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Connected

143: Super Sleuthing

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:06   From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode 143.

00:00:10   Today's show is brought to you by Encapsula and Blue Apron.

00:00:13   My name is Myke Hurley.

00:00:14   I am joined by Steven Hackett.

00:00:16   Hello, Steven Hackett.

00:00:17   Hello, Michael Hurley.

00:00:18   And Federico Vittucci.

00:00:20   Ciao Federico.

00:00:21   Ciao Myke, and hello people of the world.

00:00:25   Oh, that's a very nice greeting today.

00:00:27   Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:00:28   I want to say hi to the people. I'm in a good mood today, Myke.

00:00:32   You're a man of the people, Federico.

00:00:34   I hope so.

00:00:36   Steven?

00:00:37   Yes.

00:00:38   Follow us up.

00:00:39   I've been waiting all week.

00:00:41   So you may have seen this, we put it up on the Relay blog

00:00:45   late last week, but we are going to be at the AppCamp for Girls fundraiser

00:00:50   at WWDC.

00:00:52   It'll be the first link in the show notes.

00:00:55   This is a concert and a fundraiser for them.

00:00:58   James Dempsey and the Breakpoints were playing a show.

00:01:00   It's at this great big venue.

00:01:03   And there's going to be a section of the venue for a Relay FM meetup.

00:01:06   So we're still having our own meetup Monday night.

00:01:08   If you have a ticket to that, we will be there.

00:01:09   But we're going to also be doing this on Wednesday evening just because we want to see everybody

00:01:15   and we love AvCamp for Girls and this is a great chance to support them.

00:01:21   So you have to have a ticket to it.

00:01:22   There's a link in that blog post to buy a ticket to the show.

00:01:26   We will be there about 7 p.m. to hang out and there'll be signs and stuff where to go.

00:01:31   We'll be there.

00:01:32   And if you're in town for WBC, even if you don't want to meet us, you don't care about

00:01:36   us, you should go buy a ticket for this and go because Outkating for Girls is wonderful

00:01:40   and a really, I think, important part of our community that you should support.

00:01:44   So go check it out.

00:01:45   Like I said, it's the first link in the show notes and hopefully we will see you there.

00:01:49   Yeah, please come.

00:01:50   It's going to be awesome.

00:01:51   We're going to have a lot of fun.

00:01:53   And as Steven said, and I cannot state this enough, AppCamp for Girls is awesome, and

00:01:59   they deserve your support, and all of the proceeds of this meetup will be supporting

00:02:04   them.

00:02:05   So please, please, please go and get a ticket and you'll see us there, which might be nice

00:02:09   for you.

00:02:12   So we're going to get into a lot more hardware stuff after the break, but I did want to talk

00:02:19   kind of separately about the Siri speaker and iPad coming to WWDC, new

00:02:24   notebooks potentially, and the reason I'm putting this in follow-up is because it

00:02:27   happened in the past and we had some questions on Twitter about when is the

00:02:31   last time Apple actually did hardware at WWDC. If you go back you know six, seven,

00:02:37   eight years ago the iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 were at WWDC but the last real one I

00:02:45   I think it was like 2012 when the Retina MacBook Pro was announced and then shipped basically

00:02:51   in that summer time frame.

00:02:52   You know it was expensive, it was only the 15 inches out of the top of the line.

00:02:58   Pretty good keynote if you haven't seen it.

00:03:00   There's a, Phil Schiller does a good job, he puts his finger up to it, show off the

00:03:03   end of it, people freak out.

00:03:05   A year later in 2013 we had the Mac Pro teaser, of course the very famous "Can't Innovate

00:03:10   anymore my fill in the blank line from Schiller that maybe they've come to regret since then.

00:03:17   That's 2013 and like some the notebooks got updated and there's some airport products

00:03:21   but really since 2012 2013 there hasn't been hardware at WBC and it's easy to understand

00:03:28   why right it's the software show they have to get through you know at least Mac OS and

00:03:33   iOS and then watch OS and tv OS if there's stuff there it's a very busy keynote and they

00:03:38   try to keep it to two hours but there is some precedent for hardware at WBC and

00:03:44   so it's not completely crazy to think that there may be something coming out

00:03:48   but like I said we will get to that here in a couple minutes but I kind of wanted

00:03:52   to set this part of that conversation aside a little bit. Speaking of software

00:03:57   though our last episode which came out the end of last week so we just spoke

00:04:01   was about Federico's incredible iOS 11 for iPad video and article and so Federico

00:04:10   wanted to see how it was going, how the response has been and kind of

00:04:15   how your feelings are you know a couple days later. It went really well and I'm

00:04:19   really happy that people appreciated the video and the vision and it was

00:04:24   kind of amusing seeing the tweet from people who after watching the video and

00:04:28   reading the story, they tried to do something on their iPads and it didn't work like in

00:04:33   the concept and because sort of the brains were broken. So that was very amusing. And

00:04:38   I'm really happy that a lot of people either sent a tweet or an email and said this makes

00:04:44   sense because it's not the usual concept that you put together just to show off some graphical

00:04:49   skills and that is the goal. You know, even last year with Sam, we tried to create a concept

00:04:58   that is reasonable and that tries to think about not just how awesome something would be, but also

00:05:04   about the limitations. So it's both about creating and also about setting boundaries for ourselves.

00:05:10   And the fact that people notice that makes me really happy. There's been some, and I think it

00:05:15   comes with the territory, some negative feedback and, you know, especially on YouTube because the

00:05:21   video was on the trending page, so you open yourself up to these comments from these users

00:05:28   Which of course I cannot repeat them on the show but they're... you know they don't...

00:05:33   It's not that I don't care. I honestly I think they're kind of funny because obviously these

00:05:42   people are there not to start a discussion which is what I wanted to do with the concept but just

00:05:47   to troll you or to you know just to be the worst of the internet so that's fine and it's kind of

00:05:55   funny. There was some other type of feedback that I feel like I want to

00:06:00   respond. Some folks have said that the Finder doesn't make any sense and that

00:06:06   the iPad doesn't need a Finder and that file management is a thing of the past,

00:06:10   which of course I deeply disagree with and I feel like I try to convey this in

00:06:16   the story, which is I don't want Apple to make the iPad like the Mac and if your

00:06:22   argument is that if the iPad gets a finder or if the iPad gets better

00:06:28   file management features then just use a Mac, that argument doesn't make any sense

00:06:33   because you could say well just use a Windows PC, you know? I think they're not

00:06:39   mutually exclusive, the iPad getting better file management features and

00:06:43   being able to coexist with the Mac. And also because as I try to express in the

00:06:52   story. The iPad already has file management features that are just

00:06:56   scattered throughout the OS. So I would like to ask all these

00:07:04   people that say the Finder doesn't make any sense, if they think iCloud Drive makes

00:07:08   sense or if document pickers and providers make sense, if all these

00:07:13   other file-based features that Apple already has, if they make any sense. And

00:07:18   and all I'm arguing for is to unify them

00:07:21   and to actually make them easier

00:07:23   because I think that the system we have now

00:07:24   is actually too difficult to manage.

00:07:27   So if anything, I'm arguing for simplification

00:07:30   and that was the main point.

00:07:31   There's another comment that I got a lot,

00:07:35   which is that the video was useless

00:07:37   because it came out too late

00:07:40   and we didn't give up all the time to copy,

00:07:43   which is both amusing and interesting

00:07:46   from sort of what people think of us,

00:07:51   in the sense that I believe that some folks

00:07:55   think that it's our goal to get hired by Apple

00:08:00   or to give Apple ideas,

00:08:04   and that the concept should come out in December.

00:08:08   And those are three separate things.

00:08:10   Like, of course, personally, I mean,

00:08:13   I cannot speak for Sam,

00:08:15   But personally, I don't wanna be hired by Apple.

00:08:17   I just want to start a discussion about the iPad

00:08:19   and about iOS.

00:08:21   And I think that Apple had this,

00:08:25   at least some of these discussions a long time ago,

00:08:28   I don't think I'm smarter than the people who work at Apple,

00:08:31   the engineers and the designers

00:08:33   that actually discuss these features in practice

00:08:36   and in context, they actually make them.

00:08:40   I don't think I'm smarter than those folks

00:08:41   that had these discussions months ago,

00:08:44   years ago maybe even. And also from my perspective as a user it's impossible to

00:08:51   create a concept and to come up with wishes and things I would like to see

00:08:56   in October or in November because I've only been using the stable version of

00:09:01   iOS for two months. These are things that you know you need to take you need to to

00:09:09   work with them for a long time to understand the limitations. And I never liked those concepts

00:09:17   that, you know, they come out two weeks after a new version of iOS has shipped, because you don't have

00:09:23   the context, you don't have the knowledge, and you don't have the experience accumulated with

00:09:28   months of usage. And so the reason why our concepts, they tend to come out in April or May,

00:09:34   is because I like to take my time, it's not my goal to be hired by Apple, it's not my priority

00:09:39   to give Apple ideas and I just want to start a discussion and to give people ideas or, you know,

00:09:48   to show the potential of something regardless of what Apple thinks, what Apple is doing and if Apple

00:09:55   is working on those features or not. And finally, there's some people who really hated the song

00:10:02   And I get that this is like a thing on YouTube that some people really don't like some types of background music.

