ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► I want to be a good connector designer.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Do we have anything to talk about tonight?

00:00:05 ◼   ► I don't know, I guess. I mean, there were new iPhones and stuff, but it's really funny

00:00:09 ◼   ► how unsurprising it was. Even the parts that we expected to be

00:00:14 ◼   ► surprised by,

00:00:15 ◼   ► we were wrong. Actually, so I guess therefore it was surprising in those ways.

00:00:21 ◼   ► And I thought the camera stuff was mildly surprising. I hadn't heard anything about

00:00:24 ◼   ► that. Now obviously it's to be expected that there will be better, newer,

00:00:28 ◼   ► faster camera things

00:00:30 ◼   ► But I didn't know the the magnitude of it all and I don't think anyone did and it seems pretty compelling

00:00:36 ◼   ► That's because it wasn't like really camera hardware so much as it was

00:00:40 ◼   ► applying even more software to write a camera problem because like I mean that there is a

00:00:46 ◼   ► point of

00:00:49 ◼   ► Diminishing returns with camera hardware and phones because you know optically speaking you only have so much room to work with there, right?

00:00:55 ◼   ► But if the computing power keeps going up and up,

00:00:59 ◼   ► hey, let's do something with that.

00:01:01 ◼   ► That may be the better place to get benefit from it.

00:01:03 ◼   ► And that seems like that's what they did.

00:01:05 ◼   ► And that's why we wouldn't have heard about that

00:01:06 ◼   ► or thought about that, because you can't leak.

00:01:08 ◼   ► Well, I guess you could.

00:01:09 ◼   ► But it's not on the supply chain.

00:01:11 ◼   ► The software side is not in a supply chain

00:01:13 ◼   ► all over the world.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And there was a small hint in the WVDC slides

00:01:17 ◼   ► for iOS 7's announcement.

00:01:20 ◼   ► There was one of those million little bullet points

00:01:22 ◼   ► that they put all over the place.

00:01:23 ◼   ► One of them was 120 frames per second capture.

00:01:26 ◼   ► And--

00:01:27 ◼   ► Oh, really?

00:01:27 ◼   ► I didn't recall that.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Yeah, there was a little 120 FPS on one of those

00:01:31 ◼   ► in the upper right, I think.

00:01:32 ◼   ► And I don't think any hardware before the 5S

00:01:36 ◼   ► could actually do that.

00:01:37 ◼   ► So I think that was a slight give.

00:01:39 ◼   ► But otherwise, I mean, I think that whole camera stuff

00:01:43 ◼   ► is awesome.

00:01:44 ◼   ► I cannot wait to use it.

00:01:45 ◼   ► I mean, there was an app called-- is it SnappyCam?

00:01:48 ◼   ► Do you know what I'm talking about?

00:01:49 ◼   ► I know what you're talking about,

00:01:50 ◼   ► but I've never used it.

00:01:51 ◼   ► I'll put the link in the show notes.

00:01:53 ◼   ► but I believe it's called SnappyCam.

00:01:56 ◼   ► And it was a camera app that was written

00:01:59 ◼   ► by some incredibly good programmers who basically wrote

00:02:02 ◼   ► their own JPEG encoder and really tweaked the heck out

00:02:07 ◼   ► of the CPU to get tons of performance

00:02:10 ◼   ► so that they could capture, I believe,

00:02:13 ◼   ► it was 30 frames a second on the iPhone 5.

00:02:16 ◼   ► And it was either 30 or 60.

00:02:18 ◼   ► They couldn't reach 120 because the hardware couldn't do it.

00:02:20 ◼   ► But it was either 30 or 60.

00:02:21 ◼   ► And so they could capture that.

00:02:23 ◼   ► And then similar to what we saw in yesterday's iPhone

00:02:24 ◼   ► announcement, you could scroll through and pick your favorite

00:02:27 ◼   ► photo from that giant burst.

00:02:29 ◼   ► And so that was pretty cool.

00:02:31 ◼   ► So I'm actually really happy--

00:02:34 ◼   ► they might not be-- but I'm really happy to see that now

00:02:37 ◼   ► be a regular feature and to have it be better integrated

00:02:39 ◼   ► in the camera roll, too.

00:02:40 ◼   ► Because now you can do things like pick the two or three

00:02:43 ◼   ► shots out of that that you like and delete all of the other

00:02:45 ◼   ► ones, which SnappyCam can only do in very limited ways

00:02:49 ◼   ► because it doesn't have full access to the camera roll

00:02:51 ◼   ► because we don't have those APIs, et cetera.

00:02:53 ◼   ► So yeah, I think it's,

00:02:55 ◼   ► I'm really looking forward

00:02:57 ◼   ► to playing with that camera. That to me,

00:02:59 ◼   ► you know, the 5S is actually

00:03:01 ◼   ► a pretty substantial

00:03:03 ◼   ► speed upgrade, so

00:03:05 ◼   ► it looks. I haven't used one

00:03:07 ◼   ► yet, but it sure looks that way.

00:03:09 ◼   ► But the two things I think

00:03:11 ◼   ► that I'm most excited about are fingerprint

00:03:13 ◼   ► unlocking, because as we discussed last episode, I believe

00:03:15 ◼   ► I'm one of those people who never sets a passcode on my

00:03:17 ◼   ► phone because I just don't want the constant

00:03:19 ◼   ► day-to-day annoyance of that. And so now I will do the fingerprint lock and I'll just

00:03:25 ◼   ► put a couple of my fingers, I'll put my wife's finger and that's it. Then I'm done.

00:03:30 ◼   ► Maybe Adam's if he's lucky. Maybe he'll have to earn that. Maybe Hopps's nose. Otherwise

00:03:36 ◼   ► I think that works. But we'll see. Maybe I'll try that with my new iPhone 5s whenever

00:03:40 ◼   ► I get one.

00:03:41 ◼   ► So what is your annoyance threshold for stopping using that feature? Like what would make you

00:03:46 ◼   ► stop using it? What percentage of it is failing? Like, you try to do it and it doesn't work.

00:03:50 ◼   ► Do you try again and you try again, and you're like, "50% success rate, 90%?" Like, when

00:03:55 ◼   ► do you say, "All right, forget this"?

00:03:57 ◼   ► I would say it would have to work probably at least 95% of the time within about a second.

00:04:03 ◼   ► I don't read—I try to read as much as I could of the coverage, but what I wanted to

00:04:07 ◼   ► see—I guess probably Apple controlled this. If they had direct access to the hands-on

00:04:11 ◼   ► area afterwards, do 50 trials, do 100 trials, do as many trials as you can with success

00:04:18 ◼   ► or failure, you know what I mean? And get some kind of number about percentage-wise,

00:04:22 ◼   ► instead of just trying it and saying, "Oh, it seemed to work pretty well," and you try

00:04:24 ◼   ► it two times, you know what I mean?

00:04:27 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe. The ones we saw in the AnandTech video, and a few other people took videos,

00:04:32 ◼   ► I think, but the one I watched was the AnandTech one, and it was really good. They put it through

00:04:37 ◼   ► the whole process of registering the fingerprint, which looked like it worked really well, and

00:04:40 ◼   ► And then they unlocked it a few times, and it worked very quickly in all instances.

00:04:44 ◼   ► Yeah, well, the thing that they showed in the little movie or one of the ads or something,

00:04:48 ◼   ► they showed the guy grabbing your phone like you do and kind of activating it.

00:04:51 ◼   ► And one of the things he was using, like the side of the corner of his thumb, like we all

00:04:56 ◼   ► do when you grab the phone and go for the home button with your thumb, right?

00:05:01 ◼   ► And if that works that well, I found that impressive, because if that really works that

00:05:05 ◼   ► well, that means that—or maybe did he have to train it on the corner of his thumb?

00:05:09 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:05:10 ◼   ► Because we don't always…

00:05:12 ◼   ► If you're going to go and let me give you the full frontal of my thumb or finger to

00:05:16 ◼   ► test the feature versus let me grab the thing out of my pocket, put my finger on it without

00:05:20 ◼   ► looking and get a good read on it.

00:05:23 ◼   ► I think that's where using it in real life is going to be different than trying to put

00:05:28 ◼   ► your finger out in a demo area.

00:05:30 ◼   ► But yeah, if it works like I saw it work in all the little demos all the time, especially

00:05:35 ◼   ► in Apple's ad, that would be great.

00:05:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm looking forward to trying that and having that.

00:05:40 ◼   ► I mean, you know, as they said in the keynote,

00:05:43 ◼   ► like, most people don't use a passcode,

00:05:45 ◼   ► and that's kind of bad, and it would be better

00:05:47 ◼   ► if security could be reasonably secure,

00:05:50 ◼   ► yet also very easy so that people would actually do it.

00:05:53 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

00:05:54 ◼   ► I think that's gonna be cool.

00:05:55 ◼   ► And I don't know, though.

00:05:58 ◼   ► I feel like us talking this much about the iPhone 5S

00:06:02 ◼   ► is almost like talking about this much about the Mac Pro.

00:06:05 ◼   ► Like, I feel like we've now left the mainstream.

00:06:08 ◼   ► Were we, were the three of us ever the mainstream?

00:06:11 ◼   ► That's true.

00:06:12 ◼   ► But here's the thing, though.

00:06:13 ◼   ► Everything you see on the 5S will eventually be on the mainstream.

00:06:16 ◼   ► So it's like, you know, it's a glimpse of the future of the rest of the iOS line.

00:06:21 ◼   ► Even though it's only on this one product now, surely, unless it's a gigantic flop,

00:06:26 ◼   ► it will move on down the line until it's everywhere and just becomes standard, just

00:06:29 ◼   ► like, you know, a rear-facing camera.

00:06:31 ◼   ► Hey, can we go back a step to the camera?

00:06:34 ◼   ► Marco I'm curious to hear as a

00:06:36 ◼   ► quasi professional photographer at one point in your life

00:06:38 ◼   ► What do you think about the flash because I remember vividly years ago when?

00:06:43 ◼   ► The four of us you me and Aaron and Tiff were somewhere and we were talking about how I wish I was a better photographer

00:06:49 ◼   ► And you said well

00:06:50 ◼   ► Let me give you a tip the number one best way to be a better photographer is to never use the flash ever ever ever

00:06:55 ◼   ► and so I've

00:06:57 ◼   ► Stuck by that as any time I couldn't it has made for much better pictures

00:07:00 ◼   ► but I'm curious what your take is on the two flash setup.

00:07:05 ◼   ► Well, it's... that rule still holds true.

00:07:09 ◼   ► If you can avoid using the flash at all, you should.

00:07:13 ◼   ► The flash introduces two huge problems to the entire scene.

00:07:18 ◼   ► One of them is it messes up all the colors of everything,

00:07:21 ◼   ► and the other one is the direction of the light

00:07:23 ◼   ► makes everything look really weird and unappealing.

00:07:26 ◼   ► Now, the flash, the dual color flash, which is a really cool idea, only solves one of

00:07:32 ◼   ► those problems. It only solves the color problem. And that is a big problem, certainly. But

00:07:36 ◼   ► I think the amount of light coming from straight on is a bigger problem that makes things look

00:07:43 ◼   ► worse than just having the wrong color light shown on them. And so it's a very good idea

00:07:49 ◼   ► for when you have to use the flash. And a lot of people just leave the flash on auto

00:07:53 ◼   ► and use it whenever the phone thinks it should or needs to.

00:07:57 ◼   ► And so it's going to help a lot of pictures out,

00:07:59 ◼   ► but it's not going to make a flash picture look

00:08:04 ◼   ► anywhere near as good as a non-flash picture.

00:08:06 ◼   ► Now, a lot of times, if you're in such a dark place

00:08:09 ◼   ► that-- if you're in a bar with your friends, there's no light.

00:08:13 ◼   ► And you're going to have to use the flash.

00:08:15 ◼   ► You just don't have a choice.

00:08:16 ◼   ► If you want a picture at all, you'll have to use the flash,

00:08:18 ◼   ► and that's it.

00:08:19 ◼   ► And so if your choice is picture or no picture at all,

00:08:24 ◼   ► maybe take the picture with the flash.

00:08:26 ◼   ► - Maybe.

00:08:27 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:08:28 ◼   ► - But it's not, I certainly wouldn't rely on that

00:08:31 ◼   ► and it's not going to,

00:08:33 ◼   ► it's not gonna make me want to use the flash anymore

00:08:37 ◼   ► than before, but when I have to use it,

00:08:40 ◼   ► which is very rare, but when I have to use it,

00:08:42 ◼   ► it'll be a little bit better.

00:08:45 ◼   ► - Fair enough.

00:08:46 ◼   ► - So what do you think of the little ridges

00:08:48 ◼   ► the little Fresnel lenses on the flash. Oh, I didn't see that. What's that about?

00:08:53 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't see this either. I saw it on all the slides, and if you look

00:08:56 ◼   ► on Apple's website, they zoom right in on it, so they must not be shying away from it,

00:08:59 ◼   ► but it is totally at odds with every other physical design feature of this iPhone and

00:09:04 ◼   ► all past iPhones. Go to Apple's iPhone 5s site and scroll down to the part that shows

00:09:10 ◼   ► you the flash. Hold on. This is... I'm curious. I wonder

00:09:13 ◼   ► if that's to spread the light more, which would help. But still, the direction is, "Oh,

00:09:19 ◼   ► yeah, look at that."

00:09:20 ◼   ► Someone says it's pronounced "fren-el," but I will have you know that I looked it

00:09:23 ◼   ► up, and both pronunciations are valid according to Wikipedia, and as we know, Wikipedia never

00:09:29 ◼   ► contains any errors.

