catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

396: The World of Moving

Apple’s event unveiling the Apple Watch Series 6, new iPad and iPad Air, Family Setup, and Fitness+.

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

  1. Headphone earpads 🖼️
  2. St. Jude: Thanks * Doug! 🖼️
  3. PS5 announcements 🖼️
  4. Sponsor: Stripe Checkout
  5. Apple event
  6. Watch Series 6
  7. Sponsor: Doordeck
  8. Watch SE, Family Setup
  9. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  10. Fitness+
  11. Apple One
  12. iPad (8th-generation)
  13. iPad Air
  14. Ending theme
  15. One more thing

Headphone earpads

Chapter Headphone earpads image.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m on my now my third pair of pad thingies for my headphones

⏹️ ▶️ John And the first you know I had the ones that I came with and then I replaced them with ones that were basically Identical

⏹️ ▶️ John and they lasted about the same amount of time and they were starting to get cruddy again So when I bought new ones this

⏹️ ▶️ John time, I decided to branch out and try some different ones So I got replacements that are the same as the previous

⏹️ ▶️ John ones. I also got leather replacements Which is what I’m wearing now and also got

⏹️ ▶️ John velour replacements. Ooh Ooh. And I wore the leather ones for,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think a couple podcasts now, and I think they’re gonna last longer because they’re leather, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m not sure they’re any more comfortable, and in fact, they may be less comfortable because the paddy things are bigger and

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not as much room for my ears inside them because the ear cups on these headphones are not really that big.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m wondering if I should switch to velour, but I didn’t wanna,

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I take these off, they’re gonna be mangled or whatever, but Marco, do you have any opinion on

⏹️ ▶️ John what is the best ear cup material in terms of durability and comfort?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tons, yeah. So first of all, which headphones? Please don’t tell me the 7506. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ John crappy Sony ones that you hate. Oh, the 7506, damn it. If they ever broke, I might replace them,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the- They’re the worst. So first of all, you just said they don’t have a lot of room for your ears. That’s true, they’re kind of small.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can get more comfortable headphones that have roomier ear cups. The 7506 earcups are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty small, pretty shallow in particular. So that is something you can change with better

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones.

⏹️ ▶️ John Shallow, you mean like sticking out from my head shallow? Because my complaint is that they’re narrow, as in they’re not very

⏹️ ▶️ John wide. They can’t fit my entire ear in them very well.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have that problem as well. They are narrow and they are shallow.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so stop bashing on my headphones and just tell me earcup material. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco my question that I asked about.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The 7506 was a great headphone for a long time. there are way better ones available now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s so incredibly overrated because it has a past of being widely used,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is not a modern at all headphone in so many ways. And people who say it’s neutral

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are wrong. Look at it, it’s not neutral. Look at measurements, it’s totally not. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ear cup material, you’re basically facing a few different, keep in mind when you say things like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco leather, it’s not real leather, it’s just vinyl that is made to look like leather.

⏹️ ▶️ John These might be real leather, I didn’t look, but they might be, it’s conceivable.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Generally speaking, the material that forms the squishy part of the pad, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the inner foam ring or whatever it is, that is usually much more important to comfort

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the outside material. There are lots of different foams. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory foam ear pads you can get. There’s different qualities and densities and everything else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the foam is usually a much more significant part of the comfort than the actual material itself, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it hard to shop for different pads or compare things without actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just buying them and trying them because you don’t really know between different aftermarket pads or even first party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones, kind of what you’re getting there. That being said, typically leather

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, or the fake leather that they say is leather, that’s usually the best material

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an all-arounder. The downside is that it does tend to get slightly more sweaty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than a more cloth-like, velour-like alternative. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco upside is that it’s more isolating for sound, the leather, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what makes it more sweaty is that it sticks to your head better and there’s not a whole bunch of tiny little gaps that sound can get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in and out of. So it’s not a large difference in sound isolation, but it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a difference. So it’s worth noting for podcast usage you have now these two conflicting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco values here. Like you don’t want sound to leak because you don’t want bleed on your track from the other people talking,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you also don’t want to be too hot when you’re sitting there for two and a half hours in the summertime in your own air-conditioned room

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a podcast. So it’s up to you which one you pick, but I think there’s a very good reason why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all studio headphones choose the leather-like pad finish,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it just seals better and is generally, I think, a little bit more comfortable for long periods,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco except for the heat issue.

⏹️ ▶️ John So the thing I was worried about with the Velour was sound leakage. Do you find that that’s actually a thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John you can notice and measure, that the Velour have more leakage than the leather?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a measurable thing. One of the other things that is often noticeable with velour alternatives

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to various pads is that you get a little bit less bass response. And that’s because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is not forming as good of a seal. And it’s noticeable that on a lot of headphones, including my,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some probably my favorite mainstream podcasting headphones, the Beyerdynamic DT770, that comes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a bunch of different pads, the memory foam leather pads are significantly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more isolating for podcasting use and the bass is stronger in those than the Velour ones. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is definitely a thing. Again, this is not a huge difference. It’s nothing like the difference between open-backed versus closed-back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones. That’s a much more significant difference. But there is a small difference with whether you choose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Velour pads or leather pads. And leather is the more isolating and more bass-heavy of the two.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just for completeness sake, because I know you want to and because I will actually add it to a notes document

⏹️ ▶️ John that I have on stuff like this, just tell me the headphones that that I should buy instead of these. So if someday I decide

⏹️ ▶️ John to, I’ll already have. And keep in mind that I’m prioritizing comfort and I find these headphones to be comfortable,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is why I’ve never replaced them. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you

⏹️ ▶️ John just said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that

⏹️ ▶️ John your cups are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too

⏹️ ▶️ John small. You know what I mean, but they’re smallish, but like podcasting

⏹️ ▶️ John for three hours does not make my ears hurt. Makes my ears sweaty, but we’ve already covered that that’s just a consequence

⏹️ ▶️ John of sound isolation. But it doesn’t make my ears hurt, it’s just like, eh, I can do with room ear ones.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in particular, the leather ear pads are a little bit like the petty part is thicker. So it makes the hole in the middle

⏹️ ▶️ John a little smaller again. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s, I feel, they feel less roomy as they did with the default ones,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I still have a pair of, but anyway, what is your recommendation? It’s complicated. No, I already

⏹️ ▶️ John told you my requirements. It’s not complicated. You should have whatever your most comfortable ones are

⏹️ ▶️ John for that you think would be good for broadcasting. I don’t care about

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sound quality.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What you need, John, is you need what Marco either bought for me or made me buy, which is what he described

⏹️ ▶️ Casey earlier, which is the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro. And the one that I have is 32 ohm. Does,

⏹️ ▶️ John oh, it can’t require an amp. Right, yeah, yeah, I agree. I plug these things into my microphone.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, 32 ohm, it’s fine on the USB Pre-2. I can’t speak for your microphone, but it is reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey comfortable. They sound really good. I think, and this is a topic that we may explore someday

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sometime, but not tonight. But I think that I prefer

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a comparatively boomier headphone headphone than Marco that is not to say I want like the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stereotypical beats, you know, you can only hear bass, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that I prefer a more bassy sound than Marco does, which doesn’t make him wrong, doesn’t make me right,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just our personal preferences. And these headphones actually are really good in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my perspective for music, but they do tend to be a little tinny. However, for podcasting,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think they’re excellent. I cannot recommend them enough and they’re not extraordinarily expensive. They’re like 150 bucks,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is not cheap, but not that much more than what you got already.

⏹️ ▶️ John I read too many Marco headphone reviews when I can spell bare dynamic correctly on the first try.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you want for your preferences for you know, no amp and general comfort

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for podcasting you want the DT 770 32 Ohm. It’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s has pro in the name somewhere. I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what you want. It’s currently 160 bucks on Amazon. That’s that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about where it usually hovers. I will say there are two other considerations, three other considerations

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the listeners. Number one is these are not neutral sounding headphones. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to know that going in. They have kind of like what people would call like a V-shaped sound.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you look at an equalizer, it kind of forms a V. Like the the bass and treble are slightly boosted

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from neutral. So it’s a fun sound. It makes music sound good, but the bass and treble will be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit higher than than like a flat response. Although, you know, it’s complicated. Nobody

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually she wants a flat response, it sounds terrible. But anyway, that being said, other things to consider

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are the, with this particular headphone, most of the sizes, although not the 32,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco come with velour pads. The 32 comes with fake leather pads. The 250 ohm

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, if you have the power to drive it, I actually prefer that one because it has a coiled

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no. You

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see, I don’t think I

⏹️ ▶️ John would like that. Oh no, I have the coil cable and I like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, for a while I thought that coiled cables were bad and then I switched to straight cables. And the problem with straight

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cables is that you have all this excess cable flopping around as you’re podcasting. The coiled cable is actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more convenient, even though it seems like it would be clumsier. But in practice, a coiled cable is more convenient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you are wearing headphones at your desk and you don’t wanna have this big, long cable flopping

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around. Obviously, for portable use, you don’t want that. For portable use, it’s way too big and unwieldy. But if this is for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a desk, coiled cables are actually usually better in practice. And in this model, only the 250

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ohm as far as I know that comes with that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, that’s crappy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I need an amp for that? Not, I mean, if you wanna really crank up the volume and blast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco out your ears with music from an iMac, maybe. But it’s not super hard to drive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would consider trying that first. The downside of that is that-

⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s called the same thing? 770? 770 Pro 250 ohm. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like MacBook Pro, parentheses, 2012? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, great. Yeah, it’s like $10 more. Those come with velour pads, so try

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. You can easily get aftermarket. Now, the real pro move is they have a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco higher end model called the DT1770, and I think it’s a terrible headphone, except

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 1770 comes with, as a second pair of pads, something that has the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco item number EDT1770. This is a memory foam pad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Beyerdynamic for these headphones, and it fits the 770 as well. It’s the same shape

⏹️ ▶️ Marco case. You’ve been making the same shape headphones forever. And the combination of the 770 with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco EDT 1770 memory foam pad is the best combination because then you have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slightly improved sound, way more improved comfort, slightly improved bass and isolation.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you can get those, they’re hard to find in the US. They’re easier to find from like Amazon Germany.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They usually stock them for like 30 bucks and sometimes you can get them to ship them to the US. But if you can get the EDT 1770

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pads and put them on the DT770 Pro 250 ohm headphone, that is the best podcasting headphone.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 35, 34 euros?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s like not cheap, isn’t it? For, I mean, for, you know, for an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OEM replacement headphone pad, that’s not that, you know, it’s, yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pair of pads. It’s, trust me, that combination is what you want. And these pads are such

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pain in the butt to actually put on, because they’re so tight around the, but like, you know, John’s probably done it a million times

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with his, so he knows, but like, it’s, it’s not a fun process to swap out the headphone pads, but that combination

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the best.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, do we want to actually get started? Because we have a few things to talk about tonight.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, there was an Apple event. Indeed.

St. Jude: Thanks * Doug!

Chapter St. Jude: Thanks * Doug! image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as with the last couple of weeks, we need to start by talking about St. Jude Children’s Research

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hospital. This month, Relay FM and associated people and properties like us and like this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are doing our darndest to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. So what is St. Jude?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is, guess what, a children’s research hospital where they have children who are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick with various forms of cancer come in, into Memphis, Tennessee, where they’re located and get treated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for free. The families never have to pay a dime. This is near and dear to our hearts because of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey our dear friends, Stephen Hackett and his family. Their eldest had been

⏹️ ▶️ Casey diagnosed with a pretty rare form of cancer when he was just six months old,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and he is what, 10, 11, something like that now? And that is expressly because of the work that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude did and the literally millions of dollars of treatment that they got for free.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, in order to provide that treatment for free, that means that money needs to come from somewhere and hey, guess what? That’s you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you have even a couple of dollars to scrape together, especially if, as Marco likes to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey point out and will probably repeat, if you’re, I don’t know, spending a few hundred or a few thousand dollars on Apple products

⏹️ ▶️ Casey these days, maybe you can throw at least a little in the direction of St. Jude. So please go to stjude.org.atp,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s stjude.org.atp, and throw them a little bit of money or a lot if you can.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of a lot of money, there’s been a new development. John, can you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me about this? John

⏹️ ▶️ John Greenewald So in the grand tradition of our listeners making fun of Casey for his typo, trying

⏹️ ▶️ John to enter the name to which his contribution would be attributed, we have a new champion.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this means, according to Casey’s rules last week, that this is Casey’s new favorite listener. Is that

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? I

⏹️ ▶️ John think that’s right. I think that’s right. That’s correct. Sorry, James Neal. You are now the second favorite listener of Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think anybody who achieves the top of that list at any time is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey one of Casey’s favorite listeners.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s very true. But somebody, somebody, now here’s what they did. We said last time, look, if you just go $1 over,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be the top of the leaderboard, right? And the previous total was $6,669, $68, right? So they could

⏹️ ▶️ John have done $6,669, nice, and gotten to the top of the leaderboard, but they didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John is obviously a huge fan of the original

⏹️ ▶️ John line of PowerPC Macintosh computers. And he contributed $7,100.

⏹️ ▶️ John Pick in the middle of the road there. It’s not the $8,100, which was the big expensive one. It’s not the $6,100, which was the pizza

⏹️ ▶️ John box. It’s the $7,100. And the name that Doug put, he wrote in,

⏹️ ▶️ John Doug for Steven Starr Mike. Well done. Well

⏹️ ▶️ John done. Very, very nice. So great job, Doug. knocked off that possible hockey

⏹️ ▶️ John player to just put plain old Doug PowerPC 7100 PowerMax 7100.

⏹️ ▶️ John Good job. Now, but it does make it harder for everybody else, because now if you just do $1 over, he did a big

⏹️ ▶️ John jump there. Like, you know, so now you got to do $7,101. And don’t think time has

⏹️ ▶️ John run out because Relay is having their podcast-a-thon on September 18th.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. So as you’re listening to this, it will probably be tomorrow. It is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friday the 18th and shoot, I don’t have what time it starts. I want to say it’s two in the afternoon.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, it’s 2 to 8, 2 p.m. to 8

⏹️ ▶️ John p.m. Eastern, US Eastern time, I believe.

⏹️ ▶️ John They’re shooting for their goal to reach $315,000. So please give any amount that you can. Give $1, $5, $10, whatever you can possibly

⏹️ ▶️ John afford. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if there’s one other person out there who, like Casey’s favorite listener, Doug, has

⏹️ ▶️ John a whole bunch of money and says, says, you know what? I’m going to help save kids with cancer. Go for it. $7,101. The

⏹️ ▶️ John leaderboard could be yours. Steve McLaughlin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And Doug, if you’re listening to this and want to email me a picture of your receipt or something,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I know, because you didn’t specify which Doug you are. You just said Doug for Steve and star Mike. So if you can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey prove to me that you are the one and only Doug, I will send you a smattering of ATP stickers that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are not otherwise for sale. So please reach out if you can. But no matter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please throw a little money their way if you can.

PS5 announcements

Chapter PS5 announcements image.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we got some follow up that I don’t care about, but I’m told we have to do. So John, take it away.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the only, we have tons of follow up, but we’re not going to do it all this week because we got a lot of Apple events stuffed out too. The only two

⏹️ ▶️ John follow up items I wanted to touch on are PlayStation related because today there were some exciting PlayStation

⏹️ ▶️ John announcements. So last time we talked about the Xbox Series S, which was

⏹️ ▶️ John a lower powered version of the Xbox Series X. It was only $299. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is different from the Xbox One X and Xbox One S, which are different from the Xbox One, what you did from the first Xbox.

⏹️ ▶️ John I still do not have a name to call the new crop of Xboxes. I don’t know what you call

⏹️ ▶️ John them collectively. The PlayStation 5 is easy. They’re just the PlayStation 5 and it comes in two versions. It’s the PlayStation 5

⏹️ ▶️ John just plain PlayStation 5 and then there’s a PlayStation 5 digital edition which comes without the optical drive. We talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John that before, but the Xbox you just call them the Xbox series is how about the series series?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh God, it’s very confusing. Anyway, Sony had a little reveal today and they

⏹️ ▶️ John announced their pricing and ship date and order date for their computers for their consoles. PlayStation 5

⏹️ ▶️ John is exactly the same price as the Xbox Series X $499 so the

⏹️ ▶️ John top-of-the-line consoles from Sony and Microsoft exactly the same price. That was a relief

⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody because people were afraid the PlayStation 5 was gonna cost 600 bucks but no they exactly matched.

⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s where it gets super interesting the PlayStation 5 digital edition which is the PlayStation 5

⏹️ ▶️ John without the optical drive we talked about last time and I made the rest of development joke that many

⏹️ ▶️ John people didn’t get, but a lot of people did. What could an optical drive cost? Honestly, you know, at wholesale

⏹️ ▶️ John prices for Sony putting in even a 4k, you know, ultra HD,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, Blu-ray player, that’s not really an expensive part. And all of these sort of decoding

⏹️ ▶️ John guts are already there. You’re already paying for them. The PlayStation has the power to do all that, right? So it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ John just the mechanism, the thing that spins your optical disk and reads it with a laser, right? And we’re like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe the Digital Edition will be more expensive. If maybe it has like tons more storage and the SSD is twice as big,

⏹️ ▶️ John so it will be the more expensive model. That would have been ridiculous, but I would have been excited about that. But if it’s less

⏹️ ▶️ John expensive, how much less expensive could it be? If they just take off the price of the parts, it’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John be like 20 bucks cheaper or something or 30 bucks cheaper, right? Why would they

⏹️ ▶️ John make it any cheaper? Like they’re just cutting into their own margins. Well, the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition

⏹️ ▶️ John is $399, $100 less than the PlayStation 5. And I’m pretty sure that in no universe does

⏹️ ▶️ John that optical drive cost Sony $100 to put in there. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe someone would come and say, you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John understand the special delithium crystal inside the Ultra HD Blu-ray player

⏹️ ▶️ John is very difficult to mine from asteroids or whatever. And that’s why it’s expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that was a Star Trek reference, John. I’d like my credit,

⏹️ ▶️ John please. But it seems like that Sony has aggressively

⏹️ ▶️ John priced the digitalization. And here’s why. Here’s why the matchup is interesting. Talked about how the

⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox Series S is attractive because it’s $299 and that is a great entry price for a next generation Xbox console,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s less powerful than the Xbox Series S.

⏹️ ▶️ John It has half the onboard storage in its SSD and it can’t do 4K, it only does 1440p.

⏹️ ▶️ John Everything else about it is the same. It plays the same games and everything, it just plays them at lower resolution. So if you have a 4K TV,

⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox Series S will be playing them at 1440p and then just upscaling them to 4K. And also

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have an optical drive, yada yada, right? So half the SSD space is a big deal because it

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have an optical drive and you can’t play at 4K, right? But hey, it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John cheap. The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition loses nothing over the regular

⏹️ ▶️ John PlayStation 5 when it comes to playing the games. The only thing it doesn’t have is an optical

⏹️ ▶️ John drive. And that’s only used to copy the game off of the optical drive onto the SSD. After that, the optical drive is

⏹️ ▶️ John pointless. and I suppose, yes, you could use it as a movie player or whatever, but anyway. The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition

⏹️ ▶️ John plays everything at 4K, has all the same features as the PlayStation 5, and it’s $100 less. So now,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re looking at this, it’s not so easy to say, well, the Xbox is cheaper, but the PlayStation, you know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John I like the games for it better. You know, like, yes, it is $100 cheaper, but that’s not the

⏹️ ▶️ John good Xbox. The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, I would say, is the good PlayStation 5, because who wants optical

⏹️ ▶️ John disks, right? It has the same SSD space, It has the same power, has the same resolution, same ports

⏹️ ▶️ John on the back of it, same everything, for $100 less. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re saying is they’re including marginally less in the box

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and giving considerably more savings to the customer.

⏹️ ▶️ John And more importantly, you don’t have to make this decision at purchase time of like, am I okay with not having

⏹️ ▶️ John 4K, right? Am I okay with having half the storage space? You don’t have any sort of these trade-offs. It’s just literally

⏹️ ▶️ John the only decision is, Do I care about an optical drive or not? And if you don’t don’t get it because like I said the only

⏹️ ▶️ John purpose that optical drive is if you want to use it as A blu-ray player which some people do fine, then you get you know, you can use it as

⏹️ ▶️ John a blu-ray player and if you just want to buy physical games for whatever reason and stick them in there

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll just copy them off of the optical Disc onto the SSD because you can’t play games off the optical disc

⏹️ ▶️ John you play everything off the SSD like all modern consoles, right? So the optical disc is just

⏹️ ▶️ John a way to get the bits from the game maker to you and you know, I hate that I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John use optical disc at all, right? So you have the choice, but you don’t have to make any trade-offs about performance or storage. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox series, whatever, you have to say, do I want the good one that has twice the storage

⏹️ ▶️ John and plays in 4k? Or do you want the bad one that has half the storage and plays in 1440p?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s another hundred dollar decision. So I guess what it comes down to is if the market

⏹️ ▶️ John for next-generation consoles really is price sensitive, the Xbox could come out ahead because,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s $100 cheaper just to get into the ground floor and it can play all the same games and maybe you don’t care about 4k

⏹️ ▶️ John because who cares about 4k in an upscales anyway and you’ll never notice, right? But if gamers

⏹️ ▶️ John are the typical spec driven gamers, they’re going to look at the series s as the sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John lesser product. It’s weaker. It’s not as powerful, which historically has been

⏹️ ▶️ John poison in the sort of, you know, specification driven

⏹️ ▶️ John world, especially of next generation launch consoles where everyone cares about is powerful as you know, what is, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, before there’s any games or that anyone cares about it, they just want to compare specs, right? But it’s so cute.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, yeah, that’s the, that’s the second thing. So this will be interesting. Uh, the launch date, um, it’s launching

⏹️ ▶️ John on November 12th, which is two days after the X-Box and pre-orders begin

⏹️ ▶️ John tomorrow as we record this. So pre-orders begin September 17th at selected

⏹️ ▶️ John retailers, but they won’t tell you what those retailers are. So tomorrow will be fun. Game spot already accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ John put up their order page and then quickly took it down or something. I don’t know. I’m going to try to preorder. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John and as for things being cute, now that we have the official specs of the PS five, we can

⏹️ ▶️ John confirm what I mentioned in the last show that PS five is huge. LOL. It is the biggest console you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John ever seen. There’s a good article link in the show notes showing the sort of, uh, with height and depth

⏹️ ▶️ John as compared to a bunch of other consoles that you may recall being very large, including the original Xbox,

⏹️ ▶️ John the PS5 dwarfs them all, it is massive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Stripe. Now, in June, we launched

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP Memberships, and this is all powered entirely by Stripe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Checkout and the Stripe Billing Portal. This is super easy for you as the customers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying it, and it’s even easier for us as developers. Now, we talked about it then, and we even joked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like they didn’t sponsor the episode. Well, now they’re sponsoring one. So they recently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relaunched Stripe Checkout with a a bunch of updates and new features. And these days,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a whole lot of complexity and high customer expectations to implementing good payments.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You want people to be able to pay easily from their phones or from any device they’re on. You wanna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco support all different payment methods around the world. There are certain complicated authentication mechanisms like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3D Secure that you’d probably need to support as well. The BACS or BACS direct debit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Ideal, which a lot of European customers prefer. There’s all sorts of stuff around the world that you need to deal

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. And Stripe Checkout includes all of this right out of the box. It’s a pre-built,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosted payment page optimized for easy payment and high conversion rates. There’s all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorts of new features always being added. They recently added address auto-complete, coupon code

⏹️ ▶️ Marco support. You can of course customize Stripe Checkout with your own branding, your own logo and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco colors. They support customers all around the world with 135 different

⏹️ ▶️ Marco currencies, all automatically localized with languages and currency support to wherever your customers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, and it’ll automatically surface whatever payment methods your customers will probably prefer or that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their devices support. So for instance, it automatically detects Google Pay or Apple Pay, or depending on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the region it’ll offer different bank methods. You can use Checkout for one-time payments,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you can do what we do and use it for subscriptions. It’s super easy. We also have the Stripe Customer Billing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Portal, which allows you to do all sorts of stuff that I’m so happy I didn’t have to build, like changing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an expired credit card, or dealing with a payment failure, or managing whether your subscription will renew

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end of the month or not. All of this is taken care of with the Stripe billing portal. They have a great

⏹️ ▶️ Marco roadmap over there too. They’re always rolling out new features, card validation logic just rolled out, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you had to do this on your own before, which I have before, it’s so much code, it’s so complicated, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much easier to use Stripe Checkout. It It took us like two days to build the entire system

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with all the customer support, all the payment support, everything. They have great API, great documentations,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we just saved tons of time. Check it out at stripe.com slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco checkout. Learn more there if you need to build any kind of payment system. Stripe dot com slash

⏹️ ▶️ Marco checkout. built checkout so you don’t have to.

Apple event

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there was an event this week. As we record this, it was just last night.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was just yesterday. We have an Apple event. And do we want to cover

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the meta stuff, whatever you want to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco say? Meta?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Meta, meta. Do you want to cover that first, affluent, affluent, or do you want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just jump right into the devices?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think we just start jump straight into the news, because from a meta perspective, this was very

⏹️ ▶️ John much like their other covid time presentations, where it’s a well-produced video that features the

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple campus and has people standing in nice places and saying things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I will say one small note here that I noticed, like it was it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, you know, to see like, you know, hi, this is Tim, like, you know, in in his natural habitat.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it kept transitioning between Tim and Jeff Williams

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their boring presenters. Let’s be honest, whatever personality they might have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their private lives does not come through on these videos. And so I was kind of disappointed every time they would transition

⏹️ ▶️ Marco between them and they would breeze by Federighi. And I’m like, oh no, have him talk, have him talk.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, he’s gone. It was like a tease. Like, oh, I want to hear from Craig. He’s a good presenter. He’s entertaining.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, he makes dad jokes. I want to hear that. No, no, he’s not in this one, really. He’s not in this one, really.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s just, you know, Craig is basically a prop that they breeze by sometimes. And I was

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of disappointed by it. Yeah, well, I mean, they have always mostly stuck to the idea that the person presenting is

⏹️ ▶️ John someone who is directly responsible for the thing they’re presenting. They don’t just pick people. Oh, well, you don’t have anything

⏹️ ▶️ John to do with this, but you’re a good presenter. So Craig does, is a good presenter. And, but he only gets to present the things that he’s

⏹️ ▶️ John intimately involved with. And it would be kind of unfair to let the people who are good presenters hog

⏹️ ▶️ John the limelight. You know what I mean? So it just so happens that this event was

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of stuff presented by people who are not Craig. So I guess you all just had to live with that. Now, the good thing is they’re trying to

⏹️ ▶️ John pull from the ranks of the organizations that create these products, not just have the same person do it all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And many of their other presenters were very good, I thought. But yeah, I just like, I’m just, I’m so bored

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Tim and Jeff Williams, because they’re just not like charismatic presenters at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. But fortunately, the other presenters who weren’t them were, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, another thing I was thinking about, I didn’t take a count when this was going on, but I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least between men and women in some modicum

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of diversity, it’s gotten so much better than it has been in the past. And to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point that I didn’t feel like I had to count how many men versus how many women. And I didn’t look

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at tucked versus untucked, which is everyone’s favorite, a comical thing to keep track of. But yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s worth noting that they seem to be doing considerably better with all flavors of diversity,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not just gender. And it’s not the obvious glaring thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was just a couple of years ago. And I think that should be applauded as well. And it’s been like that for a little while

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John now.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, you should probably have counted because as with all these things, you know, what was the famous study

⏹️ ▶️ John of like when they had men and women talking to each other and when them talking at a group and when

⏹️ ▶️ John the men estimated that the women had been talking 50% of the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and they had actually been talking 20% of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s fair.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. Or

⏹️ ▶️ John the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other

⏹️ ▶️ John cliche is when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

⏹️ ▶️ John When you’re used to just being a bunch of white guys, you’re just like, oh, I saw one or two non-white guys. That’s about 50%. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John actually not 50%. And that’s why it is still important for us, for someone to at least,

⏹️ ▶️ John still be counting and not being like, yeah, no, no, they’re fine. They weren’t all white guys. Everything’s good. It’s like, nah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not quite. And it’s also worth pointing out that while diversity seems to be improving

⏹️ ▶️ Marco both in the presentations and in the medium to high ranks of the company,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the highest ranks of the company are still incredibly non-diverse.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John And even in the presentation, if you go back and actually count, it’s like, well, it was still

⏹️ ▶️ John over 50% white guys, but that still felt like it was better. What I’m saying is it’s not mission accomplished.

⏹️ ▶️ John So Apple continues to make very slow progress in this area. We applaud their progress, and we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John cheering them on to do better.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough.

Watch Series 6

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so Apple Watch Series 6. You know, I came into this feeling like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I want to upgrade. I believe we talked about last week that the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey battery on my 40-millimeter cellular Apple Watch Series 5 has really been hurting more so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I remember any of my other Apple Watches a year in. It is not unusual

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me to get a, you know, 10% power warning at a, like, mid-afternoon,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is very odd. I can’t tell if it’s just that the software has convinced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey itself that the battery is in worse shape than it really is, because I’ll say, you know, I don’t want to go into low power

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode, just continue on until you die. And it’ll last like another couple hours afterwards. So I think, I don’t know, maybe something’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little wrong there, but nevertheless, outside of the battery problems, I don’t feel like there’s anything, I don’t think there’s anything

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really want my Apple Watch to do that it isn’t already doing. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they said, oh, we have an oxygen sensor on the new one. And I said, oh, maybe I am buying one of these after all. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the OppWatch Series 6, it has the S6 system on a chip, which is 20% faster,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s lower power than the Series 5, it includes the U1 chip and ultra-wideband.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would we care about this? I guess we don’t right now, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the little press release says you can use it to open your car door with the car key thing. I mean, I think it makes perfect

⏹️ ▶️ John sense. I might care about it on the watch even more than the phone, because the whole deal with with ultra wide band is like, I can tell

⏹️ ▶️ John when things are near me in a way that is not as long range

⏹️ ▶️ John as something like wifi, but is directional. Like it’s perfect for a wristwatch, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ John like. Now we don’t know what the applications are gonna be other than the car key thing that Apple’s already announced, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s great that it’s in a watch. I think it potentially has more use there than a phone because the watch is always on your wrist

⏹️ ▶️ John and easy to put in your stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, and also not only can the watch tell what’s near it, but other things can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell when they’re near the watch. So you can imagine if future Macs have ultra wideband chips

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in them, for instance, then the watch unlock thing could probably work faster and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco better and more precisely and more securely. There’s all sorts of little benefits like that, not to mention the fact that if we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever, whenever these AirTags allegedly finally launch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could do things like find my watch, from the phone, and possibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when it’s in like low power mode or stuff like that, like in case you drop your watch in the couch cushion or something like that. So who

⏹️ ▶️ John knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John more like find your Apple TV remote with your watch by waving your watch around and hearing it beep.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah, so ultra wide band, it’s one of those things that it’s gonna be a really cool thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once it’s commonplace. It’s gonna be kind of like, you know, when Bluetooth first came out,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when Bluetooth first came out, it was in a handful of things and it wasn’t very widely used. And then you kind of went

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sleep for a few years, woke up and Bluetooth is everywhere. And now it’s so ubiquitous that lots of fun,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful things can be made based on that. That’s how Ultra Wideband, I think, will play out. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now we’ve all had phones, well not all of us, all of us stupid early upgraders who set money

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on fire have had phones for a year now that has this technology that has been mostly used for nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or slightly cooler airdrop. But that’s been about it so far. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in three to five years from now, when everything has Ultra Wideband in it that’s been made for the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco few years, really cool stuff will become possible and we will start, I think we’ll almost like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll almost be taking it for granted at that point. Like, oh yeah, of course, this is in all of our recent stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and this is another instance where it’s actually good that Apple has been sticking this in products even before

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s quote unquote ready with a killer app feature, because Tim Cook loves to sell the same products forever.

⏹️ ▶️ John So yes, please put it in the Series 6, put it in the iPhone 11, because that Series 6 is eventually gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John like the low-end phone in a couple of years, and we’ll keep selling these iPhone 11s under a new

⏹️ ▶️ John name, you know, or whatever. Like that hardware lives for a long time. Not only does it live for a long time with

⏹️ ▶️ John users, but Apple keeps selling it. So if you ever want to get to that Bluetooth thing where everything has it, you have to start selling

⏹️ ▶️ John it in the high-end stuff before it’s really ready. So that by the time it is ready, every

⏹️ ▶️ John single watch you buy has a U1 and every single iPhone you buy has a U1. So I’m glad this hardware is rolling

⏹️ ▶️ John out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I actually especially thought your point, Marco, about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer unlock. That’s an excellent point that I hadn’t considered yet. So like we talked about a minute

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, it has a blood oxygen sensor and I am not a doctor. Let me make that extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey plain up front. But we were talking in the relay slack about like, what, okay, what does a blood

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oxygen sensor really do? So I’m gonna take a stab at it and one of you guys just interrupt me when you’re ready. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a general measure of your cardiovascular health, you can look at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how much blood there is, how much blood there is in your oxygen, how much oxygen there is in your blood in order

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to see whether or not your heart and your lungs, and again, broadly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your cardiovascular health, whether or not things are working the way you expect. And my limited understanding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that there’s a very narrow range of what’s considered to be really acceptable. And if you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey see yourself falling below that range, that can be a real problem, and it’s something that’s worth getting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey checked out. And something that’s been really relevant lately is that sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who are infected with COVID-19 and who are getting sick from COVID-19 don’t actively

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feel bad, but yet if you look at their blood oxygen readings, they’re falling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dangerously low to the point that it’s a real, real problem and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need to get help immediately. And so, early on when this was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all happening, we got like a $50 blood oxygen pulse ox meter from Amazon

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it seems to work acceptably. I wouldn’t say it’s particularly great, but it seems to get the job done.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I try to use that like once or twice a day, just to have like some amount of historical data that God forbid

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can show a doctor and say, look, here’s the way it usually is. You know, you tell me if this is, if whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am now is bad or whatever. So having a blood oxygen meter on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can either call up and say, please take my measurement now, or that we’ll be doing it kind of latent

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the background from time to time. I think that’s super awesome in general, because again, it’s a very good measure just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how healthy you are, but given what’s going around these days, it is extremely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey relevant. And so the combination of a potential new battery,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, I shouldn’t say potential, there is a new battery in a new Apple Watch, and the thought of a blood oxygen sensor has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gotten me, well, I mean, I’m justifying it straight up Marco style right now, but I am

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John telling myself

⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the blood oxygen sensor and the new battery that I have to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. It has to happen to me, Marco. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John no choice.