00:10:09   There was a comment that said the music looked like it was from "Fifty Shades of Grey"

00:10:16   which I thought was very funny because I think if the video can elicit the same response as the book and the movie, well, that's great, you know?

00:10:27   So I thought that was funny.

00:10:30   I'm pleased that this is good for you, you know?

00:10:32   Yeah.

00:10:33   Whatever you need.

00:10:34   Yeah.

00:10:34   Some people just really like the iPad.

00:10:37   A lot.

00:10:38   Yeah.

00:10:38   An uncomfortable amount.

00:10:40   So overall, I'm really happy because we got--

00:10:44   a lot of folks have been super kind,

00:10:46   sharing the video and the links.

00:10:48   But just really, the main point is,

00:10:51   if the majority of people are saying,

00:10:55   this concept makes sense because I could see the iPad having

00:10:59   these features and I understand that the quote-unquote design process that went

00:11:05   into this and the limitations and the potential problems that mission

00:11:09   accomplished so I'm satisfied. Good, yeah it's really great and you know this is

00:11:16   this is what's gonna happen when you when you open the the plug gates to the

00:11:22   wider internet I think. Yeah. Right like people that are maybe less in tune with

00:11:28   the type of thing you're trying to get across, right, people that are not familiar with Mac

00:11:31   Stories, which is what happens when you get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube,

00:11:35   right, like lots of those people are never going to have heard of you before, and so

00:11:40   they don't know your intention, right, and I think that's what you've come across there,

00:11:45   but I guess the key is, like, for the audience that you are targeting, did they understand

00:11:49   it? And I think they did, right, I think that's overwhelming.

00:11:52   Yeah, I think so. And really, from the people who sort of understood the concept, if the main problem, if the main cause of discussion is file management and the finder, I think that's a success overall.

00:12:05   Because we may disagree on the particular need for a finder, but at least we're both on the same page that iOS for iPad could be so much more.

00:12:17   then we can argue on specific features, but overall I think most people that understood

00:12:24   the concept were on board with the idea that the iPad could be more and could be different

00:12:29   from the iPhone.

00:12:30   So yeah.

00:12:31   Stephen, you've been busy as well also in the last week or so.

00:12:37   You've created a new membership focused newsletter for 512 pixels.

00:12:42   And I was kind of wondering, what was your motivation to go ahead and do this?

00:12:46   So it is the 512Pixels membership newsletter.

00:12:49   Of course you can pay $5.12 a month or $51.20 a year.

00:12:54   Like of course that makes a lot of sense.

00:12:57   And this is like a new thing that you're working on I guess, like how there is CloudMax stories

00:13:03   and how there is Jason's membership at Six Colors.

00:13:07   What made you want to go ahead and do this?

00:13:10   Well I should say that Federico actually came up with the pricing.

00:13:14   That was all his idea and not mine.

00:13:16   So thank you to both of you.

00:13:18   You've been very influential and helpful in this process.

00:13:21   - I don't think I did anything, but I appreciate that.

00:13:23   - It was mostly Federico.

00:13:24   - Yeah, it was mostly Federico, I think.

00:13:26   - You're welcome.

00:13:27   - Yeah, so I mean, 512Pixels is gonna turn

00:13:31   nine years old this fall.

00:13:33   And in kind of reflecting on that and thinking about

00:13:38   the past of the website and the future,

00:13:40   I want to continue to do more with it.

00:13:42   It has spun off several other projects.

00:13:45   I'm doing a lot of series on the site.

00:13:47   I'd have the YouTube channel now.

00:13:48   So Federico, I feel your pain

00:13:49   about like random YouTube commenters.

00:13:51   It's the worst.

00:13:52   But the, kind of the heart of it is that

00:13:57   to take 512 pixels to the next level,

00:14:01   to continue doing it for the next decade

00:14:03   at the level I want to do it,

00:14:04   that's just gonna require direct support.

00:14:07   That it is a big investment of time and energy

00:14:10   and one that I'm happy to make.

00:14:12   And like I said in the blog post, now it's saying like,

00:14:14   even though it's almost a decade old,

00:14:16   it still feels like fresh and new to me.

00:14:18   And I think it's because it is more

00:14:20   than just a technology blog.

00:14:21   It has become sort of like a trail of breadcrumbs

00:14:25   through the last like 10 years of my life.

00:14:26   And I can't ever imagine not doing the site,

00:14:30   but it doesn't do much in the way of revenue and income.

00:14:36   And I need that to change.

00:14:37   So, you know, the feedback's been really good so far.

00:14:42   A lot of people jumped on it immediately.

00:14:44   Something like 60% of members are annual.

00:14:47   Like, we're off the bat.

00:14:47   People want to support it, which is really great.

00:14:49   - People just want that sweet discount, man.

00:14:51   That's what it's all about.

00:14:53   - There is a discount if you sign up

00:14:54   for the annual membership.

00:14:57   But I just, it felt like it was time to do more with it.

00:15:00   And so, like you said, I'm doing the newsletter.

00:15:03   It'll be monthly.

00:15:04   I don't have the, I don't know what sort of caffeine

00:15:08   Federico is ingesting to get one out the door every week.

00:15:11   But, and it's just me, I don't have a team,

00:15:14   so I feel like I could do once a month,

00:15:15   I feel like I can do a really good job with that.

00:15:17   The first one goes out Thursday.

00:15:19   It includes an Apple history column I'm doing

00:15:21   called Time Machine.

00:15:22   It has, this month I have a guest post by Casey List

00:15:27   that the two of you are not gonna like,

00:15:29   but that's kind of the point.

00:15:30   - I'm not gonna straight, I'm not reading it.

00:15:31   - Oh yeah. - I'm just not gonna read it.

00:15:32   - You're gonna be upset about it.

00:15:33   been told by multiple people that I'm not going to enjoy this so I can I assume

00:15:37   what it's already about and I don't want to. Oh no. Yeah but it's fine you know it's

00:15:41   it's his opinion and and it's a really great column excited to share that on

00:15:46   Thursday. I'm just gonna say that your customer set levels for your membership

00:15:49   will be below the charts from from me and Federico for your first first issue

00:15:54   so. Yeah so so there's that there's a review of a weather app that I'm using

00:16:01   that I really like and weather apps are really fascinating so kind of talking

00:16:03   that whole little corner of the App Store. Yeah so once a month you'll get a

00:16:07   newsletter and you'll get advanced screenings of future YouTube videos

00:16:10   which I know I'm overdue on. I haven't done one because I've been working on

00:16:14   this. I will rectify that as soon as WWDC is over. I already have one ready to go. I

00:16:19   just need to shoot it. So yeah so that's the membership and I'm excited to be

00:16:25   able to do more. I'm excited to have a direct relationship with a subset

00:16:30   of readers and I think it's going to be a lot of fun for everybody.

00:16:34   Yeah, people should go check it out. Where can they go to sign up?

00:16:38   Yeah, so 512pixels.net/membership and all the benefits and everything are on that page

00:16:46   and get in touch if you have any questions.

00:16:49   Today's show is brought to you in part by our friends over at Encapsula, the multifunction

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00:17:59   Thank you so much to Encapsula for their support of this show and Relay FM.

00:18:02   Apple has introduced a new ad campaign and I feel weird covering ad campaigns as a topic, but this one is really interesting.

00:18:10   You can find it online at apple.com/switch. On Apple's YouTube channel there's a new playlist.

00:18:16   And it is a campaign really built around the idea of switching from Android to an iPhone.

00:18:22   And Mac users or Apple users of a certain vintage will remember that the Switch campaign has actually been reused.

00:18:30   So that was the campaign, I guess in the early 2000s,

00:18:35   getting people to switch from Windows to the Mac.

00:18:37   And they had all those talking heads,

00:18:38   including with a girl named Ellen.

00:18:41   - Everyone's favorite.

00:18:41   - Who seemed to be super baked.

00:18:43   I don't know if that's actually true or not,

00:18:46   but they were reusing it.

00:18:47   So there's a link in the show notes.

00:18:49   Ed Cormany, a friend of mine, had a joke about that

00:18:52   and a link to a web internet archive, way back machine URL,

00:18:57   to the original apple.com/switch.

