Jony Ive Has a Lot of White Pants
Marco:
You think this is the biggest show of the year, or you think the WWDC one is the biggest show of the year?
Casey:
I think WWDC.
Casey:
I wouldn't say it's by a large margin, but I think it's the Dub Dub episode.
Casey:
Which, P.S., I've noticed myself just in the last 6 to 12 months embracing Dub Dub, which I always used to hate so much.
Casey:
Like the phrasing, D-U-B, D-U-B.
Casey:
I always used to hate it so much.
Casey:
But, yeah, I've been broken.
Marco:
Yeah, they totally wore me down.
Marco:
I too, I'm not usually a trendy word shortener, but that one, it's just so clumsy to say WWDC that that one just wore me down.
Casey:
Although, curiously, www, as in www.caseless.com, I can't do it.
Casey:
It drives me insane.
Casey:
I'm like hunching up as I'm saying it because it just drives me so crazy.
Marco:
No, that is too far.
Marco:
That one I was willing to just wait until we drop that prefix for most domain names.
Casey:
We are going to talk about the September 2016 Apple event.
Casey:
We are going to try to do this in chronological order.
Casey:
We will probably miss a little bit, but here we go.
Casey:
We started out with Tim Cook and James Corden doing Carpool Karaoke, which as soon as I saw this, I thought, oh God, oh no, this is not going to be good.
Casey:
pleasantly surprised i thought it was great i thought tim did a great job a little awkward but i'd have been 10 times more awkward if i were there could sing enough i mean he sang more than britney spears did so that's a thing uh i thought it was really well done and a really good intro i thought it was the best interaction tim has ever shown with a celebrity as part of an event well that's a that's not a very high bar but yes i agree why were you afraid uh why were you why did you think this is going to be cringeworthy
Casey:
Just because, like, Tim and Bono, for example.
Casey:
It's just not usually good.
Casey:
But it was great.
John:
But that's not the same context.
John:
That's the context of him on stage having to, like, stand out next to, like, his, you know...
John:
You know, tame racing driver, tame celebrity.
John:
Look what I have brought you.
John:
It is a Bono.
John:
And I have brought you him.
John:
And now I stand next to him.
John:
Like the context is weird where you have to just be like, isn't this great, guys?
John:
Huh?
John:
Huh?
John:
Look, celebrity.
John:
Whereas, you know, we've all seen the carpool karaoke, I'm assuming.
John:
And that is a much more relaxed environment.
John:
Yep.
John:
Marco.
John:
Jesus Christ.
John:
you don't have to be proud never seen carpool never not once i mean technically i guess now i have seen it once right but before that when this came on you didn't when you saw the back of that the suv you didn't immediately know what it was when you saw that guy sitting behind the wheel nothing i asked tiff who the guy was and then when the second guy got in the car i had to ask who he was too
John:
i feel like we need to have some kind of pop culture intervention yeah i mean i am not i am not one to really be throwing stones in the glass house in which i live but holy god marco you need to like i don't mean you have to have seen it i don't even need to know what that guy's name is just to know that this is a thing and like oh i recognize it it's that thing that i never watch but not even that anyway um that environment is much more relaxed and i knew he would do fine i should re-watch it because some people were trying to find
John:
issue with him but i i was surprised that he would agree to it because the people who usually are on that are people who want to sort of uh unabashedly uh sing in a car but like in front of everybody it's like you know dance like nobody's watching with carpool karaoke is sing like you're in your own car and no one can see you but everybody can see you because you're on the internet i'm assuming tim cook must be a fan of that and said you know i'd like to do that because
John:
If someone who didn't want to sing in front of the world was forced to do it, they would look way worse.
John:
I mean, I know I would never want to do this, and I can't imagine, like, faking it to the degree that he did.
John:
So I think he really wanted to be on this thing because he likes to sing, and he got to sing.
Casey:
All right, so I thought the intro was great.
Casey:
I also really liked, when was it that they did the Bill Hader introduction when he was, like, doing—he was directing the big—
John:
the big show intro do you know what i'm thinking of was that dub dub yeah yeah but this was better because this this had this was sort of of the moment in a way that didn't look like they were trying to cash in because i think it was just at the right point for carpool karaoke where it's not at the peak but it's not at the beginning it's like but it's not old hat and i really he looked like he had genuine enthusiasm for being on this thing that he had seen other people on and it was like relax and i know what you're talking about the bill hater thing was funny but that was like
John:
more higher budget, more complicated.
John:
Like this, I feel like it was just simple.
John:
It's like a person in a car.
John:
It's funny to see Tim Cook in that context.
John:
It was short.
John:
I really liked it.
John:
One of the best intros to an Apple event ever.
John:
Although it's kind of a shame that it was totally unrelated to anything that was presented really, but that's fine.
Casey:
The joke that James Corden made about how he had heard that the new iPhone or perhaps it was the new version of iOS was the most secure ever.
Casey:
And Tim, do you know where I read that?
Casey:
On a leak posted to the Internet?
John:
That was my least favorite part because it shows that the host doesn't understand the nuance of what he's talking about.
John:
Because is this going to be the most secure iPhone?
John:
We know what he means when he says that.
John:
I'm assuming that's a plant from like Apple or something like that to say, hey, ask us about the security because it's going to be, I'm assuming, more secure than the past ones learning from everything they've learned from all the previous iPhones and all the different FBI court orders and everything, right?
John:
But that has nothing to do with whether rumors of how the phone is being designed leak onto the Internet.
John:
That has nothing to do with the security of the phone.
John:
They're totally unrelated except for the fact that the word security can be applied to both of them.
John:
why you gotta be such a buzzkill i'm just saying like it's a typical sort of you want to make you want to make a tech joke but you're not a tech person so you think you you think you really nailed it haha isn't that funny and i feel like tim cook was like do you see the irony in that tim cook should have been like yes i see the irony in that actually i don't because it doesn't make any sense but i will humor you because i know if i have to explain it to you that won't work but i'm explaining to you because tim cook wouldn't that joke didn't make any sense and therefore was less funny than it should have been
John:
do you need to turn your brain off and turn on the emotion chip from time to time i thought it was funny nothing to do with emotion chip good humor it makes sense the best humor makes sense and it's funny that's why it's funny because it makes sense i love this show i do too but i'm gonna kill one or both of you by the end of it uh anything else about tim and james they had a big opening thing about apple music too oh yeah yeah i guess you're right it was just like hey apple music exists it's good you guys should try it here's your semi-annual reminder to please subscribe to apple music here's how awesome it is
John:
Yeah, 17 million subscribers or something.
John:
I'm watching the thing run in the background now.
John:
I'm presuming we'll comment on it almost in real time.
John:
But yeah, they're pushing it.
John:
This is what they usually do at the beginning of a thing.
John:
They have some feel-good stuff, some funny stuff, and some, hey, let me remind you about whatever it is that I'm pushing that we think we've done recently that's good or doing well or whatever.
John:
So Apple Music is getting the push here.
John:
How do you guys feel about Apple Music right now?
Casey:
I haven't used it since the demo period ran out.
Casey:
At that time, I thought it was okay, but I'm a pretty loyal Spotify user.
Casey:
And the only thing that Apple Music brought to me as a Spotify user that I didn't already have was being able to play things via Siri, which I did really, really like.
Casey:
Other than that, I haven't really looked back since, to be honest with you.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I've been a subscriber the whole time.
Marco:
In fact, we even have the family plan.
Marco:
But it's kind of like when I get a Netflix disc back in the day, back when that was a thing, and you let the disc sit there for like three months and start realizing how much you effectively paid for that disc.
Marco:
That's kind of how I am about Apple Music.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
We have the membership, and I do occasionally play something on it, but if I actually work out how much I've paid for each one of those tracks that I've played off of it, I probably shouldn't be using it.
Marco:
I think I've determined that I'm just not really a Stream Music customer because most of what I listen to is either podcast or Phish, neither of which are on there.
John:
i think i kind of i kind of split the difference between you guys i subscribed during the trial period i thought i would have no interest in it whatsoever i was surprised that i actually discovered new music with it not that they're you know for you and suggestions things are all that great but that was the point where i'm hey i'm trying a free trial i'm gonna you know put some time into going through it and i did find some music that i like what i did when i found that music is that i bought it
John:
because i didn't know i was going to continue the apple music trial so i just purchased all the songs that i found that i liked which is nice and then i let the thing lapse because i'm like doesn't i don't use it kind of like marco i don't i'm not a streaming music kind of person and it was fairly expensive or something that i was just going to let run in the background so i didn't now i find myself kind of missing the fact that i don't have access to all the music that apple music makes available and sometimes i'm like you know what i like to hear some new music
John:
And I can't because I don't have Apple Music.
John:
But anyway, I'm probably just not a streaming music subscriber.
John:
My experience out in the world with people who are streaming music subscribers is I still see Spotify having a pretty good hold on things.
John:
So I don't think Apple Music has...
John:
bump them out but apple music seems like the kind of like apple maps where even if it's not better than google maps just by being the default and being constantly promoted in this way i think they're going to start to erode some of the the competitors just for the sheer force of constant promotion and defaultedness and siri integration uh from the apple essentially
Casey:
Next thing I believe was iWork, which they said they were doing some updates, but most importantly and interestingly, selfishly anyway, was real-time collaborative editing, which I believe they said was going to be both native and web-based.
Casey:
Is that true?
John:
Actually, that came after Nintendo, but I'll let it slide.
John:
Yes, they did say there was a web.
John:
They said you can do this on your Mac, on your iOS devices, and even on the web.
John:
They didn't show any of those things, but yeah.
John:
Is the web the same thing they launched two years ago, or is it like a new version based on whatever's underpinning this stuff?
John:
I don't know.
John:
What they were demoing in some ways is a total Apple move where it's like, Google the most well-known thing where a bunch of people can edit a document at the same time.
John:
That's just a bunch of colored cursors in text.
John:
But we're going to do a presentation with graphics, and look how beautiful the presentation.
John:
It's more complicated.
John:
It's more visually complicated to have multiple people doing graphics at the same time without having them like...
John:
flash and clip over each other everything's beautifully composited and multiple people are collaborating on this graphic document or whatever so that is more impressive uh than just a bunch of cursors moving around a text field uh but almost everything about iWork has always been has looked nicer visually whether it's on the mac or even on the web it looks really nice but
John:
In the end, what people care about is, does it always work?
John:
Is the performance good?
John:
Simple and reliable is better than super fancy and not so reliable.
John:
And thus far, all of Apple's sort of collaborative editing...
John:
I work on the web on all platforms all at the same time.
John:
Document syncing crap has been nice to look at, but ranging from clunky to downright broken.
John:
Downright broken being me fruitlessly trying to get my daughter to edit the same document using entirely Apple native apps on all Apple's latest operating system and getting repeatedly locked out from that ability to even save on any platform.
John:
That's the worst case.
John:
I don't know what to say about this because I haven't tried it yet, but I can tell you that my confidence is not high that this is going to take the world by storm.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's a pretty good summary.
