135: Uncomfortable in My Pants
18 Sep 2015iPhone batteries, WebKit on Apple TV, over-criticism of Apple, iPad Pro apps, and follow-up from last week.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- CEC Unicorns
- _David Smith's 16 GB iPhone Research
- iPhone 6/6S battery numbers
- Casey's crescent moon and Genius Bar policies
- Purchases
- Apple TV
- Development hardware lottery
- Plex for Apple TV
- Clicks vs. taps
- 24p
- TV Calibration
- MFI Games
- Can Apple TV require a controller?
- WebKit on the Apple TV
- Pessimism
- iPad Pro
- Post-show:
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Top Four
- CEC unicorns
- 16 GB iOS devices
- iPhone 6S battery
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- “Rose gold”
- Genius repairs and security
- Sponsor: Lynda.com
- Which iPhones did we get?
- Apple TV lottery, 24p, games
- Sponsor: Automatic
- Don’t buy a TV
- No WebKit on Apple TV
- Over-criticism of Apple
- iPad Pro miscellany
- Post-show: Marco’s new app
Pre-show: Top Four
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I’m listening to the top four and it’s driving me insane because Marco is the worst podcast host
⏹️ ▶️ John of a show with top four ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god, I thought the same thing and I’m too nice a guy to say
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand how Tiff has the patience of a saint. Like, just pick four things, like make
⏹️ ▶️ John him write it down on a piece of paper. Everything is number five. What? Everything can’t be number five.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then within the top four it’s like, this is my number one and then all these are tied for number two.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not how top four works. The show is, and I like the fact that at the end of the episode
⏹️ ▶️ John you admitted it and like explained like I realized it but I’m not able to even follow the simple formula and Tiff
⏹️ ▶️ John is like she’s fine with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s how she can live with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well she, you know, she tolerates me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, she does. It’s like she’s not even frustrated by it. Like the show is called Top Four. Pick four
⏹️ ▶️ John things and write them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down. I’m still f***ing bitter that you didn’t bring up Transport Tycoon. I’m so angry at you for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean that’s not what he picked. It’s not your top four, it’s their top four.
⏹️ ▶️ John top four. Apparently it’s not. That one was probably at number 15 with every other game in existence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, but I couldn’t agree with you more, John. Marco, you’ve got to get a grip on the top four.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s so easy to do. You just write number one, two, three, and four, and then you write words next to each one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. That’s it. So easy to do. Tiff does it. Tiff does it. See
⏹️ ▶️ John how? Watch her do it if you need help. She does such a good job. She has a list of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John ones she considered. She’s got her top four. She has reasons. And you’re just like, I don’t know, TV shows.
⏹️ ▶️ John i like some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well i like i like this one a lot and then there’s like these 34 other ones that are somewhere down
⏹️ ▶️ John and if can like talk you into like like changing your mind halfway through the show and she’s like she even
⏹️ ▶️ John called you and she’s like you’re just saying that because i liked it you’re like no no i’ve changed my mind at this moment
⏹️ ▶️ John boy good thing she’s on that show she’s really carrying you i
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco oh my god it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John i i enjoyed uh what is What is the next episode going to be
CEC unicorns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s start with we have learned that not only does this universe have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many many many many many tap-to-click wizards But as I believe John has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phrased in the show notes, we have also found that there are quite a few CEC
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of an oxymoron because the whole thing of unicorn is like the one rare Unicorn, but there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. There are obviously not you guys. But anyway, yeah, lots of CEC unicorns last show I expressed my
⏹️ ▶️ John general disdain for CEC and my frustration with it almost working like that’s that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about it Like it almost works. It works some of the time you can kind of get it to work You’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John think you have everything set up and it’s working perfectly and then things will go wrong in a way that you can’t debug
⏹️ ▶️ John And you maybe you’ll never be able to get them work again That’s been my experience with CEC across many different manufacturers in
⏹️ ▶️ John many years So I asked anyone use CEC and have good things to say about it And
⏹️ ▶️ John I did get a bunch of people tweeting that they have you know I have a mixed component set up with components from different
⏹️ ▶️ John companies and it works for me I have a complete Panasonic setup and it works for me. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably maybe fewer than the Tapticlick wizards, but a surprising number of people are using CEC
⏹️ ▶️ John and are happy with it a lot of them Admittedly have fairly simple needs like they’re like I turn
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing on and it switches my input turns the other thing on I Think as the number of devices you connect
⏹️ ▶️ John increases and as you have greater expectations like not only does it have to just auto switch inputs
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know turn on the television and stuff but do a bunch of other things in terms of changing surround settings or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever other things it can do then maybe it goes more awry. And maybe it’s gotten better
⏹️ ▶️ John since I bought my TV and receiver a couple years ago so who knows but anyway if you want to be
⏹️ ▶️ John optimistic about CEC there are people out there who are using it successfully and happily and it’s working for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Robert Enkdahl wrote in to explain why CEC might be so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John He is an ASIC designer. What does that stand for, guys? That is? Oh, I don’t remember offhand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I can’t believe I don’t know this acronym off the top
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my head. Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Yeah. Application-specific
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there you go. How could I not pull that out? I’m getting old, guys. All right, anyway. He’s an ASIC engineer
⏹️ ▶️ John with HDMI experience. And he says the CEC protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John is crappy because only a limited set of commands are defined in the protocol, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John rest is entirely up to the manufacturer of the device. So there’s a small set of commands that are defined, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then device makers can make up anything they want. And so I assume like Panasonic will
⏹️ ▶️ John make up a bunch of stuff that works with its own stuff, and Sony will make up stuff that works with its own stuff. And on top of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the spec for CEC says even the defined commands, you don’t have to implement them, they’re not mandatory.
⏹️ ▶️ John So even though there are a small number of defined commands and you can extend them, you don’t even have to implement the defined commands. You could,
⏹️ ▶️ John for example, implement your own volume up, down, or input switching thing that works with your receiver and not implement
⏹️ ▶️ John the standard one. HDMI 2.0 apparently fixes this, but HDMI 2.0 isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John out yet on a lot of hardware. So CEC could get better in
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI 2.0 because they kind of learned from the past that if you let the manufacturers do whatever they want with your protocol, they’ll do
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are not conducive to mixing components. and maybe not even conducive to mixing with their
⏹️ ▶️ John own components from distantly separated by time, and
⏹️ ▶️ John not having the defined commands be mandatory. Like, I don’t even know what kind of standard is that. If you don’t have to implement
⏹️ ▶️ John the defined commands and you can make up your own commands, it’s basically the Wild West. So that is the explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John for why people who have bad experiences with CEC have bad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey experiences.
16 GB iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, we had yet another excellent post from dear friend of the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore David Smith. My favorite David Smith blog posts are when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he goes spelunking into data that he has gathered or can discover and figure out little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tidbits or perhaps confirm little tidbits that people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey theorize or maybe don’t even realize is true. And so the blog post that is in question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which relates to what we had lamented last episode is entitled, 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gigabytes is a Bad User Experience. In this post, Underscore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes through his homegrown analytics that he has in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his very popular app, Audiobooks, that’s not a super duper nerdy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. It’s got a really good install base of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular people. He has these graphs of reported free space
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 16 gig phones. And if you look at these graphs, it’s abundantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obvious that almost all of these phones have almost no available free space. And that just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem good. So was it John that pulled out a couple of these choice quotes? Would you like to
⏹️ ▶️ John go over them? Yeah. So the first thing is, like Casey said, these are just the customers of
⏹️ ▶️ John one application, but it’s not a super nerdy application. But anyway, this is the premise of the discussion is,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is just among people who bought this one app from this one developer. We’re hoping it’s representative and this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John best data we have. It seems like it could be representative. If anything, it might skew more nerdy. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. Anyway, this is among iPhone 6 and 6 Plus customers only. 43% of
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 6 and 6 Plus customers have 16 gig models. That’s what I was getting
⏹️ ▶️ John at in the last show when I was saying it used to be that the most popular model of whatever Apple product was
⏹️ ▶️ John always the most expensive fanciest one and that started to change I don’t know at this point like a decade ago
⏹️ ▶️ John it changed and now since Apple’s a mass-market company and sells tons and tons of things Obviously, it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John to skew more towards how you’d expect but even I was surprised to see that 43% of iPhone 6 6 plus customers got the 16 gig model because
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the newest fanciest iPhone. It’s not like we’re saying that the people buying last year’s of the year before phone or cheaping
⏹️ ▶️ John out. These are the people who want the new iPhone and just want it, like I said the last show, want to find the
⏹️ ▶️ John cheapest possible way they can get it. So 16 gig model. Now among the people with a 16 gig iPhone six
⏹️ ▶️ John and six pluses, 37% of them have less than a gig of space available. And less than a gig of space
⏹️ ▶️ John available is basically full, like less than a gig is almost anything can happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it could push you over the edge you are, you know, that’s the point where I always tend to start popping up dialogues in your face
⏹️ ▶️ John and saying, your desk looks like it’s almost full, you’d you know do something about that
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other theory is like okay well fine but I bet everybody fills up their phones well
⏹️ ▶️ John among people who have 64 gig phones only 1% of them have filled them to that amount so
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as if space it doesn’t matter it’s not like lanes on a highway where all you just make the phone bigger or people are just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John fill it there is a certain amount of stuff that people have or expected to encounter during the useful lifetime of the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and according to these stats if you have a 64 gig phone only 1% of people have basically filled it
⏹️ ▶️ John and among 16 gig phones almost 40% have filled it. And then finally taking these customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones who have the six and six plus who have filled it up,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, multiplying the percentages together who have filled it up. This is 17%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the customers of this audio books application are basically walking around all day as underscore puts it with the,
⏹️ ▶️ John um, not gonna be able to pronounce this damn clean sword dangling over their head. Did I get that right? You know, the big
⏹️ ▶️ John sword that swings back and forth a ground Is it Damoclean? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going out on a limb here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sort of Damocles. Anyway. I don’t even know what that was. Yeah, you can look it up, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John Get some culture. Yeah, so 17% of the
⏹️ ▶️ John customers. Now, is this representative of all iPhone users in the entire world? We don’t know. This again, it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John developer’s customers for one kind of general interest app, only the iPhone 6, 6 plus,
⏹️ ▶️ John but these numbers do not look promising. Again, I would think that
⏹️ ▶️ John Underscore’s customers would skew even more nerdy, because he moves in nerdy circles, he is nerdy. Some of the apps
⏹️ ▶️ John he sells are nerdy, but other ones are like Pedometer++ and the Weather app and stuff, and the Audiobooks app are
⏹️ ▶️ John just general interest applications. Again, Apple, we’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ John this before, Apple has the real numbers, we don’t have the real numbers, so that impairs our ability to definitively
⏹️ ▶️ John shame them for selling 16 gig models. But the little data that we
⏹️ ▶️ John have, We’re not Apple and they’re not sharing this information. The data that we can glean, here’s some more support for the theory that
⏹️ ▶️ John a 16 gig phone is not a good experience for users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it seems completely obvious to me that this is a terrible, terrible, terrible decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just like you said, John, we don’t have all the data that Apple has, but gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to see what metric they’re using to justify this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it’s not something related to profit or margins or something along those lines, one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those businessy terms that I’m not very good with, then— Money. Yeah, money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s called money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to know what this metric is, if it isn’t just money, because it seems so obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me that this is just a terrible, terrible, terrible decision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I’m totally in agreement with you, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can look at all the different possible explanations of why they might reasonably have done this, but none of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them are particularly strong, especially for a very high-profit product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the iPhone even at the 16 gig capacity. So the reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple very well could ship that device with 32 or even 64 at that price point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and barely affect the margins of that product at all. But I think the reason they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as we said before is is not because they can’t afford to put 16 gigs in a $650 phone. Right? Is that what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is? It’s not because of that. It’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey if they did that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would hurt sales of the one that’s $100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more. And so it would drive their average sale price down in all likelihood. So that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s not done. It’s simple as that. Any other explanation is really just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grasping at straws, trying to make an excuse. That is the real reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I completely agree. I could go on forever about this, but I feel like we’ve kind of beaten this horse, I should say.
