187: Putting Plastic on Your Couches
15 Sep 2016Anti-homers, AirPod tappers, Bluetooth codecs, and nauseous laser enthusiasts.
Episode Description:
- Home button habits
- New iOS 10 home button behavior
Settings→General→Accessibility→Home Button
- Widespread home-button conservation
- New iOS 10 home button behavior
- The iPhone 7 Smart Battery Case is larger than the 6's
- Apple iPhone 7 Leather Case's side buttons
- Are the Lightning EarPods digital?
- AirPods
- Controls
- AirPods use Bluetooth
- Bluetooth, codecs, and audio quality
- How would Steve Jobs pitch the AirPods?
- iPhones 7 Cameras
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show:
- What did we order?
- A special John Siracusa rant
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Pre-show: 1000 days 🖼️
- Follow-up: Windows To Go
- iOS 10 unlocking
- Anti-homers 🖼️
- iPhone 7 Smart Battery Case
- Sponsor: Linode (code AccidentalPodcast10)
- iPhone 7 Leather Case
- DAC/amp in Lightning EarPods
- Media controls on AirPods
- W1 and Bluetooth
- Sponsor: Fracture
- Bluetooth audio codecs
- Sponsor: Igloo
- Jobs-style AirPods design
- iPhone 7 Plus cameras
- Ending theme
- Post-show: iPhone ordering
- Post-show: Reduce Lasers 🖼️
Pre-show: 1000 days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you guys noticed that this is the 1000 day anniversary of the Mac Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh god, do we really have to talk about that? I’m already all fired up. This is the longest the Mac Pro has ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone. Although, if you count the 2012 as really just the 2010, which I would,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually is a longer span than this. That was like 1100. But if you count them separately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way Apple released them, this is the longest span by a good margin. Yay, happy birthday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John But was it you that was tweeting the other day that like you’re talking about next
⏹️ ▶️ John spring or something because you thought they weren’t gonna update the Mac Pro until they get the Skylake E in it? Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John happened to them just using the chips that are available now? You’ve given up on that now too?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can barely get them to use anything. The last thing they’re gonna do is use a six month old chip. I mean they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna either wait…
⏹️ ▶️ John A six month old chip is practically new in a three year old computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John true but this is Apple we’re talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the wind could blow like the wrong direction one day like better delay the Mac Pro again for another generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if my poor computer is gonna make it that long I don’t know if I can wait until like mid to late 2017.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I’m guess like if I had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guess like if they’re if they’re truly waiting on Skylake-E and they’re gonna do an update then knowing Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also these days knowing Apple with the Mac I’m guessing that is not even a spring release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m I’m guessing that’s June 2016 or 2017. I’m guessing that’s a WBDC release. Yeah, I
⏹️ ▶️ John know I saw that. I was like, next WBDC? No, just Apple, just release it with whatever’s
⏹️ ▶️ John available now and a new GPU.
Follow-up: Windows To Go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s dig in, starting with Zach Waldowski. Doing what Marco wants with Windows is possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows 8 and up support a deployment method called Windows to Go. I don’t care.
iOS 10 unlocking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, iOS 10 home button behavior. This has been less of a cluster than I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, so it used to be that on iOS nine, you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pick up your phone and the screen would not turn on and you could press the home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button or the sleep wake button, which a coworker of mine had no idea was also a wake button.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It, he thought it was only a sleep button, which I thought that was kind of amusing. Anyway, you could press either the sleep wake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button or the home button to turn the screen on. And then naturally, if you have Touch ID, particularly on, was it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 6 or the 6S that got super fast? 6S was, yeah. So at the 6S, the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that happened was the Touch ID was so darn fast that you would pick up your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey press the home button, and Touch ID would almost instantly authenticate you and you would miss all your notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in iOS 10, the way Apple’s fixed this is, when you pick up the phone, and this is all with the default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings, that is, It does what I believe they call raise to wake. And so the screen will come on and show you your notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you press the home button, then. It, then it will actually do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it used to do, which is bring you into the home screen. But you could just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lightly press the home button and it will say in the bottom, press home to unlock, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you can press home again to get into your phone. It’s very wonky. I still even a month or so in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t particularly care for it. And I expected the entire world to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lose their crap about this and as it turns out I haven’t heard that much complaining all told have
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody whose machine have upgraded to iOS 10 is complained about this which just includes the three members of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think about it Marco I mean I haven’t heard that much because most of the complaining I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was earlier during the beta period when all the people I know all It’s not the beta on their main phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against most advice. So most of the complaining I got through back then, from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my own personal getting used to it, it took me maybe a couple days and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when I first started, I thought for sure, oh, this is going to take me a long time to get used to because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so different on such a common interaction that I do constantly every day. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just turned out, yeah, it was like a couple days and it was totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Powell I’m jealous because it is still taking me a while to get used to it. And in fact, I was reminded by somebody earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either today or yesterday that I’m so it’s so ingrained in me to do the swipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up to control center and hit the bottom right to get the camera from the lock screen and it is so much nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in iOS 10 to swipe from right to left but I completely forgot that was a thing and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to also retrain myself on that one as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep again a few days. So I complained about this thing on the last show like I had just up
⏹️ ▶️ John last last show I had just upgraded to iOS 10 I was on the beta I forget or anyway That was an
⏹️ ▶️ John aside that I complained that this is the one thing that annoyed me about it. And that sentenced me and all
⏹️ ▶️ John of us, I guess, to a good solid week of people telling us how to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John this, which is what this actual follow-by item is about. Like, if you don’t like the new behavior in iOS 10, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a setting to change it back to the old behavior. Although, interestingly, the setting, by the way, is under General, under Accessibility,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s a thing called Home Button, and there’s just one little switch. You can change it back to the old behavior. But if you switch it back to
⏹️ ▶️ John the the old behavior the text on the screen still says like Press to unlock which I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John is true. It will still unlock it, but you don’t have to press it anymore That’s the point. It just makes it the old-style
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a little weird, but I mean it makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s all there’s also a setting for raised awake, too By the way, my phone doesn’t have raised awake and I don’t quite understand why
⏹️ ▶️ John it annoys me a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s only on the 6s. Oh, is that right? I didn’t know that Yeah, the 6s, you know, you can add that low-power processor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do to listen for hey, sir all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and I think that same process is responsible for constantly monitoring the motion
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so I miss out on that But anyway, I changed it back just because I don’t want to have to do like what I consider
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the extra press And I also configured all of my family’s devices to be like that
⏹️ ▶️ John After they complained and so now you know as far as my family concerned nothing has changed about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, see I really want to change it back but I’m trying to train myself like Marco has succeeded in doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get myself used to it because I really prefer to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tactically deploy my settings tweaks when I get onto a new device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s applicable to the Mac and to any iOS device. So I try to be cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the defaults, but sometimes you just can’t live with it. But this one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to get over, and I think I will. It’s just taking me longer than it took Marco. Somebody asked a question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least in the show notes anyway, why not five finger pinch? So on the iPad, I believe it’s optional,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it certainly used to be optional, you can enable multitasking gestures. And so as an example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it’s a four finger swipe, will swipe you between apps, which I love and use constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also use constantly five finger pinch on the iPad, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you put all five fingers on the screen, bring them closer together, and that will bring you back to the home screen. Why not five finger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pinch on an iPhone? because it’s just not that big, man. I mean, that’s what I would think.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what the question is about. The question was about my last week’s complaint about how I don’t like hitting,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was all about the home button, how I don’t like hitting the home button, like actually pressing a physical button when I wanna go back to the home screen, because it feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like when I’m on my iPad, I’m just like, oh, touch the screen here, touch the screen there, but this one thing that I wanna do frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to springboard or whatever, I have to press this physical button. And especially if it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad is like resting on a pillow or something, and the home button could be like down
⏹️ ▶️ John the little creases of the pillow. It’s just it’s not as nice as touching everything else. So the question is why not just use five finger
⏹️ ▶️ John pinch? It gets rid of all that. You don’t touch the home button. All your interaction is with the screen. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I love five finger pinch, but there has always been something stopping me
⏹️ ▶️ John from enabling it. In the beginning it was Fruit Ninja, obviously, because if you want to have Fruit Ninja on your iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to let your kids play it, you cannot enable these gestures because the kids will forever be going back
⏹️ ▶️ John home screen when they’re trying to slice through watermelons or whatever. Um, and these days, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have Twitterific, my, uh, the Twitter application has many gestures you can do. One of them I think is like a
⏹️ ▶️ John two finger vertical swipe or something to change Twitter accounts. And when I do the five finger pinch,
⏹️ ▶️ John it sends me back to springboard. But when I go back to Twitter, it’s on a different account. Oh, weird. And so, you know, is it just, is
⏹️ ▶️ John it just the way that I’m doing the gesture? Am I tripping the two finger gesture recognizer before
⏹️ ▶️ John I trip the OS wide five-finger thing I don’t know but anyway what it boils down to is
⏹️ ▶️ John I still cannot get clear of applications that I use every day that are sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John not nicely compatible with five-finger pinch which is not great because I really got
⏹️ ▶️ John addicted to it when I started using it before I realized I just have to disable it because essentially my iPad was broken for
⏹️ ▶️ John the purposes of small children playing Fruit Ninja and now I really haven’t gone back to it but that means I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John still stuck pressing the home button and what I learned from this
⏹️ ▶️ John home button behavior change in iOS 10 is that a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John have ingrained habits for like pick up your device and unlock it so a lot of people are complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about this change in behavior the number one tip I’ve seen on Twitter for iOS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John both directed at me and just you know going crosswise to everyone else’s oh there’s a setting to change it back to the old way do it
⏹️ ▶️ John do it do it but if I had raised awake I’m not sure I would change it because I would try to pick up the
⏹️ ▶️ John new habit which is if you just want to see stuff on the lock screen don’t touch anything just pick the phone up if that works consistently
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s better you know that’s better than doing the reason I don’t want to do the press thing on my phone is it’s like it’s an extra effort
⏹️ ▶️ John well this is one fewer thing that you have to do just pick up the phone so I don’t know I don’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ John phone that has a feature eventually I probably will and I might go back and give it a try what do you mean probably
⏹️ ▶️ John are you moving to Android next year
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just I didn’t eventually
Anti-homers
⏹️ ▶️ John But the other thing I learned is that lots of people have strange habits related to
⏹️ ▶️ John the home button. One, I didn’t put this in the notes, so I don’t have the URL, but did you guys read this story
⏹️ ▶️ John about habits related to the home button in the Far East?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes. Where were they? This was talked about somewhere. I think Gruber had brought it up, and I’d heard it somewhere else as
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this was apparently in the Far East, like China, Japan,
⏹️ ▶️ John Indonesia, that whole region. it’s very popular for iOS devices to
⏹️ ▶️ John enable the assistive touch feature, which basically puts like the equivalent of the home button somewhere on your screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve enabled this way back when. I haven’t enabled it in years though. But it’s like if you if you have trouble using
⏹️ ▶️ John the home button, they will put some always visible controls on top of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that will do the same thing as the home button. And this is apparently very popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody does it. And if so, if you go, if you go to the far
⏹️ ▶️ John east and you see people using an iOS device, you see a bunch of junk on their screen. I think it’s like always on top, always visible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise, how would it work? And so people are moving that stuff out of the way, like when they want to see what’s in the corner of the screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this like you eyes covering it, they move it out of the way so they can see the other stuff. Like they’re, from my perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re making their phone harder to use by putting some always visible
⏹️ ▶️ John UI on top of the screen that the people making the the applications don’t expect to be there. They have to manage and move around.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re doing this because they think that using the home button will break it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is one of those, another one of those, you know, it’s superstition based on real things because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was the iPhone 4 home button had some reliability problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4, 4S, and maybe 5 also. It seemed to stop for sure when the Touch ID sensor came in
⏹️ ▶️ John although all iPhones forever have had, you know, some degree of failing
⏹️ ▶️ John home buttoning just because it’s a very frequently used button and there’s some failure rate for certain number of clicks, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John the four is the one I remember where it was, you know, it was way out of bounds for
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’d expect to fail your rate to be. Um, the story I read about this home button thing
⏹️ ▶️ John was like their angle was that people feel like a broken home
⏹️ ▶️ John button hurts the resale value. So they don’t want to ever use the home button so that
⏹️ ▶️ John when they sell it later to, you know, trade it in for another phone or just sell it to get money to buy another phone
⏹️ ▶️ John that it won’t be hurting its resale value, which is a kind of a mercenary
⏹️ ▶️ John way to think of it. But it’s also kind of like putting plastic on your couches. And like, if no
⏹️ ▶️ John one ever uses the home button, does it matter? How does it hurt the resale value if everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who will buy and use the phone will never use the home button because they’re all preserving it just in case, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Pope comes one day and wants to use the home button it’s like it’s never been used just finally you can
⏹️ ▶️ John take the plastic off the sofa anyway this is it one article I read in the internet I have no
⏹️ ▶️ John idea if it’s remotely accurate anybody who lives in the Far East by all means send us an email and let us know
⏹️ ▶️ John if this is a real thing or this is just one of those stories that one reporter happened to see one thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John now thinks the entire region does this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean for it for its worth I’ve heard now like since the story’s been circulating I’ve heard a lot of people who are confirming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from their own anecdotes of like, oh yeah, I live in, you know, X place or a relative or friend of mine lives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And this is totally a real thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is also as an explanation of why would Apple get rid of the home button to try to encourage,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, try to encourage potentially millions of people to actually use the home button again, because
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’ll feel like, well, this button doesn’t move, so it won’t wear out. Now, I don’t think that’s going to work, because if they have the superstition
⏹️ ▶️ John going for years and years, you know, I obviously me being the unicorn that I am, I’ve never had a home button
⏹️ ▶️ John fail on an iOS device. Um, and I don’t think there are particularly bad problems