Marco:
It remains to be seen, basically.
Marco:
Nobody has really had time to use this yet.
Marco:
The credibility level here is low.
Marco:
The expectations are low because of the mediocre and poor past performances in this department.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens.
Casey:
So maybe we got the order wrong, as John alluded to, but hell has frozen over-ish, and Nintendo and Apple are sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
Casey:
Pretty much the entire internet had the same reaction I did, which was, holy crap, is John Syracuse still breathing?
John:
i did have it on i did have it on in the background but i don't see how this is such a big deal for most people because like pokemon go i know it wasn't nintendo developing it it was niantic or whatever but it's nintendo's property and like that was the the beachhead you know it's incredibly popular game based on nintendo ip on your phone um it's not the same as mario coming to your phone but
John:
The sort of the big event was, hey, Nintendo has finally I mean, we knew this from months and months and months ago where they announced we're going to make games for mobile phones.
John:
Right.
John:
And the announcement was not we're going to stop making games for our own platforms.
John:
In fact, we're going to continue making platforms.
John:
We're going to make a new platform.
John:
We won't tell you anything about it.
John:
It's a codename NX and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like they're still doing that, but they're also doing stuff for phones.
John:
And we knew that for a long time.
John:
And Pokemon Go shows they're doing stuff for phones and they're successful at it.
John:
And this is just a continuation of that strategy.
John:
Now, I think the impressive thing is that...
John:
nintendo saw fit to or i don't know i don't know who's pulling it who's pushing here is nintendo coming to apple and saying we'd like to do this and let's work out a deal because it's good publicity for nintendo to be in this presentation right to and it's good for apple to say which phone platform is mario on first and i assume exclusively for some period of time anyway our platform like so
John:
I would imagine that it was Apple coming to Nintendo, but Nintendo was probably receptive to the idea that we're already entering this phone thing.
John:
Pokemon Go is a big hit that we sort of outsourced to have some other developer do.
John:
If we're going to bring our crown jewels, we want to have the best possible experience, come with the highest end phone vendor, the most successful phone vendor, the one with the best reputation.
John:
And honestly...
John:
there's a better fit between Apple and Nintendo in terms of their philosophy and sort of like kid friendliness and how Apple patrols the app store and tries to keep it, you know, nice.
John:
And like, that's, it reminds me a lot of Nintendo seal of quality, right?
John:
So I think there's a good meeting of the minds between these two companies here, but then to have Miyamoto come out as if it's like an E3 presentation, Nintendo doesn't even do E3 presentations anymore because they always do this Nintendo direct stuff to come out on stage himself and,
John:
that's that's a pretty big deal now i feel bad because he didn't do particularly well he always insists on saying something english before pulling in the translator this is not a new thing he does this very frequently but he seemed nervous or badly rehearsed or both um and he kind of stumbled through his presentation uh but in the end i don't i don't think it's that a big deal it's not a it's not a shock we're not shocked that this happened it's just a straight line from everything that has come before um the games that they showed are
John:
not particularly revolutionary it's a runner game with mario and some other things that are already known to be well suited uh if anything pokemon go was a more more interesting and daring uh game than what uh than the the stuff they showed today because i mean not you know there's what was that game before uh pokemon go from the company that made it
John:
That was the same idea and then brought to an important property.
John:
But it is more of a risk to say we're going to take this very important property, Pokemon, and try it on a gameplay style that is very phone-dependent, that was not wildly successful.
John:
Ingress is what I call it.
John:
It was not wildly successful on this previous game, but maybe the combination will be good.
John:
And it was.
John:
And these Mario games are even more conservative than that, you know.
John:
tried and true gameplay styles with the crown jewels intellectual property from nintendo i'm sure they'll do well um i'm not sure they'll do as well as pokemon go because that was kind of like a craze uh and as we talked about uh before a great time for it because it's summer and people are outdoors and it became a big news story or whatever
John:
um but otherwise i'm happy to see uh nintendo continuing to plot along in its strategy i'm happy to see perhaps i'm assuming they're developing these things in-house perhaps they could get more of the money from this that will help them fund the whole rest of their company and uh make sure the nx isn't a piece of crap even if it uses cartridges that's it i'm shocked i mean what do you guys think about it like are you looking forward to buying this game or do you just not care
Casey:
I mean, I'll probably buy it.
Casey:
They had made some sort of reference to, I forget how they phrased it, but you'll have to pay for it.
Casey:
And then they kind of implied that there wouldn't really be any IAP purchases.
Casey:
I forget exactly what was said.
Casey:
But then I thought Underscore had noticed that actually there will be IAP.
John:
I imagine there has to be.
John:
And by the way, last time we talked about Pokemon Go, I said that my family was playing it, but I wasn't.
John:
And so far, they were all playing it for free.
John:
That has passed.
John:
My wife has spent God knows how much money on this game.
John:
Whatever monetization strategy they have or whatever scarce resource is required, either her play style or the game itself leads to you eventually running out of some resource that you want and you don't want to wait or get it by grinding.
John:
So she just buys it.
John:
I think she spent like 40 bucks in this game, probably more.
John:
I try not to even look anymore.
John:
So...
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, if you had three people in your house playing a single Nintendo game, how much would you spend if it was any other Nintendo product?
John:
You'd spend $60 and play it for hundreds of hours like a Zelda game.
Marco:
Yeah, but then you'd also have, in your hands, you'd be burning through this $50 controller and the $40 nunchuck and all this other garbage you have to plug into it.
Marco:
I mean, Nintendo doesn't sell much for less than $40.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
I know, but you buy that stuff already.
John:
The old console thing was you buy the console for $500 with all the accessories, then you buy a series of $60 games.
John:
Each one gives you what you hope is $60 worth of enjoyment.
John:
Some games last longer, some games are shorter, but it's like you pay $60 and you get the whole thing.
John:
I play Destiny, which is like $60 plus $20 or $30 a year for the expansions.
John:
plus the monthly fee for uh playstation network but that that still works out money-wise now pokemon go the problem is it's basically limitless like you can't spend there's a limit to how much you can spend on destiny per year minus the silver stuff but even that i feel like even if you've got a limit of money to spend there's not that much to buy in the game and everything you can buy in the game is cosmetic and so if you buy every single expansion and you pay for psn and you buy your playstation there's a limit whereas the pokemon go you could spend your entire life savings buying pokeballs and using them
John:
It seems like it's an unlimited potential pit of money.
John:
And so, I don't know.
John:
Those games bother me a little bit more because in order to continue to have fun with the game, you have to spend money.
John:
And you don't get new content for the money.
John:
You just get the ability to continue playing the content you have.
John:
Hoping the Mario games aren't like that.
John:
But that's a winning monetization strategy that people seem comfortable with, which is if you want to grind, grind.
John:
If you don't want to grind, pay us money and we'll shortcut that for you.
John:
Pokemon Go doesn't seem...
John:
abusive in that way and i'm assuming the mario games won't be either but um i certainly prefer the the other proposition even the proposition of destiny which i think is striking a reasonable balance of you know extracting money from me steadily over the course of years but also giving me hundreds and hundreds of hours entertainment
Casey:
So a couple other quick thoughts on Nintendo.
Casey:
First of all, Super Mario Go already has an entry that you can search for and find in the App Store.
Casey:
I'm sorry, Super Mario Run.
Casey:
I just called it Super Mario Go.
Casey:
It has an entry, a page, if you will, on the App Store where you would typically see buy or get.
Casey:
It says notify, which I've never seen for an app before, which I thought was kind of neat.
Casey:
This is the first.
Casey:
So that's different.
Casey:
And it would be super cool if developers could leverage that, like not blessed developers, but regular schmoes like us could use this to leverage the app store to kind of generate a little bit of buzz about forthcoming apps if you so chose.
Casey:
But still, that's kind of neat.
Casey:
And any thoughts on that before I get to my other thought?
John:
Uh, so the iBook store, I use this for when I was selling my iBooks has a pre-order system where you can put the book up and people can't buy it, but they can pre-order, which is even better.
John:
Instead of just notifying people when it's available, they can give you the money right up front.
John:
And I, I made a lot on the pre-orders because the people who were anxiously awaiting the book, most of them pre-ordered.
John:
So I think this, this, that type of thing should come to the iOS store.
Casey:
And then the other interesting thing, which I think is worth briefly mentioning, is that they specifically said on stage that there will be a sticker pack for iMessage that is themed around Super Mario Run, which is what I think they've been pushing relatively heavily since iOS 10 was announced at WWDC.
Casey:
So I'm curious to see if anything comes of that, but I thought that tie-in was kind of neat.
Marco:
Yeah, sticker packs are the new ringtones.
Marco:
It's an opportunity for lots of tie-in to big companies and big promotions.
John:
I wonder if there will be more strict policing of copyright infringement.
John:
I know Apple in the past, specifically with Nintendo, has actually been pretty good about tracking down, like, at the very least, NES emulators and Mario things.
John:
They still snuck through.
John:
But now that Nintendo itself is in the store, is Nintendo more motivated to have its team of lawyers wandering the store and stomping on anything that uses Mario in the name, uses its artwork...
John:
The million people trying to sell sticker packs that have pictures of, you know, Goombas and mushrooms and all the other stuff.
John:
Like, you're one Google search away from trying to sell a $0.99 sticker pack full of someone else's IP.
John:
And now that Nintendo is actually trying to sell its own version of that stuff, I imagine...
John:
it will be harder to sneak that stuff through.
John:
If not, that's going to be weird.
John:
When you do a search for Nintendo sticker pack, you find a million sticker packs and buried somewhere in there because Apple searches awful as the real Nintendo one.
John:
That will be super weird.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Oh, and in real time, follow up from the chat room.
John:
People are saying that, uh,
John:
i think they're talking about mario run uh paid up front no in-app purchase that's what that's what i'm reading in the chat room who knows if it's true that's not what it says on the itunes store page well it says here uh user rt98 underscore says uh basically that the the there's gonna be like a trial level first for free and then you pay one fixed in-app purchase price to unlock the rest of the game right so it's not like you have to keep buying more energy or coins or whatever to be able to play
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Casey:
So next thing in the presentation was the Apple Watch.
Casey:
And we can start with the name, I suppose.
Casey:
It is now called the Apple Watch Series 2.
John:
I think you mean Season 2.
Casey:
I see what you did there.
Casey:
I dig it, though.
Casey:
I really do like this name.
Casey:
I don't know what alternatives were kicked around.
Casey:
I'm not sure what I would have recommended, but I really like the idea of Series 2.
Casey:
I don't know why I prefer it over just Apple Watch 2, but I think I do prefer it.
Casey:
Maybe because it's more about fashion than the iPhone arguably is.
Casey:
But two thumbs up for the name, in my opinion.
Casey:
What do you guys think about the name alone?
Marco:
Oh, I think it's great.
Marco:
I mean, the first Apple Watch, which now has no name because it's not the Series 1.
Marco:
That's different, which we'll get to.
Marco:
The first Apple Watch, Apple Watch Series 0, that...