00:09:30 ◼   ► Nope. Now, is that—let's see, I'm looking at my iPhone 5. Yeah, the 5 flash does not

00:09:35 ◼   ► look like that, at least from eye distance. I am not a macro lens, but I think—yeah,

00:09:41 ◼   ► I think you're right. I think that is new.

00:09:44 ◼   ► I think that will help because just having a little white LED probably doesn't have a

00:09:50 ◼   ► great spread pattern for the light and now they're taking it more seriously. Like, what

00:09:54 ◼   ► can we do in this limited amount of space? We can put a little lens on it. So that's

00:09:58 ◼   ► pretty good.

00:09:59 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that could be good. Again, it's one of those things that I don't think it's

00:10:06 ◼   ► it's going to really meaningfully make you able to use the flash in a lot of cases where

00:10:12 ◼   ► you couldn't before and have the pictures look good.

00:10:14 ◼   ► I think this will just make the pictures look a little bit better when you have to use the

00:10:18 ◼   ► flash.

00:10:19 ◼   ► But this is a key feature because this gigantic, vast majority of people who use phones do

00:10:25 ◼   ► not follow Marco's advice, don't know about Marco's advice, and will just always use

00:10:29 ◼   ► whatever the thing does automatically.

00:10:30 ◼   ► And don't care.

00:10:31 ◼   ► And don't care.

00:10:32 ◼   ► And don't care.

00:10:33 ◼   ► They're taking a picture of their friends in dark rooms, and if this can make their

00:10:34 ◼   ► pictures look better, that is, it's like the fingerprint thing.

00:10:37 ◼   ► Like it's such a huge win for all the people who never used any security at all.

00:10:43 ◼   ► Maybe if the team that does Chrome security was considering this feature, they'd say,

00:10:46 ◼   ► "Well, fingerprint is not as good as the passcode, therefore we shouldn't include

00:10:49 ◼   ► it because it gives a false sense of security."

00:10:52 ◼   ► I think we should probably also go through the few handful of things that we know are

00:10:55 ◼   ► going to be true about this fingerprint thing and why it doesn't matter.

00:10:58 ◼   ► Like you will be able to spoof it.

00:11:02 ◼   ► will get the little fingerprint signature things out of that chip somehow, and none of that matters.

00:11:07 ◼   ► Because it's not, you know, and passcodes are also more secure. Not four-digit passcodes, obviously,

00:11:14 ◼   ► but like, you know, a big long one or password will be more secure. But I think none of that

00:11:18 ◼   ► matters because this is not an attempt to heighten the maximum possible security of the iPhone. This

00:11:23 ◼   ► is an attempt to heighten the average security of iPhones in use. And I think if it works,

00:11:27 ◼   ► it will definitely do that. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, what I'm curious to see is,

00:11:32 ◼   ► Is it possible to have the fingerprint scanning in addition to a passcode to have arguably

00:11:38 ◼   ► two-factor security, which in big corporate jobs can make or break your ability to use

00:11:45 ◼   ► services that you want to use?

00:11:47 ◼   ► So for example, a lot of VPNs that you need to get on for a corporate environment, they

00:11:52 ◼   ► might require like an RSID or in addition to a password or something along those lines.

00:11:59 ◼   ► And I wonder if there will be a way that you can have the fingerprint in addition to some

00:12:05 ◼   ► sort of passcode, thus you have two-factor security, and thus you can do all these things

00:12:09 ◼   ► you want to do on your corporate network.

00:12:11 ◼   ► Yeah, they didn't mention that, and I'm guessing the reason they didn't mention that is even,

00:12:15 ◼   ► I mean, obviously it is possible, but even if you can enable that feature in the OS,

00:12:19 ◼   ► like the pitch for the fingerprint thing is get all those people who aren't using a passcode

00:12:23 ◼   ► to use something.

00:12:24 ◼   ► The pitch is not, let's double up security.

00:12:26 ◼   ► Because that would be the worst way to advertise a fingerprint thing would be to pitch it as

00:12:31 ◼   ► a heightening of maximum possible security.

00:12:34 ◼   ► Even though with the two-factor it maybe would help with that, I think it's so important

00:12:37 ◼   ► to pitch this as a casual convenience for people who don't want to enter code.

00:12:43 ◼   ► And I'm one of those people.

00:12:44 ◼   ► I have never had a passcode in any of my iOS devices.

00:12:47 ◼   ► In fact, when I connected one of my iOS devices in the past to my work's VPN, and the VPN

00:12:54 ◼   ► or the Exchange server or something in the stack there required that I put a passcode

00:12:57 ◼   ► on my thing, I immediately disconnected from it and said, "Well, never doing that again."

00:13:00 ◼   ► Exactly. Exactly.

00:13:01 ◼   ► I'm never going to enter a passcode. But I will try this fingerprint thing if it works,

00:13:05 ◼   ► if I ever get a device that has a fingerprint scanner in it.

00:13:08 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good point. Do you think this is going to filter down into the iPod touch

00:13:12 ◼   ► and the iPad? Yeah, like 10 years or something.

00:13:15 ◼   ► No, no. The iPad will get it. I don't see why they would leave it out of the iPad. It's

00:13:19 ◼   ► much bigger, the top-end iPad will surely have the A7. The only reason not to would

00:13:26 ◼   ► be some crazy segmentation. It doesn't even make sense to me. I don't see why it wouldn't

00:13:31 ◼   ► be on the top-end iPads. The iPod touch, of course, Apple doesn't care about that. This

00:13:35 ◼   ► is an S year, and the S year is the iPad touch gets screwed. So we'll wait till next year.

00:13:42 ◼   ► I am curious to see what happens with the iPad this fall, because it seems like most

00:13:49 ◼   ► Most of the time, the iPhone is Apple's big thing for the year.

00:13:54 ◼   ► And it's the event that most people watch.

00:13:56 ◼   ► It's the one that breaks all the live streaming or live blogging things.

00:14:00 ◼   ► It's the highest profile event they have of the year.

00:14:04 ◼   ► But they started with it this year.

00:14:06 ◼   ► And there's still a whole lot of products to announce that are very likely to be coming

00:14:09 ◼   ► out in the next few months.

00:14:11 ◼   ► I wonder if...

00:14:14 ◼   ► How quickly are we all going to forget about how unsurprising this was once we see the

00:14:18 ◼   ► other product unveilings?

00:14:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure what to... I'm still processing like the whole event.

00:14:26 ◼   ► I watched the video and I have some thoughts on that that we should get to at some point,

00:14:30 ◼   ► but I'm a little disappointed, and this has been said a lot, that so much was known. I

00:14:35 ◼   ► am very enthusiastic about the camera. I'm very enthusiastic that the thumbprint scanner

00:14:39 ◼   ► seems to work as great as it does. Obviously, we'll all find out whenever we get them. I'm

00:14:45 ◼   ► I'm super disappointed that there's not going to be preorders on the 5S because it is our

00:14:50 ◼   ► year in the LIS household to get a new phone and I'm very excited.

00:14:54 ◼   ► But I have an actual JOB job so I can't just blow off work on a Friday and wait in line

00:14:59 ◼   ► for hours and hours, not that I'd probably want to anyway.

00:15:03 ◼   ► So now I've got to just suffer the unbelievable tragedy of not having my 5S on launch day.

00:15:09 ◼   ► Yeah, it's probably a good bet that the 5S will be supply constrained.

00:15:14 ◼   ► Yeah, which means we won't have them for a long time. It might not be that long, but like you know

00:15:20 ◼   ► They're gonna they're gonna sell out not because it's wildly popular though

00:15:23 ◼   ► It may be but really because this is the first device ever to have the a7 in it and presumably that's the the gating factor

00:15:29 ◼   ► Yeah, and Gruber wrote about this in his post about the event and I think I think that's spot-on which is that

00:15:35 ◼   ► Splitting up the phone line like this and making making the old iPhone

00:15:41 ◼   ► or at least the old iPhone core,

00:15:43 ◼   ► making that the new mainstream model

00:15:46 ◼   ► allows them to do things like,

00:15:48 ◼   ► remember there were all the rumors

00:15:49 ◼   ► they were having trouble with in-cell touch

00:15:50 ◼   ► and getting good yields on that?

00:15:53 ◼   ► Things like retina iPads and stuff like that,

00:15:56 ◼   ► like all the big, bold, forward-looking supply decisions

00:16:01 ◼   ► or component decisions that can severely limit yields,

00:16:04 ◼   ► limit supply, and make that a big problem.

00:16:08 ◼   ► They can now start doing that

00:16:09 ◼   ► because the highest end device is no longer the mainstream device.

00:16:12 ◼   ► That's true of iPads and iPhones now.

00:16:14 ◼   ► And I think that's actually a good move.

00:16:17 ◼   ► Presumably they're getting, they're making, I don't know if they're making more money,

00:16:22 ◼   ► but like if the most popular phone turns out to be the 5C, they've been making that

00:16:28 ◼   ► phone for a while now and their costs of manufacture must be down, even if they

00:16:33 ◼   ► hadn't gone to plastic, which they also did.

00:16:35 ◼   ► Of course, they also lowered the price as well.

00:16:36 ◼   ► but I wonder if the smile on Tim Cook's face was an expression of the fact that we're

00:16:44 ◼   ► going to sell a ton of 5Cs and they actually might have higher profit margins for us than

00:16:51 ◼   ► the original 5 did, which would be an amazing thing where they sell the same phone a year

00:16:57 ◼   ► later and they drive down the cost of manufacture so much that it actually gives you bigger

00:17:01 ◼   ► profit margins than your previous top-end phone.

00:17:03 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. And they need that. Wall Street's been picking on them a lot recently and a

00:17:08 ◼   ► lot of it is just temporary and unfounded. But it's also pretty obvious that their

00:17:12 ◼   ► margins are going down slowly over time because these markets are getting more competitive,

00:17:18 ◼   ► especially price-wise, especially in tablets. And so their margins are just getting smaller

00:17:23 ◼   ► and smaller. The iPad, they used to be able to sell these things for like $600 or $700

00:17:28 ◼   ► to the mass market and now they're selling like,

00:17:31 ◼   ► you know, the $300 iPad mini and, you know,

00:17:34 ◼   ► who knows what's gonna happen there this fall.

00:17:36 ◼   ► And so I think they need something like the 5C,

00:17:41 ◼   ► which honestly, I think it's a brilliant move,

00:17:43 ◼   ► it's a brilliant product and it's a brilliant launch

00:17:45 ◼   ► to do this 'cause I bet you're right,

00:17:47 ◼   ► I bet their margin is substantially better on it.

00:17:49 ◼   ► They're also now selling first party cases again

00:17:53 ◼   ► and you cannot discount how significant that is.

00:17:56 ◼   ► You know, if they, you know, let's say they make

00:17:59 ◼   ► two or three hundred bucks, I don't know what the profit

00:18:01 ◼   ► margin is usually on a phone, on an iPhone,

00:18:02 ◼   ► it's something like that I think.

00:18:04 ◼   ► Yeah, let's say two hundred bucks.

00:18:06 ◼   ► If they're also selling you a forty dollar case

00:18:10 ◼   ► to like sixty or fifty percent of the people

00:18:12 ◼   ► who buy the phone, which I think is probably fair,

00:18:15 ◼   ► that's really good.

00:18:16 ◼   ► I mean, they made a killing off the bumpers

00:18:17 ◼   ► for the iPhone 4 and 4S, I think they're gonna make

00:18:20 ◼   ► a killing on these cases too.

00:18:21 ◼   ► And that's just so much money.

00:18:23 ◼   ► They probably still make more money from the Made for iPhone certification program because

00:18:29 ◼   ► they get a cut of every single other case manufacturer's profits.

00:18:33 ◼   ► So the cumulative total of their license fees for the Made for iPhone product seal or whatever

00:18:38 ◼   ► thing they have going there still is going to dwarf their own things.

00:18:41 ◼   ► But they're probably like, "Hey, if we can make a product with 90% margins, even if it's

00:18:45 ◼   ► only 90% of $40 or $70, let's do that because it can't hurt."

00:18:51 ◼   ► The other thing on the 5C margins is if you think back to the earnings calls, before the

00:18:54 ◼   ► iPad Mini came out, they said, "Our margins are going to be decreasing, blah, blah, blah."

00:19:00 ◼   ► And then the Mini came out and it made sense.

00:19:02 ◼   ► It's like, "Okay, that's why your margins are decreasing because you know you're going

00:19:04 ◼   ► to sell a ton of these Minis and they cost less money and you don't make as much money

00:19:09 ◼   ► in each one of those as you were making on the previous iPad, so there you go."

00:19:12 ◼   ► But don't recall a similar warning about margins, or at least not one to such a degree, before

00:19:19 ◼   ► the 5C announcement. And I think it's because they feel like they can maintain. They're

00:19:24 ◼   ► probably going to go down a little bit, but it's not going to be as dramatic a drop as

00:19:28 ◼   ► it was when they released the iPad mini.

00:19:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I think you're right about that.

00:19:33 ◼   ► I certainly did not put two and two together, but you make a very good point. And it certainly

00:19:36 ◼   ► seems to me that the 5C is a play to continue to make a tremendous amount of money from

00:19:43 ◼   ► people who maybe—if the 5C didn't exist, what would they be buying? Just a regular

00:19:49 ◼   ► iPhone 5 and probably doing so begrudgingly because it's not new and shiny.

00:19:53 ◼   ► So I have two thumbs up for the 5C in principle from a business perspective.

00:19:58 ◼   ► I don't personally see why I would want one because it's older tech and there's a few

00:20:04 ◼   ► things in the 5S that I still think we should talk about that are also very interesting.