⏹️ ▶️ John in the post touch ID age. You know, the iPhone four was definitely the bad one and the, and the forest tried to improve it, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John so great. And like you said, with the five of her things, I don’t know anybody who’s ever had a failed touch ID sensor, but I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it happens, but because it is a physical button. But anyway, I don’t know if this is going to change things, but as people pointed out
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room, Apple presumably has diagnostic information like that little thing where the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you, I forget what’s opt in or opt out, but you can send Apple diagnostic information. They must know how
⏹️ ▶️ John many people in what regions are using these assistive touch features and they’ll know based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage of the population that actually needs those features, you know, because they can’t use the home button. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers must scream to them. A lot of people are using your their iPhones in ways that you Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John probably didn’t expect. So maybe address that with your next hardware model. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John that could be one possible thing added in support getting rid of the button. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason you get rid of the physical button is just because if things don’t move, it’s more reliable, and it’s easier to waterproof, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John another factor could be Oh, and by the way, maybe we can encourage those millions of people who refuse to use the home button,
⏹️ ▶️ John that maybe it’s safe to use it again, or they can just spend the rest of their time sliding always visible pallets around
⏹️ ▶️ John their screen so they can see their content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I also I still do want to point out one thing, though, that a this won’t solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem, because people will still keep doing it because of superstition as you mentioned and B
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Taptic engine now will have way more use. So it’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of moving parts just differently moving parts and the Taptic engine in the watch dies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. Now the one in the 6s seems to be okay so far as far as I know I don’t think we’ve heard anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that but I wouldn’t necessarily rule out that a new Taptic engine that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be used way more will somehow fail less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a simple button. I don’t think we know that yet. Maybe Apple knows that from their own testing. I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think in the real world, we have yet to see that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it stands to reason that something that’s sealed inside is better than something that’s your mucky fingers are touching, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John like buttons. When you press them, you open up a little gap for all sorts of lint and crumbs and muck
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff to get into. It’s way easier to make an internally sealed thing. and like the
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember the bad vibrating things in the watch but that was that sounds like an early model miniaturization
⏹️ ▶️ John problem I also wonder if if the Taptic Engine feels a little bit weaker than normal does
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know do people care does that hurt the resale value of your of your phone I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know anyway this like I said one article I don’t know if there’s any truth behind
⏹️ ▶️ John this but in my own personal life I have learned again when messing with
⏹️ ▶️ John the the settings for iOS 10, the people have weird ways of unlocking their devices that you don’t learn until
⏹️ ▶️ John something changes about it and you have a discussion with it. My wife presses the sleep wake button
⏹️ ▶️ John and then puts her finger on the touch ID, which doesn’t make sense to me. Like, why don’t you, like, this is pre-iOS 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s her pattern. Picks up the device. Yeah, same here. Presses touch wake and then does touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John I pick the thing up, put my thumb on the touch ID button, press it to wake the thing up
⏹️ ▶️ John and just leave my thumb there to unlock it, right? So I’m only going to one place. I’m not going to the top and
⏹️ ▶️ John then to the bottom. I’m just going to the very
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bottom. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, I can explain why. Well, for me anyway, why that is. So I’ll sleep-wake if I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just see notifications and not insta-clear them. And then if I know that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really give a crap what notifications I have, maybe I just looked at my phone 30 seconds ago, then I’ll do what you described, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just mash my finger down on the Home button. And I’ll just power right through to the Home screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in the case that I care about notifications, And again, like you said, pre iOS 10, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use the sleep wake button to just turn the screen on, let me see what I’m doing. And then if I want to act on one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or perhaps just use my phone, then I will put my finger on the home button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, and, uh, and unlock it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does this habit come from the super fast touch ID sensor or were you doing it before the success?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, it’s a great question. I definitely think it was influenced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the super fast touch ID. I would say I don’t remember doing it before the success. I think I retrained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself after I got the success
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, maybe I’ll change to want to have the faster sensor, but on the six I don’t I don’t have those problems I can if the same thing if I just want to look
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s on the screen I just hit it and it doesn’t go fast enough. So it’s no problem and my son refuses to use touch ID
⏹️ ▶️ John He enters his code every time he puts he hits a sleep wake button Then he wants in iOS 10
⏹️ ▶️ John who what he wanted to do was how do I get to the to the screen that has the numbers? Right, so he hits a sleep
⏹️ ▶️ John wake button and like I forget what swipe or whatever to get to the number thing he has an iPad with Touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, doesn’t use it. That’s crazy to me. I think he feels like the
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers are more reliable, like they work every time, and that he’s not pausing and waiting. It’s kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John blame my genes for this, like that he’s never waiting, he doesn’t want to be waiting for the computer, and so
⏹️ ▶️ John putting your finger on Touch ID and waiting to see if it succeeds, and then picking up and putting it down, it’s like the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John are deterministic. It’s gonna take the same amount of time every time. During that time, he’s always doing something, like
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s not waiting, even though if you were to stopwatch it was probably faster to do touch ID you know it just feels
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m busy I’m doing the thing to unlock thing and it’s probably more reliable for him he also has a slow
⏹️ ▶️ John touch ID sensor he’s got an old iPad.
iPhone 7 Smart Battery Case
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, let’s see what else we got here. Uh Nick guy Who is the Nick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guy on Twitter writes in to say? this iPhone 7 smart battery case is 2365 milliamp hours,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is up from 1877 for
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t notice it looking any bigger like maybe it’s a little bit thicker.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one right here Comparing it to the old one just visually It feels about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same The only major difference is obviously the headphone jack removal. And so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco switches to the two line-shaped grills in the bottom instead of the one line and the one dot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the giant camera cutout. Those are the major ones. Because of the aforementioned giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera cutout, if you have a smart battery case from the 6S, it will not fit
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting that they made the battery case bigger on the iPhone 7, which also has better battery life. So more battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, it makes it more reasonable of a thing to buy and it makes their price a little more reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, you can get lots of cheaper cases for a lot less money, but to have only the 1900
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever it was, now to have like 2400, that makes it a little bit better. Because before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main complaints about it were, it’s ugly, it’s ugly, it’s also really ugly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also that’s not a lot of capacity for the price. So now, you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help that last one. It’s still not a great bargain price-wise, if you look at other battery cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as I mentioned before, like we’re total converts in this family. They actually work really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. I think if you’re going to use a battery case on a regular basis, I can recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple one. So it’s nice that it has a little bit more capacity now. And it doesn’t feel like noticeably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavier. I think they should make one for the Plus. It would just, I mean, obviously it would be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and really heavy. Yeah. But it’s interesting, you know, like the, If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want the most battery life in a phone, a regular 6S or 7 in the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case will last way longer than a Plus by itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, that’s why I think the Plus needs it, because I think of the Plus as like the new iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John mini, right? Like if you put a Plus in a battery case, then you could actually take that
⏹️ ▶️ John on a long car trip and like play games on it and not kill it. Like, the Plus is supposed to be, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t mind the humongousness, I don’t mind the extra weight, I just want as much battery life as possible. And putting
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery case only on the smaller model muddies the water. It’s like, well, you know, I can imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John regular people who aren’t like trying to do the math on the milliamp hours and stuff, saying, well, which is longer?
⏹️ ▶️ John The gigantic plus or the regular seven with a lump on its back? And the regular
⏹️ ▶️ John seven lump on its back wins, but it’s not obvious. They should make it for the plus. And they should also have that lump go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. I can think of lots of reasons why they don’t make it for the plus. I mean, chief among them is size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously. But also I do think there’s a lot fewer people who need it because the Plus does have longer battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the screen is on, not by a lot, but slightly longer battery life when the screen is on. When the screen is off, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has substantially more battery life because things like, if the screen is off and it’s just doing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like playing music over Bluetooth or something like that, it’s gonna use the same amount of power as the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small phone or the medium phone now, the 4.7 inch version. It only uses more power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the screen is on. So it has a battery that is sized for the screen to be on and to roughly match or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly exceed the power of the smaller phone. But if most of your usage of the phone is with the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off, then it can last like 50% more. Like it’s a huge difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in how much better it lasts that way. So it really depends on your usage, whether the battery case is even necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Plus for most people. And I think enough people would fall into that usage pattern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it’s not really useful for them, that there’s a lot less demand for it in addition to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the massive size that it would be, resulting device with the battery case would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be quite ridiculous. And there are other people who make battery cases for the Plus, and they do look ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I totally get why Apple has not released theirs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, I’m thinking of like a kid in the back of a car who wants to play video games for a whole like three hour car trip, and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just going to be like burning the battery the entire time. They’d love a battery case. I mean, it’s not any
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than like a, you know, a traditional handheld game thing. Like they’re just sitting there. If they They
⏹️ ▶️ John were already there already except the plus like why not why not just carry around a 12.5 inch iPad Pro with
⏹️ ▶️ John you everywhere. You might as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode.
Sponsor: Linode (code AccidentalPodcast10)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to linode.com slash ATP. Linode is my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web host. Simple as that. I’ve been using them for a long time now. Years, many,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many years, long before they were a sponsor. And all my stuff is hosted there now. Every bit of web hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have is at Linode now because it is just so good, I’ve just slowly moved all my stuff there. Plans start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at just $10 a month. They have eight data centers you can choose from. You can get a server running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in under a minute. And they have hourly billing with a monthly cap on all plans and add-on services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you want something for just a few hours, you can do that. If you want it for indefinite time, if you want it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month, it’ll just tell you what it’ll cost you per month. Simple as that. They have backups, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load balancers, they have stats, all these custom things that are really, really great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not to mention, of course, you can run your own stuff because you have root, because these are VPSs. Linode recently switched from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Zen to KVM, and Unix Benchmark showed a 300% performance increase. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really incredible what you get at Linode for the price. You have full root access, you can run VMs, you can run containers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can run, of course, regular apps. You can run a private Git server, you can run blogs, websites, whatever you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco databases, anything. I run all of Overcast there. Markup.org, everything is at Linode for me, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic. They also now offer 2GB of RAM for only $10 a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of course, very reasonable prices above that for more specs. So go to linode.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will get a $10 credit using promo code accidental podcast 10. Thanks
iPhone 7 Leather Case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode.com slash ATP use code accidental podcast 10 for a $10 credit. Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much to Linode, my favorite web host for sponsoring the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So some people have noticed that your wishes have been granted, John, and the Apple leather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case now has metal buttons for the iPhone 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John That wasn’t my wish, though. When I was talking about my my pimply iPhone six leather case that
⏹️ ▶️ John looked really good right up until maybe three months ago when it’s starting to get all rumply for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was in the discussion of the home button, like how does it feel to press a button that doesn’t actually move on a small device
⏹️ ▶️ John like this? And I was saying that on my rumply case when I press the volume buttons, like nothing moves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m basically just applying pressure to these lumps. And what I was saying, it was like back to the discussion, like why did the volume
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons on the iPhone 7 move at all? If the home button doesn’t move, why do the volume buttons move? What I was saying is that I think I would be okay
⏹️ ▶️ John if on the iPhone 7, the volume buttons didn’t move. The sleep wake button didn’t move. Like they were just pressure sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John Because obviously I’m okay with it on my 6. I mean, it doesn’t bother me. Not only am I okay with my 6, I can’t even feel the edges of these
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons. They’re like, they’re just like the slightly more raised pimply area. Like, they’re very indistinct. If they had
⏹️ ▶️ John sharply creased cut buttons that just did not move and were pressure sensitive,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I would be okay with that. And so with Apple, it was gonna be like, hey, fewer moving parts, right? Everybody loves it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But instead, what they did with the Apple leather cases for the iPhone 7 is, they made it so I don’t have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with these rumbly things anymore. Oh, now you’ve got nice metal buttons, which I think they did on the They did
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the bumper. Maybe or they had I think the bumper had some other kind of pass-through thing where there was like
⏹️ ▶️ John a Hard physical thing that when you pressed would slide down and press the button that was underneath rather
⏹️ ▶️ John than coating over it with leather But anyway, I think you’re right that dish that is sure to be the new case
⏹️ ▶️ John is obviously an improvement It’s sure to feel better it certainly looks better to have metal buttons poking out of your leather case
⏹️ ▶️ John and and I bet those won’t have the same problem of getting all gross. But I still maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John that even more than the home button, I think, because the home button I haven’t tried yet. Maybe I’ll hate it, right? But the volume and power buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using, essentially non-moving volume and power buttons for a long time now, and I’m totally fine
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. On the other hand, my phone doesn’t vibrate when I press them either, so that probably helps. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John on the fancy 10th anniversary iPhone 8 or whatever, iPhone 7S or whatever they call it,
⏹️ ▶️ John If that has sleep wake and volume buttons that don’t move, I’m already on board
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. Home button, jury’s still out because I haven’t tried it.