⏹️ ▶️ John you need to be checking your blood oxygenation twice a day. That seems excessive to me. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if you are inclined to that kind of obsessive checking, hey, yeah, get an Apple Watch, and then you don’t have to worry about

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s just checking for you all the time, or as far as you know, it’s checking for you all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So either

⏹️ ▶️ John way. But yeah, Apple’s been very cagey about the blood oxygen sensor if you watch all their material, of not

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to pitch it as any particular health benefit. It’s not a quote-unquote medical device, and there’s all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ John of laws around this. It’s just a thing that you can use to measure something about your body,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it hasn’t even been certified by whatever such and such as like accurate medical tool that you use

⏹️ ▶️ John for such and such a purpose. So they just say, look, this is an attribute of your body and this watch will measure it and tell you about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the COVID angle, Apple doesn’t come out and mention anything about it, but it does exist.

⏹️ ▶️ John Those, you know, you can get a pulse oximeter really cheaply from like Walmart for like 15 bucks

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, right? There’s actually a really good YouTube video that I should have found for show notes already

⏹️ ▶️ John that explains how a pulse oximeter works. It’s on technology connections. Oh, there you go, yeah. It’s very, very

⏹️ ▶️ John clever, extremely inexpensive. And so it’s not some of this amazing technology this watch has, it’s just nice that

⏹️ ▶️ John something attached to your body that already does a bunch of health measurements has added this to the mix. So,

⏹️ ▶️ John good feature and apparently it will make Casey happy and make him stop sticking his finger into a little pinchy thing twice

⏹️ ▶️ John a day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. Normally the justification, the way that we would justify buying this,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this thing that we don’t need that’s like three or four to $600 probably.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way we justify it as well, it would be nice if the whole family had these, so that way we could tell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we get COVID, right? And not only is that not necessary because inexpensive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pulse oximeters are all over the place and work fine, but you already even have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, which makes this even better.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Hush, and if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John trying to detect COVID, checking your blood oxygenation may not be the very best way

⏹️ ▶️ John to do that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s one way. It’s a tool in the tool chest.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yes,

⏹️ ▶️ John it is. Yes, it is. It is a measurement that you can take for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so this, you know, Apple did not develop this fall’s products in response to COVID.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco their development cycles are longer than that for most of the hardware. And so, you know, anything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that helps COVID, like having a new iPad with a WoshuGetu that has Touch ID, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s coincidental. That’s not like, they didn’t do that in response to COVID or because of COVID.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, it’s hard to come up with a better thing the Apple Watch could have added this year,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco coincidentally, than a blood oxygen sensor for this purpose.

⏹️ ▶️ John Unless it takes a tiny sample of your blood and does a COVID test on it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have that technology yet, so.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. And there’s lots of other things that the Apple Watch could do as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a medical or fitness sensor that would be beneficial to people, but most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them are much more complicated and haven’t quite been worked out yet. Like for instance, a blood glucose sensor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for diabetics would be incredible. But so far, I don’t think people have really devised reliable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the skin ways to do that yet. So that’s like, they keep, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think Apple has been doing a lot of research in that area and other companies have as well, but I don’t think that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing is ready yet. But whereas blood oxygen concentration is doable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly easily from above the skin. And so that’s something that, you know, it makes total sense why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if Apple ever comes up with a reliable, non-invasive blood glucose test,

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have to be in the Apple Watch. People will wear that literally anywhere on their body. Like the market for doing

⏹️ ▶️ John that is incredibly huge. And it’s, you know, if Apple came up with a breakthrough

⏹️ ▶️ John there, even if it had to be worn someplace other than your wrist, they would probably ship it. But as for the

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Watch specifically, it’s gonna be limited to things that you can measure from someone’s wrist,

⏹️ ▶️ John because people aren’t gonna take the watch and strap it around their chest, or around their neck,

⏹️ ▶️ John or in their armpit, or whatever, it kinda has to do stuff around their wrist. So, yeah, there is a point

⏹️ ▶️ John of diminishing returns of things that we can measure. And I think it has to be non-invasive, obviously. It has to just sit there on your wrist

⏹️ ▶️ John like a watch, and occasionally do stuff. And it’s kind of amazing the number of things it can do just

⏹️ ▶️ John by shining lights through your skin and or arm hair on your wrist, right? So,

⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, like, I do hope Apple comes up with a breakthrough, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, technology for helping people with diabetes and so on and so forth, but this watch ain’t it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that being said, like, I think, first of all, another big reason to upgrade to this watch, if you’re looking for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more, Casey, is that the lights change from green to red. That’s just cooler. Like, whenever you like pop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it off and it’s still like measuring your workout stuff and you see the green lights, like green lights are not cool, red lights

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are cool. So that’s one big reason. But in all seriousness, on the medical

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, when I heard that it was pulse ox, I’m like, okay, great, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. But then when I heard it was a 15-second long test that you have to initiate, I was like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh, that’s not that great. But then they said it also takes periodic background readings.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, and I think that is kind of the Apple Watch mode of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it really makes a difference and how it can really catch some helpful things for people, is like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just get one of those $30 things from the drugstore to measure your pulse, your oxygen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how often are you gonna do that? If you’re Casey, you’re gonna say you’re gonna do it twice a day, you’re gonna actually do it once a day. If you’re a normal person, you’re gonna do it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once ever and then forget to do it ever again. And so, you know, honestly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big value here is not that they did something that you can get

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a $40 thing to do anywhere. The big value is they did something in this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that’s gonna be constantly, or periodically giving you readings all the time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without you taking any action. So it’s like the difference between a manual backup and time machine or Backblaze.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like automatic backups are way better because you won’t ever do it yourself really.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the kind of thing for health readings. And they do the same thing with the various heart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rate monitoring they do. It’s one thing to be able

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to take an EKG or whatever or to be able to monitor your heart rate when you ask for it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a much more valuable thing to be periodically monitoring that all the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to develop a baseline so you know, and it knows, what is normal.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then if it starts getting readings that are outside of your normal baseline, it can alert you to that without having to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait for you to take another test manually or remember to do a thing or to know what your baseline

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even is. So that’s where the value really is to this stuff. It’s not that you can take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a oxygen reading if you want to, It’s that this thing’s going to always be taking oxygen readings, and it can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell you if something deviates from the norm.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the fact that it has so many different sensors plays into this. Like, so to give a heart rate example, it

⏹️ ▶️ John periodically measures your heart rate. It also knows whether you’re moving or not, because it’s on your wrist,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? So if your heart rate goes up, but your wrist is moving back and forth like you’re running, that seems normal.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re sitting on your couch and your heart rate goes up, that would be a scenario where the watch can alert and say, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just sitting there on the couch and your heart rate is going way up, So something’s probably wrong, right? Similarly with

⏹️ ▶️ John the blood oxygenation, you know, it has an altimeter.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re at the top of a really high mountain and your blood has lost oxygen, not that it’s not gonna warn

⏹️ ▶️ John you about it, because you do need that oxygen in your blood, it’s very important. But at least it has some correlation

⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of alerting thresholds and everything to say, well, if it goes down a tiny bit, but you’re at the top

⏹️ ▶️ John of Mount Everest, it’s like, this is still within reasonable parameters because the person’s at, you know, really high altitude

⏹️ ▶️ John or something, right? So those are the type of things where the fact that this is a tiny computer

⏹️ ▶️ John with tons of different sensors that’s always attached to you, make it able to make smarter decisions than

⏹️ ▶️ John you personally with the $15 thing you brought from Walmart that you left at home anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I agree with everything you guys said. And yeah, there’s a brighter always on display up to two and a half times brighter,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which they cited particularly in sunlight. That’s going to be really nice. One of the kind of quiet themes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of yesterday’s event was colors, which I was really excited to see. I have,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do they call, what is the official name for the 11 Pro green? It’s like forest green, midnight green,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. Anyways, I have one

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco those. Steve McLaughlin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Space green. Jared Ranere Space green. I’m not the biggest green fan, generally speaking, but I love the way this thing looks.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the back of it, the front of it is scratched so badly I cannot even begin to describe it. I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what has happened to my phone this year, but oof, it’s bad. Anyway, but yeah, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all new colors. There’s a blue that that looks really, really good. I don’t know if I want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get a blue one because I feel like that limits, like, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know anything about fashion, obviously, but I feel like that limits my options a little bit, so I think I might just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stick with the traditional like silvery look, but there’s a blue one that looks great, a red one. A graphite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey replaces black, although I guess there’s space black in the Hermes line. Uh, and the titanium,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it? Titanium edition and no ceramic is titanium, not the edition. I never pay

⏹️ ▶️ John attention. There is a titanium edition. There is no more ceramic edition. Correct.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The ceramic continues its pattern of basically taking every other year off. Gotcha.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we had mentioned earlier, there’s continuous altimeters, so it’s always taking altitude readings. There’s new faces.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know at least some of them are on watchOS 7, because I did install that earlier today. The stripe face is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on watchOS 7. So even on my existing Series 5, you can use the stripe face. But they mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few others. Marco, you would know this better than me. And I know that you were really excited about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey all these new watch faces because they’re pretty much flawless, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco In general, I’m fairly pleased with the introduction of the Apple Watch Series 6

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Apple Watch SE. Like this part of the presentation, I was fairly happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with. I’m happy with the direction they’re going in general and this seemed like a pretty solid update.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not say a lot of kind things about the new watch faces yet. I’ve only played with them for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one day, but it’s such a shame. You know, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is again, it’s like they even brought an Allen die to troll me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been wearing my Apple watch more ever since I got the series 5

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last fall. I finally came to appreciate the Apple watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I started to finally admit to myself and let it admit to the world that the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch is a terrible analog watch. What it really wants to be is a digital watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Series 5 really hits home with that because of the way the screen dims.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If any app is open at all, it will always dim in inactive mode to a digital time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that upper right corner and in like a blurred screen or whatever. If you usually have an analog watch, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally you look at it and it’s a digital time, that’s even more jarring than like if it’s just always

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same. And so I started to realize a combination of that and how incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mediocre and frustrating all of their analog faces are to me,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that my happiness with the Apple Watch is improved

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by me totally staying away from all the analog faces. Because the analog

⏹️ ▶️ Marco faces continue to be what you would expect if you asked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a graphic designer who has never worn an analog watch to design

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. And every single analog watch face on the Apple Watch is like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The people who design these have never worn an analog watch. And they’re graphic designers, not watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco designers. And you could argue whether that should be the case or not for something like the Apple Watch, which is a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco computing device really first and a watch kind of second. Maybe that’s the right choice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the result of that is that the analog watch faces are not good analog watch faces.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They suffer from severe problems of legibility, severe,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would call them design quirks and design flaws and functionality flaws. If you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco let the Apple Watch just be a digital watch, and the face I’m almost always using now is either

⏹️ ▶️ Marco solar in the winter or Infograph modular in the summer when I wanna see things like the UV index and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. If you just let it be what it really wants to be, which is a digital watch,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a much happier experience in a lot of ways. So I’ve been using it that way. So all of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these new analog faces, I went through them today, I tried

⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming up with good combinations, I was unable to. So I’m going to continue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have it be a digital watch for me. And I wouldn’t say I’m happy with it. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t look at my digital watch with my Infograph modular face and say, wow that’s a nice looking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch. But it is functional and that’s the role digital watches have always had

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throughout history is like prioritizing function over beauty and that’s what the Apple Watch continues

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. So now that I let it be that I’m more at peace with how incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mediocre to bad all of the analog faces are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey How do you really feel? I really I like stripes in principle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot so this is where you can select I think anywhere between between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey three and nine stripes. You can select what color each of the stripes is and then you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can select like an angle that the stripes are oriented as. I really, really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig this in principle because it kind of gets you the ability to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey show some amount of pride in perhaps your country, if you’re not American, in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your particular sports team that you enjoy or just – or his sports or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, colorful thing you, I mean, you could make like an M logo out of the stripes, uh, out of the stripes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch face. If you still believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you

⏹️ ▶️ John match your outfit, I think that’s the main one. Yeah, that’s true too. If you’re color coordinating, you color coordinate your

⏹️ ▶️ John watch band. Now you can color coordinate your watch face, which is what one of the things that Mark always talks about with his

⏹️ ▶️ John anger at the watch faces, something you can’t do with a real watch is change the color of it. Uh, but if you have

⏹️ ▶️ John a digital screen, you can, so why not make that an option? And I think with the ability to save watch faces,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you spend the of time to make a watch face that perfectly matches one of your outfits, I think you can just save that off and then

⏹️ ▶️ John the next time that outfit comes up just swipe over to the pre-made watch face for that outfit. So it is time

⏹️ ▶️ John well spent if you really want to color coordinate and especially if you have a huge collection of bands that also match your stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Seems pretty cool to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I will say the bands, you know, we have yet to see any of these in person yet, of course,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the current status of the world is going to make it difficult for a lot of people to see any

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this stuff in person for a long time. But I am cautiously

⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimistic about these new bands. The direction they’re going with them looks really good to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Apple Watch has always excelled in having really good bands. Not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to other Apple devices, not relative to other fitness trackers, but relative to the entire watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry. Apple Watch has had some of the best bands in the industry. And so this new type

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of band is basically the stretch band coming in both the like a braid finish

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just a rubbery finish. I’m looking forward to that. I did the thing, I printed out the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ordered myself a white rubber one because that’s my band of choice because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really am curious. I think I’m a size 7, we’ll find out. There might be some returns happening.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see how that goes. But these are probably going to be really nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a slight annoyance if you’ve never been an Apple Watch owner

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a strap that can’t lay flat, it is less convenient. Straps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that lay flat make charging much easier because you can just have the charger sitting flat on the desk or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some other flat thing face up and just stick the watch down flat. When you have a band like these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can’t go flat, it’s more annoying. You gotta like, you know, have either some kind of stand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has like a flip up or right angle thing or you gotta like kind of just manually stick it on every time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like lifting up slightly so that that’s kind of annoying but otherwise I’m looking forward to trying these out

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yeah and I’m also I’m honestly also kind of curious about the new leather link

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I have much of a need for a leather Apple watch strap but the old leather loop

⏹️ ▶️ Marco was something that always felt way worse than it looked it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard it almost felt like a plastic link bracelet. The new one has fewer parts,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems generally a little bit sleeker, a little more elegant of a design, so I’m looking forward to seeing how that is in practice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco once I can ever go to a store again. But yeah, otherwise, I’m really happy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, the bands are moving forward in what appear to be good ways. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking forward to receiving mine to try it out. And finally, before we get off the subject of Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco aesthetics, I am very happy to see these new colors too. You know, you mentioned Casey, there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue one. There’s also a product red one for the first time. You mentioned the graphite steel which kind of replaces

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the space black and all but the Hermes line. What I would caution people about is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t make any assumptions on how these things will look until you can see them in person or until you have if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a very good easy way to return things because it’s very hard to tell how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch finishes and colors look like on a website.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found this to be the case last year with the titanium, it looked way different in person than what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I expected it to look like by looking at the website. And I expect that same thing to happen again this year with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the new gray color of the steel and probably also with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue and red aluminum. So who knows, like it might look very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco different than what you expect. So go into it knowing that there’s a risk you might be returning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it if you just buy blind on the website.

⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of returns, like the solo loop things, we’ll put a link in the show notes to the PDF,

⏹️ ▶️ John the sizing thing, which they do as good a job as they can for everything that you print out to size. It’s got a little square

⏹️ ▶️ John on it where you can put a credit card and basically says if your credit card fits exactly in the square, you know you printed it at the right size,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is much easier than trying to get people to measure things with a ruler. You cut it out and you wrap it around

⏹️ ▶️ John your wrist. But man, for a stretchy thing, it’s like, okay, well,

⏹️ ▶️ John this little thing you put around your wrist can measure how big your wrist is, but the paper is not elastic.

⏹️ ▶️ John So how firm do you want it to squeeze? Right? Maybe you would actually want a smaller size

⏹️ ▶️ John because you need it to be grip tighter. Maybe you want a higher size because you want to lose to this. You really, really would like to

⏹️ ▶️ John try these things on in person, but you know, COVID, so it’s not that easy. So I get, I mean, Apple has, it usually has a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John good return policy, but it is kind of a hassle. The other thing about the solo loop is that as I tweeted when

⏹️ ▶️ John they were announced, they look a little bit like an arm hair menace to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I do not relish the idea of trying to squeeze one of those things over my very hairy arms, especially the rubbery grippy

⏹️ ▶️ John ones. And speaking of that, we haven’t talked about pricing yet for any of the things, but the Apple Watch itself is 399,

⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is unchanged from the last top of the line Apple Watch, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Series 5? I think that’s right, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Starts at, because they go up and up. Anyway, the Solo Loop, the rubbery kind of, looks

⏹️ ▶️ John like the Sportband Solo Loop thing, is 50 bucks, which is, you know, it’s no more highway robbery than the Sportband

⏹️ ▶️ John being 50 bucks is, but it is what it is. If you want to get a cheaper one, I’m sure there’ll be clones on Amazon shortly.

⏹️ ▶️ John The braided Soliloop is $100. And I was like, what? What is it braided from? Rapunzel’s hair? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John understand how this thing could cost, A, how it can cost $100, and B, how

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s twice the cost of the rubbery one. I guess it costs money to have

⏹️ ▶️ John tiny nanomachines braid them for you. I don’t, I don’t know, risk. Apple must

⏹️ ▶️ John be making a lot of money on these. And I understand they’re, like Marco said, they’re high quality, they’re good, and I agree, they are really cool, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, it’s like a options on a Porsche. That’s where the real money is made. You know, they sell

⏹️ ▶️ John you the watch for a pretty good profit, but the profit on these straps must be ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, Series 6 looks like a good update. Nothing amazing. I haven’t been

⏹️ ▶️ John keeping up with the Apple Watch world, but before this keynote, I was actually kind of hoping they were like, maybe this year they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John surprise us all and say, you know what, the Apple Watch now looks totally different, but they didn’t. And it doesn’t, but it’s still a good

⏹️ ▶️ John product.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is definitely an incremental update. You know, this is not like a, oh my God, you have to rush out and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy this. It’s amazing. Like it’s not one of those years. This is like, you know, if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of getting a new watch or if your current watch is, you know, older and dying or the battery’s not lasting long anymore and you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want a new one, this looks like a great update. I’m personally very excited about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the brighter dim mode of the screen in bright sunlight. That

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is something that the Series 5 for all of its wonderfulness with having that always on screen,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have wished for it to be a bit brighter in the sleep mode in sunlight. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have frequently this summer run into a time where I would glance at my watch in the sun and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would actually be kind of hard to read the time until it activated. So that should be nice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise, I know it’s a frivolous thing. Like I don’t need this. I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even try to justify it. I have no justification whatsoever. I’m just getting it because it’s a fun thing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m probably gonna order one the next day or so.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Of course you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are. Are they shipping? Are they shipping? Let’s see, order today delivers September 30th through October 2, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not that long from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. Yeah, as usual, it depends on which combination you get. Many of them don’t ship until October or November.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them ship still on Friday, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, fair enough. You know what you two are not getting, though? A power adapter with your Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Watch, because- Ah, yes. Apple says that the Apple Watch does not come with, and if

⏹️ ▶️ John anyone doesn’t have an Apple Watch, this is what they’re not including in the box. So they’re still including the little

⏹️ ▶️ John thing that smacks onto the back of the watch that charges it and then has a little cord snaking from it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing that that cord plugs into, they used to give you this tiny little thing that was very, very small,

⏹️ ▶️ John and it plugged into an outlet, and then it had USB-A on the other side. I don’t know if they switched them to USB-C, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is a USB-C one available, but I think the one that comes in the box is still USB-A.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so it was just a thing that plugged into the wall, and it was as small as it could possibly be,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then you plugged a USB thing into it, right? That little tiny thing that plugs into the wall is what they’re not including.

⏹️ ▶️ John And in the presentation, they said, we’re not including this because it reduces

⏹️ ▶️ John the carbon footprint. Lots of people have places where you can plug any kind of USB thing into. Why do we need to give you another

⏹️ ▶️ John one? A lot of people just chuck these away, which makes perfect sense. They pitch it as

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the equivalent of 50,000 cars being removed from the road per year for Apple not to ship these things.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because Apple’s scale is very large, and they sell a lot of Apple watches. That’s a lot of waste

⏹️ ▶️ John and carbon emissions saved. So good for Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think this would have been an absolutely 100% clean win if they said we’re not including the power adapter.

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course, you can buy power adapter separately. You probably shouldn’t buy them from Apple, but you can buy one of these for a couple of bucks

⏹️ ▶️ John at like a gas station, right? It’s not, you know, because it’s the lowest voltage you could possibly imagine. Like to

⏹️ ▶️ John charge your watch, you don’t need a high power power. It’s just literally anything you can plug USB-A into, you’re fine,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? But Apple didn’t say, we can buy it separately

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re lowering the price by the cost of that adapter. Which wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John be much, but it would just be like, look, we haven’t always changed about this. It would complete the

⏹️ ▶️ John waste pitch, right? Of saying we’re doing this for environmental reasons. It’s like, if you want it, you can buy it, and it’s the same

⏹️ ▶️ John price as it was before. But if you don’t want it, now you don’t have to pay for it, right? Don’t pay for something you don’t need.

⏹️ ▶️ John And by you not paying for it and us not giving it to you by default, We’re saving the environment and you’re saving money and that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John great. And unfortunately that little tiny power thing probably costs five bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not from Apple, it costs $19.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but I mean for Apple. Like Apple’s cost to make that little thing is whatever, five

⏹️ ▶️ John bucks, 10 bucks, whatever. Knock something off the price. Instead of making it $399, make it $395.

⏹️ ▶️ John So that five bucks, that was the power adapter. And then people

⏹️ ▶️ John can say, clean wind, environmental, if I don’t want it, I want to have it. And if I do want it, I can have

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It would be great if you could buy it for five bucks from Apple, but like, I think that would work out. But of course, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John being Apple, they didn’t change the price. It’s exactly the same price as it was, you just get less in the box. Except,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you buy a titanium or Hermes model, they do come with a power adapter, because

⏹️ ▶️ John rich people need the waste. And also, the titanium and Hermes ones

⏹️ ▶️ John also come with a sport band, did you know that? You pick whatever band you want, and they also throw in a sport band for free. $50 value, sport

⏹️ ▶️ John band. Anyway, so if you’re a rich person, you still get tons of stuff, and it makes lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of waste. And if anyone’s gonna have some place where they can already plug in a bunch of USB

⏹️ ▶️ John charging stuff, it’s probably someone who’s buying a very fancy watch. Because like all of us, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not gonna say no one uses that little power brick, but I think if you have a lot of Apple devices, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ John have places in your home already available where you can plug in a USB-A style charging

⏹️ ▶️ John thing or USB-C style charging thing, especially when you don’t need very high

⏹️ ▶️ John power delivery. Like you’re not trying to charge an iPad Pro here. Literally anything that’s USB

⏹️ ▶️ John will charge this just fine. So I think this is a good move. I think Apple shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John include stuff like this by default, but I wish they had passed any of the monetary

⏹️ ▶️ John savings onto their customers, even just in a symbolic gesture of goodwill.

⏹️ ▶️ John I like the fact that they’re passing on the carbon savings to the world. Good, I applaud this. This is exactly what you want. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John wanna have to pay for things that I don’t want and it is wasteful and I would choose not to have it because I don’t need it. but

⏹️ ▶️ John can I get five bucks off? I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s kind of, I mean, yes, it’s wonderful that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco saving that waste. There’s also other ways they could do that. For instance, every

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sport band, every watch that comes with a sport band or every sport band you buy separately has three

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pieces. There’s the like loop piece, and then there’s two of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole pieces. There’s a short one and a long one. Every sport band they sell or every watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that comes with a sport band, you’re probably throwing away half of the band without even using it once.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you find the one that fits you and then you never use the other one. So, and also, you know, they could maybe make their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices more serviceable over time. That would probably reduce waste by a significant,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, margin, way more than, you know, removing it as your power adapter. And this isn’t to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco say that they’re going to keep it or that they should keep it. I mean, this is probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco inevitable and they should, and you know, we’re probably past the point where they’re gonna do this anyway. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you better believe they’re also gonna remove it and probably the headphones from the iPhone as well. I think this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all but seals the deal on that. They’re gone from the iPhone 12. But I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m with you, John. I wish that it didn’t feel just like we’re now just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting less for the same amount of money. Because there is an environmental benefit here. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could have done a better job of selling it to us, I think, and giving us something for it. but that was never gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen. There was never, like, there was no way they’re gonna reduce the price by 10 or 20 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s never gonna happen. I mean, the Apple way to pitch this is, well, we did reduce the price by that much,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just the Series 6 cost a little bit more than the Series 5 to make. So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it just

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco happened to be exactly the same number. Like, all this

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is fuzzy math.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a lot of BS, too, let’s be honest. Like, they’re gonna make a little bit more money from this, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whenever there is something that helps the environment that also makes them more profit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a pretty easy thing to do.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the thing about the watch strap, having both of them in there, like anything that has to do with fit,

⏹️ ▶️ John I can imagine them being a little bit wary about asking people to do that because that could actually produce more

⏹️ ▶️ John waste in terms of returns and people not understanding the difference and all this other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I worry about the solo loop, especially without people being able to try them on. In some respects, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John stretchy, like stretch pants, they fit everybody, but on the other hand, I don’t want something squeezing my wrist too tight or

⏹️ ▶️ John being too loose or whatever. Love to watch for people in the wild, if and when these things start shipping,

⏹️ ▶️ John who are wearing Solo Loops, they were obviously one size too big, but didn’t bother returning it, so

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just rattling around on their wrist, you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what I mean? Yeah, well also, as anybody knows who has ever worn a watch, your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrist size changes, sometimes even within the same day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s why elastic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is good. Right, depending on how hot or humid it is, or how hot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are, maybe from a workout or something, having a fixed size wrist or watch band

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t easily change to another different hole or something is certainly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less comfortable in some cases. But in the ideal case, if you get one that fits you perfectly,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is a fixed size, it is potentially great because then you don’t have the big

⏹️ ▶️ Marco blob of thickness in the bottom with all the mechanism of the clasp and everything, you can just have this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one continuous piece of material. So when you’re resting it on a keyboard or a desk or something like that, you don’t have that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco big blob pushing into you. So in an ideal case, if you can find a fit that works with you most of the time,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the best of all worlds. But that might be a little bit tricky at first till you figure out what size you are.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Sony took out five or 10 bucks worth of guts and gave $100 discount.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple took out a couple of cents worth of guts and it’s the same money.

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Watch SE, Family Setup

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so the Apple Watch SE, which I don’t know how I feel about that name, but whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least it’s consistent. It has the, it’s kind of, I think it was described on Upgrade as kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the merging of the Series 4 and Series 6, which I thought was a pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Casey good description. So it has a Series 5 system on a chip. It does not have the always-on display.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It does not do ECG and it does not do the blood oxygen stuff. It has the same accelerometers

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and altimeters as the Series 6. It starts at 280 bucks, which really isn’t bad. I mean, it’s a lot of money,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it’s not terrible in the grand scheme of things. And adding cellular is only 50 bucks instead of the 100 it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is on the Series 6, which is frustrating, but, you know, it is what it is. But great news,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, the Series 3, oh, never mind, it’s not dead.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, this is the kind of thing that affects Underscore more than me because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still continue to barely make a watch app, and he makes many of them. So, but the reality

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that, yeah, like the Series 3 is still in the lineup at 200 bucks.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this matters a lot because there’s massive competition at the low

⏹️ ▶️ Marco end, price-wise, of things like Fitbits and everything for the Apple Watch. And there’s pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no competition in the $400 and up price range. They don’t have much there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So really, they need to have something at this low price point. And they’ve had the Series 3 sitting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, the few years old Series 3 is sitting there for a little while. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 4 was immediately discontinued when the Series 5 came out. So the Series 4 never got its chance

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be the cheap one. It kind of got iPhone 5’d into the sunset. And the Series 5,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, is not the same thing. They’re not selling that anymore either, as far as I can tell. So it’s also gone. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just 6 and SE. But I like what the SE is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish it was cheaper so we could get rid of the Series 3 because the Series 3 is not only the last

⏹️ ▶️ Marco 32-bit device in Apple’s lineup, but it’s also the last of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple Watch old screen size and old screen shape and old complication type and everything else. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sooner we can get rid of the need to support that as developers, the easier certain stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on the Apple Watch. That being said, that’s like saying as you’re walking through hell,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ground could be a little bit smoother. You know, like of all the various hostile bits

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developing apps for the Apple Watch, dealing with those small screen sizes or its 32

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bititude is not… it doesn’t really compare to all the other incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rough edges and hostile environment that it is. So it would be easier for developers if that Series 3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco went away earlier rather than later, but you know, it’s still not gonna be a great platform to develop apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, if I’m honest, and it’s not gonna make it that much easier. So it isn’t nearly as hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to support that as it is to support small iPhone screen sizes, for instance. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, from a product perspective, I think the Apple Watch SE is a good idea. We actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordered one to try to be our kids’ first Apple Watch because I’m much

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more excited about this family setup thing. You can basically have an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch that is set up and paired to your iPhone for somebody else in your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco family. So this is especially useful. The examples they they gave were children or possibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a relative who doesn’t have an iPhone, but you want them to have an

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch for various reasons. You wanna maybe know where your kids are, give your kids some way to like emergency call you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you wanna keep tabs on like an elderly relative who might have health issues.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this kind of thing is great. We were literally in the market for this this past summer, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re to the point with our kid where some of his friends have phones, we don’t want to give him a phone yet.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a little early for that. But he will also go off

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and play down the block or walk to the ice cream shop at the end of the block

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. And it’s like, you kind of would like to know, to have some way to know where he is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yes, I know we all grew up without this, but today is today and we have options. We were thinking we should probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get him maybe an Apple Watch, but we were thinking maybe we’d pair it to an old iPhone that he would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not ever have with him. But anyway, this is a better way to do that. And they get their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own phone number. It has to be cellular. They get their own phone number that you can then like text

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and call. Presumably it needs its own service that you have to pay your carrier some amount for that I’m sure AT&T

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will make very simple and definitely won’t gouge you on the activation fee and will definitely make it super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to cancel. Nnn in the chat asked a good question. If I’m buying a Series 6 anyway, why not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco give the kid my Series 5 hand-me-down? That’s because I buy the stainless steel model and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s too heavy for him. He prefers the aluminum model, but we don’t have any cellular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco aluminum models to give him. So we’re gonna try the series, sorry, the SE. I recognize,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, this is yet another thing. I know I don’t really need this, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m admitting that I’m buying it because it’s cool. So there it is.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think this is a really cool idea, and we had seen signs of this, was it last

⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, when they announced the App Store on the Apple Watch, and I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that that’s going to work with family setup, perhaps it won’t, but stuff like that where it seems like the watch is getting ever more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey independent, and I think this is a really, really clever idea. I mean, Declan,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey even in the before times, Declan was pretty much always with us, and so he is too young

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this, and I’m not sure we would even necessarily explore it if he was older, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, I think it is an extremely cool idea, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey think if we lived in a place more similar to where you are, Marco, I think I would be much more enthusiastic about it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is really clever, and I’m really curious to see how well this is implemented

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because anytime Apple does stuff with families, in my experience, it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have the most vanilla, plain Jane, like easy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like happy path way of doing things, it all works but if you do something even remotely weird,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything falls apart.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tell me about it. I spent all day doing Xcode provisioning profile crap because I have CarPlay entitlements.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Talk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about being off the beaten path. You can’t do crap without anything automatic with that. Oh, and good luck getting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Catalyst to work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, enjoy that. That does not sound fun at all. And the other thing I’m worried about is, so let’s assume

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a moment that Adam is going to have this watch and wear it to school, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’ll be away from presumably any sort of cellular phone and he will be away

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from his house Wi-Fi. I don’t know if there is Wi-Fi at the school. I don’t know if he’d be able to get on it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either way. But that indicates to me that this watch will be sitting with the cellular radioactive