00:20:10 ◼   ► But from a business perspective, it seems like a killer deal.

00:20:14 ◼   ► We were talking last show, I think, about how are you going to differentiate the two.

00:20:18 ◼   ► We talked about a 5C Envy, like, boy, the 5C looks really cool,

00:20:22 ◼   ► and it feels nice in your hand, and it comes in colors.

00:20:26 ◼   ► What can they do to the boring old little black, gray, white,

00:20:30 ◼   ► monolith iPhone 5-looking thing to make it

00:20:33 ◼   ► an object of desire for anyone?

00:20:36 ◼   ► Gold.

00:20:36 ◼   ► For-- yeah, besides gold.

00:20:39 ◼   ► Although that probably is a factor there.

00:20:41 ◼   ► And we got the answer.

00:20:42 ◼   ► And the answer was the fingerprint thing, which we knew.

00:20:44 ◼   ► And Apple's second part is emphasizing, you know,

00:20:49 ◼   ► plain old fashioned computing power.

00:20:52 ◼   ► Like that was their pitch to people.

00:20:53 ◼   ► It's got a fingerprint thing and it's twice as fast.

00:20:56 ◼   ► And the combination of those two, they hope,

00:20:58 ◼   ► is enough to securely grab all the people

00:21:00 ◼   ► who gotta have the latest, greatest thing

00:21:02 ◼   ► and to make us forget about the colorful,

00:21:05 ◼   ► more comfortable, nicely curved 5C.

00:21:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, Steven Hackett in the chat said,

00:21:10 ◼   ► "I talked to several semi-nerds who said

00:21:12 ◼   ► "they were thinking about, quote, upgrading

00:21:14 ◼   ► to the 5C from the 5. That's the power of colors in marketing, and I think that's

00:21:18 ◼   ► dead on.

00:21:19 ◼   ► Oh, totally. I mean, you cannot underestimate the importance of things like color and appearance

00:21:23 ◼   ► and newness for something like this. For most products, really, but especially for something

00:21:27 ◼   ► like this where people are kind of… There's a fast upgrade cycle relative to most electronic

00:21:32 ◼   ► products, and it's very much a personal item. It's always with you. People always

00:21:36 ◼   ► try to personalize it with cases and stuff like that. And so to have something visibly

00:21:41 ◼   ► very new and different, especially something that's so visually different from what came

00:21:47 ◼   ► before it. I think that's really valuable, and a lot of people are going to want that,

00:21:51 ◼   ► even who already have iPhone 5s.

00:21:53 ◼   ► And I've been on the bandwagon for a long time of, like, Apple needs to make a new—to

00:22:00 ◼   ► upgrade the phone line to be more than just one phone, to make a new varied thing. And

00:22:03 ◼   ► it's like, why would they make it new? Why wouldn't they just keep selling the old

00:22:06 ◼   ► one? They've got all the parts. They know how to make the old one just fine. And I've

00:22:09 ◼   ► always said, "I think you can make a better phone if you start, not from scratch, but

00:22:15 ◼   ► make a purpose-built phone that you know you're going to sell for less money."

00:22:20 ◼   ► And people said, "What could they do?

00:22:21 ◼   ► Why don't they just keep selling it for?"

00:22:23 ◼   ► Well, Apple has shown what they can do.

00:22:24 ◼   ► What can you do?

00:22:25 ◼   ► You can stop using aluminum.

00:22:26 ◼   ► You can use plastic.

00:22:27 ◼   ► It's cheaper.

00:22:28 ◼   ► You can make the battery a little bit bigger.

00:22:29 ◼   ► You can put it in a nicer camera.

00:22:30 ◼   ► You can give it colors to differentiate it.

00:22:33 ◼   ► And we're right technology-wise that the slightly bigger batteries probably don't

00:22:38 ◼   ► that much a difference and no one's going to notice that the front camera is a little

00:22:40 ◼   ► bit better or anything, but everyone will notice the lower price, which the plastic

00:22:45 ◼   ► helped derive, and everyone will notice the different shape and color.

00:22:49 ◼   ► It's such a dramatically different product, sales, marketing, and performance-wise, like

00:22:54 ◼   ► market performance-wise, than the 5, even though it is like 99.9% just a plain old iPhone

00:23:00 ◼   ► 5.

00:23:01 ◼   ► And this is what I was talking about, and the fact that of course they can sell it for

00:23:04 ◼   ► for $100 less for the bottom end model.

00:23:07 ◼   ► So I'm glad to see they went through with it.

00:23:09 ◼   ► I still think there's more diversification possible,

00:23:11 ◼   ► but one step at a time.

00:23:12 ◼   ► This is a good step in the right direction.

00:23:14 ◼   ► - Definitely.

00:23:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, do you wanna tell us about something awesome

00:23:17 ◼   ► that I'd like to get nerdy about the A7 for a few minutes?

00:23:20 ◼   ► - Absolutely.

00:23:21 ◼   ► Do you mean the Audi or the Apple CPU?

00:23:23 ◼   ► - Either, but I was referring to the Apple CPU.

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00:24:56 ◼   ► So during the event, they talked a lot

00:25:00 ◼   ► about the A7, which is Apple's new system on a chip.

00:25:04 ◼   ► And they--

00:25:05 ◼   ► I believe it's pronounced "sock."

00:25:07 ◼   ► Like "noss."

00:25:08 ◼   ► No, anyway.

00:25:10 ◼   ► So they talked a lot about how it's 64-bit,

00:25:13 ◼   ► and I'd like to explore that a little bit.

00:25:15 ◼   ► And they also talked about how it's

00:25:17 ◼   ► a different instruction set.

00:25:18 ◼   ► And I believe during the keynote,

00:25:21 ◼   ► They also talked about there being more registers, which is what's really interesting to me.

00:25:26 ◼   ► Yeah, twice as many.

00:25:27 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:25:28 ◼   ► So let me start with the 64-bit piece.

00:25:31 ◼   ► So it's been a long time since I've taken computer hardware courses and things of that

00:25:37 ◼   ► nature, but I'm trying to grasp why that's a big deal today.

00:25:43 ◼   ► I think it – I'm guessing that it's important for multimedia applications such

00:25:49 ◼   ► as moving data for images around and things of that nature.

00:25:53 ◼   ► But if you take the very shallow view, if you're not addressing more than 4 gigs of

00:25:58 ◼   ► memory, why does this matter?

00:26:01 ◼   ► And I'm kind of looking to you, John, to fill us all in.

00:26:04 ◼   ► The reaction to this, I was kind of disappointed in the nerd reaction to this, because as far

00:26:07 ◼   ► as I can tell, and I did watch the video plus all the live blogs, Apple never said that

00:26:12 ◼   ► the A7 is twice as fast as the A6 because it's 64-bit.

00:26:18 ◼   ► And every single thing I saw from nerds was like, "64-bit doesn't make it faster.

00:26:23 ◼   ► 64-bit is not twice as fast."

00:26:24 ◼   ► Of course it's not.

00:26:25 ◼   ► They never said it was.

00:26:26 ◼   ► Who's saying it was?

00:26:27 ◼   ► Everyone just set up that straw man and just beat it to death over the course of the whole

00:26:31 ◼   ► day.

00:26:32 ◼   ► And I know regular people are confused and they think 64 is twice as big as 32 or whatever,

00:26:34 ◼   ► but we're all nerds here.

00:26:36 ◼   ► We know 64-bit doesn't make it twice as fast.

00:26:38 ◼   ► If anyone was alive during the Nintendo 64 era, you learned that when you were eight

00:26:42 ◼   ► years old or however old you were when N64 came out.

00:26:46 ◼   ► So that was disappointing, because I don't think it was bashing on anything that Apple

00:26:51 ◼   ► said.

00:26:52 ◼   ► Apple said it was 64-bit.

00:26:53 ◼   ► Apple said it was twice as fast, but I don't think they drew any sort of line, dotted or

00:26:57 ◼   ► otherwise, between those two things.

00:26:59 ◼   ► So that's issue one.

00:27:01 ◼   ► And by the way, for people who don't know the tech details, the reason people were beating

00:27:05 ◼   ► up on that straw man is because all other things being equal, 64-bit CPUs are slower

00:27:11 ◼   ► than 32-bit, because all your pointers are 64-bit, and if all other things are equal,

00:27:14 ◼   ► That means your instruction and data caches are the same size, and now they may be the

00:27:18 ◼   ► same size, but now you've got to store 64-bit pointers instead of 32, so now you have more

00:27:21 ◼   ► cache pressure, and it's not memory bandwidth for getting instructions to and from.

00:27:27 ◼   ► Things get bigger in 64-bit, and unless you increase everything else, which of course

00:27:30 ◼   ► regular 64-bit chips usually do, but again, all other things being exactly equal, 64-bit

00:27:35 ◼   ► is actually slower than 32.

00:27:37 ◼   ► When you make a real 64-bit chip, they know that you have more data to move around, and

00:27:42 ◼   ► make the caches bigger, and they make the buses wider, and they tweak things and do

00:27:45 ◼   ► all this stuff.

00:27:46 ◼   ► So in the end, it can end up being a wash, but you're not getting twice as much performance

00:27:51 ◼   ► out of it unless other things are different.

00:27:53 ◼   ► And the reason there might be some misinformation floating around about this is that in real

00:27:57 ◼   ► live CPU architectures, there have been cases where 64-bit gives you a boost that has nothing

00:28:02 ◼   ► to do with 64-bit directly.

00:28:04 ◼   ► So for example, x86, the 32-bit instruction set on Intel's chips, is ancient and crappy

00:28:11 ◼   ► and disgusting. And when AMD created a 64-bit extension of that instruction set, it says,

00:28:16 ◼   ► "Now it's our chance to get rid of some of the crappy stuff, and let's make instructions that

00:28:21 ◼   ► are nicer." And so 64-bit Intel chips that use the x8664 instruction set from AMD got a 15%

00:28:30 ◼   ► speed boost, not because they were 64-bit, but merely because the 64-bit instruction set could

00:28:34 ◼   ► do less stupid ass backward things. And so you'd want to use the 64-bit instructions,

00:28:39 ◼   ► is you got access to more registers, because the old x86, the IA-32 architecture, was like

00:28:44 ◼   ► register starved by modern standards.

00:28:46 ◼   ► And they made instructions that could execute faster on the way modern chips are designed

00:28:51 ◼   ► and everything like that.

00:28:52 ◼   ► So 64-bit Intel chips were faster than 32-bit ones, but not because they were 64-bit, merely

00:28:58 ◼   ► because the 64-bit transition gave the designers a chance to sort of update their thinking.

00:29:04 ◼   ► That could be the case in the ARM architecture as well.

00:29:06 ◼   ► Maybe they get a couple percentage speed boosts of saying, OK, well, a lot of these ARM things

00:29:11 ◼   ► were made back in the day when we were designing really tiny chips, and smartphones were just

00:29:16 ◼   ► a glimmer in our eye.

00:29:17 ◼   ► Now is our chance with this transition from the 32-bit to 64-bit to revisit some of those

00:29:22 ◼   ► assumptions and maybe make an instruction set that's more tailored to modern hardware

00:29:27 ◼   ► capabilities.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And maybe we'll get a couple percent here and there speed boost from that.

00:29:32 ◼   ► That's still not where you're getting your double performance from.

00:29:35 ◼   ► And that, I think, is the place where people are still scratching their heads.

00:29:38 ◼   ► It's like, "Okay, well, anyone in the know, like AnandTech or whatever, says, 'Okay,

00:29:44 ◼   ► Apple says twice as fast.'"

00:29:46 ◼   ► If we take them at their word, there has to be some explanation to that.

00:29:49 ◼   ► Higher clock speed, a larger amount of instructions per clock, extracting more instruction parallelism

00:29:55 ◼   ► with bigger windows, more rename registers.

00:30:01 ◼   ► All the typical things that you do with any CPU, making the pipeline longer and cranking

00:30:04 ◼   ► Like we don't know what they did because Apple didn't tell us all they said was all they did was show us a chart

00:30:09 ◼   ► So once the CPU guys get their hands on this thing

00:30:11 ◼   ► They will tell us is it actually twice as fast under what conditions and how did they do it?

00:30:15 ◼   ► And the answer of how they did is not going to be they made a 64-bit

00:30:18 ◼   ► Right and some of the things you said I think are absolutely true in this case

00:30:24 ◼   ► Specifically by moving to a new version of the ARM architecture. So from based on a little bit of reading I did before the show

00:30:32 ◼   ► accidental

00:30:34 ◼   ► It seems as though they moved to ARMv8 and I found a blog post that has a couple great links

00:30:40 ◼   ► Which I put in chat a moment ago and it talks about some of the changes that were made now

00:30:44 ◼   ► I think the speed increase to me probably comes from more registers, but we can talk about that in a second

00:30:50 ◼   ► But some of the things they did were they made all of the instructions exactly 32 bits

00:30:55 ◼   ► And so instructions are always the exact same size

00:30:58 ◼   ► They added a crud load of registers, like I said,

00:31:02 ◼   ► and they did change the instruction set,

00:31:05 ◼   ► just like you said, John, in order to simplify it

00:31:08 ◼   ► and get rid of some of the cruft

00:31:10 ◼   ► that they didn't want anymore.

00:31:11 ◼   ► So if the A7 really is using ARMv8,

00:31:16 ◼   ► then that could explain a lot of these differences.

00:31:20 ◼   ► - And that's not gonna give you double performance though.

00:31:22 ◼   ► Adding double the amount of registers

00:31:24 ◼   ► is not gonna double your performance.