Marco:
That had kind of an odd naming structure where you had the Apple Watch Sport, which is the one that everybody actually bought.
Marco:
You had just the Apple Watch with no modifiers, which is the steel one, which is like the middle one.
Marco:
And you had the Apple Watch Edition, which nobody bought.
Marco:
And so you have... It was this weird combo...
Marco:
and nobody really knew what to call the steel one, and everyone would call the sport one the Apple Watch, even though technically that was the name of a different model.
Marco:
So now they've kind of unified the naming.
Marco:
Now it seems from their website that the entire Series 2 is just called Apple Watch Series 2.
Marco:
There is no more sport or steel distinction.
Marco:
Oh, is that right?
Marco:
From what I can find, I could be wrong, but it sure looks like they're dropping the sport distinction, and now there's Apple Watch.
Marco:
And you can get the Apple Watch in steel,
Marco:
or all these wonderful aluminum colors or the apple watch edition still has its own name and the apple watch hermes has its own name i apologize to the great nation of france for how i'm pronouncing hermes it's probably wrong and i apologize although the apple watch nike plus which is another weird like another company's name gets to define a single product
Marco:
yeah so they're basically moving into these like you know these these major brand affiliations now with like fashion and sport brands and you know whatever i don't know anything about that world so that probably makes sense i can't say but overall uh naming wise uh this is a very i think it's a decent update the only weird thing about it though is as mentioned earlier so there's a series two that's fine
Marco:
There's also a Series 1.
Marco:
Now, this is almost the original Apple Watch, but with a really major difference, and that is with the new Apple Watch, they have upgraded the CPU to a pretty substantial upgrade.
Marco:
Now, it's a dual-core one, which is allegedly a lot faster, but they said up to 50%, so they're probably clocked lower.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
Whatever it is, it's a dual-core model.
Marco:
It's a different CPU that is probably a lot faster in practice.
Marco:
And they're in what I commend as a great move for everybody, owners, developers.
Marco:
They're basically retroactively installing this new CPU in the old model as they continue to sell the old model, which is now called Apple Watch Series 1.
Marco:
So you can get series one, which is just the old Apple watch with a faster CPU, which is a big difference.
Marco:
Then you can get series two, which is the newest model, which is that same CPU, but with a, with a higher grade of waterproofing with GPS and a brighter screen.
Marco:
And is that it?
John:
i mean it's totally different the inside like if you looked at the speaker diagram the speaker is different all the insides are different for all i know the battery is a different size it just looks the same on the outside for the most part but inside it's basically all new every part of it is new it seems the screen is new the the system on the chip thingy whatever is new the battery is probably new the speaker is new the thing between the dial the ceiling like it just looks the same on the outside but it's actually thicker
Marco:
is it actually yeah it's one millimeter thicker it went from like 11 11 points i'm at a 12 point whatever oh that's kind of a shame honestly and honestly like you know for a watch going from 11 to 12 is noticeable like that is a noticeable thickness increase it's unfortunate it's still not going to be like it's not going to be like chunky or anything you know if basically if whatever you thought about thickness before you will still think that but it is kind of unfortunate that i went in that direction on one of the products that could have used thinning out yeah
John:
It's nice, though, that they don't sell the Apple Watch anymore.
John:
First of all, it kind of makes it like Macintosh.
John:
The first Macintosh they introduced was not called the Mac 128K because why would they need a distinction?
John:
It was just Macintosh, period.
John:
The first iPhone was just iPhone, period.
John:
And the first Apple Watch was just Apple Watch, even though it had all those suffixes like edition and sport and so on and so forth.
John:
But there was no number or anything.
John:
So now that product that we all own...
John:
It's gone.
John:
Like, you can't buy it anymore.
John:
And imagine if that happened with phones.
John:
Like, imagine when they took the 6S and 6S Plus and moved them down.
John:
They said, and by the way, put the A10 in all of those, too.
John:
That would be, like, amazing.
John:
Like, this is, it's kind of like the Series 1 is, like, the apology watch.
John:
Like, we're sorry that the first Apple Watch CPU was so dry and slow, but you see it was supposed to ship way earlier, but the software wasn't ready, so we had to hold it back for many months, and yada, yada, yada.
John:
Also, we didn't have WatchOS 3 ready, and we didn't quite know what we were doing, and so just forget about that watch.
John:
Second attempt at the same watch, twice as fast inside, WatchOS 3, just forget about that old one.
John:
And the old one, I think, will have sentimental values.
John:
Like, it's the first watch.
John:
Honestly, I don't think it was a bad product.
John:
I think...
John:
it was good hardware wise the software they hadn't figured out yet i forgive all of it series one is like the series one makes me more excited than the other ones because basically anyone making a watch away snap now it doesn't have to be like oh i have to support the the old watches like i guess they do for whoever bought those things but like the window has moved up so rapidly all of a sudden everybody who buys one even if they buy the cheap one this holiday season
John:
will be way faster and watch os 3 will be way faster too so uh even though i mean this is not an entirely redesigned watch i don't think anyone expected it to be but it's exactly what we thought it would be a bigger battery used to power gps that can be on all the time great for workouts and stuff like that um better waterproofing which is hard for me to believe considering how waterproof the the other one was um and keeping the old watch around but not leaving it around and being crappy so i give us thumbs up
Marco:
It's nice that they didn't just keep selling the same one without changing it just because the first Apple Watch is really, really slow.
Marco:
And it's good now to be able to tell somebody to go into a store and just buy an Apple Watch.
Marco:
You don't have to tell them, oh, don't get this model.
Marco:
That's the old one that sucks.
Marco:
Because you have to do that a lot of times to the iPads and iPhones.
Marco:
But now you don't have to do that anymore and all the Macs.
Marco:
You don't have to do that anymore now with the watch, which is great because they're just all good.
Marco:
I've taken note recently, whenever I've been out in the world, like we mentioned, I spent a week in this beach town recently.
Marco:
And I looked around constantly kind of like taking inventory of watches because now I'm a watch nerd and this is just what I do everywhere I go.
Marco:
And I've kind of noticed like roughly what percentage I see of different smartwatches.
Marco:
How many Apple watches do I see?
Marco:
How many dumb watches do I see?
Marco:
How many, you know, different Android things that look like Android wear versus Pebble versus the Fitbit and Garmin watches.
Marco:
The single model I do see the most is the Apple watch.
Marco:
But I would not say the Apple Watch has more than 50% of the share of smartwatches I see.
Marco:
It's kind of like the iPhone in that way.
Marco:
It's like if you measure like phone model versus other individual phone models, the iPhone is usually the best-selling single phone in the world or US or whatever.
Marco:
But like the market share of iPhones versus all other Android phones combined, the iPhone is not more than 50%.
Marco:
You know, it's usually a little bit, usually a lot less.
Marco:
that's kind of how I see in the watch world now, in the smartwatch world, where when I, just out and about anecdotally, I see a ton of people wearing smartwatches.
Marco:
I was totally wrong.
Marco:
I thought this category was going to be a little bit weird and people were going to be very slow to adopt it.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
People love smartwatches.
Marco:
However,
Marco:
The ones I see the most, you know, Apple is the single model I see the most, but most people are wearing either an Android one that I have a hard time recognizing, like which one in particular, or I do see a lot of the Fitbit ones, either the skinny cuff band things or the square one with the diagonal bezel on it.
Marco:
You know what I'm talking about?
John:
Yeah, I see a lot of Fitbits too.
John:
And I think that, I mean, I don't know what the numbers are like.
John:
I don't know how Fitbit is doing.
John:
But in my experience, like when you say smartwatches, I was wondering if you were even counting Fitbit because people aren't wearing that as a watch.
John:
They're wearing it essentially as a stay fit, stay healthy, lose weight, you know, remain active measurement thing because Fitbit...
John:
you know even more so than the pebble fitbit has the advantage of like it's totally focused on fitness it's cheap it's practically disposable battery lasts a really really long time and it syncs with your phone it just does the one thing they wanted to do whereas the apple watch still seems like sledgehammer to kill an ant if you just want to keep track of your steps you're going to spend like hundreds of dollars for this fancy full-featured giant watch with a screen that has software or just buy a crappy little rubber fitbit that if you lose it you don't care about it and you have five of them
Marco:
Well, so this is what I'm getting at, though.
Marco:
So it certainly appears as though the market is really, you know, it's doing very well in the like basic fitness tracking and maybe notifications and, you know, maybe some smart stuff.
Marco:
But like it seems like these what people want most of the time from these is a fitness tracker.
Marco:
And because of that and because all the other ones that I'm seeing that are kind of exploding recently, it does seem like there's a lot of downward price pressure here.
Marco:
So right now, the Apple Watch Series 2, the new default Apple Watch, is now $369 starting price.
Marco:
That was one that was $399 before, right?
Marco:
So it was like a minor drop.
Marco:
I believe that's right.
Marco:
So to have the Apple Watch still be nearly $400 for the main one, when all the competition is offering these $150 or $200 watches that are doing what most people actually want their smartwatch to do, it turns out,
Marco:
that's going to put a lot of pressure on this market, especially in the holiday season this year.
Marco:
So to keep the Series 1 around at $100 less, it's $269.
Marco:
To keep that around is really smart because they have to find some way to drop the price on these by a lot.
Marco:
It is like...
Marco:
They can't just, like, get near it the way they did with iPads because look what happened with low-end tablet market share.
Marco:
Like, Apple just lost it all because it turns out you can make tablets really cheaply and most people need a cheap tablet for is videos and basic browsing and games and that's fine to, you know, get the Amazon 6-pack.
Marco:
But, like...
Marco:
It is very important for Apple, for the watch's future success, to get that starting price as cheap as possible.
Marco:
And to do it like this in a way that doesn't just sell the old one, that actually makes it a really good model.
Marco:
Because looking at these models, if I were buying one today, I'd probably get the Series 1 also.
Marco:
Because I don't care about GPS or water resistance.
Marco:
So I'd probably get that one because it's a little bit smaller and $100 cheaper.
Marco:
Let's put that money towards a better band for it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's a great thing to have in the lineup.
Marco:
So to have that be the entry price and to have that be the entry model is very, very good.
Marco:
But they are going to have to get that price down even further.
John:
Well, I think they're following the iPod playbook here where it's like really expensive, you know, Mac only in the beginning, whatever.
John:
Or like the iPhone thing, like diversifying the line of it.
John:
iPods diversified and went down market really far to the point where it was like a $49 stick of gum thing, right?
John:
I don't think the watch is ever going to go down that far.
John:
But like the phone started as a singular product and diversified and kept the old models around and did stuff like that.
John:
And now that they're upgrading the old models, we'll get to that in the phone thing.
John:
That's also a viable strategy, but I totally see it.
John:
This is the first design of the watch, right?
John:
Wait for the second or third design.
John:
It should start to diversify such that they are selling something that is more or less a direct competitor with the Fitbits at that point.
John:
Fitbit...
John:
It's pretty safe for now hanging out with its little rubbery bands with the little turds inside of them with a tiny LED display, right?
