depth things and everything like that

02:34:49   I still don't understand exactly how the masks aren't able to defeat it, but I'll take their word for it

02:34:55   I mean, there's obviously, you know some secret sauce in there that can distinguish I guess living things from non living maybe with heat signatures

02:35:02   I mean, I feel like they didn't reveal all their secrets here because maybe competitive advantage or whatever

02:35:06   But we'll find out I mean I guarantee people are gonna start trying to fake this thing out with masks

02:35:11   So I'm sure someone will

02:35:13   Came out people faked it out by lifting people's fingerprints from cups and and you know using like superglue or rubber cement and stuff and defeating

02:35:20   It it'll it'll be defeatable and they did mention like oh by the way your twin is a problem and

02:35:26   They didn't mention this explicitly, but like maybe relatives that look a lot like you might be more of a problem, too

02:35:32   but

02:35:35   You know I believe less in this than when I can't you know

02:35:38   As I came out believing in the idea of the all-screen phone with the gestures like believing that it could be good still having never

02:35:43   touched one of these face ID they basically said all the things I thought they were gonna say I

02:35:48   Have the same attitude about it now, which is you know?

02:35:52   Show me the unlock I have to I have seeing is believing I have to try this myself because I love fast touch ID so

02:35:57   much on my phone

02:35:59   I believe like I said last show I believe facial recognition can be better

02:36:04   than Touch ID for situations where the phone

02:36:07   is able to see your face, I'm not entirely convinced

02:36:09   that first gen is gonna be better than second gen

02:36:11   Touch ID in terms of efficiency, but we'll see.

02:36:14   - The speed of it is my one big concern.

02:36:17   I mean, it's hard, you know, when Touch ID first came out,

02:36:19   we all were wary of it as well, so it's hard to know

02:36:22   before we've actually had a chance to use it

02:36:24   how good it is or what the problem areas actually are,

02:36:27   but I noticed they focused a lot on how it worked,

02:36:32   which I thought honestly was a little bit creepy

02:36:34   the way it was presented.

02:36:36   They're like spraying dots all over people's faces

02:36:38   and I didn't think it was explained well.

02:36:41   - Did you see the tweet that said,

02:36:43   the new iPhone will mace you if you do a bad tweet?

02:36:44   - Yeah, right.

02:36:45   - Should I start holding the phone in this big cone?

02:36:47   Like I think that did them a disservice

02:36:49   'cause it made it look like

02:36:50   that you were having an actual spotlight

02:36:52   shined in your face but my understanding is that it doesn't,

02:36:54   I mean you can't see IR unless you're a bat, right?

02:36:57   So it's not, or did bats see IR?

02:36:59   I don't know, oh God, I'm gonna get corrections

02:37:00   from the people.

02:37:02   Anyway, some people had video where they could see

02:37:05   a flashing sensor, but video cameras often pick up IR.

02:37:08   - Yes, they do. - That our eyes don't.

02:37:10   So I don't know what to think of it,

02:37:11   but I think their demos made it look more onerous

02:37:14   than it actually is.

02:37:15   - Yeah, so I think it was presented poorly,

02:37:19   or explained poorly, but I noticed that they focused

02:37:23   on security and how it worked, but they never made

02:37:25   any speed comparisons to Touch ID.

02:37:28   And I suspect that we're gonna have a problem there.

02:37:31   I bet it's gonna be a little slower.

02:37:33   The other thing is, they mentioned,

02:37:35   actually some of my favorite analysis of this event

02:37:38   was on Back to Work this week,

02:37:39   and they mentioned there something that I do too,

02:37:42   which is, like Merlin was saying,

02:37:44   that as he pulls his phone out of his pocket,

02:37:47   he has already hit the home button with his thumb,

02:37:50   and so the time the phone is out of his pocket

02:37:52   and he's looking at it, it's unlocked.

02:37:54   I do the same thing.

02:37:55   Like, I just kinda automatically unlock my phone

02:37:58   as I'm taking it out of my pocket,

02:37:59   So I never have to wait for it to unlock,

02:38:02   especially with the new fast touch ID since the success.

02:38:04   And I wonder, is face ID going to have these little

02:38:09   like slowed down microscopic interactions

02:38:12   that are going to irritate me every single day?

02:38:15   Like, I don't know.

02:38:16   I hope it's fast.

02:38:18   If it's really super fast when it looks at you,

02:38:20   when it does finally have a view of your face,

02:38:22   maybe this won't be a problem.

02:38:24   But it just seems unlikely.

02:38:26   - I heard from a couple people,

02:38:28   You know the lock animation, it's got like a padlock type thing that basically when the

02:38:33   top of the padlock twists to show you that it has successfully recognized your face that

02:38:38   it's unlocked, that that animation, like so many animations, actually lags behind it actually

02:38:42   recognizing your face.

02:38:43   So I'm hoping they did the good game development thing where, alright, so it does have to have

02:38:49   line of sight on me, so forget about the touch ID in the pocket.