00:31:25 ◼   ► And like none of those things you listed

00:31:27 ◼   ► going to double. If you're going to get a doubling, it has to be more execution units,

00:31:32 ◼   ► bigger execution window, higher clock speed, maybe longer pipeline to get that. You don't

00:31:38 ◼   ► get double performance from those things. You get percentage increases. You have to

00:31:41 ◼   ► do something fundamental, like how many instructions are dispatched per clock? How high is the

00:31:47 ◼   ► clock speed? Those type of things. That's where you get your doubling from.

00:31:51 ◼   ► Again, all we have to go on is Apple's claim of doubling. There may be specific benchmarks

00:31:56 ◼   ► in which it really does double, but we need to get this into the hands of someone who's

00:32:00 ◼   ► going to do real benchmarks and say, "Okay, what is the actual increase? Is it double

00:32:03 ◼   ► in SIMD stuff because the SIMD instruction set in 32-bit was crappy and now it's way,

00:32:07 ◼   ► way better?" That's easy to get a double win there if you just say, "Look, the new SIMD

00:32:11 ◼   ► instruction set is way better than it was before. We have twice as many SIMD registers,

00:32:16 ◼   ► and we can address them as 64 bits in addition to 128 bits, and so now we can easy doubling

00:32:21 ◼   ► on this particular benchmark." But do you get doubling across the board? Probably not.

00:32:26 ◼   ► So we'll see.

00:32:28 ◼   ► No, I agree.

00:32:29 ◼   ► And I think the thing that's interesting to me

00:32:32 ◼   ► about the significantly increased, I guess,

00:32:35 ◼   ► doubling of the amount of registers

00:32:37 ◼   ► is that if you're not familiar, registers

00:32:39 ◼   ► are little bits of memory that are basically

00:32:42 ◼   ► on the CPU for all intents and purposes, oftentimes literally.

00:32:45 ◼   ► And so if you need to store something somewhere,

00:32:47 ◼   ► the quickest and easiest place to store that

00:32:49 ◼   ► is in these registers.

00:32:50 ◼   ► And then eventually you can move it off

00:32:51 ◼   ► into other memory elsewhere.

00:32:53 ◼   ► And so having a lot more of these registers

00:32:54 ◼   ► things, like you said, a lot quicker.

00:32:56 ◼   ► Now, how much is a lot?

00:32:57 ◼   ► Maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 10%.

00:33:00 ◼   ► I would tend to agree it's probably not 200%,

00:33:03 ◼   ► but I'm curious to see what's going to be made of that.

00:33:07 ◼   ► And I'm curious to see, just like you said,

00:33:09 ◼   ► what is this really all about deep down inside?

00:33:12 ◼   ► Did you find out if it's really double the number of code

00:33:16 ◼   ► addressable registers, or if they're

00:33:18 ◼   ► talking about rename registers?

00:33:20 ◼   ► I thought it was double the number of registers.

00:33:23 ◼   ► They went like TP4 in the chat, and this sounds right.

00:33:27 ◼   ► 14 to 31 with a hardwired stack pointer

00:33:30 ◼   ► and one other special register that I'm forgetting.

00:33:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, I looked at that thing and I said that,

00:33:36 ◼   ► I don't know anything about the previous ARM instructions,

00:33:38 ◼   ► and just looking at the slides, assume that you do,

00:33:40 ◼   ► but it was like, oh, now the program counter

00:33:42 ◼   ► isn't in a register, I guess it used to be.

00:33:43 ◼   ► Oh, now the stack pointer isn't in a register.

00:33:45 ◼   ► A, stack pointer, and B, yeah, okay, that's good.

00:33:48 ◼   ► And a dedicated zero register, like, yeah.

00:33:51 ◼   ► All sorts of things that give me a vague indirect picture of what the old ARM instruction set

00:33:56 ◼   ► in 32-bit used to be like compared to the new one.

00:33:59 ◼   ► I've heard reports from people on Twitter that the 64-bit instruction set for ARM looks

00:34:04 ◼   ► a lot like MIPS, which was a very classical risk-type thing.

00:34:08 ◼   ► Again, the old instruction's the same size, executing in predictable number of clock cycles

00:34:13 ◼   ► and the whole nine yards.

00:34:15 ◼   ► versus ARM, which looks kind of weird,

00:34:17 ◼   ► but those power-sipping features where

00:34:21 ◼   ► things could be small in variable size

00:34:23 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:34:25 ◼   ► Yeah, so we'll see what 8inTech says

00:34:27 ◼   ► when they dissect it whenever they get their hands on it.

00:34:30 ◼   ► And another easy way, by the way,

00:34:31 ◼   ► before we leave this topic, to get speed boost,

00:34:33 ◼   ► is to just add a bunch more L1 and L2 cache.

00:34:36 ◼   ► That's a cheap way to-- well, it's not cheap.

00:34:39 ◼   ► Well, you know what I mean, but to win benchmarks.

00:34:41 ◼   ► If it couldn't fit in L1, it couldn't fit in L2 cache

00:34:44 ◼   ► before, but now it can. Suddenly you get a double speed up. It's like, "Hey, we're

00:34:48 ◼   ► twice as fast," provided you something that fits in cache.

00:34:51 ◼   ► All right, so any other extraordinarily nerdy bits?

00:34:57 ◼   ► I think it's worth looking at a lot of these things. The CPU is one thing. We saw last

00:35:00 ◼   ► year when the A6 debuted and it used Apple's new Swift architecture. We saw the beginnings

00:35:07 ◼   ► of it there. I think we're seeing Apple do more and more specialized things, maybe

00:35:13 ◼   ► not necessarily primarily, but certainly

00:35:16 ◼   ► secondarily for the purpose of making it harder to copy

00:35:20 ◼   ► or match what they're doing.

00:35:22 ◼   ► Like if you look at a lot of these things,

00:35:24 ◼   ► iOS 7 is a total redesign.

00:35:27 ◼   ► We talked about this back when it was announced and how

00:35:30 ◼   ► a lot of that is going to be not impossible to copy,

00:35:33 ◼   ► but harder for certain hardware, for certain designs,

00:35:36 ◼   ► for certain setups.

00:35:39 ◼   ► You look at things like the crazy camera stuff,

00:35:43 ◼   ► The camera stuff you can copy, because that's just like an app, and Samsung can bundle their

00:35:46 ◼   ► own camera app and do that. But to do something like the fingerprint unlock of not just the

00:35:54 ◼   ► phone, but to use fingerprints to read or to authenticate you to the store to buy things,

00:36:02 ◼   ► that's going to be one thing. You need a lot of integration down the line to make that

00:36:06 ◼   ► happen. And I don't know if Android's going to be able to pull that off. Windows Phone

00:36:08 ◼   ► could.

00:36:09 ◼   ► The cloners can do the crappy clone of that. Here's the crappy clone of fingerprint unlock

00:36:12 ◼   ► in the store.

00:36:13 ◼   ► They make you enter your password, and then they store it off on the side somewhere, and

00:36:17 ◼   ► then they recognize your fingerprint, and then they get the password out of the little

00:36:20 ◼   ► file.

00:36:21 ◼   ► Like, you can do a terrible copy of all these things.

00:36:22 ◼   ► And you say, "Who would make a terrible copy of Apple's thing?

00:36:25 ◼   ► Hmm."

00:36:26 ◼   ► I don't think they're above, like, you know, I mean, doing it the right way, yes, is difficult

00:36:31 ◼   ► to copy.

00:36:32 ◼   ► I'm not sure that he's doing these things to be difficult to copy.

00:36:34 ◼   ► And one instance when you were saying, like, with the OS, it reminds me that Apple—some

00:36:39 ◼   ► Some of Apple's features in iOS 7 are actually difficult for iOS developers to copy.

00:36:43 ◼   ► I'm thinking in particular of the little transparent things that fuzz out the background that slide

00:36:48 ◼   ► up over.

00:36:49 ◼   ► Those are actually very easy to copy.

00:36:50 ◼   ► The interface, it depends on the context.

00:36:53 ◼   ► I've seen a lot of people in the NDA forums discussing this very issue and saying, "We'd

00:36:59 ◼   ► like to be able to have a way to do that kind of filtering that you do in iOS 7," and then

00:37:03 ◼   ► Apple people saying, "There's not yet a public API for that," and then them fighting with

00:37:07 ◼   ► with each other about why there's not yet a public API

00:37:09 ◼   ► for all the things they want to do.

00:37:11 ◼   ► Although you can rip the layer off a toolbar and done.

00:37:16 ◼   ► Yeah, you can do some things, but they're like-- basically,

00:37:18 ◼   ► you'll see an Apple app that will do something.

00:37:20 ◼   ► You'd say, hey, I'd like to do that same thing in my app.

00:37:22 ◼   ► And you'll find out that there's a public API that

00:37:24 ◼   ► does something close to that, but not quite.

00:37:26 ◼   ► And there's no public API to do exactly what they do.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And then you complain.

00:37:30 ◼   ► And it's not because Apple is obstinate.

00:37:32 ◼   ► It's because, technically speaking,

00:37:34 ◼   ► Apple was barely able to do what they're able to do,

00:37:38 ◼   ► and they can't do it in a way that works

00:37:39 ◼   ► in a general purpose API.

00:37:40 ◼   ► They can only do it the crazy cheating way

00:37:42 ◼   ► that they have to do it.

00:37:44 ◼   ► It's true of anything that Apple does.

00:37:46 ◼   ► A lot of times, Apple gets the APIs first.

00:37:48 ◼   ► I think even core text and boring things like that.

00:37:51 ◼   ► Apple gets them first.

00:37:52 ◼   ► They're in Apple's apps first.

00:37:54 ◼   ► You don't get them.

00:37:54 ◼   ► They're private APIs.

00:37:55 ◼   ► And in the Mac days, it's like, well, you could figure it out

00:37:58 ◼   ► and use them anyway, but at your own risk.

00:38:00 ◼   ► But in iOS, it's like, no, you don't get them at all

00:38:03 ◼   ► until or unless Apple decides we can make a general purpose API from this that we're

00:38:07 ◼   ► going to support forever. And if they never can, you never get the API. But in the meantime,

00:38:11 ◼   ► only Apple apps get it, or the OS gets it.

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00:40:25 ◼   ► All right, so I realize there's another bit of nerdery we should probably talk about,

00:40:30 ◼   ► which is the M7.

00:40:31 ◼   ► Wait, did I miss the BMW announcement?

00:40:34 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. Somebody joked—I don't remember who it was now—that Apple's come

00:40:39 ◼   ► out with the M7 and BMW's come out with the i8, so things are totally backwards now.

00:40:44 ◼   ► So we should talk about this M7, which is, I'm going to call it, and I'll probably wrongly

00:40:49 ◼   ► call it a co-processor, but it's kind of like a second chip that sits there and apparently

00:40:54 ◼   ► deals with the accelerometer, and I believe the GPS and a bunch of other motion-related

00:41:00 ◼   ► things.

00:41:01 ◼   ► And the implication, but not statement to my knowledge, was that it will also log a

00:41:07 ◼   ► lot of these events so that the A7 doesn't have to power on and handle them and deal

00:41:12 ◼   ► with them.

00:41:13 ◼   ► then it can potentially fish all these log entries off to some app like a Fitbit app

00:41:19 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:41:21 ◼   ► And it seems like a very interesting play in order to enable some really interesting

00:41:27 ◼   ► more biometric data on the phone.

00:41:30 ◼   ► And somebody, it might have been one of you guys, pointed out, "I wonder if this M7

00:41:34 ◼   ► is going to end up in some other kind of device eventually, like maybe a watch or something

00:41:38 ◼   ► like that."

00:41:39 ◼   ► Do you guys have any thoughts on this?

00:41:40 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the obvious move for the M7.

00:41:42 ◼   ► And also, by the way, for the A7, the buzz about both of these things is other devices

00:41:48 ◼   ► that they could appear in.

00:41:49 ◼   ► M7, obviously, if Apple makes something wearable, you'll be seeing that chip again, or the marketing

00:41:56 ◼   ► label for that chip anyway.

00:41:58 ◼   ► And the A7, 64-bit ARM chip, everyone is always like, "Well, we're going to put an ARM in

00:42:03 ◼   ► the MacBook Air and get 50 hours of battery life out of it," or some crazy thing.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Well, the Airs are already up to a ridiculous amount of battery life with Intel chips in

00:42:11 ◼   ► it.

00:42:12 ◼   ► convinced that there's any need in particular to bring the arm to the air

00:42:17 ◼   ► because I think Intel is coming from the other direction and they haven't yet

00:42:20 ◼   ► met in the middle. The A7 isn't as fast as current MacBook Air CPUs and

00:42:24 ◼   ► the current MacBook Air CPUs are nowhere as power efficient as the A7, but

00:42:29 ◼   ► they're converging on a middle point and wherever they hit each other

00:42:32 ◼   ► look at where that point is and decide is this a viable, you know, can we make a

00:42:37 ◼   ► viable Mac with this amount of processing power? Because if you can't

00:42:40 ◼   ► then you know there's no point in enduring the pain and fat binaries of trying to make an arm-based Mac

00:42:46 ◼   ► but the M7 in

00:42:48 ◼   ► some other device that's you know that you wear seems like a slam dunk

00:42:53 ◼   ► You know we should also point out that it enables

00:42:57 ◼   ► they say it enables things like knowing the difference between you driving and walking and

00:43:02 ◼   ► I'm not really clear why we didn't already know that by way of the GPS or something power hungry like that

00:43:08 ◼   ► And maybe it's just that it doesn't need something power hungry to figure this out.

00:43:11 ◼   ► But that presumably will lead to some interesting use cases that I can't fathom.