00:18:59   But the new one is really nice, so it's a very nice, colorful, modern webpage, has the

00:19:06   videos in there, and kind of has seven or eight different angles into the idea of switching

00:19:13   from Android to the iPhone.

00:19:16   Yeah, this sort of stuff's interesting to me because it kind of makes me remember that

00:19:24   like, "Oh yeah, there are way more Android devices."

00:19:27   What did Google say something like,

00:19:28   "I have a two billion active Android devices right now."

00:19:32   And it's like, yep, that's a lot of Android devices.

00:19:35   And it's funny that Apple is doing a campaign like this

00:19:40   and it's quite aggressive, you know,

00:19:42   like with the website and with the videos.

00:19:45   And I wonder, I wonder,

00:19:47   I wonder the motivation that goes into wanting

00:19:49   to create something like this,

00:19:50   because I think everybody knows about the iPhone.

00:19:54   Everyone knows how great the iPhone is.

00:19:55   everyone knows that like, is the iPhone still this like the highest selling phone, right?

00:20:00   Single unit phone, like it sells more Samsung still. So but it's funny to be like, oh,

00:20:05   but they they actually do consider themselves to still be in a position where they don't

00:20:10   have as much of the market as they would want. Right? Because it's Yeah, so this isn't

00:20:15   really iPhone that we're talking about here. It's iOS, I guess.

00:20:19   Yeah, so the iPhone, Apple has the most profit out of the smartphone industry and that's

00:20:26   by some huge margin, but the iPhone is a single best-selling handset, so there are a bunch

00:20:31   more Android phones, but they're splintered across hundreds of, if not more, devices.

00:20:37   And I agree with you that the positioning of this is a little odd because I think we

00:20:41   all think of the iPhone as being the dominant player because according to some metrics it

00:20:46   is but in some other metrics it's not and I think in mind share at least like

00:20:51   I mean obviously in our circles but even like out in the world like in the States

00:20:55   at least I see iPhones everywhere it's kind of the default phone but this

00:21:00   Apple's not playing the underdog here like if you go back and look at those

00:21:04   way back pages there is a little bit of an underdog tone to it right that hey

00:21:09   you know Windows is this big popular thing but the Mac's better and kind of

00:21:12   introducing you to the Mac for the first time because people just hadn't seen one

00:21:17   before or didn't know anything about it. But that's not the tone on this page.

00:21:21   This page kind of makes some assumptions that you know what a smartphone is. And

00:21:25   that you know what an iPhone is. Yeah, it's just kind of showing the things

00:21:30   that really highlight the differences between Android and iOS. Not that, "hey

00:21:35   this is how you know you tap it with your thumb," like that's great. But more of, you

00:21:40   know these are some very specific things that are different and I for one I think

00:21:45   I think it works I think it's some pretty well done. I think it's interesting

00:21:49   the the features that they've decided to showcase with the big colored sections

00:21:55   so we get the camera for example of course it's one of the very first

00:22:00   sections on the web page and of course it's a it's an iPhone 7 Plus no not an

00:22:05   iPhone 7. There's like a half of an iPhone in this section and it shows the dual lens of the 7 Plus.

00:22:13   Then they mention Apple Pay and to my surprise the tips application in another section.

00:22:22   And then they focus on privacy, security and messages. So they don't say iMessage.

00:22:31   They say the Messages app, which I thought was interesting, because they don't talk about the protocol, they talk about the app on your phone.

00:22:40   And they say the Messages app, it lets you hail rides, it lets you book restaurants and shoot lasers, and of course they're talking about the effects and iMessage apps.

00:22:51   And then they also say, and of course you can use other messaging apps like WeChat, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

00:22:58   So I think it was interesting that Apple doesn't say "Well, we have iMessage on iOS".

00:23:03   It's messages.

00:23:05   And besides the tips app,

00:23:08   Apple also wanted to kind of focus on how easy it is to use an iPhone and to get help if you don't know how to use an iPhone or if you have any problems.

00:23:18   And so they bring up the official Apple support app that is now on iOS.

00:23:24   and they even have the mention of the Twitter handle.

00:23:28   They literally say there's also an Apple support app

00:23:31   and a dedicated Twitter handle at Apple support.

00:23:35   So it's like they're actually pointing people to Twitter.

00:23:39   - Yeah, they also do look put privacy up there, right?

00:23:41   Like protecting personal information

00:23:43   and making sure there's no viruses and stuff like that.

00:23:46   Like that's also a big part of it.

00:23:48   And they, in the ad campaigns like five or six

00:23:51   little 15 second ads are probably gonna show up

00:23:53   YouTube pre-rolls. One of those is focused on privacy and it's my favorite one of them.

00:23:57   It's very funny. The ads are like your phone on the left, iPhone on the right and it's

00:24:03   like gray contrast of color, right? It's like a split down the middle and it's like something

00:24:07   sucks on the left hand side and then you get moved over to the iPhone side and it's great,

00:24:12   right? That's kind of the way to do it. It's a simple campaign but I think it works. But

00:24:16   my favorite one is the privacy one where the guy's snooping over the shoulder of the other

00:24:20   guy and he just walks over there, just walks over to the other side and the other guy can't

00:24:24   follow him. I think it's kind of funny.

00:24:26   Yeah, it's good. I did want to kind of back up for a second something Federico said about

00:24:32   the camera item. You know, this comes on the heels of, I mean, just like, I think it was

00:24:37   like just last week, Apple put up one of these pages about photography on the iPhone and

00:24:42   their YouTube channel has been flooded with these almost tutorial videos and like how

00:24:45   to take a picture with the camera app, how to do a selfie, how to do the depth effect.

00:24:51   It's a very educational series.

00:24:53   It's reminiscent of the original iPhone ads.

00:24:55   Do you all remember those?

00:24:56   That basically it would just be a phone on a white screen and it would show you how maps

00:25:00   worked.

00:25:01   And it would be a television ad.

00:25:02   30 Seconds of Google Maps.

00:25:05   That camera thing is a little bit like that, I think.

00:25:07   But Apple is really leaning into this more and more in a world where the Samsung phones

00:25:15   and the Google Pixel have cameras that,

00:25:19   there are differences, but are more or less

00:25:21   as good as the iPhone, right?

00:25:22   They're in the same arena.

00:25:24   And Apple's really leaning into all the stuff

00:25:26   they can do with theirs, and they're doing it

00:25:28   with the Plus, which we know coming off their earnings.

00:25:30   The iPhone sales have been trending towards the Plus.

00:25:34   The world is realizing that Myke was right, I guess.

00:25:37   And they're selling more Pluses in the mix

00:25:39   than they ever have.

00:25:40   And I would imagine that that has a ton to do

00:25:43   with the camera.

00:25:44   So that's been a real thing for Apple to lean on,

00:25:49   even though the competition is getting better to say,

00:25:51   "Hey, this is something that we really think

00:25:54   "is an important part of our phone

00:25:56   "and that we're really proud of."

00:25:57   As I find that interesting, they keep coming back to it.

00:26:00   Again, it continues to be the plus phone.

00:26:02   Whatever this new phone is in the fall,

00:26:04   this unicorn phone, is gonna be dual lens again.

00:26:08   This is an important part of Apple's strategy

00:26:10   with the iPhone to kill off the end

00:26:12   the point-and-shoot era and to have people, especially with the Plus,

00:26:17   be equipped to take really good photos. And I mean it is the after the header

00:26:23   saying will it be easy to switch the iPhone, which in which they talk about

00:26:26   the move to iOS app on the Google Play Store, the next stripe down is the camera.

00:26:32   Like it is a super important thing for them. But what I found sort of equally

00:26:38   interesting, I want to see what the two of you think about this, is that the

00:26:40   fitness stuff is not on here so nothing about there's nothing about the Apple

00:26:45   Watch on this page which I get but there's nothing about like the the

00:26:48   health app or the step counting the phone can do and that's been a part of

00:26:54   this sort of thing in the past right they had those big the big health push

00:26:58   do you think it just didn't make the cut because there's not enough room or like

00:27:02   I found it interesting that it was gone I think that the Apple Watch is unique

00:27:07   selling point is health and fitness. It's like even though the iPhone can track some

00:27:12   of this stuff, if you say the iPhone can do it all, then it's going to detract from the

00:27:16   Apple Watch. Right? Like it makes sense. It's like if you imagine the marketing funnel,

00:27:22   like the journey, the customer journey, after you've bought an iPhone, you start getting

00:27:27   a bunch of advertisement and messages about buying an Apple Watch and why you should do

00:27:31   that, right? Like it doesn't make any sense to put that Apple Watch on this page right

00:27:35   now because it's like oh you like all this health and fitness stuff we also do this other

00:27:39   thing it's like another $300 like you want to get into this whole ecosystem I think that

00:27:43   it is overall net negative for this campaign right to be like buy this new phone then buy

00:27:49   this other thing like I think it makes sense to try and hit people with that afterwards

00:27:53   which I reckon that they probably will do so they keep kind of the health and fitness

00:27:59   stuff for an Apple watch campaign because that's that's what sells that device so you

00:28:04   you want to kind of focus on that, right?