02:38:53   But you get it out, and what I want to be able to do is get it out, and as it comes

02:38:58   in front of my face, I want to do the swipe up gesture, even though it hasn't been unlocked

02:39:01   yet. I've started the swipe up gesture because if you swipe up and it doesn't unlock, like

02:39:06   it brings you to the like, please type in your password screen, right? I want to be

02:39:10   able to begin the swipe up. And if it recognizes me when it's in the middle of the swipe up

02:39:15   or in the middle of doing the animation triggered by the swipe up, abort showing me the screen

02:39:20   where I have to enter my passcode and unlock the phone. Like if they can overlap it in

02:39:24   that way it will it will help to hide the latency right if instead you have to

02:39:31   look at it notice with your eyeballs that the animation of the padlock going

02:39:36   and then begin your swipe no matter how fast it is that will be annoying because

02:39:40   the unlock animation has non-zero time you having to look for and recognize it

02:39:45   has non-zero time I want to be able to take out swipe recognize open and that's

02:39:51   probably the best they can do with this because you're right they didn't say it

02:39:54   was faster it probably isn't faster it's probably amazing that it works at all

02:39:58   and it's an amazing technological feat but it is also the first generation of

02:40:01   this product and we'll have to you know try it and see. I do I do love me some

02:40:06   Touch ID but I'm like I said before the idea of this dead area at the bottom of

02:40:11   my phone where there's nothing ever a circular button it's not really a button

02:40:14   anymore does seem like the past in the way that these Apple events always tend

02:40:19   to do to you. It does seem old and steampunky, and I'm willing to believe that it will go

02:40:25   away. But we brave pioneers will find out how long it's going to take.

02:40:29   >> One thing that bummed me out is it only allows for one face, which I totally understand.

02:40:36   But one of the things that I really liked about Touch ID was that I asked Erin if she

02:40:43   could register one of her thumbs on my phone so that this way, if, for example, I wanted

02:40:49   her to respond to a text for me because maybe I'm like playing with Declan or something

02:40:52   like that and my phone is not in my pocket.

02:40:55   I could just say to her, "Hey, can you grab my phone and tell Marco and John I'll be there

02:40:58   in five minutes?" or whatever.

02:41:00   And I have a very, very long passcode on my phone because I almost never need to type

02:41:05   it.

02:41:06   It's exceptionally rare that I need to type my passcode and it's something like 10 or

02:41:10   15 or 20 characters.

02:41:11   And so having Touch ID available to her is really, really nice for both of us because

02:41:18   Sometimes she needs to look at something that maybe only I have, like an email that only I have, or sometimes I want her to

02:41:23   respond to a text from me or something like that.

02:41:25   And so she does know my password,

02:41:29   but it's very inconvenient to type. And I'd really love to be able to register her face on my phone as well,

02:41:36   which is, you know, a choice that I would make. And not everyone would make that choice,

02:41:39   but that's something I would like to do. And as of right now, it is only allowable to use

02:41:45   Face ID with one face and again, I understand why I only have one face. The phone is a personal device

02:41:51   Like that like that's what the explanation other than just say this is a personal device

02:41:56   I'm assuming it has to be storage related

02:41:58   But the the thing reports I heard from the people it's like at launch only one face

02:42:02   Which makes me think there's enough storage for more than one

02:42:04   It's obviously they have more data points, right and the the whole evolving of the thing

02:42:08   I can imagine it takes up more storage and touch ID in the secure enclave where they have to keep all this stuff, right?

02:42:13   But I just hope hardware wise there actually is room for more than one. I've got fingers on every device in the house

02:42:19   I've got all my kids devices my wife's everything because you're mostly for convenience

02:42:23   It's not like they're gonna keep me out of the stuff like I know all their passwords

02:42:26   I can get into all the things. It's just it's just convenient

02:42:29   Yeah, exactly and and I had heard rumblings of the same that maybe in the future

02:42:34   It'll be more than one, but I am a little bummed right now that it is just one

02:42:38   Again as with earlier you know not really a big deal

02:42:41   This is still a phone that is unlocking by looking at my face even in the dark like things can be a lot worse

02:42:48   But it did bum me out a little bit

02:42:50   What else about this what else is new other than face 4k 60 Marco wanted it he got it

02:42:55   Oh, yeah, I got it and all the all of them, and they they didn't quite do a perfect job

02:43:01   But they did a pretty substantial job in improving the telephoto camera in the two camera module

02:43:08   but only for the 10, not for the 8 Plus.

02:43:12   Where now the, you know, before,

02:43:14   basically I said last episode what I wanted was that,

02:43:17   you know, with the 7 adding the dual camera thing

02:43:19   to the Plus, the zoomed in telephoto camera

02:43:22   was a narrower aperture, so it let in less light

02:43:25   and was noisier at night, and was not image stabilized.

02:43:28   Which basically made it very hard to ever use that

02:43:31   in low light and get a good picture.

02:43:32   And the software was smart enough to basically not use it

02:43:34   in low light and to just zoom in on the wide sensor

02:43:38   that was better.

02:43:39   Now, the new ones, the aperture difference is smaller,

02:43:43   it's still there but it's smaller,

02:43:45   and they're both stabilized on the 10.

02:43:48   So that's really nice.

02:43:49   I do wish the 8 Plus got the same module.

02:43:53   I don't think there's much reason for it not to have

02:43:56   gotten it other than just price and segmentation,

02:43:59   because there's probably room for it.

02:44:01   So it makes sense why the 8 didn't get it,

02:44:04   there's probably not room for it in the enclosure,

02:44:05   but I do wish they would have brought that

02:44:08   to the plus as well.

02:44:09   But the fact that it's there on the X, that's great.

02:44:13   And that these now do all shoot 4K 60, that's amazing.