00:43:17 ◼   ► But I think the example I saw was that Apple said when you are getting directions somewhere,

00:43:24 ◼   ► let's say you're driving into a metropolitan area and you park your car, but you're not

00:43:28 ◼   ► quite where you need to be, then maps will automatically switch from driving directions

00:43:33 ◼   ► to walking directions once it sees that you've slowed down to the point of walking.

00:43:37 ◼   ► So things like that are pretty cool.

00:43:38 ◼   ► If you're at a red light, that would kind of suck.

00:43:40 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:43:42 ◼   ► Well, I can tell whether you're in the car,

00:43:44 ◼   ► maybe with the vibrations of the butt massaging.

00:43:48 ◼   ► It doesn't vibrate.

00:43:49 ◼   ► These are not features of the M7, obviously.

00:43:52 ◼   ► These are APIs that Apple-- core motion APIs

00:43:55 ◼   ► that Apple's going to expose.

00:43:56 ◼   ► Like you say, Casey, all the chip is doing

00:43:58 ◼   ► is being really low power and writing a bunch of information

00:44:01 ◼   ► out to someplace that when this whole system comes back up,

00:44:04 ◼   ► they can read and interpret it.

00:44:06 ◼   ► The thing that's reading and interpreting them

00:44:07 ◼   ► code that Apple writes that then provide APIs to figure this stuff out. The M7 itself is just,

00:44:12 ◼   ► you know, not... The impressive thing is that it exists, not the implementation of it, because

00:44:17 ◼   ► it's probably, you know, hey, this tiny chip has... I don't even know if it's a separate chip.

00:44:22 ◼   ► Apple presents it as such, but for all we know, it could be on the same package somewhere.

00:44:25 ◼   ► Sits there and does one job and does it well and doesn't have to involve the CPU,

00:44:30 ◼   ► and its whole job is to be there and write stuff down so when the CPU wakes up, it can say, "Oh,

00:44:36 ◼   ► I don't know what was happening because I was asleep, but that guy over there knows,

00:44:39 ◼   ► let me get the list of everything that happened, and let me run a whole bunch of software that

00:44:41 ◼   ► Apple wrote to grind over that data to figure out, okay, driving, doing this or whatever.

00:44:46 ◼   ► And of course, if everything's turned on at the same time, then they're working in concert.

00:44:48 ◼   ► But the key feature is you walk around with your phone in your pocket and you grab your

00:44:53 ◼   ► phone, take it out, open your fitness tracker, and it immediately wakes up, reads all the

00:44:57 ◼   ► historical data, and tells you how many steps you've taken.

00:45:00 ◼   ► Well, and it's also maybe doing a lot of that in hardware or in very, very lightweight software.

00:45:05 ◼   ► So far what we've had, even with the very first iPhone,

00:45:09 ◼   ► we had the accelerometer,

00:45:10 ◼   ► but the data you get from it is raw.

00:45:13 ◼   ► It's just like the current motion acceleration

00:45:18 ◼   ► being put on the phone in three axes, X, Y, Z, that's it.

00:45:21 ◼   ► And then when they added the gyroscope,

00:45:23 ◼   ► then you could get things like the current phone alignment

00:45:25 ◼   ► or attitude, they call it, I think,

00:45:27 ◼   ► which is the angle in space the phone currently is,

00:45:30 ◼   ► and then the compass doesn't work.

00:45:32 ◼   ► So have you ever had a compass that worked?

00:45:34 ◼   ► I haven't.

00:45:35 ◼   ► You have to move it into figure eight pattern.

00:45:37 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:45:38 ◼   ► I'm not sure if you know that.

00:45:39 ◼   ► It never works.

00:45:41 ◼   ► That's an elaborate troll by someone inside Apple to see if they can make people take

00:45:44 ◼   ► their phones and wave them around.

00:45:45 ◼   ► Oh, totally.

00:45:47 ◼   ► So before, even, and Apple has improved the API.

00:45:49 ◼   ► I believe iOS 5 was it, added core motion.

00:45:52 ◼   ► It might have even been 6.

00:45:54 ◼   ► But they improved the API to make this a little bit easier, but you still had to deal with

00:46:00 ◼   ► data for the most part in software, you know, in the full user space code that you were

00:46:05 ◼   ► writing. And so if they can move, if they moved some of that down, which it sounds like

00:46:09 ◼   ► the M7, regardless of what its hardware implementation is, it's something that parses all that raw

00:46:17 ◼   ► data for you in some kind of extremely low power state. And so rather than saying, here,

00:46:23 ◼   ► you know, here's all of the data from 60 hertz for the last six hours, you know, here's like

00:46:29 ◼   ► like this tremendous array of floats that you have to deal with and figure out yourself.

00:46:34 ◼   ► They can, they can shrink that down with some kind of heuristics that are hopefully very

00:46:36 ◼   ► lightweight to say like, all right, just, if you want to know how many steps the user

00:46:41 ◼   ► took, just register for number of steps, tell us when to start and when to stop, and we'll

00:46:45 ◼   ► give you what was there in the middle. And if, if that's really what it does, that's

00:46:50 ◼   ► a massive, not only time saver for developers, but if they do it right, if they've implemented

00:46:56 ◼   ► this in low-level hardware that's very low power, which it sounds like that was the idea,

00:47:01 ◼   ► then this is a whole new class of possibilities that before would have just been not only

00:47:06 ◼   ► way too power hungry, but you wouldn't be able to do them unless you were using GPS

00:47:10 ◼   ► constantly because you wouldn't be able to run in the background that long.

00:47:14 ◼   ► This kind of analysis to FS events in Mac OS X where you have something that's trying

00:47:18 ◼   ► to keep track of everything that happens to the file system, but it's just too much data.

00:47:22 ◼   ► So it massively compresses stuff, it coalesces similar events and periods of time, and it

00:47:26 ◼   ► summarizes, and then it jams it all into a log.

00:47:29 ◼   ► So yeah, this little thing has to be doing, if only for compression purposes, some interpretation

00:47:34 ◼   ► of the data, because you can't store that recorded data for an hour's worth of walking

00:47:40 ◼   ► and if it really wasn't 60 hertz, that's just too much data to be putting somewhere.

00:47:43 ◼   ► So I have to imagine that it's doing some sort of coalescing and compressing and summarization

00:47:48 ◼   ► and interpretation, or even just lowering the sample rate.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Because seriously, your sample rate

00:47:53 ◼   ► doesn't need to be 60 hertz to tell when people are walking.

00:47:57 ◼   ► And then anything up the chain could further massage the data.

00:48:00 ◼   ► But I think it's probably like a storage issue in terms

00:48:02 ◼   ► of who decides to summarize data, who

00:48:05 ◼   ► does the motion smoothing, who does the interpretation.

00:48:08 ◼   ► And they must be doing something down there in the M7,

00:48:11 ◼   ► because otherwise it would just be filling up

00:48:13 ◼   ► this giant buffer full of stuff.

00:48:16 ◼   ► It's funny you bring up coalescing.

00:48:18 ◼   ► and I was going to say a minute ago that this is almost like the year of coalescing for

00:48:21 ◼   ► Apple because we had the timer coalescing in OS X Mavericks and now we have this motion

00:48:27 ◼   ► coalescing and I know Federico is going to be very happy about that.

00:48:31 ◼   ► So in any case, anything else on either of the bits of hardware?

00:48:37 ◼   ► The 5C case we were talking about last week.

00:48:41 ◼   ► Oh yes, yes.

00:48:42 ◼   ► About it, you know.

00:48:43 ◼   ► The hot case.

00:48:44 ◼   ► If they make this, no not that, well I mean first before we get to the thing with the

00:48:47 ◼   ► holes in it. The plastic back of it, you know, it being curved and more comfortable, we also

00:48:51 ◼   ► have from the pictures, but what we can't see in the pictures is what kind of material

00:48:55 ◼   ► is that. And I mentioned last time that if they made it out of a material that's more

00:48:58 ◼   ► grippy and less slippery than, you know, the glass back or the metal thing, then maybe

00:49:04 ◼   ► you wouldn't even need a case on it. And, you know, again, because they're coming in

00:49:07 ◼   ► different colors, who's going to buy a colorful phone and slap a case on it, completely covering

00:49:10 ◼   ► the cover part, the color part rather. So Apple's answer was, we're going to make it

00:49:16 ◼   ► out of a super hard, super glossy material, so forget about it being remotely squishy.

00:49:21 ◼   ► And we're going to sell our own case, made of silicone, my old favorite case material,

00:49:25 ◼   ► because it is squishy, and they're going to solve the problem of, "Okay, why am I going

00:49:29 ◼   ► to put a case over my colored phone by just punching a whole bunch of holes in it?"

00:49:36 ◼   ► Which when I first saw that holes, my first reaction was, "Yeah, I guess that's one solution

00:49:41 ◼   ► to making the case color continue to matter, but I also wondered, like, are they doing

00:49:46 ◼   ► that for heat reasons or something?

00:49:48 ◼   ► Because it just seems like, I mean, it doesn't really make sense that they'd be doing it

00:49:51 ◼   ► for heat reasons over only half of the phone or something, but who the hell?

00:49:54 ◼   ► Otherwise they can't be doing it for heat reasons because there's going to be cases

00:49:57 ◼   ► without holes in them, so it's got to be able to deal with that anyway.

00:50:00 ◼   ► But it is definitely odd, and I love the fact in all of Apple's videos when they showed

00:50:04 ◼   ► this case with the holes in it, no FCC information and no iPhone text was on the back of the

00:50:10 ◼   ► phones.

00:50:11 ◼   ► That's real convenient for your ads, but the real phones have that text there and it looks awkward.

00:50:15 ◼   ► That's not true. One of the videos definitely had it because I backed it. I was watching,

00:50:19 ◼   ► I want to say it might have been the keynote, I was watching it on my TV and I thought to myself,

00:50:24 ◼   ► "Oh look, it doesn't have the H-O-N or whatever it is that shows through." And I actually backed it up,

00:50:29 ◼   ► got off my butt, walked up to the TV because my eyes are terrible, and sure enough, it was there.

00:50:34 ◼   ► And I'm pretty sure this was the keynote.

00:50:36 ◼   ► They had some videos with it without with the text not there very clearly super zoomed in which is a total cheat and not something

00:50:44 ◼   ► I would expect from Apple because they're supposed to design like they idealize things sure like if 3d renders or whatever the heck they're doing

00:50:51 ◼   ► Or you know completely a massage to look real, but it shouldn't be like a racing stuff

00:50:55 ◼   ► You you shouldn't erase the word iPhone because it actually is in the back of the phone

00:50:58 ◼   ► You shouldn't erase the FCC things because they actually are there

00:51:01 ◼   ► so that's a shame and that's strange and I

00:51:06 ◼   ► Don't like I haven't felt any of these things in my hand, but I'm kind of disappointed that it's not squishy

00:51:10 ◼   ► But on the other hand I found from you know from my TPU case which is very shiny and very very smooth

00:51:16 ◼   ► It's not textured like you know like silicone would be it's not fuzzy or anything like that

00:51:20 ◼   ► It's still supplies surprisingly grippy because you get a big contact patch

00:51:24 ◼   ► It's kind of like slicks on a race car you actually do get a big contact patch as long as that contact patch is not

00:51:29 ◼   ► wet

00:51:30 ◼   ► Like slicks in the rain which are bad

00:51:32 ◼   ► Then you actually do get some grippiness, but in terms of

00:51:35 ◼   ► Resting on the the curved arm of a sofa with that shiny back thing. That's not so great

00:51:41 ◼   ► So I'm kind of disappointing they didn't they didn't go with any kind of squishy back

00:51:44 ◼   ► But I kind of understand it as well because if I thought about it for more than a couple minutes

00:51:48 ◼   ► I said how can they make the back of the phone squishy? You would have to have a complete rigid sort of

00:51:53 ◼   ► Inner skeletal structure over which they stretch the squishy stuff and instead they didn't do that

00:51:59 ◼   ► they have the antenna, which is rigid, but it's only around the edge, and the whole back,

00:52:04 ◼   ► its rigidity comes from the fact that they're using the super hard plastic.

00:52:07 ◼   ► Yeah, and the case, to go back a step, the case, I cannot believe that Apple did that,

00:52:13 ◼   ► and if this were any other manufacturer that had done that, the internet would have blown

00:52:19 ◼   ► up ten times worse than it did about how stupid they are, they don't pay attention to detail,

00:52:24 ◼   ► this is ridiculous, this is why Apple's so much better than everyone else, and yet here

00:52:28 ◼   ► is Apple letting "Hun" show through? I just can't believe it.

00:52:32 ◼   ► No, it's French. It's N-O-N. The top of the age has chopped off.

00:52:35 ◼   ► It is the French people saying, "No, Apple, you can't do that."

00:52:41 ◼   ► Realistically speaking, though, it's a judgment call of saying, "Apple knows that no one except

00:52:48 ◼   ► for super nerds are not going to notice this, but all the super nerds rightfully flipped out about

00:52:53 ◼   ► it and will continue to flip out about it." And I don't think the super nerds would buy that case

00:52:56 ◼   ► because I even ignore for now the terrible cutting off of the words. I think it's just

00:53:01 ◼   ► ugly anyway with the little circles over half of the surface.

00:53:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I was going to say, do you think anybody—do you think even one person who is currently

00:53:08 ◼   ► complaining about the Han/Nan, do you think even one of them was actually planning on

00:53:13 ◼   ► buying one of these? Right. Like, if that wasn't there, like,

00:53:15 ◼   ► "Well, I would buy that ugly case if it wasn't for how it cut off the letters." But I don't—

00:53:19 ◼   ► You won't even be buying the 5C. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Like, the 5C,

00:53:23 ◼   ► I've seen people who have held it to say it feels impressive, and if you like the color…

00:53:29 ◼   ► A lot of people, especially people who customize their phone, you can make an interesting phone,

00:53:34 ◼   ► like the yellow one.