00:28:08   That it's on this device other than it's in the one you already own.

00:28:11   Yeah.

00:28:12   No, it's good, it's good.

00:28:14   The environment makes it on here.

00:28:16   I guess that's true for all the devices, but that's a good point that it's sort of a step

00:28:21   removed maybe.

00:28:22   Ha!

00:28:23   See what I did there?

00:28:25   A step removed from the sort of switch to iPhone mentality, but no, I think it's a compelling

00:28:32   campaign.

00:28:33   Yeah, it definitely is. It definitely is.

00:28:36   We were talking about the iPhone and the dual camera stuff. There's been a bunch of part

00:28:43   leaks over the last couple of days about the iPhone and the iPad. You take this stuff for

00:28:51   a grain of salt. A lot of it has come from this Twitter account that I've never heard

00:28:55   of before. It is a person by the name of Benjamin Gesskin.

00:29:00   - Yeah, it's been around lately.

00:29:04   - Okay, I mean, but you know, like, I don't know.

00:29:07   There are names that you've seen before,

00:29:09   like Sonny Dixon or Ev Leakes or whatever,

00:29:11   like they're people that jump into my mind

00:29:13   as like who have provided information before

00:29:15   that's kind of come out to be true.

00:29:17   They posted a bunch of, I guess these are like molds

00:29:24   of the iPhone, right?

00:29:26   Like these big metallic, like solid aluminum things

00:29:30   that show all the new, like the next iPhone range.

00:29:32   So the iPhone 8 presumably, 7S and 7S Plus.

00:29:37   So looking at these, and this person's also provided

00:29:40   some additional information, right?

00:29:42   They're saying that this form,

00:29:43   what they're showing is 100% confirmed,

00:29:46   that's what's gonna be made.

00:29:48   And that the touch ID is not on the back.

00:29:51   And they expect it's either gonna be obviously

00:29:53   in the display as people have pontificated,

00:29:56   or in the power button, right?

00:29:58   which locks the phone and turns the phone on and off,

00:30:01   that button right there.

00:30:02   And if you look at the castings, the molds,

00:30:06   whatever you call it, this aluminium thing,

00:30:09   one of the pictures that's included in the tweet

00:30:12   in the show notes shows all three phones from the side

00:30:15   and the sleep/wake button on the side

00:30:18   is like twice the size as normal, right?

00:30:23   Is the assumption here, unless it's backwards

00:30:26   and that's actually the volume, right?

00:30:27   let's assume that it's not, right? Let's assume that that is the sleep/wake button,

00:30:33   right? That would kind of make sense, right? Why would you make that button bigger unless

00:30:37   there was something else going on there?

00:30:41   I don't know, maybe just to make it easier to reach it and to press it? I don't know.

00:30:46   I think it makes sense. I'm just struggling to… and now I could be wrong, but the surface

00:30:51   area of the button, it seems so narrow to me and I just wonder if the Touch ID sensor

00:30:58   can read enough data for a fingerprint from that kind of button shape?

00:31:05   How much data is needed?

00:31:06   I mean, that's what we don't know, right?

00:31:07   Like I don't know that.

00:31:08   That's what, yeah.

00:31:09   Right?

00:31:10   I don't know either.

00:31:11   But if it's reading like a vertical slice of it, maybe that's just as good, right?

00:31:13   Like it's always unique, I guess, right?

00:31:16   It depends how good they've gotten at detecting this stuff accurately, right?

00:31:20   That's what I guess this depends.

00:31:23   It's just for me, like I've said this, we were talking about this weeks ago, we have

00:31:26   this whole like touch ID predictions thing sitting in our document that we'll come back

00:31:30   to in September.

00:31:32   I really just do not expect, like I have absolutely no expectation that the touch ID will be embedded

00:31:39   in the display in this phone.

00:31:41   It just feels like too big a leap for me.

00:31:45   So if it's going to be somewhere, if it's not going to be on the back, my bet would

00:31:50   move to the fact that they put it in the in the sleep/wake button.

00:31:54   So you don't think it's gonna be under the display?

00:31:57   Not in this one. I think that they'll find a way to do it. I'm just... it really just

00:32:02   feels like such a huge leap. Like, that I'm just skeptical of it. You know, it just feels

00:32:10   like that is a huge leap in technology that they're taking there and potentially a really

00:32:15   risky one, right? Because there's already so much stuff happening in this phone.

00:32:20   and one that Samsung couldn't make work.

00:32:22   And Samsung, you can make fun of them,

00:32:24   but, I mean, maybe you should for the battery thing,

00:32:26   but they know what they're doing engineering-wise.

00:32:28   Like, they couldn't make it work six months ago.

00:32:31   And, you know, I don't know if it's in the button or not.

00:32:33   I would prefer it to be on the screen.

00:32:35   I have no problem with it on the back.

00:32:36   Like, I've used phones with that, not a problem for me.

00:32:39   But I think ideally it'd be kind of where it is now,

00:32:43   just under the glass.

00:32:43   But I tend to agree with you that

00:32:46   it's gotta be really bulletproof for them to do that

00:32:49   in a phone that's going to be so high profile and potentially

00:32:54   so expensive, it should really work well.

00:32:56   But I don't know if it's something

00:32:59   that can be in the button.

00:33:00   I was thinking back, ThinkPads and some other PC notebooks

00:33:04   have fingerprint readers that are much more like this

00:33:09   than what we have with Touch ID, where it's really just

00:33:12   kind of a little dash on the palm rest,

00:33:15   and you kind of put your finger on it, and it reads it.

00:33:18   sometimes you kind of roll your finger across it and it does it so there may be

00:33:23   some like technique difference with this where you know you got to roll your

00:33:27   finger I don't really know but it's it's definitely I think there's more to this

00:33:33   than just making a bigger power button because remember this phone is going to

00:33:36   potentially be physically smaller than the plus and the plus has the same power

00:33:42   button as the the non plus phone and people have gotten used to that over

00:33:46   three years so why make that change now especially in a world where the

00:33:53   volume buttons are right across from the power button you're putting a bigger

00:33:56   target there you can accidentally hit like something about it there's got to

00:34:00   be a reason for it besides we just wanted the power button to be bigger I

00:34:04   think yeah and the shape if you look at the the molds whatever it's really

00:34:12   somewhere in between the iPhone 7 and the 7 Plus and I'm really curious to see how this will feel

00:34:20   in practice because I if you remember last year for almost a month I used an iPhone 7 before being

00:34:28   able to buy a Plus and I liked it but ultimately it was just too small and when I upgraded again to

00:34:38   the plus it just felt so much better and so much more comfortable for me so I

00:34:43   wonder how it'll feel going back to a smaller phone even if it has a bigger

00:34:51   display than the iPhone 7 I guess we really weird I don't know if it's being

00:34:56   good or bad I just know it's gonna be weird because it looks smaller than I

00:34:59   thought it was gonna be yeah and if you look at the picture it's really not even

00:35:05   centimeter more than a 7, judging from this leak on Twitter. So it's definitely smaller

00:35:13   than the 7 Plus, but it's only noticeably bigger than the 7.

00:35:18   It makes the 7 Plus look like an iPad.

00:35:22   It's almost.

00:35:23   It's always funny. Like, this is the thing, I guess many Plus Club people will understand

00:35:29   this. Plus phones always look bigger in other people's hands.

00:35:34   Yeah.

00:35:35   - When I see other people using it,

00:35:36   it looks like a dinner tray,

00:35:37   but when I'm using it, it's fine.

00:35:39   It's very strange.

00:35:40   It's a very strange feeling.

00:35:41   - You know, we have an SE in the house.

00:35:44   My wife uses it and really likes it.

00:35:46   In fact, it's not in the show notes,

00:35:47   but there was, I think just this morning,

00:35:48   an article about the iPhone SE

00:35:51   has the highest customer satisfaction rating,

00:35:54   according to some new survey,

00:35:55   than any other smartphone, which is incredible.

00:35:57   But you're absolutely right.

00:35:59   The plus is humongous when you see it

00:36:02   relative to anything else.

00:36:03   but if you just buy yourself all day with your phone,

00:36:06   you get used to it.

00:36:08   But yeah, these renderings, I mean,

00:36:11   or slabs, whatever they are,

00:36:13   very much like this is a seven size phone,

00:36:18   not a plus monstrosity.

00:36:22   - So we have some real time follow up

00:36:24   from a good friend, Benjamin Mayo.

