239: Set This Money on Fire
14 Sep 2017In-depth analysis of the iPhone X event.
Episode Description:
- Apple Special Event, September 2017
- Dan Frommer's photo essay
- Today at Apple
- Apple Watch intro video
- Featuring Kyles the Gray!
- Louis CK: Everything is Amazing & Nobody is Happy
- Overcast and Apple Watch offline playback
- Watch Dots
- Qi charging standard
- ATP #172: iPhone X
- Five Years of OS X
- iPhone X in the HIG
- Disappearing scroll thumb
- Jokey notch scrolling
- Rolodex
- Light L16 camera
- Back to Work #341: Rich Boy Phone
- iPhone Folio Case Inside
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Marco figures out how to buy a bike
- Penny-farthing
- Fuse 6Fattie/29
- Orbea Loki 27+ H10
- Special thanks to:
- Budnitz Bicycles
- Albert's Westwood Cycle, an excellent bike shop in New Jersey that's worth the drive
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Backblaze: Online backup for $5/month. Native. Unlimited. Unthrottled. Uncomplicated.
- AfterShokz: Headphones powered by bone-conduction technology.
Chapters
- Steve Jobs Theater
- Apple Park
- Retail update
- Sponsor: AfterShokz
- Health update
- Apple Watch Series 3
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- Apple TV 4K
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- iPhone 8
- iPhone X
- Ordering plans
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Bike conclusion
Steve Jobs Theater
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, we shouldn’t be on this tangent. We got a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things to talk about. We can say that about almost every topic, almost every week.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we mean it this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so this week was our first real introduction to Apple Park and the Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jobs Theater at Apple Park, which we’ve all seen many, many, many pictures, most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of which are beautiful of the Steve Jobs Theater and of Apple Park. I don’t have the link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handy, but, Dan, is it from Fromer or Fromer? I always get it wrong. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fromer. There you go. Well, Dan, we apologize. But anyway, we will try to find wherever the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link was that flew by earlier today wherein he had like a little photo essay of his day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the Steve Jobs Theater, and the pictures are beautiful and really well done, and so you can check
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that out. But it was a neat event.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was interesting that we knew a lot. We didn’t know some things, and that’s cool too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I guess, do we want to start with just a kind of opening remark, or do we want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just dive right in? Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John Cynova We’re going chronological, like we always do. What’s the first thing that it did? The Steve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Jobs Tribute. Steven Paulus The Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Tribute, yeah. Honestly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought it was excellent. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to say something. If they’re dedicating the theater to him and naming it after him, they had to say something, and I think they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a remarkably good job of it. Tim delivered it really well. It was very well designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and written. It was really great to hear a recording of Steve saying some stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I did not recognize that quote. And I’ve heard from other other podcasters didn’t seem to know where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came from either. That was new to me. I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I would have picked a different quote.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco He said so many things. Anyway, yeah, no, I remember. I know it’s supposed to be talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about how much we love Steve Jobs and miss him, but that particular quote
⏹️ ▶️ John reminds me of some of the some of the worst aspects
⏹️ ▶️ John of Steve Jobs because it was about like how some people express their uh
⏹️ ▶️ John you know their love for humanity by making great things for people, tinge with a little bit like
⏹️ ▶️ John I may not do nice things but I make really cool hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like as a He said that before of like, you know, when people complained to him about, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things that are not nice or not giving you charity or whatever. He’s like, my time is I have to do more good for the world
⏹️ ▶️ John by making an awesome phone, which is possibly true, right? But also
⏹️ ▶️ John a nice way for him to excuse himself from doing nice things. And I was reminded of that
⏹️ ▶️ John aspect by that quote. So I was like, please pick a different one. He’s got so many good quotes. pick the one that has
⏹️ ▶️ John a tiny touch of sort of rationalization baked
⏹️ ▶️ John right into it. But it’s clear that most important thing was not the quote or the
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures or anything like that. It was that it’s clear that Tim still does miss him and had real emotion.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the reason that segment took longer than you would think is because he paused a lot between talking and I don’t think that’s an act.
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody really does miss Steve Jobs, including Tim, probably every time he gets up on that
⏹️ ▶️ John stage and thinks, boy, Steve would do this better than
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey me, which is true. Oh, poor Tim.
⏹️ ▶️ John He does fine, but I’m just saying, just like he said, Steve loved days like today. And he would have loved
⏹️ ▶️ John to announce this new phone and everything, right? And just, it’s the worst time to think about it, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what he lived for, all the hard work and all the yelling at people and driving everyone to be their best
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, to get to go up there and to announce it. He loved that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John them having to talk about like, here we are in this theater, you know that he would have loved the theater, he would have loved to announce these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but instead it’s us and we’ll do the best we can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you were not holding back tears during that segment, you’re not wired up right. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly moving and very, very well done and very fitting to what they were doing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to the time and everything. I do agree with what Jason Snell said on Upgrade this week, which he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying this is probably the last we’re going to hear about Steve from Apple for a long time. And I think that’s probably right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has he’s been gone for a very long time. This was a very fitting time to pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him tribute in this way, but I wouldn’t expect them to make a regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco habit of it, even when doing events in this theater. But it was a really, really nice thing, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad they did it, and I’m glad they did it the way they
⏹️ ▶️ John did it. Yeah, and I think the important point, well, first of all, there never is an occasion to talk about Steve Jobs. Like, they can make
⏹️ ▶️ John one every single time they do anything they could, but they don’t, right, to their credit. this the
⏹️ ▶️ John intro part part that uh i thought was fitting was the explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John of you know not explaining why they’re talking about him now because obviously the theater is dedicated tim’s got his name on it
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s the time to do it right but also that enough time has passed that there
⏹️ ▶️ John that apple and we all in the audience like can have some more perspective on it right so it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as fresh as it was i remember you had a good tweet mark i think what Tim said on stage was that we can,
⏹️ ▶️ John what was it, look back not with sadness but with whatever, what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco remember the quote?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like celebration or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you tweeted, I’m still sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I am still sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just here, we are still sad, but like the idea is that a lot of time has passed and now hopefully we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John have some more perspective and this is a good time to be able to at least try to shift a little bit from just like it
⏹️ ▶️ John being completely raw and just being, just you know, forgetting and then remembering, oh, that’s right, he’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s never gonna do that thing that he does again. To shifting towards hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John fonder memories of just like, it happened long enough ago that it is not, you know, that it’s scabbed
⏹️ ▶️ John over a little bit and then we can look back, you know, and think that, you know, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I think that was a, it’s not like putting a cap on it to say we’re never gonna talk or think
⏹️ ▶️ John about him again, but to say this is a milestone, right? Especially since the whole Apple Park thing as
⏹️ ▶️ John they noted was one of the last big projects he undertook. He didn’t get to
⏹️ ▶️ John see completed but he definitely knew, you know, had a vision for how it was supposed to go. So it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John as with most things Apple, it was very tasteful. Well, I’m gonna say as with most things Apple. As we expect
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple but as occasionally they don’t live up to, it was very tasteful. If you think of the intro videos
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve had at other times, sometimes they’re a little bit goofy, sometimes they miss the mark, sometimes they hit.
⏹️ ▶️ John The bad ones I think we just tend to forget, but if we search our memories, we can remember a lot of opening
⏹️ ▶️ John videos that are like, I roll, whatever, get us the announcements. This was tastefully
⏹️ ▶️ John done and it was nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was the right amount of time. It was the right timing and the right amount of time. It was long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that it was taken seriously. I don’t remember hearing it, but I saw widely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reported that they told the people in the audience like, hey, shut off your laptops and pay attention for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a minute, would you please? I don’t know how they phrased it, but that was basically the message. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I watched bits and pieces of the keynote again over the over the last 24 hours. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you look, there were a couple of people with like phones or laptops open. But generally speaking, that that theater was completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dark for that entire segment. And I thought that that was, you know, tasteful, tastefully done. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m glad that the press actually listened. Because, you know, if we remember the turn off your Wi Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John from years ago, jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John would have yelled at them and said, he said, close your laptops. It’s going to ruin the effect of the just welcome to the Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John theater on a black background. Don’t you understand? Look at the black levels on this projector. It’s a completely dark room
⏹️ ▶️ John and white text and the background totally blends in. but we can’t see it because you have your stupid laptops open.
Apple Park
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so after that so they moved on to the Apple Park intro video a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Park looks like an amazing building and an amazing campus and an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place to be However, there’s kind of this this reality of it, which is like them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco showing off like here’s this amazing building we’ve made For ourselves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re never going to see yeah, look at us looking how smart we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a visitor center for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a visitor center That’s not really the main building or that’s not really what you want to see you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be allowed at near like the cool Thing you’re not gonna be in the in the big ring You’re not gonna be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco courtyard of the middle of the big ring Only the press will ever see the Steve Jobs theater probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s just like I don’t know it’s it has this kind of It’s like look at this cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. We made you can’t have it like I I would love to see Apple Park
⏹️ ▶️ John And you could go there and walk around I mean, you can’t go into people’s office pass where you have to badge through
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, but I’m sure you could walk into the middle of the thing and go through the Cafe max or whatever. They’re gonna call it in this place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t Yeah, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that’s the case
⏹️ ▶️ John Google where you have to print out yourself a little badge. You don’t have to do that at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure we needed badges. I’m trying to remember when we went back or when we went there I think you need stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, that’s what I meant. But yeah, I think without an escort, you don’t see squat, like you certainly didn’t see squat
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you just wanna go through the food place into the middle of the ring where the trees are, I think you can pull that off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would love that, but even that is nearly impossible for anybody to actually do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just get a friend at Apple, dude. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh yes, because everyone has friends at Apple. All of
⏹️ ▶️ John us have friends at Apple on this show. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three of us do, but. I visited, so I visited Infinite Loop, I think about four or five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times now. I’ve been actually brought through and gone to Cafe Max one time. That’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I’ve actually gone like into the building and not even really into the I just walked through the building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get to the food court like one time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I mean, Apple Park thing like I remain unconvinced
⏹️ ▶️ John by the utility of Apple Park. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John unquestionably a beautiful place. The buildings are beautiful as sort of works
⏹️ ▶️ John of art. The views from and of the buildings are beautiful. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if the buildings
⏹️ ▶️ John are good places to do the things they’re designed for you to do. Is it a good place to work? Is it a good place to commute to?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it a good place to, I mean, you can ask the press, was it a good place to have a press event? It seems like mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John pulled that off. Yeah. Although, you know, it’s purpose-built
⏹️ ▶️ John for that I would hope so like but there’s the bar is low there because if you try to do it in
⏹️ ▶️ John like an actual old theater that’s not designed to have a huge amount of press in it you know you
⏹️ ▶️ John fill theaters with an audience and a small amount of press you don’t fill fill an actual theater like the Billy
⏹️ ▶️ John Graham theater with you know giant amounts of press that
⏹️ ▶️ John every single person in the audience is there because they’re reporting on something so hopefully this fulfills that purpose but even there like
⏹️ ▶️ John the the top part of this building as amazing as it is to see a giant glass cylinder with a big hat on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how is that big thing holding up there? Is it going to
⏹️ ▶️ John collapse and kill us? How do they get the wires up to the lights? Oh, it must be these little skinny, it’s like a magic trick,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Little spinning elevator and the cool stairs that are like the ones from the Regent Street
⏹️ ▶️ John store in London and all the other things that you recognize from Apple retail. It’s so empty
⏹️ ▶️ John of things like where are the garbage cans and the bathrooms and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, some place to get a drink of water and something to sit down on. It’s like, well, those are outside and we bring them
⏹️ ▶️ John in and have rentals and there are bathrooms there and you can get to them. But it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I look at it and I think of it more as a beautiful sculpture and less as a functional
⏹️ ▶️ John place for people to do a thing. But the theater, I think, can’t afford
⏹️ ▶️ John to be weird. Kind of like the Sydney Opera House, like it is itself a theatrical thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The rest of Apple Park is still, you know, nobody knows. We’ll have to wait until everyone moves in and then we can all talk to our Apple friends we were just
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about and say, what’s it like? what’s like to work there? Is it better or worse than the weird 80s infinite loop canvas?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, is it better or worse than than Google or whatever other place that you might have worked? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I remain slightly dubious about the utility of Apple Park as a place
⏹️ ▶️ John to work, but certainly looks cool in pictures and none of us have to work there. So we can just enjoy it in that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, probably as as the answer is so often with modern Johnny I have creations. Probably the answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all your practical needs is either wireless or dongles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, get a dongle to put your garbage in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. Yeah. The AR installation looked pretty neat though. I mean it’s totally like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t think of the word I’m looking for, but it’s like, oh of course you have to have an AR installation. But it did look cool. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you didn’t see the video it it looks like they they did almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a monochrome 3D display. Monochrome also isn’t the best word for it, but like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very very blank looking 3D display that’s somewhere, I guess, at the visitor center. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can take your like iPad or iPhone or whatever and hold it up to this 3D, uh, miniature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the park of, of Apple park. And it will show you like the full res,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, all the trees, all the happy trees everywhere and everything. And here’s, here’s where, here’s where all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey airflow is because people care about that. Uh, it, but it does look clever and neat use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a neat use of AR and speaking of airflow and things like that. Apparently the whole building is a hundred percent renewable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey energy, which is pretty cool because I’d like my kids soon to be kids to be able to, I don’t know, have a planet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to live on after I’m dead. So that’s kind of neat, uh, especially since it is huge,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but yeah, I don’t know. I, there was a lot of, especially around Apple park, there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a fair dose of self-congratulation, um, which I think some of that is to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected. I think it ran a little bit long for my taste, but you know, it’s their event, not mine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they can do what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I don’t, I think the Apple park and the Steve jobs thing fine.
Retail update
⏹️ ▶️ John But then when they went into the retail thing, which is the next segment, I started to think, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John get on with it. You’re allowed a certain amount of introductory material, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe it’s just because I’m not that interested in retail or maybe because it didn’t seem like it fit in the event because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is supposed to be an event about products. And the reason you get to talk about jobs and Apple Park is because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the venue and it’s the introduction of it. But retail, you could talk about anytime.
⏹️ ▶️ John I confess I mostly zoned out and when I rewatched it, I didn’t bother watching that segment again
⏹️ ▶️ John Did they announce anything new or say anything that made it worth the amount of time that it took
⏹️ ▶️ John in this presentation?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course they did if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Store. Yes, they’re not Apple stores anymore. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey centers town centers Which speaking like I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John block this out. I’d block the out the segment where they tried to redefine vocabulary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vocabulary. The problem with this whole segment is that it was full of retail jargon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way that their internal initiatives are probably talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things. But there’s a fundamental mismatch between how they talk about this to themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what we care about as the customers. And I don’t think they respected that difference or understood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that difference for this segment. And this is not the first time they’ve made that mistake. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually one of the major criticisms I have of generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook’s presentations about things is that it seems like they often blur the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line or don’t find the right balance between internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language and external language and external concerns.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mad Fientist Would you say that your customer sat is not exactly where you wish it was? Tim Cook Oh, it’s blow away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the whole thing with the store is like Angela Ahrens is going through telling how They’re going to have all these great events,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re making all these atriums and forums and theaters, and that’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what people want out of the Apple Store experience that we have
⏹️ ▶️ John Steven Out of the Genius Bar appointment in a reasonable amount of time and nowhere to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line up. Jared Polin Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What people want is literally shorter Genius Bar waits and make it easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get appointments. In general, Apple stores are overcrowded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s a huge burden on the staff that’s there. So we need more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them probably, and they need to have more staff. And I don’t think people care if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re waiting for an hour standing next to a table somewhere or in something called a forum with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of plants in it. That’s nice, and I’m glad they’re doing things like that for their own sake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we, the customers, that doesn’t really solve a problem we have. the stores have real problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that seem to not be getting solved. So it’s hard to enjoy a segment like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s not solving the problems we really have and also full of this crazy jargon that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t care about and that’s really hard to pay attention to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is the whole Apple retail thing is another, uh, great example of success hides problems. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it is important that the, that the stores are nice. That is important. It’s part of the mystique of
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. It’s part of the reason people are excited to go there and see the products that are on the tables and like, you know, all that is important.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not to say that it should just be like a giant, like, you know, supermarket with a million checkout lines to be for efficiency,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It has to be a nice place, but the success that’s hiding the problems is the reason Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John retail as you know, worth more money per square foot than any other retail place is because
⏹️ ▶️ John they sell expensive high margin products and they sell a lot of them because they’re really good and people want them,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s it. Like you have a store with products that people want presented nicely
⏹️ ▶️ John in good locations and your margins on those products are good. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’ll gives you this, this store that like you, you know, that people just want to go to and
⏹️ ▶️ John throw huge wads of money at you constantly, like over and over again, there, people are crowding
⏹️ ▶️ John in the stores. And you take all that success and you’re like, we should make nicer atriums and have a living
⏹️ ▶️ John wall and, and carve this thing out of stone and call things like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you’re losing sight of the purpose of this. I mean, Maybe they’re not, maybe this is for the external thing, but like the purpose
⏹️ ▶️ John of the store is exchanging goods for money, right? People come in with money and they want stuff to come out. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has to be nice, but none of this stuff you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John is making it more likely that people are gonna come in and buy your things
⏹️ ▶️ John or making it so that you sell more of them per second, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like it’s mostly a wash and you’re just kind of like polishing the tables and rearranging the decor
⏹️ ▶️ John and trying not to interrupt the flow of money, But certainly, if your goal was to
⏹️ ▶️ John either increase the satisfaction, then you’d be like, less wait times, more staff, so on and so forth. Or if you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to increase profits, then get people in and out faster. And that might also increase satisfaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody is clamoring for even nicer materials than in Apple Store, and yet
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco they’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John redoing things. I’m not saying they shouldn’t make them nice. They totally should, but that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Maybe we’re unique. Maybe we don’t spend enough time in Apple Stores. I think they’re plenty nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they are really nice, and I think they do, they should remodel them and refresh them periodically, but
⏹️ ▶️ John all that money flowing in lets them sort of stick their head in the sand and say, yeah, sometimes it’s frustrating, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the money keeps coming in, so let’s try to get a new material for the floor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, this is a somewhat silly example, but I went for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a run and I was putting my phone into my little fanny pack. Hi,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brits, hello. I was putting my phone into my fanny pack, or whatever it’s called, and…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not that. And, yeah, well, it’s called that here, it’s not called that there, but anyway, bum bag,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you, Slade 401, that’s what I was looking for. I think that’s the British version. Anyway. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ve heard that several times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that not just a parody of fanny pack?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, they’re all kind of parodies of themselves, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey yes, that’s true. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Anyway, I’m gonna get through this, darn it. So I dropped my phone on the pavement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I shattered my first iPhone. It’s the first time I’ve done that since getting my 3GS way back when.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I made it almost 3,000 days without shattering a phone. I’ve had some like nicks or scratches or what have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that before or after the last Mac mini update?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good question, I’m not sure. But anyway, I went to schedule
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an appointment on Friday mornings. This was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at like 6.45, seven o’clock in the morning when I was done with my run. And there was some availability. There was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a hair of availability Friday and some availability Saturday. And I ended up having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to wait until Sunday and, and, and just a couple of days out, uh, you know, there, there were the times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I had were not available to me were not terribly convenient, which yes, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that like, oh, I live very close to an Apple store. Don’t be creepy. You know, if you live an hour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two away from an Apple store, it’s much, much worse. Um, so this could have been a whole lot worse, but if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been able to schedule like a same day appointment for a convenient time for me, that would have been amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instead, I was like, oh, I guess that’s when I’ll go in. And then when I got there, it was like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait 10, 15 minutes for somebody to come talk to you to just verify the fact that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the phone you say you have, and then wait 10 or 15 minutes for somebody else to come and grab the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then wait the two hours to have the phone repaired. And yes, I understand that this is a first world problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to end all first world problems, But the point I’m bringing, the reason I bring all this up is because if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had had like a next day appointment and would have been in and out in an hour, which I think if the store was empty or perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more appropriately staffed than I could have been, that would have been amazing and I wouldn’t have stopped talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that forever. But instead it’s like, oh, well, I guess I gotta go to the Apple store. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean you have to go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey today? Yeah. You will be today at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple, at Apple today, going into their forum atrium to be in their genius grove. I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey glad you brought that up. I actually think I like Today at Apple. I think I like the name and I think I like the premise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Will I ever do it? Probably not. But I like the idea. Even though
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s for me, I think it’s a good idea. And I actually really, really like the name Today at Apple. And in the little video they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey showed, you know, they showed, Today at Apple, we’re gonna, I don’t know, do a photo walk. Today at Apple, we’re gonna do sketching.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Today at Apple, we’re gonna do Teacher Tuesday, which I also think is really awesome. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as I wanna poke fun, and I know you were joking, but I want to poke fun at today at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually do enjoy that. Apple Town Center, however, get out of here with that nonsense. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, now we’ve spent too much time on retail.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Accurately reflecting the presentation.