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like all day long. And I can tell you even in the best of times my 40 millimeter

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch when I’m using cellular which admittedly I’m also typically streaming music and I’m doing an exercise,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a lot. So consider the source here. But I have not been impressed with battery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey life when I actually am using the cellular features on my watch. Like it destroys

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the battery. And so I really hope—and I guess since this isn’t always on, that’ll make a big difference

⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. It won’t have the always-on display. But I really hope that the battery life is better than I expect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I have the expectation that the battery life is going to be real, real bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s very possible. That’s certainly a risk. That’s something I’ve heard from both

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and I believe from David Sparks of MacPower Users when I talked about this with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco him like two years ago. When an Apple Watch, when a cellular Apple Watch is away from its paired iPhone,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does burn the battery so quickly that this might be a bad idea. So we’ll find out.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never tried running it that way all day long. So we’ll see what happens in practice. I think you’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right that having the Series 5’s processor which is pretty efficient

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but without the series fives always on screen does probably give it a good amount of battery headroom that said

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course this is going to be the smaller model it is kind of funny by the way that my eight-year-old is going to wear the same size

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch that I do the 40 millimeter

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but yeah so we’ll see how it works this plan could totally backfire and I might I might report back in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco month that oh yeah we returned it cuz it sucked but we’ll see I have a feeling you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco know they probably did this family setup thing for good reason. Like, cause

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this would be a problem with almost any family setup context. So, you know, and a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco family setup only works on cellular. There’s probably a reason for that too, cause they realize this is what people actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want this for, not just for wifi only ones. So, we’ll see how it goes. But I actually, I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they probably designed it with that in mind. So it will probably be okay. Keep in mind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco also that he’s in school most of the day. He’s not allowed to like text people on his

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch in school. And of course, we are going to enforce that. We’re going to make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure that that’s enforced. So he’s not going to be heavily using the cellular necessarily.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s going to be more of a way for us to track his location and for him to call people in emergencies.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anything else on the watch specifically, then we have Fitness Plus up next, but anything else on the

⏹️ ▶️ John watch? Yeah, I just wanted to tell Marco that he’s going to enjoy finding out what an eight-year-old can do to an Apple Watch.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no. I bet you’d probably take good care of yours. Let’s see if that thing lasts a month for you to

⏹️ ▶️ John get mad at the battery life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I told him though, because he’s a nice kid and he was concerned about getting something expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what I did was I showed him one of my watches and I’m like, look, see this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant scratch on the side of this? I’m like, I scratched this watch the day I bought it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And here’s that first scratch. And I told him, you’re gonna scratch the crap out of it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you just have to learn to be okay with that because I want you to wear it and use it and everything. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s a little bit worried, but it’s time, I think. He’s ready for

⏹️ ▶️ John it. I wasn’t really talking about scratches, but we’ll see how it goes. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John The Apple Watch is pretty sturdy, to be fair. Yeah, eight-year-olds are pretty amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing I think is relevant to the SEN family setup,

⏹️ ▶️ John and also the Series 3 still being in the mix, So family setup only works with the Series 4 or

⏹️ ▶️ John later. So if you buy Apple’s cheapest watch to give with your kid, you can’t use family setup with it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second thing is, the Series 3 is $199 and the SE is $279,

⏹️ ▶️ John and boy, the Series 3 is so much worse than the SE, right? Which is basically

⏹️ ▶️ John a Series 5 plus. It’s like, I just, I don’t care about the Series 3 from

⏹️ ▶️ John a developer’s point of view. I understand, underscores pain, but in general, like Marco’s right that we do need to have a 199 model,

⏹️ ▶️ John but 279 is so close, it’s so close it feels like, you know, I just, next year,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got to get rid of that Series 3, bring the SE down in that, because it’s weird now that if you go, I want a watch

⏹️ ▶️ John for my kid, and they’re like, well, here’s our cheapest watch, but you don’t want that one for your kid, because let me tell you why. It’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John this is a little bit weird in between. All this is to say is the Apple Watch SE looks like a really good deal

⏹️ ▶️ John compared to everything else, but the Series 3 just looks like a dog to me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, but if you think about it, like if Apple’s profit is usually, you know, 30 to 40% on hardware, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of is their entire profit. Like the difference between those two.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, Oh, I know. Well, I, who knows, who knows what these watches and what the actual cost of materials are.

⏹️ ▶️ John They are very small. We didn’t mention that, but one of the other things they pitch is they’re using even more recycled materials for their watches and everything

⏹️ ▶️ John too. So that might factor in. But anyway, next year, next year, their lineup will make even more sense, but they’ve made progress

⏹️ ▶️ John this year.

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Fitness+

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think we’ve talked about this on the show in the past, but Aaron has been very dedicated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’ve been semi-dedicated to doing some sort of daily exercise. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, that comes in various forms, but for Aaron, that’s pretty consistently been something called Beachbody,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is like a kind of Netflix for exercise videos and things

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. Well, Beachbody is two things. It’s a total pyramid scheme, which Erin is not at all involved in, thank goodness,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s also a really, actually genuinely good Netflix for exercise videos.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do some of the Beachbody workouts as well. She does a lot more of them and is much more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dedicated than I, but they’re pretty good. The app is okay. It’s not stupendous,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it works. They have apps for your phone and your iPad as well as, of course, the Apple TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the idea, particularly in these times, the idea of working out at home with somebody instructing you as

⏹️ ▶️ Casey much as they can in a one-way fashion, instructing you on how

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to exercise and get fit. In my personal opinion, that can work and it can work pretty well.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And for Aaron to get this kind of Netflix for exercise, so to speak, I believe it’s $100 a year.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And yesterday, Apple announced Apple Fitness Plus,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is basically a Beachbody-style thing, so a kind of Netflix for exercise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos, that’s really built around the Apple Watch. I don’t think it absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ Casey requires an Apple Watch. I’m actually not sure about that, but it’s certainly built around the Apple Watch. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first glance, I thought, okay, well, this is just Beachbody, but by Apple. You know, of course, the production values

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are through the roof and everything is so pretty and so on and so forth, but it’s the same basic idea. But then they started

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking more and more about it. And there are a series of really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey little things that add up to really, really impress me. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things that they said, was it Jay Blanik I think was the presenter doing this part?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey He had said that as you’re doing these exercises, well first off, when you start one of these, presumably

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re doing this on like the Apple TV or an iPad or something like that. When you start one of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exercises, it will automatically start a workout of the appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ Casey type on your Apple Watch, which is an integration that I don’t recall, I guess other than the remote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, I don’t recall there ever really being a direct integration between the Apple TV and the watch. That also makes me wonder,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is this going to work if Aaron and I both use the same Apple TV, obviously not simultaneously?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I guess what if we do do it simultaneously? not only do they start the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exercises on your watch, but another thing they do is they show your stats on screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can see your rings, you can see your heart rate, and so on and so forth. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I know that they’re allegedly like profiles on the Apple TV, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I suppose that might work, but I don’t know. I’m skeptical. But nevertheless,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the other cool things that they do other than starting the workout is that they’ll show you, like I said, your heart rate, your rings,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey et cetera, on screen. And they said if there’s a time at which the trainer says, oh, and check out your heart

⏹️ ▶️ Casey rate right now, it will actually enlarge the heart rate readout

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the screen when the trainer says that. So it’s easier to see. Is this important?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Absolutely not. But is it extremely cool? Heck yeah, it is. I just think that this is Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at its finest. When they control the entire widget or the entirety of all the widgets, they can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do really slick stuff like that. And I think that that is super, super cool. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey they, you, they have all sorts of different workouts. They have like yoga, uh, treadmill, bike, um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumbbell, uh, sort of, you know, uh, lifting, uh, high intensity interval training, uh, all sorts of different stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, dancing, rowing for Marco. Hey, yep. Rowing for Marco. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and mindful cool downs, all sorts of different stuff. And, uh, I didn’t catch this part of the presentation, but they were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about on upgrade that, uh, one of the things they’re doing is like a complete beginner

⏹️ ▶️ Casey version where I guess if you’re completely unfit as so many of us are,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would say I definitely wasn’t up until recently, they have, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess, I would assume low impact or not terribly challenging exercise

⏹️ ▶️ Casey programs that you can try. It’s free for three months when you get a new Apple Watch, then it’s $10 a month

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or $80 a year, family sharing included. It’s available sometime by the end of the year and appears to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be English only for now. That is a whole lot of information. Marco, I’m really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested to hear what you have to say about it, but let’s give John a chance first because I think you’re going to have a lot more to say

⏹️ ▶️ Casey than John. So John, take it away.

⏹️ ▶️ John John Giesinke I haven’t actually used any of these things, so I’m not entirely sure what the market for it

⏹️ ▶️ John is. The only comparison that I have any information about is the one that everybody’s making, which I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ John is particularly apt, and that’s to Peloton and these other very expensive cycling things,

⏹️ ▶️ John which were sort of pioneers in this space of getting people with a lot of money to buy a really expensive stationary bike and then hook

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey up a gigantic

⏹️ ▶️ John screen to it and connect it to the internet. Right. And that’s sort of a home derived offshoot

⏹️ ▶️ John of the spin classes that people go do. And Apple entering with this product was like, well, this makes

⏹️ ▶️ John sense for Apple. This is the type of thing that they’re used to. It integrates with their devices, but it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John just a thing that shows on the screen and they’re going to have new content every week. And like you said, the production values are really high

⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. But you know what it reminds me of more than Peloton? It reminds me of, do you remember

⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple, maybe you’ve already forgotten about this a little bit, a lot of people have came out with these, we’re making music lessons

⏹️ ▶️ John by famous musicians with high production values

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that

⏹️ ▶️ John will teach you to play the piano or whatever. Do you remember that? Yep. Where are those now?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think they still exist, but did not set the world on fire. Did they? This looks a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot like that. This has better integration. It’s kind of like if Apple’s music lessons, you know, directly integrated

⏹️ ▶️ John with an Apple keyboard or something because here they have the watch doing the health monitoring for you and it hooks so

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s better than that. But it does make me wonder, I mean, we always make, at least

⏹️ ▶️ John I always make fun of Apple for not understanding the gaming market. I don’t know much about

⏹️ ▶️ John the fitness market, but when I look at Peloton, that is a company that seems to me understands

⏹️ ▶️ John very well what causes people to engage with exercise.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like they, and the reason I mentioned gaming is when I read about Peloton, I’m like, oh, they

⏹️ ▶️ John are using, not gamification, because it’s just overloaded term, but they, they’re using

⏹️ ▶️ John aspects of technology to bring sort of social

⏹️ ▶️ John and competitive angles to what is essentially a, you know, a thing that you do by yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John in your house to motivate people to exercise. And Apple, in some respects, did that with the activity

⏹️ ▶️ John rings, you know, encouraging people in a Fitbit style to be aware of their health, first of all, and second

⏹️ ▶️ John of all, to be competitive, to achieve some kind of goal. Peloton takes that a step further with

⏹️ ▶️ John the social aspect and the sort of the celebrity aspect and the personality aspect of having the instructors

⏹️ ▶️ John be, you know, very personable and, and, you know, eventually famous and having you do things in group

⏹️ ▶️ John and compete with your friends and compete with other people in the class, the same things that the spin classes did in person, but now it’s powered over

⏹️ ▶️ John the internet and it’s the entire world, that kind of integration. And also the live classes, which

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple doesn’t have any of, uh, of like being able to be acknowledged in a live class as you sit there,

⏹️ ▶️ John peddling your part out in your own house, than having the famous instructor that you’ve been watching in

⏹️ ▶️ John the Peloton video mention you or something like that. That is, you know, setting aside the $2,000 bicycle,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even talking about that, pretend the bike was free. That experience that gets people

⏹️ ▶️ John to get made Peloton what it is today and makes it a successful business, it seems like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John either, Apple certainly doesn’t have a lot of those features and it doesn’t seem like it values

⏹️ ▶️ John or understands them because there’s no reason technologically Apple couldn’t have a lot of those features. granted again,

⏹️ ▶️ John it can’t have a $2,000 bicycle, but all the other aspects I talked about, the social aspect, the

⏹️ ▶️ John interactive aspect, the live aspect, the competitive aspect, Apple does not

⏹️ ▶️ John have. Now this is a version one granted, but they’re coming into a world where things like Peloton already exist. So I do

⏹️ ▶️ John wonder, is this going to end up as a less expensive mass market version of Peloton,

⏹️ ▶️ John or is it going to end up as the exercise equivalent of Apple’s music lessons?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hmm. That’s a good question. I mean, I think the odds are pretty good that this will at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see good usage, especially because as we’ll get to with the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco One, you know, finally services bundle, I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will know about this more because it’s one of the things that’s included in the top

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tier of the bundle that they’re gonna possibly want for other reasons. And so it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, well, I’m paying for this anyway, let’s check it out. So there will be some aspects of that. I also think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is just a bigger market. I think more people want to exercise with instruction

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than want to learn musical instruments in GarageBand or wherever that was. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s probably gonna be a bigger audience, you know, no matter what. But you are right.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, a lot of the appeal of Peloton is the competitive aspect

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the live aspect. Like those are two things that are very much not present here. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually, I’m very excited about Apple Fitness Plus, even though I probably won’t use it very often

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have my own trainer set up that I do, so I’m not really the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco market for it yet, but I might do it if I’m traveling or if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day where I don’t have anything else planned but I wanna get a little bit of a workout in. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll use it here and there. The Absolute Beginner program that Casey mentioned is wonderful,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the actual experience of working out with it does look pretty cool. but it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve done a really good job with the integration and everything, with the Apple Watch and everything. So all that stuff, I’m sure it’s gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nicely produced, nicely done. Where Apple, I think, will suffer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what John said. Like, I think they’re probably never going to really nail the competitive thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t see them doing live classes possibly ever. Those both seem like things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are fairly difficult for Apple to do, like culturally or skill-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, like, they’re not good at that kind of thing. I don’t think they’re gonna do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think this will still have great value in giving people who,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the problem is, it would have much greater value if it was free for everybody who owned an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch. Like, that would be significantly nicer. The fact that they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made it its own pay service or its own member of a bundle that is a bundle of paid services,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know why they did it. I know it’s inevitable. Of course, they’re gonna charge money for it, but like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, old Apple would have just had this be a thing they did to make you buy Apple watches.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Modern Apple wants this to be its own profit center that will happen to also sell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some new Apple watches here and there. And that’s, I kind of think it’s too bad, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I know why they did it. I know it’s kind of inevitable with today’s Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John The thing is, there’s a free version of this that Apple could do that would be better than that because

⏹️ ▶️ John Peloton doesn’t offer much for free, like free, quote on for it. If you get that bicycle,

⏹️ ▶️ John but don’t pay for the service, you can still kind of use it, but it’s crap, right? So what could

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple do for free, right? Not that the marginal cost of producing these exercise

⏹️ ▶️ John videos per week is anything close to what they hope the subscriptions are gonna be, because again, you pay these exercise

⏹️ ▶️ John instructors to make these videos every week, and you pay video production crews, and so on and so forth, but that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John fixed cost. And then you get as many subscribers as you can, right? So it’s not a Zippo, it

⏹️ ▶️ John has to be subscription because they have to pay these people to make new videos every week. Marco’s right, they could totally just eat that and

⏹️ ▶️ John make it up in volume, quote unquote, by getting people into the ecosystem and so on

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so forth. The amount of money they make by selling Apple Watches is so much greater

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than whatever this costs them to produce in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John its entirety.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like you’re helping pay for these instructors’

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco salaries

⏹️ ▶️ John with your

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus, they’re saving all that money from all the power adapters.

⏹️ ▶️ John In the free realm, one of the things that Peloton offers in its pay things is something that Apple would be awesome

⏹️ ▶️ John at, an actual thing that Apple would already be awesome at. They’d have like scenic rides where when you’re riding the bicycle, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John just going through scenery. It’s not an instruction class and it’s not competitive. It’s like, what if you just wanna ride your little stationary

⏹️ ▶️ John bike and go on a beautiful mountain trail? That’s, Apple has screensavers that already practically

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do

⏹️ ▶️ John that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It will

⏹️ ▶️ John be the air version of it, right? Apple would be great at that. And you can offer those

⏹️ ▶️ John for free because you make 17 videos of scenic bike trails or whatever, or scenic

⏹️ ▶️ John running trails or whatever. And those are part of the free tier because you just make them once literally and you never make

⏹️ ▶️ John them again and you put a couple dozen of them in there. And that gets people into the idea of doing exercise in front of their

⏹️ ▶️ John TV or iPad while seeing their stats reflected from their watch. Again, Peloton is stingy

⏹️ ▶️ John with the functionality of the free tier, not giving you all the cool integrations with all that stuff. Because Peloton integrates

⏹️ ▶️ John with like heart rate sensors and I think even with the Apple watch at this point, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John there is a way where Apple could have, this is fitness plus, right? How about fitness without the plus?

⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody gets fitness without the plus. And it’s like five videos of every type, five of each

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of the videos for cycling, dance, yoga, treadmill, just to give you a taste, but it’s the same five videos, so you’re gonna get sick of them, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And then 15 or 20 cool scenic videos for the same activity type things.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you like that, sign up for Fitness Plus and what do you get for that? Maybe you get better

⏹️ ▶️ John stats tracking, leader boards, social, compete with friends, blah, blah, blah. And also

⏹️ ▶️ John every single week, new videos so you don’t get sick of watching the same videos over and over again. But

⏹️ ▶️ John no, we didn’t get the free tier, we just got the pay one. I’m just not steeped

⏹️ ▶️ John enough in the fitness world to know how competitive this is with

⏹️ ▶️ John other things, like the BeachBot thing. The pricing, was it in this ballpark, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s more expensive. This is 80 bucks a year. BeachBody on demand is 100 bucks a

⏹️ ▶️ John year. Isn’t BeachBody an MLM or something too?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what I said earlier. So if you don’t do any of the MLM

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, then you have to pay like full retail

⏹️ ▶️ John for it. Are you joking? Is it literally a multi-level marketing scheme?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it literally is. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not, I’m not a 100%.

⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell if you’re just trying to make fun of beach butter. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it is literally.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I legitimately think that it is an MLM because, and I haven’t like done the proper research and I might

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be wrong about this, but it seems to me like they really encourage you to become a quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey coach. And then when you’re a coach, then you get discounts on things and then they want you to peddle

⏹️ ▶️ Casey their like special nutritious

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then you get a pink Cadillac at the end. I get it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Okay. Yeah, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly. Reference acknowledged. What was that? Mary Kay?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is that right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. You should put a link to multi-level marketing in the Wikipedia page in the show notes for people who don’t know what this is.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had a friend whose mom had the pink Cadillac in high school.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodness. But yeah, basically, I believe it to be an MLM. But what’s nice about it is you,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron, like has completely and utterly ignored the MLM aspects and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t seem any worse for it. And again, I think that the MLM side of Beachbody

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really super gross, but if you take the videos for what they are

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as just exercise videos, and admittedly, I don’t have a lot to compare it to, but it seems to me like they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty darn good. And as I’ve mentioned before, I am not a particularly strong person and I am not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly cut or ripped or whatever the euphemism is these days, but I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly built muscle where I did not have muscle before, and that’s been almost exclusively because

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I’ve done with these Beachbody workouts. So yeah, when I say it’s MLM, I legitimately

⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe it to be MLM. But again, maybe I’m wrong. Who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matzko, MD, PhD Yeah, well, try out the fitness thing. You get the free three months. It’s worth comparing, right? Because

⏹️ ▶️ John it is cheaper, right? John Dorsey

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is cheaper. And that’s only if I get a watch though, John. You never know. Paul

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matzko, MD, PhD You’re going to get a watch.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey John Dorsey I know. Paul Matzko, MD, PhD

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You always do. You already have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a watch. What are you talking about? John Dorsey Yeah, but he only gets three

⏹️ ▶️ John months free with a new Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey purchase.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with the, yeah, okay. All right. Hey man, I don’t always get a watch. This would be the first time I did an annual watch. I did the Series Zero, Series

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Three, Series Five. This would be the first annual watch. Oh, and real-time follow-up, it does indeed require

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple Watch. I actually closed the page, but there’s a FAQ at the bottom of the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fitness Plus page, and it says you absolutely do need an Apple Watch for reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that isn’t that unreasonable, given the kind of integration that it has and everything. That’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. You know, worst case scenario, it just won’t go anywhere, and we won’t ever hear about it again.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think this is probably gonna be a success to some degree. I don’t think it’s gonna take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the world. I don’t think it’s gonna replace anybody’s Peloton or their Beech MLMs.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I do think it is probably going to help people in a maybe a more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual way, similar to what the Apple Watch always does. Like what the Apple Watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, has always done, is it brings fitness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in at least a casual way to more people. That’s like one of the greatest things the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch does, if not the greatest thing it does. It gets people more into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fitness even at a very casual level. Some more than that, but even at a very casual level,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone starts caring about hitting their stand goal, hitting their green ring or whatever. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the Apple Watch is really good at. This just takes it the next step forward. This is like, all right, if you wanna go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit further into the world of moving,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco then this is the next step for you to start doing. And that’s really great. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the potential to really help a lot of people out, to really be very useful. It has a lot of potential for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco casual use. As I said, I’m never gonna go into Peloton or anything because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have my own other thing that I do, but there are times when I would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco occasionally want to use something like this. And it’ll help me out too because I only want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it occasionally. So while I wouldn’t be the target customer for some bigger,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more established or more involved thing, this is something I might dip into sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if it comes with a bundle that we will eventually talk about that I’m already paying for, it’s like, well, it’s already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, so let me dip in on this Friday when I have no other workout and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna do some rowing with some person guiding me. And there’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just gonna be so many people who hopefully do take advantage of that absolute beginner thing,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have never done this before and might be intimidated to do something that is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either in person with a trainer somewhere or in a gym around a bunch of other people who, like, geez,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco before I ever went to a gym, I was so scared to ever go because I didn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be seen by all these other people who knew what they were doing and were more in shape than I was.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a very self-conscious thing for me to ever go to a gym. This is the kind of thing where, like, You can just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this with the stuff you already have anyway from Apple, in the privacy of your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco own home, and because it isn’t even live, you don’t even feel self-conscious

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because nobody’s watching you. So there’s a lot of value to that. And Apple didn’t invent

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, but if they’re gonna do a pretty good job that’s gonna be easily available to lots of people, there’s a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of value to that. So I think ultimately, this will either go nowhere, which would be a shame, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will go somewhere, which will be pretty good. It is kind of annoying that they made it a subscription, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s part of the service’s revenue and all that stuff. But you take the good with the bad,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think that’s a really good summary, and I think a pretty good place to leave it. But before we do, real-time follow-up reading

⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Wikipedia. Beachbody LLC is a privately held American multi-level marketing company.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There you go. That solves that.

Apple One

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. So, all right, let’s talk about Apple One. We had heard rumors of this. I think it was leaked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Apple Music app for Android or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was in our show notes, so we never got to it. Sorry, but yeah, the name was leaked a while ago. One is

⏹️ ▶️ John the bundliest number.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite thing about Apple One is that there’s three plans.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that is a good point. So yeah, so Apple One is their bundle. There are three plans. There’s individual, family,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and premiere. And they’re not all geographically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey available It depends on where the things that are being offered are available. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Americans anyway, the individual plan is $15 a month. It has Apple Music, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV+, Apple Arcade, and 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage. And so that’s a savings

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of about $6 a month. The family plan means you can share with up to five other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people. We’re not sure if you have to cohabitate or not. I would assume not, but I’m not sure about that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, that’s $20 a month. hundred gigabytes of iCloud storage and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it saves you $8 a month. It has the same Music, TV+, Arcade, and iCloud.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Premiere, which is $30 a month, it has two terabytes of iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it adds News and Fitness. So that gives you Music, TV+, Arcade, iCloud, News,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Fitness+. And that’s a savings of about $25 a month. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the short, short version. I’m really in classic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey style. I’m waffling a lot about this. I don’t pay for iCloud storage, which I know is ridiculous. I don’t need to lecture about it right

⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. You can watch me another

⏹️ ▶️ John time. Chris You’re photo backup. James I think I forgot about this and I’m mad all over again.

⏹️ ▶️ John What are you doing? You’re like the people, the old people in my family that

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to complain about a little bit later. You’re just as bad as

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I, but I also don’t use iCloud photo library and I want to, I, it is on the list

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of to-dos that I haven’t gotten to yet. I want to. But anyways, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Apple Music. I don’t use iCloud photo library. I’ve never even tried Apple Arcade. I do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like Apple TV+. I’m not sure if I want to pay for it or not, but I do like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so for me, at a glance, I don’t want any of this. Why would I want any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this? I’m a devout Spotify user, and I don’t really play video games that terribly

⏹️ ▶️ Casey often. And I’m surviving, whether or not I’m having a good life or not, I’m surviving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey without iCloud storage. So why bother? But I was talking to Tyler Stallman yesterday

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, and I’m hopefully going to appear on a show of his sometime this week. this week and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the midst of hearing him talk about it, it occurred to me, you know, even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey though I don’t pay for iCloud storage yet, it is on the to-do list of things I want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do. I probably do want Apple TV plus I’m not a hundred percent committed, but I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want it. And although I am again, a devout Spotify person, like if I got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple music for major air quotes free, that wouldn’t be so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just told you that I am at least casually interested in Fitness Plus. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doing the Premier Plan sometime in the next couple of months because it actually in a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey ways makes a lot of sense. Oh, and the other thing is I’ve got a terabyte of photos. So if those ever end up in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iCloud, I pretty much need to either jump to the Premier Plan or apparently you can do the Family

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plan, but then you can add additional iCloud storage for an additional fee. fee. So,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, one way or another, it’s quite possibly that I’m going to, or it’s quite possible that I’m going to be subscribing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to something here sometime soon. John, you already subscribed to at least some of this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is your plan? Where, where are you thinking on this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I did some quick math to see like, would I save any money with these bundles given what I have? It’s complicated

⏹️ ▶️ John by the fact that I’m still on my free first year of Apple TV Plus. So right now,

⏹️ ▶️ John if I got the bundle, I wouldn’t actually be saving any significant

⏹️ ▶️ John money. In fact, I think it would be more expensive for me to get the top end bundle because I do have the two terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud storage already. So if I wanted, I’d have to get Premiere. The thing I couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John figure out is if you add storage to the other tiers, does it just cost the same amount? I’m assuming it does, because they didn’t say you get any

⏹️ ▶️ John kind of bargain on it. But if you buy one of the other bundles and you say, I now wanna add storage, I think the storage just cost

⏹️ ▶️ John the same amount it always did. So the thing about two terabytes iCloud is that’s $10 a month on its own. So that kind of kills

⏹️ ▶️ John my ability to use other plans. But anyway, once my free year of Apple TV goes by, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John actually going to save me like five bucks or something over what I it’s saving me five bucks and I get two services that I don’t care

⏹️ ▶️ John about that I’m never going to use or whatever. Maybe I will. But like if I just ignore news and fitness,

⏹️ ▶️ John I still save five bucks, but I get, I say five bucks a month and I get news and I get fitness, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, I’m going to get the premiere. if only just to unify it into one bill. All right. But I,

⏹️ ▶️ John this whole, all these offerings really frustrate me from the perspective of

⏹️ ▶️ John like, how can Apple best solve problems that it has with its customer base as opposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to how can Apple make an attractive service bundle? Or how can Apple make more revenue for services? Or how can Apple get,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all the reasons they’re doing this that makes sense. Right. But the one that really burns me is like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has a problem with its customers where they have problems with their lives

⏹️ ▶️ John and their digital devices related to their unwillingness to pay a monthly fee for anything,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s a real thing that happens. Casey is a perfect example.

⏹️ ▶️ John People don’t wanna pay for more iCloud storage, so they don’t have enough iCloud storage to store all their photos, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John their phone goes in a lake and they lose their photos. This is a real legitimate problem that technical people

⏹️ ▶️ John in the family deal with all the time because they have to convince the non-technical people, please, please pay for more iCloud storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t have an iCloud backup of your phone. That’s literally the only place any of these things exist because you don’t have a personal computer, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Which is fine and everything, but Apple’s customers are losing important data like photos

⏹️ ▶️ John and video because nobody wants to pay for storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if Apple One was focused on solving problems Apple’s customers have, it would be

⏹️ ▶️ John all about backing up more stuff in the cloud, whether that be like iTunes Match, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John not even on this radar because no one even knows what that is except for really old people like me

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey still pay for it. Hey, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John me. Yeah. Getting people’s music into the cloud for them, or

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple music is a different thing as you’re paying for access to the world’s library. Let’s just start with like, the people have music

⏹️ ▶️ John from like their iPods or like illegally downloaded MP3s or whatever. Getting that music into the cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John and getting their photos into the cloud and getting them iCloud backups of all their devices so that when they inevitably destroy

⏹️ ▶️ John them, they don’t lose their data. And none of these plans help with that at all because Apple’s not interested in

⏹️ ▶️ John solving that problem. In fact, the insulting 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage

⏹️ ▶️ John that comes with individual is ridiculous. Like that’s not enough for anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then the family goes up to 200 gigabytes. What kind of families iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ John backups of their devices alone fit into 200 gigabytes? It’s totally ridiculous. I guess they just never take

⏹️ ▶️ John any photos or video, right? Even just the backups of their apps, if they fill all their phones, you know. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then the two terabyte plan only coming with Premiere, two terabyte is fine. And by the way, Gruber

⏹️ ▶️ John confirmed on his website, he says, I am reliably informed that you’re able to purchase an additional

⏹️ ▶️ John two terabytes on top of the two terabytes that you get with Premiere. So if you get Premiere

⏹️ ▶️ John and you want to pay, I’m assuming 10 bucks more a month, you can get a total of four terabytes, which breaks through the previous

⏹️ ▶️ John ceiling of two terabytes, which is important if you have a ton of photos. But anyway, I wish there were

⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of plan that looked like a bargain to somebody who is thus far

⏹️ ▶️ John refusing to pay for iCloud storage, they gave you enough iCloud storage to be

⏹️ ▶️ John useful. The individual plan looks like a bargain if you’re already sold on

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Music, Apple TV plus Apple Arcade, but then you get no iCloud storage, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And if someone has already sold on those three services, they’re probably not the type of person like weirdly Casey, who will pay

⏹️ ▶️ John for all sorts of things, but won’t pay for iCloud storage. There is no plan that’s like, I don’t wanna pay for storage.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you could say, you know, I don’t want to pay $5 a month in storage. It’s like, well, if you pay $8 a month in storage, you get

⏹️ ▶️ John enough storage to solve your storage problems and access to the world’s music. I mean, it doesn’t work out because

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple music, they have to pay a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey people

⏹️ ▶️ John for, or maybe Apple Arcade, like something you could, some kind of plan that would get more people to stay

⏹️ ▶️ John pay for cloud storage. And none of these plans do that. And in fact, these plans make it much, much more difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John for people to play for storage. They almost encourage you to be stingy with the storage

⏹️ ▶️ John and just get these wonderful services and not worry about storing anything. Well, I’m sorry, my photos aren’t stored on Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John TV or Apple Arcade or Apple Music. My photos are either stored on my phone or in iCloud. And if I have 50 gigabytes

⏹️ ▶️ John of iCloud storage, it’s not gonna work, Apple. So this kind of pisses me off for that reason.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like the bundles are great for what they offer, but that problem, like Apple had a chance to

⏹️ ▶️ John solve it by finally having something that they can entice people to get over that hump of paying because look at what

⏹️ ▶️ John a deal it is. People love bundles, sales, look how much I can save. The more you buy, the more you save.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I don’t understand the iCloud sizes. It’s like, it’s like putting USB 1.0 on a computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t it more expensive to give people 50 gigabytes of storage? Isn’t that like under the allocation size of whatever cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John storage thing you’re using to chunk up people? It’s like, I don’t, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, this is weird. And no one, people don’t care about this, but there, there is a customer

⏹️ ▶️ John problem that Apple has that they could have solved with this bundle and they didn’t. Instead, they just basically did a more convenient

⏹️ ▶️ John way for people like me to pay for services and maybe get a little, you know, get

⏹️ ▶️ John the rich people who are paying for all these services anyway to get Apple Fitness Plus and maybe get on board there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s gonna help News Plus because it’s like, whatever. Yeah, I’m gonna get News Plus but I’m still never gonna look at it, sorry

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, where this is, you know, strategically useful for Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it kind of helps prop up the less popular or I wouldn’t even go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far as to say failing, I think it might be too early to call anything failing, but certainly the weaker

⏹️ ▶️ Marco offerings. So for me, we are a two terabyte

⏹️ ▶️ Marco family here. Like the iCloud storage, we have multiple people doing iCloud backups

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with large photo libraries. So we had to jump to the two terabyte plan a couple years back.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you’re already doing the two terabyte plan, and if you have Apple Music for the family,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re already at 25 bucks a month in individual plans. Premiere is 30.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to match that, you basically need to want arcade or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco news or TV Plus or fitness. And if you want any of those things, it makes sense

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy the premium bundle then. And I think a lot of people will do that. I think that’s gonna be fairly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco common. Not, certainly not the majority of iPhone owners, much to Apple’s chagrin. I think you’re right, John, that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people who buy iPhones have no interest in paying Apple a subscription

⏹️ ▶️ Marco per month for anything.