John:
But Apple will come for them eventually.
John:
Apple will not leave that market.
John:
But for now, Apple is content to... You were saying that the one you saw the most is the Apple Watch, as in the stainless steel one.
Marco:
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Marco:
I've seen a very small number of stainless steel ones ever in real life outside of WWDC.
Marco:
No, I would say by far the ones I saw the most were the sport ones by a mile.
John:
But like Apple, the Apple watch is still a bauble for people who shop in the Apple store.
John:
Like it is, it assumes you have money to burn on fancy gadgets and you're already buying expensive crap at the Apple store.
John:
Buy some more expensive crap at the Apple store.
John:
Right.
John:
But that, but iPod started out that way too.
John:
Do you have $500 to spend on a deck of cards that some music do hickey?
John:
Eventually they were selling those things at like every price, every increment of $50 from $50 up to several hundred.
John:
And I,
John:
I think the watch can get there because as as the like, here's the thing, the CPU power and GPU power required to do a decent watch is within shooting distance in a generation or two of being acceptable.
John:
And that will just shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink.
John:
And unlike a phone or something.
John:
You can make a watch, you know, if they work out this interface, you can make the watch pretty slim and pretty small as long as it's still watch size and still keep most of the functionality.
John:
So I think in several generations, they'll have no place to go but down market to start pressing these things down.
John:
I don't, you know, $199 low-end Apple Watch in a few years, no problem.
John:
$150 one in four years, no problem.
John:
And then where is the room for your stupid rubbery band as Fitbit?
John:
There's no room left for you.
John:
So...
John:
I hope they executed that strategy because I think it's a viable one.
John:
But for now, they seem mostly content to stay high end.
John:
Although speaking of high end, it was interesting to see that you don't hear about the addition, the addition much anymore, but they still have a product called addition and it's not gold anymore.
John:
It's ceramic, which looks cool, but it sure as hell isn't 17 grand anymore.
Casey:
Before we get to that, I wanted to just point something out about the other Apple watches.
Casey:
So if you go to their interactive gallery, and we'll put a link in the show notes, the edition isn't there, which I don't think it ever was.
Casey:
So that's not that terribly remarkable.
Casey:
But I was fiddling around on this while you guys were talking.
Casey:
And if you start with the cases, so you're picking effectively which watch to get.
Casey:
It shows you all the different sizes and colors and whatnot.
Casey:
And as you go through them and pick one, so if you take, for example, the 42 millimeter silver aluminum case, and then there's links at the bottom.
Casey:
I'm looking on a desktop, you know, by model.
Casey:
And then that's where you go to actually buy it.
Casey:
What's interesting is it starts at $269 for the 38 millimeter or $299 for the 42 millimeter.
Casey:
But then as you scroll down, it's which series do you want?
Casey:
$299 for the Series 1 or $399 for the Series 2?
Casey:
And I find that interesting because there's no clear distinction.
Casey:
Like, are you buying an iPhone 6 or are you buying an iPhone 7?
Casey:
My recollection is that was always a fork in the road.
Casey:
Whereas here, it's just, hey, you want to get a 42-millimeter silver aluminum case Apple Watch.
Casey:
What flavor do you want?
Casey:
Do you want Series 1, Series 2, 38, 42?
Casey:
Pick your poison.
Casey:
And that, to my recollection, is different than the way it used to be.
Casey:
And smart, because I think like you guys were saying, even though this is pitched as a fitness device, if you're not someone who's working out outside or working out in a swimming pool, why would you need the Series 2?
Casey:
Maybe you always work out on a treadmill, or maybe you never, ever, ever take this thing into any sort of water.
Casey:
save yourself the money.
Casey:
Like Marco was saying, get the series one.
Casey:
It's, it's effectively just as good.
Casey:
If those things are not your priority.
Casey:
I just thought that was cool.
John:
You lose the screens.
John:
Not as bright either.
Casey:
There are other actually, that's true.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
I'd forgotten about that.
Casey:
But yeah, I just, I think this is a very smart way of handling it.
Casey:
Now to come to the addition, I did not realize that the ceramic was the addition until Marco mentioned it earlier.
Casey:
I heard them talk about the ceramic.
Casey:
I didn't, I didn't know that that was taking the moniker edition because
Casey:
which apparently it is.
Casey:
And so I'm sorry, I interrupted you before.
Casey:
I believe it was Marco that was talking.
Casey:
So tell me, Marco, as a watch nerd, why would I want a ceramic watch?
Marco:
Ceramic is really shiny.
Marco:
It looks really cool in person.
Marco:
It is an extremely hard material.
Marco:
It is very scratch and dent resistant, more so than almost anything else you could make a watch out of.
Marco:
It's kind of like sapphire in that way.
Marco:
You know, it's very high on the hardness scale, and you basically can't scratch it or dent it easily.
Marco:
However, it does shatter.
Marco:
All this hardness, you know, typically for strength, you need to be able to take dents and flex.
Marco:
So typically materials that are extremely hard also have the problem of shattering if they get enough of an impact.
Marco:
So, basically, it would not be wise to use it on the sport model.
Marco:
And that's probably one of the reasons why they haven't.
Marco:
Now, the other reason they haven't is because ceramic, in the context of making watches out of it, ceramic is still fairly expensive and difficult to manufacture.
Marco:
It's not that it can't be done.
Marco:
It costs a lot to do it.
Marco:
And it takes a little more specialized machining and techniques and everything else.
Marco:
So, typically you don't find a lot of low-end watches made out of ceramic.
Marco:
It's not worth the cost to do it.
Marco:
This is exactly the kind of thing Apple should be doing.
Marco:
Because Apple is really good at exactly that kind of problem of mass-producing things that most people can't make very well.
Marco:
or at all, or to good quality or volume standards, because it takes incredible manufacturing expertise, or incredible investment up front in high-end machines, or something like that.
Marco:
Apple's very good at that.
Marco:
So like in the previous Apple Watch, they had the amazing DLC Space Black steel watch, which they still sell, thank God, because it's amazing.
Marco:
The Space Black, which is what they call it, the Space Black watch, the coating on that also is extremely hard, and
Marco:
pretty much impossible to scratch or show any damage for but because it is simply a coating on stainless steel that will not have a shattering problem so honestly if you want to watch this going to look really good no matter how much damage it takes get the space black watch with the link bracelet like that's that's the one to get but if you you know if you're going to be doing high impact stuff get the aluminum one and just accept that you might you know chip it or scratch it or or scratch the screen just because you know if you hit it hard enough because that's better than shattering your whole watch
Marco:
The ceramic one is going to be really nice.
Marco:
I love that they have taken the addition, which was completely out of reach for everybody who would buy an Apple Watch.
Marco:
Regular watches, if you go buy a solid gold regular watch, you're going to spend over $10,000, no question, and probably over $20,000.
Marco:
So that was not an unreasonable price for a solid gold high-end watch.
Marco:
But that's not really what people want if they're buying a solid gold eye and watch.
Marco:
They want a mechanical beauty piece that's going to last decades or more.
Marco:
They don't want a technology that's going to perform like an iPad 1 and be about as useful as an iPad 1 in five years.
Marco:
So anyway, this is a smarter way to go.
Marco:
Bring the price way down.
Marco:
So the new edition, the ceramic, is $1,300.
Marco:
That's a great price point for this, because that's roughly what the high-end link bracelet ones cost, plus a couple hundred, and that's roughly what the Hermes ones cost.
Marco:
So that's a great price point for this.
Marco:
The one weird thing about it, I think, is that if you go to any place that sells ceramic watches, and you can't miss the ceramic watch case because it is glowing and bright, because ceramic, it's usually very highly polished, and they usually have link bracelets too, and so you see all these incredibly shiny white surfaces...
Marco:
next to all the incredibly shiny black ceramic services and if i had to take a guess black ceramic watches are probably way more popular than white ceramic watches so i do wonder why now a day after labor day they've unveiled a white ceramic watch and not a black one in addition or instead johnny ive has a lot of white pants maybe in california they can wear white all year round
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So yeah, that's a weird thing.
Marco:
Maybe down the road we will get that.
Marco:
You get the black one maybe at the spring refresh event or something.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But that is kind of a weird omission to offer white ceramic in the edition and not offer black ceramic because black ceramic is very popular.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
We'll see about that.
Marco:
The other thing about the, you know, there's the entire Hermes collection.
Marco:
And that's not entirely new because we've had that for a while.
Marco:
But that, too, I think is interesting.
Marco:
You know, if you look at an actual Hermes watch that's not an Apple watch, you know, they sell lots of watches themselves.
Marco:
There's actually one that I really like a lot called the Slim... Oh, God.
Marco:
The Slim de Hermes.
Marco:
I'm so sorry to the entire nation of France.
Marco:
It's a beautiful watch.
Marco:
It's $7,000.
Marco:
And I don't think I want to spend $7,000 on that watch, even though it's beautiful.
Marco:
To get the Hermes name and an Hermes strap on a nice-looking watch for $1,000 is actually a pretty good buy in the watch world.
Marco:
And that is expensive compared to the Apple Watch, what used to be called the Apple Watch Sport.
Marco:
But for people who want something nice and are willing to spend a little bit more, that's not that different.
Marco:
That's within reach, right?
Marco:
It's still a lot of money, but it's within reach.
Marco:
So I think bringing the whole price ceiling down from literally $15,000 down to $1,400, I think is really smart.
Casey:
I didn't realize until you just said that, that the new ceramic edition is just barely more than the super fancy Darth Vader setup of stainless steel with space black and all that stuff.
Casey:
That's that's much.
Casey:
I mean, I obviously 13 or 1500 or whatever it is, is a lot less than 10 plus thousand.
Casey:
But I didn't realize it is just a hop, skip and a jump away from from the more expensive regular ones.
Casey:
That's that's impressive.
Casey:
And I dig it.
John:
I imagine Johnny Ive has a white ceramic link bracelet that he's wearing right now with the ceramic watch edition.
John:
I'm also surprised they don't have black and I'm also surprised there's no ceramic link bracelet if that's even a thing that they do because it would just go together so nicely.
John:
But got to leave room for the, you know, twice yearly updates and I could totally see them making a black ceramic one of these.
John:
Uh...
John:
yeah i'm surprised there weren't that many new straps there was i mean maybe there were some new colors mixed in there but the only one i really noticed was the nike one with the holes in it which i thought looked pretty cool like that whole watch the nike wait hold on oh god i can't i can't let that go no yeah no you thought that looked good i mean i wouldn't wear it on my wrist but doesn't it look cool as like as a sculpture as like a product shot yeah
Marco:
It looks as cool as the iPhone 5C hole cases.
Marco:
Remember those?
Marco:
No, it's cooler than that.
Casey:
I actually didn't think those were bad.
Casey:
I think it's the colors that drive me so crazy.
Casey:
The look of it in and of itself, like if it was just black, let's say, or just white, I don't think the whole cutout, the cross-drill look is that bad.