00:53:35 ◼   ► But the great thing about the 5C is they all have black faces, right?

00:53:39 ◼   ► I think that's…

00:53:40 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure they all have black faces, so it's an interesting combination of you

00:53:45 ◼   ► can have a black and yellow phone if you're a Georgia Tech fan or something.

00:53:49 ◼   ► I only know those colors because my wife went there.

00:53:50 ◼   ► But whatever your school colors are.

00:53:52 ◼   ► And the cases with the holes in them, though I find it ugly, the color combinations do

00:53:57 ◼   ► give you a lot of options to sort of accessorize.

00:53:59 ◼   ► And I think Apple is sort of giving the people what they want.

00:54:02 ◼   ► They want, you know, sometimes they want cases with rhinestones on them, and they can still

00:54:06 ◼   ► get that, you know, in the aftermarket.

00:54:08 ◼   ► But Apple is giving many more options than just black and white, and I think it's going

00:54:12 ◼   ► to be a net win for them, except for the lint collection thing, because I think even normal

00:54:16 ◼   ► people will notice after a while the amount of lint that's going to collect in those little

00:54:20 ◼   ► circles.

00:54:21 ◼   ► I can confirm yes, they are indeed all black faceplates in the 5C, which is weird because they offer a white back color

00:54:27 ◼   ► But I like that one. I like the white back plate with with the black front. I think that's a cool combination

00:54:32 ◼   ► Mmm. I'm thinking this this is the first time that I've been tempted to get the white phone not the 5C, but the 5s

00:54:40 ◼   ► With the cause of iOS 7 no no the other the real

00:54:44 ◼   ► The white one's still there

00:54:47 ◼   ► Yeah, the silver back white yeah, yeah

00:54:49 ◼   ► Yeah, this has been the first time I've attempted to get that because...

00:54:52 ◼   ► Wait, are we talking about gorillas?

00:54:54 ◼   ► I'm just going to cut that out and pretend like you didn't see it.

00:54:56 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:54:58 ◼   ► You know, because iOS 7 is so white and light, and like I'm finding, as I'm designing my own app,

00:55:05 ◼   ► and as I'm seeing what Apple has done with their apps, the default before was everything was just dark.

00:55:11 ◼   ► Black, you know, textured, like it was like you were sitting like, you know, in a bar.

00:55:16 ◼   ► everything's black and leather and everything like that. Well, weird bar. I'll stop there.

00:55:23 ◼   ► But it's, you know, imagine, by the way, John, in this picture on the 5C site, the top of

00:55:31 ◼   ► the N is clearly not fully cut off and it looks like Han. Anyway, you know, iOS 7, I

00:55:39 ◼   ► think white is in style now. It's, before it was, you know, people would joke that it

00:55:45 ◼   ► it was like, you know, for women or something else,

00:55:48 ◼   ► probably horribly insensitive.

00:55:50 ◼   ► But it's just the style now.

00:55:52 ◼   ► Most of the iPods ever sold, or the original ones at least,

00:55:56 ◼   ► those were all white.

00:55:58 ◼   ► You know, I think there are eras where

00:56:01 ◼   ► this is going to be in fashion, and this is one of them.

00:56:03 ◼   ► And having everything be white, like, my whole app design

00:56:07 ◼   ► is white-based, because iOS 7 is white-based,

00:56:10 ◼   ► and it looks really good.

00:56:11 ◼   ► Like, it's kind of refreshing.

00:56:12 ◼   ► It makes it look newer.

00:56:13 ◼   ► It makes it look nice and modern.

00:56:15 ◼   ► and to put all that on a phone with a black face plate,

00:56:18 ◼   ► I think kind of weakens it,

00:56:20 ◼   ► or doesn't take advantage of the new style.

00:56:24 ◼   ► - I think you'll have to see it in action to make that,

00:56:28 ◼   ► I mean, you're seeing it in action, but I haven't yet,

00:56:30 ◼   ► because I fully plan to put a black background,

00:56:32 ◼   ► as I always have on all my iOS devices, on iOS 7.

00:56:35 ◼   ► - You know, I did that.

00:56:35 ◼   ► I did that for my first few,

00:56:37 ◼   ► probably my first month using it.

00:56:39 ◼   ► I had a solid black background,

00:56:40 ◼   ► and I turned off the parallax and everything,

00:56:42 ◼   ► just solid black background.

00:56:43 ◼   ► I did that, but it was OK, and it worked for a while.

00:56:47 ◼   ► But then when I was picking colors and an icon for my app,

00:56:52 ◼   ► I decided, let me put the phone in a more stock configuration

00:56:55 ◼   ► so I could see how most people are likely to see

00:56:58 ◼   ► the app on the home screen.

00:57:00 ◼   ► And so I switched over to-- there's

00:57:04 ◼   ► a stone graphite-looking wallpaper.

00:57:06 ◼   ► It's like a stone texture.

00:57:09 ◼   ► There was that, and I was like, you know,

00:57:12 ◼   ► I'll live with it light for a while.

00:57:13 ◼   ► Now I like it light.

00:57:14 ◼   ► Now I feel like going back to all black would be kind of retro in a bad way.

00:57:20 ◼   ► Just like kind of going backwards in time, like going back and using a Sega Saturn.

00:57:25 ◼   ► You know, I have never wanted a white iPhone.

00:57:27 ◼   ► I do not understand the appeal, but if that's what makes you happy, then feel free.

00:57:32 ◼   ► And I should add, the last time I said I just didn't understand the appeal of something,

00:57:37 ◼   ► it was a BMW, and we all saw how that ended up.

00:57:40 ◼   ► Don't forget Apple products before that.

00:57:42 ◼   ► Apple products before that. So yeah, I'm sure I'm doomed to drive a 911 with my white iPhone

00:57:48 ◼   ► sometime in the future. But regardless, I don't know, I never understood the white iPhone thing

00:57:53 ◼   ► personally. John, if you had an iPhone, what would you have? I don't know. I've always liked how the

00:58:02 ◼   ► white ones look as devices, especially being an old school Apple guy. I really love the people who

00:58:08 ◼   ► found a tiny rainbow-colored Apple sticker and stuck it on the back of their white iPhone,

00:58:12 ◼   ► because back in the days of the Snow White design language of the Mac SE30, my favorite

00:58:18 ◼   ► old Mac, and the 2ci and all those things, where there was Apple Platinum with slats

00:58:22 ◼   ► in it and everything, if you had envisioned a futuristic Apple phone, it would be platinum

00:58:29 ◼   ► or white and have a rainbow-colored Apple logo on it.

00:58:31 ◼   ► So I think those things look great, except for, as I mentioned in the past show, the

00:58:35 ◼   ► fact that, okay, it's not a piece of art, it's actually a device with a screen that

00:58:38 ◼   ► have to use and the white on that screen is never going to be, or not never, but

00:58:41 ◼   ► certainly with current LCD technologies is not as white as actual real live

00:58:46 ◼   ► white reflective surface that's next to it. So in any kind of bright light I think

00:58:52 ◼   ► a white iOS device makes the screen look worse and that's why I always go for

00:58:56 ◼   ► black faceplate. Like that's why I think the 5C is so great because they all

00:59:00 ◼   ► have black faceplates even the one with the white background so you can get and

00:59:03 ◼   ► really the 5C colors do not appeal to me except for maybe the yellow if I was

00:59:07 ◼   ► really into something yellow like a sports team or something. But the white one is the

00:59:13 ◼   ► only one that could be considered neutral, but it still has a black face, so thumbs up.

00:59:17 ◼   ► So fashion-wise, although I do like most of the white devices and I do like the silver

00:59:22 ◼   ► back on that thing, pragmatically I think I'd still prefer a black face to make the

00:59:27 ◼   ► screen look better in more conditions.

00:59:28 ◼   ► I will say too, I have a white iPad mini because after buying the iPhone 5 in its very dark

00:59:34 ◼   ► black color last year, I learned after having it and getting it that the black isn't that

00:59:41 ◼   ► good. It's too dark. I've said that before on this show. I'm not going to go into it

00:59:45 ◼   ► again. But the iPhone 5's black was just too dark, and I don't think it looks good.

00:59:50 ◼   ► And so when the iPad mini took the exact same design options, basically, I said, "No way

00:59:55 ◼   ► I'm getting that again. I'll get the white." And I like it. It looks really nice. I got

00:59:59 ◼   ► the little red crappy Apple cover with it, and it looks really good. It's a nice pairing.

01:00:03 ◼   ► And I think certainly on future iPads I'll do that.

01:00:06 ◼   ► The issue you raised, John,

01:00:07 ◼   ► I have it out here with me right now.

01:00:09 ◼   ► The issue you raise about the white of the faceplate

01:00:12 ◼   ► not matching the color or the brightness

01:00:16 ◼   ► of the white on the screen, that's a very real issue.

01:00:19 ◼   ► Right now I'm sitting in a room painted red at night

01:00:22 ◼   ► lit by a warm temperature LED bulb.

01:00:24 ◼   ► So the light in the room is very yellowish.

01:00:26 ◼   ► And the faceplate very clearly looks yellowish,

01:00:30 ◼   ► like a warm tint.

01:00:31 ◼   ► and the screen of course is relatively neutral and so the screen is a very

01:00:35 ◼   ► like you know bright cool

01:00:37 ◼   ► more you know closer to five thousand k

01:00:38 ◼   ► kinda white

01:00:40 ◼   ► so there is that imbalance right now but it doesn't look bad

01:00:43 ◼   ► doesn't look great if you like look at it and pay attention to it most of the time you don't pay

01:00:46 ◼   ► attention to it. I was thinking more in terms of brightness where as you get it

01:00:49 ◼   ► like at night time sure it looks fine because then the white face becomes basically a black face

01:00:52 ◼   ► because the source of light is the screen but out in bright sunlight yeah they all look crappy

01:00:56 ◼   ► out in black sunlight but white ones, bright sunlight but white ones look crappier because it

01:00:59 ◼   ► makes it look like

01:01:00 ◼   ► boy, can't the screen-- the screen really can't keep up.

01:01:03 ◼   ► Like, you don't realize how dim current LCDs are until you

01:01:05 ◼   ► actually bring them out to direct sunlight, which

01:01:07 ◼   ► is why people love reflective screens like the Kindle,

01:01:09 ◼   ► right?

01:01:09 ◼   ► Once you get out into sunlight, that backlight

01:01:11 ◼   ► is just totally overpowered.

01:01:12 ◼   ► And you thought, boy, this thing was so bright,

01:01:14 ◼   ► it was blinding me when I was inside my house

01:01:16 ◼   ► or laying in my bed or whatever at night.

01:01:18 ◼   ► But once you go out into bright sunlight,

01:01:19 ◼   ► it is totally overpowered.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And that type of underpowered backlight

01:01:24 ◼   ► in the face of bright light of any kind, indoors or outdoors,

01:01:28 ◼   ► really benefits from being next to black.

01:01:31 ◼   ► It needs all the help it can get,

01:01:32 ◼   ► because colors look bright, you know,

01:01:33 ◼   ► white will look brighter when it's next to a dark color.

01:01:35 ◼   ► So it's an optical illusion, saying like,

01:01:37 ◼   ► "I will make my screen look brighter to you

01:01:39 ◼   ► "because it's next to a black thing."

01:01:41 ◼   ► When you put it next to a white thing,

01:01:42 ◼   ► it's the worst possible condition.

01:01:44 ◼   ► It's highlighting all the weaknesses of the screen.

01:01:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I agree that it's a real issue,

01:01:49 ◼   ► but I disagree how much it's actually noticeable

01:01:51 ◼   ► in practice.

01:01:52 ◼   ► - Well, you're not John Siracusa.

01:01:53 ◼   ► - That's true. (laughs)

01:01:54 ◼   ► - It also depends on when you use your thing most.

01:01:56 ◼   ► If you use it mostly indoors or use it mostly in dim conditions, then it doesn't matter.

01:02:00 ◼   ► It doesn't bother a lot of people.

01:02:02 ◼   ► For me, it bothers me because I feel like it's just—it also distracts me visually.

01:02:07 ◼   ► My eyes would be drawn more to the outer—I just want a black frame.

01:02:10 ◼   ► It's like getting a TV.

01:02:11 ◼   ► I want a black frame around my TV as well.

01:02:14 ◼   ► You don't want a white or a shiny frame or anything that's going to draw your eye around

01:02:17 ◼   ► the TV because the screen is supposed to be the star, not the other thing.

01:02:21 ◼   ► The only way I would go with the white face is when we finally get the screen technology.

01:02:23 ◼   ► There really is like they could they could match it so that the white is exactly the same some sort of combination of reflective emissive screen

01:02:30 ◼   ► In some distant future that really does look the same then fine get the whole thing white

01:02:34 ◼   ► All right anything else on hardware, I'd like to talk about the actual presentation the keynote briefly, but anything else on the hardware nope

01:02:43 ◼   ► All right, so I I feel like Tim did not do a particularly good job

01:02:49 ◼   ► He stumbled a lot and seemed really nervous, which is weird because usually he's extremely not nervous

01:02:56 ◼   ► And he's very deliberate which is something. I wish I was a little better with

01:03:00 ◼   ► He'll oftentimes lead leave long pauses if he's thinking something through or perhaps trying to remember the next line

01:03:06 ◼   ► I don't know how scripted these things are and

01:03:08 ◼   ► He's always very deliberate and I felt like this time he didn't feel that way he felt

01:03:15 ◼   ► like it seemed as though he felt like he was out of his element and

01:03:19 ◼   ► Conversely, Craig Federighi, who we've said for a while now has actually turned into one

01:03:22 ◼   ► heck of a great presenter.