iPhone 6S battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, let’s talk about the iPhone 6S battery. We had, I guess we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had talked about it getting a little bit smaller last episode, is that right? One way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it got smaller. And the numbers say that the iPhone 6 had a 1,810 milliamp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hour battery. The iPhone 6S has 1,715. So almost exactly 100 milliamp hour difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is about a 5% loss in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms of the new iPhone’s 6S battery. Or I guess that’s just the 6S,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, not the 6S Plus. Which is a little bit of a loss, but presumably the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different chips on the device, and they did a shrink, didn’t they, on this one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they did. Remember in the keynote, they wanted to say they did a shrink, but they did it in like regular person speak instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of jargon. And so it confused all the nerds. Like, wait, are they saying
⏹️ ▶️ John are they trying to say shrink? Yeah, I’m pretty sure they did a shrink. And the other thing they do
⏹️ ▶️ John very often is reduce the number of chips, get chips that combine functionality. They previously
⏹️ ▶️ John took two separate chips. I’m assuming that they can absorb this 5% loss combined with the shrink
⏹️ ▶️ John and the efficiencies of just a second crack at the same size form factor. So it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John should be fine. But again, I just wanted to put some hard numbers on like the last show. We’re like, oh, it looks like that vibration haptic
⏹️ ▶️ John engine thing takes up a lot of room. Well, quantify it. And quantifying it, it looks like it’s about 5%. And by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John these numbers are pulled from Apple’s videos where they like pan over the
⏹️ ▶️ John innards and show the battery. And on the battery is stamped the power rating.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course the iPhone 6, everybody knows from, you know, tear downs and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although this also leaked beforehand. This information leaked weeks before actually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I believe the leak was right on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they usually are. But you know, I’m just, give people the source because if it turns out that the video
⏹️ ▶️ John was wrong because someone photoshopped that number on there and leaks were wrong and the real battery is different. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, one thing to consider, first of all, the 5% loss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of raw capacity and saying it’s the same battery life, that could also, even if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ignore any kind of component changes, they made iOS 9 more battery efficient. And so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can say, oh, it gets X hours just because it’s a new OS. They do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing on the Macs with the laptops. They also, I don’t know if they’re including in their battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco runtime estimates, if they are including the low power mode being turned on at 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever it is, 20 or 10 that it turns on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that, is that automatically turned on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It prompts you to turn it on. And so, but I’m guessing if you wanna fudge a number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit and really optimize your number, they would probably do that, and they could argue that that’s fair because most people would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. Anyway, so it could be including those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it wasn’t before. So keep that in mind when you read the official estimates. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see what happens in practice. I am still very skeptical. I, oh man, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just went to XOXO and I took the 6 Plus with me. And I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 6 all year except for when I took another trip or another series of trips. But I went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the 6 Plus for this trip for battery life primarily and wow, it is glorious. And then going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the 6 after a week of the 6 Plus again, oh my God, it’s so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so bad. I I wish they would meaningfully improve the battery life, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clear that They think this is good enough, and I don’t and so we just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disagree on that I will I will say one thing though that you know in on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery topic. We’ve talked in the past about how The the reason the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be this skinny and light and have a mediocre battery life is John I believe what you term the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco naked robotic core theory which is that, you know, the ideal phone is this really tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that you can that is so small that you can put it in a case if you want some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other ability whether it’s more durability, more battery life, whatever whatever cases can offer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can put it in a case to fix the shortcomings of being small and then if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really small phone you can just carry the naked phone. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked after this trip over the last few days I’ve been trying to research iPhone battery cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had one in the past and it was so big and clunky I never really used it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t fit my current phone now but I look to see what’s out there today and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so so terrible. And I feel like one of the biggest arguments against the Naked Robotic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Core theory is just how bad all the other cases are. Like if you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give this phone 50% more battery life uh you have to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much bulk and so much size way more than if they would have just built it in to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with plus it’s this big like you know plastic thing with some stupid logo on the back that’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugly and tacky that no one’s heard of from some case company who cares right you have to carry on the stupid logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then you have this uh then you have like this giant plug on the bottom the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be extended by like a half inch just to have room for this plug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the bulkiest, most terrible decision ever. And so, I think like a huge strike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against the naked robotic core theory is that by doing that, by going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that direction, and by, let’s say, you want more battery? Okay, buy a battery case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That argument falls apart when all the battery cases are varying degrees of terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I generally agree with you. I do have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Lenmar battery case, which I’ll put the link in the show notes for what I have,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I use it only when I know that I’m going to need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some extra juice, which is almost never. The only time I typically use it is at like WWDC and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I go to football games when my phone is just desperately melting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its own battery trying to search for service. And it is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you described. It is enormous. It is bulky. It is – it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not cheap. I don’t remember how much it was. It was cheaper than the Mophie was at the time and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chose it for more than just frugality. I forget why else I chose it. Maybe the battery was a little bit bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It adds a crap load of bulk to a phone that I still think is a little bit big for my taste.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that being said, just today I got an email from Mophie where they have announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Juice Pack, which is their line of batteries, called the Juice Pack Reserve. And we’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that link in the show notes and I’ve just put it in the chat room. This one is a very, very, very slimline
⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery that does not look to add very much bulk at all. In fact, in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey email, which I don’t have in front of me, they had, oh, here it is, now on the same page.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They show that without the Juice Pack, it’s 6.86 millimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And with this juice pack reserve, it is 14.79
⏹️ ▶️ Casey millimeters, whereas with the average, as they say it, or typical, as they say, a protective case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be 15 millimeters. So in other words, it is no thicker than a normal case you would put on your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone by whatever they define normal. This actually looks extremely appealing to me, and I would absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buy one if it wasn’t for the fact that I already have a case. So this might be the exception that proves the rule.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking, though, I think you hit the nail on the head. They are all terrible and huge and bulky and annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re just terrible and huge to people like us, though. Like you, I mean, forget battery cases. Just think cases.
⏹️ ▶️ John We all see people with cases on their phones that we consider hideous and huge and ridiculous. I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ John people with non battery cases that are bigger than any battery case that I’ve seen that are colored
⏹️ ▶️ John like the rainbow that might as well have like fins and wedges poking out of them and people love them.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s no accounting for taste, right? So that set that aside. The other thing I would say is that, uh, as
⏹️ ▶️ John every time this comes up, I say it, there’s a place in Apple’s line for a phone that is thicker and has more battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life that is not the six plus. Uh, they don’t currently make that, but if they keep diversifying, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually they will. And that would satisfy Marco’s need for a Johnny Ived designed, hopefully non
⏹️ ▶️ John Teflon coated, uh, nice looking phone where he doesn’t have to deal with someone else’s thing slapping
⏹️ ▶️ John onto it. He doesn’t have to deal with it. Extending the ports, doesn’t have to deal with a different logo and all the things that he finds distasteful
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. But I would say that people like him and people like me are in the vast
⏹️ ▶️ John minority, based on what I see out in the world, of how much people love their super ugly like wallet credit card,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, card jack combined, whatever, like bottle opener iPhone cases that people
⏹️ ▶️ John have on there. Like, seriously, I have all the problems that that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would think that people consider that a feature like that is the one thing of the naked robotic core allows is allows people
⏹️ ▶️ John to exercise their different tastes, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can exercise your taste with a sticker.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, please don’t encourage stickers. Besides, they’ll probably melt to the thing because it gets so warm, as you noted when you used it without
⏹️ ▶️ John a case, right? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I’ve turned into a case person with the 6 simply because…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just use the Apple leather case because it’s really slim and feels very good. I always like the feel of leather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ooh, title. that like I because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the six is just such a bad phone to hold and and I’ve I’ve heard rumblings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the new phone is significantly grippier but I have my doubts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you know just because the shape like it’s the same shape and the the six is a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for two main reasons one is the shape one is the is the slickness of the metal and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so even if they’ve made the slickness of the metal better the shape is such that it’s still probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John You tell me you didn’t get the hold one at XOXO? You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have to say who let you hold it.
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“Rose gold”
⏹️ ▶️ John So, before we get off this topic, one thing I meant to bring up earlier was the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of an Apple branded battery case. Apple has been making, it seems like more
⏹️ ▶️ John and more accessories lately. But yeah, there’s, you know, third party everything. But there’s also first
⏹️ ▶️ John party, a lot of stuff. They brought the dock back recently. The new one I think even has a headphone port
⏹️ ▶️ John on the back of it. You can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in pink. I mean, excuse me, rose gold. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just own it. Just say it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s pink. I assume it’s it’s pink in the same way that the gold one is gold
⏹️ ▶️ John and the answer is like barely But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no it’s it’s really pink.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I haven’t seen the phone, but I did go to the Apple Store Sunday Oh, I should do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick. Well. I’ll get to that in a second anyway I went to the Apple Store Sunday saw the watch the rose gold watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was pink. It was not rose gold It was pink.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very much pink. I mean, it’s it does look like it’s roughly the same saturation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the gold But it is you know unquestionably, unashamedly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pink. And I don’t know why they don’t just call it pink. You would never look at this color and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, that’s rose gold. No, it’s pink, and pink is great. I don’t know why you wouldn’t just own that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think it looks good. I really honestly do, so I agree with you. Anyway, I’m sorry, we totally hijacked your thought
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t remember where I was in my thought. I think, what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was getting at was, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, Apple making battery cases. Apple makes a bunch of stuff. They make leather cases. They don’t just make even one case
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. They make a leather case, they have the silicone case, They have those weird things with the holes in them on the
⏹️ ▶️ John back of the old iPod Touches. They have the docks, they have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John why wouldn’t they make a battery case eventually? And if they did, like the idea would be like, well if Apple made
⏹️ ▶️ John one, Marco would like it. But based on the accessories that they’ve made, likely, I don’t think that’s guaranteed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe they would have a higher chance of making a battery case that Marco would not
⏹️ ▶️ John find objectionable. But, I mean, just look at those docks where your entire phone is sitting on a lightning port.