Casey:
But these god-awful neon colors, oh, no, thank you.
John:
It's Nike-branded.
John:
It's branded within an inch of its life.
John:
You look at that, you know that's Nike-branded.
John:
like the whole thing it's just the colors match on the screen and on the thing and the whole nike with the the font and everything like that is a that is a nike sport well like look at the stuff that they sell that that is exactly on brand for them and i even give them credit for saying you know what we have holes in it and it's not just like we had to come up with some way to add neon it's vaguely functional like if it's going to be a sport watch this one will certainly breathe more than one that doesn't have holes because the holes are pretty darn big
John:
so you know if you if if you're already buying neon nike running shoes and and like headbands and like all the other outfits and just spandex or whatever like this fits right in with that aesthetic you're not gonna you know wear it to dinner at night because it's a glowing green black thing with this weird slanty font on it but uh
John:
i think it is exactly on brand i mean you have a million different kinds of watch like i think it looks less ridiculous than that double cuff thing that hermese thing with the the i don't i don't understand those like the one that wraps around twice yeah i know what you're talking about the one that has two parallel straps like all right do we have some sort of this is like some sort of disease where you're afraid that the watch is going to
John:
The part you need to just keep adding more and more straps.
Marco:
You'd put a NATO on if that was the reason.
Marco:
I'm looking at the picture of the one with the two buckles.
Marco:
How many hands do you need to put this watch on?
Marco:
Is this only people with assistance to help them get dressed?
John:
It's like a wrist corset.
Marco:
Eventually, people are going to be lacing them up.
Marco:
Definitely a part of, even though I'm so into watches, that's definitely a part of fashion I do not understand at all.
Casey:
Goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So all in all, summarize the watch.
Casey:
I'm giving this two thumbs up.
Casey:
I think this looks great.
Casey:
A few people seemed perturbed that this didn't include a cellular modem.
Casey:
Maybe if and when that time comes, which presumably it will, maybe I'll think, my goodness, I want this.
Casey:
It's amazing.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I don't think...
Casey:
I'm not disappointed by that.
Casey:
I think this looks great.
Casey:
And keeping the Series 1 around while giving it that shadow update like you guys were talking about is smart.
Casey:
I am all on board with this.
Casey:
I don't think I'm going to get a new one.
Casey:
I would like the GPS, but it's not do or die for me.
Casey:
I would like the better water protection, but again, not do or die for me.
Casey:
So I think I'm going to wait.
Casey:
But man, if you're thinking about an Apple Watch, now's the time.
Casey:
This is a great, great, great lineup.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like the cellular modem, that was never going to happen this year.
Marco:
I mean, if you look at the limitations of they have this very, compared to a phone, this very, very small enclosure here that has to sell for a very low price point and has to have very long battery life.
Marco:
The limitations of what they can cram in there, both space-wise and for power and heat concerns, they can barely... Just now, like a year and a half after they launched the original watch, they can now just barely get it performing well to just do local stuff, to just hit buttons and change screens.
Marco:
They can barely achieve that now.
Marco:
So the idea of throwing in a cellular modem and having enough free space and power and budget...
Marco:
To have all that in there, I think it's just unrealistic.
Marco:
That was never going to happen this year.
Marco:
We're lucky we got GPS.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
But all in all, you're pleased with the Marco?
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
I mean, I still don't really think it's for me.
Marco:
But if I decided to go back to being an Apple Watch wearer every day, I would absolutely get one of the new Series 2 models.
Marco:
Probably the stainless steel like I had before.
Marco:
Because that's a good balance for me of looks and budget and functionality.
Marco:
But yeah, a solid, solid update.
Marco:
And I think what remains to be seen is how much faster the CPU is in reality.
Marco:
That I think I'm looking forward to people's reactions and reviews to see that in practice and to see if there's any other downsides, like is the battery life substantially different or worse under certain usage profiles or whatever else.
Marco:
But it's probably going to be really good.
Marco:
So I would say if you are an Apple Watch user and you wouldn't miss a few hundred dollars, buy the new one.
Casey:
And we haven't mentioned, and I don't want to talk about it now because I think we covered it relatively well in the WWDC episode, but WatchOS 3 is great.
Casey:
I think it's a little overblown right now how much more instant everything is, but I think a lot of that is coming from me not having WatchOS 3 built third-party apps.
Casey:
But watchOS 3 is great and made my Apple Watch Series Zero feel a heck of a lot better.
Casey:
And I really like the changes they've done to the way watchOS 3 works or the changes they've done between 2 and 3.
Casey:
So all good things on the watch.
Casey:
But John, why don't you wrap it up for us?
John:
Yeah, as someone who has stopped wearing his Apple Watch, I still have fond feelings about it.
John:
I still look at it occasionally.
John:
Once in a while I wear it.
John:
And mostly I stopped wearing it just because I'm not a watch person and this wasn't able to get me over the hump.
John:
But all that said, none of these new watches are making me want to buy them.
John:
I'm still waiting to see, like, the next generation to get it slimmed down to, you know, the actual big redesign.
John:
But I think Marco hit the nail on the head earlier when he said the most important...
John:
aspect of this watch design from the perspective of a technical person is that it is now 100 completely safe to tell anyone just go into the store and buy an apple watch because none of them are stinkers um with i mean even if they adjust on the hardware that would be true but the hardware plus watch os3
John:
I feel confident that anybody who is vaguely interested in going there and whichever one you buy will be great and be aware, like, you know, about the GPS, because I think that is if they had to pick one feature to add for that big battery, they pick the right one, because I know a lot of people who I mean, my wife included, she has this giant clunky Garmin GPS watch because.
John:
If you're a runner and you want to keep track of your runs, you want to show me exactly where I ran, like my exact route.
John:
Like that's that's that's an important feature.
John:
And to have to have your big clunky phone with you, especially if it's a plus, is difficult to try to find like a belt to strap it to.
John:
And then you're wearing your watch.
John:
And so she ends up just wearing the Garmin GPS thing because she can bring one thing with her.
John:
These are both good products.
John:
Series 1 and Series 2 are both good products.
John:
The fatter watch, now that I know it's a millimeter fatter, reminds me a little bit of my beloved iPad 3.
John:
That's a good point.
John:
The ceramic, everything about it, this I think is the...
John:
the right compromise between new features new technology and everything while we wait for the big redesigned apple watch series 3 or whatever they they change it to so i'm i'm not tempted to buy one but i am happy with the update you know the only thing i would say though is that with the exception of the gps which as you mentioned that's no small thing because you know as we've been having we've been talking about like
Marco:
The Apple Watch has really found its market in fitness tracking.
Marco:
That's such a big part of it, of why people buy it and why people use it.
Marco:
So to add one big thing to help that market tremendously is totally worth it and totally the right call.
Marco:
But I will say, though, that other than GPS...
Marco:
They didn't really address any of the reasons why you wouldn't have wanted one before.
Marco:
So basically, if you were already into the Apple Watch, this is a great update.
Marco:
If you didn't buy one before for a particular reason, other than GPS, that reason probably still applies.
John:
One more thing on the watch before we leave.
John:
I left out the most important reason for my life, my personal life.
John:
My wife, I assume, will be getting a new Apple Watch.
John:
She does not have an Apple Watch.
John:
She's thought about getting... She's seen mine.
John:
She knows what it's like.
John:
She's thought about getting it, but for a variety of reasons, just never...
John:
gotten over the hump for that i mean part of it is that she can't wear it in all places uh at work so she can wear a fitbit everywhere at work or most places in work but can't wear the apple watch it's kind of a pain but like i said she does run she does use a big clunky garmin gps thing when she runs she does have a fitbit so she's got the garment she's got the fitbit and she's got the iphone um
John:
The thing that's going to put her over the edge is Pokemon Go on the watch.
John:
That's what it's going to do.
John:
Because she is still playing Pokemon Go, and it's really difficult with a 6S Plus to just have that big phone out.
John:
And the game makes you either have the phone out or have it in like... It's supposed to have the sleep mode where you turn it upside down and the screen goes off, and it never quite works right.
John:
It's a little bit buggy.
John:
But to be able to do, like, now I know enough about the game where they're showing, like, oh, you can incubate your eggs and see how much time you have, and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Like, I know what all those things are, and I know that she does it with her giant phone out.
John:
If she could just do it with a watch, this is, I almost guarantee that she's going to get an Apple Watch, and she'll claim it's not because of Pokemon Go, but it kind of is.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It's barely as big as a keychain.
Marco:
you pair tracker to your smartphone you can attach it to anything and then find its precise location by tapping a button it's that easy so you lose your phone push the button on tracker and your phone will ring it'll make an alert sound even if it's on silent mode you can also do it in reverse you can if you if you have the device but you don't know where the the tracker is you
Marco:
You can go to the Tracker app in your phone and say, hey, find this device, and then the Tracker itself will beep.
Marco:
So it's really cool how you can find things both ways with this thing.
Marco:
It's great for any kind of misplaced, often misplaced things, and you can have more than one paired to your phone.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
We have not yet mentioned vastly improved diversity of the presentation crew on this presentation.
Casey:
Yeah, from the start, it was a lot, lot better.
Casey:
I was disappointed, and God, I can never get her name pronounced right, but Bozema St.
Casey:
John, I believe, is it?
Casey:
I was disappointed she wasn't there because she just killed it at WWDC.
Casey:
But many, many, many more not-white, not-dude faces, which is a vast improvement I was really happy to see.
Casey:
Although Jason pointed out earlier, Jason Snell had pointed out earlier, that most of that diversity was either in the photography that was shown by the white dudes...
Casey:
or by third parties that were coming on stage.
Casey:
Some of it was Apple themselves, but a lot of it was the third parties, which is a bit of a bummer, but I'll take any improvement at all.
Casey:
So that's a good step.
Marco:
Yeah, basically it's progress, but we're not done.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Very well summarized.
John:
And I think the new factor here is they're finding new ways to make progress.
John:
Because, again, it's Tim and Phil and what's his name on the watch?
John:
Sorry, I can't remember.
John:
There's a bunch of old white guys roughly the same age who are still in charge of all these major projects, right?
John:
So that isn't changing.
John:
And that's difficult to change on a dime.
John:
But you can change who's in the product photos easily.
John:
And like, it's amazing that hadn't occurred to them to lean on that more heavily in the past, because they have, they've always done a pretty good job of that.
John:
But like, you know what, if we can't do it in this other area, if we can't fire Phil and replace him, right, and we don't want to,
John:
We're just leaning really hard in the other area that we can control.
John:
They're finding more levers to pull to try to make an effort in this area.
John:
And it's good that they're not sort of like deciding that they're done and just coasting.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I was pleased to see that.
Casey:
So iPhone 7.
Casey:
Well, Phil came on stage.
Casey:
This is Phil, I think, at his best.
Casey:
Phil Schiller, just really happy, really enthusiastic.
Casey:
And he said that he was going to go through 10 different points to describe the new iPhone 7.
Casey:
And I think we're just going to go through them one by one.
