345: Unapologetically Digital
27 Sep 2019Our experiences with Series 5 Apple Watches, iPhones 11 Pro, and… AppleCare.
Episode Description:
- Last chance for September donations to St. Jude
- Analog(ue) #166 (to be released Sunday, 29 September)
- Podcastathon video
- Pre-show: The fine art of literature, and staying young.
- Follow-up:
- AppleCare+ refunds/enrollment details
- iPhone 11 battery/RAM details
- A13 is 🍌 fast
- Casey's iMac Update
- Apple Watch Series 5 impressions
- iPhone 11 Pro impressions
- Post-show: 🐭
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Channels: Stream live TV from inside or outside your house, using software written by people who really care. Get your first month of Channels Plus free.
- Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a $20 credit with code atp2019.
Chapters
- ATP Book Club
- Donate to St. Jude
- privacy.com
- AppleCare & refunds
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
- Caseless Casey Liss 🖼️
- iPhone 11 RAM, battery
- A13 performance
- Bilateral-charging hardware?
- Casey’s iMac
- Sponsor: Channels
- Our Apple Watches 🖼️
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Our iPhones
- Ending theme
- Mice
ATP Book Club
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am back on my iMac. Back and better than, I don’t know. Well, better than the MacBook One.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is true. My poor little adorable six to my left. Sad that it is not the star of the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it fast enough to feel sadness?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a fair question. It’s actually funny. I’m reading a book by the author Blake Crouch, who, if you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all, he did this trilogy Wayward Pines, which was really, really bananas. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve read several of his novels at this point. I’ve come to really, really like all of them. I’m about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey halfway through Recursion, I believe is the name of the novel coincidentally, which is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on-brand. Anyway, yes, it’s called Recursion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of these novels are about what is or is not real
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how do you know what’s real and can you screw up your perception of reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds very negative and dark. It isn’t. They’re fascinating novels. In fact, this was all stemmed by Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking, is the adorable capable of feeling sadness? Is it fast enough to feel sadness? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbeknownst to Marco, that was very on point given I was reading just before the broadcast tonight about whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not reality is really real. Is this real? Is this now? Are you real?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you know that I have such a broad and deep knowledge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of literature, especially, and it’s even deeper than my knowledge on film.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the fine world of literature and film. Naturally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you don’t read novels that often, do you? I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I used to do it more. I keep buying them and I keep starting them. I’m in the middle of like four,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I occasionally-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, slow down. How, you start one and then you pick up another? How are you okay with this, but not okay with Merlin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting and then stopping and then starting a film?
⏹️ ▶️ John Books are different. You can’t, I can’t anyway. I can’t read them in one sitting. I don’t read that fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you actually go back and pick one up? Once you’ve started a different one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to one that you hadn’t finished and actually return to it? Absolutely, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. I’m a book multitasker. I didn’t used to be, but I am now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who are you? But it’s only because I used to plow
⏹️ ▶️ John through to the end more than I do, and now I read so much less that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m running in parallel on these things, and each one of them I’m dipping in doing a page here or a page there and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not great. I read less than I used
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to. That’s no way to live, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, I don’t recommend it. If I had more time, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably read more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you stopped murdering your brain cells playing that stupid video game with words that do not belong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the English language.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like that video game. This is a conscious choice. I could read more and play Destiny less. I do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s murdering your brain, John. It’s murdering your brain!
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just fine. Destiny’s keeping me sharp in my old age.
Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is your last chance to donate to St. Jude, except not really. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the, as this is being released, it will be the 27th or 28th of September and September is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. We’ve done this pitch for several weeks in a row. I will spare the long version of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this time. I will just say that, you know, September’s running out and this is your last chance to get in under that big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heave that Relay is doing for September, and I would like to genuinely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely thank everyone that has listened to us or even donated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to St. Jude on account of all of our browbeating and whatnot. The original goal was $75,000. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was plowed through relatively quickly and as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I record tonight on the evening of the 26th, $266,000, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is absolutely incredible. And genuinely thank you to anyone who has linked, who has talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, who has encouraged people to donate, who especially have donated. It is not too late to get in on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey September, but really anytime you feel like it, definitely please donate. And at least through the month of September,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure if it lingers on after that, stjude.org.org.at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you wanted to donate any more. And we really, really appreciate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I gotta say, like, it’s the amount of money raised. Like, you know, we We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really do anything for this. We don’t set it up. We aren’t the ones chiefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco evangelizing it. This is Relay’s game here, and they really deserve all the credit here. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just do the minimum that we can, which is we publicize it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What they have done here is so incredible. Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann Santos Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely. Jared Polin We’re lucky that we are kind of nearby as they do great things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like all the credit here goes to Relay and to all of you who are donating. This is it’s really been incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so we’ve I’ve recorded earlier today. In fact, I recorded this analog, which is episode 166. I’ll put a link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes that link will be broken until Sunday. But but nevertheless, Mike and I talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot about this whole heave that that Relay has done and what it was like for them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do their podcast a thon, which john was a big part of and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John quite enjoyed watching part
⏹️ ▶️ John of I was there for like five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I’m trying to give you credit, John, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine, fine. Accuracy. All right. Well, anyway, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can check out analog and we’ll also link the podcast-a-thon video, which is quite amusing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well, if you wanted to check that out too. Again, scenetune.org slash ATP.
privacy.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Back to our regularly scheduled follow-up. A lot of people wrote in a couple of weeks ago This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has been like a lingering topic about me using a one-time use credit card number for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SiriusXM And I don’t think we had the time to talk about this last episode or perhaps it hadn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come up since last episode Until after last episode but one way or another Privacy.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a website that I think for free will give you one-time use virtual credit cards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not look into this very heavily to be completely honest with you but I got a lot of recommendations for it. The only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say is that it’s tied to a checking account. So you’re not like what I was doing where you’re just getting a different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey number for your existing visa or what have you. This, it actually extracts the money from your checking account. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you want to get like points or what have you, then it’s not going to work in that sense. But from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I understand, it is a very good service that is either free or low cost in order to get these one-time use virtual cards.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not a sponsorship, mind you. It’s just a lot of people have said it’s good stuff. That’s privacy.com.
AppleCare & refunds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, an anonymous former Apple employee wanted to clear up some things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to AppleCare+. We had a few people write in, but this person, if they’re right anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as being a former Apple employee, has the most clout. And they said that AppleCare+, and virtually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all service and support contracts for electronics, cars, and appliances, have a US
⏹️ ▶️ Casey state-mandated refund policy. So in AppleCare+, you can see it in section 9.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the short, version is if you want at any time, you can cancel your AppleCare Plus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’ll prorate the refund that they give you. So if you buy AppleCare Plus for 200 bucks and use it for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 10 months, you can call AppleCare and cancel it and get the majority of, well, maybe not the majority, but more than half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of your purchase price back minus processing fee and any of the repairs that you may have used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so it’s worth noting that. Additionally, when you trade in devices to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple that have AppleCare service on them, typically they’ll get a slightly higher value
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than those that do not have AppleCare+. Also, finally, we were wondering what would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happen if you bought without AppleCare+, and what’s the window, and how do you buy AppleCare after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receiving the device? And someone in one of the slacks we’re in noted that there’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a prompt in iOS 13, or maybe it’s 13.1 in settings that says, hey, you have don’t many days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left to get AppleCare Plus, which is, I don’t know. On the one side, I find that super sleazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On the other side, I kind of understand it. But anyways, one way or another, you have 60 days after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchasing your device to get AppleCare Plus. And interestingly, if you do it on the device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself, I’m told that it will run like a full diagnostic suite on the device to make sure that you didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like just destroy your screen. I’m not sure how I can tell this, but one way or another, it will run a diagnostic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suite on your device to see that it is okay at the point in which you enroll and you’re not trying to like
⏹️ ▶️ John One minor correction, I think this person was saying that the resale value of hardware that has AppleCare is
⏹️ ▶️ John better. I don’t think you get anything more on the trade-in, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just selling it on the open market, obviously it’s more valuable for someone if you still have like a year left
⏹️ ▶️ John on AppleCare. I’m assuming that means that it transfers. I don’t know what the transfer things are, but this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco person is saying that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does. AppleCare, I mean, I don’t know if you’re paying monthly, if that would easily transfer, but any kind of prepaid upfront AppleCare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that used to be the only kind, is just tied to the machine serial number. It’s not tied to any particular owner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why you can go buy or sell laptops that have a year left on them, for instance.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, there you go. But the refund thing is good to know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I had no idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paying month to month would be good if you’re not planning on keeping it for free, but apparently you can buy the upfront one and just get your money back. Although it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a little bit more of a hassle than it is just canceling your month to month thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably true. Additionally, we were wondering, how does this work if you pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up front but want to continue forevermore. And Willie writes that AppleCare Plus can continue monthly for iPad, iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or watch, even if you pay up front. So, you let your two years elapse, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then after that you can renew it on a monthly basis. You know, and so that might make sense if you’re holding onto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a phone for, I don’t know, what is it, three plus years or whatever the case may be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you really wanted to keep that service for that time. And then finally, Phil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sutton writes, If you stop AppleCare monthly payments or miss a monthly payment, then it stops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you cannot start it again. So once you let your coverage lapse, that’s a one-way street and that is it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so if you are going month to month, you’re gonna wanna make sure that you don’t have an oops with regard to payment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or else it will cease forevermore.
Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host for running my servers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say I’ve been a Linode customer for almost nine years now, since long before they were a sponsor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wanted to get them as a sponsor just so I can tell you all honestly, I love them. I use them myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recommend them strongly, I love having servers at Linode. So whether you’re doing something that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, one server, which is how I started, just running my little like, you know, play around, you know, Linux and blog server,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way up to hosting all of Overcast. They’re all of my Overcast servers there. I think I have about 24 of them now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re all at Linode. And from small stuff to big stuff, whatever you want to build, you can build it at Linode. The servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are fast. They have enterprise-grade SSDs on all the servers. They have Xeon processors,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you get tons of great resources. And they’re really affordable. Their entry-level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price starts at just $5 a month. They get to a server with 1 gig of RAM. And then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have lots of plans above that that are all very competitively I have servers big and small there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say over the entire, you know, eight or nine years I’ve been with them, they’ve always been either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best value in the business or tied for the best value in the business. No one has ever been able to beat them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how they do it. Over time as hardware gets better and cheaper, they even lower their prices or they increase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacity for the same price or whatever. So they really keep up. Their support is also fantastic if you ever need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve used it here and there as you know, as you need to with web hosts sometimes and and it’s been fantastic every single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. You can pick whatever data center you want your servers to be in. You can have a blend of different data centers. They have them all
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP and get a $20 credit when you use promo code ATP2019. I
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Caseless Casey Liss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So check it out once again, linode.com slash ATP for all your server needs. Get a $20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco credit when you use promo code ATP2019. Thank you to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if now is as good a time as any to bring up my AppleCare experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I received my iPhone 11 Pro, which we’ll be talking about more later. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey received it at roughly 830 in the morning on Friday and by 830 in the evening, I had dropped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on my driveway and have a humongous crack in the back of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Caseless Caseyless. I was gonna say you didn’t last the whole day but you didn’t how many hours did you last?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was approximately 12 hours. 12 hours for caseless Caseyless. What have we learned about caseless?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well I would love to make fun of you for this but it’s just too painful like the the idea of dropping my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half day old phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John cracking it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like even even though you had AppleCare which that’s good it’s good thing at AppleCare. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco despite that even knowing it’s not going to cost you that much to get it fixed, it’s still really painful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like you drove your car off the lot directly into a telephone pole, like across the street from the dealership.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Basically, yes. I really shouldn’t be laughing about this, but yeah, that’s basically true. I will put a link in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show notes. I am really, really disappointed in myself. So I can tell you my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tale of woe, and it is a long and sordid tale, but I don’t think anyone actually cares.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Suffice it to say, I was washing Erin’s car, which is a big American
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SUV. Well, American in the sense that we live in America. It’s actually a Swedish SUV or Chinese, depending on how you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. But anyways, I was washing her car. I was doing it in a rush for, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uninteresting reasons. I was trying to listen to the relay, the podcast a thon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried to get my AirPods to work with my phone and for whatever reason, they wouldn’t work. Then I tried to get them to work with my iPad and for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason, wouldn’t work. I was like, ah, screw it. I’m running out of daylight. I’m running out of time. I know what I’ll do. I’ll just put the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my back pocket, speaker up, and I’ll crank it, and I’ll be able to hear it even without my AirPods, because I just don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have time to continue to mess with this. And that plan was flawless up until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the moment that I jumped up high in order to get some of Aaron’s roof.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the next thing I heard was a smash. Oh, not a smash, like a clack or a clatter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the ground. And I was like, huh, that’s weird. What? Oh, no. Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John You sprang from your bed to see what was the matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, something like that. It was the worst Christmas ever. But anyways, so yeah, I look down and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realize that the back of my phone is not in good shape. Now, with that said, it is aesthetically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey horrible. Truly and utterly horrible. But the funny thing about it is, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel bad to the hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Stop rubbing your fingers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, listen to me. I can’t feel it at all. It’s like it’s under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the matte finish. Trust me, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels bad. You feel bad. Just get it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixed. Well, I will get it fixed. I absolutely will get it fixed without question.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we’re going to, we’re going on a vacation next month. And so I’m continuing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to roll caseless casey list for now. And I figure subsequent to that vacation, if it will take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey damage, it is very likely that it will take more damage during that vacation. So I will hold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on until after then. And then I will pay the $100 to fix it because I had thought at first, oh, it’s only 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bucks. That’s not so bad. But oh, But oh no no no no, the back glass is a full $100. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they just give you a refurb or you know, like replace the whole darn thing. I don’t know that for sure, so I might be wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the front glass is $30 and the back glass is $100. And so I was kind of pissed off that it was $100 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not $30 until I saw that the no Apple Care cost, do you guys know what the no Apple Care cost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this is if I didn’t have Apple Care?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey $300, $400, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann that? $600. Whoa.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For the back glass? the back of
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing the whole phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly i may have misread it and i apologize if so but if as far as i understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey six hundred dollars gentlemen to replace the back wow how
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s something or you could put some electrical tape over it
⏹️ ▶️ John now after you get your new one and so i understand you’re going to be one of the the cracked phone masses
⏹️ ▶️ John we all see them out there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just wandering
⏹️ ▶️ John wandering the world using completely shattered phones rubbing their fingers against tiny glass slivers for
⏹️ ▶️ John years at a time. But eventually you’re going to bite the bullet and pay the money
⏹️ ▶️ John get it fixed. After that, are you going to use a case?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think so because I’ll have one more oops. And then if I do have a second
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to burn all your timeouts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly right. And then if at that point, I don’t know, I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not as opposed to a case as I sound. I’ve used cases, I don’t know, for the past four
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or five iPhones at at least, but I don’t know, I really like, I love the screen and I don’t like, I don’t know if I really like the clear case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was thinking, oh, it’ll be all right. Yeah, the clear case got bad reviews. Yeah, so there you go. And I’m, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. So one way or another, I just thought to myself, you know what, I will just spring for the AppleCare Plus and hope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I will do okay. And this is the first phone I’ve broken since, it was my seventh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I broke, you know, several years ago now. And I generally have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty good record with this sort of thing, but well, a pretty good record in terms of the amount of phones broken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versus how many I’ve owned. A terrible record in terms of the amount of time it took me to break this particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone. But yeah, if you go to support.apple.com slash iPhone slash repair slash service, we’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a link in the show notes. iPhone model, iPhone XS Max, 11 Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone XS 11 Pro, oh I’m sorry, it’s not $600, it’s $550 for the 11 Pro. My apologies. So a bargain, I tell
⏹️ ▶️ John The only person who might have you beat is that, remember this was like a couple of phones ago, Someone was like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some video going around YouTube where it was like, he got like the first phone from the store and he opens it up. He comes out of
⏹️ ▶️ John the store and he opens the box right there, like on the sidewalk in front of the thing. And as he opens it, he
⏹️ ▶️ John opens it in a rush and it pops out and falls on the pavement. But I think it didn’t crack.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t recall. I know what you’re thinking of. And actually somebody tweeted at me that exact video. I’ll have to see if I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig it up. But yeah, I don’t remember how it ended up, but I know exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re talking about. And oh God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it was- Yeah, it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John had a lot of nicks on it. So some some general phone advice like I understand that you were
⏹️ ▶️ John you said you couldn’t get the air pods to work with it or whatever but I would have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I shouldn’t have tried to do any of the things I did like this isn’t 100% my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But my thought was this is a one-time thing that’s streaming live and I didn’t want to like miss and I wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miss as little as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like what was the deal with the air pods like they just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I honestly don’t know it kept saying both my devices actually kept saying both the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the iPhone 11 Pro, both said that they were connected,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they wouldn’t actually pump any audio to them. It was the weirdest thing. It could have been user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey error, but I’ve had AirPods for a while now. I feel like I know how to use them. For whatever reason,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of these devices, they just would not work. And I could have surely stuck with it a little while longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and figured out how to fix it, but I was running out of light. I didn’t want to continue to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mess around with them. I just wanted to get Aaron’s darn car fix, uh, clean.
⏹️ ▶️ John for the AirPods, I usually usually putting back, putting them back in the case and closing the case and letting them chill for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while and then bringing them back in a better environment house. But anyway, um, one of the underrated advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John of AirPods is the removal of cords. I, you know, I listened to podcasts while I make
⏹️ ▶️ John dinner, while I do dishes, uh, and before the advent of AirPods, I would be,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would have to have my phone on my body somewhere and then have a cord snaking to
⏹️ ▶️ John headphones in my ears. With AirPods, I don’t even have my phone in the room.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in a different room on a piece of furniture, laying down, no fear of anything happening to it in the kitchen, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if I jump up in the air, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ John staying where it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are playing the speakers on your phone, that’s even more reason to not have it on your body. Just put
⏹️ ▶️ John it on a shelf on the side of your garage and point the speaker, they’re very loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that loud. Did you ever see how
⏹️ ▶️ John people use their phones? people use their phones as a sound system for their entire house. They just put their phone in the dining
⏹️ ▶️ John room, crank the volume all the way up, and then just wander around the house cleaning, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can hear the phone everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. Again, it is entirely my fault, and poor choices were made. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were made for somewhat good reasons. I was washing Aaron’s car. I wasn’t even washing my own car, and I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to listen to the St. Jude thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you didn’t want to get the stepstool that you use for the roof, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the thing, and I was rushing, so I didn’t get the darn step stool that I always, always, always use. Again, mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John You bought a car that’s too tall for you. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann this we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco could drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann watch this
⏹️ ▶️ John down to. Why do you even have this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just call me Toyota, right? Anyway, but yeah, so instead of $550, it is $100 if you don’t consider the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact that I paid $200 for AppleCare. But nevertheless, I am both deeply relieved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thankful for past Casey not trusting future Casey, and also deeply annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m that dummy that within 12, it might’ve been 11 hours, might’ve been 11 and a half hours, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effectively within 12 hours, I broke my brand new phone and, Oh, God, I’m so mad at myself.
iPhone 11 RAM, battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s all right, though. All right, moving on, a little bit more follow-up. Speaking of iPhone 11
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, the RAM and battery numbers, we talked about this last episode and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what we had heard rumors of. John, can you take me through, if you don’t mind, what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we said and what the reality is, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, despite the fact that we’re a couple weeks out now and iFix has actually done a full teardown on the Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and like a live teardown on the regular Pro, And
⏹️ ▶️ John this information is from the Chinese equivalent of the FCC, which is apparently called TENAA.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t even know if this is official, but it’s the best information
⏹️ ▶️ John I was able to find at the time of this recording. So the things that we got wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John according to both this and the iFixit thing from last show, is that the 11 Pro battery is actually a 15% increase
⏹️ ▶️ John over its predecessor, not 20. that the 11 Pro Max battery is actually a 25% increase, not 10%.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the 11 Pro Max battery is apparently way bigger than we thought it was. And the 11
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is a little bit smaller than we thought. And the 11, we got the numbers right. And the other thing is RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John where even the iFixit teardown, you should go through the teardown of the Pro Max. They’re trying to figure out how much RAM there is. Apparently there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some rumor about RAM dedicated to the camera, but they couldn’t find it. Like, they’re just looking at the chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they had, you know, sliced the tops of the chip or anything. So they have limited ability to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John this out. And of course, the reporting that you get from inside the OS is it was the thing that was giving us six
⏹️ ▶️ John gig numbers and people were confused by. But anyway, the consensus right now is everything has four gigs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there’s no six gig model. It’s four gigs across the board, which is that’s one gig
⏹️ ▶️ John more for the 10R replacement. The 11 has one gig more than the 10R did,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then the 10S and the 10S Max have the same amount as the 11. I’m going to be so glad this is gone. 11 and 11 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t be able to say 11 and 12 next year. It’ll be so nice. I can’t, for some reason I had no problem with 10 S and 10 and 10
⏹️ ▶️ John mentally jump from Roman numeral letter to number.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really hurting my brain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you and me both.
A13 performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The A13 performance, this is somehow part of follow-up, even though we’re about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk even more about the iPhone 11. Maybe we’ve moved out of
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s follow-up because it’s about the phone stuff. And I recall a show a while ago where
⏹️ ▶️ John both of you took such glee in telling me that your phones were faster than my Mac. Well, guess
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Guess what? Your time has come, Mr. iMac Pro, Mr.