⏹️ ▶️ John great. It’s kind of wobbly and, you know, it makes me a little nervous. And the leather case
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. Most of their cases are okay. I always like the bumper. Remember the bumper
⏹️ ▶️ John they made? I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John really nice case because it had like the shiny edges, but then it had rubber on the parts that you gripped and it had metal buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John in them. Anyway, if that ever happens, maybe it will help
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco with his battery woes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I like the bumper as well. But I will say that for the 5s and the 6,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been rocking the Apple leather case. I have gotten it in black because that’s the way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should be done. And beyond that, it’s probably the only one that doesn’t eventually turn black anyway because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s already black. I quite like this Apple leather case. If I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was brave enough, I would roll without a case at all, but I’m not that brave. And although I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet to break an iPhone, it is only a matter of time. now have probably jinxed what I’ve purchased, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll talk about in a minute. So I will hopefully stick with this Apple leather case going
Genius repairs and security
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And before we talk about our purchases from this past weekend, I wanted to do a very brief, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick follow-up with regard to my crescent moon on my iPhone 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, if you haven’t been keeping up and following along, that is, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a crescent moon kind of thing in the front-facing camera. I believe they call that the FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera on my iPhone 6. I realized that we were running out of warranty time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for those of us who purchased on launch day like I did. And so I took my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the local Apple store this past Sunday. I mentioned the crescent moon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The genius didn’t even blink twice. He said, okay, we will get you a new screen. It’ll take about 45
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes. He took my phone from me. Interestingly, he forced me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn off, like not in a jerky way. I should say he asked me to turn off, my iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I guess isn’t a bad thing, but it struck me as a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey odd. Like if all they’re doing is replacing the screen, why does that really matter? Maybe in case they screw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something up and then need to replace the phone. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had people write in about that too. One person was super angry about having to, you know, being told to like enter his passwords
⏹️ ▶️ John and unlock everything and unencrypted and turn off the, like, whatever I I’m always
⏹️ ▶️ John nervous about what is actually going on. It’s like when the Grinch takes your Christmas tree back to repair it. right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m giving you my phone and then a little while later you’re going to emerge with another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you say is my phone. Are any part of those ones related? Am I just getting a new refurbished
⏹️ ▶️ John phone? Did you really replace the screen? Does this thing come apart and go back together
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that is, you know, is it meant to come apart and go back together? Is it possible to even do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it a one-way assembly? I’m always nervous about things like this is why I always just really hope I
⏹️ ▶️ John win the lottery and get something that doesn’t have any problems. It was like my old laptop. Like once
⏹️ ▶️ John I opened up my old laptop to replace the hard drive and it’s never been the same again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not good at doing that. Presumably they’re better at the Apple store where they do it over and over and over again, but I’m always nervous
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. And the smaller the thing gets, the more, yeah, I don’t know. They’ve got to be better than I am,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As far as I can tell, I did get the same phone back. I mean, I didn’t need to restore from backup all
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, but that’s, but if they have you turn off all that stuff, that’s the whole thing you don’t, you know, like what you should have done is put like a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John microscopic, uh, you know, etching of your initials in some part of the case that they say they’re not replacing and see if it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John there when you get it back, put a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hair across the headphone port. And if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey tell you, you’ll know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, it’s hard to tell because this thing has lived in a case pretty much since day one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it does look good, I’m not going to lie. I mean, it, I don’t, I didn’t inspect it for scuffs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as apparently the genius had noted that it had. I do know that where there was a little scratch in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the screen, there isn’t a scratch anymore, but that makes sense because they replaced the screen. But I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of beta apps on my phone and those still worked. All the stuff that was once on my phone is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my phone. Maybe Apple can do a bit-for-bit restore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what’s on the phone, but everything that I can see that indicates that all I got was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a screen is what happened. It appears to me that all I got was a screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very likely because that is the way most of them are fixed. Most of them are not swapped out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s how mine was fixed earlier this year for the same reason, before you apparently caused this global shortage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey time by mentioning this on our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I did get, or we did get some reports in that some people went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the Genius Bar and were specifically asked, oh, do you listen to the Accidental Tech Podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve gotten a lot of you in here lately, which I genuinely hand on heart made me extraordinarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey proud. I was very happy to hear that. But yeah, so I did get a replaced screen. My understanding is some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did get replaced phones. In fact, one person wrote in and said, well, I went in right around closing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time and they didn’t want to deal with it. So they just gave me a new phone, which I thought was pretty awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good strategy. Which is a pretty solid strategy. I wish I thought of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it didn’t work for me. Like I went in in the evening when I went to get mine fixed story this year and they just told me come back tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh wow. Like they kept it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overnight and they said come back tomorrow so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I said alright.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s you know what when I go in there I try to avoid having service done on my current active
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone and if I really do have to have it done I will just switch to an old phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wipe it because like I because I don’t because you know the whole idea of like oh unlike like because they told me to you take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your passcode like does it they basically tell you disable all of your security on your device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I say no that’s I’m not doing that that’s that is not an option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I guess I just wipe my devices whenever I have to get them serviced and and it’s inconvenient but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it’s terrible that they make people do that and whatever the reason is they should find a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better way to do it that doesn’t require that you know they they’ll say oh well a certain tools won’t run well then your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple make tools that run like that’s you know you can do that there’s no reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get people to disable all their security while doing a hardware repair that is complete BS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think there might be some legit reasons because the whole idea is that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no secret backdoor key to get it to your data that Apple has, right? And you say, well, I just make
⏹️ ▶️ John something worth you’re essentially asking them to put a backdoor. So at some point, there has to be some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m saying for a hardware repair, like if it’s a screen replacement, what why do they need access to the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone for a screen replacement, they
⏹️ ▶️ John probably do want to do a full backup of your thing in case the guy slips
⏹️ ▶️ John with a screwdriver or something and, you know, cracks a chip in the thing and they have to give you a new phone and then you say, but where’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all my data? I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if that’s true, though, because he specifically, the genius that I was speaking to, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went to, went into the settings on my phone, went to the iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup or I believe it was iCloud backup screen and said, whoa, whoa, you know, you haven’t backed this up to iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a while. Have you backed this up to your computer? And I said yes last night.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at that point he was completely satisfied, but. I think there would have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of, um, a little bit of a kerfuffle if I had said, no, I haven’t backed this up in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ages. Why do you ask? Um, he also didn’t, if memory serves, he did not expressly ask me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to remove my passcode, but he was, well, the funny thing about it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he wasn’t clear about why he wanted my Apple ID password and he handed me the phone to type it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. It’s not that he needed it himself, but as I was typing it in I looked at what he was doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he was disabling find my iPhone So basically he just wanted to make sure that I had a backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He wanted to make sure find my iPhone was not on and then at that point he was satisfied
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the tipster is frustrated. They were not listening to him that That
⏹️ ▶️ John is impossible. What he says it was it impossible to Ring out he says
⏹️ ▶️ John a repair if you don’t find my iPhone on to do the tool use But I think what it all comes down to is that
⏹️ ▶️ John they want to be able to use your phone even if they’re not making A backup which makes sense because that Paul doesn’t usually care
⏹️ ▶️ John about your data They want to like when they’re doing this screen repair I assume that when the screen repair
⏹️ ▶️ John is over they want to make sure everything works They want to be able to tap things on the screen and if your
⏹️ ▶️ John screen is locked and is gonna like erase itself After 10, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to be able to get at your stuff somehow Otherwise, like, can’t they just do an I’ve a hardware repair
⏹️ ▶️ John blind and just repair it and give it back to me and then when I turn it on I’m sure that it will work
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sure that you know, I Like like I said, I don’t I don’t think it’s possible for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John not ask you to undo some amount of security To do repair any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John repair even just a hardware repair just so they can verify that the hardware repair was successful so
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes some sense Maybe the geniuses aren’t telling people because it’s very difficult to explain why they might need to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John Whenever I’ve brought a Mac in for repair, I’ve always just wipe the entire thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John put it on a single account username Apple password Apple on an entirely erased hard drive I take out
⏹️ ▶️ John all my third-party RAM like a you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco back in the day
⏹️ ▶️ John if I brought something to the Apple Store It’s just so much easier to do that Then you don’t have to deal with anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s like sometimes I would put in a new hard drive like, you know Most of my Mac was still at home because
⏹️ ▶️ John the part I was repairing was not that, especially in the days where they were cranky about third-party RAM. Like, here you go, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a box-stock computer with no data on it and a single account called Apple Apple, have at it. And Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically doing that with his phones. And it is annoying, but it makes your repair
⏹️ ▶️ John experience smoother in exchange for you spending some time at home to do stuff. Just make sure you do like an
⏹️ ▶️ John actual encrypted local backup that will save all your passwords and then you don’t have to wait for your apps to restore over
⏹️ ▶️ John the course of several hours from the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, no, I couldn’t agree more. And one other quick piece of real-time follow-up from me to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it occurred to me that one of the things, one of the reasons I knew that I did not get a different phone was because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Touch ID was still working exactly as it was when I got my phone back. And if the secure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey element is really secure, then that means I must have gotten the same phone back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just with a new screen.
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Which iPhones did we get?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should recap what we bought this past weekend. I for one am in for two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones. I bought or pre-ordered Aaron a rose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gold 64 gig iPhone 6s and I pre-ordered myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a space gray 64 gig iPhone 6s. I am not part of the Plus Club
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I actually know what I’m talking about. Marco did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you eventually give in and join the Plus Club?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, one of the reasons I brought the 6 Plus to XOXO was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pre-orders were going to open up about in the middle of my trip. And so I figured I’d give it, because I was on the fence, I’d give it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one more time to see like, you know, because I really was undecided because I really, as I said, I really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not been happy with the 6 battery life. And I really do appreciate the larger screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during many of the things I do of the 6 Plus. So I was really on the fence. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however, you know, so I moved all my stuff over the night before I left, moved all my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff over and started using the phone and literally within 20 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, nope, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey buying this one. Adam Boyd
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Atta boy. So Mike was wrong?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mike Lugin For me, yeah. I mean, so there’s a number of, you know, the 6 Plus, as I said, there are a lot of benefits to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and if you can use it and hold it comfortably, then more power to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. It is a great device for a lot of people. What didn’t do it for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is two things. Number one, and it’s not how big it feels in the hand. I got used to that last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. It’s fine. What it is for me is the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the pocket, which is a big deal. And like, if you, I’m not a phone on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the table kind of person. I keep my phone in my pocket if I’m sitting down somewhere. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I need to use my phone or check my phone for something, I’m taking it in and out of my pocket
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot right so any like a phone that large it’s like taking a dinner tray
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of your pocket like it is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s so big it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clumsy to insert remove and secondly what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco another thing that’s weird about the 6 plus is that a lot of apps that don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco normally rotate on the 6 do rotate on the 6 plus and when they do rotate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they go into this like weird like miniature iPad, not iPad mini, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this nano iPad mode where they will use a split view the way iPads do. And this is part of the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco universal thing. I know how it works on the SDK side. It considers it like a mini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. And so you’ll have this cramped, weird, tiny iPad-like split
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface in a lot of apps when you rotate them. And I found that it rotates more easily. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Maybe it’s just happier to do it. Maybe I just wasn’t used to it. Whenever I use the 6 plus it’s constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rotating when I didn’t want it to and I try rotation lock But it’s like you know that then then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go to look at the photo or watch a video and you turn to the side And you got to undo it. It’s a pain and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found that even Even you know I’m used to these iPhone 6 and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have these problems on the 6 And I haven’t had these problems on any previous iPhone including ones I wasn’t used to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when I first got the 6 and it was I’m going up a size So I’m not used to holding it. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have these problems with that that. So I know it isn’t just that I’m not used to the 6+, it’s just that the 6+, like springboard rotates,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of things rotate, and they do it in a weird way. And so I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found it cumbersome in those two big ways. And so those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are important enough, especially the pocket size, those are important enough that I couldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Now, in the future, you know, Apple likes to make things thinner and smaller. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they can like shave off more of the margins, I don’t know. I mean, it is heavy, but it doesn’t really matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they can if they somehow like if we ever get like the borderless iPhone that like that loses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chin on the top and bottom you know somehow God knows how but if they somehow do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I would consider it again but as of now it’s it’s just too big for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just gotta wait for a flexible one that’s the thing that annoys me most about even a six I find. Then you got to unfold
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone. No just so it curves like the six I find uncomfortable in my Pants
⏹️ ▶️ John pockets because it is so like it stays Flat it doesn’t conform
⏹️ ▶️ John to the shape of my leg or anything. It kind of stretches the pants out a little bit So yeah flexible ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s probably in our lifetime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hopefully we’ll say dad John. Did your family buy anything?
⏹️ ▶️ John Nope, didn’t buy anything I didn’t even know what people were all talking about staying up late at night in the
⏹️ ▶️ John beginning when people first started tweeting about it No, I’m not like and here’s the reason not not just because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not getting I mean My wife is probably gonna get a 6s, but we’re not in a hurry She’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John I think she’s got a couple more months before she can actually get it I’m gonna go to the Apple store and look at it but
⏹️ ▶️ John the final reason and the same reason I always sort of hold off on these things with a few rare exceptions
⏹️ ▶️ John is You get the first one you get crescent moons like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anything any weird
⏹️ ▶️ John manufacturing defect a weak tap Taptic engine in your watch or whatever like you don’t want the first cars
⏹️ ▶️ John off the assembly line, right? You want to everyone else to find all those problems? I have a 6 but I didn’t buy it on launch
⏹️ ▶️ John day. I bought it not too far after launch But after everyone had gotten the first round of phones Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the second round of phones and so mine was manufactured on a line where hopefully they had worked out more of the kinks and
⏹️ ▶️ John Lo and behold, I have no crescent moon and so far no other problems with my phone So that is my
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy, but I’m not even getting a 6 my wife is going to get a 6 plus but not imminently
⏹️ ▶️ John success or 6 plus. Oh, sorry success. Yeah, I think stupid names. They’re killing me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just want to make sure we all agree that Mike was wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not participating in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s because you’re a better man than I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John are you a secret six plus user is that why you just bring your flip phone to conferences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodness, what they I should note is that I had been kicking around the idea of getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new iPad mini What is that called? I’ve had many four. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah the weird I oh by the way a quick follow-up I was wrong about the CPU in that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had said last episode that there is now no difference between the iPad Air 2 and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini 4 except for screen size. That is wrong. The Mini 4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has an up-clocked A8 processor, so it is slightly faster than an iPhone 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in benchmarks. And that’s a dual-core processor. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air 2 has the A8X, which is a triple-core processor. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at various benchmarks and stuff that we’ve seen so far, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Mini 4 is faster than the Mini 3. It is a nice chip,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is very close to the performance of an iPhone 6 and not very close to the much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher performance of the Air 2.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s correct. And so I thought about replacing my beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OG RetinaPad Mini with a new iPad Mini 4, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. And part of that is because I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent $1,700 or whatever it was on two completely contract-free iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did that because that’s the way I wanted to do it. I’m not saying it was the best approach. I’m not saying it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the most frugal. It’s just what I wanted to do. Please don’t email me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’ve dropped all this money, and I probably shouldn’t be spending any more. The other reason I haven’t done it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m kind of bummed, not surprised, bummed that 3D Touch hasn’t made it to the iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet. And I want to wait if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can. Now, the last time I said this was about the watch and we saw how well that worked out, but I want to wait if I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and see what 3D Touch is all about and see if I really like it and see if it’s, um, see if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like earth shattering and it just completely life-changing. And if it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then maybe I’ll just hold out for, for hopefully next year when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPads get 3D touch, although we’ll see what ends up happening. Knowing me, I’ll probably buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for myself as like a Christmas present or something like that. Um, but for now, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next, at least few weeks, I am holding off. All right. Any other thoughts about Saturday morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchases? All right. Oh, the other thing I actually wanted to ask you guys, did you hear anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about really, really bad inventory issues like there were last year with the iPhone 6 because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not. It seemed like the inventory was considerably better for this year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than last. And I don’t know if that’s because most people are not on the S-cycle. I don’t know if it’s because they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were fine. Last year we finally got the bigger phones that so many people have been clamoring for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I did not hear any big grumbling about, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really wanted the blah, but it was sold out by the time I got through. Did you guys hear anything?