02:44:18   Because again, as I mentioned last week,

02:44:20   almost no professional video cameras shoot 4K 60 yet.

02:44:24   That's very rare.

02:44:25   And so to have that in anything, let alone a $700

02:44:31   and up phone is really impressive.

02:44:34   And on top of that, the iPhone is already

02:44:36   such an amazing video camera.

02:44:39   That's a pretty big deal.

02:44:40   So I would say for most people, for most purposes,

02:44:44   the iPhone remains the best video camera in the world.

02:44:47   And this is a giant step forward even for it.

02:44:50   So I'm very impressed with the camera on paper.

02:44:53   And I hope, in practice, I hope it proves

02:44:55   to be as good as it sounds.

02:44:57   - 240 frames per second slow-mo.

02:44:59   I thought that was what the old one did,

02:45:00   but I guess I'm mistaken.

02:45:02   Is that double what the old one did?

02:45:03   - I think that did it, but only for 720p.

02:45:06   - And now it does 1080.

02:45:07   - And so they've upped it to 1080p, yeah.

02:45:08   - Yeah, all right, so that's good.

02:45:10   But now we get to finally the real reason

02:45:13   why people will buy and be happy with this phone,

02:45:16   if this is true.

02:45:17   Two hours more battery life.

02:45:20   It's what we've always wanted.

02:45:21   Don't make the phone thinner, add more battery life.

02:45:23   This phone got a big giant screen on it,

02:45:26   extremely fast, powerful processor,

02:45:30   all sorts of cameras and wireless doodads and sensors

02:45:34   and blah, blah, blah, and they added two hours

02:45:36   of battery life, which is a lot.

02:45:38   That reason, I have to see how it measures up to the plus,

02:45:43   but the seven was already pretty good.

02:45:46   That is going to feel like a premium experience

02:45:49   when people buy this fancy phone for all the money

02:45:51   that it's gonna cost and they get it at their screen

02:45:53   and it's a little bit weird and blah, blah, blah.

02:45:55   But A, it's gonna be a new phone,

02:45:56   new phone's always last longer than your old one

02:45:58   'cause your old battery is shot.

02:45:59   And B, the fact that this actually has more battery life,

02:46:02   if that comes out the way it does,

02:46:04   that is perhaps the most high-end feature

02:46:07   that you can give to iPhone users in particular

02:46:10   who are used to kind of being starved for battery.

02:46:12   So I was very happy about that

02:46:15   'cause that was one of the few questions we had

02:46:17   because we may have known the exact milliamp hour size

02:46:21   of the battery from leaks.

02:46:22   I don't know if we knew that or not,

02:46:23   but even if we did, you never know

02:46:25   what is the overall battery life

02:46:28   this very complicated system that involves tons of components going to be, especially

02:46:31   since software is such a big factor in balancing the components. That's one of the things that

02:46:35   can almost never be spoiled for us unless we leak the presentation, which I guess is

02:46:38   what will happen next year. We'll get the keynote slides right a week in advance.

02:46:41   We should get video of the rehearsals.

02:46:44   Yeah, exactly.

02:46:45   Seriously.

02:46:46   That's a hell of a thing. That made me extremely excited to see that. But not just like, "Oh,

02:46:51   and it's a little bit better." Two more hours that I put that up on a slide. That is amazing.

02:46:56   - Yeah, I hope that translates into real world gains.

02:46:59   We will see over time.

02:47:01   It is worth pointing out that the 8 Plus

02:47:04   still claims higher battery life.

02:47:07   So if battery life is the most important thing to you,

02:47:11   the Plus phone is probably still the right move.

02:47:14   Also, again, if screen size is the most important to you,

02:47:16   Plus phone, still the right move.

02:47:18   But, see, I don't know, this is why,

02:47:21   once again, in the Apple product line,

02:47:23   they have made it so that there is no one

02:47:26   best choice.

02:47:27   Like this was the case for a while on the iPads,

02:47:29   like it's definitely the case in the MacBook Pros,

02:47:32   like there is no one best model here,

02:47:35   it just depends on which things you prioritize

02:47:37   over which other things.

02:47:38   Fans of the Plus should strongly consider

02:47:42   getting the next Plus instead of getting the X.

02:47:45   But the reality is, you know, all of us who talk

02:47:48   on podcasts about these phones and everything,

02:47:50   we're all gonna get the X anyway.

02:47:52   - Yeah.

02:47:53   - I do wanna mention that the,

02:47:55   I think the 8 does as well,

02:47:57   but doesn't the 10 get True Tone?

02:48:01   - Yes, at least the 10 does.

02:48:03   I don't know if the other ones do.

02:48:04   - Yeah, I think they all get it,

02:48:05   which is surprising to me,

02:48:06   because that means they found a place

02:48:07   to smuggle that sensor on the 8s.

02:48:10   I mean, it's nice.

02:48:11   I mean, although this is my biggest surprise

02:48:14   of the thing actually was no ProMotion,

02:48:16   which makes very little sense to me.

02:48:19   Unless there was some kind of battery life thing,

02:48:21   because it's not like they don't have the CPU grunt

02:48:25   to do it and they're not moving that many pixels

02:48:27   and there's plenty of room on the phone

02:48:29   'cause it's a little bit bigger.

02:48:31   I mean, it must come down to either component size

02:48:33   or costs or battery life

02:48:35   because it's not a technical limitation.

02:48:37   So they found room for True Tone for everybody,

02:48:39   but no promotion.