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome computer that I love, Mr. 2017 computer that I tried to make Casey buy last show.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that computer, and in fact, every single shipping Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John has slower single core performance than Casey’s broken phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is all kidding aside, like that is absolutely bananas. How is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this thing in my pocket shattered as it may be faster than Marco’s beloved iMac?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, now this is this is Geekbench and benchmarks aren’t real world performance and yada yada yada. But and here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual numbers. on Geekbench’s site if you don’t believe us. The fastest single core performance for an iMac is
⏹️ ▶️ John not even the iMac Pro because it’s like the regular iMac with the really fast low core count thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can make one core go turbo up to high speed or whatever. Anyway, it’s 1,262. That’s the fastest Mac score, period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Any Mac that you can buy right now. And the A13 gets 1,332. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John incredible. For a single core
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is absolutely nuts. Yeah, who knows, maybe the Mac Pro that they introduce still won’t beat it. because
⏹️ ▶️ John again, the Mac Pro’s forte is not gonna be, I want the best single core performance. It’s all about huge numbers of cores
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything, which is why Marco’s iMac is still way better for building overcast, obviously, than
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone. But boy, our Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann any day now, right? Because this is- Any day now. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is really embarrassing for Intel and just absurd and ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John and a thing that no one is thinking about and it just doesn’t make any sense and I don’t understand the world anymore.
Bilateral-charging hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and John if you wouldn’t mind Can you continue with the iFixit teardown and tell me about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not bilateral charging is in the hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the thing where you can stick another device on top of your phone and it will charge from your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John Through the coil that’s hidden in the back of it Rumored to be a feature. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John not an announced feature when they did the teardown Like many other things in the teardown it was inconclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s some hardware in there that wasn’t in the you know the 10s and the 10s max
⏹️ ▶️ John that like extra wire is going from the coil to the battery and stuff that could be used
⏹️ ▶️ John for that but on the other hand is also a bunch of features to better manage the battery and report
⏹️ ▶️ John on its authenticity and stuff like that and just by physically looking at it they couldn’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John so there is a physical difference it could mean that bilateral charging is there but disabled
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe not but anyway um the one that we can say is Because they didn’t crack it open and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is nothing in here that would even remotely lead me to believe that it has bilateral charging. Because it does
⏹️ ▶️ John look different than the predecessors of phones in ways that could make sense with bilateral charging. So inconclusive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we are still not able to rule out the possibility that all of our phones can
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually charge our AirPod cases or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be kind of neat. Like I said, I think last episode, I’m more interested, especially with my new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch, I’m more interested in charging the watch than I am AirPods. and we’ll talk about that more a little bit later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that would be super cool if it was possible or to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this via software and just magically turn that on. Which actually, as much as I love pooping on Tesla these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the very cool things about Tesla is how you do get over the air updates. And actually to that end, you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have podcast art that friggin’ works now, don’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My car hasn’t gotten the update yet, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann is officially, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is apparently in the new, like I guess it’s a beta or it’s doing a slow rollout. whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, the new software finally supports artwork transfer over Bluetooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So finally, it’ll stop doing that terrible fuzzy matching against it’s like music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album database, where it would just find like whatever music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album, artist and title were semantically closest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in like edit distance or something from whatever your podcast title was that was playing, which was oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comically not close at all, oftentimes ridiculously inappropriate or, or,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, weird to be showing on your car display. There were a number of times when like it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco match whatever my podcast title was to some piece of artwork that from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some obscure album that had like, you know, people in bikinis in the front. And I’m like trying to pick up my kid like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at preschool. And the screen in my car is this giant picture of like, you know, this bikini
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clad woman. I’m like, I swear I didn’t, I didn’t put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey this. It just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened to you. It happened to you, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so finally, Tesla is adding Bluetooth over, or Bluetooth artwork support. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to my car getting that finally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our long national nightmare is
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been watching, this is my new, brief Tesla sideline here, my new YouTube obsession. I don’t know how I even
⏹️ ▶️ John got into this, probably just the algorithm led me there, is to a YouTube videos series where people rebuild
⏹️ ▶️ John totaled cars. I think I posted a whole big thread about the first one that I got into in one of our slacks, but I’m watching
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch of them, including ones where people buy total Model S’s and rebuild them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know a lot more about how that car was put together than I really wanted to know at this point. Don’t tell me don’t ruin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I was gonna say, does that make you more or less likely to ever? I mean, I know you would never buy one, but hypothetically,
⏹️ ▶️ John just about neutral because it’s just like it’s not worse than I thought, but it’s not better either. It’s pretty much exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what you would think. But I mean, there are some impressive stuff in there. But then there are other things about assembly and build quality
⏹️ ▶️ John that aren’t great. And the main attraction of these rebuild things is watching what awful things these people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John rebuilding the cars do, where you’re like, that doesn’t seem like I would want to drive a car that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I mean, these are all totaled cars, but serious damage. And they’re like, well, we could probably patch it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John God, oh, God, maybe, no, maybe just maybe don’t drive that, especially with with like Tesla’s and other
⏹️ ▶️ John things. But these people don’t understand the cars and are doing all sorts of hacks to get around the fact that lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John things in the Tesla like any electronic device or like your printer are like out to not let you do an
⏹️ ▶️ John unauthorized repair on them. Yeah. Right. So the Tesla does not want to be repaired. It won’t even like charge
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you do a bunch of stuff to to fool it. It’s a little bit scary. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I can probably can’t put the links in the show notes to those because there’s just too many videos. But if you’re interested in that type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or you think you might be check out car rebuilding videos on YouTube.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of them are surprisingly fun and they’re really long and I found myself like I’ve watched like four hours of
⏹️ ▶️ John car rebuilding videos. That’s apparently what I’m doing with my life when I’m not playing destiny
⏹️ ▶️ John But I know a lot about car repair now.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Oh, that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you or have you just seen it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann Yeah, I know how to like
⏹️ ▶️ John hit things with hammers and and like seriously, it’s like car repair. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John tool you have is a rock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool, that sounds very safe.
Casey’s iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. In a kind of transition from follow-up to our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actual main topics, I would like to give everyone an update on my iMac, if that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First and foremost, I would like to genuinely thank the handful of listeners who are in a position
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to and did offer me the Apple Friends and Family Discount. That is genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely kind of you. I had a handful of people reach out and say, hey, you can use my Friends and Family Discount if you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like. I really, really, really, really appreciate it. That is exceptionally kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t end up doing so because the iMac is back and better than ever, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It went into Apple the day that we recorded last, coincidentally on iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey release day, when my iPhone still was not shattered.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You went into a store with an iMac on iPhone day?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, no, I left a store with an iMac I had previously bought. Oh, okay. it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on iPhone day. But anyway, so I went back, I don’t know, like four hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I had left in order to pick up the iMac and that went fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interestingly, I wasn’t charged for it. I, honest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to God, have no idea why. I did not try to call in any favors. I never asked anyone about it, but supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it got a logic board replacement, which should run me like $700-ish. And that does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does seem to have fixed everything as far as I can tell. But when I went to pick it up, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentleman that was helping me out was using his fancy Apple iPad. And he was saying, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, this is the bill of materials. It was like $600 or so for the logic board, and like $80 in labor. Sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here, blah, blah, blah. And then he goes to the payment screen and whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal iPad app he’s using, and it says, I owe nothing. I was like, what? He said, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey owe anything. I’m pretty sure I owe you guys something. I was like, no, I don’t think you do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s when you say, thank you, sir, and you walk out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, see, but I’m too nice, and so I was like, no, no, no, are you sure? Because I really don’t want to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco stealing stuff from you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re, they tell you you owe nothing, you say, okay, thank you, and you owe nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I pushed back a couple times, and he wasn’t upset about it. Well, because I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like that’s bad karma, man,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann to like just. No, listen, there’s only two ways this went.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Either they decided that you shouldn’t have been charged for this because it should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covered for whatever reason or someone called in a favor and in which case you say you shut up and you say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you and that’s it and that’s the coolest thing ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann like that’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, fair enough and jelly is sending me a text saying please largest company and richest company in the world. Please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take my money, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann basically what I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, but but anyway, but yeah, so he progressed the payment screen and said, you know, I don’t know anything and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said, are you sure blah blah blah and he said, no, no, no, you know, worst case will call you but get out of here basically and so that’s what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. I restored from Time Machine from my Synology, which is my Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup. That took from Friday late afternoon until the time I went to bed Sunday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was not delightful. As it turns out, I love my Synology. I still love my Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe not the best Time Machine backup destination in the entire world.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before I get a zillion emails, I do use SuperDuper. I had thought at the time that the hard drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was out of town. town. It actually wasn’t because I send them off with my parents and move them off site for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real safekeeping. As it turns out, it was not out of town. I didn’t realize that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey local, but either way, it was several weeks old. I only do that once a month. And the time machine backup was several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours before everything took a dump. And so I did restore. It has been working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just about flawlessly as far as I can tell. So I think all is well. That being said, this machine is now tainted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey twice over. And so I am still casually in the market for a new computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but thankfully, I do not need to do a desperation purchase now, now, now, which is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought I was going to have to do. So ultimately it has worked out well and I am pleased to have my beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac back, even though I don’t feel like I can trust it at all anymore. So anything that was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hanging out on my desktop, usually I’m a very devout, clean desktop kind of person. I usually don’t have, you know, stuff strewn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all across my desktop. But over the course of the last three years, there was plenty of cruft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had accumulated. And so the first time I really had a chance, you know, when when the kids were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either in bed or out or what have you, I went through the iMac and like, made sure I filed away all these things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I that were in the two file category on my desktop. And so hopefully this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing takes another dump, it won’t be quite as ruinous, but we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John We got some good feedback from people trying to diagnose your problem. In particular, one person reported
⏹️ ▶️ John that they had a problem not with their RAM itself but with the compatibility between third-party RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and first-party RAM. And the RAM vendor was like, oh yeah, sometimes we hear that, that for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John reason, our RAM doesn’t like to play nice with the Apple RAM, and the only solution is to
⏹️ ▶️ John just either use all Apple RAM or all third-party RAM. Again, I don’t know if that was your problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann No, it shouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John been. Maybe it really was your logic board, but it’s just one more thing to look out for because we were trying to deal with third-party RAM. You had the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, and they replaced it, But if you still had some wonkiness, that’s one more thing to look into.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, what sounded like it was mostly around Fusion Drives, but we did get a handful of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing in saying that there were very weird lockups and so on and so forth that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ultimately, they convinced themselves and or they were traced back to a completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey borked APFS volume. And I don’t want to mess with your beloved APFS, John, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people seem to believe, whether or not it’s true that occasionally APFS will just get confused.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And when that happens, there’s no turning back and no recovery.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t had that happen yet. But it’s possible. It’s a new file system. File systems do take a while to sort of mature
⏹️ ▶️ John and settle down, but so far so good for me with APFS.