Casey:
The very first one, the refined was the word he used, design.
Casey:
Which, outside of colors...
Casey:
Basically meant move the antenna up the antennas up to the top into the bottom.
Casey:
And otherwise, it looks about the same to my eye.
John:
Yeah, I tweeted this was hanging a lantern on it.
John:
It's the expression from like script writing where you have something that doesn't really make sense in the plot of your movie.
John:
And the way you handle it is by having one of the characters in the movie.
John:
say but this doesn't make sense that shouldn't even be possible and once they say that the audience accepts oh if no one says the audience is insulted like you expect me to believe this that's not how that works but if someone in the movie says but that's not possible that shouldn't be happening it's like yeah that's what i'm thinking too in the audience guy up on the screen now i feel better about it so this is the same design we've talked about this before it's not they haven't changed i think all the old cases fit too like is it exactly the same down to the millimeter the cases won't fit because the camera openings are now totally different
John:
Well, even on the 7?
Marco:
Yeah, it's a much bigger camera opening.
Casey:
Is it?
Casey:
So the exterior dimensions all told, leaving aside the camera bump, the exterior dimensions are identical.
Casey:
Or if not identical, then so unbelievably freaking close that I don't know how you can tell the difference.
Casey:
But you make an interesting point, Marco, that I hadn't considered, that the camera bumps are different.
Casey:
So that might...
John:
I mean, you don't have a hole for the headphone port coming.
John:
So at the very least, it would be weird to put a 6 on there and have this hole where there's nothing.
John:
But at any rate, essentially the same design.
John:
And they lead with that, with the new design.
John:
And the Johnny I video is great because...
John:
what is he going to say about this like he says he says all the things you'd expect him to say like this is this is our third bite of this apple this is our third you know it's the ultimate refinement of this design right so this is a design they've had time to work on first one was a little bendy second one was stiffer and now they're just like move the antenna lines you know they're just continue you can imagine if they were forced by you know some unseen you know an alien to say you have to keep doing this design forever and just refining it johnny i would just continue to find ways like reduce moving parts and make it better and just you know
John:
But if you watch that video again, the Johnny I video is available on Apple's website.
John:
I think they call it the design video.
John:
Wait until the last line he says, which is I forget the exact wording.
John:
He basically recaps what he said at the beginning.
John:
At the end, he says, this is the ultimate incarnation or whatever.
John:
I'm paraphrasing.
John:
I remember what he says.
John:
of this design and the way he says it is this is the ultimate incarnation of this design like he says that he's holding he's holding the iphone 8 in his hand while he says it's like i can't believe they let that intonation go in there go listen to it again marco will put a clip in right here and we'll be able to hear it is it's totally weird when complete iphone 7 is the most singular the most evolved representation of this design
John:
But honestly, hanging a lantern on it or lampshading it or whatever you want to call it for the new design, I think it worked on me.
John:
You know why?
John:
We knew about the Jet Black ahead of time, or you did if you were looking at rumor sites.
John:
I really like the Jet Black.
John:
I think the product shots of this thing are amazing.
John:
I've never been a hater of this design as much as Marco is.
John:
I think it is a perfectly cromulent design.
John:
It is a rounded rectangle.
John:
Shouldn't have been bendy.
John:
Way too slippery.
John:
But aesthetically speaking, the jet black one is the first one of this design that I actually could say that I've liked.
John:
Not just tolerate it and say, yeah, it's fine, it's okay.
John:
I think the jet black one looks freaking cool.
John:
Can you tell me what cromulent means?
John:
It's not in the Apple dictionary.
John:
It would take too long, except for the other show.
Okay.
Casey:
So I agree with you that the Jet Black, at least aesthetically, looks awesome.
Casey:
I immediately thought to myself, oh, I know what I'm getting.
Casey:
I'm going to be getting a Jet Black iPhone 7.
Casey:
And then I thought other things, which we'll talk about in a minute.
Casey:
But what was interesting was I had noticed earlier today that Apple basically comes out and all but says, well, the jet black one is probably going to get the smithereens scratched out of it.
Casey:
So it says on the page that you go to go ahead and buy it.
Casey:
Footnote number two.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Black.
John:
Black.
John:
Use it in all your product shots.
John:
It makes the surface look like one big, giant, featureless thing, and the screen just comes out of it.
John:
Black everywhere.
John:
Black front.
John:
Black back.
John:
Everywhere.
John:
Black is back.
John:
I'm happy about that.
John:
And they have two blacks.
John:
It's so awesome.
John:
They have not space black, not space gray, just black and jet black.
John:
And I agree that the... I wish they'd call it piano black, but I agree that the shiny black one... I mean...
John:
can you even look at it can you even take it out of the case like it's like the guitar and spinal tap don't touch it don't even look at it like you can't touch that with your fingers like it's just you know it's like the piano black and marco's car right you have that friend and you're a tesla right the little you just you can't talk touch it you can't breathe on it you can't do anything with it but boy does it look good in product shots and it takes a lot to get me excited about the same lozenge shape that's been here for three years but they found a way to do it
Casey:
Yeah, visually, I think this looks unbelievably good.
John:
Right.
John:
So now do you think this thing is going to squirt out of our hands like one of those little inverted water balloon things?
John:
You know what those are?
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
What's interesting about this?
Marco:
So Gruber was in the hands-on area doing a couple of periscopes earlier today.
Marco:
And he said that that people were asking about the grip, the grippiness of like the two different blacks.
Marco:
And he said that and there was a couple of people that back this up.
Marco:
So it's not just him that the the jet black super shiny one is almost tacky feeling.
Marco:
It is surprisingly grippier than the regular steel or the regular aluminum ones that we've had to date and grippier than than, you know, the matte black one.
Marco:
So this is going to be interesting.
Marco:
Basically, what do you choose here?
Marco:
Do you choose something that looks better in pristine conditions, but is probably going to look worse all times of day, every day in reality, and after the first day you have it, but is easier to hold?
Marco:
Or do you go with the one that is slippery and harder to hold and you'll probably have to have a case with it?
Marco:
So to me, I'm kind of leaning towards glossy black, jet black, just because I like having the additional grip texture.
Marco:
And if it's going to look crappy on the back, oh well.
Marco:
I leave my phone – so I've been going caseless for the last few months.
Marco:
I got the D-brand skin that MKBHD told everybody about.
Marco:
I got those because they're like $12 for both my 6S, and then I also have the 6 non-S Plus that I bought for testing back when the first Plus came out.
Marco:
And I put it on both of those, just a basic black vinyl skin, basically.
Marco:
And it really does improve the grip by a decent amount.
Marco:
But this sounds like it might even be more than that.
Marco:
And so if I can get a very grippy back, I wonder, is it going to be as grippy as the old plastic cases on the 5C and the 3G and the 3GS?
Marco:
Because if it achieves that level of grip, I don't care how it looks.
Marco:
That would be amazing to hold for a new, potentially giant phone.
Marco:
Because what you don't want with these big phones...
Marco:
You don't want to need a case because cases add size.
Marco:
So if your complaint is that the phone is too big in your hand or pocket, the last thing you want to do is have to bulk it up just to add grip because then you're making that problem even worse.
Marco:
So ideally, the reason I switched back after about a year and a half of using the leather case, the reason I switched back to caseless with these vinyl things is because I wanted a smaller pocket size.
Marco:
I wanted to minimize that.
Marco:
And it works great.
Marco:
And then I have the full usefulness of the left side swipe, the pushing and the force touch for all the edge gestures and everything, which are a little bit harder using the leather case.
Marco:
So ideally, caseless but grippy is the way to go.
Marco:
So I am totally willing to get the fingerprint and scratch magnet and accept that it will just never look good.
Marco:
as long as it works well in my hand.
Marco:
Because when I'm using the phone, I'm not looking at the back.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Also interesting, which was not mentioned during the keynote, but now it's probably a pretty good time to say it.
Casey:
Apple quietly reduced the price of Apple, what is it, AppleCare screen replacements.
Casey:
It used to be, I believe, $100, and now it's only $30, which is probably going to be enough for me to buy AppleCare for the first time ever.
Casey:
And potentially enough for me to go caseless for the first time in quite a long time.
Casey:
I think I started using cases with the 4S.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
And I've been in cases of some flavor ever since.
Casey:
If you get two accidental replacements for $30 a pop with AppleCare, which I believe is the case, and I have yet to irrecover... How do you pronounce that word?
Casey:
Irrecoverably?
Casey:
Anyway, I've yet to really destroy an iPhone.
Casey:
Not like that, but we know what you mean.
Casey:
Yeah, I've yet to properly destroy an iPhone, knock on wood.
Casey:
I think I might go caseless and just get AppleCare for the first time and just take my chances because that's not a bad deal to get a whole new screen replacement, assuming there's no other damage to the phone.
John:
I have bad news for you.
John:
You have irrevocably destroyed your iPhone the second you get that screen replaced.
John:
These are not repairable devices.
John:
I'm sorry to tell you that.
John:
But once they open it up to replace the screen and put it back together, it's never the same.
John:
Yeah, you're probably right.
John:
That's basically right, yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, it's not that I'm saying I'm planning on dropping the thing, but for the first time in a long time, caseless might be caseless.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I'm so tempted to hit the bell, but I just can't.
Marco:
I just can't do it.
Marco:
Marco will insert some terrible rim shot.
John:
He deserves it.
John:
Wow.
John:
So what about the shiny, the jet black business?
John:
uh it's kind of i'm not gonna say this is the same as the ipod nano the scratcherific ipod nano but this is aesthetics aside and grippiness aside um this is the wrong material to make super shiny i still maintain that my favorite and the best
John:
uh phone design aesthetically speaking as just an object that you hold in your hand setting aside uh most other things about it is the foreign 4s and the black ones obviously the black foreign 4s had a shiny black back to them and that worked because it was glass which is incredibly scratch resistant unlike this surface which apparently if you sneeze on it it's going to get scratched even if you put a case on it
John:
It's going to get scratched because in between the case and your shiny black back is going to be some tiny little piece of dust that's going to leave microscopic scratches on it, right?
John:
But speaking of $30 screen replacements, glass back, not a great idea because now you have two sides that can shatter and people did.
John:
So I'm assuming the 10th anniversary iPhone 8 complete edge to edge piece of glass, blah, blah, blah.
John:
That presentation should have parts of it that were omitted for this one.
John:
Parts that emphasize how much stronger the glass is and how much it resists shattering and instead bends and how much stiffer the case is.
John:
Just all the damage aspects.
John:
They leaned on waterproofing and dustproofing, which is great, and I'm glad they're advancing on those fronts.
John:
But droppability-wise, this one is just as shattery as the other ones.
John:
And now, if you get the jet black one...
John:
It's like the scratchiest thing that Apple has ever shipped, according to their own documentation here, except for the iPod Nano.
John:
So I think if you just want it for grippiness, that's fine.
John:
I think if you buy this and use it without a case, or even if you use it with a case, you have to embrace the idea that it's going to get scuffed up.