02:48:41   - I wonder if maybe the OLED panel

02:48:43   can't refresh that fast yet, at least maybe like--

02:48:45   - People said that, but I don't see how that's like,

02:48:47   OLED TVs are refreshed 120 easy.

02:48:51   Like I think your TV does that already.

02:48:54   Maybe they're different when it's smaller, I don't know.

02:48:56   - Or maybe like their particular quality level

02:48:59   of OLED panels getting their color and their contrast

02:49:02   and their gamut.

02:49:03   Maybe those can't do 120 yet,

02:49:05   and they wouldn't have the 8's panels do it

02:49:09   if the 10's panel couldn't do it.

02:49:11   So like that could be a reason.

02:49:13   - I don't know.

02:49:13   I think it most comes down to the hardware

02:49:17   to drive the panel at that rate and finding room for it

02:49:21   and potentially what the power does.

02:49:23   But I would love to hear from somebody

02:49:24   who knows more about the internal details of how

02:49:29   you drive any screen at 120 hertz

02:49:32   and how that might affect-- or if someone on the iPhone team

02:49:34   just wants to write in and tell us why the hell you don't

02:49:37   have promotion.

02:49:38   And especially since the animations on the 10

02:49:41   in particular, they're kind of more prominent.

02:49:46   like when you go back to the home thing of the application that you just chucked upwards

02:49:50   it like floats back into the icon that it came from and all sorts of scaling things

02:49:54   and all those animations would look better at 120 because they're short animations, there's

02:49:57   not that many frames and so they can end up looking stuttery even if they're not actually

02:50:03   dropping any frames because they're so fast so 120 would definitely help there and give

02:50:07   a more sort of fluid experience but maybe next year.

02:50:11   I'm stoked for True Tone though, because I don't have any devices with True Tone.

02:50:17   From what little I've seen, it looked really, really nice.

02:50:19   Not to say promotion isn't by any stretch, but I have seen promotion briefly, and I thought

02:50:25   it was nice.

02:50:26   I'm sure if I had time with it, I would start to say, "Oh no, this is amazing."

02:50:30   But I'm really stoked to have True Tone.

02:50:33   I think I heard it on Upgrade, and Jason had mentioned that a lot of times he's getting

02:50:38   the brightness not to the position he wants it just because he's fighting kind of the

02:50:42   ambient light situation in the room. And I feel like I suffer from the same problem from

02:50:46   time to time for a very loose definition of suffering. But anyway, I feel like having

02:50:52   True Tone is going to be really nice and it's going to be new for me. So I'm excited about

02:50:56   that.

02:50:57   But before you get off True Tone, the best thing I can say about True Tone is that I

02:51:01   enable it and I don't notice that it's on because that's how it should work. You shouldn't

02:51:04   notice that it's making your screen more brown and crap like this horrible flux and nice

02:51:08   shift things that I hate, I leave it on and I don't even notice that it's there.

02:51:14   And if I turn it off, like sometimes I go back and say "what would this look like without

02:51:17   True Tone?"

02:51:18   You see it being like more blue when you're sitting in your house at night.

02:51:21   So True Tone gets a big thumbs up from me as a quality of life thing for a screen where

02:51:26   you're not doing like color work for like, you know, where you need accurate reproduction

02:51:31   of colors where you just want it to like look the way it's supposed to kind of look given

02:51:36   the ambient lighting.

02:51:37   So I really liked your job.

02:51:41   The stuff that we had talked about up until the iPhone X, pre-ordering Friday as I think

02:51:47   I mentioned earlier, and then available a week from Friday.

02:51:51   This one though, the iPhone X is not going to be pre-orderable for basically a month

02:51:58   and a half until the 27th of October, which is again Friday, and available the following

02:52:03   Friday, November 3rd.

02:52:04   That's, I mean, in the grand scheme of things,

02:52:06   not a big deal, but that's a bummer.

02:52:08   I wanna give Apple just unreasonable amounts

02:52:11   of my money sooner than that, please.

02:52:14   - I think it's also, like many Apple launches of late,

02:52:18   the official day one launch, if you're very lucky,

02:52:22   you might hit that, but I think most people

02:52:24   are not getting this phone probably before January.

02:52:28   - Yeah, I'm gonna be really bummed.

02:52:29   - Yeah, and it's fine.

02:52:30   I mean, we always knew this was gonna be,

02:52:32   and there wasn't gonna be much supply and delay,

02:52:35   like it's, you know, we'll survive.

02:52:37   It's better than waiting around

02:52:38   for the color you want, I guess.

02:52:40   The gold phones, people getting in line,

02:52:44   but you know, that's, I bet Apple would have liked

02:52:46   to have more squarely hit the holiday season,

02:52:48   but they're just, you know,

02:52:50   like it's gonna be January for most people, sorry.

02:52:53   You want one under the tree, just print out a picture of it

02:52:55   and put it in a little box and then just sort of cradle it.

02:52:59   - So any other thoughts?

02:53:01   I have one final closing thought,

02:53:03   but any other thoughts before then?

02:53:05   - I didn't see any battery packs for the 10.

02:53:09   - Oh, interesting. - No hunchbacks.

02:53:11   - Yeah, it appears that there aren't new battery cases.

02:53:14   They're saying that cases for the 7 will fit the 8,

02:53:18   and similar for the pluses.

02:53:20   So I imagine that probably means

02:53:23   that the 7 battery case will fit the 8.