⏹️ ▶️ John Sales numbers are bigger this year than last year. So it’s not like, you know, what they’re saying so far, rumors, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re selling even more than they sold last year. I think it’s just that they had more lead
⏹️ ▶️ John time to build up inventory and wanted to have more lead time because this is an S year and they’re not making
⏹️ ▶️ John an entirely new phone in an entirely new shape. And you know, so that’s if they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a year where they have more inventory, it’s going to be an S year, I would imagine, because they’re they’re They’re kind of used to making phones
⏹️ ▶️ John like this and they know what they’re doing and the scheduling just worked out. Yeah, I heard the same thing. Although some people were saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you went to a particular carriers website, a lot of those had really crappy dates for like when you were
⏹️ ▶️ John going to get your phone and that’s just like however Apple is distributing the inventory they
⏹️ ▶️ John do make and you know, presumably they’re keeping most of it for themselves. So yeah, but that was
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of staying up late and ordering a phone. I did see tweets from a bunch of people who were like, I didn’t stay up late. I just woke
⏹️ ▶️ John up at my normal time in the morning and I got online and I ordered my phone and it was still in stock and it’s going to come
⏹️ ▶️ John right away and you know, voila.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean the morning after the launch, like you know, later that morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nine hours later or whatever, I looked at all the configurations, I was curious and the only one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was showing any delay and it was only a small delay was the 6 Plus in some of the colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including the new pink one. The regular 6, even the pink one was fine. And actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I just looked right now if you go if you go to Apple’s site right now and configure the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common boring geek phone which is the 64 gig black 6s that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still saying deliver is 925 which is the first day any of them are delivering so this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey still day one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey go right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I didn’t have to wake up at 3 in the damn morning
⏹️ ▶️ John nope that’s part of the fun part of the fun
⏹️ ▶️ John you know as as the tipster is saying in the chat room don’t try to do that next year I don’t know You never know.
⏹️ ▶️ John It all depends on how many could they make before they went on sale. And that’s a factor of scheduling and the timing
⏹️ ▶️ John of whatever event they’re going to have and everything else they have to announce, and any
⏹️ ▶️ John glitches in manufacturing, and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so this is a good year for everyone to
⏹️ ▶️ John get their phones. I just hope you don’t all have whatever the new incarnation
⏹️ ▶️ John of the crescent moon is. Broken home button, weak tap to click, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, say the Taptic Engine that may or may not work, et cetera, et cetera.
Apple TV lottery, 24p, games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so speaking of new purchases, Marco, did you purchase anything recently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was very, very, very cheap?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, did I? For one dollar?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, the Apple TV? Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Damn it, man, pay attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, the developer lottery Apple TV. Yes, I registered for that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won, I guess. I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything about it. I agreed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. I just… Yeah, I don’t know. I agreed to not write
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about and talk about like the actual device and what it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t remember if that agreement included that I’m allowed to mention whether I have one or not. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, heck, as of right now, I don’t have one. So there we go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m disappointed in my Twitter timeline, which I read exhaustively, that I didn’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ John this lottery was even a thing until people were finding out whether they had one or not. that I would have entered because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not developing an Apple TV app, but how did I not even know about this? Was this just not a big deal? The lottery?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I heard about it. I heard about it when people were saying, oh, I got one, I didn’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John one. And we’re like, what are they talking about? And I went to the website and looked at it. It was a reference. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I think on my Twitter timeline, people were talking about it obliquely without anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John actually ever saying it or linking to a story or writing a blog post about it or doing anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, a bunch of people, who is it that had the, I saw some number thrown
⏹️ ▶️ John out there for how many they gave away. Anyway, they gave away a bunch of Apple TVs. I saw some people speculating that
⏹️ ▶️ John these were originally going to be WWDC style, look under your seat, free gifts for every
⏹️ ▶️ John attendee in WWDC, but then of course Apple TV wasn’t launched at WWDC. That would have been cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have been excited to get one. I’m buying one anyway, so whatever. Doesn’t make a difference. The
⏹️ ▶️ John tipster says the WWDC thing is true. I think I saw someone posting pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of the packaging and it was all fancy packaging with inspirational words, all of which fits with the rumor of
⏹️ ▶️ John these were meant to be gifts for developers at WWDC, which is kind of out of character for Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t, since the Apology Mouse, I haven’t, don’t think they’ve given away any significant hardware at any
⏹️ ▶️ John of their events. That’s totally a Google thing to do and lots of other conferences. Like I think when you went to Build one year, they gave
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone Xbox Ones and they give
⏹️ ▶️ John surfaces you know Android phones and all sorts of stuff like that. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John loves free hardware Apple so get with the program. Maybe next year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the kind of thing like giving a bunch of developers, I mean the rumor that we heard is that there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were tens of thousands of these given out, given a bunch of developers early access to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware that they’re very excited to develop for that has a really apparently, I haven’t looked at it yet, but everyone’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very easy SDK because it is it is really very close to iOS. I mean it is iOS basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and just like with certain frameworks not available and certain new frameworks but very very close to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS. So giving a whole bunch of developers who are excited about this early access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making them feel special and letting them make their apps on a real device that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, before it’s available to the public, that is really valuable to get the app story started. And you know maybe they learn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the watch, you know, with the watch, the app story with the watch early on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and honestly still is pretty weak. And a lot of that was because of just limitations of watchOS 1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and limitations of WatchKit. But a lot of that was also because the developers, for the most part, didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early access. You know, a few did, but most didn’t have early access to the hardware. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this I think is pretty cool. I think it’s a smart move. It’s the kind of move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re right. Like, we wouldn’t have expected this from the Apple of even two or three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago. But now it seems like like Apple is making more of these like, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would never do that kind of very pragmatic moves. And that’s a good thing. I think everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wins here. I don’t think there’s any downside. They’ve already announced it. You know, no one’s gonna blow any secrets. They’ve already shown it off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like crazy, so they don’t have to worry about that. I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ John great. It’s also the cheapest platform they sell. Like if they’re gonna give you a device,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like if you have to pick one to give, even the watch is more expensive. Like this is what, 150 for the small one? And there’s no watch at 150.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the free phones
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t count because of plans and subsidies or whatever. So, yeah, if you’re gonna give something away,
⏹️ ▶️ John start with this one. And people, here’s the thing about like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think people were excited to make watch apps and it seemed like for the TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John people were excited for other people to make TV apps. Like I think there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would like there for me to have apps for the TV, but it wasn’t, there’s not a straight line from
⏹️ ▶️ John people who develop either watch, Mac or iOS apps apps to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can do it on a TV. It’s like, well, it’s not a touch screen, it’s not a mouse, it’s not a keyboard. If I don’t have video
⏹️ ▶️ John content to show, I’m not quite sure what I’ll make. But if you give them free hardware, they’re like, you know what, let me try thinking of something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I can come up with something, maybe I have some kind of idea. So I think this is just the kind of platform
⏹️ ▶️ John where the developers might need a little boost to get moving and get motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John about, if you get free hardware, you’re like, maybe I do have a couple ideas. Let me try this, let me try that. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you might surprise yourself. Whereas if you don’t have the free hardware, you’re probably just convince yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John that none of your existing applications or skills or ideas for apps are applicable to a big screen that you
⏹️ ▶️ John sit far away from and can’t touch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s pretty wild. I don’t know. Speaking of Apple TV, we should note that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode I had said, I don’t know, maybe I’ll get it, maybe I won’t. And I had said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my beloved Plex, If that was available
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Apple TV, I would probably Insta buy it. And in the time between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last episode and this episode, IT World got in contact with the Plex, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think CEO, and has stated that yes, they are developing a Plex client
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the Apple TV. So that means I’ll probably be buying one. Why don’t you tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clicks versus taps, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you skipped that one. You noticed that, huh? Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. So yeah, last
⏹️ ▶️ John week I looked at the, like, Apple’s developer documentation that had these animations showing the
⏹️ ▶️ John new Apple TV remote and showing like a dot on it showing this is a click and this is a tap and they both look the
⏹️ ▶️ John same to me and I didn’t understand how you could tell a difference or what was going on there. So someone asked
⏹️ ▶️ John on Apple’s, oh, is Apple’s developers from NDA? I can’t even say, can I?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only if it’s like the red section, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m pretty sure you can because I’m pretty sure I just hit it with, Yeah, I’m not logged in. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re good to go.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I wanted to know the difference between a tap and a click was. In Apple’s developer forums,
⏹️ ▶️ John an URL that we’ll put in the show notes, someone asked the very same question and someone with a little Apple logo underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John their name said that a click is when a user
⏹️ ▶️ John physically clicks down on the trackpad causing a select event and then I guess a tap is just tapping. So what it sounds to me
⏹️ ▶️ John like is that the touchpad at the end of the remote moves in some way,
⏹️ ▶️ John like physically moves, uh, and makes a click as opposed to just tapping on the touch surface.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, none of us have this device yet. And when Marco gets it, he probably can’t talk about it. So we’ll all,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll all find out. I will find out what mine ships. Cause I’m, I’m ordering that day one, basically I’m going to accept
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the equivalent of the crescent moon is for the, uh, Apple TV hardware because it’s cheap and whatever. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care. Uh, but it seems like it’s actually a physical button and I still don’t quite understand how that will work based on the pictures of
⏹️ ▶️ John the remote. What part of it moves? How does it move down? How far does it move? Is there a hinge? Does it just bend?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. All these questions will be answered when we get it into our little hands, but it was interesting to see an actual
⏹️ ▶️ John response from an Apple person about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. All right. Let’s see. What else do we have to talk about? We already talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plex. Do you want to tell us about 24p on the Apple TV?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, I think, from the exact same Apple person in the Apple forum. asked a question said
⏹️ ▶️ John will the new Apple TV actually output 24p video and so 24p is
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of movies old movies and new movies are shot at 24 frames per second
⏹️ ▶️ John 24p is a video mode where it sends 24 piece for progressively
⏹️ ▶️ John scanned frames of video just one frame another frame another frame another frame 24 of those every second
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s how the movie was shot what you want to happen is if you if you are viewing a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John at home you want 24 frames of video every second
⏹️ ▶️ John to be displayed in your television one frame then the next frame then the next frame but at exactly 24 if
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t do that it’s not going to look quite right the most common situation is where your
⏹️ ▶️ John television or the device that’s outputting something for example your computer is going at 60
⏹️ ▶️ John Hertz so it’s got 60 frames per second the computer you’re looking at right now and I think I think all iOS devices except for maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the new iPad Pro, which has the variable refresh rate. But anyway, 60 hertz is common
⏹️ ▶️ John for computers. Unfortunately, 24 does not go into 60 evenly. So if you’re going to display
⏹️ ▶️ John video content that originally has 24 different frames every second, but you have to show 60
⏹️ ▶️ John frames every second, you have to divide them up unevenly. And when the camera pans quickly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it can kind of look weird. They call it judder, where it can kind of look kind of herky-jerky because you have to figure out how
⏹️ ▶️ John to, You know, you’re gonna show the first frame. How many times are you gonna show the first frame? And how many times are you gonna show the
⏹️ ▶️ John second frame? You’re gonna end up showing some frames longer than other frames. And when you have a smooth camera move, you can kind of see it as a jerkiness
⏹️ ▶️ John in the motion. So what you want is 24 frames all the way through. This is the whole, this, video files are asking this. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John in practice, in my setup anyway, the only way I can see video like that is if I buy a Blu-ray, my Blu-ray
⏹️ ▶️ John player and my television all do 24 frames. So the Blu-ray puts out 24 frames, the television
⏹️ ▶️ John shows 24 frames. Again, I don’t have an LCD, I have a plasma. all straight through no image processing