John:
And I don't know, maybe it will look good when it's scuffed up, or maybe like Marco, you shouldn't care.
John:
But it's another one of those products that unfortunately...
John:
You have to divorce the reality of Apple product shots from the product that you're going to actually unwrap because they're mostly unrelated to each other and just make your peace with what it's going to really be like to own it.
John:
But that aesthetic, shiny black that maintains, the 4 and 4S did that.
John:
Like, because it's not, you know, you can make glass pretty hard and scratch proof.
John:
So if you didn't drop it and shatter either side of it, like I go look at my wife's 4S right now, it still looks pretty darn good.
John:
I mean, it looks almost like it's new.
John:
That was an incredibly good design.
John:
If you're going to do glossy, you have to do it something that's scratch resistant.
John:
Otherwise, you're just inviting trouble.
John:
And so Apple is inviting trouble with this jet black thing, but it looks really cool.
Marco:
Well, yeah, it looks really cool in pictures and videos.
John:
And yeah, no one has ever touched it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like if you look also in Gruber's Periscope, his one, I believe it was the second one in the hands-on area.
Marco:
You can see like the phone that was in the hands-on area.
Marco:
Like at one point he like does like an angle shot and you can just see like it's covered in fingerprints.
Marco:
And that's like from a few and they had people like the staffers who were there running the hands on area.
Marco:
People were saying that they would wipe them down with polishing cloths between each person handling them most of the time.
Marco:
And this one was just like one that was lying down flat on the table, which obviously was handled by like two or three people, maybe at most.
Marco:
and it was covered in fingerprints.
Marco:
Basically, your phone, if you get the Jet Black, will never look the way... By the time you're unwrapping it and plugging it in to sync everything over, if you do everything with iTunes, like a smart person with backups, because then you don't have to enter your passwords all over again if you click the and create backups box.
Marco:
Anyway...
John:
like by the time you're done like setting up your phone it's not gonna look like that anymore like you won't even get a day with it looking like that yeah you can't you can't touch it you can't touch it you can't expose it to the air or dust or anything like you just get and here's the thing the front of all of our phones all already looks gross like we are exuding oil all the time our little fleshy appendages are just gross and they're like constantly like that's just the way it is if you touch things with your bare fingers they will be gross the front of go look at the front of your phone right now it is a mess it has to be like the oleophobic coating on there to
John:
make the oil spread but like there's no there's no getting around it yeah by the way i was wondering like did they put that coating on the jet black because they never mentioned it so the answer is probably no but it seemed like they it would have benefited from the oleophobic coating i don't know if that would have made it slippier but like there's no hope like the smudges there's nothing anybody could do about it but but i think again getting back to the four on 4s they've smudged up and everything too but smudges can buff right out scratches less so so if it is scratchy
John:
then it's just going to look like a big scuffed up mess.
John:
And it's like getting scratches in the clear coat of your car.
John:
Eventually, it just looks like a mess.
John:
Whereas if your car was entirely made of glass, it wouldn't get scratches, but probably not a great material choice for a car.
Marco:
It's for many of the same reasons.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The other thing I would say about these colors is...
Marco:
The non-glossy black looks a little bit dated.
Marco:
It reminds me of the iPhone 5, before the 5S, when it had its own space black.
Marco:
It kind of looks like, okay, you had a bunch of geeks pick some phone colors, and of course they're going to pick black.
Marco:
I like that it's actually black, though.
Marco:
I'm sick of all these different grays.
Marco:
Like, make it black.
Marco:
But see, now we have two blacks, though.
Marco:
Do we really need two?
Marco:
Because then if you look at the rest of the colors, there's no more space grays.
Marco:
Now you basically have light silver, gold, and pink.
Marco:
To me, the whole lineup, with the exception of the the glossy black one, the colors look a little bit dated and stale to me.
Marco:
They look a little bit overplayed now, which is weird for a brand new high profile device like this.
Marco:
Like, is it just me?
John:
Do those colors not look old to you?
John:
Those colors don't do anything for this design.
John:
The reason I think the jet black looks so good is that it accentuates the parts of this design that are interesting, which is basically the rounded edges.
John:
And the rounded edges just blend away into nothing if you have an entirely matte case on it.
John:
When you have something that is glossy or even something that is black is more reflective, it highlights the rounded edges and makes it look cool.
John:
Or even just the little highlights around the little speaker openings.
John:
If everything is matte, it's like, well, there's a screen and then some amorphous blob back there that's like silvery or goldy.
John:
And that's not...
John:
doing this design any favors and you're right they have repeated those colors for a long period of time and they're not particularly helping it but i think most people use cases i think the black one is great mostly because you get the black front with it and then just throw it in a case and like i don't even remember what color the back of my phone is i assume it's like grayish something but i don't see it because it's inside my case um so i think it's appropriate like what else could they do with it could they make them like really dark primary colors i think that would be unwise at this point it's best to just
John:
stick with colors they know they know the relative popularity of those colors add one or two new things in the mix and interesting also that they're doing the the black book thing 150 for black if you want your macbook in black well if you want the jet black one you can't get the lower storage model you have to get the 128 or 256 which so it's a clear signal that the jet black one is supposed to be the fancy one they're kind of punishing you for your uh desires for a shiny phone by a giving you a phone that's never going to look like that and be making you pay more which is
John:
totally in the apple tradition and everyone who buys the jet black one including me are going to deserve it so you are getting a jet black one i think so i think i'm going to get one because like i didn't know if there would be anything in the seven to convince me to upgrade because this is my year i have a six um mostly i was convinced by the things we haven't talked about yet but the jet black didn't hurt
Marco:
fair enough you are the perfect person to have a jet black because you are always slightly dissatisfied about everything and you will always be slightly dissatisfied with the condition of your jet black finish i i don't know if i think i'll probably still get a case for it i'm i'm generally dissatisfied with the state of my leather case i don't know what's happened to it but it's starting to get like all rumply and pimply
John:
So my leather case was awesome up until maybe three months ago, and then it started to get rumply, and now I'm like, maybe I should get a black silicone case next time.
John:
But I have to hold it in person to see what it's like, how slippery it is, because I would not use my 6 without a case ever.
John:
I don't think I would use a 6S without a case ever either.
John:
I'll have to try this one out to see how it is.
Casey:
I am really torn because I really liked the look of the jet black, but I think even in a case, I'm going to know that that thing's getting scratched crap.
Casey:
And I actually think the, the black black looks really darn good as well.
Casey:
I completely echo what John is saying that to me, anything other than a black iPhone is kind of silly.
Casey:
Like,
Casey:
It would be one thing I would actually really consider the silver phone if it had a black front.
Casey:
But these white faces just, oh, no, thank you.
Casey:
If there was if there was a silver and black, I'd probably pull the trigger on that one.
Casey:
But since there's not, I think I'm going to go regular black.
Casey:
And I think I'm going to go 128.
Casey:
I don't think I need to go 256.
Casey:
And we'll talk more about that later.
Casey:
Marco, what are you planning on doing?
Marco:
So I'm going jet black for the grip, even though I know it's going to look bad.
Marco:
I'm tempted to take a piece of sandpaper to the back the very first day I have it and just give it a smooth coating.
Marco:
Just give me a nice matte finish here that's still grippy.
John:
The soft...
John:
Matt.
John:
Then it'll get slippery again.
John:
I think it won't be grippy anymore.
John:
I think part of the gripperiness is the shininess, kind of like the plastic back of the 5C.
John:
So don't do that.
John:
It'll happen naturally on its own.
Marco:
All right.
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Casey:
So next on the list of 10, water and dust resistant, which is one of the things that was spilled by Apple's own tweets earlier in the presentation.
Casey:
So I don't have the term handy, but now it is meeting like IP67, something along those lines.
Casey:
That means that if I remember correctly, you can submerge it not very deep for up to a half an hour and it should work just fine, which is excellent.
Casey:
I'm really excited about that.
Casey:
And that's an improvement for everyone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, you can tell a lot of the changes they've made this year are to... And we'll get to the other ones in a minute.
Marco:
But a lot of the changes they've made this year are to reduce the ways in which people's iPhones can fail or get killed, basically.
Marco:
Reduce the number of moving parts, of parts that can get crap stuck in them or cables bent in them or whatever else.
Marco:
And this is just one other way...
Marco:
Clearly, Apple looks at its repair data from the Genius Bar and warranty claims and everything.
Marco:
Clearly, they know anything you can do to keep dust and water, especially water, out, you will do wonders in prolonging the lifetime of these devices and making people happier with them.
Marco:
you know, I disagree with some of the reasons they've chosen to remove things with the headphone jack.
Marco:
But the result here is, you know, pretty good that now I don't have to worry if I get my phone really wet to the point where like, as Phil showed on stage, like somebody falling in a pool with a phone in their pocket or like, I think the more pedestrian horrible version of this is dropping your phone in the toilet.
Marco:
But there's lots of ways people can inadvertently submerge their phone briefly in water.
John:
that used to most likely kill it and now most of the time or all the time basically won't and that's great i can't believe they they didn't do the obvious demo i wonder if it does this in real life remember in the watch thing where they're like oh we sealed up all the openings so they did the same graphic for the phone we sealed up all the openings now it's even more water resistant now the phone is water resistant except for of course we couldn't seal up the speaker so our solution here is that when water gets in the speaker after you end the workout we push the water out of the speaker
John:
Well, the one opening that they left aside from the speakers on the phone that has been known to have problems is the lightning connector.
John:
So what they should have done is we recommend once a month that you put your phone in the water and then the Taptic Engine will eject the water and all the scum that's got in there.
John:
So you don't, because speaking of Genius Bar, like that has to be one of the major reasons people go to the Genius Bar.
John:
Oh, it's not charging anymore.
John:
I can't get the connector all the way in.
John:
It says this accessory is not made for this device.
John:
All the different problems that basically boil down to you have pocket lint installed.
John:
in your lightning port let me pick it out with this pointy little tool yep if it's water resistant and if the taptic engine is right behind it this is like a self-cleaning type of thing where it should be able to it does it needs a medium so probably get some water but like eject the the content like every once in a while your phone just like sneezes and ejects all the scum that's in there
John:
That would be amazing.
John:
Watch for that in the next version of the iPhone.
John:
They did it on the watch.
John:
Anyway, that's what I was thinking.
Marco:
Oh, can you imagine Phil explaining this feature?
Marco:
We call it iPuke.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
But that would be really useful because people's phones, mine included, they always fill up with crap.
Marco:
I have to take some kind of pointy prod tool or often just a paperclip and scrape out all the pocket links at a lightning center maybe every three or four months.
John:
I have to tell you, I've still never had to do that, but I know that I'm an outlier.
John:
Talking to all the other people I know with this phone, including my own parents, everyone else seems to have to do this, but not me.
Casey:
Now, the chat room has given us the real-time follow-up we needed.
Casey:
It is IP67, and the phones should be able to survive immersion in up to 3.2 feet of water, which is one meter.