Sponsor: AfterShokz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks bone conduction headphones. Go to ATP.Aftershocks.com
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco every other kind of headphone, bone conduction leaves your ears completely open with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing sitting on top of them or resting in them or squishing inside your ear canal. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brings some major benefits. So first of all, there’s a major comfort benefit. If you, like me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t wear earbuds because they just hurt after a while, this doesn’t have that problem. There’s nothing in your ear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re also awesome for exercise and for hot weather because you don’t sweat as much without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing covering up or sticking inside your ear. They also stay in place really well as you move around during exercise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they are IP55 certified for water resistance. So if they get too sweaty or if it starts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raining, you don’t have to worry about it. And the biggest difference for me with Aftershock compared to any other headphones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that nothing is blocking your ears so you hear all of the sound of the world around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. So this is not so good if you’re in a very loud place like a subway station, but it’s awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re doing something like running outside or doing stuff around your house where you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to still hear what’s going on in the house or taking a call in an office. It is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is like no other kind of headphone I’ve ever used, and I use it for walking especially.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world and you don’t want to be blocked out for safety or practicality reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The flagship model was the Trex Titanium, which they still sell and it’s great. And it is, I think,
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Health update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you very much to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Next up was Apple Watch. This was, it started out with some new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medical initiatives around kind of continuous heart rate, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-blown monitoring, but kind of like passive checks throughout the day for heart rate monitoring that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do new things like attempt to detect if your heart rate is elevated when it shouldn’t be, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re not exercising. They also announced a new heart study that they’re starting that will…the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goal of which is to detect things like arrhythmias and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AFib. And this is a really big deal. This is exactly the kind of awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that I think the Jeff Williams-led health initiatives really get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. I really hope that this works out for them. I’m very glad they’re doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be commended for doing this because this is potentially life-changing for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people. A lot of people. So that’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you have to opt into this study though. It’s not, I mean, it’ll be better when if everything works out.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what the regulatory situation is, but can they just like build this in so you don’t have to know anything. You just put your Apple watch on
⏹️ ▶️ John and then one day you get some kind of notification says, Hey, we noticed something weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe Maybe you should contact somebody and whatever. Versus now where
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to download this app, sign up to be part of the study, probably sign a bunch of disclaimer things or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good for people who already know that they might be at risk for this type of thing to have monitoring,
⏹️ ▶️ John but no one, as far as I understand this program, is going to passively get the benefit of this program because it’s still in
⏹️ ▶️ John the experimental stage. So it’s a start. It’s a start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I’m pretty sure you’d have to opt in to being in the study and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John They have to
⏹️ ▶️ John download an app and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but like, you know, Apple has been building a framework to do these things for some time now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that’s… Yeah. And to do it at quite immense scale, too. So that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are so important and why they’re so impressive. That you know, Apple’s doing this at scale with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty advanced resources at their fingertips here or at their wrist tips. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s… There actually is potential to do pretty significant things here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they were saying that, you know, I thought it was during this keynote that they said that a lot of medical studies are something like a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, and this is potentially going to be like tens of thousands, if not more than that, which is really awesome. We also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skipped a brief moment. What did you think of the introductory video for Apple Watch? This is not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cellular video, which comes later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, where they have the guy reading his letter from his car crash and stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John My main complaint about that thing is that it was not clear to me whether the
⏹️ ▶️ John people in the video were actors or the actual people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s funny you bring that up. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wish I could.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s like we planned this. Friend of the show, Kyle Seth Gray, or Kyle’s the Gray,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a relay listener, and I think he listens to this show. I’m not sure, so if so, hi, Kyle. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, he’s definitely a relay listener, and he was one of the people in the video. He was the one on the bike,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stationary bike. And so that is a real person that I have met, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have shaken his hand with my hand, and he is real. So yeah, maybe others were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actors, but I’m pretty sure not. And I feel like we saw something fly by that the guy in the elevator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was also a relay listener.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s always kind of weird to me when, I mean, they do this all the time, but they enter a segment about a
⏹️ ▶️ John product, and especially with the Apple Watch, where the new one looks just like the old one,
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes a couple seconds to ramp up to say, they’re just telling us how great their product,
⏹️ ▶️ John existing product is, which they tend not to do. Like there wasn’t a big segment about how great the iPhone seven is
⏹️ ▶️ John before the iPhone eight part, right? But it’s like, let me just tell you about it. And it was mostly about watchOS four
⏹️ ▶️ John and people love their Apple watch and sales are great, even though we’re not going to tell you how many there are, but trust us, they’re great.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and, and then the video and then of course the new, the new Apple watch on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. But it was like, it was almost like, uh, again, a lot of time spent on something that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the announcement of the new product. But, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel like it’s important to them to emphasize the fact that the watch is
⏹️ ▶️ John a success in a way that they don’t feel like they have to do for the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Steve McLaughlin That beats me, but I thought the video was good. And I think to come back to where we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were before I interrupted, I really think this Apple Heart study could be something extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey powerful, and I’m pleased to see them doing it. of Tim or whomever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deciding that this is something that’s important to Apple or to them personally and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple. And so they’re making it happen and really making some stark
⏹️ ▶️ Casey positive change. Or hopefully, we don’t know yet, but I would assume that’ll be the case. And that’s really awesome. Yeah.
Apple Watch Series 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then after that, unless there’s something else we had here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. So series three, which is with LTE.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, optionally with LTE.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a fair point, fair point. It’s optionally with LTE. This is pretty exciting. It sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it will be a completely separate, of course, connection to your particular cell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone carrier. You will share, however, the same phone number with your iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there’s been a little bit of chatter about how that’s working technically behind the scenes, but the net effect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is if you run out of the house and your phone is at home and you go driving somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else or running or what have you, then if you get a phone call, your watch and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone will both simultaneously ring and you can answer on either one. And you can send text messages
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from either one, et cetera, et cetera, in a way that you can only do now if you’re either connected to Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in certain circumstances or connected via Bluetooth to your phone. And that’s extremely cool. What’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool is that, at least in America, it seems that all the cell phone carriers, or at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone who’s talked about it yet, is saying it’s gonna be $10 a month for a watch, which I think is preposterous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why I came to this conclusion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because the watch is small and you pay more money for big things.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No. No, I think you’re right. I think you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do K-Man size the comparison?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, I know that we are spoiled by modern cellular plans being amazing, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an entirely separate cellular data device that is only $10 a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month to have on your plan, that’s a good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not more data. They’re selling you air like Woody Allen’s father in that movie that I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John remember. They’re not giving you more data. It doesn’t cost them that much more money
⏹️ ▶️ John to have another device on their network. So
⏹️ ▶️ John trust me, they’re making a huge amount of profit at an additional $10. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know but like but that is a very you know compared to the industry and what they do and what we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always paid for To have an entirely separately activated device for $10 a month
⏹️ ▶️ John disagree It’s the same. It’s the same. It’s the same phone number I mean here’s a problem the problem with all this stuff is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not we don’t know What we should actually be paying for these things because so many telecom companies
⏹️ ▶️ John have not a monopoly But you have one or two reasonable choices the competition is not
⏹️ ▶️ John strong in this industry Oh sure regulation is not you know so we don’t know what this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff would actually be worth with competition And we do know that in other parts of the world you get more data and faster
⏹️ ▶️ John speeds for less money So the general frustration with carriers and telecom in the u.s. Underlies
⏹️ ▶️ John everything and so it’s hard to say you know But you’re saying your argument you
⏹️ ▶️ John have Marco is the relative thing like thing thing X costs this amount and thing Y
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s cost cost way less proportionally. I’m getting another device, and it’s only $10 But
⏹️ ▶️ John it just feels like it feels like the bad the the doomsday scenarios of the net neutrality
⏹️ ▶️ John things where it’s like every new thing You want to have they can charge you money for the carriers have always been there
⏹️ ▶️ John and remain there and now it’s like well great Everything’s gonna have a cell connection and I have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John not nickel-and-dimed But five didn’t end for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco every single one of these new items that I had It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John untenable after a certain point, especially if it doesn’t come with more data, right, especially if it doesn’t so I you
⏹️ ▶️ John know We all hate carries and wish they did a better job at this point when the number of devices starts going up like this
⏹️ ▶️ John like We fast forward 10 15 years and everybody in the family who is an
⏹️ ▶️ John adolescent or adult has a watch
⏹️ ▶️ John Phone a tablet and not a laptop because Apple will never write cellular to it because they’re evil
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a that’s a lot of damn devices and you start saying can I just pay a huge amount of money for my whole family? And just be like a
⏹️ ▶️ John flat rate for a huge amount of data and not have to get additional money every time You
⏹️ ▶️ John know someone adds a new device, but we’re far from that so anyway. It’s not that bad ten
⏹️ ▶️ John dollars seems reasonable for the kind of people who are gonna buy
⏹️ ▶️ John an Apple watch with cellular which is already a pretty expensive product as a companion to their already expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, so Apple’s right on the money in terms of You know who this product is for and what they’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay We’ll get to more of that later when we start getting into the phones, but, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it looks good. I agree with you, Marco, that getting this for free
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and John as well, but, but Marco, I think you were, I think you thought I wanted this for free. I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that, that a free additional connection to, in my case, AT&T’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network is reasonable. I don’t think that at all. This is different, for example, than tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where tethering is still only one connection to AT&T and how I choose to blow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through my data to me should be my choice. And I found it completely egregious when tethering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an additional fee years ago, because it’s still only one connection and it’s still just my data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in fact, in some ways they should encourage tethering because then I’m going to blow through my data even quicker and then hypothetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay them even more money. This is different in that I do think it should cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a non-zero amount of money to have an Apple watch connected to your cell phone plan. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that bothers me though is that I don’t think $10 a month is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable cost. I think it should be half that. Now, how did I come to that conclusion? No freaking clue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s what John alluded to earlier. The watch is physically small. The iPad is physically big. It should be less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the iPad. And I concede that really if you put that on paper, it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it just seems bonkers to me that something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really shouldn’t necessarily be drawing that much data, and even if it was, it’s still the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucket of data. It’s not like I’m getting more data for it. I just don’t think that $10 a month is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonable. I think five would have been the right answer and I wouldn’t have blinked an eye if it was $5 a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month, but for $10 a month, that’s making me go, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I want cellular, but I’m not so sure. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, before I set you on fire, this kind of like micro price
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anger is why app developers can’t charge money for apps. But anyway, let’s not do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And actually, $10 a month, $5 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month even is great for apps. Anyway, like, here’s the thing. The
⏹️ ▶️ John cost of this, the cost of this device to the carriers is network capacity, right? Because every device that is communicating
⏹️ ▶️ John one of those towers ads, right? But in the grand scheme of things, even with apples, we have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John how many they’re selling thing. We know roughly how many of the thing they’re selling in proportion to the number of
⏹️ ▶️ John cell phones that are on a cell network at any given time and it is minuscule. So there is a capacity increase
⏹️ ▶️ John for connecting these watches, but it is small and all pricing of cell data plans
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the realm of whatever, whatever carriers make up and or colluded with each other for. There is
⏹️ ▶️ John no market pressure to lower prices because there’s so few people and
⏹️ ▶️ John the only one who’s hungry is always like the one with the terrible network. I think it was that sprint these days or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John T-Mobile, right? And even they pull prices essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John out of thin air. So it’s hard for us to know how much this stuff is worth, other than, like I said, looking at the rest of the world
⏹️ ▶️ John and realizing we don’t have it that great here. So I don’t know. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re remotely on the fence, get the cellular one. Why would you even bother getting one of these phones
⏹️ ▶️ John and not get the cellular? If you were already looking at a Series 2 and you’d never had any
⏹️ ▶️ John interest in cellular, then get the Series 3 without cellular. But if you thought, I would really love
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a cellular thing, but that $10 a month is, I mean, just drop one of your
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming subscriptions. This is an expensive product for your expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but I might add a streaming subscription because of stupid Apple Music, which we’ll get to in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s cellular, on your wrist. That’s awesome, pay the 10 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s incredible. Even for this year, even for this day and age, even for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the wonderful technology that we have, that is still amazing. Like, how is, how,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this is like the Louis C.K. like, you know, sitting in a chair in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey how is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not amazing? And like, you know, people are like, I’ve seen some of the comments that are like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just a watch. No, it’s not just a watch. It’s a tiny little computer that lives on your wrist and can talk to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anywhere in the world without any phone attacks to it now. Like, that’s incredible. That is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Can I run Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John on it? Because that’s really what I care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, I’m not. Amen, brother. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a software limitation. That is not a hardware, like, and we’ll get to that. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so okay, let’s talk about that now. So, you know, cellular on the watch. What is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually good for? And the answer so far is, you know, the basics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of lots of times we have talked about, and other people have talked about, you know, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you bring your phone with you with the watch? And when the Apple would add features like standalone music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback from the watch, like to a Bluetooth headset, or when they talk about adding SOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier this summer, a lot of us would ask ourselves, why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would I not have my phone with me? Because a lot of people, even when they go out for exercising, they still bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their phone with them just in case there’s an emergency or somebody has to reach them or they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need help or whatever else. So there’s a clear reason for lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who would otherwise take just the watch with them somewhere, I would love to do that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t been doing that, not because of anything about the watch’s hardware or software, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it just didn’t have cellular itself which I guess is hardware, but ignore that for a second. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was holding back a lot of people. And so I mentioned last week, in our predictions episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we had already heard the rumors last week about the cellular watch, because that was from the HomePod leak, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had, I discussed, the things I want in the watch watch are for it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a smarter and nicer looking timepiece. But what most people use the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for is exercise and notifications, and that seems to be driving the sales. So what Apple’s doing here is very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart in that way. It looks like they’ve done zero to make it a nicer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking, better, smarter timepiece. But this is a massive jump
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward for making it an exercise and notifications device, because Because now, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are significant times when people would want to bring just the watch with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And those are times for which people are buying or want to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch. So that’s exercise, that’s going on the beach, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is certain types of travel and activities. Let’s be honest, it’s mostly exercise. But that’s a big thing. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of runners want to run without having a phone strapped in some weird spot on their body or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything like that. It’s a huge market. So this is awesome for that. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going beyond the phone call in an emergency scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think one of the other things, they mentioned the Apple Music streaming. That’s cool. That should be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a little concerned about how that will affect battery life, but it’s probably… Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re underplaying that. I think that’s the most important thing because when you take it when you’re running, I think a lot of people bring their phones
⏹️ ▶️ John with them. They say, oh, it’s in case I fall down and need to call somebody, but really they want to play their music from it. Yeah, you can play
⏹️ ▶️ John music from your watch now, but it’s a pain in the butt. I think streaming music plus AirPods is like the killer
⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s going to sell cellular for people. You’re going to tell them, oh, I can make phone calls. That will make me feel better.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think it is all about 40 million songs on your wrist and AirPods. Like that is the ultimate
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to run and listen to stuff. And that’s why I think it should work with Spotify and all the other services. I have no idea if it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope it’s not constrained to Apple Music. And I agree with your concerns about the battery life and the streaming. But that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the killer. And they show that in the ad, like, look at me, I got AirPods and I got wrist. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the lightest way to listen to all the music in the world while you do some activity, while
⏹️ ▶️ John it also tracks your workout and your pulse and everything. That I think is the total package on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s why a minute ago I alluded to, you know, I might need to get an Apple Music subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am a diehard Spotify kind of guy. I love Spotify for reasons that are not interesting for right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the thought of being able to go for a run, like everything Marco just said, be able to go for a run with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just my AirPods and my watch and not have to worry about dropping my phone, but more importantly, just carrying my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey darn phone. That sounds amazing. And if I twist my ankle or something like that, that I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call for help and get help from Aaron or whomever, that’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Casey, all this amazingness, including having all the music in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessible via voice control on your little wrist computer that you can wear anywhere and have cellular coverage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not worth 20 bucks a month, is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John worth 20 bucks a month. He’s not complaining about the price of the phone, no. He’s complaining about the price of the carrier plan.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. That he feels like he’s already paying for. Especially if he doesn’t bring his phone, he’s not having extra network capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. No, but anyway, but the problem, though, but leaving all, leaving all my whining, conventioning aside
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the price of the cellular part, you know, it could be that I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in $10, to your point, Marco, $10 for the cellular, $10 for Apple Music, but, and that’s monthly, which adds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up real fast. But all of this really comes down to, however, the thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I most enjoy listening to when I go for a run is actually podcasts. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular podcast client catcher, whatever, of choice that I enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens to be Overcast. And all I want in the world now is to be able to leave my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my house, take my watch and my AirPods and listen to Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from anywhere. That would be nice. Tell me, Marco, that you’re going to make this happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying, but I don’t think I’m getting anywhere anytime soon. I know. I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leave it at that, because I’m literally not getting anywhere yet. But I am trying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I told you, I said when I removed that feature, I’m going to try to bring it back. I am trying to bring it back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but so far I haven’t. But I’m not going to stop trying. In fact, this has now lit a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fire under my butt, because I really, really want this to be a thing that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do, that I can do also.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know why that is, by the way? Because I know why that is, and it has nothing to do with me or any of your customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has to do with your newfound obsession. And you don’t want to bring your phone with you while you’re riding your bike either, do
⏹️ ▶️ John sure don’t. Shouldn’t be listening to podcasts while you ride your bike.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I actually don’t. I more have been wanting this on dog walks, honestly. Biking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey even though— Oh, fair enough, fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even though I’m not biking on the street, I’m biking on a trail. But even on the trail, I don’t want to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to things. I’m listening to the world around me because I’m scared out of my mind. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so also there are other reasons to want a cellular watch. So I thought of a couple. So obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of app potential here. The watch so far has been a pretty mediocre app platform, but this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes things quite a bit for a lot of different types of apps. So this could be a big thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right now, a lot of the watch has been held back by the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the apps on the watch are pretty slow compared to doing the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your phone. But if now more people have more reason to not have their phone with them at all, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of a sudden the watch is all they have with them, that opens up new potential for apps, a new demand for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. I also thought about things like, so they mentioned in the keynote that if you leave your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at home and if you bring just your watch with you, just your new Series 3 with LTE, that updates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your location for find friends tracking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, that’s right,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that was really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is not only awesome for like exercisers and things, but also I thought like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if you wanted to track locations of your children, and you didn’t want to give them a phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you maybe could give them an Apple Watch with LTE. Like, I know this is an awfully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over-engineered solution to this problem, but I think that’s actually, that’s a potential use I thought of here.