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks correct it looks right don’t have to worry about anything Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John according to this answer from this Apple person is does not do that no the device output frame rate is fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John and content it’s automatically converted during playback to match the selected device output frame rate apps
⏹️ ▶️ John do not have the ability to affect the device output frame rate this is you have a scenario where you believe this would be
⏹️ ▶️ John required please file a bug blah blah blah this is focused on application development
⏹️ ▶️ John saying I’m making a video app and I want to show video can I control the frame or whatever the answer is no
⏹️ ▶️ John unclear to me whether if you buy a movie on iTunes and the movie is 24
⏹️ ▶️ John frames a second does the Apple TV is it also unable to
⏹️ ▶️ John send that natively over HDMI to a device that is able to display 24p
⏹️ ▶️ John some theories I’ve seen thrown around amongst people who are disappointed in this decision is
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple doesn’t want to incur the switching overhead of like switching modes and HDMI apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John can be wonky and take some time and blank your screen and stuff and you don’t want to do that it’s like a bad user experience
⏹️ ▶️ John like everything else involving HDMI so they’re just gonna lock it at like a
⏹️ ▶️ John computer like a tiny little computer like a tiny little Mac mini lock it at 60 frames and just up convert all video
⏹️ ▶️ John on the device presumably with nice scaling and trying to deal with all these different problems
⏹️ ▶️ John to hide judder and image processing anyway video files hate all that so if you are a video
⏹️ ▶️ John file like me I guess you will probably want to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John buying the movies that you really care about in a format other than videos that appear on Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if you are a video file there’s hope for you because there’s a good chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that something will come to the Apple TV what would that be John
⏹️ ▶️ John um did we talk about on this show a long time ago about calibrating your television
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m heavily in favor of calibrating your television. It’s not a super complicated can be super complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even just very basic calibration can be done pretty easily. But the question is how how do I calibrate
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know when you know my I just look at my television. I can’t tell what looks right. Well, they sell
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS applications that can help you calibrate your television is also blu ray discs that help you calibrate
⏹️ ▶️ John them used to be that every THX DVD came with the calibration thing maybe you know a Tivo comes with a calibration
⏹️ ▶️ John thing built into the thing. Lots of different ways to do this, but iOS apps are ideal because hey, it’s an app and you can,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, write a fancy app and the, the, the, uh, whoever owns, I guess it’s Disney
⏹️ ▶️ John now, whoever owns THX can make an app for it and stuff. And lo and behold, there is a THX apps for iOS and you can use it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to airplay to do it. And I always worried about that because what you’re really calibrating is how airplay
⏹️ ▶️ John video looks like. Well, maybe I calibrate my TV, but then when I play things off my blu-ray player through or a different input,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that calibration is still valid. But with an Apple TV, the Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s where you’re watching your video, the apps can be right on the Apple TV. You’re not air playing this weird MPEG-4
⏹️ ▶️ John compressed stream or whatever. It can be right on the Apple TV, so I’m excited about the prospect
⏹️ ▶️ John of native Apple TV cal, I’m the only person who’s excited about calibration
⏹️ ▶️ John apps for the Apple TV, but it’s perfect, it is perfect for the Apple TV because it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t help you with your Blu-ray player, but it does make you sure that what you’re calibrating is the exact thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re gonna watch movies on, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if you have a bunch of iTunes movies on your Apple TV. Of course, the people who would be most
⏹️ ▶️ John into calibration are also now crushed that it doesn’t do 24p, so I’m not sure, if it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John the HDMI switching issue, I’m not sure Apple will ever fix that, because I’ve seen, you know, when your TV
⏹️ ▶️ John screen goes blank or goes gray or does this little glitchy fuzz, it’s terrible, I would never
⏹️ ▶️ John want the Apple TV to do that. So I’m actually kind of in favor of this cheap little $150 box, never
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that, and just putting out everything at 60 frames per second. And let the audio files by
⏹️ ▶️ John their Blu-ray players, and we’ll get along fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. What iOS games support MFI controllers,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, but we got a list. And we’ll put in the show notes. I think someone was saying that the list was only like 16 games, so that seems way
⏹️ ▶️ John small to me. But I’m sure there’s a huge number of games that support it, because it’s been around since iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John this was offered up as the potential base for
⏹️ ▶️ John games that could go to the Apple TV. But that’s not really true because these games probably also have like a touch
⏹️ ▶️ John control and you know they’re not going to have a touch equivalent. Let’s get to our next follow-up item
⏹️ ▶️ John which is if you have a game that works with a controller and also works with touch controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John can you just bring that right over to Apple TV? Well the controller port you can bring right over because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think they’ve changed anything involving the controllers there. But the touch part obviously you can’t bring over and you say well that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine I will just bring over the game and say it requires a controller to play and last week
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I went to their website and look this up and I think in the show it was like oh you know Apple says that you can have games that
⏹️ ▶️ John require controllers so a bunch of people sent us links and the great thing is a bunch of people tweeted to us and sent us email
⏹️ ▶️ John with exactly the same URL some people saying Apple says that you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV apps that require a controller and other people saying Apple says you cannot make
⏹️ ▶️ John out and both point to the same exact URL. Luckily, someone on Twitter actually screenshotted it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s here’s a screenshot. And again, you can fake screenshots, but I’m pretty sure I read this on Apple site. At one point,
⏹️ ▶️ John this URL that we will put in the show notes said pointed to a document that said had a heading
⏹️ ▶️ John that said you can require an extended game controller. Unlike iOS apps, Apple TV apps can require the
⏹️ ▶️ John user to own a full game controller that supports the extended game pad profile. All right. But requiring a full
⏹️ ▶️ John game controller is highly discouraged when you restrict blah blah blah right? But bottom line is you can require an extended
⏹️ ▶️ John controller, but the current version of that page says exactly the opposite Your game must
⏹️ ▶️ John support the Apple TV remote your game may not require the use of a controller So going by like the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know last one wins rule Although I should probably click on this link now to see what it actually says
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure that despite the waffling in the first day or two after the Apple TV was announced
⏹️ ▶️ John right now It says your game may not require the use of a controller and that spawned a whole bunch of stories on
⏹️ ▶️ John tech websites about everyone going crazy about how Apple doesn’t understand gaming and if you can’t require
⏹️ ▶️ John a controller You’re not gonna be able to play insert my favorite genre of game here and all that is true
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this rule is in keeping with how Apple has positioned all of its device devices
⏹️ ▶️ John with respect to gaming It seems kind of dumb to me but on the other hand, like does
⏹️ ▶️ John it what was it the case that The next Call of Duty was gonna come for Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John If only Apple changes one rule. Nope. It was never coming I was not it was not this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that’s keeping it It’s it’s kind of silly if Apple it showed what it does People said
⏹️ ▶️ John this shows Apple doesn’t understand games or isn’t serious about games What it shows is how Apple views
⏹️ ▶️ John games for its platforms. It wants games to be on its platforms It wants a certain kind of games the kind of game it
⏹️ ▶️ John wants It wants you to be able to play without having to buy a controller. That’s the product Apple is making. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think it shows a lack of understanding because I don’t think anyone in Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John under any illusions that they are going to You know have the same type of games that consoles
⏹️ ▶️ John have and appeal to the same people who buy console games and love them I think they’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John a decision not to do that And so this is in keeping with that but it drives people who love console games crazy because
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel like oh you’re so close If only you got serious about games and get serious by get serious They mean
⏹️ ▶️ John made games that appeal to the millions of people who buy the PlayStation 4 the Xbox one and even the Wii U to some Extent
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not what Apple’s doing Apple is not serious about game. But one of one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas I have in my ideas file for Hypercritical that code that I never update.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s one of the first ideas I put in there I think I mentioned it before is like Apple in games he’s just not that
⏹️ ▶️ John into you. Like Apple doesn’t feel the same way about games
⏹️ ▶️ John that those of us who have game consoles and have played Mac and PC games feel about games.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they have a different attitude towards games and their attitude is more common
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of people who are going to buy their products than our attitude is. And that is disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John to a lot of people but that is just the case. So this rule, assuming it hasn’t swapped back by now
⏹️ ▶️ John is in keeping with that. I think it will cut down on the sophistication
⏹️ ▶️ John and interest of the type of games they’re gonna get. It might also cut down on shovelware and maybe that’s why they’re doing it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really interesting to see this phenomenon of Apple having public documents that are not even behind
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer account password that one day say one thing and the next day say the entire opposite about a
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly significant feature having to do with gaming on their newly launched product. It’s a little out of character for
⏹️ ▶️ John them to go back and forth like that. Is it? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John publicly, like, I mean, what can you think of you get a carbon 64
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution independence?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking more like the various app review controversies that usually crop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up after a new ability is added to the SDK. So, you know, they they might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decide, you know, like, like, similar to how they how with iOS eight, there There was this big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kerfuffle about what notification center widgets could and couldn’t do or include, and then what keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could and couldn’t include, and could you include a button in the notification center, and all this crazy stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s like rules lawyering, though, because someone will get rejected, and they’ll say, well, according to the rules, it doesn’t seem like it should
⏹️ ▶️ John have been rejected. Then they amend the rules to make their decision right, but then people complain, and they reverse it. Or like Launch Center Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John where you couldn’t launch an app from a notification screen. They changed that, but like two years later. This was just like a black
⏹️ ▶️ John and white before anyone had even started development. day one, one thing and it wasn’t even like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was in response to outcry. It’s almost like they just forgot to update the public facing docs, you know, because
⏹️ ▶️ John no one even had probably some it was literally day one and day two. So that that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John strange to me that they just not have their acts together because I don’t think any hat anything happened between day one and day two
⏹️ ▶️ John that made them reverse this policy. There was no outcry from developers or whatever. It’s just they, they kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like forgot to update the site. Or Maybe like the final decision
⏹️ ▶️ John maker made his decision one day late or her decision.
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Don’t buy a TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John tell me about the Apple TV and webkit
⏹️ ▶️ John For you to that is fun to point out that Neil Cronin in the chat room reminds me that the ps3 Does actual
⏹️ ▶️ John 24p output by the way, the ps3 is my blu-ray player when I was saying that’s where I watch movies It’s on the ps3. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty good blu-ray player. I’ll be a kind of noisy. But anyway, it is possible It’s not like it’s impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John for a computer like device to do this But I’m pretty sure the ps3 when you launch a blu-ray right blanks the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John and switches HDMI modes and does all that stuff that I said the Apple TV probably shouldn’t so what may be appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John for a blu-ray player even if that blu-ray player is essentially a mini computer like the ps3 is maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not appropriate for $150 fanless black puck I’m not that I’m saying Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t import it support it if they can figure out a way to do it that’s fine I’m just saying I kind of understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John it might not support it same thing with 4k by the way we didn’t discuss this but maybe briefly mentioned last
⏹️ ▶️ John time the new Apple TV is not 4k everyone who asked me you know they keep
⏹️ ▶️ John asking me if they should get a television or what they want to know what television to get and I tell them get no television because now is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a good time to buy TV because we’re after the plasma times over for OLEDs
⏹️ ▶️ John have come into their own mostly OLEDs I keep seeing a curve to I really hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes away I really hope that goes away like 3d kind of went away because I do do not want a Korg TV. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a bad time to buy because 4k is on the horizon. You can buy a 4k TV now but it would be kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like buying one of the very early plasmas. Unless you get really lucky and got
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the top-end Kuro Elite’s things, probably not the best time to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a 4k television. Apple doesn’t support it but a lot of people are saying why doesn’t the new Apple TV support
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k? It’s got enough grunt to support it in theory. I don’t know if if the
⏹️ ▶️ John HDMI spec that it conforms to supports 4K to the degree that’s needed, but I kind of agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that it seems like, well, it’s an A8 in there, right? Maybe handle 4K, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Anyway, bottom line, it doesn’t, that’s not how this product is defined. I wouldn’t count on
⏹️ ▶️ John this product being updated in any way to support 4K in the future, even if the hardware is technically capable of it, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s just not kind of the thing that Apple does. I mean, they made you buy a whole new product when they went from 720p to 1080p,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that tells you anything. So don’t buy an Apple TV if you’re expecting it to magically have
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K support. Just resign yourself to spending under $150 in a couple years when
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k finally matures.