Sponsor: Channels
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually pull TV from the freaking air and watch it on channels. Channels
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey love you for it. It’s so serious how much they care that when you set
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Our Apple Watches
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey to. Channels, thank you very much for sponsoring this episode. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s move on. I would like to briefly talk about the Apple Watch Series 5 because I don’t think that’ll take too long,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then we can talk about the iPhones Pro. I did get to recap.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I moved from a series 3 cellular 42 millimeter Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a series 5 40 millimeters. I went to the small size cellular Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm, which of your friends who has good taste in watches told you to do the small size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes indeed, and I regret it and let me tell you why I think this is a temporary regret
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I cannot overstate how how f***ing terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the battery is on this watch. It is atrocious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny you mention that, Casey, because I too bought that same watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you? With Cellular 2? Uh, yes, but it isn’t activated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough. Humorously enough, as we recorded, it is 9.38 p.m., and at 9.37 p.m., my watch turned off with 0%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery. Ha ha ha!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Has it been on all day? Like, on your wrist all day, I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only have I been wearing it all day, I’ve been wearing it all week, And we can talk about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, oh. But I wore it today as my all day watch. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put it on at about eight in the morning and I’ve been wearing it all day and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at 937 p.m. died. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John before you to pile on your watch quite so much, I have one other interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John related story, which is my wife has got a watch and a phone, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the day she set up her phone, She was complaining that her watch battery
⏹️ ▶️ John was the life wasn’t as good and it was she expected to have much more it didn’t like turn off but she’s like to have much more
⏹️ ▶️ John battery by the end of the day and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this is the new one
⏹️ ▶️ John getting getting close well this is the thing no because her watch hadn’t come yet this is the old watch
⏹️ ▶️ John the what the same watch and she’d been wearing that has not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey changed the series
⏹️ ▶️ John for and she complained about it for multiple days because it took a while for her watch to get here she got the phone basically on
⏹️ ▶️ John day one but the watch like just came yesterday and she’s like I don’t I don’t understand why my watch battery life is so terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I kept telling her, well, just wait until you get a new watch, maybe your watch. But it was a dramatic change, and the change coincides
⏹️ ▶️ John with her getting a phone with iOS 13 on it. So my pet
⏹️ ▶️ John theory now is there’s something going on between phones with iOS 13, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John phones with iOS 13 that have just been set up, and watches period. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John going to a smaller watch, yes, Casey, in your case, you should expect to get less battery because there’s less battery
⏹️ ▶️ John in there and the always on screen is probably an array but the battery inside inside these watches is a little bit larger
⏹️ ▶️ John so I would say that there is a possibility that you’re both getting screwed by
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 13 more than you’re getting screwed by your watch battery but we’ll just have to wait until like 13.3 or whatever to see if this resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the thing is that from as a regular consumer this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a really really bad experience Now, again, let me reiterate what you just said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand and totally agree that I am absolutely going to have worse battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey life on account of it being a smaller watch. I understand and totally agree I will absolutely have worse battery life
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on account of it being always on. But I have gone from my Series 3, two-year-old battery
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Series 3, which again was the big one, that would last all day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every day, without even thinking twice about it, including on occasions where I would do a half hour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run on cellular with my AirPods paired to the watch, listening to either overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or music. It would go to the end of the day, no sweat, every day. There were maybe 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times in the two years I owned that watch that I didn’t make it to the end of the day. Now, in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brand new watch with a brand new battery, where I feel like I’ve actually been pushing it less hard than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did my Series 3, I can barely make it to dinner. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just seems wrong to me. Now, the frustrating thing about Apple is they never say anything about anything until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s like a big kerfuffle. And this apparently is not a big enough kerfuffle for them to say anything. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been whining to every little birdie I can talk to about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the rumblings I’ve heard is that things will get better. I don’t know when.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely don’t know when. I wish I could tell you. I’ve heard that watchOS 6.1 will fix everything. I genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. But I have heard that there are things that are coming that will make this better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco and I don’t know the series
⏹️ ▶️ John Some suggestions on how to deal with this. One of them, obviously, is you can try this experiment.
⏹️ ▶️ John The always on watch face is an option and it’s on by default, but you can turn it off. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John you can try that experiment to see if it works. But the other things are things related not to your new watch again, but just iOS 13.
⏹️ ▶️ John check to make sure your phone is not more aggressively trying to shove stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John onto your watch. Check to make sure that your settings on your watch haven’t changed
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it’s trying to transfer massive playlists all the time in a much more aggressive manner than usual. Because again, I
⏹️ ▶️ John remind you both of the example, my wife’s Series 4 suddenly got way worse battery life
⏹️ ▶️ John when she set up her new iPhone. There is no Series 5 watch in this equation and she is not changing sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John The same watch she had, same unmodified Series 4. So I feel like there’s something going on
⏹️ ▶️ John with iOS 13 that is doing and her solution to this, you know Was to try to see is
⏹️ ▶️ John there a bunch of stuff on my watch that I shouldn’t have there, you know I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t make any sense. So I Am very suspicious of iOS 13 on the phone and not the
⏹️ ▶️ John watch now from your little birdies I can also totally believe that the series 5 and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever watch OS 6 or whatever is on it are There’s some wonky problems
⏹️ ▶️ John in the point zero release and they need to get straightened out or whatever But I’m very suspicious of 13 on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. I mean trust me the wonky problems extended the point one release as well In fact, I introduced some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new ones that affect apps with navigation bars good thing. That isn’t too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John many apps I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to make UI in your app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, UI so I mean this very much could be software like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in the best Versions the most mature stable versions of these OS’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in those scenarios because watchOS in particular is way buggier than iOS in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my experience, and also the process between phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and watch communication, anything with watch connectivity framework, anything where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone and the watch are transferring information in either direction is the buggiest part of the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software stack by far, and I don’t care which side it’s on, whether it’s watchOS’s fault or iOS’s fault, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter, the transfer process between the two is always horrendous. it became even more horrendous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this summer during the betas. So I know like stuff, major stuff changed there basically. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something about watch connectivity changed so much that it was literally broken, I think until beta three. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so there is very likely to be a software problem here that can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixed hopefully with software fixes if they ever fix the software. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also think like, you know, if we think back to, if you remember the series zero Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we all had it. John still has it, right? Yep. If you got the 38
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millimeter, the small one, the battery life was not very good to last for the day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you ever used workouts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann Yeah, yeah. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workouts put it in a higher power state and it has a little light on the bottom and it runs all the sensors at full blast and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you didn’t do workouts, or if you got the bigger one, you were okay. But if you did workouts much during the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, the smaller one would not have a great battery life. And I think what this has done by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding the always on screen, which we’ll get to in a few minutes because I actually very much like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always on screen, and it’s a huge feature. It’s a category defining feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that other watches were adding and the Apple Watch didn’t have and it’s a big deal. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really glad they added it. But I think what it largely has done is reset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the battery gains. All the gains that we’ve gotten over the last few years have now been spent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Always On screen. And we’re kind of back to where we were in series zero now. Where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you, like, cause I’ve been wearing this watch for, as I said, about the entire last week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hadn’t run workouts until today on it. And today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did about two hours worth of time running in workout mode. As a result, I got to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 9pm, battery died. And before today, it was fun. I would end other days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with way less than my Series 4, which was the same size. Like, the Series 4,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would put it in the charger if I wore it for a day, which granted, I didn’t do that often, but if I wore it all day, I’d put it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the charger for the rest of the day, and it would often still have more than half of its battery life left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after all day of wearing it. Whereas the Series 5, again, same size,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is ending most days with no workouts at like 25 or 20 percent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So no question, the Always On Screen is a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change to how much you use the battery. Like, we had kind of too much battery life before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was great. It was a great problem to have. They have spent the surplus big time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I think it was the right move to spend the surplus this way because it’s awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll get to that in a minute. But the battery issues are very real. And I will give the The exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same advice to people now that I gave with the Series Zero and we heard those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reports which is basically if you plan to use either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workouts or cellular, get the big one. I wouldn’t normally say like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get one that doesn’t fit you very well, but honestly if you use workouts or cellular and you don’t want to take it off in the middle of the day to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charge it, you’re going to want the big one. I even might switch to the big one. I’m thinking I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go try one on tomorrow to see if I can really pull it off or not. because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life is really bad on the small one if you do aggressive things. Now the reality is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my usage of the watch, I’m not frequently running two hours of workouts in one day. Today was unusual for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it might not ever matter for me. But for those of you out there who do wanna do those things or who do wanna use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular while you’re out and about a lot, that should be a strong consideration to get the big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I have been trying to diagnose this. I have been posting about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this on Twitter and everyone has had their own theories as to what it is. And I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people trying to give me ideas as to what to test. I assure you that whatever it is, listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’re thinking of, it is all but guaranteed that I have tried it. So you do not need to send
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emails or tweets, I appreciate it. But I’ve tried most things and I haven’t found anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that works. Additionally, if you look at my mentions over the last few days, there are, I would say, exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey half the people that say, oh, you are crazy, this is great, it works flawlessly, no problems here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And exactly half the people have said, oh, it’s a disaster. It’s a disaster on the old stuff. It’s a disaster on the new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything’s a disaster. And there was a brief window of time earlier today when it sounded like only the cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey models really got hit bad with this. But I’ve heard other people say, no, no, no. I have a non-cellular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model, a GPS model, and it’s still garbage. So I don’t know. I really don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I am really, really hopeful that it gets better. And ultimately, one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am of the opinion, and this is like, I think was it you or Mike? I think it was Mike was getting very upset about everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey telling him to, to, um, restore his phone or what have you, reset his phone. I think that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like if you look at this on a broader level, I spent $500 to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a watch that Apple promised to me would last all day and could have the screen on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all day. I shouldn’t have to micromanage my power. I shouldn’t have to treat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this like a Tesla going across the country worried if I can make it or not. I should be able to put it on in the morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and take it off at night and that’s it. And it’s just a really, really crummy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience for a brand new user to have to worry about this sort of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And furthermore, like on Erin’s watch, at this I would love debug help with. You know, her old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch, she would use her watch face was the photo space and it would be pictures of the kids
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were coming off of a shared album on iCloud. And I cannot for the life of me, get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her brand new watch or series five to get photos onto the watch because, uh, yeah, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you go to that watch face, it says, that’s lovely. I would love to show you pictures, but there aren’t on the watch. I’ve done everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can think of outside of a, you know, start from fresh, which I was planning on trying tonight, but didn’t have time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot figure out how this works. And so Aaron has been like really unjustifiably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fired up that this thing that she spent $400 on, cause it’s not cellular. It isn’t working.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just not working and it’s so frustrating. And the thing that frustrates me even more is I freaking love this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Like when it’s working, it is amazing. And one of my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features about it, well, first of all, I do like the rounded display or the, you know, the new kind of display in the Series 4 and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Series 5. Cause remember I was coming from the rectangular display and like, I don’t know what faces I said I’m using.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even know. The California face is extremely customizable, which everyone else under the sun knew, but I did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause I didn’t have it before. I am loving the California face. What is it? The Meridian? That’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco really good. Yeah, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that one too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a lot to say about these two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I genuinely do want to hear it. So this short segment, as ATP History tells you, is going to run very long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the Always On Face, it really is delightful. And I mean that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey word, I choose that word deliberately. And what I found myself doing in the first couple of days of having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on is I would like, say I was eating lunch or something and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my arm is just resting on the table. And I would look over at my watch and it would be on and it would show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me the time. And my internal monologue would say, I would just say to myself, oh, I got lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It happened to be on. I guess I just moved my arm in such a way that it just happened. You know what I mean? I just happened to catch it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before it turned itself back on. And it was this really delightful feeling. And then when I realized, no, no, no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey always on. It sounds so dumb, but I’ve had what, four years, five years,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that of having an Apple Watch that the only way it turns on is if I’ve just moved my arm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here it is, it’s always available to me, and it makes a huge difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knew having a timepiece that always displays the time is useful?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out a few other people knew this. Yeah, I mean, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons why I’ve been wearing it for the last week. I wanted to really give it an honest shot, like, you know, in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t given the Apple Watch an honest shot in years. for me, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I loved about the Apple Watch at first was, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m wearing a watch, which I haven’t done since middle school, and I like wearing a watch. And then I very quickly discovered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, after about a year and a half, I’m like, wait, well, actually, I really love just the time on my wrist. That’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of what I want. It’s like 90% of the value that I get out of a watch is the time, which doesn’t seem like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that crazy of an idea. And so I quickly became attracted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular watches and I got super into the jewelry aspect of them. These