⏹️ ▶️ John give your children $300 watches. You know, I just bought a GPS tracker for my dog and it was much cheaper. So consider that if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John track your children.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t always be $300. And that’s less than a phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple one will always be, well, $199.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And $10 a month, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey. All right, anyway, so I do think this is pretty remarkable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they did BS the size increase a little bit. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John noticed that today. Yeah, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. That was great judo there where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco The case is the same thickness. The case is exactly the
⏹️ ▶️ John same size. I felt like they should have stopped there. They shouldn’t, but they felt like they need to be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they said, technically speaking, the little thing that bumps out of the case is tiny bit bigger but the case, they could
⏹️ ▶️ John have just said the case is the same size and left
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is bigger by a small amount and I bet nobody would notice but because they’re Apple, they have to cover their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wasn’t it like a quarter millimeter? Like that’s a pretty small
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, two sheets of paper, they said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was almost nothing but to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fair, if like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Samsung had pulled something like this, we would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John all, well, nobody would pay attention. They don’t pay attention, but because
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple, someone would say, I put them next to each other and you could see two pieces of paper, extra thickness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, I mean, it is kind of BS though. Like just call it like you see it and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, we made it infinitesimally smaller or bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most amazing thing I think, I always have to remind myself of this when I look at the Apple Watch, is that every time they
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about this, like, oh, you know, essentially they’ve kept the watch the same size for many generations, gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit thicker over time because the Series 2 was thicker than the original series zero. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is thicker still, so fine. But in general, it’s the little Airstream trailer with the bulge on the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then I remember it comes in two sizes. And I think, how the hell does the smaller one work? They have to fit all the same
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in there. The only thing that is smaller is the screen. So you can get a slightly smaller battery because you have a slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller screen. But everything else can’t be, doesn’t shrink in power use. It’s just not like, oh, the small one has a cell radio
⏹️ ▶️ John power. If they had a cell radio that used less power, they would use it in both of them. So the small one is the miracle. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that also means the small one doesn’t get as good battery life, which is a bummer. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. That’s always been the case. The small one has always gotten noticeably worse battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life. I know, but I mean, like, does it scale linearly? Because now they add LTE.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still the same all day battery life, blah, blah. Is the small one even worse now? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery must be so tiny in there. And I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John battery size is to run any kind of cell radio to transmit to a radio
⏹️ ▶️ John tower that is potentially far away from you. Anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m reminded of that looking at the models. And we’re like, oh yeah, they make one that’s like way smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What size does Tina have?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think she has a small one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, yeah, it’s a thing. She’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With LTE? Yeah. Are you gonna grumble about paying $10 a month? No, I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ John encouraging her to get it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey She uses it. She uses it
⏹️ ▶️ John for the intended purpose as shown in all of Apple’s ads. So
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as they don’t make a Pokemon Go app for it, then everything will be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I wonder, I’ve heard through, you know, various reporting that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing just, that the Series 3 just feels a heck of a lot quicker, like opening apps and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things like that. I kind of wonder, and something Marco said earlier made me think of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it doesn’t have to like, so let’s say for example, I’m using Lyft for the first time in forever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I try to do it on my watch for whatever silly reason. It has to, if I understand things correctly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, it has to wake up the Lyft app on my phone, or at the very least, wake up the phone and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, I’d like to use your internet connection. But something has to get woken up on the phone and it needs to communicate with the phone, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah. I wonder if not only obviously the processor is so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faster on the Series 3, but I wonder if just having its own connection to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rest of the world on these LTE models will also dramatically increase and improve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey performance and just make it feel a lot snappier, even leaving aside the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tremendous gains in the processor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, because with the watch, like one of the reasons why the original watch was so unbearably slow is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole UI of apps was being driven effectively by the phone, like remotely over the Bluetooth connection. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every tap was basically going back and forth with the Bluetooth to the phone. And so everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve done to make the watch more independent in both hardware and software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has had a noticeable increase of performance and responsiveness because anything you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing to reduce those round trips is good. Now the current watch, the Series 1 and 2, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were pretty fast relative to the first one, the Series 0, and I’ll have a rant here in a second about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these names, but they could go over WiFi if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to, but they would frequently default to Bluetooth to the parent phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of making their own WiFi connection for I think just power efficiency reasons. That Wi-Fi used a lot of power,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it was kind of like a last resort. The watch would attempt to use Bluetooth for as much as it could.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they made a few comments about the W2 indicating that it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only much faster, but much more power efficient for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth than the W1.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m hoping that the watch will be more aggressive at using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its Wi-Fi, and then when you’re out using its cellular, instead of just like trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth first for everything to save power because that will make lots of things better. If, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to bring Overcast back to the watch, one of the big problems there was file transfer speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s because most of the time it was going over Bluetooth, even when the devices would be plugged in, they would still often use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth to transfer the files. That makes no sense to me, but they would. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was no way for me as a developer to say, look, this is a big file, please, for the love of God, transfer it over Wi-Fi.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the user is literally waiting for it right now and it’s not being transferred over Wi-Fi. Like there’s no way for me to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the API. So I’m hoping this will help push them in that direction of having these new chips. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I forget about the naming here, the first watch was called Apple Watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The second watch was called Series 1 and 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John Zero index, that’s great for programmers.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, right. And so- Three is the fourth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. As they’re introducing three now, cause Series 1 and 2 had the same guts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but series two was waterproofed basically. And it was like the same chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside, like most of the same internals. So it was really like series one and series one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waterproof. Like that’s what they probably should have called that. Actually, they should have called them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both series two and just retcon the first one series one. But instead we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series zero unofficially called, we have the first one. Then we have series one and two and three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, but series two was discontinued because the new premium model is Series 3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now we have Series 1 and Series 3. Now the casual buyer will look at that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Series 1 is two years old, when in fact it’s only one year old. And it’s not two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generations back, it’s one generation back. And if you have an original Apple Watch and you’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about upgrading, you’re gonna think the Series 1 is the one you have. So it’s a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco confusing name now. Not the first confusing name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John in this event, but a very confusing name. That’s not the best at naming.
⏹️ ▶️ John The best thing is that the Series 3 also comes without an LTE. So it’s like, oh, Series 3 is the one with cellular. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are just terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John names. Yeah, well, the good thing is they all look the same. Like from people, when they’re all lined up on the
⏹️ ▶️ John table, they all look the same. So I think the stigma of getting the lesser thing, it’s like, well, they all look the same
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. Like they have a, like on Apple’s website or something, it has a big comparison thing. Like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want out of your watch? Do you care about cellular or do you not? Do you care about waterproofing or not? Do you care about GPS
⏹️ ▶️ John or do you not? Do you care about a red dot on the crown or do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Can we talk about the red dot for a second? Now, I love watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love red. I even love red watches. Or red on watches, rather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a watch with red accents. It’s wonderful. I do not think this red dot looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good on any color watch except maybe the white edition. On
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single… I know I haven’t seen them in person yet, But in all the press photos and all the shop photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not think this looks good. And again, I love red. Everything I own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is red. I love watches. I love red on watches. This does not work
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it works as long as all the rest of the colors are neutral. Like if it’s based, that’s why you like the white one. Like you just have,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything is neutral and the only accent of color is the red. I mean, it doesn’t clash. I think it looks fine. It looks okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t mind it. But it really does limit your aesthetic choices when you’ve got this stupid red dot
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t get rid of. I mean, maybe it is changeable, I don’t know. Didn’t they do this before with the edition where you have different
⏹️ ▶️ John crown colors when you bought the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Hermes thing? Stuff like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the Hermes was always, I think that was always black, but with the original gold edition line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would have, there was like, if you bought the fancy little red one, that would have the red dot. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cook was spotted wearing a watch with a red, wearing a regular steel watch with a red dot on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco his crown at one of the early events for the Apple Watch. So it was kind of like, ooh, he gets the special one with the red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dot. And even at the time, I was like, ooh, I want that. But now that that’s offered, I’m like, mm, I think I, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like, I don’t think it looks good. Maybe it’ll look better in person, but in the pictures on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website, it does not look good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it limits your choices, because if, say you have a color scheme that clashes with red, like you have a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John band that you want, or like a body color, like I want the gold aluminum with this color band, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John red clashes with it, so it’s not great. Also, I was, during the presentation, I was like, Did they get
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of the stainless? Because that’s the one that I like the best. That’s the one that I have. Yeah, me too. I like that look the best. I don’t like the aluminum at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s still there. They have limited choices. I think I saw you can only get it with the Milanese
⏹️ ▶️ John with the white sport, but whatever. They didn’t change the size. They didn’t change the band compatibility. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if I was to get one of these, which I’m not, I would just get the stainless at tremendous expense and then not use the
⏹️ ▶️ John white things and use one of my other straps with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do not dig the red dot at all. I think it’s really terrible. And I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a store online, watchdots.com, and they are not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sponsor. I have no idea if their product is any good or not. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I will seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider, I’m not kidding, I will consider putting a sticker over it. Something like completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John muted and neutral. It’s kind of simple,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can tell you have the fancy one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know, whatever. But yeah, so now, see Marco, now I’m in $10 a month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the stupid cellular, and then $10 a month, potentially, for Apple Music, because it won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work with Spotify the way I want, and then $10 once for the stupid watch. I can’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get this out with a straight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you’re not selling this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So before we leave the topic of the watch, which we should, I was trying to remember,
⏹️ ▶️ John like way back when we first talked about the watch, I don’t remember if it was like after it was announced, it must have been
⏹️ ▶️ John after it was announced, because before we had just had all sorts of wild ideas, but after the watch was announced,
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about it on one of the shows and I remember being pretty vehement about the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that even though what you see here is a watch that does the things that Apple says it does, this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is gonna have cellular. It’s only a matter of time. And I thought I said by the fourth watch maybe it will have cellular
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe I’m misremembering. But either way, like, when the watch was introduced it was so clear
⏹️ ▶️ John that this thing is going to have cellular and live on its own. And the only reason it doesn’t is because they literally
⏹️ ▶️ John could not do that. And I I think they did it on a pretty good schedule.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it hasn’t been that long since the watch was introduced and they already got cellular into it. And they did that
⏹️ ▶️ John by doing something that we had previously described as very un-Apple-like, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t actually make it thinner year after year. Don’t actually change the case. Keep everything gigantic,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Airstream trailer on your wrist, and reap the benefits of that by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John If we keep it the same size, we can get to where we know we’re going, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is cell access on our wrist, right? We can get there faster. They could have shrunk it and kept
⏹️ ▶️ John similar functionality, but instead of shrinking it, what they did is just add battery life, let’s add GPS, let’s add LT.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now finally, in a couple of years, in the next major revision, now they can shrink
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s probably not that much more stuff they’re going to stick in there, like, you know, in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John tech wise, maybe some cameras, right? And maybe better microphones and speakers. But now, advancements
⏹️ ▶️ John in technologies don’t have to be spent entirely on adding important features because they finally got the feature
⏹️ ▶️ John set that the watch always wanted to have. It is, you know, it’s kind of like when the iPod left the nest
⏹️ ▶️ John and no longer needed to be connected to your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to like initialize
⏹️ ▶️ John it or whatever. I think the phone, same thing, didn’t you have to hook up the phone to your Mac in the beginning too? Like, all these devices
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be free of the tethers of their larger devices and the watch is finally free. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer, you know, I guess it’s still tied to your phone’s cell plan. But it is as free as it
⏹️ ▶️ John can be in the world. You can leave your phone at home, go out with your watch, and it does all the magic things that we always wanted it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So really quick before we move off, Marco, are you going to buy one? And if so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it going to be pretty much exclusively for testing or do you expect to use it from time to time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both. I use the watch now fairly regularly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not wearing it all day every day. I prefer to take it when I’m, as I said earlier, when I’m going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dog walks or when I’m biking. I like to at least track my distance, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least use it as a remote control for the Overcast app on my phone, even though I can’t do local playback very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well yet. Yeah, so I am gonna buy this because I think I wanna see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I can do as a developer with 3G on the watch, or LTE, excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, with LTE on the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so which one do you think you’ll get? I’m probably gonna get Steel, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since I’ve been getting the Polish Steel for the last two watches, I think maybe this time I’ll go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you fancy. That’s the one we all wanted way back when the first one came out, isn’t it? And then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because I already have the black bracelet. I bought the bracelet separately. And I liked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the black bracelet looked with the contrast of the steel before. But now that I’ve become more of a watch nerd,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the metal mismatch bothers me. And I’ve been wearing it more on the rainbow sport band anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s less of a problem. But I want to try the black this time. because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do like, like the link bracelet that Apple makes is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the best link bracelets in the world ever. Like it doesn’t have micro adjustment,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is unfortunate, but besides that one shortcoming, it’s amazing. Like it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, really good bracelet. So I wouldn’t mind getting more usage out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. John, what’s your plan?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not getting one because I never wear my watch, which is a shame. I would really like to have one. seems cool, but no.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey could. Because I
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t wear it, because I would love to be able to have a thing that’s on my wrist that, you know, I wear my Apple Watch like three times
⏹️ ▶️ John a year, like when I’m traveling, when I’m walking around city streets at WWDC, when I’m on vacation in London, and for
⏹️ ▶️ John those times it’s fun to do it, but the rest of the year I don’t wear it, it just sits on top of my dresser.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if I got this new one, I would wear it the same amount of time. And it would be cool to have cell
⏹️ ▶️ John access on my wrist, but maybe, maybe I could be convinced if Overcast works on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But I don’t know what the context is. I would still bring my phone with me to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it’s expensive. I’m not going to get it. The only one I want is the $600 steel one, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say, too, for anybody who might be waiting for Overcast before they get one, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might be buying one hoping for Overcast to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t hold your breath. Yeah. I would say, because I have not made any progress on that front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, I can’t tell you when I’ll I’ll be able to read that feature or even if I’ll ever be able to read that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature. So don’t make this decision for overcast. Make this decision for other reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. And if down the road overcast does end up getting the support again, by all means, you know, reconsider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it then. But you know, that might be the next watch. I don’t even know. I don’t know when it’s going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would absolutely love to get the gray ceramic case with the gray black sports band,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but at $1300, there’s no freaking way that’s happening. So instead I will be getting the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure I’m going to leave behind the Space Gray, even though I love it, but I want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have the ability to use basically any other color band. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instead I believe I’m going to get the aluminum, which does not bother me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The aluminum one with, what is it like the fog white or something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically the default cellular sports, whatever, aluminum watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will be getting one of those. Erin will likely be getting the same thing, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think she’s going to want anything to do with cellular, particularly once I explain to her it is a non-zero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost per month, even a dollar. She’d probably be like, ah, I don’t need that. But yeah, that is my plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I will be waking up at three in the morning because the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco has to revolve around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey California. And I’ll be waking up at three in the morning to place my order for my two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new Apple Watches. And that is just the beginning of me going broke this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say also though, if it was my primary watch that I wore most of or all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day, that white ceramic I still think is one of the best looking options in the whole lineup, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the best looking option. And especially if you’re going to get the red dot, I would totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco splurge for the white ceramic if it was my primary watch. Matthew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a lot of money. Gosh, is that a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Geoff It is. It’s stupid, but that’s how watches work. When you like the way something looks, you’re like, yes, set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this money on fire. I need to have that on my wrist. If you don’t miss the extra money, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white ceramic is a pretty awesome option.
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Apple TV 4K
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now we should move on to Apple TV, there’s new Apple TV 4k with HDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s still two tor storage tiers the remote which I won’t mention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out loud So I don’t get flamed really isn’t that bad is not changed with the exception of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey raised loop around the menu button Other than that, it’s all basically the same old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No USB-C ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think any of us really care that much, so let’s move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco on. I cannot believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I care. Okay, so similar to when I said earlier how the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing people want in an Apple retail store is faster genius appointments and stuff. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing we wanted with the new Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is a better remote. That’s not true, not all of us. Not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us. A redesigned remote, because this remote is terrible. And I would also say, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high on the list of what people would want with the Apple TV, it would be a lower entry price. And we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got neither of those. We got, the most insulting part is that they did change the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote. So like, they made a change at all, but it appears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s only different in that they added a white circle around the menu button.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe there’s other internal changes, I don’t think anybody knows yet. I hope there’s more to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it than that, but it is still a small, skinny rectangle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is symmetrical in most ways that you will still fall off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your couch cushion because it has a smooth back. It’ll still slip between your couch cushion and get lost because it’s tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thin. It is still too small for good ergonomics. It still relies on an imprecise, annoyingly, accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inputted touchpad. It is still hard to tell which way is up in the dark. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s just like, I don’t understand how the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people in charge at Apple could go through the trouble of changing the Apple TV at all, look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that remote, and decide, this is fine, we don’t have to change this. Like, are they listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to anybody? To any customers? Like, does what we think matter at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have they lost their sense of taste for shipping that in the first place, and then two years later, or however long it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been, shipping it almost identically again?
⏹️ ▶️ John I was reminded of when you mentioned as talking about the remote,
⏹️ ▶️ John you started talking about the new remote where you’re going to get as if it was a done deal and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was just a question of what the new remote would be like. And I was feeling particularly snarky and I laughed and I said, wait
⏹️ ▶️ John a second, you think there’s gonna be a new remote? I am so upset to have been right. Because honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I thought there was gonna be one too.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was in a snarky mood of being like, oh, you think they’re gonna change the remote? We were all so confident.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, how could they not change
⏹️ ▶️ John how could they not? It doesn’t need that much. We need 4K, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Update the hardware. They did gig ethernet. That was another big one in terms of hardware. You gotta do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s about time. It’s 2017. I mean, come on. Right, and then. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco celebrating that they finally upgraded the 10100 port. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only device in history that had a USB-C port and a 10100 ethernet port?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but like, yeah, it just, I don’t, they didn’t have time to redo
⏹️ ▶️ John the remote. So all they could do was, it’s, this is basically the equivalent of the little bump in the iMac puck
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse where it’s like, well, we’re going to design a new mouse eventually. In 2001,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone will get an apology mouse at the Macworld Expo. But in the meantime, is there something we can do
⏹️ ▶️ John for the existing mouse to make it so that people can tell which end is up? How about we put a little divot, a little
⏹️ ▶️ John divot in the button. And so this is like, I don’t even know, having not seen one of these in person, is
⏹️ ▶️ John the white ring even something that you can feel? Nevermind
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that feeling around the remote.
⏹️ ▶️ John around the remote is death because if you accidentally swipe the touch pad, then you have to remember the correct incantation to not
⏹️ ▶️ John cause the play head to start playing in that position or you can just like not touch it and
⏹️ ▶️ John put it down and say, don’t touch it, it’ll go away eventually and it won’t accept my input. I hate that remote so much and they
⏹️ ▶️ John need to fix it and it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I want to see Apple with new industrial design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leadership. Oh God, here we go. I want to see someone else designing these things. The current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team is out of ideas and is prioritizing things that I don’t think are fully in line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with what customers actually want. Put someone else on these kinds of decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because this needs editing, this needs new leadership. Nobody should look at that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote and say, that’s so good we should ship another one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t agree at all. So I’ve blown all credibility by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhat seriously whining about a $10 a month fee, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that the three of us care about are not the things that most people care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I personally don’t really have a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the remote. Do I think it’s stellar? No, I don’t. Do I think it’s amazing? I don’t have I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somehow stumbled into asking and answering my own questions. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I have I got this treadmill, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mean I I’m not trying to say you’re wrong by any means I’m not saying that this is a shining example of good design, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s functional and it works just fine for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John better than it is it should be yeah Really good,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But that’s the only real thing. It’s got going cord It’s a bad remote, right? And we all
⏹️ ▶️ John have bad remotes in our life. And more importantly than it being a bad remote, I think like the most important thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John this remote is that it’s difficult for people to use. Like forget about
⏹️ ▶️ John tech nerds, people listening to tech podcasts, people who are like, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John enthusiasts who’ve been following the company forever, who care about the industrial design and everything. You give this remote to
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody, any plain old person off the street, anybody, and it is difficult for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to use successfully. They have accidental inputs, it’s hard for them to swipe upward
⏹️ ▶️ John and right and left with their thumbs, it’s hard to tell what’s activated on the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an easy remote to use. In many ways, the 5-way was easier, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it had a stupid circle that made it harder to tell when you were hitting up and down and left and right. And all
⏹️ ▶️ John these things, all remotes are difficult to use. You’ve seen anybody using any kind of remote that’s difficult to use, but
⏹️ ▶️ John this remote in particular, I feel like, does not have good usability in the old-fashioned sense of the world in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of how successful are people, how confident are they when using it? Do they feel like it’s a it’s a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they have to be careful touching because something could go wrong? I think people like us
⏹️ ▶️ John are use this remote better than most people because we know all the nuances of how it works. We know
⏹️ ▶️ John how we have to approach it and how to work it. We have lots of experience swiping our fingers on things as we do it all day on our
⏹️ ▶️ John magic mice and on iOS devices using our sophisticated gestures instead of just you know multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ John gestures and swiping from from edge and all sorts of things that regular people don’t know how to do, because they don’t care about this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John that much. So I think the this remote is more usable to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re just complaining about it more because we’re picky and we want more of Apple. I just think this is this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John this remote. It falls down in in all ways as
⏹️ ▶️ John a to for what it’s actually supposed to do. And because we
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we know this podcast and we want Apple to be the best at everything. I feel like you
⏹️ ▶️ John get it wrong a couple times, fine, learn from your mistakes, revise, do better. This was their chance to do better after a very
⏹️ ▶️ John long break, and they put a ring around the menu button, and so everyone is angry. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John justifiably so. But there’s always… I was going to say there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always next year, but there’s always three years from now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What annoys me so much about the Apple TV is not that it’s worse than the competition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The sad thing is that it’s better than the competition, but it really could be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much better than it is. It has always been an afterthought. It has always been the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lowest of low priorities over things like the Mac Mini, I guess. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be so much better, and it’s just so mediocre. It seems like every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do something new to it, either hardware or software, it’s just two steps forward, one step back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it are so frustrating and we’re all I think all three of us are heavy users of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple TV for us it is our only TV video source the only things we ever do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our TV are Apple TV or the switch that’s it I just want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this product to be so much better than it is and I don’t think my demands are that high for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I expect from a good product in this area and it just it fails to meet them so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often and it’s very frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ John so a couple more before I move on to this, because we do need to move off. One good thing about the Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John aside from it being 4K and supporting HDR and all the HDR standards, is their announcement
⏹️ ▶️ John of their 4K media pricing, which is the same as HD and your HDs all get upgraded. So we always complain about
⏹️ ▶️ John Eddie Q’s deal making or whatever, but this is a pretty damn good deal. Same price as HD
⏹️ ▶️ John is good, and free upgrades of all your HD content is crazy good.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So thumbs up. Yeah, I was really surprised by that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, as the chat room just pounded out, except for Disney asterisk yada yada yada. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John that deal is even remotely as real as it was announced on stage, that is a great deal for people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it almost makes up for being locked into their ecosystem being forced to use this remote to, you know, or like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have to use your remote. You can get another remote trained in blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s awesome. That like to, you know, to give them full credit on the Apple TV, like the four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco K content deals with the exception of Disney awesome that is unexpected I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very very happy with that I’m even more happy about the 4k screensaver remaster I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think that’s that comes for free yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John have to pay for $10 a month for the screensaver you’d pay it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I still don’t know if I’m supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the 32 or 64 gigabyte model which for some reason still exists it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like I know people who question that but it’s like it’s it’s for it’s for games and for video caching like
⏹️ ▶️ John will your movie be cast on that like there’s some automatic storage management and the automatic storage management has an awareness
⏹️ ▶️ John of how much storage there is in the device. And so if you want to have a higher chance of playing that movie or still being downloaded from
⏹️ ▶️ John the last time you played it three weeks ago, get the 64. I’m getting the 64. That’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting. It’s $20 difference. Why are these two separate models?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s two months of your watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or one month without music. Why? I don’t understand. Like, okay. It seems like when, when the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV four came out, whenever it was two, three years ago, the, the two big like puzzling things about it were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Oh, why? why are there two different storage tiers? They never really explained why you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need more storage. It’s not really exposed to the user at all in the interface, and it just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemed like, why are there two? Why does that exist? And then the other thing was why this remote sucks. And with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, they fixed neither of those problems. They have not fixed their remote, and we still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two differently priced models, although they’re closer in price. I believe it was a $50 difference before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now it’s a $20 difference. The old one didn’t get any cheaper. The new ones are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive. This is a theme of the Apple event. The new ones are more expensive. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine for people like me who are gonna buy every Apple TV anyway because we use it so heavily. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see this really expanding their market much though because everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the set-top box business like this is just killing them on price and features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Other, like Amazon and Roku have 4K boxes for $100 or less, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s is now 180 for the small tier or 200 for the big one. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old one is still 150 where it launched two years ago. I don’t understand why.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s a mistake and whatever is causing them to keep the price high even on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old low-end one, I gotta imagine there’s cost in the market share and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if that calculus is right.