01:03:25 ◼   ► As he did in the WWDC this year, he absolutely killed it again.

01:03:30 ◼   ► And I was very confused by Tim's apparent confusion.

01:03:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:03:35 ◼   ► Did you guys notice that as well?

01:03:36 ◼   ► Am I the only one?

01:03:37 ◼   ► Well, I mean, he did call it a—did he call Keynote a spreadsheet or Pages a spreadsheet?

01:03:42 ◼   ► Did he call something a spreadsheet?

01:03:43 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:03:44 ◼   ► Well, who cares?

01:03:45 ◼   ► I mean, Schiller called FireWire ports Thunderbolt or vice versa.

01:03:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

01:03:48 ◼   ► That's the—people misspeak. We of all people know better than anyone. The vibe I got from him

01:03:54 ◼   ► was that he seemed giddy and happy, that he was excited that these products were going to be

01:04:00 ◼   ► released. Did that affect his performance? Maybe he was—he didn't care. He was just happy. "Boy,

01:04:06 ◼   ► I can't wait till these things get—" He seemed very smiley to me. He was really happy about these

01:04:11 ◼   ► products, really happy that they're going to be out there. He wasn't the serious, deliberate Tim

01:04:17 ◼   ► Cook that we'd seen before explaining like, you know, how only Apple could do this and

01:04:23 ◼   ► what Apple's philosophy is or whatever, but I think that was okay.

01:04:26 ◼   ► Like, you know, he's more of an emcee in these things anyway, and, you know, Schiller was

01:04:30 ◼   ► Schiller and Federighi did his thing perfectly well.

01:04:34 ◼   ► So I don't mind his stumbling and missteps or whatever because I think it was not—I

01:04:41 ◼   ► didn't get the nervous vibe from him.

01:04:42 ◼   ► I didn't get the "I'm really nervous because I'm worried about what we're going to announce."

01:04:47 ◼   ► I got the I'm excited about these products and maybe I'll trip over myself in the excitement.

01:04:51 ◼   ► And what'd you think Marco? Well, honestly, I skipped most of Tim's sections when I was watching the video.

01:04:57 ◼   ► Well, just because Tim doesn't really say a lot that's like new or interesting, especially the beginning half.

01:05:03 ◼   ► I skipped over that entire thing.

01:05:04 ◼   ► I just went right to the right to the part of his introduction because I was watching the live blogs, you know,

01:05:07 ◼   ► I knew roughly what he said and what he was talking about and that was all I really needed from this event.

01:05:11 ◼   ► But, uh,

01:05:13 ◼   ► so I can't really comment on that except that I

01:05:16 ◼   ► I always, like, when you're watching the keynote videos on your computer, if you open it up in QuickTime,

01:05:22 ◼   ► you can actually, you get like a 2x control, you get like a little speed control that you can adjust.

01:05:27 ◼   ► And I always put Tim on like 2 or 3x because he just speaks so slowly, I have to get through it in a reasonable amount of time.

01:05:34 ◼   ► So I really can't judge for sure in this case because I skipped most of what he said,

01:05:41 ◼   ► and the parts I didn't skip I played very quickly because I was bored.

01:05:45 ◼   ► Usually, I liked Tim a little bit more.

01:05:49 ◼   ► I just think in this keynote, there

01:05:51 ◼   ► wasn't a whole lot for him to say

01:05:53 ◼   ► that was very interesting.

01:05:55 ◼   ► Like, I don't think it's necessarily his fault.

01:05:57 ◼   ► I just think there wasn't a whole lot for him to say--

01:06:00 ◼   ► that there wasn't a whole lot for any of them to say, really.

01:06:03 ◼   ► Here's some new iPhones.

01:06:04 ◼   ► They're really good in some ways and really unsurprising

01:06:07 ◼   ► and boring in others.

01:06:08 ◼   ► And it's almost all exactly what you all expect.

01:06:11 ◼   ► You've all already seen these things on rumor sites.

01:06:14 ◼   ► here you go." There wasn't a whole lot of room in this event to really get that

01:06:20 ◼   ► interesting by the presenters. They didn't drag it out. It was a pretty

01:06:25 ◼   ► tidy presentation. It was pretty much right on the hour. I think it was fine. There was no

01:06:31 ◼   ► showmanship required for this. They weren't revealing iOS 7 for the first time. There's

01:06:35 ◼   ► a time and a place for that type of thing, and this was just more of let it go out the door.

01:06:41 ◼   ► Steve Jobs would have been flipping out about how much was known about these things ahead

01:06:46 ◼   ► of time, but it seems like the current crew was like, "Yeah, supply chain's going to

01:06:50 ◼   ► leak.

01:06:51 ◼   ► It's going to happen.

01:06:52 ◼   ► What can we do?"

01:06:53 ◼   ► I can't tell if people are still seething back there or if it was all Jobs' secrecy

01:06:58 ◼   ► personality that, you know…

01:07:00 ◼   ► Tim said, "Oh, we're doubling down on secrecy," and people make fun of that.

01:07:05 ◼   ► It was like, "Well, good job," because we knew everything about these phones, basically.

01:07:08 ◼   ► But I'm assuming what he meant was whatever new product category thing that they release,

01:07:14 ◼   ► I'm assuming we won't have complete video of people playing with that ahead of time.

01:07:19 ◼   ► And in fact, we don't even know what they're doing.

01:07:20 ◼   ► Are they making a TV set or are they not?

01:07:22 ◼   ► Are they making a watch?

01:07:23 ◼   ► Are they making a nose ring?

01:07:24 ◼   ► We don't know.

01:07:25 ◼   ► That type of secrecy, so far, assuming any of those things have any reality behind them,

01:07:32 ◼   ► so far Apple really has doubled down on secrecy because we have no idea what they're doing

01:07:35 ◼   ► in TV that we haven't already seen. And we have no idea if they're making a watch.

01:07:38 ◼   ► It's just a bunch of rumors. Now, as we get closer, we'll see if it really holds.

01:07:42 ◼   ► But I'm not ready to say that his doubling down secrecy thing was a total failure because

01:07:47 ◼   ► I think that Apple could still potentially have secrets that it's kept 100 percent.

01:07:53 ◼   ► Nothing from those things. We just have speculation and rumors. We have no blurry pictures. We

01:07:58 ◼   ► have no videos of people playing with cases or anything like that.

01:08:03 ◼   ► And yeah, we don't even know what they're doing.

01:08:04 ◼   ► You're right.

01:08:05 ◼   ► It's like even when the iPad was about to come out, everyone had pretty good, you know,

01:08:10 ◼   ► pretty good rumors saying Apple is doing a tablet specifically.

01:08:13 ◼   ► Like it is a tablet, it will run iOS, and it will come out roughly around this time.

01:08:18 ◼   ► And those are all that ended up being correct.

01:08:21 ◼   ► You know, to have, if they are indeed very close to launching a new category, which we

01:08:27 ◼   ► don't really know, but if they're really close to launching a new product category, yeah,

01:08:31 ◼   ► you're right.

01:08:32 ◼   ► keeping it secret. And there's also a massive number of important product details that we

01:08:39 ◼   ► know are coming soon. Like, one of the biggest is whether the iPad mini will have a retina

01:08:43 ◼   ► version this fall. That's a major product detail, and we don't know the answer to that

01:08:47 ◼   ► yet. Everyone's all over the place with the predictions and the rumors and the BS analyst

01:08:51 ◼   ► and all these things. So there's that, there's whether there's going to be retina displays,

01:08:55 ◼   ► retina iMacs, what the heck's happening to the MacBook Pro line, when those are going

01:08:59 ◼   ► to be updated and what they will have in them, like the Mac Pro release, when it's actually

01:09:03 ◼   ► going to happen, what will cost.

01:09:04 ◼   ► Well, the Mac Pro itself, they totally kept that one under wraps.

01:09:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:09:08 ◼   ► We didn't even know if they were going to discontinue the computer line.

01:09:11 ◼   ► Nobody had spy shots of a black garbage can.

01:09:13 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:09:14 ◼   ► So that's why I feel like the phone is always an exception, and the iPad a little bit.

01:09:19 ◼   ► It's an exception because they just have to make so many of these things.

01:09:23 ◼   ► And for them to say, "You can buy this next week," they had to have been producing them

01:09:29 ◼   ► for a while already, and they had to have been testing and producing parts for a while

01:09:33 ◼   ► before that. And they're making these things in such ridiculous quantities. So many suppliers

01:09:40 ◼   ► are involved. That's why the phones always leak, and a little bit of the iPads too. That's

01:09:44 ◼   ► why they always leak in advance now, because they're just making so many of them. Too many

01:09:48 ◼   ► people are involved and they can't control them all. The other products, the Macs in

01:09:52 ◼   ► particular, just don't sell anywhere near those kind of volumes, and so it's easier

01:09:56 ◼   ► for them to keep those things secret. And certainly a new product category probably

01:10:01 ◼   ► falls under that same protection.

01:10:05 ◼   ► Well depending on what it is, I suppose, if it's something that's as universally desired

01:10:09 ◼   ► as an iPhone, then they're going to need to make a gazillion of those too. Although I

01:10:13 ◼   ► guess it's a harder thing to bet on before you've even announced it to anyone.

01:10:17 ◼   ► Right, and maybe the very first version won't be that successful. I mean the very first

01:10:20 ◼   ► iPad was not a massive blockbuster hit. It sold more than anyone thought, but it didn't

01:10:25 ◼   ► sell as much as the iPhone still doesn't.

01:10:27 ◼   ► Yeah, the iPhone is the best example.

01:10:30 ◼   ► The very first version of the iPhone was not selling that many.

01:10:34 ◼   ► It was a slow ramp up.

01:10:35 ◼   ► So whatever thing they come out with, this watch or television, they'll have time to

01:10:39 ◼   ► ramp up manufacturing.

01:10:41 ◼   ► As someone in the chat room said, the easy way to do it is what they did with the iPhone,

01:10:44 ◼   ► which is secrecy behind the iPhone.

01:10:47 ◼   ► No one had any idea what it was going to look like, but we all know they were making a phone.

01:10:51 ◼   ► Just announce it six months before it ships, like they did with the Mac Pro, like they

01:10:54 ◼   ► did with the iPhone.

01:10:55 ◼   ► six months or whatever it was, because then you haven't started ramping manufacturing

01:10:59 ◼   ► yet and there aren't a million of these things shipping around the world and you have a big

01:11:02 ◼   ► lead dime.

01:11:03 ◼   ► They did it with the iPhone because the FCC, clearing the FCC in the US would require pictures

01:11:10 ◼   ► of the device and everything like that, so it was going to be spoiled anyway, so they

01:11:12 ◼   ► had to pre-announce it, which is fine.

01:11:14 ◼   ► And the Mac Pro, they pre-announced it because they'd already made it wait God knows how

01:11:17 ◼   ► long and we were going to flip out.

01:11:19 ◼   ► And so they were like, "All right, here you go.

01:11:21 ◼   ► We're actually making one.

01:11:22 ◼   ► You can't have it now, but don't worry.

01:11:24 ◼   ► it's not dead, and they needed to do that messaging-wise.

01:11:27 ◼   ► And for new category product, if there's some sort of FCC stuff, maybe they have to pre-announce

01:11:32 ◼   ► that too, but I don't know if there is going to.

01:11:35 ◼   ► I don't know what the requirements are for fitness trackery things that you wear or for

01:11:40 ◼   ► television sets.

01:11:41 ◼   ► I don't think either one of those things is probably going to have its own LTE, 3G, whatever

01:11:47 ◼   ► connection, so they're probably okay.

01:11:50 ◼   ► All right, you want to wrap it up?

01:11:53 ◼   ► Yeah, that's fine, unless you wanted to do some late follow-up, which we can always

01:11:57 ◼   ► say for the next show.

01:11:58 ◼   ► Follow-up comes at the front of the show, Casey.

01:12:00 ◼   ► Well, that's why it was late follow-up, John.

01:12:02 ◼   ► Late.

01:12:03 ◼   ► You can't just put a modifier in a word and change it.

01:12:06 ◼   ► That works.

01:12:07 ◼   ► Yes, we should end the show.

01:12:09 ◼   ► All right.

01:12:11 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, MailRoute and Squarespace, and we'll see

01:12:14 ◼   ► you next week.

01:12:16 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:12:22 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:12:28 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:12:33 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:12:38 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:12:43 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:12:52 ◼   ► So that's Kasey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:12:57 ◼   ► E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse

01:13:04 ◼   ► It's accidental (it's accidental)

01:13:07 ◼   ► They didn't mean to, accidental (accidental)

01:13:12 ◼   ► Tech Podcast, so long

01:13:17 ◼   ► We have the more important issue in the tail end here.

01:13:21 ◼   ► Mark, do you see the two links I put in the Skype chat?

01:13:24 ◼   ► Let's see.

01:13:25 ◼   ► Are we talking about the Han versus Nan?

01:13:28 ◼   ► Yes.

01:13:29 ◼   ► See, there's enough of that H shaft, I guess.

01:13:33 ◼   ► There's enough of that.

01:13:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:13:35 ◼   ► What's the typographical term?

01:13:38 ◼   ► The yellow and green one shows more of the stem of the H than there is a stem on the

01:13:44 ◼   ► N.