DAC/amp in Lightning EarPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are the Lightning EarPods digital? And follow on, why do we care?
⏹️ ▶️ John I care mostly for curiosity. I mean, although Marco, do you have an audio reason to care?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not really. I mean, so basically through various statements from Apple PR representatives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and various things confirmed by various people, the original story that we had heard and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talked about on the show that Mac Ocotora reported forever ago, that the iPhone 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lightning port was going to be special and that it was going to have a mode where it could output
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analog audio over the pins and therefore the devices plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into it like the new Lightning headphones and the headphone adapter could be really, really simple. That is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the case. That apparently all the Lightning ports are treated the same. This port is not different from the rest of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least not in that way as far as we know. And that the Lightning headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Lightning to headphone adapter for $9 are both full digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightning devices that include an audio DAC and a little mini amp in there. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people have asked me what I think about this, whether it’s possible, whether it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good because it’s so cheap, and the quick answer is, you know, with a disclaimer that I’m not an expert in manufacturing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little DAC amp chips are very plentiful, very common, and very cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the one on the phone before was already not like a $50 DAC or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. You know, the parts in a phone are most of the most of them are very, very cheap parts and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little audio codec chip that was in there is almost certainly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not a very expensive part to begin with. The one that they put in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone adapter, which also must include an ADC going the other direction because there’s a microphone involved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, but the ones the one they put in there is probably going to be similar quality than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one they have already in the phone. I don’t expect it to be noticeably different. I’m generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a DAC quality skeptic. A lot of audio people think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to have a really amazing, complicated, and key factor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, expensive DAC slash amp or both in order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have good audio performance. And I am generally a skeptic on DACs and amps. It is very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very rare that I ever hear any difference whatsoever, even with very good ones versus very crappy ones. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is extremely rare to hear any difference whatsoever. And on the headphones that almost everybody is using with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their iPhones, it would be extremely difficult for anybody ever to notice a real difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between DACs and amps. So that being said, it is indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally possible for Apple to make and sell a whole bunch of little crappy adapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for $9 that include a digital DAC chip in there, especially since Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves do not need to pay the MFI licensing fee for the lightning chip that’s in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that also helps a lot. For that reason alone, I don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see a lot of third-party ones that are near that price point, but we will find out, I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess. So the interesting thing to me about this technically is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the potential promises of digital audio is you can
⏹️ ▶️ John convert from digital to analog sort of at the last second, right? So you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about transmitting an audio signal over a potentially long wire, very thin wire
⏹️ ▶️ John probably doesn’t have, you know, not not not particularly sturdy wire that could potentially fray or, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone has had headphones or one ear starts cutting out or like the wire starts to fray or or if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John like a plug thing you plug things into your car with right? wires can wear out because they’re not super heavy-duty
⏹️ ▶️ John and if what you’re transmitting over there is analog audio as you’re wearing down that wire
⏹️ ▶️ John or something bad is happening to where it’s passing close to something that’s magnetic or whatever it can mess with your signal
⏹️ ▶️ John and start to sound worse so this is theoretical right but it could happen
⏹️ ▶️ John and so like oh we’ll send digital digital is robust all we got to do is be able to distinguish between a 1 and a 0 it’s much easier than
⏹️ ▶️ John maintaining the fine details of frequency and amplitude of an analog signal and then just the last
⏹️ ▶️ John second right before it goes into your ears will convert that with our tiny little DACs into
⏹️ ▶️ John an analog signal. But did we say DAC is digital to analog converter?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. I don’t know if people know that, but that’s what we’re saying. We’re saying all caps DAC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And so you have to understand that in order to hear audio, you need to go from ones and zeros
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into a wave, into something that a speaker can play. And so the debate is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the conversion from digital to analog by a digital to analog converter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or DAC. Does that happen in the phone? Does that happen after it leaves the phone? So what’s coming out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone through the lightning port is just ones and zeros, and then eventually it gets converted, and that’s the crux of the conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco —Right. And there’s lots of different ways to do that. It is not actually a simple problem electrically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to solve, to convert those ones and zeros to the corresponding waves. The main reality of it, though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that even though there’s lots of fancy DACs that can do a more accurate job,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can measure better on official scientific measurement machinery. The crappy, cheap, like $2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DAC-amp chips all-in-one do a good enough job that most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people can’t hear the difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike Lewis And you’ll find that Marco prefers digital analog converters that have tubes in them because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it gives that nice, warm, rich sound that you don’t get otherwise. John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Walker Actually, I hate tubes. They’re a giant pain in the butt. They pick up static. They burn out. They’re asymmetric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes. Tubes suck. I’m all solid-state over here. Mike Lewis Just
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, continue, John. So the $9 adapter now that we that we have learned basically
⏹️ ▶️ John conclusively that has a little digital analog converter in it like that What’s what’s being sent out of the lightning port is
⏹️ ▶️ John digital Raises the question Where is the DAC in the wired ear pods
⏹️ ▶️ John that come? It could be that the DAC is in the lightning connector And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John still sending analog audio across the wire to the wired headphones, so it only gets
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh Oh yeah. Seven millimeters out of the phone before it’s converted by the, not the DAC
⏹️ ▶️ John in the phone, but by what is presumably an even cheaper DAC that’s like seven millimeters away. And then it
⏹️ ▶️ John just sends out like, you know, or they could also be in the earphones. I don’t know where it is. Like I really want iFixit to slice
⏹️ ▶️ John these things open to see what the heck is inside them. But it would be kind of weird to bundle the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with like, you know, quote unquote, digital ear pods that merely move the DAC slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. No, that’s all marketing BS. Of course, it is very, very likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the DAC is in the Lightning connector end of it. That is extremely likely. You know, just based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the way other Lightning peripherals are built, that is very likely to be the case. The fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, this isn’t really solving a real problem. Just like fancy DACs and fancy amps are portable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones that don’t need more amps than what the phone can provide, this is solving fake problems. This is solving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placebo problems for most people. The fact is, you are not going to pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meaningful amount of analog noise that will be audible in your headphones from the six feet of cable, at best,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are running from the phone to your crappy earpods. It is way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely that any flaws in your sound will be masked by how crappy those drivers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than being audible by you.
⏹️ ▶️ John The practical reality of it would only be in the failure modes for people who are like
⏹️ ▶️ John pets are chewing on their wires or they get it caught in a car door or whatever any other sort of cable abuse
⏹️ ▶️ John the failure mode for analog is like staticky or whatever and the failure mode
⏹️ ▶️ John for digital sounds different essentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s say that it anything that would cause noticeable degradation of sound in the analog from cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damage would destroy the digital signal also because you’re talking like you know shorts and phrase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything there’s no way
⏹️ ▶️ John but it sounds different it’s a difference between static which we all know from our childhood and the
⏹️ ▶️ John manufactured static that comes over with MPEG2 compression with on like television sets you know when you turn them on they have
⏹️ ▶️ John this this fake MPEG of static but static is like the worst case scenario for video compression algorithms they all look stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway yeah like I can imagine the failure modes sounding different one possible
⏹️ ▶️ John way they could sound different is like oh if if the thing is damaged enough the digital can’t get through you hear nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John or it cuts out or whatever but I don’t even know that to be the case but I do know that they would sound different because analog has a different
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of degradation you know anyway um all that just means you should get your
⏹️ ▶️ John get a new set of headphones because if your wire is damaged your wire is damaged it doesn’t really make any difference but academically it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s interesting to me to think about this whole because that was one of the things i did all the digital audio uh uh
⏹️ ▶️ John it didn’t really push on it too much but like the digital audio is better than analog audio and really
⏹️ ▶️ John like marco said it doesn’t matter at all for these tiny little ear pods because the sound quality is
⏹️ ▶️ John so bad, relatively speaking, that all those other things are ridiculous and don’t make a big difference. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John um… It does matter from Apple’s parts perspective. If they could have, like, I mean, I’m sure they
⏹️ ▶️ John could have. I’m interested in why they chose to go with tiny little DACs instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of repurposing the pins. And maybe it really wasn’t possible, I don’t know. But like, certainly, if you’re gonna pinch pennies,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make an even cheaper connector without little chips in it, right? They could have gone that route,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they didn’t, you know. Maybe they don’t, maybe just they, they… they’ve used up all their pins and resistor
⏹️ ▶️ John combinations on Lightning and didn’t have the ability to repurpose it in that way?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe they really are all on board with the digital thing and they just wanna say, nope, it’s digital from now on
⏹️ ▶️ John and even if it’s digital only until it gets a couple of millimeters outside the phone, then it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s probably a combination of just not having anything modified about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone, having it be compatible with any Lightning output on any model phone, so in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case you plug it into also an iPad or maybe down the road if Macs have lightning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports, that would be kinda cool, you know, stuff like that. Compatibility in that way and also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the chip is just so cheap that it doesn’t really matter. Like, I really don’t think, the difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between like, the basic job that all lightning peripherals have to do to connect to lightning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, there’s already a chip in the connector to do that. I bet the difference between that and a basic DAC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amp is really not that big.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet the cost of the metal lightning connector more than the cost of the chip. Probably. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco from Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective in terms of like what it takes to manufacture because those little DACs, they could probably buy them for fractions of a cent
⏹️ ▶️ John each, but to manufacture the lightning connector to the tolerances required for those little contacts on it, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the most expensive part of that entire $9 connector from Apple’s perspective.
Media controls on AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about those AirPods, which are the wire-free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the lightning ear pods we were just discussing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have wire, they just move it. Now you have a wire to charge up the case that the beer pods plug into, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this intermediary object that’s required for use it that has a wire.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a wire, it’s a hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, but there’s gonna be a wire involved. That’s the magic of Bluetooth, it just moves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wires around. Why don’t you park your
⏹️ ▶️ John car parking in a car hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good grief. Wow. All right. So regardless of whether or not they’re wireless, Captain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pedantic, the question at hand at the moment is, do they or do they not have start, stop and skip controls?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From what I’ve understood, they do sort of. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you take, if you have both AirPods in your ears and take one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them out, by default, It will pause whatever you’re listening to, unless it’s a telephone call, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey presume. And you can choose to restart that via your phone or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch, or Siri, I suppose. And then if you restart it with both headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of your, or I’m sorry, with one AirPod out of your ear, then it would convert to mono.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or alternatively, if you say, or trying to listen to somebody who’s talking to you and you pop one out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then pop it back in, then it will automatically start playing again. But skipping and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey volume control, all of that is done either via Siri or via the phone or watch, as far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I understood. Is that what you guys had as well?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the presentation, they didn’t, all they showed was exactly what you described in the presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was hoping in the hands-on area that I would hear more details. And when I did, they basically echoed what Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John said, that like, that what I’m looking for is not there, that you can do everything you
⏹️ ▶️ John said and you can talk to Siri and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking forward to hearing stories about people who were on a bus full of other AirPods users and I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear everybody say, hey Siri, skip forward. Hey Siri, skip forward. Hey Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John wait, skip back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is what’s making like the AirPods, I totally want to try them because it’s like that’s what I’ve been talking about with
⏹️ ▶️ John the wireless thing. I would love that and yet I don’t, I can’t get excited about them if I don’t have the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to pause and change volume. I don’t care about skip forward and skip back. All I care about is pause and change volume. Pausing
⏹️ ▶️ John by taking the ear pod out talk about a way to lose your ear pods. Don’t do it like I’m not that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna do that right Being able to tap you can you I think you can tap to pause can you or can
⏹️ ▶️ John you not even do that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s something like that. Yeah, I know I thought it was strictly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Taking one out in order to pause.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s like I don’t know again None of us have them so we can’t tell but it’s like it’s tap to talk to Siri It’s like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to talk to Siri. I I just want to pause playback and changing volume It happens if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John walking around and like you happen to come to a noisy section where you’re closer to a road and you need To go up one notch on the
⏹️ ▶️ John volume. I don’t want to talk to Siri to do that It’s like having to it’s like having to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a conversation with somebody To try to like pick a forkful of food up into your mouth. Like it’s like just just let
⏹️ ▶️ John me do it It’s one little click on the little thingy. I don’t Tension the volume with Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John is the worst use of speech Anyway, the whole point is these things have accelerometers in them
⏹️ ▶️ John and I desperately hope that that a future software update
⏹️ ▶️ John enables more useful functionality in these AirPods, if what we’re all saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that we think the way these things work is the truth. Because not being able to pause or change volume
⏹️ ▶️ John means I just won’t buy these. Like I already know before buying them at all that I am not going to talk to Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John to do either one of those functions ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but why couldn’t you reach into your pocket and use the physical buttons on your phone? I mean, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easily discover where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John they are and hit them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t go back to that, are you kidding? Sometimes it’s all, you know, sometimes it’s in my back pocket, sometimes,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, like the little, I will prefer to use the wired thing with the little clicker. Like, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John no way. So, this is really depressing me, because it’s not like they don’t, it’s like, well, how could they do it? They have a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it. They have a thing that you can tap, but tap, I mean, and by all means, make this the default.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tap for Siri is the default, but then have a setting somewhere, like the iOS 10 home button that says, actually, what tap does is pauses.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then for volume up and down, I don’t know if two taps are I’m willing to tap the little thing in my ear however
⏹️ ▶️ John many times you want. Obviously, it knows when I’m tapping it, but play pause in volume please Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s you know in all of my searches and tests of good Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones it is it is pretty much impossible to find any that have good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls for playback and stuff like that. They’re there they exist, but there’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few because the main thing is in order to have like good, reachable, usable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliable controls for seeking and volume and everything else, you really need physical buttons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need real physical buttons and some kind of logical arrangement that you can feel on the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re walking so that you can just hit it and not have to think about it and not miss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have to have a weird touch gesture or anything weird like that. And most headphone manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do this because I guess it’s more parts to have buttons but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think one of the main reasons is that it just makes it uglier. And manufacturers are all doing these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird, like overly clever, overly designed things with like touch gestures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and various like tap commands and everything. But by far the best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones I have to walk with and to listen to podcasts on are these ugly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really crappy sounding Sennheiser PX210BT’s that are now discontinued
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the new Sennheiser MM400 and 450 are very similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have these just nice big buttons on the ear cup and it’s great. I use those every day when I’m walking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to podcasts because it is so nice to just be able to reach up and feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the buttons and just hit the one and have it work every time, always hit the right one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is so, so nice. And the advantage of Bluetooth is that you can do that. If you have wired headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no protocol that Apple defines for wired headphone makers for them to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have buttons that do anything else besides the single clicker thing. But Bluetooth headphones have that spec built in. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any Bluetooth headphone can do that. But it requires some kind of large control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually ugly big buttons for it to be any good. On AirPods there just isn’t room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that and even if there was room for that there is no way Apple would release a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no headphone jack and no buttons on it and then have AirPods with this giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall of buttons on them. way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m being told via the chat that you can in settings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn off Siri and turn on double tap to pause.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cool. The adp tipster is very adamant about that that setting is there. So that’s nice to know. So that puts me back
⏹️ ▶️ John on the fence about buying them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That solves one of the reasons that you might want to
⏹️ ▶️ John is a volume is still out there. But play pause that goes 50% of the way there because
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to be able to do that. And I don’t quite maybe I just haven’t been reading enough articles about her maybe not enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John have air pods yet No people have them. They’re separating them out into a separate review. I guess I haven’t read those yet, but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m happy to hear that. I’m back on schedule to potentially buy them volume
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not quite sure how they’d implement that two taps Triple tap
⏹️ ▶️ John up. I don’t quite know. I’m not sure if I can give that up I’m gonna have to start keeping track of
⏹️ ▶️ John how often I raise the volume I have the little clicker on my my Bose headphones for plane flights too and I’m also glad that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have that clicker because My phone is like in my pocket or like somewhere tucked away Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t really get to it easily and frequently I pause it and put the volume up and volume down Over the
⏹️ ▶️ John course of the whole flight those seem like basic functions to me I wouldn’t wear air pods on a
⏹️ ▶️ John plane anyway, because I don’t have the noise cancelling but Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a problem to be solved for sure I don’t want a wire dangling from it and like Marco said I don’t want buttons They’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna put buttons on it. I certainly don’t want buttons on it cuz how would you find them on these little tiny ear pods?
⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine maybe squeezing little little ends Like if they were squishy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no I mean trust me like you you don’t want them to come up with clever gestures because they won’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on things that are that small They’re not gonna work reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not gesture It would be a physical button like a physical squeezy little you know like if they were
⏹️ ▶️ John squishy ends I’ve had little squishy ends on them. You know little rubber little rubberized things anyway Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that could be stop and then tap. Anyway, well, we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how this goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then what happens when you’re in mono? Because one of the benefits to my mind of the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that they will gracefully switch to mono if you so desire. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so then how do you which which end are you squeezing? Are you squeezing the top end of the headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the of the mono earpiece to go up in the bottom end to go down like that’s never going to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The right answer to this, unfortunately for you to is to just use your darn watch. But since neither of you believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Apple Watch, then that doesn’t really help.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that any less cumbersome than the phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, actually no. I would rather do the phone to be honest with you. Even though I do love my Apple Watch, it would be easier to do it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John If I could just turn the little crown to do volume up and down?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually I suppose my watch is actually in low power mode for the first time possibly ever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any case, if you left up the now playing glance app thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you would be able to just raise your wrist and fumble with the crown,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I am not 100% sure about that. I don’t know, either way, I mean, to be honest, to me, the easiest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer is to just use the volume buttons on your phone. I agree with you that it is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of weird not to have any ability to change the volume on the device itself, since we’ve all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been programmed to be used to being able to reach to approximately our chin and grab the little,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, bulbousy part of the cord and do it there. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not as bothered slash offended by this as you seem to be.
W1 and Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was a lot of contention both online and amongst like personal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends of mine. Oh, this is ridiculous. Apple is making a new standard and using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their own proprietary junk, blah, blah, blah. Why does Apple hate everyone? Why does Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hate open blah, blah, blah. So the AirPods do use regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old Bluetooth, just like everything else. Now they do sprinkle a fair helping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of special sauce on top. Hopefully Marco you can fill in a little bit about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the codecs that they’re using Because some of my neckbeard Audiophile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends are very perturbed with some of the codec related things But really the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah the thing I wanted that that I want to make clear which I don’t think we were very clear on Last episode is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air pods do use Bluetooth? And I’m actually now quoting the really good buzzfeed article
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about why Apple killed the air the headphone jack back. AirPods use Bluetooth for their connection. Bluetooth headphones have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey historically suffered from a conga line of connectivity problems. Onerous pairing dropped connections, crappy sound. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident it solved them all with that W1 chip. Quote, as you can imagine, by developing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our own Bluetooth chip and controlling both ends of the pairing process, there’s a lot of magic we can do. Quote, somebody named Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says. Quote, we use a Bluetooth connection but covered in a lot of secret sauce.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you haven’t read that article, it’s not terribly long and very, very worth it. So it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular Bluetooth. And apparently there’s a little button on the back of the case of the little pillbox that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can either press or hold down in order to pair the AirPods with any traditional Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that was totally not clear from the talk from the presentation because the word Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ John from my recollection was not even spoken during the presentation. All they said is, wow, we wireless things
⏹️ ▶️ John and we have another one of those chips that’s like a letter and a number W one. And so it for all the world, it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was like, look, Bluetooth sucks. We have a better solution. Here it is uses these W one
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. But very quickly after the that we learned, actually, that we want to just a Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John chip. But there is some extra stuff that Apple is doing to smooth over the parts of Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t work. But it’s nice that, as you said, that special sauce
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it is, like other some other protocol that they use to negotiate
⏹️ ▶️ John and sync and handshake with their own devices. All that just goes away if you take the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John and use them with other devices they’re just plain old Bluetooth audio headphones. You can buy AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory and use them with your Android phone or with any other thing that supports Bluetooth. This is my understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John of it anyway. So how special is the W1?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is the W1 just a really nice Bluetooth chip? Does it have any Any
⏹️ ▶️ John extra hardware features or is that all in magic software? I don’t know. This is another one of those mysteries that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not really interested in telling the world about at this point. Like I said, they weren’t even interested in telling the world
⏹️ ▶️ John that they were using Bluetooth. So if they have managed to make Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ John as they say, to fix all the things that bother people about Bluetooth, that’s just as good as,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not better than having to roll everything your own from scratch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Fracture.
Sponsor: Fracture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fracture, vivid photo prints directly on glass. Go to fractureme.com slash podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then mention our show for 10% off your first order. Fracture is a photo decor company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s out to rescue your favorite images from the digital ether. They print your photos directly onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glass and a laser cut rigid backing. So they’re ready to display right out of the box.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No framing, nothing else. They’re finished, awesome looking, totally printed photos directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on glass. It looks fantastic. My office is full of these things. We give them as gifts. They’re amazing. They even include the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wall anchor. You need to hang them up. Just upload your digital photo and pick your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size on fractureme.com. It is that simple. The fracture process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes the color and contrast to your photo really pop and the sleek frameless design let your photos stand out while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still matching any decorating style. Bring a special memory to life. Give it as a unique gift. People
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love these things as gifts or decorate your home with the moments that tell your story. Fractures come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with 8 frames. Fractures come with a 60-day happiness guarantee, so you’re sure to love your order. Each fracture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco print is handmade in Gainesville, Florida, from U.S. source materials in their carbon-neutral factory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For more information and 10% off your first order, visit fractureme.com slash podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know that’s weird. It sounds like a placeholder, but it’s not. Fractureme.com slash podcast, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention our show in the one-question survey that you get there. To help support the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let them know you came from here. So once again, thanks for watching.
Bluetooth audio codecs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to fractureme.com slash podcast and mention our show for 10% off your first order. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ♪ Fracture Me ♪ Okay, so I have a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of super neck beard audio nerd friends and they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really ticked off that the headphone jack was going away and that Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the new thing. Mostly because they felt like they were going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either have a lossy encoding of their source material or alternatively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey re-encode even if their source material was lossy in the first place. So to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back up a half step, MP3s, most AACs if I recall correctly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and jump in whenever you’re ready if I start going off the rails here, are lossy, which is to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they know what a human ear should be capable of hearing and if there’s information that’s outside the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey range of what a human ear should be able to hear, they’ll just drop it on the ground and just not save
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, not include it in these MP3s and this AAC files, et cetera, because in theory, there’s no point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to having it. You can’t hear it anyway. Now, super nerds, and so as an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey example, if I were to download a Dave Matthews Band concert, I know that you could do this with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Phish as well. They’ll often save these files as FLAC, which I forget what that stands
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for. Maybe you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lossless audio codec, I believe. There you go. That sounds perfect. And you can guess where this is going. Flac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey means there is no loss. The, everything that the microphone or whatever, uh, mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that captured the audio could hear, it gets saved the whole way through. So these neckbeards, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio neckbeards were complaining, Oh, either my flax or whatever the source may be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are going to have to be lossy encoded. And that’s BS now I’m losing things. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I start with, let’s say an MP3, most Bluetooth headsets don’t support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MP3, so then it gets re-encoded to something else like AEC or,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it that’s super popular? AptX, which is a terrible name. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s going to get re-encoded, no matter what, it’s just lost all the way down. This is horrible, and then tables are flipped and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets angry. So how much of this is a regular person? Let’s leave aside audiophiles for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How much of this is a regular person should I care about? Because I’m assuming the answer is zero, because that’s about how much I care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So not only should you care zero, but they should care zero as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well. And here’s why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth is a digital protocol and digital audio is kind of large. It takes a lot of bits per second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so in order to improve the efficiency of Bluetooth and save battery, because the more you transmit, the more battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need and to make it less skippy, because you don’t want to be maxing out all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible bandwidth. You want to send as little as possible to minimize power usage and to maximize reliability of the connection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all these different codecs that you can use to either lossily or losslessly compress the audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going between your transmitting phone or whatever and your Bluetooth headset so that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can save bandwidth and have a more reliable connection and better battery life. Lossless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compression really does max out at roughly 50% just by math.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s nearly impossible to have an average compression ratio that’s substantially different than approximately 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 1 with lossless compression. Lossy compression can go 10 to 1 easily, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the more advanced ones can even go better. So your friends are all upset because the idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of lossily compressing audio is horrendous to a lot of audiophiles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In reality, it is very, very hard for most people to tell the difference. Even extremely well-trained
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who know exactly what kind of artifacts to listen for have a very hard time often detecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference between a well-encoded mp3 or a AC file and and the uncompressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version or the loss or the losslessly compressed version. So the question of whether lossless compression
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is even necessary and detectable at all is certainly up for debate. I personally lean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more towards the fact that lossless is a waste of space for almost everything and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that you know it’s not really necessary and that most people can’t hear the difference. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the realm of phone audio and Bluetooth. People blamed Bluetooth headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sounding like crap on these codecs that they use to compress audio and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is generally true that the old A2DP standard did indeed have crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio quality because it was such a primitive standard so long ago that it had to have very simple electronics on both sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That one did kind of suck but since then we’ve had a few advances. The aptX codec
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you mentioned is a big one that it It can sound very good. Problem with AptX is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for these codecs to be supported for playback, both the phone and the headphones have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support them. And there are a lot of decently high-end and mid-range headphones that support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AptX these days, but the iPhone, as far as I know, to the best of my knowledge, the iPhone doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support it. There’s licensing fees and patents and everything involved. As far as I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last time I checked, it didn’t support it, and that wasn’t that long ago. missing no iPhone supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppDeX. Apple does have a license to use AAC. AAC is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lossy. You mentioned earlier it might be lossless. Nope, you’re thinking of various AAC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco containers like M4A that can also contain lossless audio like the Apple lossless audio codec,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yes, that is what I’m thinking of. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pure AAC is indeed lossy, but it’s a pretty good codec. It’s similar in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco general genre to MP3. It’s slightly newer. It has some advancements here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there. So AAC is a decent codec. And the fact is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned earlier about the DACs and amps on phones, the vast majority of Bluetooth headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sound like crap, sound like crap because of their crappy driver design and cheap components. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because they really need higher fidelity being transmitted to them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the phone or through their codec. That’s not the problem that you need. You can sound way, way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better even with the most basic MP3 or the most basic AAC encoding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just have better headphones to begin with. And the reason why your friends don’t even need to care about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because if they’re truly concerned about all this crap anyway, they probably use external DACs and amps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their phones, which means that the phone not having a headphone jack doesn’t affect them at all because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were already using the Lightning port to have USB DACs and amps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know that’s not the case in this particular context. I mean, I agree with you, but these particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends of mine, and they’re smart guys and I really do enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their company, but they are using just traditional headphone jacks on traditional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well then in that case, then the adapter, the lightning to headphone adapter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should probably be totally fine because then you avoid this problem entirely. Like, you’re not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forced to use Bluetooth with the new phone. You’re just being forced to use the lightning port or Bluetooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And again, most high-end audio files, or really picky audio files, have already been using USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and portable DACs and amps in the Lightning port for years. Now, just the ones that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were using the headphone jack have to use a little $9 adapter that is probably using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same quality DAC and amp that was inside the phone to begin with.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for the AAC transmission, does it take an AAC song
⏹️ ▶️ John and just transmit it as is, or does it have to double encode it? does that take an AAC and then encode that
⏹️ ▶️ John as AAC and then send it, is it like, is it downgrading it? Like I’ve got a 256 kilobit AAC and then it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta re-encode it as 96 to send it over Bluetooth? So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is certainly possible for the software stack involved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there to detect whether something is AAC and is within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the right parameters to be compatible and to just send it without recompression. That is possible. but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given the design of the various AV foundation frameworks and core audio and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s pretty unlikely that’s what’s happening. It’s possible, like as I said, but I think it’s unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t think you could hear the difference if you have a double encoded AAC?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I grant that most people can’t hear the difference of a single AAC if it’s at a reasonable bit rate, but if you had a 128
⏹️ ▶️ John and then re-encoded it again at 96, a double encoded, you think you can’t hear any artifacts in that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s a lower bit rate, and if it’s, especially if it’s as low as 96, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’d probably hear that. But if it’s like 128, 160, 192, like in that range, especially the higher end of that range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s like 160, I don’t think you’d hear it. But like if you did