No WebKit on Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell us about webkit.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a big kerfuffle started. I think it was started by Daniel Pascoe He’s from black pixel,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he wrote a thing called a world without Apple TV a world without web views lamenting
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe just reporting the fact that you are not allowed to bring up a web view in your Apple TV application
⏹️ ▶️ John and Everyone is upset about that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s I don’t think it’s gonna be that big of a deal I mean, one question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, which I think we don’t really know the answer yet, is how many of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that we have on our phone are going to be necessary to have on our TVs? How many are we actually going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to want to have on our TVs? I think it’s going to be a smaller and slightly different group. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the apps on your phone are just like for things that could have been websites, you know, like your bank app and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like some of the stuff like it just could have been a website. And so they obviously web views are used very heavily in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of those things. And so, you know, it’s fine if a lot of those can’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that being said, there are a lot of apps that use web views
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in smaller ways. Like I use web views in Overcast for the rendering of the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the playback screen, the scroll view on the playback screen that includes the artwork and the show notes below it, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a web view. It is a giant web view. Because that way I can render HTML in the notes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works just fine and it’s great. So like you know stuff like that, that makes sense. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like reading apps, you know, Instapaper. Instapaper is a big web view as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think people are going to be reading on their TVs very often. Who knows? I mean sure somebody might want to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s not going to be a very common request. I don’t think so. Again, that’s fine too. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be annoying for some people but not nearly as big of a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as what most people expect. Now the other thing is, what about just web browsing on the TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, not just using a web view in an app, but actually just browsing to arbitrary pages. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think about something like a Twitter client on the Apple TV or a news reader, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are going to be challenging to make compelling because, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are they going to do? Twitter’s full of links, so if you are browsing a Twitter client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the TV and you can’t tap any links it’s gonna be kind of annoying. But again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like are people really gonna be browsing arbitrary web pages on TVs? Because one thing that people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often talk about but becomes obvious if you’ve ever tried to do this like plugging a computer into your TV or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that TVs actually look terrible when you try to view like text and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web pages and stuff. Like TVs are much lower resolution than you think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird contrast and color issues and limitations, they really are not good screens to be reading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text on. So I don’t think this is that big of a problem, really.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the screen quality, if you have a good TV and you’re the right distance from it, it’s not that bad. It’s not as bad
⏹️ ▶️ John as it used to be in the old CRT standard deaf days. And if you have a 4K TV, even though Apple TV doesn’t support it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, then I think those problems would be gone. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of disappointing to me that they don’t support it, mostly because every smart-ish thing that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a computer that is connected to a television in the past, you know, several years has
⏹️ ▶️ John a web browser built in. I think, you know, my PlayStation four does my Wii U does I think my Wii
⏹️ ▶️ John does like everything. I don’t know if my Tivo does but like everything feels compelled
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a browser if it hooks up to a TV and has an internet connection because hey, why not? Why am
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the 3ds has a web browser or crying out loud. And every single one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John browsers is the worst browser ever. Like they are terrible to use you launch it once and you realize
⏹️ ▶️ John like maybe it uses like an old version of the Opera engine and can’t render anything it’s really slow and they have these
⏹️ ▶️ John weird controls about scrolling the page and moving the cursor and oh it’s just terrible and
⏹️ ▶️ John so you just never launch it again you know and the only reason I’m disappointed the main reason disappointed is
⏹️ ▶️ John that if an iOS powered device with an a8 in it
⏹️ ▶️ John powered by WebKit was hooked up to my television and they put a web view on it and I had like a touch control in
⏹️ ▶️ John the remote to scroll around, it would actually be like nice and responsive and fast
⏹️ ▶️ John and look good and render correctly. And that would be a miracle, because I’ve never seen that on my television.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, I really have no urge to browse my pages on my television. And I think that’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s I’m not gonna say it’s a red herring, because we’ll get to like what the motivation to this might be. But when
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, when you’re talking about like the show notes, that’s coming from the web. And of course, insta paper content
⏹️ ▶️ John is coming from the web. But I think there are a lot of perhaps a surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John number of iOS applications that use a web view to
⏹️ ▶️ John render content that does not come from the web. Maybe it’s just in the application bundle. Maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like they want to just build a string on the fly. Maybe someone who is like a web developer and is more accustomed to doing that maybe it is
⏹️ ▶️ John served from their own private web server and parts of the UI or web views like you’re not giving them
⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrary web browsing. You’re not even perhaps giving them links you’re just using it as a more
⏹️ ▶️ John flexible or maybe just a way that people are more comfortable with way to lay out text and images
⏹️ ▶️ John in your UI which is probably not the appropriate thing to do but because WebKit is so fast and
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s fairly efficient and if you have simple needs it is a pretty easy
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do you know to sneak a little bit of web development into your iOS app and the fact that that’s not possible
⏹️ ▶️ John I think is something that Apple may have to end up backsliding on it because as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as like why is this why is this happening is it happening because they couldn’t get webkit
⏹️ ▶️ John ready in time for Apple TV that seems unlikely because all the TVML stuff surely uses webkit or at least JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John core or something like that in there and it’s just an a8 and it’s just an iOS variant getting webkit
⏹️ ▶️ John to work is not rocket science it could work is it because they don’t want anyone to ever
⏹️ ▶️ John make a web browser app for the Apple TV couldn’t they do that with app review like slap
⏹️ ▶️ John you down if if you try to make something like a web browser. Or the final reason, the most popular one seems to be they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want you using web technologies to make a UI, they want you to make a native application.
⏹️ ▶️ John That may be the case, maybe that’s getting back to what I talked about in the last show about the AMC and the USA apps, one of which was terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John and one of which was only merely so-so. And I can’t remember which was which.
⏹️ ▶️ John But a lot of those seem like big giant web views with HTML5 video players. Is that why they’re cruddy? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John is it cruddy because the servers wouldn’t respond? Or is it cruddy because they have buggy JavaScript detecting whether they’re seeing a commercial or not? I don’t know where
⏹️ ▶️ John the blame lies, but it’s conceivable that that app was cruddy because it was done with web
⏹️ ▶️ John UI. It was like a repackaging of their website inside an iOS container, and their website was crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so was their iOS app. As usual, Apple is silent in this
⏹️ ▶️ John area. I haven’t heard anything, whispers from anybody about, is this something they’re going to amend?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it just we weren’t quite ready in time? Or is it an intentional thing where they’re trying to send a message
⏹️ ▶️ John with a lack of WebKit support to tell you you’re not allowed to use web technologies anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John in Apple TV. I would love to know what the answer is, but right now I don’t.
Over-criticism of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell us about your early musings on the iPad Pro. Well, actually, before we do that, any other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts on the Apple TV?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m honestly, I’m kind of looking forward to it. I mean, I, so one of the topics, I don’t know how much I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to get into this now, because I haven’t really thought too much about it yet, but one of the topics that we kept hearing about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I kept hearing about, is how could, how could we in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually me specifically, how can I be so pessimistic about all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stuff Apple announced? And first of all, I don’t think I was. I don’t think I was unreasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pessimistic. And I do think there’s a lot of warranted pessimism or skepticism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I expressed about the various stuff. However, there are two things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I am more excited about this week than I was last week. Number one is 3D Touch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because after watching more of the videos and after maybe seeing some people using it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does look, I have not used it, I have not felt it or touched it myself. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does look like it’s going to be really, really nice as a shortcut mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do a lot of quick things. My concerns about its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discoverability and everything remain. However, I do think for power users like us,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’ll be really nice to have. So we’ll see how much it matters for regular people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going to matter about as much as things like multitasking gestures for regular people, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other thing I am more excited about than last week is the Apple TV. I do, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I said last week my main concern with the Apple TV is not whether I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it, it’s whether people will buy it. Because it’s a $150 box entering a market of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very cheap things that people think are good enough, and they’re still going to keep selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old Apple TV, so it’s going to have to compete with that, which is half the price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s going to be a tough sell for a while until the app story develops if it does. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking forward to it because first of all it’ll allow me to consolidate our universal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote situation here which will be nice, but also I’m looking forward to it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like apps and I think it’ll be kind of interesting and kind of fun to play around with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I am looking forward to both of those things. the whole rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world is, we’ll see what happens there. But I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Yeah, I didn’t think, like, Apple TV was the one thing I said I’m definitely buying, and I was enthusiastic about it as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, I’m also enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, so I don’t think, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s the hypercritical influence, but thus far,
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly on this show, we’ve found it more interesting to talk about the potential problems
⏹️ ▶️ John of products and think about what could go wrong than to just spend the entire time gushing about the things that we like. But there were things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we like. And, you know, if we end the show and a bunch of us say that we’re definitely getting an Apple TV, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably, you know, like who cares? But anyway, who cares if we’re getting one? Like we talked about the products, the good, the
⏹️ ▶️ John bad and the ugly. I do agree that Marco lately has been in a downswing in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of being cranky about things that Apple has is falling down about. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like he’s just inarticulate. He’s written thousands of words about it. It’s not a vague notion that he
⏹️ ▶️ John just kind of has and just, you know, has got an axe to grind. He’s got specific concerns that he’s expressed
⏹️ ▶️ John in various ways. And so I think that’s just his opinion, man.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think also there’s a lot that I’ve been positive about. Now, you know, the idea that I have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equally positive and negative is, of course, totally wrong. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John fair and balanced, Margo. Yeah, right. Let’s get that out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way. That is total BS. However, there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple stuff and Apple products that have launched in the last couple of years that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really enjoy, that I use constantly. I’ve been very vocal about how much I really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch. Even though I think the app situation is terrible, which it is, I think the rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco product is great. And I keep saying that. Nobody hears it, but I keep saying it. I also really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rediscovery of MDNS Responder and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the eviction of DiscoveryD from our operating system because, as I’ve written about and said on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this podcast, the reliability of the things I do with my home network on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an OS X has skyrocketed. The reliability of my Apple TV and the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do on there and AirPlay and things like that, those have all skyrocketed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after MDNS Responder came back.
⏹️ ▶️ John is the new coke because like no but there was maybe you came into the Mac too late
⏹️ ▶️ John but there was no love for MDNS responder in the many years and when it was introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John it was always a source of problems you always had to kill it people had problems with or whatever the only reason it gets any love is because
⏹️ ▶️ John they brought a new coke and nobody’s like new coke and they brought
⏹️ ▶️ John indianess response and DNS responder classic everybody loves it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right anyway so yeah it that like my world has been changed at home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the last year with Yosemite was really rough until that change was made a few months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as I wrote about on my site when it happened that has made a massive difference for me in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reliability of this stuff. However, there’s still tons of things that need work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance, I launched an app today which we might get to and it was delayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by an App Store bug for five and a half hours after it was approved for sale because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the CDN just didn’t work and that’s happened a lot of developers today during the release of iOS 9.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It happened to tons of people. There’s still issues with the services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are still issues with some of the applications. There are still issues with some of the hardware. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are still delays of things like Skylake, which granted is not Apple’s fault, but it still affects Apple’s products.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s been significant stagnation in the laptop lineup recently because we’re so late with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU. So you know like there’s stuff that is not perfect and there is stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the iPhone 6 battery that I think is you know not the decision I would have made and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the decision that fits me. When I say things like that the product line is gaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more narrowly focused products and that the question of who is this for, the answer to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeps getting narrower for a lot of these newer products. I don’t think that’s unfair or necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco negative but that is certainly an observation product line. But again, it’s like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still use the iMac, which is this general-purpose large desktop and the 15-inch MacBook Pro, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the most general-purpose laptop I think they have. Like for you know, get a laptop that will serve anything you need to serve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the one. Okay, you know, I’m talking to you on this through a Mac, through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live streaming through another Mac with a room full of Apple gear. I mean, it’s like you know, I still like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Apple stuff. However, I don’t think it’s unfair
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or unwarranted to point out the areas in which they’re kind of missing the mark for me or for everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as they keep serving more and more and more areas, because what they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today with the product line is way more broad in just like sheer number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of products and services and apps that they have right now, is so much more broad than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the fact is they’re not doing all of them well at And you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has never been able to juggle too many things at once particularly well. And the number of things they can juggle at once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well over time has gone up, but so has the number of things they try to juggle all at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once. And so they really, you know, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still always areas that can use improvement. And we on the outside, people like us who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t work for them, and they’re like, because people who work for them can’t really say anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they can get in trouble. But people like us on the outside who don’t work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and can say whatever we want can affect positive change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within Apple and within its products by ranting about them when it’s when it’s warranted by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giving them real constructive valid criticism when it’s warranted.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That actually affects positive change. Every time I complain about something about Apple that is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fair complaint. I hear from people on the inside of the company either right then or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near that or either right then or soon after I hear from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whatever I said or wrote was circulated in some group and that that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helped that team argue for their point or make a change or whatever and I hear this from everyone I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who writes about Apple or who talked about Apple the people inside listen our complaints are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ammunition for internal fights and that complaining works in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filing bug after bug might not for me. Complaining works and again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know there’s no reason to stop complaining just out of you know trying to be nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if things really are broken or could use improvement.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah the thing that struck me about the feedback we got and we did get several people writing in saying oh my god you’re a bunch of curmudgeons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know maybe there’s some truth to that but I don’t know I don’t think it does anyone any good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us to just be parrots that are saying, Oh, this is the best. Apple’s the best. Apple is flawless. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple does is wrong. I mean, that would not be a particularly enjoyable show for us to make or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for most people to listen to. So I feel like I speak for all of us and saying genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, if, if we came across grumpy last episode, that, that wasn’t our intention,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you know, we’re, we’re going to call it like we see it. And if we see things as being broken,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then. Damn it. We’re going to say that it’s broken. And that’s just how we feel. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it doesn’t work for you, then I’m sorry. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, TJ Loma is saying in the chat, it was a three-hour negative-a-thon. Maybe we listened,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe what I said did not feel like a three-hour complaining festival.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t get a chance to listen back to the episode, but man, it certainly didn’t feel that way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I was recording it. And I’m pretty sure that you guys didn’t think it went that way either. And if it came across
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that way, then, you know, we’re sorry, but this is how we feel. And, you know, if you’re looking for someone to just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parrot about how amazing Apple is, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that criticism, for lack of a better word, is good. Criticism is right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Criticism works. Criticism clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this a reference?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could tell that that was your quote voice, but I couldn’t figure out where it was from.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was my quote voice and I was, I was, there’s a double quote voice because I was quoting a thing in which I was
⏹️ ▶️ John quoting a thing. Oh God. We’ll put it in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of quoting yourself.