01:13:45 ◼   ► one shows pretty much equal amounts of stem above the H and the N. And as we know, this

01:13:51 ◼   ► case is not like a precision aligned. Like that amount of motion can clearly be, you

01:13:56 ◼   ► know, from just shifting the case around a little bit. So I still say N-O-N because the

01:14:01 ◼   ► amount of extra stem that you're going to get above the N is so minuscule and may actually

01:14:06 ◼   ► be non-existent. So N-O-N is my take and the white one supports my theory. They're super

01:14:11 ◼   ► super zoomed in, probably artificially rendered yellow and green one does show a tiny bit

01:14:17 ◼   ► more stem on that H.

01:14:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

01:14:21 ◼   ► I think...

01:14:22 ◼   ► Take out Photoshop and draw a horizontal line across the N-O-N and the white one, you'll

01:14:25 ◼   ► see.

01:14:26 ◼   ► I would say the white one is a shadow.

01:14:27 ◼   ► Like, it's shadow covering that part and then on the...

01:14:30 ◼   ► We'll see.

01:14:31 ◼   ► Well, now you have to buy one with that case.

01:14:34 ◼   ► There's no way I'm buying that.

01:14:36 ◼   ► It's silicone, so it stretches, so you can just move your thumb and say, "See?

01:14:39 ◼   ► Now it's covering it."

01:14:40 ◼   ► Now it's coming.

01:14:41 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:14:42 ◼   ► That's gracious.

01:14:43 ◼   ► By the way, real-time follow-up, Marco, I think you're thinking of a sender, apparently.

01:14:47 ◼   ► Yes.

01:14:48 ◼   ► Okay.

01:14:49 ◼   ► I know de-senders are the things that break the baseline, but yeah.

01:14:54 ◼   ► All right.

01:14:55 ◼   ► Anyway, Shaft is better.

01:14:56 ◼   ► You want to talk about this USB 3.0 micro-connector?

01:14:59 ◼   ► I actually have one of these things.

01:15:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I have one too.

01:15:03 ◼   ► It's on my bus-powered one-terabyte drive.

01:15:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I have a card reader that uses—

01:15:07 ◼   ► Yeah, why is this a thing right now?

01:15:09 ◼   ► We've known about this.

01:15:10 ◼   ► I guess people who don't either buy a lot of accessories or don't keep up with the umpteen

01:15:15 ◼   ► different USB connectors think this is a new thing.

01:15:18 ◼   ► The story was this will be coming to your Android phone, which may or may not be true

01:15:22 ◼   ► and whatever, and maybe it's more embarrassing because it's such a relatively large connector

01:15:27 ◼   ► for a phone.

01:15:29 ◼   ► But it's got one thing over regular, you know, the regular whatever it is, type B, I think,

01:15:35 ◼   ► the flat rectangular one, is that at least it's externally asymmetrical.

01:15:38 ◼   ► At least we can give it that.

01:15:41 ◼   ► But I mean, for mine, because it's on a card reader, I actually use it frequently.

01:15:46 ◼   ► And it is really hard to insert or remove that cable.

01:15:48 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's just mine, and maybe the socket on my card reader isn't

01:15:52 ◼   ► that well made, but it's really kind of a b*tch to plug that in.

01:15:57 ◼   ► And I always think I'm breaking it.

01:16:00 ◼   ► It's that bad.

01:16:01 ◼   ► Yeah, these are no Lightning connectors.

01:16:03 ◼   ► Lightning connector is genius both because it can be plugged in either way and there's

01:16:06 ◼   ► and also because it inverts the normal relationship of connectors, which is a bent piece of metal like into like a not a tube

01:16:13 ◼   ► But like you know hollow cylinder and then change the shape of that so it's got this

01:16:17 ◼   ► Flimsy metal wall surrounding this internal thing where the pins are where it lightning says no, we're going to make a solid metal

01:16:23 ◼   ► Flange and put our contacts on top of it and anything with the flimsy metal wall

01:16:29 ◼   ► Especially as you shrink it down it just becomes ridiculous because lots of micro USB connectors are externally asymmetrical

01:16:34 ◼   ► But just barely like you have to squint at it to get the little trapezoid on your you know some of them are just

01:16:39 ◼   ► microscopic like the one

01:16:41 ◼   ► My new camera has whatever the super teeny tiny USB thing is and it's trapezoid shaped

01:16:46 ◼   ► but you you can't barely feel it with your fingers and you have to really squint to see it and you have to make sure

01:16:52 ◼   ► you put it in the right way, and then you're shoving a

01:16:54 ◼   ► Little you know ring of metal into another ring of flimsy metal

01:16:59 ◼   ► It's much more satisfying to stick the solid metal

01:17:02 ◼   ► lightning connector to something. So Apple's connector is way better here.

01:17:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree that the USB micro connector is, even the 2.0 one is awful. I mean, it's

01:17:13 ◼   ► every time, because it's on almost every camera these days, and it's on every Kindle, it's

01:17:16 ◼   ► on a lot of devices now. And yeah, I always have to look very carefully to see what direction

01:17:22 ◼   ► it goes in, and I get it wrong half the time. It's almost, or even more, I would say it's

01:17:26 ◼   ► almost as hard to plug in as a VGA cable.

01:17:31 ◼   ► Like those, I always got VGA cables backwards.

01:17:34 ◼   ► Even I would look, and then I would not quite see it right

01:17:37 ◼   ► and still try to plug it in backwards.

01:17:39 ◼   ► - Oh, VGA never bothered me, but DVI to this day,

01:17:41 ◼   ► I always get backwards every single time.

01:17:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, DVI, you gotta look for the cross.

01:17:45 ◼   ► Or, well, if it's not an iCable,

01:17:46 ◼   ► then you have like the dash, but even then,

01:17:49 ◼   ► I still mess that up too.

01:17:50 ◼   ► Although nothing, I mean, USB, regular USB-A cables,

01:17:54 ◼   ► those mess me up, because they're ridiculous too.

01:17:56 ◼   ► I've said on past shows, if it's your job to design a connector, there are very few axes on

01:18:03 ◼   ► which you can excel. You would think, "I want to be a good connector designer." What do you even

01:18:08 ◼   ► have to think about except these exact very issues? There's not an entire world of possibilities.

01:18:12 ◼   ► There's reliability, there's fulfilling the spec, and there's, "I've got to plug it in and unplug

01:18:18 ◼   ► it all the time." Don't make that a pain in the butt. That's what your job is. You're a

01:18:22 ◼   ► connector designer. I don't know how these people sleep at night. Like, I sure did a

01:18:28 ◼   ► good job designing that connector, didn't I? How? How are you measuring yourself? How

01:18:32 ◼   ► are you deciding that you did a good job? I hope they suffer their entire lives just

01:18:36 ◼   ► getting their connections wrong and fumbling with their cameras and not being able to...

01:18:40 ◼   ► Like, then they must say, "Boy, I suck at my job."

01:18:43 ◼   ► I'm sure that's what they're all going through. Keep in mind, Apple has two massive luxuries

01:18:48 ◼   ► that most connector designers don't, which, well, I don't know how big this field is,

01:18:54 ◼   ► but they have two huge luxuries. They don't have to worry that much about cost, and they

01:18:59 ◼   ► can completely break backwards compatibility. And a third, I guess, is that they're kind

01:19:05 ◼   ► of a dictatorship in that they don't have to work on some committee and please 16 different

01:19:11 ◼   ► companies who are all trying to make the same connectors as you for the next 10 years and

01:19:16 ◼   ► do all that stuff. They can just say, they can just decree, "This is what's best.

01:19:21 ◼   ► We're going to do it. We don't care what you think, and we don't care what it costs you."

01:19:25 ◼   ► And that's it. Yeah, cost has to be the biggest one, but I still think at this point,

01:19:30 ◼   ► you should still throw in the criteria of, "Oh, and by the way, it should be impossible to put

01:19:36 ◼   ► in the wrong way and very clear which way it's supposed to go." And your job is to make that,

01:19:42 ◼   ► also make it cheap. Like, yes, make it reliable, make it a good connector to use, and also make it

01:19:47 ◼   ► cheap. And I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility. Granted, maybe you can't make

01:19:50 ◼   ► something as beautiful and precious as the Lightning connector, but surely we can do better

01:19:55 ◼   ► than these crazy USB things. Like, you know, even if you just, like the cost thing is like,

01:20:01 ◼   ► "Oh, we can't have it be reversible because that makes it so much more expensive for the devices,

01:20:07 ◼   ► because now they have to handle it being both ways." I think we can overcome that. I think the

01:20:11 ◼   ► The universe of ethernet cables being able to detect whether it's a crossover cable or

01:20:14 ◼   ► not, like we crossed that hurdle.

01:20:16 ◼   ► Now we don't have to deal with cross…

01:20:18 ◼   ► Even the super cheap crappy PCs have that.

01:20:20 ◼   ► So it's possible.

01:20:21 ◼   ► It can be done.

01:20:22 ◼   ► It just takes just a little tiny bit of effort.

01:20:26 ◼   ► We can make USB connectors that are impossible to put in the wrong way without breaking the

01:20:31 ◼   ► bank.

01:20:32 ◼   ► Like they're being penny-wise pound foolish.

01:20:34 ◼   ► Oh, how's the review?

01:20:36 ◼   ► Any update?

01:20:37 ◼   ► I was so excited today through Twitter.

01:20:39 ◼   ► someone directed me to the dev forums, which gave me a solution to getting offline dictation

01:20:45 ◼   ► working.

01:20:46 ◼   ► You had to go there to get that working?

01:20:47 ◼   ► I didn't have to, I was directed there by a helpful person on Twitter.

01:20:52 ◼   ► You wouldn't think, "Okay, I've got DP7, but this feature doesn't work.

01:20:56 ◼   ► Let me search the dev forums, see if there's a way I can make it work."

01:20:59 ◼   ► And sure enough, there was.

01:21:03 ◼   ► I'm assuming it was a bad updater or something, but it just involved making a symlink to a

01:21:06 ◼   ► framework or something.

01:21:07 ◼   ► Because it's an XPC thing, and the XPC thing

01:21:09 ◼   ► couldn't find the thing that it was executing.

01:21:10 ◼   ► So you just make a SimLink, and then it works suddenly.

01:21:13 ◼   ► So I was happy to see that this is some sort of packaging

01:21:17 ◼   ► and installer problem and not a technical problem.

01:21:22 ◼   ► The code was there.

01:21:23 ◼   ► The code actually does work.

01:21:24 ◼   ► It's just that the operating system couldn't find it,

01:21:26 ◼   ► because it wasn't in the right place.

01:21:28 ◼   ► Fun.

01:21:29 ◼   ► So does it work?

01:21:30 ◼   ► It does.

01:21:31 ◼   ► And I used it, and I wrote up that little section,

01:21:32 ◼   ► which was like three paragraphs.

01:21:34 ◼   ► But it's like--

01:21:35 ◼   ► Nice.

01:21:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:21:37 ◼   ► So it's being edited?

01:21:38 ◼   ► It's done being edited?

01:21:39 ◼   ► They finished editing what they had,

01:21:41 ◼   ► but of course they haven't edited my three paragraphs

01:21:43 ◼   ► on dictation.

01:21:44 ◼   ► And we're still running tests, battery tests.

01:21:47 ◼   ► I would like to get tests on the GM and put those in the review

01:21:50 ◼   ► and not say, OK, well, on DP7.

01:21:52 ◼   ► Although I don't think things have

01:21:54 ◼   ► been varying that much between these builds,

01:21:56 ◼   ► so if we can't get the GM version,

01:21:59 ◼   ► it won't be the end of the world to run tests against.

01:22:01 ◼   ► I think the numbers that we get on whatever

01:22:03 ◼   ► the second-to-last build are, we're

01:22:05 ◼   ► probably going to be pretty accurate. But yeah, I would like a ship date and a GM. That's

01:22:10 ◼   ► what I would like. And not have it be like iOS 7, where it's eight days from now.

01:22:14 ◼   ► Well, it sounds like you're kind of ready for that, though. I mean, as much as you're

01:22:19 ◼   ► probably going to be. No, I've got to send these things to the

01:22:22 ◼   ► iBook store. I don't know what the turnaround time is.

01:22:24 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. Because I have to assume I'm going to be rejected

01:22:27 ◼   ► first. So there's a one turnaround time where you send it, and they reject it for some crazy

01:22:30 ◼   ► reason. And if you're lucky, the second time, it'll be the first time I'm sending any books

01:22:34 ◼   ► to the iBook store.

01:22:35 ◼   ► So I assume that I will be rejected the first time.

01:22:39 ◼   ► I should have looked at my notes during the thing,

01:22:41 ◼   ► because I wrote stuff in them.

01:22:43 ◼   ► I forgot to mention the storage shift.

01:22:45 ◼   ► Oh, the lack of a storage shift?

01:22:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:22:48 ◼   ► Come on, man.

01:22:49 ◼   ► But anyway, I just need-- storage shift.

01:22:51 ◼   ► Seriously, how much does an additional 16 gigs of flash

01:22:54 ◼   ► cost these days?

01:22:55 ◼   ► Not $100.

01:22:57 ◼   ► Well, that's their margins.

01:22:59 ◼   ► I know.

01:22:59 ◼   ► But even Apple shifts eventually.

01:23:02 ◼   ► eventually they stop shipping, you know, standard Macs coming with two gigs of RAM and they change

01:23:07 ◼   ► to four. Like that happens. It has to happen eventually. What is this going to be, 10 years

01:23:10 ◼   ► from now? It's like, well, it comes in 1632 and 64. No. I like it. I think we have to put this

01:23:17 ◼   ► rant in the show. No, I'll do a better one next week. I'll still be pissed about this. I don't

01:23:22 ◼   ► I don't know why isn't anyone else pissed about this.