⏹️ ▶️ John double 160, double 128, like take a 128 and then re-encode it again as 128, like you’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ John a loss every time, right? Well, not necessarily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there are small errors introduced in the decoding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and encoding. But the way most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these codecs work is by discarding frequencies that they don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll hear or reducing the precision in things that they don’t think you’ll hear. If the input
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio is already lacking those frequencies or those details, you might not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually hear it very much. It’s not gonna be like generational loss of a cassette tape. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be different errors and different imprecisions, but I bet it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a lot less noticeable than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I’ve never actually done that experiment, but I’m assuming that if you were just to run this on a loop,
⏹️ ▶️ John it would be like generational loss. It’s just a question of what’s the slope of the line. Does it get crappy after
⏹️ ▶️ John five re-encodes or does it take like 105, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, sure, yeah, and here the answer is two. So it’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, it’s very unlikely, again, it’s very unlikely to be noticeable on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even really good headphones. might not be noticeable, let alone the headphones most people are using to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through Bluetooth. I mean, the realm of Bluetooth headphones is terrible. There are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very few that even have like moderately good audio quality, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not because of the codecs, it’s because of the crappy drivers. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t hold your breath on this being like the answer to really anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re already at AAC apparently, that’s good enough for the the vast majority of uses here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people are not gonna notice any difference that is actually attributable to the codec itself or any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible transmission re-encoding that might be taking place.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would hope that one of Apple’s advantages, maybe not in the W1, but in the W3 or whatever, at
⏹️ ▶️ John once the minimum bandwidth requirement goes up a little bit, would be to go
⏹️ ▶️ John end-to-end and take your mastered for iTunes 256 kilobit AACs
⏹️ ▶️ John and just send them exactly as is to your headphones. like, you know, if anybody could pull that
⏹️ ▶️ John off, it’s them because they would literally control every piece of hardware and software in that chain.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though it may be simpler to just so just you will you just universally encode everything and it will be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Being able to do that is something they could tout in a presentation and whether
⏹️ ▶️ John or not, you know, they will cater to audiophiles a little bit whether or not you would actually hear the double encoding,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if they get to the point where they can handle the bandwidth of 256. just seems like it would be more efficient
⏹️ ▶️ John to not have to encode it, you just send it as is, if they know it’s a CA already in it. And like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it fits within whatever the bandwidth constraints are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s, you know, bandwidth trans also like AC has a lot of optional features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just like all the crappy video codec complexity that’s out there. Like there’s all these optional features and like kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of spec things you might get in a bit stream. So there is also a good technical reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they would want to just always transcode what they receive into a certain profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they know they support on the other end. And also, I think, again, with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design of these APIs, it would be difficult to have a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pass through the original lossily encoded data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without decoding it first, all the way through AVPlayer and everything. There might be some of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involved to do things like surround pass-through, but I doubt there’s much of it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would just be complexity for this very minor gain that most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t notice. All to send very, very slightly, probably imperceptibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better sound to crappy little earbud drivers. Our final
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsor this week is Igloo. Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Sponsor: Igloo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an intranet you will actually like. Anybody that’s worked in a corporate environment, like Casey and John, knows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how painful intranets always are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is stale, the interface is ugly, and you can’t access it on your phone because they were built like in 1985. Igloo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an intranet you’ll actually like. It’s designed for the user, but it has the features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually sell to the businesses. So Igloo gives you the flexibility to get your work done how you want,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you want, and on whatever device you want. Igloo truly is building a product meant for 2016, not 1997.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can share news, organize your files, coordinate calendars, and manage projects all in one place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything on igloo can be optionally social with comments and like buttons and anyone can add content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on their permission levels with drag and drop widgets and what you see is what you get editor. And igloo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes use of responsive web design and modern web technologies. So it looks fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all your devices. And everything works on all your devices. You can annotate documents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a BlackBerry if you want to. Everything works on all your devices because of modern web technology at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco igloo. So sign up today at igloo software.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a free trial and get yourself started. Once again,
Jobs-style AirPods design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco igloosoftware.com slash ATP for a free trial. Thank you very much to Igloo for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so apparently there’s a jobs-related story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the AirPod design philosophy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not jobs-related, jobs-style. I was thinking after the presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John of the EarPods was if Steve Jobs had given that presentation, one thing he liked to do
⏹️ ▶️ John when introducing hardware products to say something, especially if it’s like a funny or
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting anecdote, about the process of designing it. Of like, why did we decide
⏹️ ▶️ John that this product should look like the way you see it now? And what did we, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John was our thinking when we thought of this, the obvious idea, and why did we reject that? Why did we go with this? The, the,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably the most famous one is his discussions, maybe it wasn’t even in the keynote, but subsequently about the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the flat panel iMac, the one that was on the Time magazine cover that leaked at the little semicircle base and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen and talking about the obvious it was in the presentation the obvious thing was just to take a big screen and put computers
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s crap on the back of it but they didn’t like that so they rethought it you know anyway the ear pods
⏹️ ▶️ John the obvious story to me is you know if you can like make up
⏹️ ▶️ John the the design thing is like they’re gonna have these things in our ears and they’re not gonna have wires like that seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the premise right there’s not gonna be wires on them at all they’re just gonna be things in the ears the part that
⏹️ ▶️ John goes in your ear is probably going to be the same shape that we figured out for the ear pods or whatever, but what about the rest of it? We have to find a place for a battery
⏹️ ▶️ John and for all the chips and stuff like that. What shape should these be? A lot of the ones that are on the market
⏹️ ▶️ John that are similar to the AirPods are shaped like snails or little turds
⏹️ ▶️ John acorns. Some of them have sticks coming out of them, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can imagine if you just start with a clean slate and say, what shape should we make the little things that poke your ears
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s lots of possibilities because obviously the part that’s not in your ear can be almost any shape they’re not going to be that
⏹️ ▶️ John big you want it to look nice and to be easy to grab and take
⏹️ ▶️ John in and out and I can imagine if Steve Jobs was there he would show slides of other
⏹️ ▶️ John competitors thing that look like snails and say but we decide not to do that you know we thought about it and try lots of different
⏹️ ▶️ John designs but in the end we realized the the solution was sitting there right in front of us just take the ear pods
⏹️ ▶️ John that we know and love, snip, and cut off the wires. Done. Because conveniently,
⏹️ ▶️ John the little white stem thing is a perfect place for a cylindrical battery, and lucky Apple finally
⏹️ ▶️ John gets to make a cylindrical battery. I guess they did for the pencil, too. Although I don’t even know if they’re cylindrical in there. But hey, a cylinder
⏹️ ▶️ John is the shape of a traditional battery. It’s got a nice handle for you to grab it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think there’s a slightly better chance that you won’t lose them when they’re awkwardly shaped than if they were
⏹️ ▶️ John actually shaped like little snails. You know, like the fact that it’s, like, longer and has this protrusion coming from it, even though it might
⏹️ ▶️ John look a little bit more awkward, it’s just generally a better design. But if you look at them, they look
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the world like someone took the regular wired Apple EarPods and
⏹️ ▶️ John just cut the wires off of them on them. And already people are selling wires that you can attach to them so you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John which is ridiculous. Although I don’t understand why, we’re talking about this thing we all
⏹️ ▶️ John saw, like someone selling a sort of a clip-on wire that you attach to your AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep you from losing them but it clips on like a little cuff, like the eclipses like there’s little metal
⏹️ ▶️ John things on the bottom of them right they should be magnetic The little case has little magnets
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco in it right you should
⏹️ ▶️ John make that I don’t understand That’s staring you right in the face Maybe they can’t sell those little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever they are those rare-earth magnet things that kids swallow and they go in their intestines and have to you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, they also don’t want to cover the mics because I thought the microphones were at the very very bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little I don’t know protrusion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’d have to make it like hollow or do something but it would be anyway that if Apple made these things which is
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous thing about it they would do that but anyway that was not discussed like and in the presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John there was no sort of job style story about how they arrived at the design that is essentially exactly like the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPods but with the wires cut off but I think that’s really like not obvious if you’d ask
⏹️ ▶️ John me what shape will the Apple things be like I would have lots of ideas but I wouldn’t occur to me
⏹️ ▶️ John to just take the existing ones and cut off the wires but of course after you see it you realize even though it looks kind of weird
⏹️ ▶️ John it does have a lot of advantages in particular I think having a little handle like having a thing to grab
⏹️ ▶️ John it by the hand an obvious place to grab it so you’re not grabbing a little snail that’s in your ear you’re grabbing a stick
⏹️ ▶️ John right that that seems like a big win to me and then of course the place to put the battery is probably easier to hide a battery
⏹️ ▶️ John and a little stick than it is to try to find a place in the snail shell to wedge the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that does make sense especially since oh yeah look at what we’ve done it’s so perfect now we’re just gonna make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfecter. ______ You
iPhone 7 Plus cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness. All right, so let’s round out by talking about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 7 Plus cameras. And there’s been a plethora of debate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over what they can and cannot do. And a mutual friend of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ours, Matthew Panzarino, who is editor-in-chief of Tech Crunch, wrote a really fantastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey review of the iPhone 7. And you knew it was going to be good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it starts as follows. This is the very opening. My kid farts a lot. Farting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and eating is pretty much all he does. And that’s because he’s four weeks old. But anyway, any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone review that starts with a story about flatulence is good with me. So in this story,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he tells us a little bit more about the iPhone 7 camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so he says, every time you take a picture with the iPhone 7 Plus, both the wide angle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and telephoto fire off. Yes, two 12 megapixel cameras for every shot. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be a prime driver behind the increase in the iPhone 7 Plus’s memory to 3GB.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both images are needed due to an Apple technique it’s calling Fusion internally. Fusion takes data from both sensors, merges them into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best possible picture for any condition. If, for instance, there’s a low-light scene that has some dark areas, the image processing chip could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose to pick up some image data, pixels or other stuff like luminance, from the brighter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey f1.8 wide angle and mix it in with the data from the f2.8 telephoto, creating a composite…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t pronounce it. It’s a composite. Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. It’s actually pronounced Bazzell. On
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the fly, without any input from the user. This was debated a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last week. Do both cameras fire and do you get data from both cameras when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you take a picture? And according to Matthew Panzarino, who I trust, the answer is unequivocally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, both of them fire.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I saw there’s actually a developer document somewhere along the way where basically at At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the API level, you can specify, like if you need certain low-level access,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like raw controls and things like that, then you have to just pick one and use that one. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the default mode appears to really be this kind of mishmash that uses both and tries to be intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it. So that’s cool. I worry a little bit about if there’s going to be any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of artifacts from that, but I assume Apple thought of that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worked around that in software, so we’ll see. That’s pretty cool. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that we need to cover with the camera, which is kind of big, which is kind of related to this, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re calling the telephoto lens is not as good in a few pretty critical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. You might not want the data from it necessarily. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it depends on how they’re combining it. This has kind of actually got me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into questioning whether I’m getting the plus or not. Basically, we know from the keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was only f2.8 compared to f1.8 of the wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lens and that results in a lot less light coming in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and therefore in low light you’re going to have a lot more noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming from that sensor because it’s going to have to crank up the sensitivity to make up for the lack of light coming in. The other problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of related to that which is that the telephoto lens does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image stabilization. Basically, you know, it’s the difference between what the 6 Plus and 6S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus have had over the 6 and 6S camera. Because the pluses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have always had optical stabilization on the main cameras and the minuses, I guess, have not until the 7. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, you can see in the reviews that compare like the 6S to the 6S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus camera, you can usually see in their low-light photos a pretty noticeable difference because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the image stabilizer allows the camera to have a longer shutter speed as long as nobody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moving had to have a longer shutter speed without the shake of your hands getting in the way of making it blurry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so in low-light longer shutter speed means again lower sensitivity needed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know less less boosting of the signal on this on the sensor and therefore less noise in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the picture. So the fact that the telephoto does not have stabilization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will generally mean that, you know, in any kind of moderate to low-light, basically indoors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pictures from the telephoto camera are going to be noticeably noisier than the ones from the wide camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And additionally, because of that f2.8, it’s going to make it even worse. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, the telephoto camera is going to be mostly an outdoor camera. You can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it inside, but it won’t be very good. The second camera, oh and also people on Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analyzed the EXIF data from some of those Sports Illustrated sample pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they seem to conclude that the telephoto sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also smaller. There’s some various conflicting reports about this from like Apple PR statements, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sensor might be smaller. If the sensor is smaller, that also means, generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually more noise because the pixels are smaller and collect less light. So again, more amplification necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, um, so all of this, you know, there’s lots of good reasons why these might be the case space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco considerations. A longer lens involves differently shaped optics that are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deeper. Um, and and like, you know, these are, I mean, these aren’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, $1000 cameras in here. They’re probably like 40 or $50 cameras and that adds up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the bill of materials to these things like they’re already adding a second one to add a second one that’s even more expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even larger and even more mechanically complicated would probably have a noticeable effect on their cost and their margins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They probably don’t want. So it’s probably, I’m guessing cost is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the secondary reason and that physical constraints are the primary reason. But whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reasons, it’s kind of unfortunate that the telephoto lens is just not as well specced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the wide lens. So I’m actually, I’ve decided for myself that I’m probably going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular size 7 this year and not the plus.