02:53:26   There is no 7+ battery case, so that rules that out.

02:53:29   And yeah, it does appear that there's not gonna be,

02:53:31   at least there isn't yet a 10 battery case.

02:53:35   - Yeah, although they do have a folio case.

02:53:37   - Yeah, that's interesting.

02:53:38   - They do have the leather,

02:53:40   although the folio case,

02:53:40   I saw someone with frustration had the same thing.

02:53:43   They only show it from the back.

02:53:44   There's two pictures on the Apple Store

02:53:45   and they're both from the back.

02:53:47   I think that's just a mistake in the store.

02:53:48   But I'm not that I'll ever buy one of those,

02:53:50   but I wanted to see what it looked like.

02:53:51   But I was excited to see the leather case for the iPhone 10.

02:53:55   That's essentially the same as the leather case

02:53:57   that I have now that comes in some interesting colors.

02:53:59   And I'm a big fan of that case.

02:54:00   So hopefully the new one is just as good.

02:54:02   And because the leather case, Apple's other case, the existing one and the new one are

02:54:05   totally open at the bottom, the one edge where you're going to be swiping constantly, you

02:54:09   won't have to be swiping against the edge of a case.

02:54:11   Oh, and fast charging on both of the, on all the new phones.

02:54:14   The whole like whatever, I don't know what standard is for the USB fast charging thing

02:54:17   where you can get a 50% charge in 30 minutes.

02:54:20   Yeah that was interesting.

02:54:21   Setting aside the wireless thing.

02:54:22   I think that's just like a USB fast charging standard or.

02:54:25   Yeah, it's USB-C power delivery.

02:54:27   And so basically if you have like one of the MacBook Pro adapters or if you have the iPad

02:54:32   fast charge adapter, none of these come stock in the box of any iOS device.

02:54:38   But if you happen to have the USB-C to Lightning cable, which also doesn't come stock in the

02:54:42   box, and one of these fast charging power bricks that also doesn't come stock in the

02:54:46   box and that many of which aren't even made for these products, then it will charge faster,

02:54:50   which is a nice thing to have if you need it.

02:54:53   I do question why they didn't just boost up

02:54:55   the power bricks that come with it,

02:54:57   but you know, Apple, what are you gonna do?

02:54:59   - Yeah, yeah, well they wouldn't be able to fit it

02:55:02   in the boxes, the one they give you is the little tiny nun.

02:55:05   You know, and that's probably--

02:55:06   - I honestly think, not to dress up too much,

02:55:09   but I honestly think that one of the reasons

02:55:11   why the Apple TV remote is so bad and unchanged

02:55:14   is because they didn't wanna make the box bigger.

02:55:17   I bet that's a big reason for it.

02:55:19   - Yeah, it's not just the box.

02:55:21   They don't wanna make the remote bigger.

02:55:22   That's what it comes down to.

02:55:23   They feel like it should be in scale,

02:55:26   and it should be elegant and dainty,

02:55:27   and they don't understand that people's hands

02:55:29   are not that big.

02:55:30   - Yeah.

02:55:31   - Or not that small, rather.

02:55:32   Real time follow up, someone in the chat room

02:55:33   did helpfully provide a view of the front of the Folio case.

02:55:37   I will never buy one of these, but some people like 'em.

02:55:39   And so now there's one from Apple,

02:55:40   because why wouldn't they charge you 70 bucks or whatever

02:55:42   for a thing to put on your phone?

02:55:44   - Yeah, some sort of something about it.

02:55:46   And there's a whole bunch of other small stuff

02:55:48   from the event that we don't have time for.

02:55:50   I mean, we didn't talk about Animoji,

02:55:52   we didn't talk about AirPower or the mats

02:55:54   or anything like that, so yeah,

02:55:56   I guess that'll be part of next week's show.

02:55:58   That'll be like our junk drawer of all,

02:56:00   two weeks with a follow-up, plus like Animoji

02:56:02   and AirPower mats and things like that.

02:56:05   - I don't wanna talk about Animoji other than to say

02:56:11   I have received a few and they are pretty awesome.

02:56:16   And I don't know it's something

02:56:17   that I'm gonna be using a lot or doing a lot,

02:56:20   but they are pretty cool.

02:56:21   It is very amusing, and we can talk more about it next week.

02:56:25   So, closing thought, Marco, what phone or phones

02:56:28   are you going to be buying, and when will you be doing that?

02:56:32   - I mean, again, because I'm a developer

02:56:35   and an Apple commentator, I have to get the 10, no question.

02:56:39   And that's probably gonna end up

02:56:40   being the phone for me overall.

02:56:42   I am disappointed that the screen isn't bigger, wider.

02:56:46   I feel like for the size increase and all the trade-offs,

02:56:49   I would've liked a little bit more width

02:56:51   than what I already have, so that's unfortunate,

02:56:53   but it's probably gonna be great,

02:56:56   I'm probably gonna love it.

02:56:57   I'm definitely going to love having that camera system,

02:57:01   so I really want it for that, if nothing else.

02:57:04   Oh, I'm gonna need to do a lot of work on Overcast

02:57:06   to make it fit the notch.

02:57:07   It's, basically it ruins my entire UI, is how this works.

02:57:12   - The sleeve! - This ruins everything.

02:57:13   So I'm getting the phone for that.