⏹️ ▶️ John The premium brand, I don’t mind the pricing especially in the grand scheme of things, the streaming services that you’re gonna pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John to watch on the thing are gonna swamp the price of this device pretty quickly. But this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a catch-up device. Like, there’s a bunch of stories in the show notes for many weeks about people
⏹️ ▶️ John complaining how behind the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a catch-up device. It’s catch-up on 4K, it’s catch-up on all the other things they’re adding, and maybe it’s a little bit ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John in some areas in terms of the content deals, or the 4K pricing, or the live sports and live news.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not aware of what all the offerings are. I guess you’ve got YouTube TV and a bunch of other stuff like that. It’s behind
⏹️ ▶️ John on Amazon Video and YouTube TV, which apparently aren’t still on this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is basically a catch-up product, but it’s a good catch-up product. So I think they maintain their position. They are the premium
⏹️ ▶️ John brand because they have fancy expensive hardware and their interface looks pretty nice and their
⏹️ ▶️ John remote looks nice as long as you don’t touch it. And people have a lot of content in
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes. And so this was the keep the lights on product
⏹️ ▶️ John and they did it. And I like the fact that they offered the big one because this is what I always
⏹️ ▶️ John ask for, like make one that has more stuff that’s really expensive. Most
⏹️ ▶️ John people shouldn’t buy it, but the people who care about it will buy it if there is some benefit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think there is because every once in a while I will play a movie that the kids watched three weeks ago and it’s gone and it has to redownload
⏹️ ▶️ John and if the network is wonky or if iTunes is wonky, it’ll spin for a while and I would rather just have it play.
⏹️ ▶️ John It would be great if I could actually pin movies to the thing and say just keep it on here, but anyway. So I’m getting this,
⏹️ ▶️ John we do have to move on, But two quick questions for the people out there listening. Does this have a fan? I asked people, no one told
⏹️ ▶️ John me. It has holes in the bottom of it. The other one didn’t have, but those could just be for passive cooling. I have no idea. I would love to
⏹️ ▶️ John know if this thing has a fan in it. If it does, I suspect it’ll be as quiet as the one in the tower
⏹️ ▶️ John airport base station, which is so quiet I literally cannot hear it unless I put my ear up to it. I’m just curious
⏹️ ▶️ John if it has a fan. Probably not, because it’s the same chip as an iPad, and this is bigger than an iPad, but who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then the other question is, Does this do 24 frames per second cadence? Can it show 24
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second video where it shows each of the 24 frames for the same amount of time? Which is what you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do to show a movie shot in 24 frames per second without screwing it up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John no Apple TV that has existed before could do this, except for maybe the one that ran Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X Tiger. That could probably do it. I forget, I don’t know what the video output was like on it. But anyway, none of the little
⏹️ ▶️ John black pucks can show 24 frames per second video showing each of the frames for an equal amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this one can either. I asked a bunch of people, I got no answer. So next week, Apple people who work on Apple TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me, 24 frames per second cadence, and is there a fan?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you said both of you guys are gonna be getting one? Yep. Yeah. Even though, do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, both of you have 4K TVs or neither of you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t. I do, and I’m getting it for that reason, but I’m also really interested to see how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fast that new CPU is. The current Apple TV is kind of inexplicably slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during some common interactions that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So any CPU speed improvement would be welcome if that is indeed the bottleneck, if it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of weird software thing. And going from the A, was it the A8 in the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one? Going from that, whatever it is, to the A10X, that’s a pretty big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump. They have really spec’d this new one well. I still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know why it comes in two storage capacities that are $20 different and why the old one is not cheaper, but they have spec’d this one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. So I hope it’s a lot faster. So I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you don’t have a 4K TV, it might be worth it for some people just for that. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the old one didn’t get cheaper, it’s still 150, and this one’s 180,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just get this one for future proofing. Like if you’re buying new today, like if you already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a fourth gen, maybe the upgrade is a bit of an iffy question if you don’t have a 4K TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you’re buying a new one, get the 4K one because it’ll be probably useful for longer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so John, why are you getting it then? Just because it’s better?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s better. It’s faster. Like it’s faster, it’s gonna slot right in. The best
⏹️ ▶️ John thing with the Apple TV with the internal power supply is when I get new ones, I don’t even have to go back in the TV and unplug
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of crap. You just pull it out and plug it right back into all the same cables. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, mine’s still plugged into a PS3 power cable.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what power cables are. It’s just the ones that are attached to the thing. I mean, I don’t recommend people get one. If you have the old one and
⏹️ ▶️ John it works fine for your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t have a 4K TV, there’s no reason to
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m totally gonna get it. And I almost, that’s one of the other reasons I buy the big one is, cause I want Apple to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep improving this product. And by buying the most expensive one, I’m trying to encourage them with my money. Please
⏹️ ▶️ John keep going. Take another shot at it. Try again.
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iPhone 8
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase. Squarespace, make your next move. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so iPhone 8, big changes are glass back with better glass, supposedly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although I feel like we’ve heard that almost every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that should be great for grippability too. Like, if, like the reason that I like the jet black so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the back kind of feels like glass, so it’s very tacky and grippy on my fingers without using a case. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having glass backs on that, that’s a pretty big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I tweeted, it’s jet black but without the scratches because glass is very resistant to scratches compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever the hell the jet black thing is made out of. I don’t know. Some kind of chalkboard material.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, it’s all the benefits of jet black without the downsides. Speaking of,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could look these things up in my past. I’ve got to use the podcast search. But back when the iPhone 4
⏹️ ▶️ John came out and, you know, still my favorite physical iPhone design, front and back looked
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. But now you had a back that could shatter to and then the back shattered
⏹️ ▶️ John is not as big deal as the front shattering, but people didn’t like it. It was cheap to replace the back cheap ish,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because it’s just a piece of glass. But anyway, after two generations of that, the four and the four s
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember talking on some podcast, maybe it was this one had to be this one, or maybe someone was like Apple’s going to come up
⏹️ ▶️ John with a new phone and you can bet it will not have a glass back. And of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco five didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a glass back and neither did the five s and neither the 6, and neither the 6s, and neither the 7,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they found their way back to it because I think they like, I like that design,
⏹️ ▶️ John I love the 4 design with the glass front and back, it just had a couple of downsides. It took them this long, took
⏹️ ▶️ John them like five phones, five whole years, to say can we get the glass back on this
⏹️ ▶️ John phone? And they went through all like the laser welded mesh of copper and steel
⏹️ ▶️ John and blah blah, like they, clearly, like, Like, they wanted to go
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. They went there and they backed off, they regrouped, and they eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John got where they wanted to go again, which is a glass back, because there are so many vendors. Scratch-proof, it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John for grip, you can make it look really pretty. It’s radio transparent-ish, more so than
⏹️ ▶️ John metal, right? You don’t have to have that glass window like the 5’s had on the back for the
⏹️ ▶️ John radios and stuff like that. So this iPhone 8, I was more impressed by the industrial design than I thought it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be, because I had, honestly, I hadn’t been keeping up the iPhone 8 rumors that had all been about the, you know, the edge-to-edge screen
⏹️ ▶️ John one and everything. I thought, yeah, these will just be like the 7s. It’ll be fine. They’ll have faster internals. I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of excited about these because I think the physical design, despite being almost the same dimensions,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s cool. It looks cool in pictures. And I think physical properties wise, it will be
⏹️ ▶️ John a better phone for people than the other phones that were also shaped like this. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John give the 8 a pretty big thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s kind of unfortunate that it’s going to be kind of buried in the news cycle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the most part and in the year and in the attention cycle by the iPhone X because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does look like a pretty good release.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was impressed by it, but of course I was only paying half attention to it because I was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, yeah, okay, whatever, whatever, whatever, get to the iPhone X, get to the iPhone X, get to the iPhone X, except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not. I think you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean X. Oh, no, no, no, I said that deliberately.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John We’ll get there. We’ll get there. We’re getting there. We’re getting there. More
⏹️ ▶️ John good things about this one. So, I mean, we assume this would be the case, but it’s worth reemphasizing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got the same chip as the fancy phone, right? It’s not like it’s got a lesser chip. This is not like, oh, this is last year’s model
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has the A with one, one lower A. It’s got an A10. No, it’s got an A11
⏹️ ▶️ John and the A11 is nuts as usual. Like people posted the benchmark showing it, beating
⏹️ ▶️ John a 13 inch MacBook Pro in like Geekbench benchmarks in both single and multi-core.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, if those are real, by the way, that means that they have now beaten Casey’s computer, which is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, it’s pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you get that in the eight. Like, you don’t have to buy the fancy phone for that. It has wireless charging, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t think it would have for differentiation purposes, but it does have it. And even though
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not ready with its charger thing, I love the fact that they use that Qi charging standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John A friend of mine has that charging thing. He bought wireless, he bought like a wireless charging case for his iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John you put like I figure which phone it was it was like a six or something you put this case in it and it wirelessly charge
⏹️ ▶️ John your iPhone with this standard by like essentially having a case that makes it do the thing and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like oh that’s great but you’re you just bought yourself into a dead end because when Apple comes out with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wireless charging insurance
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna be this cheese
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stuff and when they came
⏹️ ▶️ John on that slide I’m like they did it they they used a someone else’s standard because they recognized
⏹️ ▶️ John that they you know they didn’t have to fight that same battle they did with CarPlay does they get it you know because they’re putting these chargers in cars and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John now and it’s It’s so hard to like, in the same way like the stupid 30 pin iPod port
⏹️ ▶️ John went to every hotel room, and if you are another manufacturer and wanted to get in there, it’s like, sorry, we already picked the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re going to put on our nightstands and it’s this stupid thing. The Qi charger, am I pronouncing
⏹️ ▶️ John it right? Qi? I believe that’s right. The Qi chargers are, I don’t know if they won the market, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen them around in a couple of places. I’ve read reports of them coming in cars or whatever. And so Apple getting on board with
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but also finding a way to like add its own twist and influence the standard to charge multiple devices with that air
⏹️ ▶️ John power thing. All that being on the quote unquote lesser iPhone 8 makes
⏹️ ▶️ John this a pretty darn good phone. Like the only reason people should, you know, the only
⏹️ ▶️ John reason we’re all going to start talking ignoring it is because we’re tech nerds and we care about all the stuff we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about for the iPhone 10. But this is an 8. It’s one bigger than 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks really cool. It has great features. If I had a friend or relative
⏹️ ▶️ John who was looking for a phone, I would not say, oh, just ignore the eight. I would ask them what they’re looking for in a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think a lot of people should get the eight instead of the 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think it will be great for them. What’s the other thing, Mark, you can tell me the camera, they, that did they
⏹️ ▶️ John add optical image stabilization for the zoom didn’t want on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this or only on the 10? No, only on the 10. But it, but I mean, like these are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, so the camera, you know, we’ll see how it is in practice. The specs sounded pretty good. It’s still 12
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megapixel, but you know they said it’s an all-new sensor You know more light better color,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco etc. You know kind of the usual suspects there, which is awesome There’s a whole bunch of like custom silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding things or custom processing steps kind of things that they gave you know fun marketing names Too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that they glossed over like they mentioned that That you know like first of all I think it’s interesting noting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the a11 bionic Like they gave it a name the bionic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John afterwards like
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like the fusion made even less sense but whatever they want to have names they can have their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names. Yeah but anyway so like they have a lot of name for these things now but they also have pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in the in the presentation of a lot of these things that they have custom things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so they mentioned first of all this is a six core chip that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome like that’s and and I have no idea you know what the performance characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this will be but it seems like the answer is going to be fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does seem like there is a more than usual of a focus on power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efficiency gains over straight performance gains, but it seems like they also got straight performance gains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s pretty cool. Again, we’ll see how this does in practice, but I have a feeling it’s going to be kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco awesome. One of the things that caught my attention is that they now say they have an Apple-designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU. And they, so it doesn’t, the specs don’t sound amazing at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. They said in the presentation that it is 30% faster than the A10’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GPU. And for a GPU performance for an iPhone year over year that actually isn’t that amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve had bigger gains before. They also said it can offer the same level of performance as the A10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at half the power as an alternative I guess. So that’s interesting. So again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focus on power efficiency. This is the first Apple designed GPU core in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect based on how they did when they took CPU core design in-house with the iPhone 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they had their first core which is code named Swift inconveniently now it’s very hard to search for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you look at those performance graphs that they used to show but curiously didn’t show this time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it’s had like you know performance of the original iPhone and then like this big like ramp up to performance of today’s iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a pretty noticeable acceleration right after the iPhone 5 that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they took it in house. So taking GPUs in-house as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably a significant long-term and will probably result in pretty impressive gains.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you know they mentioned during the presentation that this is a custom design optimized for Metal 2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Core ML, their APIs. And that’s the kind of thing they can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they take designs in-house and when they can specialize the hardware to their software needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they can do things like analyze every app in the App Store and its performance characteristics and what kind of instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs and what kind of optimization they need and practice. They can do some really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff with some really impressive performance gains when they take Silicon design in-house. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the past and they’re doing more and more of that. So we’re gonna see benefits of that continuing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the road. That’s pretty great.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the GPU thing, we knew this was coming because of the whole imagination lawsuit or whatever thing like
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple had pre-announced. We’re not gonna be using your tech
⏹️ ▶️ John So they kind of telegraphed themselves. But for the speed gain,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems to me, not having seen a floor plan view of this chip, that they spent their dive space and
⏹️ ▶️ John transistors more on the six cores and the neural whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and everything else and less on GPU because GPUs honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John aside from what they said, you know, custom tailoring it to the APIs that know they’re going to get called
⏹️ ▶️ John and making sure it’s efficient for those things and figuring out the right balance of execution units and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John As they as they say, GPUs are embarrassingly parallel, and essentially you can make them as fast as
⏹️ ▶️ John you want with, you know, just die space and power budget,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so the iPads, obviously, they have more pixels to push and they have more die
⏹️ ▶️ John space and more power. And so it’s the iPad GPUs that are the big monsters. Most of the time
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone, you don’t have as many pixels to push around and you just don’t have the die
⏹️ ▶️ John space and the power to, you know, it’s not like, oh, we couldn’t make it. They could have made it 300%
⏹️ ▶️ John faster by just, you know, adding 10 times as many transistors and sucking up 10 times
⏹️ ▶️ John as much power. But like the trade-off they’re picking is four tiny CPU cores, two
⏹️ ▶️ John big ones, the neural thing, the image processor, right? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, I think is like a distant third because as much as people are gonna game on their phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more important for the Apple TV to have a good, powerful GPU for gaming than it is for the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John The phone GPU is, like I said, it’s like tertiary. It’s like primary and secondary
⏹️ ▶️ John is the camera and image processing and the CPU, and I’m not even sure what order those should be in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then third is the GPU. So I wouldn’t worry about it. I think this GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like Swift, where they’re like the CPU, not the language, where it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John their first try and they weren’t that good at it. I think they’re already awesome at it. and this is just a trade-off they made and the correct trade-off
⏹️ ▶️ John for the phone. And we haven’t gotten to the battery life yet of the 10, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, that’s the weird thing about this being the same system on a chip in both of them, as far as we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John aware, like there’s no differences, but the whole neural processing thing for Face ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 8 doesn’t have Face ID, it doesn’t have the depth cameras, it doesn’t have any of that stuff, but I think it’s still got the neural processing
⏹️ ▶️ John thingy in there, otherwise they’re making a custom version of it just for the iPhone 8 that doesn’t have that, or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John support. I don’t know. Anyway, there’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of weirdness there. But I think they’re choosing to spend their transistors where they want. And I think when you see
⏹️ ▶️ John the A11X, you will see the graph
⏹️ ▶️ John continue just as it had before, because they’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room and more power. The 32 gigs is gone. It’s 64. And 128 is gone, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now they all cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s 64, 256. Continuing the theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of price hikes throughout the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John explanation for that is that flash storage costs more money across
⏹️ ▶️ John all their products and it does. Well, I mean, that’s the estimate. They gave it in their earnings call before where they’re not going to be making
⏹️ ▶️ John up BS because they’re held to that, their statements there by the SEC and everything. So they’re basically saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John our component costs have gone up and the rest across the the rest of the industry component costs are gone up and because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the magical capitalism, they pass on that lack of savings to you, the customer. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could have eaten it, but they didn’t. And it explains why everything is more expensive. Why, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the price hikes across the board because all these things include lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of flash storage and especially because they got rid of the 128. So it’s like 64 as entry level, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is acceptable now. Finally, we can forget the days of like 16 top tier devices
⏹️ ▶️ John with entry level. And the fact that it jumps all the way to 56, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as granular as you would want, but I like the fact that it doesn’t top out at 128,
⏹️ ▶️ John which it hasn’t for a few years now. So anyway, that’s typical Apple move. The big, big
⏹️ ▶️ John one costs you tons and tons of money and even more money because of their component prices. What can you do? I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty happy with the storage choices here because honestly, I think 64
⏹️ ▶️ John is good for almost everybody. And if you feel like you want more, you should have the mostest,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that is 256. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t love that they had to randomly increase prices across all their products, including the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, that’s what convinces you that it’s component cost, because that’s not a strategic move. Like, they don’t want to have to do that, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they have to to maintain their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco margins. They’re the only company that, going into the holiday season, increases their prices. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John should look. I mean, if component cost is really our gap for everybody, I think this will hit everybody. Maybe other companies
⏹️ ▶️ John are not in a position where they can, Yeah, you know, but they can pass that right on to the customers
⏹️ ▶️ John and say that they’ll take it but apple is and so they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing it. Yeah, I I’m guessing apple’s hand was not forced here. I’m guessing they’re doing it because they know they
⏹️ ▶️ John can also That’s an important part of we’re gonna go to the iphone 10 in a second but all these price
⏹️ ▶️ John increases like I don’t know what the correct term for this is someone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John economics major who has read anything about it would know like pricey elasticity or whatever like
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom line is like If you charge your customers more, if you increase the price of your product, how
⏹️ ▶️ John much does the demand go down? right and Apple has always been in this weird position,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with its top end most popular products where it’s like a game of chicken against itself It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John if we had a hundred dollars How much fewer of these will we sell and they add a hundred dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John and they sell more of them like? Did we just sell more but we would have sold even more
⏹️ ▶️ John if we hadn’t increased the price? And so they keep running this experiment if we had $50 will anybody mind
⏹️ ▶️ John right and they’re learning for the most part especially on the high end They
⏹️ ▶️ John can keep creeping that price up and people and the Mac Pro is the perfect thing They don’t even ask the
⏹️ ▶️ John question with the Mac Pro like how much can we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco charge this? I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know just like make up a number $10,000 sure ship it like like whatever because they can they absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John can and Towards the top end of the iPhone, especially now that they have this Ferrari of iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John they can just add a couple hundred bucks for that. I mean, they’re already doing it with like, oh, you go up in storage
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s extra hundred bucks. Like they discovered they can do that. We’re gonna add $5 in component prices, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John price of customers is increased by $100. And we’ll keep, we’ll pocket the 95. Like it is a great
⏹️ ▶️ John deal. And so this, you know, the component price, which I totally believe is a real thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John they should have been pretty confident to say, our component prices are going up. We can either take a hit in our margins
⏹️ ▶️ John or we can just increase our prices. And in fact, maybe we can increase our prices more than
⏹️ ▶️ John our component costs increase. So maybe our margins can actually increase. And so they’re gonna try it. And I think they’re right. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John especially, this will not deter customers. And it scares me because I’m like, if they doubled
⏹️ ▶️ John the price of the iPhone, how much would demand, would they sell half as many? Or would they sell like 20% fewer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, it’s scary how, you know, like how they toy with their demand, right? I mean, it’s another way
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep people out of Apple stores. You know, just keep increasing the price of your products. become even more and more premium,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And you know, I don’t think this is a good long-term strategy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they should be cautious because you don’t want to leave a price umbrella, as Tim
⏹️ ▶️ John likes to say, like leave the low end available to everybody else. And it makes people angry, even the
⏹️ ▶️ John people who can afford it, as evidenced by all of us, or Casey and I, anyway, complaining about $10 a month, which
⏹️ ▶️ John we can both afford. So it is a dangerous game, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple is actually right that as the high end of their
⏹️ ▶️ John phones starts to get higher end, as I think it should, because they should be expanding their line,
⏹️ ▶️ John like having more diversity in their line and going for all the different things, they can
⏹️ ▶️ John add lots of money to the price, because they have a product that people want, and it’s really cool, and it’s fancy,
⏹️ ▶️ John and just crank up the price, and sell people $100 case and $130 charging
⏹️ ▶️ John pad, charging pad and just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that’s why they make all the money. They’re not dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John and we are willing to pay for it. So I can’t, unlike the $10 thing, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John mad at the carriers, I can’t even be mad about this because unlike the carriers, Apple has products that people want
⏹️ ▶️ John and I want them and we’re willing to pay for them. And if we can’t pay for them, We will buy the lesser ones because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still pretty cool.