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are beautiful things that make me happy and make me feel like I look good. I smile when I look at them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The things that jewelry and fashion do for people, that’s what watches have done for me over the last few years. The Apple watch really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t compete on those standards. It still is not much of a a fashion piece,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit, but not as much as, you know, most good watches. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are certain aspects of it that can never fit the jewelry side of it. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the way that a mechanical watch could be, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be beautiful in like, you know, just some of the ways that like the light reflects off the various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco facets of the hands and the hour markers and things like that. Like there’s just a lot of things that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like the way that you play with light and look at a watch that the Apple Watch can’t do because it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screen. There’s also a lot of value to the Apple Watch and I feel like I should be more familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it being in this ecosystem, both as a podcaster and as an app developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need some familiarity with it. And so I’ve wanted, and also, I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the workout tracking stuff sometimes. So I’ve wanted to get back into it for years and every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I would, I would buy the newest watch And I would enjoy it from a development perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the new watch has always been significantly faster than the one before it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development cycles were always a lot easier and a lot faster, because watch development’s still pretty painful, so any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gains there are significant. So I’d be fine with it from development side. But then from the wearing it as a watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, I would fall out of love with it pretty fast. Because what would always annoy me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about an Apple Watch is that stupid wrist turn. That I would turn my wrist, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about 20% of the time maybe, it wouldn’t work. And I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see the time, or there would be like a half second delay before it would light up, and then I would start looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time. And that annoyance just adds up for me so quickly, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I got accustomed to regular watches where they are just always showing the time, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you said. So the reason why I was so interested in the Series 5 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that always on screen. Like that’s why, it seems like Apple really just barely made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it here with the battery, and maybe they haven’t even just barely made it with the battery, but this is why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s an important thing, because it really radically improves the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very critical way for a lot of people. To me, the Always-On Display is bigger than cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I know not everybody will agree with that, but to me, cellular is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice-to-have feature that I think most people think they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use more than they actually end up using it and most watches aren’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipped with it because most people just buy aluminum and half of them don’t have it and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know of all the ones that have it how many are activated you know it’s not it’s probably not a great percentage there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either and then of the of the few that have cellular and the few that are activated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what percentage of those people are actually using the cellular connection. You know, like, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cellular effects, in reality, I think, probably a pretty small percentage of Apple Watch usage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the Always-On screen makes the Apple Watch between a little and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicer for all of them all the time. Yeah, agreed. So that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, is a way better use of the power budget. And it’s the way more impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feat to me. And I know technically cellular was hard and everything, But to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the always on screen is a much bigger deal because it makes the watch just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overall significantly nicer in use for every single person using it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John You may change your opinion on that once you start strapping your hand-me-down watches onto your children because when they have
⏹️ ▶️ John cellular, you can track them when they’re just wearing the watch. And you think, won’t they always have their phone with them?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe. My kids don’t want to take their
⏹️ ▶️ John phone anywhere. My daughter leaves the house, I say, take your phone with you because that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John most reliable way to track her and get in touch with her. It’s got a big battery, it’s got more
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful radios, all the other stuff. She doesn’t want to take her phone. But the watch, once you get it
⏹️ ▶️ John strapped onto the wrist, as long as they like it there and put it on every day, they just forget it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not trade Always On for cellular for my kids’ watches,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco watches, but for my own,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wore a watch. The good thing is we don’t have to make this trade. Like, you know, they, but anyway, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really big deal and there are a lot of implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details and things to work out. Some things about it are a little bit weird, but overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it works as advertised. It really is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know. Battery issues aside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, but again, like, you know, like battery issues, I think it’s, again, it’s very similar to the Series Zero where like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you push it hard, it’s not gonna make it through the day. And I think we’ve been spoiled with some of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent generations that have had just way more battery life than you think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than anybody really seemed to need. You know, so much so that sleep tracking with the watch became
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing which Apple has never really advertised, has never made easy because the whole thing was you’re supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take your watch off and charge it overnight, you know, according to Apple. And like, there was so much surplus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco battery life that this whole sleep tracking thing has come up on the side because people can wear their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch almost 24 hours a day, and if you charge it for a couple of brief periods,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can get enough charge to last the whole day. So we clearly had a big surplus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think this was a great way to spend it. Anyway, so as I’ve now come back to it for the week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know how long I’m gonna stick with it as a daily wearer, but I do wanna keep doing it for a little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer so I can get, really get myself into this world and be able to talk about it more intelligently and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else and know what it’s like and be able to make my app better for it. A lot of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch complaints have been partially resolved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or mostly resolved with this change. But a lot of those complaints are still there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love now telling time on it. That was the, I know, shocker, telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time on a watch. Telling time on the Apple Watch before sucked because again, you’d turn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your wrist and it might not be there or it would take a minute. Like, it was terrible. Now I enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco telling time on it, but there is one giant asterisk on that. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot design an analog watch face to save their lives. Aw.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know everyone loves the new California and the new Meridian faces. You’re grading on a curve. Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analog watch faces are incredibly mediocre. They have lots of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have lots of design flaws, many of which are really easily avoidable, but they didn’t. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch faces seem like they’re designed by people who have never worn analog watches and really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t understand them at all. It’s like the same way, it’s to me like the analog watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faces on Apple Watch are like game centered video games. It’s like this was designed by people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t understand it, right? Like when Game Center had like that green felt, like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just not good analog faces at all. It’s not good analog watch design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And at heart, the Apple Watch is a digital watch through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and through. So for me, I have found, for multiple reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have come to peace with this fact that this is never going to be a good analog watch, unless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple lets us do third-party faces, which honestly, I think, now that the faces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are even more complex in the way they have to deal with the sleep versus wake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state of the dim screen, I think the chances are lower than ever that we’re ever gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get third-party watch faces, because I think Apple looks at this as now a critical power management thing. they’re never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna let third party watch faces in my opinion. I wish they would, but I just don’t see it happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll take that bet as I stated in the last program. Fine. Because we have to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John the infinite timeline to complete for you to ever win, so. Yeah, right. Or the Apple Watch to be discontinued,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suppose. Anyway, so the reality is, the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really mediocre analog watch, but it can be a pretty decent digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. And so I’ve come around to this fact, and I’ve come around to the fact that I’m never gonna get the analog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face I want. I’m never gonna get good analog face design from them. So I’ve just been using Solar,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my favorite face. Solar is the old face that has like the sun going through the sky with the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clock on the corner, complication on top and bottom. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love just part for me, like a huge part of watches is the aesthetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco appeal. I like the way they look and I buy them based on how they look and how they make me feel. And I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Solar face. The solar face is not only incredibly attractive, but it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use a Johnny term, it is unashamedly, plastic, is that what you said? Unapologetically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann There it is, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is unapologetically digital. Like there is nothing about solar that pretends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be an analog face at all. And it’s not perfect. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still does that weird time travel thing where if you turn the crown, it enters like this, like the time travel like mode that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been kicked out of watchOS for like two years now. but it’s still on the solar face so that you can scroll through and see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, like what sunset time is and stuff. And that’s annoying, because if you like accidentally brush the crown, it goes into this mode and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, but it is unapologetically digital. And the Apple watch is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better digital watch than it is trying to fake analog watch. It’s so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that. And again, not perfect. There are things I would edit, but so many fewer things, like, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such smaller things. Another just practical advantage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of going digital now Series 5, two things. Number one, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in bright sun and the screen is in the dim mode, you can see the digital, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read the digital time a lot more easily and with a lot less of the screen very visible to you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot more quickly than you can read analog hands. Because like one of the reasons why Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analog faces are so mediocre is that they they really have been pretty poor on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time legibility, especially if you use any complications. And some of the faces are a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or worse than others, but like the analog faces are not very good at letting you quickly see the time and figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time it is. The digital faces that just put the time like in the upper right corner or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot less of the screen has to be visible and for a lot less time. And it’s a lot easier to see if you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re in like a bright light and there’s a dim screen, it’s a lot easier to see that time. Like I just, I spent a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the beach again, walking around outside and the bright sun and everything. And it was totally fine reading the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in all conditions. There were sometimes where it was a little close, like I could almost not read it, but I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read it. And you know, or if I’m like hanging my arm like on the window while I’m driving, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have very bright sun hitting your wrist there, but you can still glance at it and see that digital time in no time at all. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s one major advantage. Like I think in the dim screen mode, having a digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time makes it much more readable more of the time. And then secondly, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this weird thing where, you know, people who have Series fives know this, where if you, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, if you have an app open and it goes into dim mode, the app doesn’t dim unless it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the workout app. And if it’s any other app, it blurs out the app with like the, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big blur effect and just puts a digital time in the upper, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you are normally using an analog face,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you happen to have put the watch to sleep while an app is running, congratulations, you now have a digital watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s jarring. like that, the transition is like, that’s not what you want at all. And maybe this was just because the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, you know, the dim face software is super, super young probably. Right. Cause it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand new hardware. Like I’m sure the software is going to improve and there’s going to be, you know, better transitions and smoother
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that. But like right now, it’s like the Apple is going to force you to see this digital face pretty frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. So if you’re already accustomed to one of the faces that puts the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in the upper right corner, like so many of them do, then this, It looks a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different when it does this than other times. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have dramatically improved my enjoyment of the watch by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just making a digital watch only. I’m not using any analog phases right now. I’ve just been using digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that just makes it a lot nicer for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I know you would never give up your beloved mechanical watches, and I don’t say that to poke fun, believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or not, But in the past, it sounded like you would use an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch only for the things it was uniquely well-suited for, so something like exercise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an example. But now it sounds like you’re less—I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bitter isn’t the word I’m looking for, but less—and disgusted is too strong a word—but less grossed out by it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the question I’m meandering toward is, do you see yourself electing to wear this at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times when it isn’t necessarily the best suited for the job at hand?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s a hard thing to judge. Like, choosing what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wear for the most part is mood and fashion and situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based, right? So like, I’m not going to be that analytical about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco To me, like, it used to be this annoying thing that I had to wear sometimes for my job basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now I’m embracing it as this is just a nice digital watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. And I really like the way it looks when I configure it my way. Like I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solar face. I once again got stainless steel. I love the 40 millimeter size.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although we’ll have to see about the battery thing, but like you know I love the size. I love the stainless steel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I love my my white sport band. Like it’s, I love the look of this thing. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks very nice, especially now when, by having always on faces, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make much more of a fashion decision about what your watch looks like. Because before you would have, well, you could choose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the strap and the metal, and then we’re gonna have a big black square most of the time, and that’s gonna be your look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, all right, well, now I have, now I have more control over that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I, God, I wish so much for third-party watch faces, or for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple to put a lot more effort into the number and customizability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their watch faces. But neither of those seem likely. It seems like Apple is treating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch faces just as these afterthoughts, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy to me, because it’s like the interface to one of their most important products,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they seem to be afterthoughts, honestly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you feel like if the software enabled you to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it tomorrow, do you feel like you, Marco, could design a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good or maybe even perfect watch face, analog watch face? Or is it more like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know the things you don’t like, but you don’t know if you personally are capable of generating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that you do like?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Definitely the latter. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, you know, like film critics don’t have to know how to make movies, right? Like, yeah, totally. know, which is a common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco argument actually, but like, you know, like I feel like you can be a critic of something without necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to make a really good version of the thing yourself. And so, and I, I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critique any watch style design and, and I, I know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I know what I don’t. And, and unfortunately, yeah, the Apple Watch does not come close in the analog faces,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the digital faces are a lot better and, and there’s, there’s less about digital faces to be offended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by because it’s just it’s you know the time is just condensed this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little group of numbers and then you have the whole rest of the screen to kind of just play with so you know as opposed to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know regular analog face design where you typically have the entire surface of the watch is responsible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the time you have these big broad hands going across it and everything you got to indicate the hour somehow in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some kind of legible way like there’s all these there’s a lot more that goes into the design of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco analog faces than digital faces. And so, yeah, I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I like. I can look at something and tell you why I do or don’t like it, but I don’t think I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would. I would like to try making them myself, but I don’t think I’d be very good at it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, on that topic, it’s obvious that you’re not in love with any of the analog
⏹️ ▶️ John faces that Apple makes, but I’m not sure what the overall public opinion is. Like you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple is bad at making analog watch faces. I mean, they’re bad at making analog watch faces that you like, but your watch
⏹️ ▶️ John nerd is the general public. Are they satisfied by the watch faces? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John they think the amount of configure configurability is adequate? Are they? Is it legible to most people?