⏹️ ▶️ John And they resent it. They resent the fact they just bought this incredibly expensive phone. It’s like, I can’t even back it up

⏹️ ▶️ John what you tell me I’m supposed to do for some reason. Now I have to pay Apple more money. I just paid them the $1,000 for this phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John No way I’m giving them another cent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and they will gladly accept the incredibly poor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user experience of having to constantly fight for iCloud storage because they’re on the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco free, whatever it is, like 10 megabytes plan. They’re constantly battling that. It’s a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco user experience and they don’t have photo backups, as you mentioned, Like, but they wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay any subscription at any price. The only way to improve their experience is to improve the free offering,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I think is very unlikely to happen. So unfortunately, like Apple’s not gonna get those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people in any way that Apple would stomach. What these plans do is for people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are already willing to pay Apple subscription fees, this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes a more compelling bundle and it helps Apple prop up all of their other smaller unpopular

⏹️ ▶️ Marco services. So for instance, as we head into the time period in which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple TV Plus is gonna start expiring for everybody, the free year they got from buying last year’s phones

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is gonna expire, there’s gonna be a lot of people questioning whether they wanna keep Apple TV Plus. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have a bundle where you’re gonna buy music and iCloud storage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, and it’s only a few extra dollars to get TV Plus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Arcade on News and Fitness, a lot of people are probably gonna choose that option. And that’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Marco help keep TV Plus going, it’ll help keep News Plus going, which let’s be honest, is probably not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing great. And it’ll probably help Arcade, which again, I kind of blew

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by it last week, but I don’t think Arcade is doing that well. I could be wrong, I don’t think they’ve ever actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said anything, but I just, I never hear from anybody about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new game they played on Apple Arcade. I never hear anybody talking about any of those games, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco leads me to believe not a lot of people are giving a lot of attention. And so I don’t think Apple Arcade

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is doing great. But if it’s part of a big bundle like this, look,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon Prime TV as a streaming service largely sucks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has largely always sucked. There’s not a lot of good stuff on Amazon Prime TV streaming. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why it’s so popular by user base is because Amazon Prime

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a compelling overall option, mostly for the free shipping and stuff, that it has a lot of people in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it anyway. That’s the whole value of a bundle. That is like the strategic power of bundling,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can take something that you’re gonna sell a bunch of anyway and stick a bunch of other crap onto

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it that will therefore get huge audiences and user bases, even if they aren’t very good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so that’s why, that’s one of the reasons why it was important for Apple to do a bundle, because they’re trying

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to launch a whole bunch of different services, and some of them are working, and some of them are kind of eh, And this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco will massively boost the usage of all of them among the people for whom

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth buying that top tier bundle. So in that point of view, this is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be, I think, a great success for Apple’s services push, even though it feels a little

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit gross on some levels. But I’m gonna buy it, I’m in, because I was already hitting the 30

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks. I’m already paying for Arcade, even though I never actually logged into games and I should probably cancel it. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Marco already paying for, I guess I will start paying for TV Plus next month, even though I’ve only watched like two TV Plus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows, but I still like them. So, you know, this is a good time for this and I think it’ll do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well and it will help prop up all these other services and give Apple an easy platform

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with which to launch future services.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think the bundle effect also helps for things like Apple TV Plus. Like you mentioned Amazon Prime not being a powerhouse

⏹️ ▶️ John video streaming service, but both Apple TV Plus and Amazon Prime have a couple of shows that are really

⏹️ ▶️ John good that you’ll hear about from friends, right? And the normal move is, like I’ve been doing with CBS

⏹️ ▶️ John All Access, which isn’t called that anymore. I kind of unintentionally predicted its demise

⏹️ ▶️ John a couple of shows ago. Anyway, it’s now Paramount Plus, it’s stupid. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John what I would do is I would subscribe, watch the series that I heard all my friends talking about, then unsubscribe. But when

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s part of a bundle, it seems like more of a hassle. Well, I’ve already got the bundle with it in it, and I guess I could unsubscribe,

⏹️ ▶️ John but then it comes with all the bundles, and so should I go with like a lesser bundle? And like, it’s just like,

⏹️ ▶️ John you just leave it, right? It’s harder to, if you want to individually manage these services,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can, but that’s a hassle. You get multiple bills, you gotta remember which ones you’re canceling, oh, we’ve done watching

⏹️ ▶️ John Ted Lasso, now we can cancel Apple TV Plus, but what about season two? Just get the bundle and stop thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that’s what Apple wants you to do, That’s the power of the bundle.

iPad (8th-generation)

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so iPad 8th generation, A12, old pencil, $329, $299 for education.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It ships Friday. Moving on, iPad Air. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s basically it for the iPad 8th gen. What did it come with before the 7th gen was A10, right?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, they went from A10 to A12. I love how incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco important this product is, and yet how incredibly boring it is. Like, good for them, they’re finding ways

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep delivering good value to schools and bulk purchasers. That’s great. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of sad when they said, they called it their most popular iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, oh, that’s kind of, it’s kind of sad that this is, I mean, I know

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why, it makes sense why, but.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple Watch Series 3

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of iPads. Well, and this is true largely. This is one of the reasons why Tim Cook

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the way he is, that whatever the cheapest product is in a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco given product line is usually the most popular one for Apple. Like, usually the cheapest

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad is the most popular iPad, the cheapest MacBook is the most popular MacBook. There’s so much other sales now go to like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bulk purchasers, like businesses and schools and stuff, where if you’re ordering like 100 MacBook Airs for your staff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, like it’s just better to just get the cheap one and you don’t care as a business

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much, like cost is more important. Or if the school is buying 5,000 iPads

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its entire student body, like you kind of want them to be the cheap ones. So I understand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it is this way, but it is kind of sad that we spend all this time obsessing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about and focusing on all these nicer higher end products, and Apple spends all this time developing all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco these nicer higher end products, but what actually sells for the most part is whatever’s cheapest.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s got two things going against it. One is that we’re at a generational boundary, kind of like the Series 3 and Series 5, 32-bit,

⏹️ ▶️ John 64-bit, big screen, small screen. you know, like, and so this is this iPad is the last of the old shaped

⏹️ ▶️ John iPads to drift out of the line. It’s still in the line for now, but like to Apple’s credit, I think the seventh

⏹️ ▶️ John gen was a good product in that they said, okay, well, we can’t, this is still going to be the old form factor,

⏹️ ▶️ John but let’s make it be able to do all the things. So they gave it pencil support. It’s the old pencil,

⏹️ ▶️ John but hey, at least it’s got pencil support. Now they give it a decent processor and give it a decent screen and give it good touch

⏹️ ▶️ John ID and you know, like it made it viable, but it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John clearly the last generation of iPad and now in the 8th gen they Gave

⏹️ ▶️ John it two generation to a processor which makes it stay viable It is still a viable and still a good product and still

⏹️ ▶️ John has pencil support and it’s still the old pencil but it’s so clearly the very last gasp

⏹️ ▶️ John of that form factor, so when the Apple Watch Series 3 disappears and all the Apple Watches

⏹️ ▶️ John have the good new display with the rounded edges and Then eventually this will disappear and all the iPads

⏹️ ▶️ John will have the flat sides and we’ll be in a much better place So it’s not in this case not really the fault

⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple selling the same product forever because they have been updating this and they Updated it again. So I think this is actually

⏹️ ▶️ John if you want a cheap iPad don’t feel bad getting his iPad It’s a good iPad, right? It’s you know, it

⏹️ ▶️ John feels good in your hand. It’s got good specs for the price It’s very popular and it’s quote-unquote

⏹️ ▶️ John sad that you know, they don’t get the fancy new one But this is still a good I still use an iPad shaped kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of like this and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey feel sad

⏹️ ▶️ John about it And mine mine does not have an a12 in it. So I still think this is a good product I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John probably still a little bit overpriced given what they put in it, but only Apple knows

⏹️ ▶️ John what its exact margins on every individual product, right? So I think it’s fine,

⏹️ ▶️ John but next year the line will make more sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I would say price-wise, actually, it’s one of the best values in the lineup, like in Apple’s entire

⏹️ ▶️ Marco product lineup. It remains one of the best values for sure.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because it’s a very cheap product and it has good specs. Like it’s not terrible. You

⏹️ ▶️ John can play really good games on it And you know, it has an okay-ish camera and it’s got a pencil that

⏹️ ▶️ John works like the original Apple pencil, which is actually pretty good. And you know, it’s got all the things.

iPad Air

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so then we have the iPad Air. And I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really confident I am not in the market for an iPad Air, but I really think that this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey might have been the most impressive or perhaps interesting announcement of the entire hour-long session

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we’ve been talking two hours about. But this is the first appearance of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A14, which is 5 nanometers. It’s a six core CPU, two big

⏹️ ▶️ Casey boys and four little boys. So two high performance cores and four

⏹️ ▶️ Casey little cores, or energy efficient cores. Four core GPU.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It quote, runs more instructions in parallel, quote, because I guess more execution units, more instructions

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in flight at once. There’s a deeper pipeline. John, I presume you have something you want to add here. So what would you like to add to

⏹️ ▶️ John that? Well, you’re just reading my notes as if you know what they mean.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s great that you’re doing that.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, yes, yes. It’s something that they said in the, in the, in one of their texts, things more runs more instructions

⏹️ ▶️ John in parallel, or maybe it was during the presentation they said it, but they didn’t elaborate. And that can mean a lot of different things because this is the very

⏹️ ▶️ John first device to have the 14. It’s the first chance we get to take a look at like, what is the 14? What

⏹️ ▶️ John does it got? So you covered it’s I think it’s major specs and the important things, right? More instruct runs, more instructions in parallel.

⏹️ ▶️ John That could mean it has more execution units. It could also, it could also mean that it just has more instructions in flight

⏹️ ▶️ John at once, and that could mean that it has a deeper pipeline, but it could mean none of those things or just one of those

⏹️ ▶️ John things or any combination of them. So we still don’t really know what does the

⏹️ ▶️ John A14 have over the A13. And they mentioned large high performance caches.

⏹️ ▶️ John Are there bigger caches in the A13? Probably, but how much bigger? So we have to wait for like Anandtech or

⏹️ ▶️ John somebody to tear this apart to find out what’s in it. But they did give us some other stats, 11.8 billion transistors,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is 40% more transistors than the A13. And then they did this weird thing during this whole section because the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Air is weird, where they made comparisons, but not to the A13. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John They made comparisons to the iPad Air’s old chip, which was, I believe, the A12,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? Correct. So they would say it’s 40% faster in CPU

⏹️ ▶️ John performance, compared to the A12.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s 30%

⏹️ ▶️ John faster in GPU performance, compared to the A12. Like, not to the A13. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John now you gotta do all those math that you’re, okay, well, if the A13 was this much faster than the A12, and you gotta do all

⏹️ ▶️ John this algebra, And it’s like just Apple just tell us I mean we’re gonna find out as soon as we get these anyway, but anyway

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s weird because It’s weird that the very first device

⏹️ ▶️ John to have the new System on a chip with the one bigger number after the a is not

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPhone According to Mark Gurman who tweeted this the last time this happened the last time a non

⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone got the best system on a chip from Apple was nine years ago when the iPad 2 got the a5 before

⏹️ ▶️ John it shipped in the iPhone for us so You know, it’s weird,

⏹️ ▶️ John like as many people put it, if it wasn’t a COVID times, maybe this, you know, the phone would have been released in September and this wouldn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ John been a thing, but the way it worked out, the iPad Air is the first one to get the A14. The

⏹️ ▶️ John A14 looks better than the A13. It’s way better than the A12, but

⏹️ ▶️ John nothing about it stands out enough for us to know. Apple typically did not throw

⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of benchmarks up on the screen. So I guess we’ll have to wait for these to ship to find out what does this really do?

⏹️ ▶️ John what is it clocked at, how much RAM does it have, how does it compare to the A13, so on and so forth. But

⏹️ ▶️ John here you go, your A14 debut product, the middle of the range iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s kind of, certainly there’s a large question mark of like, why

⏹️ ▶️ Marco haven’t the iPad Pros been meaningfully updated in so long when now this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out and is the best iPad by a lot of measures?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, that’s the thing, and people saying, oh, well, the iPad, quote unquote, pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John that thing has an A12 in it. It doesn’t even have an A13. And this supposed

⏹️ ▶️ John mid-range one has a 14. 14 is bigger than 12. In fact, it’s two bigger than 12. That’s terrible. This is

⏹️ ▶️ John the new best iPad, but those little letters that they stick on the end really do mean something. The

⏹️ ▶️ John A12Z has eight cores, not six, and an eight-core GPU, not a four-core. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it would not surprise me, and I believe it’s probably going to be the case, the A12Z stomps all over

⏹️ ▶️ John this particular A14 in any spec that you could care to do a spec test for because it’s, you know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John not single core, but everything else, multi-core and anything having to do with GPU. The GPU is literally twice as big.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now it’s not the same GPU and they aren’t the same cores, so it might be closer than you think, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the iPad Pro, especially with all eight of its GPU cores enabled,

⏹️ ▶️ John is still fairly comfortably at the top of the line. The real question is, why didn’t they

⏹️ ▶️ John just wait to update the iPad Pros put A14 X or Z or Q or

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey P or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John the hell they’re going to be in that one. And I mean, the answer to that that makes a lot of sense to me is they’re about to ship

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hopes a lot of A14 chips in iPhones. How many

⏹️ ▶️ John what is their manufacturing capacity for A14 derived things on this new five nanometer process?

⏹️ ▶️ John This may be not enough to support the I for the A14 series, something derived from

⏹️ ▶️ John A14 on the five nanometer process, they may not have had enough manufacturing capacity for it to ship in

⏹️ ▶️ John all their upcoming Macs, in all their upcoming iPads, and all their upcoming iPhones. Now granted, those three

⏹️ ▶️ John things I listed, the iPhone is the big piece of the pie, and then the Mac and the iPad are little tiny things off in the corner. So

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s not as big a factor as I think, but if you have, if you don’t have enough to go around, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John gotta skimp somewhere, and this is the big year the Mac is making the transition, maybe you skimp on the

⏹️ ▶️ John top end iPads? I don’t know. I mean, even that makes a little sense to me because they probably sell so many more

⏹️ ▶️ John of the $329 iPads than I do of the iPad Pros, but for whatever reason,

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad Pro is off-cycle, but that doesn’t mean the iPad Air is now

⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly the best or the fastest iPad. It’s not. It’s a really

⏹️ ▶️ John good one and really interesting, and the iPad Pro will have to be updated eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ John but for now, this middle-of-the-range iPad is more like just below high-end

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. Yeah, in other ways it looks awesome. Like, you know, this iPad Air,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks fantastic. The only weird thing about it is what it means for the iPad Pro, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual iPad Air as a product looks pretty great. I mean, you could argue

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s better than the iPad Pro in many ways. I think one of the only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcomings I see about it is the speaker system isn’t as nice

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the Pro speaker system. But for other things about it, Oh, and of course no face ID, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some people, that’s actually a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature. And no promotion.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s only 60 hertz, I

⏹️ ▶️ John believe. No promotion, it’s only 500 nits instead of 600 nits. The screen

⏹️ ▶️ John resolution is slightly lower. The USB-C interface only transfers at five gigabits,

⏹️ ▶️ John not 10 gigabits. Lots of it. There are a bunch of things that you probably don’t care about. Oh, the camera’s in the back, it doesn’t have the LiDAR

⏹️ ▶️ John sensor, it doesn’t have the multiple cameras or whatever. But this is a really good mid-range

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad It’s pressing up against the high end. And if you don’t care about all those things that I just listed,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can save a lot of money and get this thing in colors, and it’s a great product. The Face ID kind of surprises

⏹️ ▶️ John me because of all the places to cut cost, you can take

⏹️ ▶️ John out Face ID, but then you have to put the Touch ID thing in, and how much are you really saving? I’m sure Face ID is more expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John than a touch sensor, right? But it just, it seems kind of weird to me that that was where they chose

⏹️ ▶️ John to save costs on this particular product to take out the Face ID because

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, maybe I’m just used to the idea that look, if you don’t have any buttons on the front, you have to support

⏹️ ▶️ John face ID, but they’re saying, no, no we don’t. We can stick it on this weird button that you’re gonna have to hunt for and

⏹️ ▶️ John remember which side of the thing it’s on. Because for all the things that we complained about,

⏹️ ▶️ John having the button on the front, the touch ID on the front of the iPad and it being in different orientations, you can just look at it and

⏹️ ▶️ John you see where the little button is that you have to stick your finger but it’s kind of hard to see where

⏹️ ▶️ John the quote unquote top button is and what side it’s on or whatever, you might have to feel around and find it. So

⏹️ ▶️ John it seems a strange place to save costs to me, but that’s what they did. And I am excited about the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John of Touch ID coming back to any of Apple’s products, really.