iPhone X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we have one more thing, gentlemen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pretty appropriate use, I feel like. They save it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think they should have retired it. I think it’s fine for them to continue to use it. I think it is an homage, an honor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they do save it for the important ones, and this was an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important one. I agree, I agree. I think it is worth, like they’re allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it if they use it sparingly and appropriately. And so far they have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, I agree. The iPhone 10, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did call X earlier deliberately because I still think it should be called X. I will not call it the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X anymore, but my point earlier was that I was just waiting for this iPhone X to show up, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure enough, we are immediately told, no, no, no, it is not the iPhone X, it is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you wait, were you reading it, were you in the Gruber camp where you thought they were actually gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John pronounce that X is a 10? Or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that X is an X, rather? I thought it was going to be X. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so we saw the strings from the firmware, and that’s the problem with all of us having
⏹️ ▶️ John read it before anyone ever said it, because we all read it in the leak, right? And there’s no pronunciation guide in the leak, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If the first time we had ever experienced this was on stage, I think there would have been a fighting chance, like not a big chance,
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, but a better chance that we would all be saying it internally in our minds
⏹️ ▶️ John as 10. But now, we had like a week or two of saying it in our heads
⏹️ ▶️ John as X and then they come out and say 10. And if I had to bet, I would have bet against Gruber.
⏹️ ▶️ John I spent several years opening all my Mac OS X reviews by saying, and by the way, this is another
⏹️ ▶️ John reminder, the X is pronounced 10. Because no one knew what the hell Mac OS X was, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I had to say, hey, you’re reading your review right up there, there’s an X, I know you’re probably reading this, but just so you know it’s 10. Didn’t work, people
⏹️ ▶️ John still call it X, there’s nothing you can do. Couldn’t stop them from calling it an iTouch, you’re not gonna stop people from calling this
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, yeah, yeah. I will try to do 10. I will never do 10. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, and all kidding aside, I will too. When I was saying it earlier, it was in the mindset of 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minutes earlier in the keynote, I expected to see the iPhone X. But now we know it’s the iPhone X. And if I slip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up from now on, don’t let me tell you it was deliberate because it isn’t. But earlier that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deliberate. You know, like when they released one of the S models, I believe it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 5S, and they gave it a lowercase S, and it just looked like the iPhone 5s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and nobody, like immediately, even in the initial reviews of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone just capitalized the S, because it was really weird without it. So everyone just went against Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wishes, and eventually I think Apple just kind of gave up, and it got normalized everywhere as capital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S. I think this is the kind of thing where I have a feeling a lot of people are going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call this the iPhone X, no matter how Apple says it, this is gonna be the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X to most people, and we’re just gonna have to deal with that. We’re gonna have to be okay with that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how it’s gonna be. Calling it 10, yes, there is that history with Mac OS 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which everybody screwed up, but that was such a smaller scale than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. The iPhone is so much bigger than the Mac ever was or will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most people who are gonna be calling it the iPhone X are probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, see, if the first time you hear the name of it is in an Apple store, the Apple people are all going to say 10, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t even know that it’s an X. If the first time you see it is an ad on TV, maybe you’ll start saying X, but most people
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t reading about this, you know, in reviews like that. So percentage-wise, I think the breakdown will be about the same. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John that the numbers are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger. I mean, most people are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be calling it the new iPhone. Yeah. We had to be reminded by a listener, MT Walker, I had to be reminded
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, that we had a show, episode 172, the title of which was iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ John space, capital X. Do you remember that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey show? No. Remember that discussion? I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey heard it because of Apple. Perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco should click the link in the show notes and hear our very
⏹️ ▶️ John discussion at 58 minutes and 6 seconds into episode 172.
⏹️ ▶️ John We will put the link to this in the show notes. We have a discussion where we jokingly say that the next iPhone should
⏹️ ▶️ John be 10, but it should be an X like a Roman
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numeral. And so here’s the problem with this. If this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the only iPhone released this year, they could plausibly just call next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years 11 and be fine with it or move on. This one does not go to 11. So yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the problem. They have two iPhones that they released that are very similar in many of the specs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of which is called 8 and one of which is called 10. So similar to the Watch Series 1 versus Series 3,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this makes the 8 seem older than it really is. It really makes it hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about these phones. We can’t just say like, oh it’s the 8 family or whatever else. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes there appear to be much more of a a difference than there really is. That also is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco age badly if you start thinking about what might they do in the next couple years for the product naming.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what’s gonna what are gonna be the phones next year? 9 and 11? Or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this naming scheme like this they’re gonna have to like mess up the names again next year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it hurts their message this year of trying to make a lot of people still want to buy the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 8’s because it makes them sound even older than they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why people thought they were they’re all gonna be called 8 but I think Apple’s willing to eat that because most people
⏹️ ▶️ John will shop based on the product not the name. And I think they have a plan in kind of the
⏹️ ▶️ John same way that when they went Mac OS 7.6 and then
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually Mac OS 8 which wasn’t Copeland even though it stole the name and then they did
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS 9 and then they did Mac OS 10 with the Roman numeral
⏹️ ▶️ John and that Roman numeral did not ever change. just went away and now we’re just back to plain old
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS. But we had a Mac OS 10 with names and version numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John and year after year after year of Mac OS 10. Someone being reminded again by someone sent me a link to my
⏹️ ▶️ John five years of OS 10 review at Ars Technica. And I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John starting the reviews with a section saying what is Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS 10. So because people didn’t know what it was, and the pronunciation tips.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I noted that even Steve Jobs had said x instead of 10 on stage
⏹️ ▶️ John like because you know he’s a human being and i also know that he said powerbook instead of macbook because macbook is a gross name
⏹️ ▶️ John and he knows it too but it is a difficult name but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a system that has been proven to work you just don’t increase the number you never go to 11
⏹️ ▶️ John you just you just do the iphone 10 and uh this iphone 10
⏹️ ▶️ John like they didn’t lean on this as much as I thought they would but it is like two
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the eight right it’s they didn’t say oh we skipped the nine and it’s like living in the future and
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth but that’s the message that this is not just one better than the eight it’s two better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the eight it is and the next generation of product they did say this is the in the same way the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air was the future of laptop this is the future of phones and it It seems clear to me
⏹️ ▶️ John that fast forward a couple of years, they’ll all be iPhone X’s. Like they’ll all be
⏹️ ▶️ John like this phone, right? The notch, the edge to edge screen, the physical design, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’re going to change the X or they’ll just drop it entirely in the whole, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what all future phones will look like eventually. Not this year because the 8’s look like the 7’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco On an infinite time scale. No, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John is, no, but pretty, not infinite, like within a couple of years. As these things go down market,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to move this design down market because they said it themselves, this is the future of the phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have a name because it uses a letter and not a number. And because people don’t know how Roman
⏹️ ▶️ John numerals work after a certain point, I don’t think there’s a temptation to go Super Bowl LMVXI.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no temptation to do that. So they either just keep the capital letter
⏹️ ▶️ John X or they just drop it entirely like they did in Mac OS. It’s an extensible naming scheme just
⏹️ ▶️ John about at the time when the numbers are about to get unwieldy on iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes sense. But the other thing to consider, though, is that… One of the weirdnesses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that the line is now bifurcated, that as you think about how the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names scale, don’t assume that the bifurcation of the line into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular phone at the regular prices plus 50 bucks, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new phone that’s $300 more or whatever, that’s gonna keep being there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not gonna sell a phone for $1,200 massively this year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have a huge hit rate with that, and then next year say, let’s make it cheaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no way that’s going to happen. Once they get used to selling phones at these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two different price points and selling a ton of the higher one, they’re not gonna give up that profit in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future, but they’re also not gonna wanna give up the market share of having the slightly less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones also in the lineup at the base level. So they’re going to keep having two lines for
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s not gonna be two lines, they’re all gonna look like that, they’re just gonna be three phones, three sizes. We, not so we, and freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s SNL references everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John that Austin Powers? That was SNL, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Maybe it was Austin Powers, it’s Mike
⏹️ ▶️ John Myers. Mike Myers doing his impression of an Irish
⏹️ ▶️ John gentleman, say. Or no, Scottish, Scottish.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They come with their Scottish.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. Did you know, John, that if it’s not Scottish, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John crap? Yes, I think it’s the same thing. I hope it’s Mike Myers. Might not be any stronger. Anyway, whole point is, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna, the diversification of the iPhone line has not
⏹️ ▶️ John recontracted. They’ve only gone more. We’ve got the SE hanging out down there, which is kinda hanging out where
⏹️ ▶️ John the 5C was, and we got the little phone and the big phone, the six and the six plus,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now we have this kind of in-betweeny size. And price range going down market
⏹️ ▶️ John with the SE, which is now like 350 or something, like the cheapest iPhone that has ever been in terms of just what the price is,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the most expensive one, they’re not gonna give up that range. I’m just saying tech wise, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John What distinguishes the X now is that it’s got the edge-to-edge screen, it’s got the notch, it
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have a home button, like it is a new phone design, and Apple said explicitly, this is the future of the smartphone.
⏹️ ▶️ John So within, I think, a couple of years, two, three years,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole, they’re gonna come a September event and all three or four, depending on how they deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John the SE, all three or four new phones are gonna be notch bearing, edge to edge, non-home
⏹️ ▶️ John button having things. One of them is gonna be 1300 bucks, right? And one of them is gonna be whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the cheapest one here is 400 to 500 or whatever. But that’s what I mean. And
⏹️ ▶️ John once they all start being edge to edge, not on the home button, notch bearing, watchamacusies,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can name them as a family. You can market them as a family. It is a family that spans a range.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will be more cohesive than it is now where they show the family, you’ve got the SE design and then the
⏹️ ▶️ John 6S and 7 and 8, and then you’ve got the 10. It’s a little bit of a motley crew, but we’re in
⏹️ ▶️ John transition. We’re in transition the same way we were when we were transitioning to Retina, when we were transitioning to Touch ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John but things will flow downwards. And I have some confidence that
⏹️ ▶️ John their product line will be much more coherent in a few more years, even if their names aren’t necessarily, because
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s be honest, Apple’s a little bit weird with the names. There’s a possibility for a
⏹️ ▶️ John brighter future for naming, but Apple’s really good at screwing it up, so I don’t put
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anything past
⏹️ ▶️ John people said, this is the new iPhone. One year they’re gonna drop the 10 and just they’re all gonna be the new iPhone and we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna have any way to talk about them. Who knows, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we knew a lot about this phone. We didn’t really acknowledge tonight that there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tremendous leak of the iOS 11 GM specifically for this phone among other things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve- In between the last show and now, the leaks came so fast that we, on our regular weekly schedule, we
⏹️ ▶️ John missed an entire gigantic leak.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we knew a lot of this. We certainly didn’t know everything. We didn’t know that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were gonna call this OLED display Super Retina.