⏹️ ▶️ John How many people care about the hands blocking the date window? Like I don’t I don’t I’m not in touch with enough regular
⏹️ ▶️ John people who have Apple watches to know. Mostly I don’t hear about
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints about the Apple watch except for from watch nerds. And I did remember hearing
⏹️ ▶️ John some complaints when they moved to the whatever the thing is with the I don’t know the names of these stupid watch faces the one with like the
⏹️ ▶️ John three dials remember what that was the first rounded
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah infograph was the first time I heard complaints from people mostly because that was so heavily
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t read the time and it was and it was confusing but other than that I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve had enough watch faces that I think most people who really who basically don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John watch faces can find something that not only that they tolerate but that they’re actually happy with so I’m not entirely ready
⏹️ ▶️ John to say Apple is bad at making analog watch faces. Apple seems like they’re bad at making watch faces
⏹️ ▶️ John that watch nerds like, and they’re definitely bad at making watch faces that you like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like, overall, are they dropping the ball on watch faces or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, lots of people use Windows PCs every day and see nothing wrong with them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I’m saying, like, this, you know, I don’t, I’m not sure if they’re, like, bad at it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, they are making keyboards, ho. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann not, like, there it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it is so much of a taste thing. Like there is legibility, right? But even on that front, I don’t feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a common complaint that I can’t read the time on my watch. Unlike, you know, my space bar is acting wonky
⏹️ ▶️ John or I get too easy when I press the key. Right. And very quickly, because it is so subjective,
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes into, well, what do you like? What appeals to you? And then everyone, you know, has their own taste. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John legibility, the number of watches I see where it’s got a picture of someone’s kids face, like they use the picture
⏹️ ▶️ John face. That’s Aaron. Yeah. Like it boggles my mind. It’s like you’re complaining about details,
⏹️ ▶️ John legibility of your thing. and they’re just like, nope, giant picture of my kid. Like that’s the one thing. Those are digital faces, they’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but like legibility-wise, it’s just a big giant picture with no thought for legibility
⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever. I mean, it might even be the same color as the letters and the numbers for the time
⏹️ ▶️ John in the background. People have strange tastes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make better things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know. I mean, obviously, like, again, third-party watch faces is the solution here, and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John like one or two watch faces with extreme customizability for the watch nerds is definitely an area
⏹️ ▶️ John where they need to branch out and maybe they’ll never make a watch face that you personally like but like I said I’m not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John sure that they are actually bad at making watch faces because if most people
⏹️ ▶️ John can find a watch face that they’re actually happy with I think they’re probably doing okay
⏹️ ▶️ John making watch faces. Still should, still definitely should do third party watch faces for a whole bunch of other reasons but I don’t Oh.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should finally talk about iPhones and our iPhones 11 Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, you personally did not get a phone this year, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but my wife did. She got the 11 Pro in Space Gray on day one
⏹️ ▶️ John and slapped into another funky colored silicone case and has been messing with it since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then. Okay, and Marco, you and Tiff, what was your agenda for this? You both got 11 Pros?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, I got the, what I said, you know, the white one with regular size 11 Pro and a red
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple leather case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, and then what did Tiff, did she get a Max or did she get just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco an 11 Pro? She
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got the Max, green, with the clear case.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I obviously, like we discussed, I got the 256 Pro in green
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I am running caseless which I somewhat regret. I wanted to quickly cover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of things and if you guys have stuff to add, please feel free to jump in. Otherwise, I’ll just blaze forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My pickup experience, I wanted to briefly talk about. For the last several years when I’ve gotten new phones, I did not get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the XS series. So last time I got a phone was the X, but the phones leading up to that with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the exception of whatever one it was that they did not do pre-orders, I’ve always had them shipped to the house and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never done a store pickup. I’ve never done a schedule
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pickup time in advance store pickup, but I did do that this time. Again, I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a phone for Aaron and me, one phone a piece. I ordered a watch a piece for Aaron and me. Interestingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the watch did not let me set a time earlier than 10, which is when the store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usually opens, But the phone, because it knew it was launch day and the store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was opening early, the phone let me set a time for 8 a.m. 8 to 8.30 was the time I chose. And I was a little, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if worried’s the word, but I was curious whether they would let me do my 10 o’clock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch appointment at the same time I did my 8 o’clock phone appointment and they did and it was no problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pick up, now granted, you know, the Short Pump store here in Richmond is not overwhelmingly busy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only store in a surprisingly large geographic radius, but it is not a terribly busy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store. I got there about 8.15 and I was out of there by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 8.30, 8.45, something like that. It was pretty easy, pretty painless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no big issues. I was picking up Erin’s phone, which I believe I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just as like an AT&T otherwise untethered, so to speak, phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also picked up her watch, she ordered under her own Apple account and so on and so forth. And she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent me as a pickup person for it. That was no problem. I just had to show my ID. The pickup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience for me was really, really good. And I think, especially because my UPS driver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loves to come at like six o’clock at night on iPhone day, I’ll probably continue to do pickup where possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the future. John, your Atinos was shipped to the home. Is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Greenewald Yeah. Some people have to go to jobs during the day, so it’s kind of hard to go to an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey store. Oh God!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, monsters! And Marco, as a fellow unemployed person, what did you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did the order for delivery, you know, on like, you know, at the 8 a.m. I ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, I ordered them for delivery, and but I happened to be next to an Apple store doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like shopping errands that day, and I thought, well, you know what, I didn’t order a case, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I think I want a case. I think I’m a little scared to go caseless on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey one. Geez, why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right, so I was next to the Apple store and so I went over and of course they have you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the big lines set up outside and there’s like three different lines for like whether you have an appointment or not and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they were probably this was pretty early in the day still so there were probably about a hundred people out there in line and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco went up to the the agent who was assigning people which line to be in and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I just want to buy a case and she’s like okay hold on and I had to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know five minutes something and she let me in so it was great all right so I go over to the cases and I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the wall and I’m like, all right, I wanted the, the red leather 11 pro case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was not a spot on the wall for that. Interesting. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the red leather case exists for the 11 pro, but there just wasn’t a spot for it. And it looks like, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like behind little things, like all the little boxes to see, like, you know, maybe they just got misshelf or something. Nope. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nowhere to be found the red leather case for the 11 pro. So I’m standing around and like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, on iPhone day, inside the Apple Store, almost every employee is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking to somebody, like setting up their phone. And so like, you can’t really get a lot of people’s time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I happened to luck out. One of the employees was walking by, like between things, and he’s like, do you need any help?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m like, well I’m having trouble finding this case. Do you not have it? And he was super nice, and he’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me see what I can do. And so he goes in the back and looks, and you know, eventually comes back out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he’s like, he actually found one, like in in the back somehow. And I’m like, out of curiosity,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could I pick up a watch while I’m here? Yeah, there it is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure enough, and yes, the answer was, yeah, sure, no problem. Because once you’re in, once you’re assigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a person, they don’t care how many things you have to bring out from the back. Like, that’s a different person that’s doing that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re just ringing you up. So they happened to have what I wanted in stock, which of course, online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t reserve it. But they have a certain percentage for walk-ins, I guess. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got an Apple Watch, exactly what I wanted, by waiting in line for five minutes. Now the funny thing is, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went home, waiting for my phone to arrive. It’s about, I don’t know, five, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four or five at night, and the UPS truck comes. And we ordered two phones, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two different orders, because I wanted to just go fast through the process. So we ordered two phones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could track it on a live map. Yeah, those are awesome. And it showed them both on the same truck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, only one box arrived with only one phone in it. It was Tiff’s phone. And I’m like, oh no. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on a trip the next day. So I’m like, I want my new phone for my trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the tracking still said it was on that truck. So I like chased down the truck that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a block away once I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann this out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I waved down the driver, who was of course delivering other people’s iPhones to their houses like down the street
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from us. And he checked, he’s like, look, I’m sorry, it’s not on this truck. whatever it is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not here. And he was like, sometimes this happens, you can call them. I called them, he’s like, maybe got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mis-dispatched or whatever to a different truck. I’m like, oh God. I call UPS, this was like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the worst phone call ever. Trying to call UPS’s national call center on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone day, saying, you know, where is it? It was going nowhere. I’m like, oh crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, you know what? I had kind of an easy evening. I’m like, let me just go back to the store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann There it
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann, Marco is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We all knew where this was going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I went back to the store and I go to the line person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by this point, the lines were much shorter, but I knew I’d have to actually wait in the real line this time. I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take press mail twice. So I go wait on the real line. But I told the dispatcher, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just so you know, I know exactly what I want and I’m not going to do any setup and I’m paying in full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and she put me in a different line for oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a much shorter one. Oh, that’s funny yeah. So I went again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no reservation, got myself in a much shorter line. This one was only like fifteen minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of like you know probably forty five to an hour for the other one. I get in there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know I got a person that they start looking stuff up and oh they yeah they have one in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the back okay and they go and and it after like 15 minutes, I got a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco message from TIFF saying your phone just arrived on a different truck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco word and about two minutes after that the employee comes back. I am so sorry, but the manager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just told me we actually don’t have this phone anymore, like we’re actually out like even though I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they created a reservation for me like but I guess it didn’t work somehow. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, all right, I guess, you know, no problem. So thanks for trying. See you later. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I left and came back and got my phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my word. That is a very Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a lovely story demonstrating Marco’s incredible patience. Chasing