⏹️ ▶️ John the pluses giant. Here’s the thing about Apple and this PR cycle. The day
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I heard from multiple different people who were in contact
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple PR different things, which is not typical for Apple. Usually Apple PR has everything all
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to say specific people and specific facts. These are minor facts that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things but
⏹️ ▶️ John where our PR will tell one person one thing to a very specific technical question
⏹️ ▶️ John and tell a different person a different thing. Like obviously Apple PR is not a single person, so it could just be two different people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like anyway, it seems like their story was not exactly straight, but on the sensors, I have heard that Apple is very
⏹️ ▶️ John adamant that they are exactly the same sensor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, well, whatever the case, they still have the optical disadvantages, where it’s a much smaller aperture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the lack of image stabilization.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the image stabilization is the obvious one. I mean, you can, that one, like Apple confirms obviously, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John look at it in Apple’s little pictures. For the fusion thing, last show we were talking about whether
⏹️ ▶️ John the zooming was blending the two picture. Now it turns out everything is blending the
⏹️ ▶️ John two pictures. Now forget about the zooming. Just in normal operation, everything’s blending. And like you said, we’ll put the link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John to the AV Foundation documentation for using the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera in fused mode and how you lose all this control or whatever. What’s interesting to me is if I have one of these, one of the first things
⏹️ ▶️ John I would do is put my finger over one of the cameras and take a bunch of pictures just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey try to confuse the, like that or at least
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like a color filter or something
⏹️ ▶️ John right something that they hinted at in the thing like oh this whatever their image processor with billions of calculations on every
⏹️ ▶️ John single you know whatever yeah because that’s it is doing a fairly complicated task of
⏹️ ▶️ John what i assume is trying to see if there is anything worthwhile to combine from
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the potentially blurrier differently zoomed in image from the other camera to
⏹️ ▶️ John you know to put together to make a bigger better picture. And so that algorithm has to be smart enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John like not make your pictures worse if it still happens that it’s just below the light threshold of the the
⏹️ ▶️ John good camera you know or the the wide angle camera it can get enough light but the zoomed in one
⏹️ ▶️ John is all like noisy and gross. I hope it will be smart enough not to make your what would be a perfectly good one camera
⏹️ ▶️ John picture worse by trying to blend it. Same thing if I cover up my one of the cameras with my finger
⏹️ ▶️ John I would hope it would be smart enough to say oh well there’s no useful data and that other thing so don’t combine
⏹️ ▶️ John it and have it look like the same. I guess if you were a developer and you have control with these apis to say
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to either use this camera alone or this camera alone or do the fusion that would be fun to like you
⏹️ ▶️ John know do a series of three pictures with your finger over the thing. Obviously the picture of the just your finger is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John all just you know black or pink or whatever color it happens to be depending on the lighting conditions of you know
⏹️ ▶️ John shining through your translucent skin and then the other one would be clear and then the the fusion
⏹️ ▶️ John picture, would it be the same as the single camera picture that had a clear shot
⏹️ ▶️ John or would it be like worse? I don’t know. Anyway, this is all going on behind the scenes. It’s all supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to be entirely transparent. I understand why Apple doesn’t care to explain technical details. If it just works, it just
⏹️ ▶️ John works, and that’s great. But I am very curious about exactly what they’re doing under the covers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you said, Marco, is it going to make your pictures better than a noticeable way?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or will you just never know that it’s happening and you also have to trust that things would be worse if it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John combining all these pixels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Ben McCarthy has an iPhone app called Obscura and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so he knows the programmatic interfaces to the cameras really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. And he had confirmed, and I just wanted to call this out, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get manual exposure in focus, and this is what you were alluding to earlier, Marco, on the 7 Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you cannot use the fused camera mode, you have to say either I want the telephoto or the wide one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we’ll put a link in the show notes to that. The depth mapping,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey BuzzFeed says, because both cameras in the 7 Plus can be run simultaneously, it can capture nine layers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of depth from foreground to background. I’ve also seen, and I don’t have a link handy, but I’ve seen rumors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there is an IR sensor or something like that sitting in between the two lenses. Did you guys see that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I took that out of the notes because I, someone was just saying because looking at the parts, there’s like a hole in the
⏹️ ▶️ John middle, but I don’t know if that’s for an IR. Like, that’s the question. Where does it get the
⏹️ ▶️ John depth map from? Last show I said these cameras are really close to each other, so you can get depth from two cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John that are separated from each other. The more they’re separated, the easier it is to get depth information out. You could also get it
⏹️ ▶️ John with an IR spray or something, but I have a feeling if that’s what was going on, we would know
⏹️ ▶️ John about it by now. Anyway, another one of the mysteries of Apple’s magical hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John How are they getting the depth information? But the nine layers says they’re not getting that much depth information.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nine layers is pretty granular for an entire scene. I think like the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s it, 360 had the first, uh, what the hell was that thing called? Boy, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John bad that I can’t even remember the name of it. You know what I’m talking about, right? You stand in front of the Xbox and you wave your arms around. The Kinect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kinect, there we go. But yes, the first one of those had fairly primitive depth mapping to figure out where
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody was in the room, but it was way more than nine layers. So the camera, this, and
⏹️ ▶️ John these layers are going to be used for the, the, the fake depth of field effect that, uh, as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m aware, no one has actually tried yet, right? Even reviewers don’t have this yet because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco later this year. Yeah. So we just
⏹️ ▶️ John still don’t know how that works, but that’s what the depth is for. Um, and you know, and nine layers
⏹️ ▶️ John is from this Buzzfeed article I assume was confirmed from Apple. don’t expect miracles in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John a mapping of what’s near and what’s far.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and you can kind of see that in their demo photos that show off the the focay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effect that like you can tell it the the edge detection of the subject
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of crude and it’s like things are blurred that shouldn’t necessarily be blurred
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like depth wise so that’s what we’re seeing there is probably just the effect of the of the death
⏹️ ▶️ Marco map being fairly imprecise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Dan Hickson has written about RAW,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he has pointed out to us that RAW is not a new feature of the iPhone 7, but a new feature of iOS 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that works with any iPhones that have 12 megapixel cameras. So I believe that’s just 6S and 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right, yes, 6S and forward. Although I think also the SE.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, I think you are right, actually. That’s a very good point. consider that. He says he’s working on a raw camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app for iOS 10 and here’s why. He and his partner are professional photographers. The main reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we want raw on our phones is because Apple’s noise reduction algorithm is too aggressive. It’s optimized for iPhone screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and looks good there, but if you zoom in on a photo that you took recently, the edges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are still milky and yucky. I even have a friend who is also a pro photographer who has begun stockpiling iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5s’s because the noise reduction is less aggressive there. And I feel like I’ve also seen previously mentioned Ben McCarthy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say some of the same things that the noise reduction is really aggressive on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the on the Apple side of things and so if you take the raw image
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then you can apply whatever noise reduction you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Linode, Fracture, and Igloo, and we will see See you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Auntie Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, technical podcasting is so long.
Post-show: iPhone ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should perhaps talk about the ordering process and what we ended up doing. It sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like… So, what did you order, Marco? I thought you were ordering a Plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I did order a Plus, but I decided at the very last minute to go for Jet Black because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted the grip. I was kind of on the fence between regular black and Jet Black. And on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Plus, I really wanted extra grip because I really wanted to use it caseless and because just because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so big. And as I mentioned, I had been using a Plus for the last week or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, just to kind of as a sanity check, to make sure, do I really want a phone this big?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the problem is that minute one, the earliest, and the earliest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ship date anybody got on a Jet Black Plus was September 26th.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the time my order went through, mine, which had been quoted at that time, was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved up to October 4th through 10th. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, I mean, that’s granted that’s only like three weeks away or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I really want this phone now and I really have reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it now. Like for instance, Overcast has a prominent feature that depends on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware of the phone’s built in speaker and profiling it to minimize distortion during voice boost.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really would like the new phone so I can profile the speaker and I can get this feature throughout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the door so that all the people who get these phones can have overcast sound good and correct out of their speakers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus, I just want the phone. You know, I’m a nerd, I’m impatient. I wanna talk about it on the show. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for the various minor business purposes. So yeah, to wait till early to mid-October
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of would suck. So in the meantime, I started thinking, you know, what else could I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe could I, should I just go into the store and try to get a reservation and everything and try to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one in the meantime and then whichever one comes first, just keep that one and cancel the other order.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the problem is I got all this crap with AT&T where basically Apple is not very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happy to sell you T-Mobile unlocked ones in very much quantity because most of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are probably being resold on the gray market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really? Yeah, oh yeah. The T-Mobile stock went out way earlier. The T-Mobile ship dates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went out way further ahead than everyone else’s, way faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I see what you’re saying, okay. A little secret between us and the listeners, which we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to tell anyone, is that I might have ordered a second phone for somebody else that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lives in the house that may not know this yet. Declan? And that one, yeah, totally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that one I ordered is T-Mobile because on the off chance that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get murdered for spending a lot of money on this phone that wasn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asked for, then it would be a very easy return. You know, it wouldn’t be set up against her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or his, but her phone number. And so I just got a completely vanilla T-Mobile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone. And I don’t remember what the ship date was. To your point, it was out a ways, but I did this like hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after waking up last Friday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So… Well, also, if it wasn’t a plus, then the dates were a lot closer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is not a plus. And I bring all this up just to say that for one phone, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was, as far as Apple is concerned, like a complete rando. for one T-Mobile phone, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t blink an eye and it was super easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s good, yeah. Anyway, so I was living with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus all weekend and I came to the conclusion that I can have a phone that big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s really compelling for all the other reasons, I can totally live with the Plus size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. So when I came home, I lived with it for a little bit longer and then I switched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this morning back to my 6S just to kind of have the other side then. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God, I love the 6S so much more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same feeling that people get when they switch to the SE after using the 6 for a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re like, oh my God, I can reach everything and it fits in all my pockets and it’s so small and light. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feeling I got switching from the Plus to the 6S. Like, it was such a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. And the Plus, like, yes, the screen is way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and way nicer. The cameras, even though the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco telephoto camera is not as optically high specced as the other one, I would still love to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dual cameras and would gladly pay $100 extra if they could be in the same size body as the regular success. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life is indeed better, again not as much if you’re using the screen, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed noticeably better. But there are still some things about it that annoy me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still hate that springboard rotates. I still hate that apps have that weird half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad view when you accidentally rotate them, to the point where I typically have to keep the phone with rotation lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, which I never have to do on my 6S, but on the Plus, I really just have to keep the rotation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lock on just to tolerate all the various weird stuff that goes on. It is really substantially larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and noticeably heavier, to the point where it’s less comfortable to use while reading in bed while holding it up above me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it does not fit in very many pockets very easily. And also, yeah, the battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much longer, but when you do wanna charge it up, it charges a lot more slowly, because it’s a bigger battery and charges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the same milliamp hour rate. So it charges more slowly. The battery case not available for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, it’s really big. So I can totally do that. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next year, it’s gonna be a lot smaller in all likelihood. If all these rumors are true, then the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus size screen will be available on a much smaller phone body next year. and we can already look and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see like what Samsung and everyone else does with like getting rid of bezels and maybe slightly curving the screen around and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this other crap. You can get a big screen in a small phone body and that’s probably what Apple’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the next iPhone for next year with this big redesign with no bezels. And one more year would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also give it a chance to maybe improve that telephoto camera a little bit and for us to hear more from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual users and actual analysis and like deep testing to see like how good is that second