iPad Pro miscellany
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why don’t you tell us about what you said about the iPad Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, speaking of quoting myself, I was just curious about this because we talked about the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John last week. And this is, you know, I’ve wanted an iPad Pro for a long time. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how long? When did I first start talking about the iPad Pro? I thought it was on a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I deployed the underscore David Smith, who has magical abilities
⏹️ ▶️ John to find out when people said things in the past, which we should all be frightened of, because I don’t understand where he gets these powers.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’ve lost your car keys, contact underscore David Smith. He will tell you where they are. It’s a very convenient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As long as you’ve spoken about it on a podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Well, we don’t know. We don’t know. Let’s not just, you know, you’re speculating by the limits of his
⏹️ ▶️ John power. Anyway, I searched my own podcast for like a good 90
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco before I went to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Slack channel and asked Dave to look it up for me. I feel kind of bad. Anyway, but I did search for
⏹️ ▶️ John it, and I couldn’t find it. He found it immediately. It was Hypercritical episode 58 in March of 2012, 31 minutes in.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll hear my first musings about, my first public musings
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know what Apple should do? They should make a bigger iPad and call it the iPad Pro and blah, blah, blah. So if you’re interested in that,
⏹️ ▶️ John or just wanna hear a really old Hypercritical where I sound really weird and talk about things in the past, I will put that link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, speaking of the iPad Pro, Dr. Wave, Michael B. Johnson from Pixar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeted at some point or another, I believe it was a tweet. He said, my understanding is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad pro recognizes the stylus data from the Apple pencil, uh, flowing in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 240 Hertz fingers at 120 Hertz. And, um, the air too, in general, we’ll do 120 Hertz and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all other iPads and iOS devices do 60 Hertz.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, my understanding is that his understanding is accurate, that the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pros 240, uh, for the Apple pencil, one 20 for everything else in all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the Air 2 is 120, everything else is 60. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that, combined with the variable refresh rate, is really interesting, you know, the technical lengths
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple either has to go or is willing to go or both to do a good job with, like, why
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t you just add a stylus to the iPad? Well, it’s not that simple. You have to figure out how you can do pressure
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitivity, and also, you know, 60 hertz, again, very common
⏹️ ▶️ John for computery things, any kind of computery thing, whether it’s hooked up to a TV or hooked up to a monitor, it’s been the standard for many years,
⏹️ ▶️ John and ever since CRTs went away, it’s just 60 Hertz, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not good enough for it to feel nice when you’re drawing on it. I’m not sure why the Air 2 is 120.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they just cranked it up because they could, or I don’t know what the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John behind that is, but 240 for the thing that supports the pencil makes perfect sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, during the videos that they showed people drawing on the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could see the lag. Like the lag, once you know what to look for. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I could too. You know, the lag
⏹️ ▶️ John is there. But if you’ve ever used a Wacom or Wacom tablet, depending on how you
⏹️ ▶️ John pronounce it, or Cintiq, which is their thing where you draw on a screen that they provide to you,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s plenty of lag there too. We’ll link for the umpteenth time that video from the Microsoft Research
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that shows, they have like an experimental display that shows different amounts of lag where they can just turn a dial and
⏹️ ▶️ John crank it up and down. And boy, the difference between current technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and the best thing that we can do right now with unlimited money is dramatic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as soon as you see the good one, you’re like, oh, well, I want that. You know, it’s like, well, tough
⏹️ ▶️ John luck. You can’t have that. But, you know, we’ll get there eventually. And the only way we’ll get there is by every
⏹️ ▶️ John new iteration of these type of things that you can scroll on with a pen, make it better, make it faster. So
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m interested in, I haven’t seen, I think I have a link that we can put in the show notes from somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote a blog post comparing the Apple pencil to the top of the line tablet that
⏹️ ▶️ John artists use now, and had nice things to say about the Apple tablet, but I guess we have to wait
⏹️ ▶️ John until these things are in people’s hands and see like hands-on tests or whatever. But I do know that every
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet I’ve ever seen anyone use to draw with or have drawn with myself has had lag that I
⏹️ ▶️ John can see. Apple’s thing also has lag that I can see. I can’t eyeball it. I can’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John which is worse or which is better. One point that was made, Is this in the show notes somewhere?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought we had a link to it. Anyway, one point that was made in this article about comparing
⏹️ ▶️ John the Cintiq to the iPad Pro was that the Cintiq,
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes it seem like where the images and where your stylus touches the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John are distant from each other, like there’s an air gap or like a, you know, sort of like a large gap so
⏹️ ▶️ John that depending on what angle you’re holding it, the parallax makes it seem like the ink or whatever is not coming out of the tip
⏹️ ▶️ John of your pen, coming out of some point removed from the tip of your pen. And in the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, that seems less because the whole thing is thinner and the glass is thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and is laminated to the glass and all that other stuff. And that makes sense to me tech-wise because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is surely better able to manufacture the fanciest screen with the smallest
⏹️ ▶️ John gap and no air gap and great lamination and everything. is a company that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes tablets for artists necessarily has much smaller volumes and not as not
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have billions of dollars in the bank and all the other stuff. So there is the potential for the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a really good tool for artists that is potentially as good as or better than
⏹️ ▶️ John all existing dedicated tools. But I think we just have to wait and see for the people to actually buy this and use
⏹️ ▶️ John it to do real work and they’ll report back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is another by the way, another one of those things I was very positive about was the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro for pen input, the pencil itself, and the general notion of writing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a screen with a pen. I like all those things. They just aren’t things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to do. But I’m very positive on all of those things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who use pens or who like to write or who like to take notes or who like to draw. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sounds awesome for those people. However, I’m a computer geek in the you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old-school sense of computer geekdom where I mostly just need a keyboard a mouse and a Big screen and a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful computer, so it’s not really for me however You know good on them for the people who actually
⏹️ ▶️ John You know if they if this ever does it’ll go all the way down to an iPhone 6 size device You would get a little
⏹️ ▶️ John stylus and scratch things out on it If only because someone will make like someone would bring out draw something again And people
⏹️ ▶️ John would forget that it previously existed to be
⏹️ ▶️ John wow try this great new game you draw pictures to each other It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really fun sure yeah, I mean look if this was available even for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know even when as soon as it comes to an iPad Size that I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to own. I’ll probably buy one I’ll probably buy whatever you know if like if next year’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad air supports the pencil Then I’ll probably get one of those I just or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if there’s some really compelling reason for me to get the iPad Pro I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will get it like I talked before like I’d love to make a podcast editor And you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m gonna do that making on the iPad Pro is certainly worth investigating. However
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not doing that right now I’m doing other things and I don’t plan to do that anytime soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know by the time I would get to that it’s probably next year I’ll get the second one. But I also am worried with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current one that you know we I think I mentioned this in last week’s show that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forced touch on the iPhone is gonna be so interesting and so compelling as a shortcut mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s gonna be weird getting used to that on the phone and then not having it yet on the iPads. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would rather wait if I’m gonna spend over a thousand dollars on a brand new really high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad that I don’t really need right now. I would rather wait until next year to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if maybe gets forced touch. But we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you mean 3D touch but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah you’re right. Even Federighi screwed it up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come on. Yeah it’s so true. All right, do you think anyone’s going to make any money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on apps on the iPad Pro? Because the friend of the show that we just mentioned, underscore David Smith,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tweeted a link to a company, I don’t recall their name, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the people who make Sketch, which apparently is a very popular app, they are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, no freaking way we’re going to touch the iPad Pro because we can’t make any money on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that post kind of struck me the wrong way because we all know there are problems of the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John and their problems with the companies that have difficulty finding a way to make money and the price pressure. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about these things a million times. But I think one of the least convincing,
⏹️ ▶️ John at least convincing because this app is Sketch and not Photoshop I guess, but one of the least convincing things you can do is say this entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John new thing, like an Apple tablet with a pencil, which has not existed before, we are writing
⏹️ ▶️ John off because we assume it will be exactly like all of the other markets. And they’re probably right.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying they’re wrong or anything like that. It’s just there are many reasons why it makes sense for them not to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the app. Maybe they don’t have you know, they have Mac developers, not iOS developers. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can sell Mac apps or more like all the things we’ve talked about or whatever, but the idea that it is inconceivable
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re just entirely sure, I guess they just they’re saying is that we can’t risk it. We think that there is not a market
⏹️ ▶️ John for a sustainable market for for iPad pro applications. And we think that because we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John judged there not to be a sustainable market for these applications on the previous iPads and on the phones and blah, blah, blah, so on and so
⏹️ ▶️ John forth. But it reads kind of like, you know, we understand it’s a chicken
⏹️ ▶️ John egg situation, you go first. And you go first with the hardware and we say, yeah, no, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John so. Like someone is gonna go first. Someone’s gonna try to make a go of it here. Maybe they’re the suckers and they’re gonna all
⏹️ ▶️ John go out of business and not find out that they can’t make money on the platform. But it’s not particularly convincing to me for
⏹️ ▶️ John one company to say, because there are a bunch of good reasons for us not to
⏹️ ▶️ John make an app for the iPad Pro, it is a condemnation of the entire concept of there being
⏹️ ▶️ John a supportable Pro application space. I think the iPad Pro has the best chance, maybe Apple TV’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tied with that, the best chance to break through the thing that has caused the
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS pricing and business model to get pulled down so much. Because you can
⏹️ ▶️ John sell, well there’s two things here. One, you can sell more expensive things to professionals. Right, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re always looking for. That’s why if someone needs a Mac app to do their job, and they make a lot of money at their job, they will
⏹️ ▶️ John give you $100 for this app that they use at their job. They will just do it. Even just for musicians, people who sell
⏹️ ▶️ John music applications. Even if these people don’t make money doing music, they love music, they’ll give you 50
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks for a thing that lets them do something with their band. And that will definitely happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John much less so than trying to sell somebody a little game or something more trivial
⏹️ ▶️ John or general interest. So pro apps are great. Second thing, this is a theory I’ve had for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s still kind of true, the bigger the screen, the more money you can charge
⏹️ ▶️ John because bigger equals more money. I know that makes no sense logically, but in my experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen, it seems to me that people can be more convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John to, maybe it’s just a coincidence, maybe it’s not actually causation, it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just so happens that computers have bigger screens and people use computers to do their jobs and blah, blah, blah but like what I was
⏹️ ▶️ John getting at was I’m thinking, can you sell an Apple TV app for more money because it’s bigger?
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside things like video content where that’s just, you know, you’re not, it’s not that
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen is big, it’s that you’re buying video. Like I’m buying access to HBO, I’m buying access to the Major League Baseball
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Setting that aside, can you charge more money because the screen is bigger or is it because
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that run on a bigger screen can have more features and people are gonna pay for those features? I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John connection is, but anyway, I am not ready to entirely write off both the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and the Apple TV as platforms where it is just as difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell an application for more than a couple bucks as it is on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well the big thing is going to be volume. It’s will the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell on enough volume that it’ll be worth developing high quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for it. is, if it doesn’t achieve really high volumes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and high volumes for an iPad are still very low volumes for an iPhone, but let’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, if it doesn’t sell a lot, if a lot of these things don’t sell by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad standards, it’s going to be very hard for most companies to justify developing for it, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that basis alone, before you even get to price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think volume works against it, though? Because the high volumes is part of the reason why there’s such downward price pressure, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you sell to almost everybody, most people don’t want to pay for software period. But if you’re selling a pro app, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need like, you know, there are very few pros. How many people who are going to buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a $50 music app? Are there out there like it for for drawing applications, the iPad Pro, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John chicken eggs, someone has to make the software, someone has to go first, Apple has made the hardware, and they hope someone makes the software.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s how many professional artists are there in the world? How many people who use
⏹️ ▶️ John a styles to do their daily work, drawing and designing things either in the world?