⏹️ ▶️ John Retina. Such important things we didn’t know. on that point of like us not knowing everything, I think we knew the most about this Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John event than I’ve ever known about any Apple event. We had mock-ups of
⏹️ ▶️ John this phone that are indistinguishable on video from the actual real thing, probably down to the millimeter perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We knew so much about the software from the software leak, which has never happened before. Now that I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, I think a little bit about what would have been like in the era when people didn’t pay attention
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple and Apple didn’t accidentally leak things. And we saw this iPhone intro and the eight came
⏹️ ▶️ John out and we’re like, oh, the eights are okay, they’re pretty good. And then out of nowhere came this one more thing and it was this phone. We
⏹️ ▶️ John would have, this show would have been 900 hours long just about the 10. But luckily we had
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco months. We’ve had months of talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John this. We were talking about the phone and every single thing was, even the leak, even the late breaking German leak
⏹️ ▶️ John about the swipe up for home button and all that stuff, even though it was phrased in kind of a wishy-washy way, it’s pretty much on the money.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what was there, right? Yeah. So we knew so much. This is the new high watermark
⏹️ ▶️ John for how much can you know about an Apple event before it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, we knew the Apple TV 4K deals. We knew, we had a picture of the watch over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey from the software. Yep, yep. We had the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture of the red dot with the LTE watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? We had the cute Face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID face. Yeah. Oh God, it was, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know. So this, I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it’s a shame and Apple will work on it. But honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really fighting against the tide here. Like, for products this popular,
⏹️ ▶️ John For a company, for so many people who are so motivated to find out this information,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a really Herculean task to keep anything secret. So that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John we should all concentrate entirely on the Mac Pro, which no one will care enough about to leak and we will all be totally
⏹️ ▶️ John Once again, the Mac Pro wins. Anyway, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but you’re gone, Casey, back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the phone. I just want to contest the narrative that we didn’t know much about this. We knew the most
⏹️ ▶️ John we have ever known.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, it was somewhat disappointing in that regard because we did know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much, but there were certainly some things that we didn’t know. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so they pitched the Super Retina displays being brighter with wide color and better color accuracy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth. Still is 3D Touch. A lot of people I saw on Twitter anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking, wait, what happened to 3D Touch? They never really talked about it. I’m actually looking at the keynote right now and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco slide that says 3D Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they said it’s now built into the display. I guess that’s just like a you know a construction detail But where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is mechanically, but yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t quite understand that part, but anyway. It’s still there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yep, so now Before we get into face ID, which we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey momentarily the home button is indeed gone There’s been a lot of back and forth as to whether or not the home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button would be gone It is gone well I guess not ever after the leak but until the leak there was a lot of back and forth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the home button To get back to the home screen, to get back to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Springboard, you just swipe up from the bottom. There’s a little, not notch, a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grabber handle, if you will, not a physical one, mind you, a software one, at the bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen, generally speaking, that you grab and slide up. I noticed that when,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was an iOS 11 beta, they got rid of the force press on the left edge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the screen to multitask. And I saw a few people who were really worked up about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And now, as it turns out, you just swipe, not even force press, I don’t believe, but just swipe the little,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, the little knuckle at the bottom that represents the like home grabby
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, what is the right term for this? I’m failing all over the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place. Like a drag handle. It’s called a gripper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey It’s not a question of where he grips it. Drag indicator,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a dragon, whatever a gripper, let’s go with gripper. So if you swipe laterally on the gripper, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe between apps. Uh, if you go halfway up, you can get into multitasking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you go the whole way up, like I said, you’re going back home, uh, to get to notification center versus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a control center. It depends on where you’re swiping from the top, which I’m not a tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fan of. I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco going to be the best. Honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the swiping from the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that sounds like they’re so, so yeah. Yeah, so they you basically like so now the top has those two ears
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the each side of the notch. You basically pulled down on the left ear for notification center. No, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You pull down the right ear for control
⏹️ ▶️ John center. The right ear is control center. Everything else is notifications, including
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle. So if you pull down from the middle like you normally do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But so basically this now puts control center in the hardest to reach corner of the phone if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold your phone in your left hand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, this is bad. This is totally bad for people, for lefties. I totally admit that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, I mean, it’s bad for everybody because reaching the top corners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already hard for almost
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody. The way, the way I hold, the way I hold my phone, I think, I don’t know, I’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ John to see. This is the thing about the phone. We can all speculate on what it’s going to be like, but as everyone who’s designing software
⏹️ ▶️ John for it has said, it’s really difficult to do anything until you physically get one of these in your hand. I have to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John I was super doubtful, cautious, worried about based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor, but seeing them use the home swipey thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I started to believe I started to believe two things. One, that the home swipey thing
⏹️ ▶️ John could be a thing I can get used to. I’m not sure about control center, I will have to like I’m holding my phone now trying to see
⏹️ ▶️ John can I get to that corner? Is it going to be I don’t know. I’m not quite sure what the deal is there. But Apple has some options. But the home swipey
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, certainly that is something that we’re going to use all the time and I feel like that’s gonna be pulled off and the second thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this phone the iPhone 10 and the presentation of it worked its magic on me at least
⏹️ ▶️ John to the point where I even just started thinking about my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John which has a section of the bottom which is not a screen and the only thing in that is a giant circle
⏹️ ▶️ John that I press to do something and it seems barbaric
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s a section
⏹️ ▶️ John of like that that is just like this blank area of my phone with a button on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if it’s not like a button that moves anymore, it is still like a button. It’s like, what is that? It’s like when you
⏹️ ▶️ John had to connect the track balls to PC laptops on the side with those little hooks, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs had track balls built in where the track pad is now, like underneath the keyboard. And PCs, laptops
⏹️ ▶️ John were then made where the entire bottom part was keyboard from front to back. So they had no place to put a track pad so you
⏹️ ▶️ John could clip it on the side. And now I look at my phone, I’m like, this has this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John dead area appended to it where we have to put like a physical button that’s like steam
⏹️ ▶️ John powered or something. And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco barbaric when
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole thing should be screened. And I don’t know, maybe the screen will be terrible. Maybe I’ll hate the gestures.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I’ll long for the button. Setting aside face ID just in terms of like what it’s like to go back home or
⏹️ ▶️ John to activate multi-tasking or whatever. But I came away from that keynote
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty big believer in the correctness of the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John front of the phone being a screen and believing that
⏹️ ▶️ John pull up from the bottom or some kind of thing that is like i dedicate an entire edge of the screen to
⏹️ ▶️ John important common actions is better and requires less precision
⏹️ ▶️ John than finding that little button again setting aside touch id setting aside face id just the part of like i’m using
⏹️ ▶️ John the home button to go home and do all the other stuff uh i i was pretty convinced i i went into
⏹️ ▶️ John this being skeptical that if i was going to buy a phone which I’m not this year, whether or not I would get the fancy edge to edge one. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I came out of it saying if I was buying a phone this year, 100% I would get that one because I just I need to try that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I am now optimistic that that they’re right about that they’re right about
⏹️ ▶️ John this future that they’re right about the fact that all screen is the way to go. And we will look back on these phones that had these dead
⏹️ ▶️ John sections above and below that weren’t screen and then they’ll seem messed up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now for the record, I am all in on the swipe up home gesture thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s going to be great. I really honestly do. I think that’s going to be way more convenient and it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very natural, very fast. What I just don’t entirely love is having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be more precise to get to notification center versus command or control center. And it may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up that it’s no big deal at all, but I use control center constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I use notification center frequently. And so I’m a little worried,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, not having tried it, that that’s going to be a a little bit frustrating, but I am totally with you that I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in on the all-screen front. I am all in on the no home button. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right there with you on that. Marco, what do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m basically with you, Casey. The swipe home button thing sounds totally fine. That seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensible to me. If you’re going to get rid of the home button, that seems like a pretty okay way to handle it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Having to pull down on the right ear to get to control center, I think that’s a very hard place to reach,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter which hand you’re holding your phone in, especially because this phone is now taller than the 7, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s going to be a problem for a lot of people. Also keep in mind when you’re making size comparisons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I’ll get to in a minute, I have a lot to say about this about the screen, but keep in mind that now because you aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having that top and bottom chin, if you’re thinking about whether certain parts of the screen are going to be reachable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you, keep in mind that you’re actually going to have to reach higher on this one because you’re reaching into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the area that used to be the earpiece bar, you know, like the forehead area. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be a hard place to reach. Maybe one way to solve this, I haven’t played with the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the simulator yet, so maybe they can do this, maybe there’s some reason why they can’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a shortcut to Control Center could be if you do the home gesture swipe up when you’re already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the home screen, maybe you can open up Control Center. I know that’s not perfect, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to pull down from that right ear area, that seems like it’s going to be really hard to reach for something that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only frequently use, but frequently use when they’re one handed. So that’s that that seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that needs to be fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the iPad, remember they on iOS 11, they do the thing where you pull it from the bottom and the dock appears but if you keep
⏹️ ▶️ John pulling control spender appears they kind of did the same thing on the phone. But now now it’s like if you pull it part
⏹️ ▶️ John way you get multitasking and if you keep pulling its home, I feel like they have some options if reachability turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a concern. But the main thing I thought was really clever about control center is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is one instance where they made, you know, got some lemons, which is the notch, which I’ll talk about a
⏹️ ▶️ John bit later. And they made lemonade was like, well, we do have this notch here. And it conveniently physically
⏹️ ▶️ John and prominently divides that bar into sections that are clearly understandable. Like, if imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John the status bar, we’re just straight across on top of the screen was flat, this kind of thing where it’s like, well, you have to know that if you swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John down on like the right ish third of the of the the single continuous thing that it does
⏹️ ▶️ John a different thing than if you swipe down on the other two thirds, but because the notch is there, it gives them
⏹️ ▶️ John like essentially a button, like a physically outlined thing that says this place is different than
⏹️ ▶️ John the other place. And people can be forgiven for thinking that it’s right ear versus left ear, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really right ear versus anything else in the entire bar is notifications, which lets people continue their muscle
⏹️ ▶️ John memory of swipe from the top. And you’re right, Marco, that the top is top of your than it used to be. So we’ll see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that still works because I don’t know how many, I mean, I pull notification down from the center middle of my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you continue to do that, it will keep working. And since I can reach the center middle of my phone to get notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel I can probably get to the ear. I guess we’ll all find out. But they do have,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have options because it is all screen. They’ve got a bunch of multiple edges. They could even somehow work it into the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom. Give them some time to work it out. But I’m, I’m mostly optimistic about how this
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to work, especially for, you know, for poor people with a giant plus. Like I hope this phone brings
⏹️ ▶️ John people down from the ledge that is the plus. It says, look, you can get not as many pixels, but
⏹️ ▶️ John more. How do you feel about
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this? Is it better?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, maybe it won’t work. People like their giant phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and so on that part though, like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, hold on, really quickly. Do you feel like this is going to be difficult for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more novice users? And maybe the answer is no, novice users don’t even really know what Control Center is or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Notification Center for that matter. But I don’t know, it’s just, one of the things that I think was so great about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPhone was that you always had a physical button to press
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you needed to get out of jail, like you needed a parachute, maybe is a better analogy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve noticed on Aaron’s car, just bear with me, on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Aaron’s car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a touchscreen, there are occasions, or certainly when we first got it, especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were occasions when we got in some screen, somewhere in the navigation, and I was like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no idea where I am. And it was nice to be able to find, I could see this physical button
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I could just mash down on and I went back home. I’m probably,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, I’m probably overblowing the issue here. And well, I don’t even know that it’s an issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I wonder, I can’t help, but wonder if this is going to be difficult. So say you’re like 70 or 80
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year old, you know, grandparents who maybe is just now getting a, a, an iPhone for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very first time, like you need to explain to them. Well, if you want to go home, you need to swipe up, but don’t, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe up only an inch or so, because then you go into multitasking, you need to swipe all the way up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where do you swipe from? Well, just from the bottom. Well, where on the bottom, just from the bottom, you know what I mean? Like, I feel like this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it’s it’s the, the home button was already so overloaded where single tap does this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except when it doesn’t double tap does that except when it doesn’t double double touch, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not tap is something else entirely, which by the way, is going away. Uh, it, it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just seems like there’s a lot here and I’m a little worried that for not us, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be a little more challenging. But am I just being a big
⏹️ ▶️ John baby? Now, Apple’s doing the thing. Apple’s doing something that I think is smart, where they have
⏹️ ▶️ John been shedding the previous conventions as the bulk of their user base
⏹️ ▶️ John has become more sophisticated because they grew up with phones or have used a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of them. So in the same way they got rid of slide to unlock, and like, oh, now there’s not an obvious thing with the giant
⏹️ ▶️ John animated arrow saying slide here, dummy to unlock your phone now the whole screens thing but how people tell
⏹️ ▶️ John can they see that subtle symbol people figured it out like I’m mostly convinced of the
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact this will be successful by seeing people in the wider world use Android phones
⏹️ ▶️ John which very often have basically soft buttons like buttons that don’t press in but they’re just symbols
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can press which are pretty awful I think because there’s not even any sort of good haptic feedback in a lot of cases
⏹️ ▶️ John and lots of swipy gestures and I see people navigating these things with no problem. They’re just basically a minefield
⏹️ ▶️ John of touch sensitive icons and back buttons and home things and swipe gestures that are
⏹️ ▶️ John all different from phone to phone depending on what carrier crapware is on there and what version of Android you’re using. A
⏹️ ▶️ John huge variety of fairly complicated swipes and you’re right about it being difficult more difficult action than pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John a button and that is a problem but for the bulk of the market I think the market has become more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re spending more time with phones and appropriately phone vendors are
⏹️ ▶️ John shedding the affordances that were required in the past to let people understand how the hell you use a phone that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have a physical keyboard and doesn’t have physical buttons it doesn’t have number keys that becomes less and less necessary
⏹️ ▶️ John and so I you know Apple is mostly catching up with the Android world in
⏹️ ▶️ John terms of how featureless and swipy the front of the phone is and
⏹️ ▶️ John net net I think it’s it’s it’s the right thing to do. It would be good if they could come up with some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John better, more comfortable, safer system for people who have difficulty with swipe gestures, which includes
⏹️ ▶️ John me a lot of the time. But I think I think it’s I think it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John in the right direction. I think this is the step by step progression is the right thing to do. Did they overstep
⏹️ ▶️ John this time by a little bit? I think it may just be in the details like Marco was saying, like, Okay, well, maybe the idea is right,
⏹️ ▶️ John all screen is right. But you have to rejigger things to figure out what’s reachable and what’s commonly
⏹️ ▶️ John used and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Marco, tell us about the screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright, so we have kind of jumped through a million hoops with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone X in order to get this edge-to-edge screen. And the reason we wanted an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge-to-edge screen, with asterisks on some of that, but the reason we wanted that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we wanted to fit a bigger screen into a smaller phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you look at how big the screen is versus how big the phone is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you consider the amount of space you’re now losing in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big screen to things like the new status ears and the home indicator and the margins around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things, the gain I think is less compelling than I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted it to be. The important thing to realize, and I think this is going to bite a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus fans, I think a lot of Plus fans are going to upgrade this phone thinking that it’s going to give them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Plus-sized screen in a smaller phone. But it isn’t that much smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the screen is not Plus-sized, at least not the way you might think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the iPhone 6, 7, and 8 screens are 375 points wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So is the X. Sorry, 10.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Plus is 414. So that’s 375 versus 414 in width. The iPhone X is the same width.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We did not gain any width, which means things like if you’re scrolling, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Instagram or any kind of photo stream thing, your photos aren’t going to be any bigger. You’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to fit more than one on screen maybe, but it’s going to be the same width as the small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones have been. That also means the keyboard is presumably going to be the same width.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re one of the people like me who found it more comfortable to type on the Plus, you won’t get that here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the iPhone X. It is the same width as the 6, 7, and 8. The height
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is substantially bigger than the Plus. So the height of the 6, 7, and 8 is 667,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and these are all points, not pixels. The Plus is 736, and the X is 812. That is awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re going to have much taller lists. However, you’re also losing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some height due to the home indicator, the drag indicator thing, due to the margin around it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco due to the now taller status ears slash status bar. So if you actually consider, if you run the numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you see the size of what I would call the application content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area, if you assume an application that includes displaying the status bar on all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones, then how big is the area between the status bar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and either the bottom of the screen or in the case of the iPhone X where you can go before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hit the home indicator. And so basically how much area does an app have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its content. And the difference there is pretty small. So again we’re the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco width between the old 6, 7, and 8 and the iPhone X. The height though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is 647 for the smaller screens, 716 for a plus, and 734 for the X.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is the tallest, it’s taller than the Plus in usable area, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not by that much. So what you’re basically getting is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same width for sure as the smaller screen phones, a little bit taller usable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area than the Plus phones in a phone that is bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the small phones, but smaller than a Plus. And in order
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get that, we had to change and give up a lot. We had to lose Touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had to engineer this entire Face ID system, we had to change the way apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the screen. Developers have tons of design changes to do. Also now those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corners are now very rounded, so we have to stay away from the corners or design around that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have to design around the notch, and we have to use the ears and scroll content weirdly around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. screen things have a lot of work to do to either avoid the notch or go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around in a way that doesn’t look weird or suck. This has been a lot of work and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of effort and the phone and for the people who use the small phones like me the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone is getting larger for a screen that is not wider at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is pretty tall which is nice but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know is that good enough for all it like all the sacrifices that had to be made,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the workarounds, all the hacks, all the UI changes, and all the developer effort that’s going to be required,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both in Apple and outside, to accommodate all this craziness in this new phone. Is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that worth a screen that isn’t any wider and is just
⏹️ ▶️ John taller? So I don’t know if this size is the right set of compromises, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John design, all screen gesture blah blah blah, like I said, I am optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John that this design will actually in the end to be a better overall design. And when there’s an entire family
⏹️ ▶️ John of phones, including the big one and the smaller one that are all like this with the years, then
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s less pressure on this one phone to be the right trade off. Would you know, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, change UI paradigm and all these sacrifices for not that much more screen. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you make something the size of a plus with edge to edge screen. That’s there’s way more
⏹️ ▶️ John screen there, right? Because you’re getting rid of a very large chin and forehead on that phone because they’re just so darn
⏹️ ▶️ John big, you know, comparatively and yet diminishing returns as you go smaller because the chin and forehead are
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller on the smaller phones. This may be not a great compromise, especially if
⏹️ ▶️ John the width is the same, but the phone is actually wider, which I believe is the case. So the phone is physically wider, but the screen has the same number
⏹️ ▶️ John of points on it. Then again, it could be that just like, what’s the, is this a 3X? This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the thing that wasn’t clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. Yes, and to give them full credit, it is a true 3X. The Plus never has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been true 3X. The plus has been 3X pixels rendered down to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1080p panel. And this actually is real 3X. So it is 458 dots per inch instead of 401.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s going to look incredible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OLED has benefits too. Like OLED’s gonna have better contrast and everything. So it is going to look incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I just, I can’t believe we didn’t gain any width by making the phone bigger and going
⏹️ ▶️ John If you made something 100 points wide and you measured it with a ruler, is
⏹️ ▶️ John it wider on this phone than it is on the 6-7?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think so, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. The other important aspect of making a phone that is physically larger
⏹️ ▶️ John while the number of points is the same is that things are bigger for people with poor vision,
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly anyway. And I know you have the zooming and all the text sizing and stuff like that. Anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John am less concerned with whether this exact size is the right compromise,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I truly believe that this design will spread across all of them. And once it does, this problem goes away. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John then you don’t have to worry about, like, first of all, I think the changes and the sacrifices,
⏹️ ▶️ John plus or minus the notch, which I will still get to, are worth it if this is a better way to interact
⏹️ ▶️ John with phones than having dedicated buttons on it. If face ID is actually better than touch ID, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John overall, despite, you know, the edge cases where one might be the other. If
⏹️ ▶️ John arbitrarily swiping from the bottom is better than having to find home button in the middle, like if all this turns out to be true,
⏹️ ▶️ John then I’m, you know, I think it’ll all come out in the wash because they’re not gonna just make one size of this
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And I would assume that they, that they
⏹️ ▶️ John have some experience with sizes now. They could have made this phone any size, right? They could have, they could have chosen
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it wider or shorter or taller. And this is what they came up with. and I’m hoping
⏹️ ▶️ John that the size is a reasonable compromise. I think they did a good job with the seven, the six size, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it is a pretty good compromise when you have more screen, but it’s not as big as the Plus. The Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ John of course, is ridiculous, but that’s what people want. So they want a ridiculous phone and they got one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think I’m less worried than you, Marco, but even if this one is
⏹️ ▶️ John the wrong size for people, give them a couple of years. I hope they’ll work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, I would be, I would caution people who really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the Plus, this might not be the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Oh no, this is not, for Plus lovers who absolutely need the Plus, like that’s why I’m telling my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife to get it, even though she is a Plus lover, I’m gonna have to talk to her about the fact, like you realize
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s gonna be less stuff on the screen. Like it’s a smaller phone and it’s not gonna look like
⏹️ ▶️ John your Plus does. It’s not gonna have all that stuff on it. So, but yeah, if you love the Plus, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably not the phone for you because it’s just it’s going to feel like using a big seven, a tall
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Because that’s what it is. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to get all that all that extra room, which, like I said, I think is fine because I’m I know that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant monster aircraft carrier version of this phone coming in a year
⏹️ ▶️ John or two or three. And so the plus people will have their day and they’ll have so much damn
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, they won’t know what to do with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it can be called the 10L.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll come with a stylus. It’ll be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I agree with Marco, though. I think it’s going to be very interesting and very funny to watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many of our mutual friends who swore up and down, oh, it’s plus club or nothing, plus club
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or nothing. And I think they’re going to have some really conflicting thoughts and some really uncomfortable
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. They’ll have to get it so they can talk about it on their tech podcasts, right? But I think there will be grumbly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there will be lots of this. I bet a lot of them