02:57:16   If I were not a commentator and developer,

02:57:19   I honestly might consider the 8 Plus instead,

02:57:22   but oh well.

02:57:23   Maybe I'll end up getting both and putting the 8 Plus

02:57:26   as a dedicated Waze machine in my car

02:57:28   because Waze is amazing.

02:57:29   Anyway, so. (laughs)

02:57:31   So I'm definitely getting the 4K Apple TV

02:57:34   and just because, you know, again, I use it constantly

02:57:37   and I do have a 4K TV and I'm getting the 3G watch,

02:57:41   or sorry, the LTE watch series three.

02:57:44   So yeah, overall it's been a pretty expensive event.

02:57:47   - Yeah, tell me about it.

02:57:49   I mean, I'm in for two watches, like I said earlier, one LTE, one not.

02:57:53   I'm going to be getting definitely one iPhone X in 256 space gray.

02:58:02   Probably one for Aaron too.

02:58:04   We haven't really had time to talk it over yet, but I suspect I will.

02:58:07   I don't know what color she'll want, and I'll almost certainly just insist that she gets

02:58:12   a 256 there.

02:58:14   So between two watches and two phones, no Apple TVs for me, not yet anyway.

02:58:18   I'm looking at something like $3,000 this fall, which is truly and utterly preposterous.

02:58:24   And if you've ever listened to any one of our ads ever, then thank you.

02:58:28   Thank you.

02:58:29   Because if it wasn't for that, I would not be getting probably any of these things.

02:58:33   So, Jon, Jon, what's your situation?

02:58:35   You said Tina's getting a watch and she's probably getting a phone as well and you're

02:58:40   getting just the TV?

02:58:41   Yeah, well, TV is for the whole family, not just for me.

02:58:44   I am not going to live vicariously through my wife, who I'm trying to convince to get

02:58:47   a 10 so I'll have one to play with but it's not it's not my phone year I'm gonna keep using my 7.

02:58:51   I like it I'll add the rest of world experiment I hope she gets a 10 because then I will be able

02:58:54   to play with it and see what it's like without having to actually use it as my phone which I'm

02:58:58   not sure I'm ready for if it was my year I would get a 10 though if it was my phone year I would

02:59:02   totally get that because I'm very convinced that that is the the one that I would want to try.

02:59:07   It's the one that you want. Who who who. I got it but Marco didn't. Oh no I got it yeah. Oh how'd

02:59:15   you get that reference. I know some music. Is it her influence? It's music. I know music.

02:59:20   I have heard music. You can't go, you can't live in the world and not have heard that

02:59:26   song. Ah, you can. Thank you for having heard and seen. Alright. Touche. Always continue

02:59:31   to amaze me. Alright. Thanks to our three sponsors this week. Squarespace, Backblaze,

02:59:36   and Aftershocks. And we will see you next week.

02:59:39   [MUSIC]

02:59:49   Oh it was accidental.

02:59:51   Accidental.

02:59:52   John didn't do any research.

02:59:54   Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.

02:59:57   Cause it was accidental.

02:59:59   Accidental.

03:00:00   Oh it was accidental.

03:00:01   Accidental.

03:00:02   And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

03:00:07   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at

03:00:13   [music]

03:00:42   - Oh my God, this is a long show.

03:00:44   - Yeah, well I don't know if we really need much

03:00:45   of an after show.

03:00:46   I was surprised you didn't bring up aftershocks

03:00:47   when you were talking about riding your bike

03:00:49   because that is the ultimate time for aftershocks

03:00:52   'cause they're open air.

03:00:53   - I know, well, the only problem is that

03:00:56   when I'm riding my bike, I am terrified

03:00:59   so I don't want to die.

03:01:01   So I've been mostly using the aftershocks on the walks

03:01:05   and not on the bike rides.

03:01:06   - What are you afraid of on the trail?

03:01:07   There's no cars that are gonna run you over, right?

03:01:09   - I'm mostly afraid of just getting myself to the trail

03:01:11   even though it's quite close to my house.

03:01:14   - Oh, you're on the bike doing it still?

03:01:16   - I mean, I could just pause the podcast,

03:01:19   drive to the trail, bike to the trail, and then resume it.

03:01:24   I'll probably start doing that.

03:01:25   I haven't gotten a lot of biking in.

03:01:28   I guess this is our after show now.

03:01:31   So I have finally completed my bike shopping extravaganza.

03:01:37   - That's a lie.

03:01:39   That's a lie you're telling us and yourself.

03:01:41   - Mm-hmm.

03:01:42   - It turns out I am terrible at buying bikes.

03:01:46   So the way that I buy everything else basically

03:01:50   is I do a ton of research,

03:01:53   it consumes my mind for like two weeks,

03:01:56   and eventually I convince myself to buy the best thing

03:02:01   and I buy it and then I'm happy for a while

03:02:03   until a better thing comes out.

03:02:04   That does not work for bikes.

03:02:08   What I have learned basically is that

03:02:11   The correct best way to buy a bike

03:02:14   is to go into your local bike shop,

03:02:17   drive a few things around that you like,

03:02:20   and whatever one feels the best to you, buy it.

03:02:23   And that's it.

03:02:24   You should do basically no research.

03:02:27   You should learn about almost nothing

03:02:29   about the high end of bikes.

03:02:31   You should read no online reviews

03:02:33   because they're pretty much useless.

03:02:35   The way for most people to buy a bike is just that,

03:02:38   to do it in the most casual way possible.