⏹️ ▶️ John There was no phones at this event. Obviously, phones are gonna come soon. I haven’t been keeping up with the rumors.

⏹️ ▶️ John And like you said, with the COVID things, it’s not as if Apple decided at the last moment to stick Touch ID on their phones

⏹️ ▶️ John and iPads because of COVID, because their timelines are way longer than that. but I would love it if the new iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John had Touch ID into the button and Face ID. Yeah. And if this one doesn’t have it, I

⏹️ ▶️ John really hope Apple is considering it for the next iPhone or the next, next iPhone, because they’ve shown

⏹️ ▶️ John they can do it. We can put Touch ID in a power button, and boy, wouldn’t it be great to have all those options?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that, I would love that so much to have both. And I mean, heck, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the plan for the iPad Pro. You know, maybe the next iPad Pro will have both, and maybe if they can fit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the required stuff into the iPhone, I would, jeez, I would love that so much. Cause that, that would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a godsend with doing like, you know, masked outings, shoppings and everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. Like it would be so great. And even, you know, even before COVID, you know, even,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even in the last, just in the last few years using Face ID, there are times when Face ID doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco work right. And there are times when Touch ID doesn’t work right. It would be great to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS devices that will, that provide both and either allow you to unlock with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco whichever one recognizes you first, or if you want some super secure like ultra mode, you can have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it require both. And to have that be an option would be awesome. Do

⏹️ ▶️ John any of you have any idea why the screen resolution is lower? Here’s the numbers. It’s 2360 by 1649.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the iPad Pro of a similar size is 2388 by 1668. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad Air screen size is quoted as 10.9 inches. Right, instead of 11.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s got to be just like slightly smaller of a screen.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it. It’s the same DPI and they just shaved pixels off the edge. How is, I guess all the apps scale now, so it’s not an

⏹️ ▶️ John issue anymore for iPadOS apps and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it’s just, it’s weird.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess it’s just, it’s based on whatever panels they could get in the right quantity with the right attributes because the panel is, it’s True

⏹️ ▶️ John Tone P3, anti-reflective coating. Like, it’s, you should go to Apple, put a link in the show notes to Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like product configurator. When you go down the list of comparing the features, you’ll be surprised how many

⏹️ ▶️ John things the pro has that the air doesn’t. And you may also be surprised by how little you care about those things, right? Like

⏹️ ▶️ John lots and lots of areas. There are specs that are missing. There’s features that like I said, there’s no light. There’s no second

⏹️ ▶️ John camera in the back. It’s just, you know, there’s no portrait mode, an emoji or emoji because there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no face ID sensors in the front. So it can’t do that depth stuff like, you know, the two speakers instead instead of

⏹️ ▶️ John the four. Like there are tons of things that are lesser about this than the pro,

⏹️ ▶️ John including I still think even the A14, uh, you know, in terms of raw horsepower

⏹️ ▶️ John for when you’re using all of it. But this, this product is just

⏹️ ▶️ John waiting for the next iPad pro to come. That’s going to have all the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John pro features and in eight or 12 core A14Q processor or the hell it’s gonna be.

⏹️ ▶️ John This is gonna be a monster, right? Plus all the ARM Macs, and we don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna have in them. So this is a preview of things to come, and a great deal

⏹️ ▶️ John on a flat-sided iPad that uses the new Pencil. If you don’t care about

⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff that I just listed for the program. If you can’t tell the difference between 500 and 600 nits of brightness,

⏹️ ▶️ John get this one. It’ll be great. Like I even, you know, I’m perpetually,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, somewhat in the market for a new iPad since mine is so old. And I was thinking about

⏹️ ▶️ John like, do I care about any of the pro features? Maybe I should get this one because I kind of like the idea of

⏹️ ▶️ John touch ID, but I think I’m just gonna wait. But that’s just me personally. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if you are in the market for an iPad and any of the attributes of the flat sided ones

⏹️ ▶️ John appeal to you, the Air, this is a great time to buy the Air because never will it be this

⏹️ ▶️ John high in the lineup in terms of performance and price and all that other stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t mention this also comes in colors and not just like two or three. It comes in what, rose gold, green,

⏹️ ▶️ John blue, silver, and gray.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, good for them on that. It’s about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John time.

⏹️ ▶️ John Agreed, agreed. And especially since on this one, this is another thing I don’t like about the flat-sided iPads.

⏹️ ▶️ John And seeing Touch ID and the power button made this make a little bit more sense to me. The flat-sided iPads

⏹️ ▶️ John all have these sandwich cases that just put a flat thing on the back and a flat thing on the front, but nothing on the sides.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care about the naked sides. What I care about is the sort of, you know, the edges of the Oreo cookie sticking off of the

⏹️ ▶️ John edge, you know, like sharp edges, right? Cause you’ve got the little flangey edges of the case and then

⏹️ ▶️ John the smooth metal of the sides. From the edges, I don’t like that sandwich feeling.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like sharp top and bottom edges and metal middle. I’d rather have it be curved

⏹️ ▶️ John and nice, right? Obviously they didn’t, couldn’t cover one side because you stick the pencil there, right? But they could have

⏹️ ▶️ John covered all the other sides, but now you’ve got another place where you can’t really put too much case because yeah, You

⏹️ ▶️ John could you could shove your finger down into a little touch ID belly button to get to it But it’s a lot easier to use touch ID when it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just on the naked metal sticking out like we all had the phones with The touch ID in the front of it If you ever

⏹️ ▶️ John tried to use a case that surrounded the touch ID button It became this linty little belly button Then you had to shove your finger down

⏹️ ▶️ John into to get it to the touch ID sensor and that was It’s more awkward these sort of I was gonna say intangible.

⏹️ ▶️ John It was the opposite. They’re literally tangible these tangible feelings of using a device How does it feel

⏹️ ▶️ John in your hands is? I feel like profoundly influenced by the shape of the device in the shape of

⏹️ ▶️ John the case and these flat sided iPads while they look Awesome and are great for attaching accessories and working

⏹️ ▶️ John as little portable computers I think the case the sandwich case design makes them less

⏹️ ▶️ John pleasant to hold in your hand if you’re using still using it like a an Old-school iPad

⏹️ ▶️ John user and not as like a floppy laptop.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Don’t all told though the iPad air is super super impressive And yeah, if you’re even

⏹️ ▶️ Casey remotely in the market for an iPad, I would really take a strong close look at this. They

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have all the neat colors. They have, you know, the nice, I like the flat

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sides personally.

⏹️ ▶️ John They work with all the accessories, the cool keyboard with the magic, I don’t forget the names of the magic keyboard with the cool hinge

⏹️ ▶️ John thingy and all the other cases, like all that stuff works with this. It’s all USB-C. It’s, you know, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John it looks kind of sad when you see that one single camera parking it out of that huge camera hole and Apple’s accessories, but they all fit.

⏹️ ▶️ John all do fit. So to Apple’s credit, it’s not, you know, you can, you can buy the accessories and

⏹️ ▶️ John use them with the iPad Air or the iPad Pros and presumably for a while to come if they continue to make iPads in this

⏹️ ▶️ John shape.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So I’m, I thought it looked really, really good. So overall, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think outside of the March ever, the ever forward

⏹️ ▶️ Casey March towards services revenue, I thought the, the presentation was pretty darn good

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and nothing was earth shattering to me, although the iPad Air does look really good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all told, I think it was a pretty good presentation and I’m satisfied

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it. It just makes me, though, even more excited and I’m just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey salivating for the next iPhones. I don’t know what I expect from them, but I’m just ready to see it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, me too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I thought they were all good products. Like, you know, there’s nits to be picked with all of them, but that’s exactly

⏹️ ▶️ John what I want to see from updates. Make all your things better in the ways that I expect

⏹️ ▶️ John you to make them better for the one or two cool things. They did it. Good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco job. Thanks for our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Stripe, and Doordeck.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can do that yourself at at atp.fm join if you’d

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like and we will talk to you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause

⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check the podcast so long.

One more thing

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, there’s one more thing, Marco. iOS 14 is shipping tomorrow, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John actually today. Surprise!

⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, what a move. What a cap to the summer. Let’s not focus on this for too much,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I feel

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been in a pretty good mood all night. I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to ruin it.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think this is definitely a bad mood thing. So here’s the thing. Regular

⏹️ ▶️ John users of Apple’s products don’t know or care anything about this. It’s just a developer concern. It’s a developer

⏹️ ▶️ John relations concern that developers expect to have the final release of the OS before it ships so they can get their stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John Ready for it, right? And there’s usually a couple days lead time up to a couple of weeks or you know a week or whatever Like

⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll put a link in the show notes to will Haynes has on his website a graph of how long We

⏹️ ▶️ John usually have for the GM’s right? It shows a bunch of different color-coded things and at the end of each line graph is a little dark

⏹️ ▶️ John gray bar that shows how Long the GM was out for and this is a new record of like less than 24

⏹️ ▶️ John hours basically, right? which is not ideal for developers. Users don’t care, but it may

⏹️ ▶️ John impact them if they get iOS 14 and one of their favorite apps doesn’t work because

⏹️ ▶️ John that developer expected to be able to ship on day one, but it turns out they couldn’t and it turns out their current version doesn’t work with iOS 14.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a, you know, it’s not corporate relationship managers. This is just developer relations. Just

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple either doesn’t know that

⏹️ ▶️ John what a scramble is gonna put developers in or Apple thinks, eh, it’s a scramble, but we had to do it and

⏹️ ▶️ John we feel bad about it, but it’ll all be over shortly. And I mean, it’s not the end of the world,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just another fumble, like another fumble in Apple’s recent history of not great developer

⏹️ ▶️ John relations. And the tea leaf reading among the people who are developer adjacent

⏹️ ▶️ John and care about this is like, well, why Apple? Why would you do this? Why not just like

⏹️ ▶️ John ship everything like two days later or three days later? Like what’s the big rush, right? Because developers don’t expect to have months

⏹️ ▶️ John of time with the final release, but they expect a few days, maybe a week or whatever, less than 24

⏹️ ▶️ John hours seems extreme. And we understand why they hold back the GM because you could look at the GM and find

⏹️ ▶️ John out all these features that we just talked about that were previously secret, right? But you can do the announcement,

⏹️ ▶️ John give developers the GM, and then say everything ships in two days, and then the developers get two extra days.

⏹️ ▶️ John So this is just a silly unforced error amongst much larger

⏹️ ▶️ John developer relations issues. It just, you know, it came at a bad time for

⏹️ ▶️ John them. Kind of like the hay controversy happening right before WWDC. Something like this happening when developers

⏹️ ▶️ John are already kind of cranky at Apple is not great, but this too will pass fairly

⏹️ ▶️ John quickly in. And this is not, unlike all the other things we’ve talked about, this is not a systemic problem where Apple’s constantly releasing

⏹️ ▶️ John GMs 24 hours at a time. This is literally the first time this has ever happened with iOS. So live

⏹️ ▶️ John and learn, hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple will. Yeah, and honestly, like, you know, People expect me to rail against this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot, and yeah, you know what, it does suck, but I will take this over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 13’s release

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John any

⏹️ ▶️ John day. As long as iOS 14 works better than 13, we’ll live with it, even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers. iOS 13’s release was so horrendous in so many other ways,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not least of which because it was buggy, but also because it was so buggy, it broke our apps in weird ways. Like, there were actually

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like weird behaviors in our apps in common things like navigation bars.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that shipped at iOS 13.0, and I think 13.1 even broke more things. Like, it’s easy to forget. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you forget how much labor hurts so you have a second kid. Like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so easy for us to block out how bad iOS 13’s launch was last year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was so rough in so

⏹️ ▶️ John many ways. Ladies, you can email Margo for comparing iOS 13 development to child

⏹️ ▶️ Marco labor. Yeah, this is a massive improvement over last year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Admittedly, this is again, like, you know, it’s like making the path smoother in hell, but still, like, this is a huge

⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvement from last year. So while it was ill-conceived timing by Apple, like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I don’t think they mean to be jerks with this stuff. I think they just don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it. Like, I think they honestly, they aren’t concerned, or at least the people who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are concerned don’t have the power to override the hardware schedule. You know, like, so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco think they just, they are oblivious to how much they, how much work they cause for us

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unnecessarily and on short notice.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s probably some kind of math that like every day we wait to put things on sale, approaching the holidays costs us X

⏹️ ▶️ John amount of money.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John Therefore, we’re gonna ship right after the keynote instead of waiting two days because those two days cost us X amount of money. But you know, hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ John developers will send grumpy feedback and maybe that equation will balance

⏹️ ▶️ John differently next year. Obviously, the other thing is, of course, COVID. Everything is screwed up in this schedule. The phones

⏹️ ▶️ John are delayed. You know, the phones aren’t being announced in the September event like they normally would. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John everything’s all messed up, right? So, you know, I think people do give Apple some leeway

⏹️ ▶️ John in this, but if it turns out to be that simple cost-benefit analysis of it costs us X amount

⏹️ ▶️ John of dollars to delay these launches, and it costs us Y amount of negative feedback from developers,

⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple chooses in terms of the money, that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. Yeah, but honestly, I bet that didn’t even factor in to the decision

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as whoever made the call to do that probably just didn’t even think

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what it would be like for outside developers. This is always the problem with Apple. The people inside

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have any idea what it’s like to be outside. They really, truly don’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they are so blind to the real world of what we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually face with lots of things, from APIs, because they don’t need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use only public APIs. Many public APIs exist, they actually don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco use at all, like WatchKit, dealing with the App Store, dealing with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the provisioning profile crap that I was talking about earlier. There’s all sorts of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple’s internal employees don’t need to deal with directly themselves, usually. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so therefore, they are totally blind to the problems that exist there and the challenges that exist

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. and I bet the timing of this GM being

⏹️ ▶️ Marco less than 24 hours before the OS was released, I bet it wasn’t them trying to be jerks. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might not have even been them thinking, well, it’ll cost too much to delay it any further.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The most likely explanation for this is that they are so oblivious to what it’s like being a developer outside of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple that they didn’t even think about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And this is common for companies. I’ve worked with lots of different big companies And it’s like, there is a

⏹️ ▶️ John concerted effort inside most good companies to try to do what you just described, Marco, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is like, what is it like for our customers? What is the experience of being our customer? How

⏹️ ▶️ John do our customers see us? What do they experience? And you would think, well, doesn’t every,

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t every, isn’t that easy thing to know? Because you say it’s like Apple should know what it’s like to be outside of Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s surprisingly hard to know what it’s like for the people outside your company when you’re in the company.

⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re not the customer, you’re the company making the stuff. And so there’s all this time and money and effort

⏹️ ▶️ John and personnel put towards the, good companies, put towards the idea of help

⏹️ ▶️ John us figure out what it’s like to be our customer so we know how to change our products. Because people have all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ John of reckons inside the company about, you know, well we should do this, because our customer, it’s like, but

⏹️ ▶️ John what do our customers actually say? What do they actually want? What do they actually experience? What are their actual pain points instead

⏹️ ▶️ John of us just guessing or trying to use metrics of like, let’s just measure where they click and we’ll figure it out. It’s like you have to talk to them.

⏹️ ▶️ John You have to bring people from outside the company in who have experience outside. Kind of like the pro workflow

⏹️ ▶️ John team, right? What is it like for the customers of our pro tools? Apple solved that problem by saying, we obviously

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. But we have to get people who have a career outside the company using

⏹️ ▶️ John tools like ours and then hire them and say, your whole job is to use our stuff and say, if you were

⏹️ ▶️ John one of our customers, which you previously were very recently, tell us what it’s like to use this. What’s actually important

⏹️ ▶️ John to you? What do you care about? So it’s actually not easy and not trivial. We

⏹️ ▶️ John feel, when you’re the customer, you’re like, how can Apple not know what we’re feeling? Cause we’re feeling it and we’re

⏹️ ▶️ John all, and we’re numerous and there are many of us. And if they wanted to know, they could just ask and here we are, we’re yelling at them and they just don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John seem to get through to them, right? So Apple obviously could do a better job at this, but it is actually a fairly

⏹️ ▶️ John tricky problem to figure out what it is like to be on the outside. And it takes a lot of effort. And

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple probably does expend effort doing that, just either insufficient

⏹️ ▶️ John or not well-directed. But things like the Pro Workflow Team, as we talked about when it was formed, show

⏹️ ▶️ John things headed in a better direction, right? First, taking the feedback that, hey, you should

⏹️ ▶️ John continue to make pro products and maybe put more ports in them. We’re working on that still. And

⏹️ ▶️ John then second, we need outside help. Let’s hire a bunch of people in the industry

⏹️ ▶️ John to work for Apple. And I think I’ve done a lot of that in health too, hiring people from the health world to work on their health

⏹️ ▶️ John products. and I think it shows in the stuff they’ve been making. Dev relations, still ripe for some

⏹️ ▶️ John advancement in that area. Beep, beep, beep.