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera in practice? How useful is it really? Is there anything weird about the dual camera setup?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, as I said, any weird artifacts with the picture being combined and everything? We will know all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that in a year. And in a year, I’ll be able to get all the benefits of the Plus phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all likelihood, in a much smaller physical shape and size. So I think I’m just gonna wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco till then. Always a Plus maid, never a Plus. Yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m gonna go with the regular size, size the 4.7 inch 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year. And also the difference between the 7 and the 7 Plus like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various specs and everything is a lot closer than it used to be like between the 6 and the 6 Plus. The battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is way closer. It’s very similar now actually. I mean the Plus is still a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if the screen is off as I said but like for screen on use the battery life is actually very close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the battery got a lot bigger in the 7 and and only a little bit bigger in the 7 Plus. Oh, and also the 7 camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got the optical image stabilization, so that now the wide-angle camera is identical between the two, which it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t before. So combined with little annoyances about the Plus, like the weird iPad half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modes and just the large physical size, I’m just a lot happier with the regular 6S size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now. And so again, next year, when they change the sizes, maybe I will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less happy with it and I will go up again, back to the Plus there, or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will go down and use like, you know, basically like, so, you know, my theory is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the, the S E name will make a lot more sense in the future because the S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco E is probably a temporary model inserted as a bridge until we can get the smaller iPhone bodies that were supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be out maybe a year ago. Um, so that’s basically my theory on the S E there in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four seconds. Uh, but basically, uh, the, the next 4.7 inch phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be close enough in dimensions to the SE that they don’t need it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, that’s my theory, that the SE will never be updated and it was just a bridge model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get them until next year when the 4.7 is small enough that the SE customers will tolerate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so the answer basically is right now I have nothing ordered because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t, once I cancelled my 6 Plus that was going to ship in October
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could basically reuse the AT&T verification on a different phone. But then that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stopped working. And for the last few days, I’ve tried here and there placing orders, and I’ve gotten the Apple thing saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s a reservation. We couldn’t contact the carrier system, but here’s a reservation for you. And then I’d go follow through. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it says, you know what? Never mind. We actually couldn’t do it again. So I keep going through all these stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco processes, and I still can’t get an order in. So I have like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last-minute order for a T-Mobile one that’s going to arrive in early October also. You’re so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desperate to have this phone. Well, it’s the same phone. T-Mobile, it’s the same phone as AT&T, like, and it’s… I’m buying a full
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I’m just saying, like, you need to have it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you were… If you had anything in front of you, if the world was your oyster, you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a 128 7 Jet Black, is that correct? That’s right. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, what about your household? Last I heard, you were going to wait on yourself because you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to see both in hand before made a decision. But what about Tina? Did she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order one? Was she planning to?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, she’s got a 6S+. It’s not her year. I mean, I’m assuming she’s going to get a watch, but she’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John ready to pick that out yet. So yeah, no hurry. I didn’t order anything. Like I’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John wander into a store at some point and take a look at them. I need to see them in person first and then decide what I’m going to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just going to wait. And whatever shortage and shipping dates and other weird things are going
⏹️ ▶️ John on, I’ll wait until that’s all over and I don’t have to deal with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. I ordered myself a matte black 7128.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not a member of the Plus Club. I was flirting with it real hard for a little while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but when I saw the details about the camera, I felt like, you know what, there’s nothing that’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enticing me about Plus Club except battery, but like Marco was just explaining, the battery’s gotten a lot better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the 7 supposedly anyway. So it is apparently sitting in Louisville, Kentucky as we speak,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be delivered Friday and I am very stoked. And then if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secretly ordered a phone for Aaron, which I totally did not do, it would be a 7-128 in Rosegold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s delivered in like mid-October or something like that, hypothetically.
Post-show: Reduce Lasers
⏹️ ▶️ John Before we end, I just want to take one more run at justifying what I hope is
⏹️ ▶️ John the first software update to iOS 10 to allow me to send people
⏹️ ▶️ John lasers with reduced motion on. Right? Because,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, as we discussed last time, it’s baffling to people that those two things are connected in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You know, why is that baffling? I don’t get why that’s baffling.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because all the people that I happen to know who have reduced motion on have it merely as an aesthetic preference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? they’re not doing it because they experience huge amounts of vertigo, just
⏹️ ▶️ John they just like it a little bit better. Like me. That’s why I have it. Like I experience a little tiny bit of vertigo but
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough that I would be about it. I just like it better the other way. So it is it’s an it’s a preference it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a preference in the literal sense like you just like it better. You don’t need it but you just like it. And I like it so
⏹️ ▶️ John much I don’t want to go back to the other way. Now I totally understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John people who need the motion to be reduced because they it really affects their ability to use their phone
⏹️ ▶️ John also don’t want to see lasers. Good. All thumbs up. But there I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John there have to be people out there like me who have reduced motion on just because they feel like it
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s a pretty strong preference but they also want to send people lasers so all you need to do is have a separate
⏹️ ▶️ John preference in messages that you know off by default that says even when reduced
⏹️ ▶️ John motion is off give me lasers that’s it it’s one little toggle throw that in there
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have yet to meet a person who was able to figure out on their own without
⏹️ ▶️ John you know like scratching their head and just randomly guessing that reduced motion is the reason they can’t send people lasers
⏹️ ▶️ John and then to agree that that’s a thing that oh okay well I that’s you know now
⏹️ ▶️ John that I understand it should just be that way because people just want it the way they want it they want reduced motion on they want to send lasers right
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to allow that they just have to I this cannot stand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this is going to happen personally.
⏹️ ▶️ John stand. You can’t leave it like this. People want to. Why? You know how many times I’ve been to the reduced motion
⏹️ ▶️ John setting, sending people lasers? I need to send lasers. Okay. It needs to be done. And yet
⏹️ ▶️ John I got to go back to the setting app. Like I’m working on like I leave it on the reduced motion toggle
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can turn it off, go back to the app, send my lasers. It’s just, it’s untenable. They can’t leave it like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I completely, I completely disagree with you. And it’s best summarized actually by the tipster in the chat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do not use accessibility features to tweak the phone problem solved. I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, no, no, no, no. So like, that’s not problem solve people. People want to do this. I understand why they’re there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not arguing that this should be like the default. Obviously, it should work this way. The defaults are correct. This is the way it should work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there are there are people who use we all know them who use accessibility features as
⏹️ ▶️ John aesthetic preferences. You can’t just deny those people exist. So you shouldn’t be using them that way. Look, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John there, They’re switches people can toggle and they’re the kind of switches that people can toggle like I’ve had to reduce motion
⏹️ ▶️ John on since iOS 7 That as far as I’m concerned that is the iPhone experience to me is with reduced motion
⏹️ ▶️ John turned on Most people who have reduced motion turned on purely for like reasons of personal preference
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s how they’ve been using phones for years to say that you have to choose between that and seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John confetti and balloons It’s just it’s just not I I don’t, I
⏹️ ▶️ John really think they’re going to change this because it just seems obvious to me that Apple has misestimated
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly how annoying it is not to be able to send lasers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am, first of all, deeply amused that you are this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fired up over something that is so kitschy and silly. But beyond that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand where you’re coming from, but I completely disagree. And again, I think that the fact that you happen to prefer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this aesthetically, well, noogies for you because that’s not the purpose of it. The purpose of it is to prevent
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t matter what the purpose is. It just matters how people use it. It doesn’t matter what the purpose is. It only matters how people
⏹️ ▶️ John use it. You can make things for whatever purpose you want. It just matters how… It’s like the force
⏹️ ▶️ John quit thing. It doesn’t matter what the purpose is, like if your app is frozen, use it. It only matters how people use it. And people use it to obsessively
⏹️ ▶️ John force quit all their apps to clear off their thing. You can design a feature with one intention, but when people
⏹️ ▶️ John use it, they’re showing you, Well, you may have designed it that way, but here’s how we’re using it. And you have to take that input
⏹️ ▶️ John back into the system and say, well, if people really don’t like a bunch of clutter on their app switchers, maybe we should give them a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to get rid of clutter or have an option that says never show more than three things in the app switcher, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s clear that people are really annoyed by seeing a little screens on the app switcher. And even though it’s supposed to be there
⏹️ ▶️ John to exit an app, the tongue, people use it for something different. So you have to reexamine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, maybe it’s only me and literally the five other people that I know that do this and the rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire world never runs with reduced motion on or they run with reduced motion on and once they found out they couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John send lasers they either didn’t care about the lasers or didn’t care about reduced motion anymore. But I find it hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to believe that there aren’t lots of people out there using accessibility features quote unquote for the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons who are annoyed now that they can’t use the new features and messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So really you just want to be able to tweak everything. So really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it comes back to what Marco said. This is not a million tweaks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not a like. back to Marco, suggesting you get an Android phone. I’m on him. I’m in the Marco campaign.
⏹️ ▶️ John look, I will, I would gladly trade, for example, the home button tweak, which I’m amazed exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m amazed that home button tweak exists because it’s totally like, look, with the raise to wake, you don’t need it anymore. So why would we ever
⏹️ ▶️ John give you an option to go back to the old way? But they did. You know why? It’s just one little switch. I will click trade that in a second for
⏹️ ▶️ John not having a crippled version of messages with reduced motion on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But so what I don’t understand, though, is I thought you were made physically ill by having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reduce motion off?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little bit of vertical but not much. Oh, see the truth comes out.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, I don’t want to turn the whole point is I don’t want to turn reduce motion back off. That’s why I’m not doing that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just want I’m not bothered at all. I don’t get any illness at all from balloons and confetti and lasers.
⏹️ ▶️ John See what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know, everyone has one of these things like, like, you know, I mentioned earlier my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my my annoyance with rotation lock on the 6+, I would love it if apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had individual rotation lock settings, it’s not gonna happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter used to have that, Twitter ever used to have that and they got rid of it in favor of the OS one, I remember those days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast has one too, but like, you know, there’s not gonna be like a system preference somewhere that lists all my apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, just like the cell data thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but that’s untenable, like this is an easy, obvious one, it’s one toggle switch, you know exactly where
⏹️ ▶️ John it would go, you’re done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what you’re saying basically is, You really want there to be no motion effects anywhere in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OS except this one app.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s still motion effects in tons of apps though. Like I am not, reduced motion does not, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you run with reduced motion on?