⏹️ ▶️ John will say, I wouldn’t buy this phone if it wasn’t for the fact that I need to be
⏹️ ▶️ John informed about it and talk about it and like, you know what I mean? Like that they’re taking one for the team
⏹️ ▶️ John because they have to, right? And you know, some of them will just buy three phones and just use that one to
⏹️ ▶️ John play with or whatever. Um, God, we’re going long. So I, on the notch,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I have a little bit, there’s probably way more that we can say about the notch and maybe we’ll save something
⏹️ ▶️ John for a future episode. But the one thing I want to say about the notch is this is my time to say exactly the same thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John I alluded to earlier about the LTE on the watch. The
⏹️ ▶️ John notch, Apple doesn’t want the notch. The notch is there because it has to be
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the job done. Apple wants nothing more than to make this exact phone with no notch
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. Apple is going to do everything that it possibly can over the next five years or so to get rid of that damn notch
⏹️ ▶️ John so this screen can go edge to edge, right? They are doing the sort of hang a lantern on it thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John we had to do this notch thing. We couldn’t figure out a way not to have it. So we have to embrace it. We
⏹️ ▶️ John have to say we’re not trying to hide the notch. We acknowledge that it’s there. We’re going to do all sorts of things and incorporate it
⏹️ ▶️ John into the UI and make it an aesthetic and super totally embrace the notch in the ways we’ll all discuss
⏹️ ▶️ John here. But Apple make no mistake. Apple wants to get rid of that notch. They want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John top to bottom, left to right edge. Johnny Ive wants to not retire or die before he can do that. He
⏹️ ▶️ John might not make it, but they don’t want that notch there. So the clock begins now and Apple’s teams
⏹️ ▶️ John working two or three phones out are already trying to figure out how the hell they can get rid of that notch. So
⏹️ ▶️ John people may hate the notch and hate all the stupid compromises that it requires for software and it’s gonna be painful
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s gonna be annoying and it’ll have varying degrees of ridiculousness
⏹️ ▶️ John but I am very very confident this is not a thing that Apple did not set out to make a phone with a notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is just what they had to do and I think it’s the right trade. I don’t think they should have waited
⏹️ ▶️ John until they they could have done this film without a notch to do it. I think they should do it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether they should have embraced the notch as much as they did is arguable, but I remain confident
⏹️ ▶️ John that we will have top to bottom edge to edge screens, probably from Android makers first, but eventually also from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m still bummed about embrace the notch. Like, I haven’t seen it, I haven’t held it, I haven’t played
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it, but it just, I don’t know. From everything I’ve seen when people have mocked up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, you know, kind of hide the notch approach where the where the top bar adjacent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the notch is just black. It’s still to me looks better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But ask me again. And well, I was gonna say in a month, but I won’t have one in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John month. But as a nice
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is, the humor interface guidelines, which many people are quoting from the section says do
⏹️ ▶️ John not attempt to hide the devices rounded corners, sensor housing, sensor housing, it’s not a notch or indicator for
⏹️ ▶️ John accessing the home button, like do not they’re telling you don’t try it, you must embrace that. But guess what? app developers can
⏹️ ▶️ John do whatever the hell they want. So I think it’ll be interesting to see how people decide to do that. Do they follow the Apple advice
⏹️ ▶️ John and say totally embrace the notch? Or do they decide to make the status bar black and not embrace the notch?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing like I have a pretty big problem with my now playing screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, but it’s all it’s all programmer addressable. There’s no trickery
⏹️ ▶️ John to make it seem like the screen smaller than it is like applications, it seems have the
⏹️ ▶️ John ability to draw pretty much anywhere on the screen. I’m not sure if they can draw over the little home indicator
⏹️ ▶️ John under the home indicator thing. But lots of the by the way, Apple reads a tons of sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John WWC videos, not a WWDC of how to do this. They’re all about like, here’s your margins and your safe area
⏹️ ▶️ John and stay away from the rounded corners, all within sets. And with the idea that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t watched these videos yet. But looking at the diagrams, I’m thinking, oh, that means developers have to program
⏹️ ▶️ John all these insets in which is work for them. But it also means that they don’t do that, like on the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ John they could draw right to the edge and look stupid, right? And have it be on the watch the opposite resource
⏹️ ▶️ John to draw the edge. Anyway, they could draw right up against these rounded corners and look bad. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe during the keynote, or one of the commercials, I think it was during the keynote video, they showed that AR game
⏹️ ▶️ John that they were doing a demo from it was like, I think it was like a commercial with the air thing. And one of the status indicators
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen in the AR game was clipped by the notch because it was too far to the left
⏹️ ▶️ John outside the safe area it was a circle it was like the flat tire Android phone speaking of things
⏹️ ▶️ John with screens cut off it was clipped by the notch because they just hadn’t updated it to move everything over and in fact if they
⏹️ ▶️ John had moved it over I think I just got to shrink those circles right so
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way software developers are going to decide this as much as Apple Apple can tell you what
⏹️ ▶️ John they want everybody to do but if the sort of consensus of software developers
⏹️ ▶️ John is, yeah, we’re not going to brace the notch, then they won’t and it will be fine. I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ John heard sporadic reports from people who use these phones in real life. The impression
⏹️ ▶️ John I get is that the notch is less onerous when using the phone than when watching it on video. I guess where
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes are just drawn to it when using the phone, you’re not looking at that part kind of like Marco’s not looking at the back of his phone that’s all scratched
⏹️ ▶️ John up, right? You kind of looking where the content is and you kind of get over it. But it is a lot of work for
⏹️ ▶️ John developers. And there are lots of awkward slash funny things
⏹️ ▶️ John related to this. One of the two best ones will put these links in the show notes. Ben Packard had
⏹️ ▶️ John an interesting bit where like the scroll bar, you know, when you scroll on iOS, that little line appears to kind of the proportional
⏹️ ▶️ John scroll bar that you can actually grab and scroll, like shows you where you are. With that hiding underneath the notch when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in landscape, lots of fun stuff happens when you’re in landscape, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you’d scroll, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, where’s the scroll thumb? Oh, it’s under the notch and you scroll and you don’t see anything up it popped up on the top and popped up on the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John and the other one was uh voucher stavik did a uh
⏹️ ▶️ John a joke post of look i fixed the notch where he had scrolling going
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco by the notch it’s amazing it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a bunch of names and they’re up against it’s the beatles names and they’re up against the edge of the screen but then when they hit the
⏹️ ▶️ John notch they literally like bump around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it no it landscape the notch is a disaster
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a disaster if you don’t if you don’t embrace it if you just black it off now you just have a screen that is slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John offset. And people are worried about like they kept showing in the presentation here’s video with the notch cut out of it
⏹️ ▶️ John which as many people guessed based on my last complaints about like the slightly rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John corners of QuickTime player years ago pissed me off now this phone has super rounded corners that you have no choice
⏹️ ▶️ John because literally the screen is rounded like there is they’re not just not lighting up those pixels like there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John there forget it and now you’re gonna show video with a notch intruding into it no never but the thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not not only do you not have to do that That’s not even the default when you play video it will play
⏹️ ▶️ John as a rectangle and you will see every part of it It will be inset because it’s got to stay away from the rounded corners,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s got to stay away from the notch But it’s fine and that as far as I’m aware is the
⏹️ ▶️ John default on the built-in video players like in Safari and Apple videos if you double
⏹️ ▶️ John tap it It will zoom to full screen and then you’ll be playing video behind a notch and you’ll be losing all the corners
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you zoom to full screen on an iPhone today, unless your video is exactly the same aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John ratio as your phone, which it probably isn’t, if it’s like a movie or something, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John zoom to full screen, you’re already cutting off sides too. So I’m not that annoyed about the notch
⏹️ ▶️ John and the rounded corners in terms of video playing. I think it will probably be
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, but Apple’s big push to embrace the notch
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of, It’s kind of, I mean, I mentioned Hang a Lantern on it before, which is a narrative device where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John something that doesn’t make sense. I hope I’m getting this right. God, I was waiting a million corrections where something doesn’t make sense in a movie
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know it doesn’t make sense and you don’t want people to saying, oh, I did that scene
⏹️ ▶️ John was messed up because I didn’t, that wasn’t plausible to me. So all you do is you have a character in the movie
⏹️ ▶️ John say out loud what the audience is thinking. So like, you know, we shouldn’t be getting readings like this. They’re impossible,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we are. As soon as you have them say that by hanging a lantern on a thing that the audience knows is impossible,
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly it seems okay because then the people in the movie are acknowledging the thing that you’re all thinking. So
⏹️ ▶️ John by Apple hanging a lantern on the notch, like, we should be able to light up all the pixels on the screen, but there’s this giant thing
⏹️ ▶️ John there, and Apple says that, yeah, there’s a giant thing there, and we’re going to emphasize it. They’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of, you know, they’re making the best of a bad situation because nobody wants the notch, but if there’s going to be a notch,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are embracing it, and they want you to embrace it too. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John is an interesting aesthetic. It kind of reminds me of those little
⏹️ ▶️ John cards from Rolodex’s, which are actually before my time. I’m not actually that old, but like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John little like cards with little notches on them, right? It kind of reminds me of that. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of an interesting aesthetic. It does look a little bit like rabbit ears. It does look a little bit weird in landscape
⏹️ ▶️ John and I feel bad for all the software developers who have to deal with it. But you know, you, you dealt with size
⏹️ ▶️ John classes and going from fixed layouts to auto layout and this is why you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the big bucks, right? Or don’t get them unless you know how to exploit people with free to
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanics. But anyway, I think it will work out, but I am
⏹️ ▶️ John already awaiting the day when the notch goes away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How long do you think that that is away from now? If I had to guess, I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. They might just stick with this because if you look at the problem they’re trying to to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here. They have a whole bunch of sensors and cameras and speakers and stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for these things to work at all, they pretty much need to be facing forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they clearly want the screen to go to the top edge and the bottom edge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So how would they get rid of the notch exactly? Would they somehow just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make those things so small they would fit within the current bezel that’s above the screen?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got it. Like, they’re not very good at making cameras small. Like if you look like they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this giant camera bump in the back because to make a decent camera you need a little bit of size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see how they get, how they retain the super thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bezel around most of the screen area while also fitting those front sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by the way now there’s more of them with Face ID. So while also fitting those front sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into that. I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t see them getting rid of the notch as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long as they have this general borderless design. The only way they can get rid of it is to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically backtrack on part of this design and make something that looks more like the S8, where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just thin top and bottom bezels. So as
⏹️ ▶️ John people have pointed out, this screen’s not really edge to edge. I can see where it doesn’t go to the edge. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big black band. Like there are margins on this thing. And like you said, they could go notchless
⏹️ ▶️ John next year by just putting a very thin forehead on it. They don’t want to, because then they’d feel the need to do a very thin
⏹️ ▶️ John chin as well, and then they’d be giving up on the edge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like- You know what they could put? They could put a home button in a very thin chin, because if it doesn’t need touch ID anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it can be a little skinny button. No, I don’t think they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John back on that. I think they’re all in on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gestures. You’re right, they’re not. But like, if you look at the Galaxy S8, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never said anything nice about an Android phone for good reason. However, that’s a very attractive design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a edge-to-edge screen phone, and that’s a different set of trade-offs. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stuff on the back, like the fingerprint on the back is dumb, but if you look at just the front of the Galaxy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S8 compared to the iPhone X, I have a hard time picking the iPhone X in that comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the iPhone X looks better, but the way you get to the notchless without
⏹️ ▶️ John even the thin forehead is, yeah, like the March of Progress can make some components
⏹️ ▶️ John smaller and other components can be under the screen. Like that’s how you get there. Like create, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, no one would have thought that cameras could be as small as they are now. You can make lesser quality cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John even smaller. Say the one front-facing camera is replaced by seven pinhole-sized cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John dotted along the top and the, you know, the images are combined from that, the company that you have the friend who works
⏹️ ▶️ John for, that light camera thing. Like, we’re not saying this is, you know, technology that’s available now.
⏹️ ▶️ John You couldn’t make a watch with LTE on it when the Apple Watch came out, and you can’t make an Oculus phone like
⏹️ ▶️ John this. but I think you will be able to eventually. There’s nothing about the array
⏹️ ▶️ John of sensors that makes me think they can’t hide them in an edge. It’s somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John around the edge of this phone in the space it’s already provided because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t go all, the Galaxy S8 goes way farther to the edge right and left
⏹️ ▶️ John than this phone does. There is actually room around it. And if they’re willing to compromise
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit, add two more pieces of paper width to the top, right? to wedge things in and get a couple, like at
⏹️ ▶️ John the IR sensor underneath the screen somehow, or the dot spreader underneath,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like, I feel like it will eventually happen, and this design will become viable.
⏹️ ▶️ John You said, you asked me how long, I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ John five years is my best guess. I think it could come sooner. It depends on how much appetite Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John has for it. If they don’t feel pressured to do it, because everyone loves the notch and their whole line is notch-bearing,
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s just like, they’re sailing, and it’s like, why do, you know, we didn’t want the notch, but now that we’ve got it, everybody loves it, and everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John software’s written for it, and why would we even change it? That could delay it just because they don’t want to go for it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think technically plausible in five years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, I couldn’t even wager a guess. I mean, five seems reasonable, but, oy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we are running long. Face ID seems to be mostly what we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected. I think we certainly got a lot more information about the mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind it. I thought it was really fascinating that Schiller had talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how they went and got Hollywood makeup artists or whatever, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prosthetics artists, in order to make these eerily realistic masks that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently employees would put on to try to fool Face ID. It’s apparently considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more secure than Touch ID, which seems weird to me, because any face identification I’ve ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard seen about or seen anything about seemed very easy to defeat, whereas fingerprint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seemed much harder. But I’m sure that’s just because of crummy technology. And if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says it’s better, I’m inclined to believe it’s better.
⏹️ ▶️ John The reason it’s better is because faces are so much bigger. So the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey with fingers is
⏹️ ▶️ John that the feature size down there, like the number of points they could sort of match up on your fingerprint,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the features are so small, there’s not that many things to sort of hang on to. Whereas if you look at the number of dots that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re a little dot sprayer, assuming those diagrams are even remotely accurate. There’s just more data points. So there’s more places where
⏹️ ▶️ John things can vary, uh, than on fingerprints. Plus people’s fingers don’t even fit entirely. Like the sensor doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even cover your whole finger. So you’re just getting like a window snapshot of a finger. So it’s not as if,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, my fingerprint is the same as someone else’s. They got to unlock my phone. No, it’s one tiny little square shape region
⏹️ ▶️ John of your finger. Maybe close enough in the few areas that the touch ID sensor can
⏹️ ▶️ John I identify as distinguishing to a potentially totally different point on someone else’s finger.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I totally believe that because I mean Touch ID makes this you know Oh it unlocks my finger and it’s great and no
⏹️ ▶️ John one else in my family can do it And so it must be perfect because we have this mystique around fingerprints But when it comes down to it It’s a bunch of little
⏹️ ▶️ John ridges and skin and it’s not even that many of them because the sensor is small whereas this thing is Spraying our entire
⏹️ ▶️ John face with tons and tons of data points of you know, not just what it looks like But you know all the depth things
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything like that. I still don’t understand exactly how the masks aren’t able to defeat
⏹️ ▶️ John it But I’ll take their word for it. I mean, there’s obviously, you know some secret sauce in there that
⏹️ ▶️ John can distinguish, I guess, living things from non-living, maybe with heat signatures. I mean, I feel like they didn’t reveal all their secrets
⏹️ ▶️ John here because maybe competitive advantage or whatever, but we’ll find out. I mean, I guarantee people are going to start trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John fake this thing out with masks. So I’m sure someone will do it. As soon as Touch ID came out, people faked it out by lifting
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s fingerprints from cups and using like super glue or rubber cement and stuff and defeating it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll be defeatable. And they did mention like, oh, by the way, your twin is a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t mention this explicitly, but like maybe relatives that look a lot like you might be more of a problem, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, I believe less in this than when I came, you know, as I
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, believing in the idea of the all screen phone with the gestures, like believing that it could be good, still having never touched one of
⏹️ ▶️ John these face ID, they basically said all the things I thought they were going to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have the same attitude about it now, which is, you know, So, show me the unlock. Seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John is believing. I have to try this myself, because I love fast Touch ID so much on my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe, like I said last show, I believe facial recognition can be better than Touch
⏹️ ▶️ John ID for situations where the phone is able to see your face. I’m not entirely convinced that the first gen is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John better than second gen Touch ID in terms of efficiency, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll see. The speed of it is my one big concern. I mean, it’s hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When Touch ID first came out, we all were wary of it as well. So it’s hard to know before we’ve actually had a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use it how good it is or what the problem areas actually are. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I noticed they focus a lot on how it worked, which I thought honestly was a little bit creepy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way it was presented. They’re like spraying dots all over people’s faces and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t think it was explained well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see the tweet that said the new iPhone will mace you if you do a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bad tweet? Yeah, right. She was
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone in this big cone. I think that did them a disservice because it made it look like that you were having an
⏹️ ▶️ John actual spotlight shined in your face. But my understanding is that it doesn’t. I mean, you can’t see I are unless you’re a bat,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it’s not our debate. See, I don’t know. Oh God, any corrections from the
⏹️ ▶️ John people? Anyway, my like some people had video where they could see a flashing sensor, but
⏹️ ▶️ John video cameras often pick up by our yes, they did that our eyes don’t. So I don’t I don’t know what to think of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think I think their demos made it look more onerous than it actually is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So like I, I think it was presented poorly or explain poorly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I noticed that you know they focused on security and how it worked but they never made any speed comparisons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Touch ID and that I suspect that we’re gonna have a problem there. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bet it’s gonna be a little slower. The other thing is they mentioned actually some of my favorite analysis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this event was on back to work this week and they they mentioned there something that I do too which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like Merlin was saying that as he pulls his phone out of his pocket, he has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already hit the home button with his thumb, and so the time the phone is out of his pocket and he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at it, it’s unlocked, I do the same thing. Like, I just kind of automatically unlock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my phone as I’m taking it out of my pocket, so I never have to wait for it to unlock, especially with the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fast Touch ID since the 6S. And I wonder, like, is Face ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to have these little, like, slowed down microscopic interactions that are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to irritate me every single day. Like I don’t know. I hope it’s fast. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really super fast when it looks at you, when it does finally have a view of your face, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this won’t be a problem. But it just seems unlikely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Heard from a couple people, you know the lock animation’s got like a padlock type thing that basically
⏹️ ▶️ John when the top of the padlock twists to show you that it has successfully recognized your face, that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unlocked, that animation, like so many animations, actually lags behind it actually recognizing your face.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m hoping they did the good game development thing where… Alright so it does have to
⏹️ ▶️ John have line of sight on me so forget about the touch ID in the pocket. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you get it out and what I want to be able to do is get it out and as it comes in front of my face I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do the swipe up gesture even though it hasn’t been unlocked yet I’ve starting the swipe up gesture because if you swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John up and it doesn’t unlock it like it brings you to the like please type in your password screen right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I I want to be able to begin the swipe up and if it recognizes me when it’s in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the swipe up or in the middle of doing the animation triggered by the swipe up, abort showing me
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen where I have to enter my passcode and unlock the phone. Like if they can overlap it in that way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will help to hide the latency, right? If instead
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to look at it, notice with your eyeballs that the animation of the padlock
⏹️ ▶️ John going and then begin your swipe, No matter how fast it is, that will be annoying because
⏹️ ▶️ John the unlock animation has non-zero time. You having to look for and recognize it has non-zero time. I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be able to take out, swipe, recognize, open. And that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the best they can do with this because you’re right. They didn’t say it was faster. It probably isn’t faster. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably amazing that it works at all. And it’s an amazing technological feat, but it is also the first generation of this product.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll have to, you know, try it and see. I do love me some Touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like I said before, the idea of this dead area at the bottom of my phone where there’s nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John except for a circular button that’s not really a button anymore does seem like the past in the
⏹️ ▶️ John way that these Apple events always tend to do to you. It does seem old and steampunky,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m willing to believe that it will go away, but we brave pioneers will find out
⏹️ ▶️ John how long it’s gonna take.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One thing that bummed me out is it only allows for one face, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally understand. But one of the things that I really liked about Touch ID was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I asked Erin if she could register one of her thumbs on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my phone so that this way, if for example, I wanted her to respond to a text for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, because maybe I’m like playing with Declan or something like that, and my phone is not in my pocket, I could just say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to her, hey, can you grab my phone and tell Marco and John I’ll be there in five minutes or whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a very, very long passcode on my phone I almost never need to type it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceptionally rare that I need to type my passcode. And it’s something like 10 or 15 or 20 characters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so having Touch ID available to her is really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice for both of us, because sometimes she needs to look at something that maybe only I have, like an email that only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have, or sometimes I want her to respond to a text from me or something like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so she does know my password, but it’s very inconvenient to type.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’d really love to be able to register her face on my phone as well, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a choice that I would make. And not everyone would make that choice, but that’s something I would like to do. And as of right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is only allowable to use face ID with one face. And again, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why. I only have one face. The phone is a personal device.
⏹️ ▶️ John understand why? The explanation other than just, oh, this is a personal device, I’m assuming it has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be storage related. But the reports I heard from the people, it’s like, at launch only one face, which
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me think there’s enough storage for more than one. Obviously, they have more data points, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole evolving of the thing, I can imagine it takes up more storage and touch ID in the secure enclave where they have to keep all this
⏹️ ▶️ John But I just hope hardware wise, there actually is room for more than one. I’ve got fingers on every device in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got all my kids’ devices, my wife’s, everything, mostly for convenience. It’s not like they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep me out of of the stuff, like I know all their passwords, I can get into all the things. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. And, and I had heard rumblings of the same that maybe in the future, it’ll be more than one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am a little bummed right now that it is just one, uh, again, as with earlier, you know, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really a big deal. This is still a phone that is unlocking by looking at my face, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the dark, like things can be a lot worse, but it did bum me out a little bit. Uh, what else about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this? Uh, what else is new
⏹️ ▶️ John face for K sixty Marco wanted it he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got it and all the all of them and they they didn’t quite do a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job, but they did a pretty substantial job in improving the telephoto camera in the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera module, but only for the ten not for the eight plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where now the you know before I basically I said last episode what I wanted was that you know with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the seven adding the dual camera thing to the plus the zoomed in telephoto camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a a narrower aperture so it let in less light and was noisier at night and was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image stabilized which basically made it very hard to ever use that in low light and get a good picture and the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were smart enough to basically not use it in low light and to just zoom in on the wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor that was better. Now the new ones, the aperture difference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is smaller, it’s still there but it’s smaller and they’re both stabilized on the X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s really nice. I do wish the 8 Plus got the same module
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s much reason for it not to have gotten it other than just price and segmentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because there’s probably room for it So I you know like it makes sense why the eight didn’t get it They’re probably not room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it in the enclosure But you know I do wish they would have brought that to the plus as well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the fact that it’s there on the 10. That’s great and and that these now do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all shoot 4k 60 That’s amazing Because again as I mentioned last week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no professional video cameras shoot 4k 60 yet. That’s very rare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have that in anything, let alone a $700
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and up phone is really impressive. And on top of that, the iPhone is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already such an amazing video camera. That’s a pretty big deal. So I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say for most people, for most purposes, the iPhone remains the best video camera in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the world. And this is a giant step forward, even for it. So I’m very impressed with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera on paper. And I hope, in practice, I hope it proves to be as good as it sounds.