00:36:27   He works at 9to5Mac and he sent me a link to a Sony phone

00:36:32   that has a fingerprint scanner in the power button.

00:36:36   There's gonna be a link in the show notes to the video.

00:36:39   There's a hands-on video and it's the Sony Xperia Z5

00:36:43   from a couple of years ago.

00:36:45   And it shows how there's indeed a fingerprint scanner

00:36:49   and the fingerprint setup going on in the software.

00:36:52   So you just place the finger multiple times

00:36:53   and it recognizes your fingerprint.

00:36:55   So seems to be definitely possible.

00:36:57   I was not aware that there were already phones on the market

00:37:00   with this kind of scanner in the button on the side.

00:37:05   So there you go.

00:37:07   Maybe Myke is somewhere in the ballpark again.

00:37:11   I won't say it, Myke.

00:37:13   - You can't say it yet.

00:37:14   You can't say it yet.

00:37:15   - I cannot say yet, so I'm just circling around it.

00:37:18   But maybe it is possible.

00:37:21   - All right, I'll put that link in the show notes

00:37:23   so YouTube videos can go watch it.

00:37:24   But yeah, just basically the idea is that

00:37:26   you know now that it is at least possible, right?

00:37:29   Again, it's like, maybe it's not as reliable,

00:37:32   like we don't know, but like technically,

00:37:35   you can make a fingerprint scanner

00:37:37   in a configuration like this.

00:37:41   So there you go.

00:37:43   But this isn't all.

00:37:45   The same person, Benjamin Gaskin,

00:37:48   tweeted some stuff around the 10.5 inch iPad,

00:37:52   which is changing the story a little bit

00:37:55   about what this device is gonna be.

00:37:57   So there's a couple of tweets there is,

00:38:01   that I'm putting in the show notes,

00:38:02   there was some renders of this

00:38:04   and there's some additional information, some measurements.

00:38:08   So you can see what those look like, right?

00:38:11   So I'll put it in the show notes.

00:38:12   But basically the idea being,

00:38:14   10.5 inch iPad Pro as we know, right?

00:38:17   And this is the model that the case manufacturers

00:38:20   are apparently getting these details as well,

00:38:23   'cause there's been some leaks of some cases and stuff

00:38:25   over the last couple of days.

00:38:27   the home button exists, there are still bezels on this device but they're thinner, but the

00:38:33   actual iPad itself will be a little bit larger, like physically larger, so they haven't gotten

00:38:40   rid of the bezels, the bezels are slimmer, but they're still there, so with a 10.5 inch

00:38:44   screen, it's making the device a bit bigger. And this is very different to what has been

00:38:49   expected, right, from this device.

00:38:52   Yes, we were expecting I think the edge to edge display with no home button and like

00:39:02   a radical new design.

00:39:06   At least I think the last time we discussed the rumors that was what people were speculating

00:39:10   about.

00:39:11   Instead, I mean this is nice, but it's not bezel less.

00:39:17   The bezels are thinner and it's slightly, very slightly taller, but it looks like an iPad.

00:39:23   I mean, you know, it's not this "Oh my god, am I holding a piece of glass or a tablet?"

00:39:29   It looks like an iPad, there's a home button, there's three microphones at the top, which

00:39:33   is interesting I guess, and maybe the SIM card slot will be in the bottom right corner

00:39:40   of the iPad, but it doesn't look like, you know, visually it's consistent.

00:39:46   thinner but it's consistent with the current design.

00:39:50   So I think that this lends additional credence to the idea of this device debuting before

00:39:57   September because there was always the question of like if they are going to debut the bezel-less

00:40:03   design is it going to come in the iPad before the iPhone?

00:40:07   That was always a confusion point.

00:40:09   And again I can see how somebody would hear information about this device and say what

00:40:15   has been set, right?

00:40:17   Edge to edge.

00:40:18   - Yeah.

00:40:19   - Right, like 10.5 inch.

00:40:20   I can see how you would get to that point.

00:40:22   But for me personally, like, all right, I don't care.

00:40:26   Right, like, for me this was more,

00:40:28   this has always been about a larger screen

00:40:32   and what that could potentially facilitate,

00:40:34   which is to put everything software-wise,

00:40:37   it's in a 12.9, into a more manageable in size iPad.

00:40:42   And if that's what this is, that's all I want.

00:40:46   And what this also does is,

00:40:49   especially with it being physically larger,

00:40:53   it more easily differentiates this iPad

00:40:56   from the $329 iPad, right?

00:40:59   Like you will see these three in a lineup

00:41:01   and they will be different sizes now.

00:41:03   And then you can be like, oh, that's the bigger one.

00:41:06   - Yeah, I wonder side by side, the bezels really,

00:41:10   you can see the difference between the old one

00:41:12   the new one. Even if it's not so much bigger, but when you compare them side by side, I

00:41:17   imagine on the Apple website you could tell the difference.

00:41:20   Yeah, but like, this is physically bigger than the iPad as well that it's replacing,

00:41:24   right? Like it's not just that the screen is bigger, like the dimensions are larger.

00:41:28   So I think that this makes sense for how they will have the product line up, especially

00:41:32   when we talk about what we're about to talk about in a moment regarding the iPad Mini.

00:41:37   I think, yep, this is it. Like I'm looking at this and I'm like, the iPhone, I'm like,

00:41:40   okay that makes sense but like everything I'm seeing with the iPad Pro

00:41:44   here I'm like yeah this makes so much sense considering everything we have

00:41:47   heard and then everything that we think is going to happen I think that this

00:41:52   makes a lot of sense and this is probably what we're gonna get maybe in a

00:41:56   couple of weeks time which I am very excited about because I want it so bad

00:41:59   the thing that made me I don't want to say realize but that put me like hmm

00:42:06   maybe an iPad is happening at WWDC, it was the beta of iOS 10.3.3 which added three new

00:42:14   wallpapers and the thing with the wallpapers may seem minor but why would you add during

00:42:21   the iOS in such a minor release posted on the developer website just a couple of weeks

00:42:29   before WWDC.

00:42:31   That's some good sleuth work there Federico.

00:42:33   new wallpapers, you know, I'm just saying new wallpaper, new iPad, it makes for, you

00:42:40   know, a nice announcement, it looks different, quote-unquote different in the promo material,

00:42:46   I mean it already looks different because the design, you know, is new, but there's

00:42:50   a new wallpaper, there's a new beta just a couple of weeks before the event.

00:42:55   So looking at 9to5Mac, these wallpapers are for 12.9 inch iPad Pro. So yeah, this is new

00:43:02   that's right like this that's what this is for and if it's for the 12.9 inch well then

00:43:07   it fits both right so now like I'm thinking we've questioned oh what are they going to

00:43:13   do about the 12.9 but what they're going to do about 12.9 is not a lot right like they'll

00:43:17   update the internals of it now because the design is not going to be drastically different

00:43:22   so it doesn't need to change they can keep the design as it is update the internals maybe

00:43:26   put a true tone display in it and ship both of these and yes they only need to put the

00:43:31   wallpapers in this one because it's going to be the same screen resolution for both devices, right?

00:43:36   That's the idea.

00:43:37   This is some super-sluicing.

00:43:39   That brings me to my problem, which is, do I want the 10.5 if it looks like this,

00:43:45   and if it's got the same specs of the 12.9, or do I want a possible new 12.9-inch iPad Pro?

00:43:54   So do I want to stay on the current size that I have, or do I want this other iPad?

00:43:58   because I think that the doubt that I have in my mind that I shared a few months ago is

00:44:05   even if it's bigger I don't think the software will be as comfortable as the big iPad Pro.

00:44:10   So I guess it comes down to seeing whatever they announce, maybe WWDC, it seems very likely to me

00:44:18   at this point honestly and you know I just want to try it and see how, especially how split view

00:44:24   and using the software keyboard in Split View compares to the big iPad Pro.

00:44:28   I'm really curious to see.

00:44:30   Yeah, I mean, look, if our assumption at this point, which I think we're all holding on to and will refuse to let go,

00:44:35   is that WWDC brings a lot of iPad-focused iOS features,

00:44:41   it really makes sense for them to say we have new devices.

00:44:44   It's like, "Oh, we're putting all this work into it, but we're still not going to release any new iPads."

00:44:49   And I know that it won't be for now, but it is like how they brought a bunch of people

00:44:55   into a room and told them that they care about the Mac. It's a similar kind of sign, right?

00:45:01   In like, we have these new devices, you can buy them now and you can take advantage of

00:45:05   everything your iPad has, and in a few months time, they're going to run this great new

00:45:09   software and we promise we care about them.

00:45:12   Yeah, and you could be like, and of course the new iPad will support the great features

00:45:17   of iOS 11, whatever. But in the meantime, it'll ship with iOS 10.3.3 and you get new

00:45:25   wallpapers. I could see that happening.