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so it does not remove all animations from the system, right? It reduces them. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. Plenty of apps have their own animations all over the place in them that are not affected at all by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but see, like, I get so many ridiculous feature requests for Overcast that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically are along the lines of, I like this one feature that you implemented here, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to have per podcast control over it, or per episode control over it. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is by far the most common format of feature request I get. The problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that every one of those things is different. And if I actually satisfied these requests in any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable way, I would just have a wall of settings and options all over every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. And it’s untenable. And so what you’re saying is you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of granularity for your little pet thing here, but everybody has one of those pet
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not a granularity thing. It’s about the disconnect between reduced
⏹️ ▶️ John motion and app features, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John ridiculous, because No, it isn’t, because reduced motion does not reduce motion in apps. Like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I have reduced motion on. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect to see. It does if they use the right APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey No, I mean like Right, it’s supposed to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Accessibility features are meant to be blunt instruments that are not meant for everyone to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them and they’re designed as they’re designed that way Too so like you know one of the accessibility features bold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text right because the text got so skinny in iOS 7 and stuff Turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you if you want bold text in all of your apps except one There’s no option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that like because that’s these are meant to be broad blunt instruments for people who need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them for accessibility purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are plenty of applications that ignore the bold text setting because they don’t use it the same thing reduce motion
⏹️ ▶️ John if you turn on reduce motion then play a game that’s filled with motion it’s not reducing motion for you there’s motion everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco well that’s true but
⏹️ ▶️ John reduce this is the only this is the only case in which reduce motion has made entire
⏹️ ▶️ John headline features of any app let alone an Apple app completely inaccessible like you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even have a choice to use them they’re not hidden they’re not locked, you just cannot use them. You can’t see them,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t even send them. Everything becomes sent with lasers in parentheses. Right? This is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s unprecedented. It’s unprecedented that a feature like this would total and like I said, everybody who has discovered
⏹️ ▶️ John this, you find out all the people who are using reduced motion, because the first time iOS, they upgrade to iOS 10, they want
⏹️ ▶️ John to send lasers, they can’t and they can’t figure it out. You know, many times I’ve seen the same conversation and different slack
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yeah, trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to send laser, I’m trying to send balloons that I can’t Oh, do you have reduced motion on? That’s what it is. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John those people are just stuck. It’s like, well, I guess I can’t have reduced motion anymore. I mean, think of it this way. What if
⏹️ ▶️ John you are made physically ill by the reduced motion effects, but lasers and balloons don’t bother you? What about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John No one cares about you anymore? Because those two things, well, I’m sorry. You know, like, I don’t think this is a question of granularity.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is a totally unprecedented linking of basically unrelated things for a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t reduce motion across the entire operating system, but just this one app, The messages team said, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what, balloons is too much. Confetti is too much. We’ve got to reduce it. Which again, I’m on board with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you have to recognize that there are people out there for whom the constant zooming in
⏹️ ▶️ John and out motion of transitioning between applications is bothersome, but lasers are not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard you say. So the name of the setting is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reduce motion. So use fewer balloons. But you want it for balloons
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and lasers that are like on the verge of a strobe light, but you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that to be okay. The whole point is-
⏹️ ▶️ John Not by default, not by default,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just an option.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And why should it be an option
⏹️ ▶️ John for this one application? Because this is the headline feature of iOS 10. The messages enhancements are a headline feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of iOS 10 that regular people want to use, they’re sure to be very popular. It’s the first thing everybody tries.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like some obscure corner of the OS where I’m like this one app that nobody ever uses.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, I think this is unprecedented. I think this absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John has to change in a future version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also would like to note that there is UI accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is reduced motion enabled, which is an official API that any developer worth their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey salt, which is really none of them, because I don’t know if I would bother with this, but anyway, any developer worth their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey salt would check and crank back on their own in-app animations if this is turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. So maybe nobody does this, but strictly speaking, it is the responsibility of Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me, of any other iOS developer to check this and crank down on animations if it is turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. So just because we’re maybe bad citizens of the platform, and I shouldn’t lump Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in with this, maybe you are using it, but if some, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there you go. I do use all the text features, dynamic text, buttons, I use all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, so if we’re bad citizens of the platform and you’ve, and you know, bank error in your favor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey win $200, well, good for you, But the fact of the matter is, reduced motion is supposed to reduce motion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s what it’s doing. It’s reducing the motion of balloons and lasers and strobe lights and things like that. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John reduce the motion of the messages sliding up when the things go by. This is like if you had a game where if you had reduced motion
⏹️ ▶️ John on, you could play the game, but you couldn’t fire the rocket launcher because the rocket launcher had too many flashing lights.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’d be trying to play the game and you can’t figure out why you can’t beat this boss. And you pick up the rocket launcher, but you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John fire it and you can’t figure it out. And you write to the developer and say, oh, if you have reduced motion on, you can’t fire the rocket launcher. This is,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that would be an obscure third-party game. That’s a bad decision by one obscure third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John game. This is a headlining feature, totally gone because you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to see Zoom animations when you go from a springboard into an application. It’s completely absurd.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how wrong you are aside, I cannot believe how much time and energy you’re putting into trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get these tacky, horrible effects. That’s the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I can’t believe you’re- This is like the worst part of
⏹️ ▶️ John iMessage. That’s what everybody does. Do you know someone who got iOS 10 didn’t immediately try to play with those effects.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s what everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. Oh, at work today, a friend at work was at my desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking to myself and a coworker, saying, why can’t I get lasers to work? And we couldn’t figure it out for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, are you on a six? So do I need to tap and hold? Are you on a 6S? Do I need to deep press? I found
⏹️ ▶️ John another person, another casual reduced motion user.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hold on, yes, it was another casual reduced motion user. However, the moment that I pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out it’s a choice between reduced motion or lasers, Immediately, reduced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey motion was canned, lasers it is, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John roll with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John These people have more drive for lasers. I am about 50-50. I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John turn reduced motion off, but I also want lasers, so I go back to system preferences, I turn reduced motion
⏹️ ▶️ John off, I send the lasers, and then I turn it back on. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannot believe you are that dedicated to frickin’
⏹️ ▶️ John I agree it’s ludicrous, and there should be a preference for it. And I can understand, I’m not saying like, oh, Apple should have known, because
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they just don’t know how many people are using reduced motion for like, you know, who
⏹️ ▶️ John put it this way, who are bothered by the motion that reduce motion stops but are not bothered by lasers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And maybe they just didn’t know how many people do that. And the ATP tip to keep saying accessibility as an accessibility is
⏹️ ▶️ John a different class of people. Accessibility is for everybody. Every single human being is going to need eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John one or more accessibility features. There’s not a separate class. Well, normal people and the accessibility people,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody needs accessibility features, every single person, So they are not separate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the accessibility options in iOS are designed for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-mainstream use. So they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John put- No, it’s not non-mainstream. It is 100% mainstream. There is no distinction between normals and people
⏹️ ▶️ John who need accessibility features. If you would like the accessibility feature because it makes the experience of using
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone easier or more pleasant for you, then that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if Apple actually wanted this to be like a really good setting that had granularity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and features to satisfy everybody, they wouldn’t bury it in accessibility, they would make it a regular setting.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the headline feature of their new operating system. This is not an obscure tweak or setting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact that it is totally absent is different from I Wish It Behaved in a little bit different a way. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not I want per podcast setting for every single thing. This is not I want per conversation red receipts, which by the
⏹️ ▶️ John way, they have. This is not that. This is those lasers that you keep seeing. Have
⏹️ ▶️ John fun banging your head against your phone trying to figure out how to send them. You can’t, and guess what? It’s because of that thing, Because you didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to see Zoom animations when you go between apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who is sending you all these lasers? I haven’t gotten any lasers. What if you’re talking to Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve sent you like one. You
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of drawings and little heart things and everybody’s playing with it. Everyone wants to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Dude, I have not sent you any of that stuff. I can’t even find… Oh, I haven’t sent John that stuff. I was sending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco stickers. Where are the lasers? So, alright, we’ll send you a laser. And by the way, I am as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deeply pissed off as you are about this, which is preposterous I maintain. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as deeply pissed off if not more so that they removed the sweet techno beats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From the lasers sound effect and now just sounds like garbage so Marco I will send you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lasers by typing the word garbage Deep pressing on the up of the blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up arrow hitting the segmented control swiping over and then hitting the blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button So I have just sent you lasers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my god look at all that motion. It’s not being reduced at all Nope,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a bit. So if you have your phone in silent Casey How would you feel if you had your phone in silent mode if you couldn’t send lasers
⏹️ ▶️ John now? Like you couldn’t you no longer had access to any bubble effects or any screen effects.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No That is not an analogous argument
⏹️ ▶️ John disappears because some aspect of it is potentially harmful You said you didn’t want any noise and noise comes with the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thing. So sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey analogous and it out Analogous argument would be you know, John I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would really love to be able to send lasers and even if the phone is silenced It should play the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio for the lasers.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, no, no, because reduce motion is not like the mute switch again There’s motion all over the place and reduce
⏹️ ▶️ John motion on even in apps that honor it is impossible to eliminate motion Like I said when you send a message the bubbles
⏹️ ▶️ John slide upwards that’s motion My
⏹️ ▶️ John goodness, I can’t even believe I can’t even believe you two are disagreeing that because a Apple needs to change this to be I Think they will
⏹️ ▶️ John change it because it’s so easy to change and it’s so obvious And I think they just are did not correctly estimate
⏹️ ▶️ John how many people are casual reduced motion users who want lasers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at all these balloons and confetti. I’m having all this fun over here with all this motion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will bet you one American dollar that this that you’re that you’re delightful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setting will never exist ever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I will take that bet. I will take that one dollar bet. And my time frame for that bet is before I was 11.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s all I’m saying. I don’t know what point release
⏹️ ▶️ John be 10.0 point 2.3 point four. I don’t know what numbers they got to but that is a $1
⏹️ ▶️ John bet that I will take.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will absolutely agree to this $1 bet. Oh my god, this is ridiculous. Will you give me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey odds on that? No, I will not. It’s 10,000. It’s 10,000 to
⏹️ ▶️ John one in my favor right because Apple not doing something is always the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just turn off reduce motion. You don’t need it. Yes, seriously. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried, I can’t take it, I can’t take it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just close your eyes when you hit the home
⏹️ ▶️ John button. No, I can’t take it aesthetically. Like, I believe I can.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is. That’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t need it for an accessibility reason, you just have a preference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, it does, it’s borderline. Because like, I do
⏹️ ▶️ John feel a tiny, tiny little bit of vertical but I would get over it. Like, it’s not debilitating. When was the last time you
⏹️ ▶️ John used it? Like, I don’t know, like 15 minutes ago. Like, I keep going back to the reduced motion Because again, when you
⏹️ ▶️ John send lasers, it’s pain to go back and forth, so I leave it, and then I realize that it’s still on, I go,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, then I turn it back off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For people who are so sensitive that they would need that for the actual accessibility purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s a reasonable default to disable as many full-screen animations as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, no, it’s totally a reasonable default. Totally a reasonable default. But I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you did the Venn diagram of people who actually need that feature versus people who are also
⏹️ ▶️ John bothered by lasers, it’s not 100% overlap. That’s why the non-overlapping region is the place for the
⏹️ ▶️ John second setting. And again, I will gladly sacrifice the home button setting if you want to keep your number of toggle switches
⏹️ ▶️ John to a constant level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, there’s fireworks. Yeah, look at that. This is the most preposterous argument I think I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard you make, John Syracuse. This is truly ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John By the way, when a reduced motion is on, you can send the sparkly little dewdrop message thingies. No problem with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s exactly the same motion as fireworks. Speaking of fireworks, sparkly little lines that when you do the tap on the little black
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and makes a little bloop. That’s basically a firework. That’s apparently fine with reduced motion on, no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t handle this, oh my God. I literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot even. I’m just, I’m worn out from the ridiculousness of this. How many windows do you have open right now, John? I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need something else, I mean just.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t, most of the reason I’m so angry is I can’t believe that you two are both against me on this.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, I would say odds of one, fine, but both of you it’s just it’s ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know what it is? I have I have had to support an app that sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t look quite right or didn’t work quite right with some of these obscure accessibility options turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on and then people people just turn them on and then forget that they’re on and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they send in supporting most saying hey there’s a visual bug in your rendering here’s a screenshot and they blame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me and the reason it looks that way is because of an accessibility setting they set. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as As a developer, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who set these settings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without knowing even what they are just as like little preferences that like who don’t need them for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual accessibility purpose, because those people tend not to forget why they set them, then email me saying, Hey, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a problem in your app, because I set the setting that I forgot about that that I’m not really using for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its purpose. So I do have a hard time feeling bad for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not using you keep getting back to the not using for purpose. I don’t think that’s a valid anything like not using
⏹️ ▶️ John for purpose. Look, it’s a setting. If people want to use it, they want to use it. Say, oh, well, it doesn’t count because you’re not using it
⏹️ ▶️ John for its intended purpose. Look, they’re using the setting. Anybody can change the switch on the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, and again, I think from a UI wise, people
⏹️ ▶️ John not being able to figure out why they can’t send lasers is just a plain UI problem. Forget about whether you think it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John they should have something in the UI that says, I see that you’re trying to hold down on this little up arrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, like they have a little cap locks indicator. Like, it’s the user’s fault. They have cap locks on, they don’t realize they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John mistyping their password, the cap lock is on. You put a visual indicator, it’s not even that obvious, but you put something on the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John to let them know. Rather than just leaving them there, stranded, holding their thumb down on a little upward-facing arrow on
⏹️ ▶️ John messages and not understanding why they can’t send stuff. Like, that’s a UI issue, independent of what you think, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they think it should be supported. There should be something in the UI to tell people, you may not realize this, but the reason you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do this thing, we know you’re trying to do it, and we know exactly why you can’t do it, and it’s totally not obvious,
⏹️ ▶️ John And no one will ever think of that setting that they did they change in ios 700 and thought about since so That is a separate thing entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John and I hope both of you can agree That interface needs to be there because I think you’ve both dealt with people who have not been able
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure out why they can’t send lasers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I I think it should
⏹️ ▶️ John be you won’t even agree on that You’re sitting you both of you won’t agree on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It should be more obvious What the cause of not being able to send?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Thank you. Thank you for
⏹️ ▶️ John the voice of reason finally marco still won’t agree on it But you will
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that it should be more obvious. We didn’t even give him a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We didn’t even give him a chance So he
⏹️ ▶️ John just sighed at me and he is angry people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who turn on settings then forget about it in his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sighing because like, yes, I think that is bad you I had to just silently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fail and not tell you why. However, I disagree with your entire premise of why this matters as much as it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but that’s not what I was asking about. I was asking about the narrow case of you agree that it should be because again, that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a UI problem. People are confused by an interface. People are trying to accomplish a task. They know this task is possible
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’ve seen it demonstrate they’re trying to accomplish it and they can’t figure out why they can’t. And there is a reason and you can decide whether
⏹️ ▶️ John this reason is a good or bad, but a good UI will let those people know what the reason is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, again, I concur that the failure is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too hidden. I think, you know, let’s take a success. If you mash down hard on that send button,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe the first time or perhaps every time it says, well, you know, this is where you would normally be able to do things, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because you’re, you’re just ridiculous and you’re John Syracuse, so we’re not going to let you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but here’s where you would need to go to fix it. That I concur, but I still find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your entire argument about a sub toggle or what have you to be preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, yes, yes. I see. I know you you’ll be $1 poorer later. You’ll see. Okay. Yeah. We’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Oh my God. The sad thing is this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entire argument has to go on the show because it is so ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now we’re going, now we have a long show again, despite our every effort to keep it short. And we actually did a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably okay job. And here it is two and a half hours later. Worth it.