⏹️ ▶️ John the truck down the street, where’s my phone? I’m going to the store. I got a phone. All right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I’ll see you later. I mean, I took a lot of good pictures on that trip.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Now you did. So to that end, that’s actually a perfect segue. So again, I came from the iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so I didn’t have any of the 10S super HDR goodness. Obviously none of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us have had night mode and none of us have had the supposedly better battery, which we saw how well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that worked on the watch. Let me start with the camera. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went to this really interesting festival that’s here in Richmond called Field Day of the Past, which is potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth discussing another time, but suffice to say it’s sort of kind of like a state fair. I was taking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few pictures here and there and I didn’t bring my big camera even though I usually do because I thought, well, let me put this through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its paces like Pansorino style. I took a picture of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it was just the landscape, but I was pointed directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the sun and this was a picture that should have failed miserably in pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much every way And it came out beautifully. And that was one of the first pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I took with my then unbroken phone. And at that point, I realized, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, this is the real deal. I also have noticed that I am trying to go wide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on all the things, which is exactly what Mike has talked about. I think on upgrade, it might have been connected.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But he said, you know, I think everyone’s going to be doing wide, you know, wide shots of everything just because we can. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep, that’s me. I’m that guy. it. I’m loving the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flexibility of the ultra wide. I’ve calmed down already a fair bit on actually using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, but I’m loving the option. I am very much loving the much improved and wide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey selfie camera because something I’ve noticed myself doing more and more often is taking pictures of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all four of us and trying to do that with the front facing camera, which is genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hard. Maybe I’m just a bad selfie taker, but it’s hard to do on the 10 because just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot of width to these shots and using the wide camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the selfie camera is just freaking delightful. I haven’t played with night mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much, but I did take a really pretty picture of my car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the driveway at like late, late, late dusk, almost night. And it is very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Having not really experienced the pixel night sight or whatever they call it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve seen, you know, examples of it from time to time, but never really played with it. I had this, in retrospect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey completely bananas thought that like you could take pictures with almost no light whatsoever and they’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perfect and noise free. And that is not at all my experience with night mode. Night mode definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey requires some amount of light. It just requires quite a bit less light than you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would expect. And I got to say it is extremely impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I am loving the cameras on this phone as someone who came from a X.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco is not only a photographer, but someone who’s come from the XS. Any thoughts on the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically, and then we have some other things we can talk about, but what about the camera?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love these cameras, I gotta say. I mean, it’s funny, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe I said on this show a week ago that, you know, well, I wish they would’ve done like a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a more telephoto, you know, the wide, you know, I’m not gonna have much use for the wide. Yeah, I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. Now I think some of that is just because it’s new and fancy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but yes, I completely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree. And, and, you know, and what I, what I do wish, and I think you’ve done a little bit of this. So like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have actual optics, like an actual optical zoom that is moving elements in a lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward and back to achieve different zoom levels, uh, you get differences in the perspective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like the, if you, if you take like the, the super wide shot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just crop the middle section out, That’s not how it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you use a lens that is that focal distance. Like there’s a certain amount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of perspective, compression and distortion in different ways that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, so what I kind of wish is that, I very rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need the entire like ultra wide, like 13 millimeter out zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I often wish for something that’s between the 13 and the 28 or 26. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they simulate it, but it’s not quite the same. It doesn’t have the right optical characteristics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as if you had like a 17 millimeter, 18 millimeter zoom lens. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of wish for that, but I know that’s probably out of scope for what they’re doing here. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the other thing I will caution people about wide, wide angle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shots can look very strange and can be extremely unflattering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people. I would suggest, I mean, you know, it’s a fun effect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to play with, but I would suggest if you’re gonna shoot something ultra wide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t want it to be very close to the camera. You know, it’s great for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco landscapes, obviously, and stuff like that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shooting ultra wide of people or things, those people better love you very much,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also, again, not being super close to the lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be good for you. But yeah, I love these cameras. Just like shooting video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially, and some of the photos I’ve gotten have just been incredible, and I’ve put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no effort whatsoever into them. Just like casual snaps of snapping the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign of where I parked in the parking lot, so I can remember where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, and it looks incredible. Like my typical boring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know Merlin was talking a lot about this, I believe on Rec Tips this past week, right John?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco About how whoever, who does Apple think we are with these cameras? We’re all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shooting pictures of models and on vacations and these incredible scenes. It’s like, no, the way I use my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone camera is I shoot mostly very boring things like everyone else. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very rare that I’m shooting beautiful scenes. And yet, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the stupid stuff, these cameras look fantastic. And they take no effort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPhone has been heading in this direction for years. This is not a brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new thing that it can do this at all. But this is a significant leap forward. And the XS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was also. The XS was also a fantastic leap forward on the camera in most ways. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just that much better that it even outdoes the jump that the XS made. So I am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very happy with these cameras so far, and I’m looking forward to using them more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I don’t think I talked about this on the show, but I was talking to somebody about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s interesting to me that I’m finding myself less and less enthusiastic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in taking my big camera. And I love bokeh more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything, and the portrait mode in this is still eh. Like I took a photo, a portrait mode photo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just earlier today of Mikaela on a seesaw and it was one of those instances where like her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leg was out and made like a, there was an empty space in between her leg and the seesaw itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was crystal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann clear. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, it should have been, you know, it should have been blurred out. And so portrait mode still leaves a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be desired. But outside of when I really want that beautiful background blur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for pretty much any other kind of picture, I genuinely think my iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is considerably better than my micro four thirds camera I bought just I think a year ago. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both wonderful and kind of weird. But you know, I take that example I used a minute ago, shooting into the sun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I understood and knew how to edit a photo like you or Tiff does, I might be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to take a similar shot or maybe take one shot and underexpose it, you know, and take another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shot and overexpose, you know, and do this basically the magic that the phone does on my behalf. Maybe I could do that by hand, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why the hell would I want to? And the phone just does this for me and it does it perfectly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least to my eye anyway, it does it perfectly. And it does it in a fraction of a second. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey night mode, good grief, there is no way I would get anything night mode like out of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey micro four thirds camera. Now, maybe if I had one of those bananas, full frame cameras like you and Steven have, maybe I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t need night mode at all. But for me, with my equipment that’s in my house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the only time I’m going to turn to my micro four thirds is when I know it’s really important to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to have that beautiful background blur. And it is important to me a lot, I’m not gonna lie. But it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreal how good these cameras are. And I think some of that is just new shiny,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but so much of it is just, they are so flexible. And the computational photography that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does is so good that it makes me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reluctant to bring my big camera at times when I absolutely would have just a year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and there’s aspects of this that big cameras can’t match. Like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night sight mode or whatever it’s called. We call it night mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I think it’s night mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, night trap, whatever. So the night mode here is so good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that big cameras don’t do. Because big cameras, you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a giant sensor, and you can have amazing optics, and you can have an incredibly high sensitivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that sensor so you can crank the ISO way, way, way up. and or you can put it on a tripod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and go to crazy lanes, so maybe have like a timer release so you don’t have like the shake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of pushing the button to really keep it steady and have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Jonathan Mann it shoot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like a 30 second or a minute exposure, some long time. But what big cameras can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is give you a pretty good shot in pretty minimal light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while you’re hand holding them. Yeah, good point. Because it’s like night mode is not just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a long exposure. It is a combination of a bunch of stuff and it especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handles handheld motion way better than any regular camera can,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re not doing that kind of smart. They’re applying like sheer hardware and optics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the problem, whereas Apple doesn’t and will never have hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and optics to best the big cameras, so they’re using software and tricks instead, and they’re really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effective tricks, and really smart software, and really incredible computation there, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big cameras can do a lot of things better, but they can’t do the night
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode stuff. Like in real world, real life, when you’re not having a tripod, you’re not setting up some big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro photo shoot with tripods and gimbals like in an Apple commercial. Like if you’re just a person holding your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone trying to take a picture like the rest of us, you will actually get way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures out of the iPhone under a lot of circumstances than you’ll get out of even the best big cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and that’s so bananas to me that this thing in my pocket that we all laughed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about in 2007, 2008, whenever it was that the first iPhone came out, the internet connection was slower
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than dirt and it didn’t have copy paste and so much of it was such trash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back then, but it was still so much better than what we had. And now, the LTE
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection on a good day is not as fast as what I have at home, but more than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ample enough. This camera is arguably better than the one I spent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost equal money on between the camera body and the lens. Actually, I spent about the same money between the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera body and the lens. It might be better than that camera. So much of this is just phenomenal. While
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re gushing over these new phones, I need to basically take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the whining and complaining I just did about the Apple Watch, which really is chapping my hindquarters,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and everything is reversed for these phones. me anyway. I can’t tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what your experience has been like, Marco, or what Tina’s experience has been like, but I’ve been using my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and off all day long and it is 10.35 in the evening and I am at 53%,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is nuts. It is insane
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how good this battery is. It is as good as the Apple Watch battery appears to be bad right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot get over, I mean this genuinely, I cannot believe, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess it was two years for me, but really from my understanding that the XS wasn’t too much different than the X,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the difference between a two-year-old X battery and this battery is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bananas. I cannot believe they’ve gotten this much juice out of this. And I know we’ve learned that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bigger battery as we talked about earlier, and we’ve learned that there, or we knew that there was much better power management,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this is absurd how much battery power this thing has, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am loving it. It is incredible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so far, I haven’t been using it so much, like, without being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco near a charger that I have a good idea of it, but so far, it feels pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I cannot gush enough about how good this battery life is. It’s to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, I mean, we’ll see what happens next time I do like a trip or a conference or what have you, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when I’m at a conference like WWDC, basically any occasion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to charge my phone, because I’m not one to use a charging case, I have no problems with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just am too cheap to buy them. Anytime I have an opportunity to charge my phone at DubDub,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will absolutely take that opportunity because you never know the next time you’re going to be able to charge unless it’s bedtime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that to me is like number one pro tip of WWDC. here today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I would probably make it a day or it would be close to making it a day without charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas with every other iPhone I’ve ever had, there is not even a prayer of me making it through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day at WWDC with any of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, how have you found the removal of 3D Touch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both better and worse than I expected. There are places that it drives me insane,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like on the lock screen. It drives me insane
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen. I don’t know. I guess they don’t want to do momentary touch on the camera and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flashlight buttons because maybe you’ll hit them by accident. But I feel like the delay is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long enough that it’s frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I know you can slide for the camera, but I don’t think you can slide for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann flashlight, my friend.