00:45:27   Yeah, and they'll say, "Oh, and there's a public beta coming in a month."

00:45:31   Yes, there's a public beta.

00:45:34   And you can try it then if you can't wait.

00:45:37   When Federico will already be exhausted, yeah.

00:45:41   That will definitely make it in. One more piece of iPad news. Boygenius Report or BGR,

00:45:46   Are they still Boy Genius report or are they just BGR now?

00:45:49   Bruggr.

00:45:50   I think in spirit they are still Boy Genius.

00:45:54   Okay but they're Bruggr now, they're just Bruggr, right?

00:45:56   Mmhmm, that's it, I think that's how you say it.

00:45:59   They're reporting that the iPad Mini will be no more.

00:46:01   They have a source that states the reason is being "fierce cannibalism of our own products"

00:46:06   and that the iPad Mini has been "sized out of its own category".

00:46:09   Apparently as well the sales numbers are telling the story.

00:46:13   Are we sad about the iPad mini going away? I don't know are we there's someone in my house really is like badly

00:46:20   Like to the point where I've had to do some some you know, you know like

00:46:26   You know when you have somebody in your life who?

00:46:30   Who just wants to trash Apple right now? That's their thing, you know, like they like to just say how bad the company is

00:46:36   Right. Where are you going with this?

00:46:38   And you as a fan of the company feel like you have to stand up for Apple, right?

00:46:43   I get it. Yes.

00:46:44   You know?

00:46:45   Yes.

00:46:46   Right?

00:46:47   Like you need to fly your team flag. I've been having to do that over the last few days.

00:46:50   Adina loves her iPad mini too, which was my old iPad mini. She loves that device so much.

00:46:58   And the idea of the iPad mini going away has been met with fierce criticism in my household.

00:47:04   She is very angry about this idea. I have tried to say to her why all of the benefits

00:47:09   of going to the bigger iPads, but she's not excited about any of them. She is a very

00:47:15   small person and so all of the things that she owns, like bags and stuff like that, are

00:47:20   all so small. So she likes the smallest iPad that she can possibly have to put into her

00:47:26   bag and just to have in her life. So, I mean, we've been looking at the current Gen iPad

00:47:33   mini and we're not gonna we're not gonna spend the money on a one was it 128

00:47:37   gigabyte it's like $400 or something it's crazy we're not gonna buy that

00:47:41   there's any of the refurbs they are like going so fast right now it's barely

00:47:46   impossible to buy them but even then they're not great deals so I think she's

00:47:52   gonna be out of luck and she's kind of now going through the acceptance stage

00:47:55   of understanding that if she if and when her iPad mini dies because she won't let

00:48:00   go of it, she's going to have to go up to a larger size. But that kind of brings me

00:48:05   around to say, who is the iPad mini for other than Adina? Who is buying this, we expect?

00:48:13   Well, you know, we had that question last week from a listener about old iPod touches

00:48:18   and do you do that again or do you get an iPad mini or do you do, I think, the cheap

00:48:24   9.7 inch iPad and I think the iPad Mini is kind of the same question right?

00:48:29   There are definitely people like Adina who like the small size because it's

00:48:34   compact they can take it with them. My dad is one of those people he has an

00:48:38   iPad Mini 2 maybe a 3 now. I think he upgraded to the 3 and he likes it

00:48:44   because he can take it to work and you know it's small and and light and

00:48:49   convenient to have but there's definitely that use case like the

00:48:53   listener question last week that people have them for kids. We have an iPad mini

00:48:57   2 in this like ridiculous, you know, military style case so they don't

00:49:03   destroy it. iPad mini 2 for the kids and they do homework and stuff on it and

00:49:08   it's um there's a real use case for it there but I don't know if that's enough

00:49:15   for Apple to keep making them and I mean I think the writing's on the wall right?

00:49:22   Like the quote from the BGR report makes a ton of sense.

00:49:26   That is in line with what Apple likes to do.

00:49:29   Like you know, I think it was when the iPhone came out and someone asked Apple, "Is it going

00:49:34   to cannibalize the iPod?"

00:49:35   And they said, "Well, if one of our products is going to be cannibalized, we want it to

00:49:38   be by one of our other products.

00:49:40   We want to do that to ourselves, to our own lines of devices."

00:49:43   And I think it's clear it's happening to the iPad mini.

00:49:50   I just, I mean, they could do the iPod touch thing, right?

00:49:53   They could have it on a long refresh cycle.

00:49:56   That's where it's been really that iPad mini 4 has been around for a long time

00:49:59   now.

00:50:00   Um, the thing that, I think that's kind of gets me is like, like you said, Myke,

00:50:04   the only skew is expensive and it's 128 gigs.

00:50:08   They don't have a cheap iPad.

00:50:10   Many of the cheap iPad now is that 9.7 inch.

00:50:13   And I think that answers the question as to what the feature is.

00:50:17   I think it's even though there are people who want it and as a parent, you know

00:50:21   I like that it's small my kids can use it and they can handle it and everything but

00:50:25   It definitely seems like it's just times taken away, you know

00:50:30   Yeah, but I think you know, they're not gonna keep making a product

00:50:36   Most people are buying it if people are buying it. They're gonna keep making it

00:50:38   I'm assuming the sales went down before they reduce the skews

00:50:43   And you know, they're there. What's the point in making I mean we've had this right in the last year or so

00:50:49   with the other markets to Apple maybe have gotten out of right like

00:50:53   Potentially the display but we're not sure about that anymore

00:50:56   But like routers and stuff like that right like markets that Apple may be moving away from

00:51:00   And I guess it makes sense that if people aren't buying the iPad mini why keep making and selling the iPad mini

00:51:08   mm-hmm and

00:51:10   Because most people's needs can be fulfilled by one of their other devices, right? I think that's the thinking sure

00:51:15   And there's some chicken and egg there a little bit too, right?

00:51:18   The iPad may doesn't sell well you make only one skew for selling its expensive and and you know large capacity

00:51:24   It's gonna sell even worse. Yeah, but my assumption is the decision was made before they did this sure

00:51:31   Right. This is winding down of the inventory. I

00:51:33   Think so. I think that's I think that's what it is. And I don't think we're ever gonna see an iPad mini 5

00:51:39   Rest in peace, little friend. You were good to us for so long. We were so impressed with

00:51:44   you. You were amazing. Remember that time when you were as powerful as the big iPad,

00:51:50   just the smallest screen? Those were the days. Everybody say goodbye to the iPad mini.

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00:53:52   way to cook.

00:53:54   So we had a listener question from Jeff Fowler on Twitter a couple weeks ago but I think

00:54:01   it's super interesting. Jeff writes, instead of listing the services you

00:54:06   subscribe to, you know we've talked about that in the past right, different cloud

00:54:09   services the three of us use for various things, list those that Relay pays for

00:54:14   and why. So what we're gonna do now is kind of go through some of the services

00:54:19   and apps that we use in our in our respective businesses. So Relay FM, owned by

00:54:25   Myke and I, and then Max Stories. So what we're doing at Relay, I'll start with the

00:54:29   business end and then work towards I guess the creative end. We use Freshbooks

00:54:34   for all of our invoicing. Freshbooks is a sponsor. We have worked with them for a

00:54:38   long time but we paid for their service. We continue to pay for their service. We

00:54:42   signed up for them long before they were an advertiser on the network. We use

00:54:47   Trello and Pipedrive for some sales management stuff. We're kind of phasing

00:54:51   Trello out and moving to Pipedrive which is a, how do you describe it Myke, like a

00:54:56   a sell cycle management tool.

00:54:58   - Yeah. - It's super businessy.

00:55:00   - Yeah, it's like a contact database, right?

00:55:02   So it keeps all of the people that we work with

00:55:04   in the companies, and then we can also manage deals.

00:55:07   So as a sponsor signing on,

00:55:09   or we're dealing with paperwork,

00:55:11   we're able to manage those deals, right?

00:55:13   Like it's very businessy, but we were kind of--

00:55:18   - Looking at the screenshots,

00:55:20   and it's very enterprising.

00:55:23   - Yep. - Mm-hmm.

00:55:24   - It's nice though.

00:55:24   thing is we kind of need a lot of that now at the size that we're operating at and we

00:55:31   were using Trello and we were starting to cut, we kind of baked this into Trello ourselves

00:55:36   like it turned out that like oh funnily enough these products this is how they look but we

00:55:40   didn't, I don't think we knew that when we started using Trello for this and it got to

00:55:44   the point where it was like okay nobody but Myke knows the names of the people that we're

00:55:50   we're working with or their email addresses.

00:55:53   So we need that all to be in one place.