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. Like I think volume, that’s a, you know, not that you can’t sell like 10,000 of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t, and I think you probably even need more than Microsoft Surface numbers, but you don’t need iPhone size numbers. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the middle is there. Like if it just sells in merely normal iPad volumes,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that too few? But if it sells in merely normal iPad volumes, couldn’t they sell,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, one to every designer in the entire world and still have tons left over?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s conceivable, I think, that it could sell, I mean, just look at the Mac. The Mac sells in vanishingly small volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the iPhone, and yet it is a sustainable platform for some companies
⏹️ ▶️ John to sell programs that people use to do their jobs on their Macs, and they pay astronomical
⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of money for them by the standards of iOS applications, like 20 whole dollars for an application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s true. However, Macs also have the advantage of an installed base already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they don’t sell as many units as before. However, if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to… Suppose Apple made a new Mac with some interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new screen shape or something, and you made an app that worked well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. Well, there’s also the millions and millions of other Macs that already exist in the world that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can probably also run that app. So the sales volumes itself are a little bit of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad example here. Also I would argue that there’s a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who quote get their work done on a Mac than an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these kind of like content creation or professional kinds of fields. That’s I don’t know that offhand, however, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounds very likely if I can take a guess. Now you know on the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro to make a really good iPad Pro app you need to really use that expansive screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space very well and also it would be nice if it worked well with the pencil. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be a huge differentiator because again I like the pencil idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that sounds very good and very compelling and very interesting. However, again there’s going to be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few of these things in the market for a while so it’s going to be hard just numbers wise. Now assume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have healthy install base. Assume it actually becomes reasonably possible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell a decent number of $30 or whatever apps on this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then the question is, can you actually build and sustain a business with the App Store’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing and trial and upgrade situation? And that is another question.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve had iPads for five years now, five and a half years now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I know a lot of companies have struggled to bring that kind of business to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. hard enough on the iPhone where you have tons of volume to make up for it, it’s even harder on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what do you think? I don’t think the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro alone can solve that problem. It can solve the first problem of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, let’s get a bunch of people buying these things, you know, because they’re really good. But how do you solve the second problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, you know, if you’re Apple? How do you solve the App Store pricing problem? Or do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you not think that’s enough of a problem to matter?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what the right answer is. I do know that a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, wrote a really good piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Apple platforms becoming platforms rather than products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t get a chance to read it thoroughly, so now I’m assigning myself some homework to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so, but we’ll put a link in the chat for both myself and for the listeners. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that from what I did get to read of it, he made some really, really great points,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That you know Apple seems to think that they can solve these problems by just creating new products And that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the case just like you said Marco. You know creating a new product doesn’t just fix all of these problems
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah the reason the iPad Pro is interesting is because it’s finally a new product with different features that like
⏹️ ▶️ John it changes a little bit of The equation of like if you’re gonna sell $100 app for designers
⏹️ ▶️ John for the iPad without a stylus good luck Like it’s you what am I supposed to just swipe it this with
⏹️ ▶️ John my finger or a big smushy ball of rubber or a hotdog? or something, it’s a non-starter. So
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly things are more possible. This post from the sketch designers or sketch developers
⏹️ ▶️ John is so definitive. It’s like, this is a quote, apps on iOS sell for unsustainably
⏹️ ▶️ John low prices due to the lack of trials. Like they’re just flat out conclusion. The
⏹️ ▶️ John prices are unsustainably low and the reason is no trials. And we all agree that like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John based on the model that we know worked on the Mac, upgrade pricing, trials for very expensive applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can figure out if you like them, so on and so forth. That is a system that has already existed on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac that did work. Apple’s contention, implicit contention with iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John has been, we can get rid of all the bad sides of that system
⏹️ ▶️ John while, you know, and make up for it by
⏹️ ▶️ John just being better in so many other ways. Make up for it in volume, make up for it in an easier to develop platform, make up
⏹️ ▶️ John for better user experience, so more people buy your apps, make up for it because people can just tap their finger on a piece
⏹️ ▶️ John of glass and buy your app really easily and we’ll take care of the payments. And it’s enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John be probably the most successful application platform ever created because it’s so easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy applications. Far more people put apps on their phones than ever put apps on their computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John volume-wise. It’s just so easy to get an app. We talked about this before. There’s lots of upside. But
⏹️ ▶️ John once you get into the realm of professional applications, applications that cost a lot of money to develop applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that are always going to sell in smaller volumes. They’re not angry birds that you know, there’s only there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only 700,000 people in the entire United States who even need this application and I need to sell to 5% of
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And that’s my entire user base. I’m going to charge each one of them $1,000. And I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John charge each one of them $1,000 every single year, I have to charge them $1,000 once and then $200
⏹️ ▶️ John every year or two when I make major updates. And if I can’t do that, it doesn’t work for me and
⏹️ ▶️ John pick whatever numbers you want for the applications. Like I’m thinking back to the good old days of the I am rich
⏹️ ▶️ John application. Uh, in some ways that’s kind of, I have a kind of nostalgia for the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that, that, that’s how high the pricing would go. I know there are some high priced applications on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, for very, very narrowly defined fields, but it’s just, this is big gulf,
⏹️ ▶️ John like in the middle between free or almost free things
⏹️ ▶️ John and, you know, and things that are just really expensive and were being sold to companies that
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be on the Mac. There was, and still kind of is a healthy place for applications that cost
⏹️ ▶️ John tens or hundreds of dollars, uh, that let people do their jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John better and let the developers, uh, support that application and ongoing basis
⏹️ ▶️ John year after year after year, just working on that application, making it better, porting it to new platforms, knowing
⏹️ ▶️ John that their user base doesn’t need to grow by leaps and bounds. so they will just continue to pay them a little bit of money each year
⏹️ ▶️ John for the new version of the whatever, because it helps them get their job done. So I sympathize
⏹️ ▶️ John with the sketch people, but I really hope I really hope someone some poor sucker I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John runs the experiment and says, well, you know, can I make a
⏹️ ▶️ John business selling professional level applications for double digit or triple digit prices
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad pro not just like get an Apple design award next year’s WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John but five years from now still be selling the latest version of that application and have an actual company that runs
⏹️ ▶️ John with maybe more than one or two people selling an application that people really use. That’s what I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should be bragging about. They always go up there and they brag about, look at all these applications we have. And look at this
⏹️ ▶️ John one, it’s beautiful. And you all love this app or whatever, but where
⏹️ ▶️ John are their success stories like, you know, Adobe Photoshop or BB Edit for crying out loud or any application
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s like, this isn’t just a flash in the pan, popular application for a company that got bought
⏹️ ▶️ John by Facebook or Google or went out of business or got venture funding or whatever, but it is actually a sustainable business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, on the Mac, they have things like Omni group at the very least. And on iOS, they have
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, companies that can subsidize things like Microsoft and Apple itself, and to some degree, Adobe,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a bunch of other one and two person shops who get really rich selling a game that sells to millions of people, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John games are great and everything, more power to them. But there’s a dead spot in the middle for
⏹️ ▶️ John applications that could sell to a lot of people, but are forced to sell for $2 because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the real or imagined pressure to price that low
⏹️ ▶️ John and the platformers worse for off for it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think users are worse off for it. That’s setting aside developers because developers can always do something else like I make a different
⏹️ ▶️ John application do you know, are employable. They’ll be fine, right? It’s just most disappointing for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and for users, because users want better applications, and I think so does Apple. I think they would be able to brag
⏹️ ▶️ John more convincingly about the things that happen on their platform if it wasn’t a new one every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So we have, at least by the way the clock reads on the Skype call, we have had two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours of follow-up. So I think we are pretty much tapped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Lynda.com, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Automatic. and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Harmon, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Accidental, check podcast
Post-show: Marco’s new app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco did anything happen today?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Barely. It almost happened tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. So you have a new thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I launched a new app. It’s called Peace. It’s an iOS 9 content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocker and the big deal about it is… So it’s an ad and tracker blocker but the big deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it is that I actually licensed the database from Ghostory. So this is powered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Ghostory which is pretty cool I think. I think it’s the best database out there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I tried a lot of them and really a lot over the summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I found them to be the best. So I went to them, I asked if they’d be interested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in licensing it for a simple revenue share deal and they actually said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, which is amazing. And yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we worked it out and they’re fun to work with and easy, which is, you know, big company so that was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a surprise for me and yeah great all good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you couldn’t have licensed the database would you have made the app anyway?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had other databases you know in various stages of testing throughout the summer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a really hard time finding one that that was really truly good and not just some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like total mammoth thing like massive number of rules massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know database size and complexity and everything because the the bigger you make the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule set the worse it impacts performance and it is a pretty fast system and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do quite a lot of rules and have it not slow down too bad but you know you you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do change things like like how when you make a change the rules you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to send the system all of your rules again so if you like add a whitelisted site you have to send all of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules back to the system again and that actually takes with my rule set on an iPhone 6 with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the ghostry database that takes like two and a half seconds to do the way you can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how long it takes is if you use the the the open unrestricted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extension the way that works is it literally just sends an empty rule set opens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Safari view controller and then when the Safari view controller closes it re-enables the regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule set and so you can tell when when the Safari view controller closes it says restoring piece
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot dot dot for a few seconds and then that screen goes away that is how long it takes to reload the content blocker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rules that is what that is waiting for and so if you if you test with if you do a larger database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of like the big hosts files the easy list all these all the different sources of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either ad block format or hosts format block lists if you do those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you tend to get like 10,000 entries for a good one and mine is 2,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it literally loads, for the most part, pretty much five times more quickly. And then there is some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per-page cost as well. And even though the cost might be small, it is still a per-page cost to evaluate all those rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It tries to do smart things like building trees and building fast parsers and everything, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fewer rules, the faster it is. So I also found with the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule sets, I had more compatibility problems. So like certain sites, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tracker, I think it’s called Adobe Omniture. I don’t know much about this stuff about like the specifics of these things but in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enterprise exactly it’s also used on Apple site and if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you allow if rather if you block Adobe Omniture on Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer site the site doesn’t work like it’s like you can’t do provisioning profiles stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that like it just doesn’t work because certain sites will actually use various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco events triggered by these analytics packages to trigger page functionality. So if you disable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of these things pages actually stop working right and Ghostory does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know compatibility work. They’re a big enough company they have the resources to to both hear about these things and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make exceptions. So their database is pretty sophisticated and like you know these rules should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be exempted on these domains otherwise things break you know stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their data was just it was better for me. It was just better. I did try…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of my crazy ideas, which I ran for about two weeks, was to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco block all third-party JavaScript. Just all of it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found I had to already make a few little exceptions, even just to make that work. Like, one of the biggest ones was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace sites. They would just break. Like simple things like links and images and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Squarespace hosts all of its scripts on like a static Squarespace CDN domain, which is consider third party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you look at like our page template because we have our own domain so any Squarespace site hosted on some domain name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would break without these certain exemptions made.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Google has like jQuery hosting and tons of people use that so yeah you can’t you can’t blog all third party because
⏹️ ▶️ John just lots of stuff won’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly and I even found like like I was like so many sites that you wouldn’t think like like I like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was when I was trying to order my camera and B&H their site broke like the whole B&H site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just can’t view any product page on iOS with that enabled so so like Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were so many things that broke with simpler rules like that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bigger rule sets were primarily focused on like hiding ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on PCs and without regard to breakages really. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a lot of those issues with breakages. They also just had these giant rule sets that were full of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know 5,000 entries for Russian porn sites. And it’s like do I really need that? Do I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to waste thousands of entries on things like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to block those ads to the X10 camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow! I’m sure you saw that on a totally legitimate news site. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I tried lots of other databases and rule sets. I inquired about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco licensing because a lot of these things, like for instance, I saw a couple of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser blockers. If you’re free and open source, you can include a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco host names and block list sources than if you are a commercial product. If you are a commercial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on iOS, there’s a lot of these lists that you are not allowed to use by their license agreement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did go to some of them and approach them for licensing. Most of them didn’t respond. Some of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them said no. Some of them said yes for X dollars a year, but I never found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any that were both usable and were actually good enough, if that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes sense, except Ghostory. And that’s why I went to them. I did not think they would say yes. I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re a big company. They have these plugins. want to do their own thing. Turns out they don’t want to do their own thing on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the content blockers are so limited they can’t do their core business function. So they didn’t really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything ready for iOS 9 and I was and I had an app that needed a database and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they had a database needed an app. So there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s pretty awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really worked out very well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To channel some friends of ours, you know, I’ve been testing it for a couple of weeks now and it is pretty darn good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s funny because I had, um, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been noticing that especially at home, when I’m doing more browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, rather than, you know, looking up things for work, I felt like my internet had been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting slower lately and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was or why it was and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between installing Ghostory on my Mac and installing Peace on my iOS devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suddenly things seem snappier again. And it very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well could be that this is all in my head. But I feel like having these content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blockers has really made things feel snappy, like they did just a year or two ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so whatever content blocker you choose to run, whether it’s Peace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something else, I strongly encourage you to run one, because it really does make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your browsing experience that much better, especially if you’re on a limited data plan. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t want to have to pull down all that superfluous information that really doesn’t help you read what you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to read So do what you got to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John We have more on this topic I think we’ll save for the next show because I do want to talk more about things that Marco had
⏹️ ▶️ John a post today about peace, but also kind of about the larger issue of ad blocking
⏹️ ▶️ John and Tracking blocking all that stuff. And of course he had posted previously about that as well So you should read those
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’re ready as your homework listener for next week when we will probably talk more about
⏹️ ▶️ John ad blocking and all that stuff but in the meantime I’m mostly upset that finally my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad 3 has been left behind because none of the content blockers I’ve tried to work on it they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t because of a what was the requirement a 764 bit 64-bit and
⏹️ ▶️ John is it just for content blockers 64 bit or is every submission have to be 64 bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s content the content blocker back end is It’s 64-bit only.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, okay, so that’s the… All right. What is the 64-bit? They’re finally accepting 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John only apps, right? But you don’t have to submit them.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Okay, anyway, content blockers are all 64-bit. If you have an iPad 3 like me, you’re sad, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of a bummer. So now I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco really do need to
⏹️ ▶️ John get a new iPad. My iPad 3 is really showing its age now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still do manual updates because I’m a nerd and I want to see what’s updated and stuff. So when I
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the App Store updates tab and it’s like five things need to be updated I hit update all and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I hit the home button and try to go to another app I don’t know why I even bother because that iPad is gonna be paralyzed
⏹️ ▶️ John While it’s doing all those updates in the background, even though I’m just trying to browse a web page Just everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is slow and creaky. So yeah, I need a new iPad, but yeah, I just installed
⏹️ ▶️ John peace and we’ll talk more about content blockers next week but I am in favor of of them.