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann Try every direction. Yeah, well, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never know. But nevertheless, I find I’m annoyed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it being missing there. I don’t like the text selection. You have to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more deliberate and do it on the space bar. I do like that there’s still an option because I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be eight times more furious if there was no option for the touchpad text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Jonathan Mann placement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. But I am glad there’s something I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that I can’t just mash anywhere on the keyboard and do it. Aaron pointed out something interesting to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which maybe has been an iOS 13 the whole time and I just never noticed. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it used to be like, say you’ve composed a text message and you tap and hold on a word,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would bring up the little, what do you call it, loop or whatever, and you would be able to shimmy the cursor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around by starting that with a tap and hold. Now, a tap and hold selects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the word. And sitting here today, only a week or so into having that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change, because I believe that’s a change anyway, I don’t particularly care for it. I bet you over time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll get used to it. But Erin was like, what the hell is this? Why can’t I tap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and hold and get the loop and do it the way I used to do it? And I was like, I don’t know. Hit the space bar. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’ll work. And after she showed me the arrow in the FedEx
⏹️ ▶️ Casey logo, I realized that it is kind of annoying me too. but that one I think I’ll get over.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The space bar thing, man, that’s frustrating. I might get over it, but God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those lock screen buttons are driving me nuts. How do you feel about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel pretty similarly. Like I never did the word selection thing, but I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the keyboard cursor movement thing doesn’t actually bother me very much in practice because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with force touch, excuse me, 3D touch, I had a pretty high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error rate with trying to mash it to get the cursor to show up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey drag it around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually had a pretty high error rate, and my error rate with doing the space bar is almost zero. So that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a little bit slower, but it’s more consistent, and so I actually prefer that. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flashlight and camera buttons in the lock screen, though, I definitely don’t like that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as John mentioned, you can swipe. I actually forgot about that. Ever since moving to the 10 series of phones that added
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those buttons, I actually totally forgot that you can swipe to get to the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m trying to retrain myself now, but it’s taking, you know, undoing two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of muscle memory here. But I assume that’ll be fine eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s where I felt it the most, is that camera button, because it’s making me miss shots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it takes a little bit longer now. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna, I hope I can fix that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think for the camera, you and I will retrain ourselves over time. But yeah, I agree with you. The other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I actually meant to bring up, and I forgot was the lack of peak and pop, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the change I should say in peak and pop. So it used to be, so let’s say I’m reading Twitter on Tweetbot or what have you, and there’s a URL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. Well, I used to be able to mash down medium strength and it would pop up like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preview of what the URL shows. Then if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey push down even harder, it will be as though you had tapped it and it will open up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this Safari view controller and show you what that URL is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, if you long press on a URL, you get a snapshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what that web page looks like, but you also get a whole bunch of actions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I miss peek and pop, but I am really liking having quick access to all those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actions in that pop-up menu. I think I’m on board with this overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even though I would have told you I use peek and pop a lot, which I did and I would miss it, which I do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having all those actions there is really nice and I’m really digging that. One
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other thing really quickly, the NFC reading, I’m really enjoying. So when I was at WW this past year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I genuinely don’t remember who it was, but somebody gave me a shortcut sticker, actually with the shortcuts logo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on it, that is an NFC sticker. So now with 13.1, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go ahead and set up a shortcut automation that is triggered by an NFC sticker. And so now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if my phone is unlocked and I wave my phone over the sunglass holder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the roofline of my car, it will automatically, without any intervention from me, send
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a text to Aaron saying, I’m on my way home. I’ll be home at 4.15, which is in 12 minutes, which I think is super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Truth be told, I can also just say to the, or not the tube,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can say to the robot, hey robot, I’m on my way home, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will also accomplish the same thing. But that doesn’t use the future technology, man. That’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I keep trying to say the name. That’s the old assistant stuff from like six years ago. I want to use the future in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NFC card reader. And I think that’s super amusing. And I was talking to actually one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people that works on channels, which is a sponsor for this week’s episode. And he was telling me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he’s put a tag near his receiver at his house, you know, his stereo receiver
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or surround sound receiver. And so I haven’t tried this myself, but apparently what you can do is you can set up a shortcut triggered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by NFC that will basically tell the phone to pipe audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a specific AirPlay speaker. So the thought is, if you’re near this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receiver and you want to hear whatever you’re listening to on the living room stereo, you just wave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone in front of the sticker and the next thing you know, it’s playing on the living room stereo, which I want to try that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real bad because that sounds super awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should do that for their AirPods because I’ve spent so much of my day going to the various menus
⏹️ ▶️ John on the lock screen or on the control center to switch the AirPods. Because I have one set of AirPods and one set
⏹️ ▶️ John of ears, but I go back and forth from Mac, phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann and iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of those things, too. And the problem is I don’t have a case. I’d love to be able to just rub the
⏹️ ▶️ John AirPod against the device I want it to pair with. But I understand, due to the nature of NFC,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s probably not feasible. But maybe the case, if I had the case in my pocket, if I could just
⏹️ ▶️ John rub them together, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s probably not a great
⏹️ ▶️ John solution. I’m open to the idea of like sewing NFC things into my clothing and having all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann sorts of weird gestures.
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone and put it on my chest, it does this. But if I put it on the side of my arm, it does this. And then if I put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in my pocket, it does this. Or, you know, putting them around the house. If I put my phone down here, it plays through my
⏹️ ▶️ John stereo speakers. If I put my phone over here, it’s time for the TV. You know, yelling out to
⏹️ ▶️ John your digital assistant is actually probably
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, but I like the idea of having a silent, physical way to do it rather than just
⏹️ ▶️ John yelling into the air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Totally. Marco, John, any other thoughts on the 11 Pro? I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to give you an update on the Pokemon Go situation. Because I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey my wife is getting the
⏹️ ▶️ John workout yet. But that’s obviously the ultimate stress test. And I don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not going, she’s still going to need to have her giant arsenal of batteries. She’s going to say, how much better is
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Is it better in a noticeable way? Or can you bring a smaller battery? can you actually go out and do a thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John not kill the battery entirely? But I don’t have any reports yet. We did bring the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John to one of my son’s cross country meets. I brought my big camera, obviously. This highlights another place where
⏹️ ▶️ John phone cameras are just not up to the job. Like, you know, it’s, they’re people running and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John far away and they move fast and you just, you know, you don’t have the reach with a phone. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann you’d get a wide shot.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every shot is a wide shot. There’s a little blurry spec. Yeah, it’s my son. you need a longer
⏹️ ▶️ John lens, bottom line. But the landscape pictures that came out of it looked
⏹️ ▶️ John good. So, you know, I think it is a better camera, but I’m not ready to give up my big heavy thing quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Channels. and we will talk
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann N-T Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann tech podcasts so long
Mice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, a little while before the iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had its near-death experience, I actually decided to use a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse. And I have for years, basically since the Magic Mouse came out, I’ve used the Magic Mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is an ergonomic disaster, but I do love the ability to swipe two fingers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side to side to do things and so on in the scroll with the inertial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scrolling I really like. So leaving aside the fact that it is a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ergonomic mouse, functionally I’ve always really liked it. But a couple of weeks ago, maybe even a month ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, I don’t know why, but I just spontaneously decided I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to start using my Magic Trackpad and just see what I think. And I’ve always hated trackpads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s a little strong. I’ve never really liked trackpads that much. If you recall from years and years and years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I grew up on Thinkpads and it had the little track point, which I was the only human in the world that loved,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I loved it. I loved it too. The Little Red Eraser?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, those things are great. You and I were the only ones that loved it. Now, to be fair, in today’s world with gestures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so on and so forth, I don’t think I would love it the way I did then. But back in my day, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things were simple and we walked uphill both ways to school, when you only had two mouse buttons and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe like a scroll, it actually worked really, really well and I really liked it. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’ve been using the Magic Mouse for years and I started using the Magic Trackpad just to see what I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I might stick with it and I don’t know what to think now. It’s like me telling you I bought an automatic because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to. What is happening right now? And so I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bring this up only to share because maybe somebody would find it interesting, but also to ask you guys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is your mousing situation? I’m assuming, John, you’re still using the mouse from back at Vietnam.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And interestingly, when I found myself once again in Staples
⏹️ ▶️ John during the first week of school with a thousand other parents, I took some of the time to
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the collection of mice they have there, or mouses if you prefer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And first of all, I noticed the selection was way down. They used to have like a giant long table with like a million
⏹️ ▶️ John mice and trackpads all set up. Now the selection is much smaller, but it did get to, but this is the only way you can
⏹️ ▶️ John really tell with that. You have to actually, like I said about the game controllers, you have to actually put it in your hand. You can look at the pictures online
⏹️ ▶️ John all you want, but you have to actually feel how it feels in your hand and just accept that you’re getting all people’s germs. So I did
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And I looked at a bunch of other ones. And I think when I get my new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro eventually, I think I’m going to get a new mouse.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh my God. Really? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann my God.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in the market for a mouse. These old mice are getting really gross.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re not great. And you know what’s done mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John because my wife has like a modern mouse and I although I don’t like her mouse and wouldn’t buy it for myself
⏹️ ▶️ John using her modern mouse a lot has said you know I can tolerate this like there are advantages
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it being glowing review
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever so if I just get a you know like because the options
⏹️ ▶️ John for I don’t want something with a million buttons and I don’t want you know but I want maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I’m gonna bite the bullet and get something with horizontal scrolling I definitely don’t want the gesture thing because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not into that. But maybe I’ll get one of those momentum wheels, you know, the wheels that spin freely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love those things, but as soon as I had a need for horizontal scrolling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I immediately went to the Magic Line from Apple because it’s just way
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Yeah, I was recently using an app that makes Shift scroll wheel be horizontal scrolling, which is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of neat because this is Affinity Designer, and if you’re using that kind of app, your hands are always on modifier
⏹️ ▶️ John keys anyway, So it’s really actually pretty easy to flick a scroll wheel and then hold down shift and
⏹️ ▶️ John flick the scroll wheel to go sideways. Yeah, maybe I would be into a gesture mouse if there was
⏹️ ▶️ John ones out there that worked as well as Apple’s but weren’t really low because I don’t like a low mouse. Anyway, all that is to say
⏹️ ▶️ John is I still have my old mouse. I still have my old mouse at work. I still like it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re getting kind of gross and so I’m in the market for a new one. I mean, like here’s the thing with my new Mac Pro. This is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if this has been clear from my discussions of it, but like everything is on the table
⏹️ ▶️ John for a newness. Now I’m not getting a new house for the new Mac Pro, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s pretty much where
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m drawing the line. We’re gonna like new, you know, new UPS, you know, I’ve already got
⏹️ ▶️ John the new chair, new mouse, new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yet you’re saying you’re gonna have a old monitor with it, your old non-retina
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor. We don’t know what I’m gonna do for monitors. We don’t know yet, there’s no configurator.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Jonathan Mann We know. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Jonathan Mann no. We know. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey man. Well, so all kidding aside, John, Are you soliciting recommendations
⏹️ ▶️ John Would you like, okay. No. In case you haven’t noticed, most of the time when I
⏹️ ▶️ John want to buy a new thing, I don’t solicit recommendations. Totally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I— You give the recommendations.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I just—I don’t—here’s—I don’t have trouble figuring out what I like. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I may have trouble finding
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco something that I
⏹️ ▶️ John like, but I don’t have difficulty deciding if presented with six options, which one should I buy or should I buy
⏹️ ▶️ John zero of them. This is not a weakness that I have.