00:55:54   So we started looking at that and then we realized that,

00:55:58   oh, we can just move all of this stuff from Trello

00:56:00   into Pipedrive, we have it all in one place.

00:56:03   And it's got a bunch of integrations

00:56:04   as these things should these days.

00:56:05   So now we use this service called Pipedrive.

00:56:08   And yeah, it is super enterprisey and it's super businessy

00:56:11   and it has tons of buzzwords, but it also is,

00:56:14   it's really powerful and the iOS apps are pretty good.

00:56:18   And yeah.

00:56:19   - There is a sales pipeline academy that you can take.

00:56:24   - I've been to the academy, I got my diploma.

00:56:28   It's hanging on my wall, so there we go.

00:56:31   - Nice, it looks nice though.

00:56:33   - Yeah, I don't recommend this to like 99.5%

00:56:37   of the people that are listening

00:56:38   'cause you're just not gonna need it.

00:56:39   But if you hear this and you're like,

00:56:41   ooh, I need that, then you should get it

00:56:43   because it's really good.

00:56:44   That integrates with Slack, just like Trello did.

00:56:48   Slack is like headquarters for relay FM.

00:56:51   All of our hosts are in there.

00:56:52   We have a paid account,

00:56:53   so we get all the bunch of paid goodies.

00:56:55   And it's really like the office, like Slack is work.

00:57:00   We use Google Suite for our email and calendar stuff.

00:57:05   - I think you'll find it's G Suite.

00:57:07   - What did I say?

00:57:09   Google Suite. - Google Suite.

00:57:10   Yeah, you gave it a good name.

00:57:12   - The naming is terrible.

00:57:13   - So bad.

00:57:14   G Suite.

00:57:16   G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps.

00:57:19   So it's great.

00:57:20   Works just like Gmail.

00:57:23   The website is hosted at Heroku.

00:57:27   Our website is a custom CMS.

00:57:29   We do use Squarespace, also a sponsor,

00:57:31   for our blog and merchandise store.

00:57:35   But Heroku hosts the website and our custom CMS.

00:57:40   The MP3 files are at Lipsin.

00:57:44   And we use Linode, which is another sponsor,

00:57:46   to host our-- so we have an ad tracking software.

00:57:50   It's Linode.

00:57:51   I'm happy to report that it's actually Linode.

00:57:54   I found this out after I started sponsoring,

00:57:56   and everyone was calling it Linode.

00:57:58   And we had to change that.

00:57:59   So it's Linode.

00:58:00   Linode.

00:58:01   Linode.

00:58:03   So what else?

00:58:04   So they host some stuff.

00:58:06   And then we use Memberful and Campaign Monitor

00:58:09   for our membership program.

00:58:11   Memberful is what I also use at Fido Pixels.

00:58:13   This is what Federico uses at Mac stories.

00:58:16   It's super great if you need a membership.

00:58:17   It kind of does everything out of the box you would need.

00:58:20   And then we use Dropbox to move files around.

00:58:24   We have a Mac Mini at Mac Stadium in Las Vegas.

00:58:28   And there's a Dropbox Pro account

00:58:31   that's signed in on that Mac Mini.

00:58:32   It syncs everything as a backup.

00:58:34   That machine gets backed up by Backblaze.

00:58:37   And then we also have the Adobe Creative Suite,

00:58:41   which we really don't need for work except for Audition,

00:58:44   which Myke and I both edit in Logic.

00:58:48   I think he's happier there than I am.

00:58:50   But we use Audition for a lot of noise cancellation

00:58:53   and equalization stuff.

00:58:55   It's better than what Logic does.

00:58:56   And so I, at least, when I'm editing,

00:58:58   I do pre-flight stuff in Audition.

00:59:01   And if I have time, I'm slowly learning to edit in Audition.

00:59:05   It's a complicated task to learn.

00:59:07   But at the very least, I'll kind of

00:59:08   take care of some tracks and clean them up.

00:59:10   and then a symbol and logic.

00:59:12   So you pay for Adobe Creative Suite,

00:59:14   and you get Audition as one of the apps.

00:59:16   And so yeah, a lot of moving parts here,

00:59:19   a lot of cloud services.

00:59:20   I didn't really realize how many things we were using

00:59:22   until I wrote them down,

00:59:23   but I feel like everything is on that list for a reason,

00:59:27   and I think that we are working slowly

00:59:30   to simplify moving away from Trello

00:59:31   into something more specialized.

00:59:33   And for us, anytime we look at a service,

00:59:36   we feel like we need to be able to trust the company,

00:59:39   they're not gonna go out of business, right,

00:59:40   that we are investing in something that's going to be stable and be around.

00:59:44   We want something that has good iOS support.

00:59:46   So that was a huge deal with Pipedrive that sales management and CRM would have a really

00:59:53   good iPhone and iPad app, and Pipedrive does that.

00:59:56   And then we want something that we can, I guess is flexible enough to deal with the

01:00:04   fact that Myke and I are sort of across the world from each other.

01:00:07   So something that is, you know, we can kind of put data in

01:00:11   and hand off to somebody else.

01:00:12   That's kind of fuzzy to talk about,

01:00:14   but some of these services are really designed

01:00:17   for like one person to sit down and do something,

01:00:18   and we want everything we do to be collaborative

01:00:21   to a degree, so.

01:00:22   - Yeah, 'cause we're a growing company now.

01:00:24   Like it's not, again-- - We are.

01:00:25   - You know, people, they have this nervous show's notice,

01:00:27   it's not just me and Steven anymore,

01:00:28   we have someone to help us.

01:00:30   So we need to be able to provide that sort of stuff as well.

01:00:33   I should say like G Suite is huge.

01:00:36   like all the Google Docs and Sheets and all that stuff, like that's all tied up inside

01:00:40   of that.

01:00:41   Like we use that for so much stuff collaboratively.

01:00:44   Yes, and we should say that our assistant who's helping us found Pipedrive.

01:00:48   It was one of their first tasks.

01:00:50   Like we needed a tool that does this and they went and found it and it was awesome.

01:00:54   So our next story is, besides coffee, of course.

01:01:00   Puppies.

01:01:01   Puppies.

01:01:02   We use a lot of services as well.

01:01:05   And some of these are for my personal usage

01:01:08   and others are more collaborative services

01:01:10   where we have multiple users.

01:01:12   But I still feel like both individual

01:01:15   and team-based software is still part of work stuff

01:01:20   that I pay for or that we use.

01:01:23   So the main glue between everything I would say is Zapier.

01:01:27   And we use that for both my personal workflows

01:01:31   and other stuff that the team can also enjoy.

01:01:34   And it connects all of these little pieces that we need.

01:01:39   For example, we use Zapier when a new issue

01:01:42   of the Club Maxories newsletter goes out.

01:01:45   Zapier, for example, can tweet

01:01:47   with the Club Maxories account

01:01:49   that a new issue has been sent.

01:01:50   And it also posts on Slack a message.

01:01:54   And that message contains a link to run a workflow

01:01:58   archive the issue as a PDF so anyone on the Mac stories and the club Mac

01:02:06   stories channel can archive a PDF of the newsletter if they want to have a hard

01:02:11   copy for the future and it also you know Zapier does a bunch of stuff for me and

01:02:16   for others for example it puts tasks in my to-do list which is to do is to you

01:02:25   publish articles on Mac stories. It does a lot that is hard to describe because it's very

01:02:32   custom to us but in terms of automation it is essential. So as I said Todoist is the task manager

01:02:39   that I use and that we also use as a team. We have a bunch of collaborative projects where

01:02:45   we create those for both for the whole year and also for specific projects that are time sensitive.

01:02:53   In Slack, we have a paid Slack account because we want all of the integrations and some of

01:03:00   the premium features that Slack offers, and we take advantage of the integrations between

01:03:06   Slack and Todoist to do stuff like when we're talking to each other, we can easily create

01:03:11   a task just by using the slash command.

01:03:14   And of course Slack has a bunch of other features like it can import links and preview them,

01:03:19   it can preview Google Docs stuff, so it's super nice.

01:03:22   truly the big change that we're making to the way that we work is the Storybot.

01:03:27   I talked about the Storybot I think a few months ago and at that time we

01:03:33   only had one feature which was the ability to create and complete article

01:03:39   assignment requests. So it is a way for me both from Slack and from Workflow

01:03:45   because Storybot is an API, it is a way for me to say I found this news on the

01:03:51   and I want you guys to read about it on Mac Stories. Over the past couple of

01:03:56   months we have enhanced this feature with the ability to self-assign a story

01:04:01   so someone can say "well I'm working on this, it's assigned to myself, you guys

01:04:08   should not touch this because I'm handling this". So there's now the ability

01:04:12   to self-assign, but we also rolled out another feature and we're almost

01:04:17   completing the third feature of StoryBot. So the second one is called the emoji

01:04:23   reactions and those are really the same emoji reactions of Slack but with a

01:04:27   twist. So in every channel where StoryBot is present we can assign an emoji

01:04:33   reaction to a specific Todoist project and a specific due date. So when we're

01:04:39   talking to each other we can react with an emoji and that Slack message will

01:04:45   become a task in a specific project with a preset due date. So for example my dart

01:04:51   emoji on Slack is assigned to the Mac Stories project with due date in one

01:04:57   hour. So when I'm talking to someone about a Mac Stories task I can just

01:05:01   react with the dart and it goes straight to my Todoist thanks to the story bot.