⏹️ ▶️ John 240 frames per second slow-mo. I thought that was what the old one did, but I guess I’m mistaken. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ John double what the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one did? I think that did it, but only for 720p. And now it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they’ve upped it to 1080p,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Yeah, all right, so that’s good. But now we get to finally the real reason
⏹️ ▶️ John why people will buy and be happy with this phone, if this is true. Two hours
⏹️ ▶️ John more battery life. It’s what we’ve always wanted. Don’t make the phone thinner, add more battery life. This
⏹️ ▶️ John got a big giant screen on it, an extremely fast, powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John processor, all sorts of cameras and wireless doodads and sensors and
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah blah, and they added two hours of battery life, which is a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ John That reason, I’ll have to see how it measures up to the plus, but the 7 was
⏹️ ▶️ John already pretty good. That is going to feel like a premium experience when people buy
⏹️ ▶️ John this fancy phone for all the money that it’s going to cost and they get this edge to edge screen and it’s a little bit weird and blah blah blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But A, it’s going to be a new phone and new phones always last longer than your old one because your old battery is shot. And B, the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that this actually has more battery life, if that comes out the way it does, that is
⏹️ ▶️ John perhaps the most high end feature that you can give to iPhone users in particular
⏹️ ▶️ John who are used to kind of being starved for battery. So I was very happy about that, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that was one of the few questions we had. Because we may have known the exact milliamp hour size
⏹️ ▶️ John of the battery from leaks. I don’t know if we knew that or not. Even if we did, you never know
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the overall battery life of this very complicated system that involves tons of components going to be. Especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John software is such a big factor in balancing the components. That’s one of the things that can almost never be spoiled for us unless we
⏹️ ▶️ John leak the presentation, which I guess is what will happen next year. We’ll get the keynote slides
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a week in advance. I wish they had video of the rehearsals.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Seriously. That’s a hell of a thing. That made me extremely excited
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that. But not just like, oh, and it’s a little bit better. Two more hours that they put that up on a slide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I hope that translates into real world gains. We will see over time. It is worth pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out that the 8 Plus still claims higher battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if battery life is the most important thing to you, the Plus phone is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still the right move. Also, again, if screen size is the most important to you, Plus phone, still the right move.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, see, I don’t know, this is why, like, once again, in the Apple product line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have made it so that there is no one best choice. Like, this was the case for a while on the iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s definitely the case in the MacBook Pros. Like, there is no one best model here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just depends on which things you prioritize over which other things. fans of the Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should strongly consider getting the next Plus instead of getting the 10. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reality is, you know, all of us who talk on podcasts about these phones and everything, we’re all going to get the 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I do want to mention that the, I think the 8 does as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but doesn’t the 10 get True Tone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, the, at least the 10 does. I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John ones do. Yeah, I think, I think they all get it, which is surprising to me because that means they found a a place to smuggle that sensor
⏹️ ▶️ John on the 8’s. I mean it’s nice, I mean, and although this is my biggest surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing actually was no promotion, which makes very little sense
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Unless there was some kind of battery life thing, because it’s not like they don’t have the
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU grunt to do it, and they’re not moving that many pixels, and there’s plenty of room on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a little bit bigger. I mean it must come down to either component size or costs or
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life because it’s not a technical limitation. So they found room for True Tone for everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder if maybe the OLED panel can’t refresh that fast yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John At least it may
⏹️ ▶️ John be like- People said that, but I don’t see how that’s like, OLED TVs are, you know, refreshing 120
⏹️ ▶️ John easy. Like I think your TV does that already. Like maybe they’re different when it’s smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know. Or maybe like, you know, their particular quality level of OLED panels getting their color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their contrast and their gamut. Like maybe those can’t do 120 yet. And they wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the eight panels do it if the tens panel couldn’t do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So like that could be a
⏹️ ▶️ John reason. I don’t know. I think it most comes down to the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware to drive the panel at that rate and finding room for it and
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially what the power does. But I would love to hear from somebody who knows more about the
⏹️ ▶️ John internal details of how you drive any screen at 120 hertz and how that might
⏹️ ▶️ John affect. Or if someone on the iPhone team just wants to write in and tell us why the hell you don’t have promotion. And
⏹️ ▶️ John especially since the animations on the X in particular, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of more prominent, like when you go back to the home thing of like the application that you just
⏹️ ▶️ John chucked upwards, it like floats back into the icon that it came from and all sorts of scaling things. And all those animations would
⏹️ ▶️ John look better at 120 because they’re short animations. There’s not that many frames. And so they can end
⏹️ ▶️ John up looking stuttery, uh, even if they’re not actually dropping any frames because they’re so
⏹️ ▶️ John fast. So one 20 would definitely help there and give them more sort of fluid experience. But maybe next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m stoked for, uh, for True Tone though, because I don’t have any devices with True Tone and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what little I’ve seen, it looked really, really nice. Not to say promotion isn’t by any stretch, but I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have seen promotion briefly and I thought it was nice and I’m sure if I had time with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, I would start to say, oh no, this is amazing, but I’m really stoked to have True Tone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think I heard it on Upgrade and Jason had mentioned that a lot of times he’s getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the brightness not to the position he wants it just because he’s fighting kind of the ambient light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey situation in the room. And I feel like I suffer from the same problem from time to time for a very loose definition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of suffering. But anyway, I feel like having True Tone is going to be really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice and it’s going to be new for me. So I’m excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. But before you get off True Tone, the best thing I can say about True Tone is that I enable
⏹️ ▶️ John it and I don’t notice that it’s on because that’s how it should work. You shouldn’t notice that it’s making your screen more brown and crap
⏹️ ▶️ John like this horrible flux and night shift things that I hate. I leave it on and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even notice that it’s there. And if I turn it off, like if sometimes I go back and say, what would this
⏹️ ▶️ John look like without True Tone? You see it being like more blue when you’re sitting in your house at night. So True Tone gets a big
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up from me as a quality of life thing for a screen where you’re not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John like color work for like, you know, where you need accurate reproduction of colors where you just
⏹️ ▶️ John want it to like look, look the way it’s supposed to kind of look given the ambient lighting. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I really liked your tone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the stuff that we had talked about up until the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 10, uh, pre-ordering Friday, I think I’d mentioned earlier, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available a week from Friday. This one though, the iPhone X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not going to be pre-orderable for basically a month and a half until the 27th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of October, which is again Friday, and available the following Friday, November 3rd. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal, but that’s a bummer. I want to give Apple just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreasonable amounts of my money sooner than that, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s also, you know, like many Apple launches of late, the official
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day one launch, if you’re very lucky, you might hit that, but I think most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not getting this phone probably before January.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m going to be really
⏹️ ▶️ John bummed. Yeah, that’s fine. I mean, like, we always know this is going to be in, you know, there wasn’t going to be much supply
⏹️ ▶️ John and delay, like it’s, you know, we’ll survive. It’s better than waiting around for the color
⏹️ ▶️ John the gold phones, people getting in line. But you know, that’s, I bet Apple would have liked to have more
⏹️ ▶️ John squarely hit the holiday season but they’re just, you know, like, it’s gonna be January for most
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Sorry. You want one under the tree, just print out a picture of it and put it in a little box
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just sort of cradle it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So any other thoughts? I have one final closing thought, but any other thoughts before
⏹️ ▶️ John then? I didn’t see any battery packs for the 10. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco interesting. No hunchbacks? Yeah, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appears that there aren’t new battery cases. They’re saying that cases for the 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will fit the 8 and similar for the pluses. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine that probably means that the 7 battery case will fit the 8. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no 7 plus battery case, so that rules that out. And yeah, it does appear that there’s not going to be, at least there isn’t yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 10 battery case.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, although they do have a folio case.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. They do have the leather. Although the folio case, I saw this on one with frustration, it had the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They only show it from the back. There’s two pictures on the Apple Store and they’re both from the back. I think that’s just a mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John in the store. But I’m not that I’ll ever buy one of those, but I wanted to see what it looked like. But I was excited to
⏹️ ▶️ John see the leather case for the iPhone X. That’s essentially the same as the leather case that I have now that comes
⏹️ ▶️ John in some interesting colors. And I’m a big fan of that case, so hopefully the new one is just as good. And because the leather case,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s leather case, the existing one and the new one are totally open at the bottom. The one edge where you’re gonna be swiping
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly, you won’t have to be swiping against the edge of a case. Oh, and fast charging on
⏹️ ▶️ John all the new phones. The whole, like, whatever, I don’t know what standard is for the USB fast charging, where you can get a 50% charge in 30 minutes. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was interesting. Setting aside the wireless thing, I think that’s just like a USB fast charging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s USB-C power delivery. And so basically, if you have like one of the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro adapters, or if you have the iPad fast charge adapter. None
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these come stock in the box of any iOS device. But if you happen to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the USB-C to lightning cable, which also doesn’t come stock in the box, and one of these fast charging power bricks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that also doesn’t come stock in the box, and that many of which aren’t even made for these products, then it will charge faster, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a nice thing to have if you need it. I do question why they didn’t just boost up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the power bricks that come with it. But, you know, Apple, what are you gonna do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, yeah, well, they wouldn’t be able to fit it in the boxes. The one they give you is the little tiny nun,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly think not to dress up too much, but I honestly think that one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why the Apple TV remote is so bad and unchanged is because they didn’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make the box bigger. I bet that’s a big reason
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. Yeah, it’s not. It’s not just the box. They don’t want to make the remote bigger. That’s what it comes down to.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They feel like it should
⏹️ ▶️ John be. It should be in scale and it should be elegant and dainty. and they don’t understand that people’s hands
⏹️ ▶️ John are not that big. Yeah. Or not that small, rather. Real-time follow-up, someone in the chatroom did helpfully provide
⏹️ ▶️ John a view of the front of the folio case. I will never buy one of these, but some people like them. And so now there’s one from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John because why wouldn’t they charge you $70 or whatever for a thing to put on your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, some people do. I mean, and there’s a whole bunch of other small stuff from the event that we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have time for. I mean, we didn’t talk about Animoji. We didn’t talk about AirPower or the mats or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. So yeah, I guess that’ll be part of next week’s show. That’ll be like our junk drawer of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two weeks with a follow-up, plus like Animoji and AirPower mats and things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to talk about Animoji other than to say I have received a few
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they are pretty awesome. And I don’t know it’s something that I’m going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using a lot or doing a lot, but they are pretty cool. It is very amusing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we can talk more about it next time.
Ordering plans
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it next week. So, closing thought, Marco, what phone or phones are you going to be buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when will you be doing that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Mignone, CEO Alphabet and Google I mean, because again, because I’m a developer and an Apple commentator,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to get the 10. No question. And that’s probably going to end up being the phone for me overall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am disappointed that the screen isn’t bigger, wider, like that, like I feel like for the size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increase, I and all the trade offs, I would have liked a little bit more width than what I already have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s unfortunate, but it’s probably gonna be great. I’m probably gonna love it. I’m definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to love having that camera system. So I really want it for that, if nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I’m gonna need to do a lot of work on Overcast to make it fit the notch. It’s, basically it ruins my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire UI, is how this works. Like, this ruins everything. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting the phone for that. If I were not a commentator and developer, I honestly might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider the 8 Plus instead. but oh well, maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco end up getting both and putting the 8 Plus as a dedicated Waze machine in my car because Waze is amazing. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m definitely getting the 4K Apple TV and just because, you know, again, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it constantly and I do have a 4K TV and I’m getting the 3G watch, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry, the LTE Watch Series 3. So yeah, overall it’s been a pretty expensive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey event. Yeah, tell me about it. I mean, I’m in for two watches, like I said earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one LTE, one not. I’m going to be getting definitely one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone 10 in 256 space gray, probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one for Aaron too. We haven’t really had time to talk it over yet, but I suspect I will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what color she’ll want and I’ll almost certainly just insist that she gets a 256 there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So between two watches and two phones, no Apple TVs for me, not yet anyway. I’m looking at something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like $3,000 this fall, is truly and utterly preposterous. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’ve ever listened to any one of our ads ever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John then thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it wasn’t for that, I would not be getting probably any of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, John, what’s your situation? You said Tina’s getting a watch and she’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably getting a phone as well and you’re getting just the TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the TV is for the whole family, not just for me. I am not going to live vicariously through my wife who I’m trying to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John to get a 10 so I’ll have one to play with.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But it’s not my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone year, I’m gonna keep using my 7. I like it, I’ll let the rest of the world experiment. I hope she gets a 10 because then I will be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to play with it and see what it’s like without having to actually use it as my phone. Which I’m not sure I’m ready for. If it was my year
⏹️ ▶️ John I would get a 10 though. If it was my phone year I would totally get that because I’m very convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John is the one that I would want to try.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s the one that you want. Hoo hoo hoo.
⏹️ ▶️ John got it. Oh, how’d you get that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco reference? I know some music. Is it her influence? It’s music. I know music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have heard music. You can’t live in the world and not have heard
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco can. Yeah. Thank you if you haven’t heard it. All right. Touche. It always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazes me. All right. Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Backblaze, and Aftershocks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we will see you next time.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to Accidental, tech podcasts so long
Post-show: Bike conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a long show. Yeah I don’t know if we really need much of an after show. I was surprised you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bring up aftershocks when you were talking about riding your bike because that is the ultimate time for aftershocks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open-air. I know well the only problem is that when I’m riding my bike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am terrified so I don’t want to die
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ve been mostly using the aftershocks on the walks and not
⏹️ ▶️ John the bike ride. What are you afraid of on the trail? There’s no cars that are gonna run you over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I’m mostly afraid of just getting myself to the trail, even though it’s quite close to my house.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re on the bike doing it still?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just put in the bike. I could just pause the podcast, drive to the trail, let you know, bike to the trail,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then resume it. I’ll probably start doing that. I haven’t gotten a lot of biking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in. I guess this is our after show now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have finally completed my bike shopping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extravaganza. That’s a lie. That’s a lie you’re telling us and yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm. It turns out I am terrible at buying bikes. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way that I buy everything else, basically, is I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a ton of research, it consumes my mind for like two weeks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and eventually I convince myself to buy the best thing, and I buy it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I’m happy for a while until a better thing comes out. That does not work for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bikes. What I have learned basically is that the correct best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to buy a bike is to go into your local bike shop, drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few things around that you like, and whatever one feels the best to you, buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And that’s it. You should do basically no research. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should learn about almost nothing about the high end of bikes. You should read no online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews because they’re pretty much useless. The way for most people to buy a bike is just that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To do it in the most casual way possible. The way most people buy everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have done such an insane amount of research online,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsing different things, looking at different specs, figuring, okay, I definitely want this kind of thing, I definitely don’t want this kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It got me basically out of nowhere. It got me to a lot of wasted research
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, a lot of consuming mental time. It got me to rule out things that I actually like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not knowing that I was ruling them out. It got me to get myself really dedicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to certain types of bikes that are not right for me, that actually don’t fit my needs, and that I’m not comfortable on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has taken me a long time to finally figure all this out. What I did basically, and a special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you to the people at Budnitz Bicycles, who I basically have been bothering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and asking questions to and arranging like trying to get a loaner to try out or trying to visit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a showroom to try things out for a good three months now. They’ve been very patient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with me and they even did arrange for me to test out one of their bikes in the Hamptons and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore I drove to the Hamptons. They arranged to lend me one of their bikes for free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I could try it and then order my own that you know things I would like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried it. It wasn’t right for me. very, very tolerant of me, very patient with me. Thank you so much to the Budnitz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bikes people. And if you do want a bike of the kind they make, which is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really nice city bike, that’s amazing. Like, they were ridiculously nice. But I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically through all this that what I actually want, what I’m most comfortable on, and what I actually need to ride this trail over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, which is the main way I ride here, is a pretty normal
⏹️ ▶️ John mountain bike. I was gonna hope it was a penny farthing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t know. But like, what I need is a basic mountain bike.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we’ve discovered, and you know, Tiff and I went to a couple of local bike stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We just discovered that we don’t want to buy the thing that all the research tells us to buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We don’t want to get the best possible thing. We just want to get a bike. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we, now Tiff and I each have bought bikes in the last 48 hours.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they say Trek on them in big letters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Close, they almost did. No, mine says specialized in
⏹️ ▶️ John big letters. Yeah, I was close. I was gonna say, one of your requirements is gonna have to give, and I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the one with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, no, that had to, yeah. Once you go into a bike shop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to get something that looks fairly tasteful is incredibly challenging, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the major brand bikes are just outrageous looking. My Mongoose looks awesome, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course it does, yes. Present company excluded. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Tiff and I both landed on, even though they are kind of slow at times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that we both really had a lot of fun on 27 and a half inch plus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco semi-fat tire bikes. So Tiff and I are each now owners of semi-fat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mountain bikes, both at the fairly entry level price points.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mine is literally, this is the actual name of this product, It is called the Specialized Fuse 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fatty Slash 29. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that a comment on the people who buy the bike? Get on the bike, fatty?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I am buying this bike for fitness purposes
⏹️ ▶️ John as one of the- Seems like a counterproductive marketing strategy. This is the bike for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fatty. Yeah, so I put the link here. So yeah, so I have the 6 Fatty 29,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and uh and then tiff has the or bea loki 27
⏹️ ▶️ John mouthful that’s a lot of words for the name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a bike but basically what happened is we tried a few bikes in the store and i tried all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the red ones and tiff tried all the blue ones and she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John picked her favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John blue one that this is a great this is a great
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco shopping strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and i picked my favorite red one and we got pretty good prices on them they’re pretty inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively speaking and they’re not the best bikes in the world, but they make us the happiest. And we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be bike power users for a long time, probably. So I tried really hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do my regular, you know, my regular research heavy thing and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually get the best or at least get like the most sensible. And it turns out that’s just totally the wrong way to buy a bike.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s just so much easier to just go to the shop and find the one that rides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best for you and just
⏹️ ▶️ John buy it. Well, you have so little experience with bikes and bikes are such a large world. Imagine if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John so little experience with computers and computers are such a large world you’d end up buying one based on like specs or something
⏹️ ▶️ John but not realize the importance you placed on the OS and it’s just it’s just too much. But I bet
⏹️ ▶️ John your research strategy would work if you ride bikes ride these bikes for
⏹️ ▶️ John many many years and kind of get a feel for what you like and then it’s time to buy a new bike and then you would be able to do the exhaustive
⏹️ ▶️ John research knowing actually really what you like and what you don’t don’t like the same way you can with cameras because you’ve had a lot of cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can do the 10 hours reading DP review because you’re not going in with no
⏹️ ▶️ John with no foundational knowledge you know whereas bikes it was just like they have two wheels and you sit on them
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there’s a bunch of words that other people’s opinions are basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco informing yours right yeah and and like and online reviews of bikes are all written
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by like pro bike guests and they have very different preferences and needs yeah then what I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a casual recreational
⏹️ ▶️ John rider. Well, because you were shopping for pro bikes that cost like thousands of dollars. So of course, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the reviews are gonna be from pro people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s not gonna be from
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I ride in the trail behind my house and it’s $3,000 bike. Well, and also and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the pro bikes are doing things like complaining about certain component choices and certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bikes and everything. And like, if they say, Oh, this doesn’t have the, you know, SRAM a seven brakes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I don’t even know if that’s good or not. Like, I, I had no concept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what components were good and what weren’t. And there was a large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price range for the different types of bikes people were recommending and that seemed to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular sellers and everything. But what I found when I would go to a bike store and ride
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the really nice ones versus ride the base level ones is that I found that I just, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey fashion, I just didn’t care about the difference. the ones that I found that were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like super fun that just felt right to me were relatively
⏹️ ▶️ John inexpensive. No belt drive, no CVT.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. I tried really hard to find a mountain bike that has a belt drive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of internal gearing option. I found one with a belt drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Spot makes one that has a belt drive but it’s fixed gear only.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found zero that have a belt drive and internal
⏹️ ▶️ John gearing. That’s what I was getting at when you listed belt drive as your requirement. It’s like, you don’t even know.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t even know if this is. You just discover this is a thing that exists, and it seems fancier, so you want it. But there’s a reason the
⏹️ ▶️ John chains are all in use. And it may just be the belts haven’t trickled down from the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco high end yet. But also, this is. That
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like most of the reason. There’s also that chains are a tried and true technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John They are a solved problem. They can make them pretty well. And of all things, you would think mountain
⏹️ ▶️ John bikes would have the internal ones and not have it all be mucked up and everything. but I guess they’re just either not there yet
⏹️ ▶️ John or the sort of chunky reliability of a chain. So I noticed this one doesn’t have a front derailleur. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an innovation in recent decades in mountain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bikes. I mean, I think it’s probably also just because it’s like a lower end model, like it only has 10 speeds, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like you can get, a lot of them seem to have like between eight and 11 speeds that just had a rear derailleur,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, that’s fine for me. In many ways, it’s probably a cultural demand thing. Like I don’t think mountain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bikists want the additional weight of internal gear hubs on the back wheels. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there seems to be a large need for them to be able to do repairs while they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. So things have to be fairly mechanically simple for that to be possible. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a belt and a fancy internal gear hub, they exist. Thank you, I know about roll-off hubs. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist, but it seems like putting them on mountain bikes is nearly unheard of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least is not usually done on bikes that you can buy that are stock configured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way. People seem to customize them sometimes, but that’s about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this is to say, I totally failed at buying a bike, uh, through my usual methods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I did finally just buy one and now I’m done with it. And now I’m going to actually enjoy riding it. Cause you know, a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to burn through a whole fall full of nice weather, not riding a bike is to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to spend all this time going bike shopping. I have spent so much time in my car in the last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like just moving bikes around or renting bikes or transporting myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to and from bike shops that are far away. Like, I have missed out on so much good riding time because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was spending too much time overthinking this
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Sounds rough, driving around to bike stores. Yeah, the struggle is real. Casey and
⏹️ ▶️ John I are at work, just so you know. Beep, beep, beep.