03:02:40   the way most people buy everything.

03:02:43   I have done such an insane amount of research online,

03:02:49   browsing different things, looking at different specs,

03:02:52   figuring, okay, I definitely want this kind of thing,

03:02:53   I definitely don't want this kind of thing.

03:02:55   It got me basically a lot of nowhere.

03:02:57   It got me to a lot of wasted research time,

03:03:01   a lot of consuming mental time.

03:03:03   It got me to rule out things that I actually like,

03:03:06   not knowing that I was ruling them out.

03:03:08   It got me to get myself really dedicated

03:03:12   to certain types of bikes that are not right for me,

03:03:14   that actually don't fit my needs

03:03:15   and that I'm not comfortable on.

03:03:17   It has taken me a long time to finally figure all this out.

03:03:20   What I did basically, and a special thank you

03:03:24   to the people at Budnitz Bicycles,

03:03:26   who I basically have been bothering and asking questions to

03:03:30   and arranging, like trying to get a loaner to try out

03:03:33   or trying to visit a showroom to try things out

03:03:35   for a good three months now.

03:03:38   They've been very patient with me.

03:03:40   And they even did arrange for me to test out

03:03:42   one of their bikes in the Hamptons,

03:03:44   and therefore I drove to the Hamptons.

03:03:46   They arranged to lend me one of their bikes for free

03:03:49   so I could try it and then order my own,

03:03:52   that, you know, things I would like.

03:03:54   I tried it, it wasn't right for me.

03:03:56   They were very, very tolerant of me, very patient with me.

03:03:58   Thank you so much to the Budnits Bike people.

03:04:00   And if you do want a bike of the kind they make,

03:04:04   which is like a really nice city bike, that's amazing.

03:04:07   they were ridiculously nice.

03:04:09   But I learned basically through all this

03:04:10   that what I actually want, what I'm most comfortable on,

03:04:12   and what I actually need to ride this trail over here,

03:04:15   which is the main way I ride here,

03:04:17   is a pretty normal mountain bike.

03:04:20   - I was gonna hope it was a penny farthing.

03:04:22   - No, I know.

03:04:24   But what I need is a basic mountain bike.

03:04:27   What we've discovered, and Tiff and I went to

03:04:31   a couple of local bike stores,

03:04:34   we just discovered that we don't want to buy

03:04:37   the thing that all the research tells us to buy.

03:04:39   We don't want to get the best possible thing.

03:04:42   We just want to get a bike.

03:04:43   And we, now Tiff and I each have bought bikes

03:04:47   in the last 48 hours.

03:04:48   - And they say Trek on them in big letters.

03:04:51   - Close, they almost did.

03:04:53   No, mine says specialized in big letters.

03:04:55   - Yeah, that was close.

03:04:56   I was gonna say, you're gonna have to,

03:04:58   one of your requirements is gonna have to give

03:04:59   and I bet it's the one with the logos.

03:05:01   - Yeah, no, that was, that had to, yeah.

03:05:04   Once you go into a bike shop,

03:05:06   trying to get something that looks fairly tasteful

03:05:09   is incredibly challenging,

03:05:11   because all the major brand bikes

03:05:13   are just outrageous looking.

03:05:15   - My Mongoose looks awesome, by the way.

03:05:16   - Of course it does, yes.

03:05:18   Present company excluded.

03:05:19   What Tiff and I both landed on,

03:05:24   even though they are kind of slow at times,

03:05:27   is that we both really had a lot of fun

03:05:30   on 27 and a half inch plus semi-fat tire bikes.

03:05:35   So Tiff and I are each now owners of semi-fat mountain bikes,

03:05:40   both at the fairly entry-level price points.

03:05:44   Mine is literally, this is the actual name of this product,

03:05:47   it is called the Specialized Fuse 6 Fatty/29.

03:05:52   - Wow.

03:05:53   - Is that a comment on the people who buy the bike?

03:05:55   Get on the bike, Fatty?

03:05:57   - I mean, I am buying this bike for fitness purposes

03:06:00   as one of the--

03:06:00   - Seems like a counterproductive marketing strategy.

03:06:03   Bike for you, Fatty.

03:06:05   - Yeah, so I put the link here.

03:06:06   So yeah, so I have the six fatty 29,

03:06:10   and then Tiff has the Orbea Loki 27+ H20,

03:06:15   which is a mouthful also.

03:06:19   - That's a lot of words for the name of a bike.

03:06:21   - But basically what happened is we tried a few bikes

03:06:23   in the store, and I tried all the red ones,

03:06:26   and Tiff tried all the blue ones,

03:06:28   and she picked her favorite blue one.

03:06:29   - This is a great shopping strategy.

03:06:32   - And I picked my favorite red one,

03:06:34   And we got pretty good prices on them.

03:06:36   They're pretty inexpensive, relatively speaking.

03:06:38   And they're not the best bikes in the world.

03:06:40   But they make us the happiest.

03:06:41   And we're not going to be bike power users for a long time,

03:06:44   probably.

03:06:45   So I tried really hard to do my regular research heavy thing

03:06:51   and then eventually get the best or at least get

03:06:54   the most sensible.

03:06:55   And it turns out that's just totally the wrong way

03:06:57   to buy a bike.

03:06:57   And it's just so much easier to just go to the shop

03:07:01   and find the one that rides the best for you and just buy it.