01:05:05   I like a dart. A dart is good for that I think. I like that. Yeah, yeah it's great.

01:05:10   I think I would have used the screaming guy if you need to article it into an hour.

01:05:14   But that's just me.

01:05:16   And the third feature that we're almost completing, this is a great one,

01:05:22   we have made Storybot integrate with Google Drive.

01:05:27   And there's going to be two features initially, which is

01:05:31   the first feature is Storybot will be able to list our Google Docs

01:05:35   and it'll be able to extract from any Google document

01:05:40   every URL in the document

01:05:44   and offer you a list of every link that you have in Google Doc.

01:05:49   And that list can be a plain text list of links or a markdown list.

01:05:55   And that is going to be super convenient for us to put together the show notes for App Stories.

01:05:59   Because instead of doing a bunch of copy and paste,

01:06:02   we can just run a command in Slack or via workflow

01:06:05   to return a list of links in like two seconds from a Google Doc.

01:06:09   And this was super difficult to put together because Google has some crazy authentication stuff going on.

01:06:14   But thankfully we were able to roll out this custom solution.

01:06:18   And the second feature also for Google Docs will be an append

01:06:23   functionalities.

01:06:25   So from Workflow and iOS, if you want to

01:06:28   append a link or some text to an existing Google Doc,

01:06:33   Storybot will be able to do that.

01:06:35   So that's gonna be useful.

01:06:37   And then I have a list of services

01:06:40   that mostly match what you guys use for Relay.

01:06:44   There's Memberful for Cloud Max Stories,

01:06:46   Libsyn for App Stories, G Suite, of course, Dropbox.

01:06:51   We use GitHub to share markdown articles together

01:06:57   and check out each other's typos.

01:07:00   Trello, we're still big on Trello.

01:07:02   - I should say we use GitHub for web and CMS development.

01:07:07   It's always funny when we're going through

01:07:08   this whole programmer debate thing

01:07:11   that people were finding that I have a GitHub account

01:07:14   and that's why.

01:07:15   It's like to post issues, right?

01:07:18   I believe is what it's called.

01:07:19   Issues.

01:07:19   - That's good.

01:07:20   - I post a lot of issues.

01:07:21   - Hey, I found this broken, please fix it.

01:07:23   - Most of the time, honestly, I just text them to Steven

01:07:25   and let him post it.

01:07:26   - That is mostly what happens.

01:07:28   I assign them as if they come from you though.

01:07:30   It's good.

01:07:31   - That's good.

01:07:31   So yeah, we're still big on Trello, Toggle, I use it both personally for time tracking

01:07:41   and also with Ryan to sort of keep an eye on what he's working on and sort of, you know,

01:07:48   how much time he logs every week.

01:07:51   And I'm using personally Numbers and iCloud for spreadsheets for my accounting, but in

01:08:00   In terms of invoicing and sending invoices to sponsors and stuff like that, John uses

01:08:06   Invoicely, which is a nice looking service that works for both euros and dollars, which

01:08:13   was necessary for me.

01:08:14   It integrates with Stripe, so it's got all these little touches that I needed.

01:08:20   And finally, I need to mention, I pay for Rackspace, the CDN, and Kraken, which is kraken.io.

01:08:30   is an image optimization service. I've been using this too for years and in fact we also

01:08:35   have a custom web app that provides image uploads for the Max Stories team with Rackspace

01:08:42   and image optimization built in. It's callable via workflow of course. So yeah, this is all.

01:08:49   It's a bunch of different services but they work really well and it's worth it.

01:08:57   So for 512 pixels, it's obviously a much shorter list.

01:09:01   I use FreshBooks for invoicing.

01:09:03   I also do some consulting.

01:09:04   I don't really ever talk about that,

01:09:05   but that's all run through a FreshBooks account.

01:09:08   I use G Suite for my email and Docs and calendars

01:09:13   and everything.

01:09:14   Memberful Now for the membership.

01:09:16   And the site itself is hosted at WP Engine.

01:09:19   It is a WordPress host where they sort of bake in and take

01:09:24   care of a lot of stuff for you.

01:09:25   So it is more expensive than a bare bones WordPress install.

01:09:29   But you get caching and everything out of the box.

01:09:31   You don't have to do that yourself.

01:09:33   And you can do backups.

01:09:35   And you can fork the site and have a development site.

01:09:38   Lots of tools that you can do on your own.

01:09:41   But I kind of wanted just one solution to do it all.

01:09:45   And in my past job at a development design agency,

01:09:48   we used WP Engine for some client projects.

01:09:50   And I was really impressed.

01:09:52   And so the site lives there.

01:09:53   And I think that's about it.

01:09:56   It's a pretty straightforward GitHub for the theme

01:09:58   and for the code and stuff,

01:09:59   but it's a pretty straightforward little operation.

01:10:02   - So basically all of my business,

01:10:05   probably like actually 100% of my business

01:10:08   is relay FM stuff,

01:10:10   so like all the things that Steven mentioned.

01:10:12   It's basically all I do business-wise,

01:10:14   but I do have like a small handful of things that I pay for

01:10:18   with my own mythical company that exists, which is Zapier.

01:10:22   I use Zapier for a bunch of stuff, I spoke about that in the past.

01:10:25   Todoist for all of my tracking of tasks and Toggle as well for my time tracking.

01:10:30   I love Toggle, Toggle is so good and I use that with our assistant as well so we can

01:10:35   manage their hours.

01:10:36   So it's become a really good service for me recently.

01:10:40   So I'm very happy about that and I continue to evangelize Toggle to anybody that's thinking

01:10:45   about time tracking.

01:10:46   I think it can help you learn a lot about yourself.

01:10:50   if you don't necessarily use the billing stuff, just it has helped me make some real good

01:10:56   realizations about the way that I work, even though time tracking I have learned absolutely

01:11:03   bores people to the point of complete distraction and they will hate you if you keep talking

01:11:09   about it. So I'm going to stop talking about it right now.

01:11:13   So that's a lot of services. So if you started this week's show and wondered why there were

01:11:18   were 37 links in our show notes.

01:11:21   That's why.

01:11:23   If you want to find those show notes,

01:11:24   you can go to relay.fm/connected/143.

01:11:29   We are just a couple of weeks away now from WWDC.

01:11:34   So we're all gonna be there together.

01:11:36   Next week we'll probably do our kind of final thoughts

01:11:39   and maybe some predictions running into the event.

01:11:42   We're gonna be doing the draft on upgrade next week.

01:11:45   So that's gonna be fun.

01:11:46   week's the last week before WWDC. Yeah. Only one more episode. And me and Steven

01:11:51   realized when we were talking yesterday that we'll be recording the first ever

01:11:54   full live three of us in person live, not with an audience, but the three of us in

01:12:00   person episode of Connected. Because last year it wasn't, right? Like we did the

01:12:05   whole RelayCon thing. So this would be just the three of us sitting down with a

01:12:09   table and just talking. So that's gonna be nice. So you can look out for that in a

01:12:14   couple of weeks time. But yeah, join us next week and we'll be talking about our final

01:12:18   thoughts on WWDC leading up to it and talking about some predictions and doing all the like.

01:12:25   You can find us online, Stephen is over at 512pixels.net, go there and check out his

01:12:29   new membership newsletter. He is @ismh on Twitter, Federico is @maxstories.net, he hosts

01:12:36   a couple of shows on Real AFM and also App Stories as well. And he is @fatici, V-I-T-I-C-C-I

01:12:42   on Twitter and I am @imikeyke. Thank you to Encapsulent and Blue Apron for helping support

01:12:48   this week's episode. Also go to our show notes and you'll be able to find out information

01:12:53   about coming to see us and meet with us and see some cool music and support a great cause

01:12:58   if you're at WWDC for the AppCamp for Girls benefit. So please go and take a look and

01:13:03   sign up for some tickets. We're going to be in London in like a week and a bit, me and

01:13:10   Federico so if you got a ticket for the London meet up we look forward to seeing you.

01:13:13   All right then thank you so much for listening to this week's show.

01:13:17   We'll be back next time. Until then say goodbye guys.

01:13:20   Adios.

01:13:21   Adios!

01:13:23   [