03:07:03   Well, because you have so little experience with bikes, and bikes are such a large world.

03:07:07   Imagine if you had so little experience with computers, and computers are such a large

03:07:12   world, you'd end up buying one based on, like, specs or something, but not realize the importance

03:07:16   you placed on the OS, and it's just too much.

03:07:19   But I bet your research strategy would work if you ride these bikes for many, many years

03:07:25   and kind of get a feel for what you like, and then it's time to buy a new bike, and

03:07:28   then you would be able to do the exhaustive research knowing actually really what you

03:07:32   like and what you don't like.

03:07:33   same way you can with cameras, because you've had a lot of cameras, and you can do the 10

03:07:36   hours reading DP review because you're not going in with no foundational knowledge. Whereas

03:07:43   bikes it was just like they have two wheels and you sit on them, and then there's a bunch

03:07:46   of words that other people's opinions are basically informing yours, right?

03:07:50   Yeah, and online reviews of bikes are all written by pro-bikeists, and they have very

03:07:56   different preferences and needs than what I have as a casual recreational rider.

03:08:02   'Cause you were shopping for pro bikes that cost like thousands of dollars, so of course

03:08:05   all the reviews are gonna be from pro people.

03:08:06   It's not gonna be from like, "I'm riding the trail behind my house in this $3,000 bike."

03:08:11   - Well, and also, the pro bikes are doing things like complaining about certain component

03:08:15   choices in certain bikes and everything.

03:08:17   And if they say, "Oh, this doesn't have the SRAM A7 brakes," I'm like, "I don't even know

03:08:22   if that's good or not."

03:08:24   I had no concept of what components were good and what weren't.

03:08:30   And there was a large price range for the different types

03:08:34   of bikes people were recommending and that seemed to be

03:08:37   popular sellers and everything.

03:08:38   But what I found when I would go to a bike store,

03:08:41   like ride the really nice ones versus ride the base level

03:08:44   ones, is that I found that I just, in Casey fashion,

03:08:48   I just didn't care about the difference.

03:08:51   And the ones that I found that were super fun,

03:08:54   that just felt right to me, were relatively inexpensive.

03:08:58   No belt drive, no CVT.

03:09:01   - That's true, I tried really hard to find a mountain bike

03:09:05   that has a belt drive and any kind of internal gearing

03:09:08   option, I found one with a belt drive, the Spot,

03:09:13   Spot makes one that has a belt drive,

03:09:14   but it's fixed gear only, and I found zero that have

03:09:19   a belt drive and internal gearing.

03:09:22   - That's what I was getting at when you listed like

03:09:23   belt drive as your requirement, it's like you don't even

03:09:26   know, you don't even know if this is, you just discovered

03:09:28   This is the thing that exists and it seems fancier so you want it, but there's a reason

03:09:31   the chains are all in use.

03:09:32   And it may just be the belts haven't trickled down from the high end yet, but also—

03:09:35   That seems like most of the reason.

03:09:37   There's also that chains are a tried and true technology.

03:09:41   They are a solved problem.

03:09:42   They can make them pretty well.

03:09:44   And of all things, you would think mountain bikes would have the internal ones and not

03:09:47   have it all be mucked up and everything, but I guess they're just either not there yet

03:09:50   or the sort of chunky reliability of a chain.

03:09:54   So I notice this one doesn't have a front derailleur.

03:09:56   That's an innovation in recent decades in mountain bikes.

03:10:00   - I think it's probably also just because

03:10:01   it's like a lower end model.

03:10:02   Like it only has 10 speeds.

03:10:04   You know, like you can get,

03:10:05   a lot of them seem to have like between eight and 11 speeds

03:10:08   that just had a rear derailleur,

03:10:09   which is, that's fine for me.

03:10:11   In many ways, it's probably a cultural demand thing.

03:10:13   Like I don't think mountain bikists want the additional

03:10:16   weight of internal gear hubs on the back wheels.

03:10:18   And also there seems to be a large need for them

03:10:22   to be able to do repairs like while they're out.

03:10:25   So things have to be fairly mechanically simple

03:10:28   for that to be possible.

03:10:29   So like, you know, a belt and a fancy internal gear hub,

03:10:32   like they exist, thank you, I know about roll off hubs,

03:10:35   they exist, but it seems like putting them on mountain bikes

03:10:38   is nearly unheard of, or at least is not usually done

03:10:43   on bikes that you can buy that are stock configured

03:10:46   that way, like people seem to customize them sometimes,

03:10:48   but that's about it.

03:10:49   So all this is to say, I totally failed at buying a bike

03:10:55   through my usual methods, but I did finally just buy one

03:10:58   and now I'm done with it, and now I'm going

03:10:59   to actually enjoy riding it.

03:11:00   'Cause, you know, a quick way to burn through a whole fall

03:11:03   full of nice weather, not riding a bike,

03:11:06   is to try to spend all this time going bike shopping.

03:11:08   I spent so much time in my car in the last week,

03:11:12   not like just moving bikes around or renting bikes

03:11:15   or transporting myself to and from bike shops

03:11:18   that are far away, like I've missed out

03:11:20   on so much good riding time,

03:11:22   because I was spending too much time

03:11:23   overthinking this problem.

03:11:25   - Sounds rough driving around to bike stores.

03:11:27   - Yeah, the struggle is real.

03:11:29   - Casey and I were at work, just so you know.

03:11:31   (beeping)