Casey:
for up to 30 minutes so basically don't go deeper than about a yard or a meter and don't leave it there for very long and you should be good to go and that's that's super awesome don't try to take like underwater pictures with it by the way like that's what it comes down to like if you drop it in the water it'll be fine right but don't like i'm gonna take it swimming and take movies underwater for an hour nope don't do that
Casey:
As the tipster puts so eloquently in the chat, it can survive me.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Jerks.
Casey:
When we were going through our list of 10, I accidentally skipped number two.
Casey:
Water and dust resistance was number three.
Casey:
And coincidentally, one of the ways that they got to water and dust resistance was by swapping out the home button.
Casey:
And it isn't really a button anymore.
Casey:
It's not a piece of glass necessarily, but it's kind of like the new trackpads that Marco is so in love with.
John:
and now it's all just smoke and mirrors and the taptic engine straight out of dune buttoning without moving a reference that you guys don't get that's fine anyway it doesn't move it's a button that doesn't move we have a bunch of buttons that don't move on our macs we're totally used to buttons that don't move the screen is filled with buttons that don't move now the home button doesn't move anymore but it's still got a little indentation so it's nice that you could find it
John:
Yeah.
John:
We'll see how it is.
John:
Like, Marco's least favorite non-moving trackpad is the one on the smallest device, and I'm assuming that's because on the really small MacBook One, the Taptic engine can't give the bump that he needs to feel like he's pressing something.
John:
I imagine that problem will also exist in the very tiny phone.
Marco:
Well, it's worse than that even.
Marco:
I mean, if you look at the impressions that the hands-on people have of it, they all basically say it actually doesn't feel anything like the Force Tux trackpads, and it doesn't feel button-like at all.
Marco:
The opinions vary between the people who are there about whether they like it or not, but the overwhelming consensus is that it does not feel like you're clicking a button at all.
John:
It doesn't fool you like the trackpad can fool you.
John:
no it's the way they describe it sounds a lot more like the apple watch's tactic engine where like you push hard on something and it vibrates but it doesn't feel like you just clicked a button for real yeah that's another thing i think i'll have to try before i actually pull the trigger on the seven is you know i'm not i'm not going to pre-order one i'm not going to order one side unseen i'm going to wait you know the same stuff i usually do let people get the crappy first batch that has all the problems and
John:
go into the apple store and try it i think no matter how bad it is i'll get over it because again honestly the the current home button on my six that goes in and out i'm not a super big fan of that one it sometimes it bothers me especially when i'm using my ipad my new ipad pro frequently especially with stupid ios 10 with the little press the button to unlock i don't want to press the button on i just want it to unlock like it used to anyway i'm gonna i'll get used to it but pressing in especially when i've got it on my lap on my bed or something
John:
I like being able to sort of graze my fingers across the surface of the screen, except when I realize, oh, I want to go back to the home screen.
John:
Then I have to actually press really hard on the thing.
John:
Now, Force Touch probably doesn't get rid of that hard pressing, but, you know, maybe it'll feel better that nothing moves in.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I totally defer to everyone in the hands-on area, and the fact that it's been split at this point...
John:
probably means that this is not a slam dunk home run but i might not be bothered by it but i as with so many things as we'll get to later this just feels like an inevitability where apple you know apple gave all the examples we remove moving parts from our products because overall it's better for reliability and you'll get used to it and i think all that is true
John:
Isn't the Taptic Engine a moving part that dies constantly?
John:
But it's inside the thing.
John:
It's a sealed unit.
John:
It's not a moving part that you get to move.
John:
We move it.
Marco:
We'll get to this more.
Marco:
I really fundamentally disagree with the justification that this is the inevitable future.
Marco:
Of course, we're moving to get rid of all this stuff.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Is that really inevitable?
Marco:
I think in a lot of these cases, that's not really a valid argument or that's not a complete argument.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know if you've ever heard this podcast, Marco, called Hypercritical, but this guy who hosted it used to talk about the naked robotic core of different devices.
Casey:
And I would say we're moving closer and closer to that.
John:
Well, we have volume buttons.
John:
We have the silent button.
John:
I was thinking of the volume buttons, right?
John:
Why do the volume buttons still move?
John:
And when I was thinking about why the volume and the power button, why do the volume buttons and the power buttons still move?
John:
When I was thinking about that, I was thinking of my...
John:
very weird rumply and pimply leather case for my iphone 6 which by the way someone in the chat room tells me that the 6s cases were actually manufactured differently supposedly i assume better but anyway um when i use my iphone 6 in the leather case and i operate the volume controls and the power button through this rumply leather case they might as well not move i can't even tell that they're moving i essentially just apply pressure to the bulges that are on the outside of the case and i'm pretty much fine with applying pressure to the bulges
John:
I can't really feel them move underneath my fingers, but I don't have to apply that much pressure.
John:
If they made the volume buttons and the power buttons not move, but feel the same as they do on my leather case, I think I would be fine with that too.
John:
So maybe I'm going to be in the camp that doesn't mind it, but the inevitability is just like...
John:
moving parts break and get crap wedged in them and are bad for waterproofing and it's not you get used to not having them like it's possible to make a good physical user interface with something that doesn't move or doesn't move that much um as we've seen like the the four star track pads they do flex they don't they don't move they don't go up and down but they do actually flex if you were to look at with a microscope they do actually bend and flex um
John:
Maybe if they gave the home button a little bit of give, again, I think we talked about this when we were talking about the 4-star trackpad of the F-16, the control stick that doesn't move that much.
John:
It moves a little bit.
John:
They originally, I think we went through this as a follow-up, but we're just going to repeat the same freaking follow-up.
John:
Like the control stick, normally when you play a control stick like in a flight simulator game or an airplane, you move it up, down, left, and right.
John:
Well, in the F-16, the flight stick is not in between your legs, but it's to the side.
John:
And I think they originally made it.
John:
So it didn't move at all, but it was totally weird for, for like pilots to just apply pressure and not have it move.
John:
So then they made it move a little bit, but in general, it doesn't move as much.
John:
So you're mostly just applying pressure.
John:
I think that kind of happy medium can make for a really good, efficient user interface.
John:
Um,
John:
maybe they just haven't struck the right balance here and when they come out with the eight they will enhance it the thing the worst case scenario is the rumored eight they keep mocking up which is actually no button like it's just a smooth completely smooth surface you can't even feel where it is and it gives as much as the screen gives and again we all use buttons that don't give it all on the screen all the time and we're fine with it but the home button is like the last bastion of like i can pull the thing out of my pocket and feel around to unlock the phone and i think they can't they can't really give that up
Casey:
Yeah, I'm curious to see how it feels.
Casey:
Very, very curious.
Casey:
I feel like every Apple device that I've owned that has a home button, over the year to two years that I use it, the home button just feels less and less crisp over time.
Casey:
Even though they've always worked, like I've never had a catastrophic failure of my home button, it just feels kind of gross after a long time.
Casey:
And if this prevents that because nothing is actually moving...
Casey:
I'm all for it.
Casey:
I mean, I'm a little worried based on the reviews like Marco was talking about, but in principle, sounds good to me.
Casey:
Also, real-time follow-up, IP67.
Casey:
It turns out that actually IP is ingress protection, and then the 6 and 7 are how much dust protection you can get from 0 to 6, 6 being the most.
Casey:
And how much liquid protection you have between zero and 9K, where six, I'm sorry, seven is the immersion up to one meter in depth.
Casey:
The two remaining options are immersion one meter or more depth.
Casey:
And 9K is powerful high temperature water jets.
Casey:
So I guess if you wanted to bring it in like a hot tub or something like that, which I did not know.
Casey:
I thought that was kind of cool.
Casey:
Anything else on home button design, water dust resistance, anything before the camera?
Marco:
It all remains to be seen in practice.
Casey:
Yeah, very much so.
Casey:
But I mean, so far, this is sounding really good.
Casey:
I mean, these are incremental updates, but I dig it.
Casey:
I'm looking forward to it.
Casey:
All right, Captain Negative.
Marco:
I really don't like Force Talk.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Everyone says this one's different from other ones, so hey, maybe I could like this one a lot because it's not like the other ones.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
We'll see.
Casey:
i don't know i really think that if you weren't told that you were trying a force touch trackpad for the first time now you've been ruined for life but for the first time if you tried it on a macbook pro and not a macbook and you weren't told beforehand i really think you would never be able to know the difference especially if it was cranked up to maximum touchiness i don't know what but maximum intensity
Casey:
um i i really don't think you could tell but now you it's like you've seen the arrow in the fedex logo and you are forever ruined i don't know anyway so let's talk cameras uh first and uh most importantly to me as someone who does not think he's going plus club optical image stabilization on the iphone 7 two thumbs up for that
Casey:
uh f 1.8 aperture instead of i think it was 2.2 before is that right i believe that's what dan sturm had said on said to me on twitter um so a little bit wider aperture which is really really kind of exciting um the lens that i have for my micro four thirds camera that i spent several hundred dollars on i think can go to maybe 1.4
Casey:
And we're talking 1.8 here?
Casey:
I don't know like you guys do.
Marco:
There is a very important distinction here, though, and that is that the pairing of aperture to sensor size is the relevant part here.
Marco:
As you make the sensor smaller, the aperture equivalent goes up.
Marco:
So like an F1.8 aperture at the little tiny iPhone sensor size...
Marco:
might have the background blur capabilities of an f4 or f5.6 lens on your size sensor.
Marco:
I don't know the exact ratio for these two, but it's like... And then if you have an f1.8 lens on your sensor versus an f1.8 lens on a full-frame sensor, the full-frame one will have more background blur capable based on... Yeah, there's all these ratios and everything because of the optics, but basically...
Marco:
The F1.8 is nice to have just for the amount of light it's lighting in, but for background blur purposes, it is not comparable to the numbers you get from yours.
Casey:
Oh, I did not know that.
Casey:
Well, that's really interesting.
Casey:
But still, I mean, it's fair to say it's an improvement, right?
Casey:
I mean, it's certainly not a bad thing.
Marco:
Oh, it's great.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the important thing is what Phil said on stage, 50% more light being let in.
Marco:
And that is, you know, that means that you can get faster shutter speeds or you can get, you know, more light collected before you start getting noise issues and the pictures get all noisy.
Marco:
So, yeah, anytime you can increase the aperture to get more light in while keeping what you want in focus,
Marco:
that is always a good thing for the quality of your photos.
John:
They didn't say anything about sensor size.
Marco:
Is this bigger than the previous sensors?
Marco:
I don't know if they changed it or mentioned it.
Marco:
I did see that it was backside illuminated, but I forget whether the 6S was also.
John:
No, that's been around for a while.
John:
That's what I thought, yeah.
John:
That's where the rubber meets the road.
John:
They say a lot of stuff about the lens and the image stabilization, but the bottom line is how big is the sensor and how sensitive is it to light?
John:
And the Apple has at various times tied both of those like, oh, we don't have as many pixels, but the pixels we have gather more light each so you can get better light photography.
John:
Right.
John:
Or we made the sensor bigger.
John:
So now it gathers more light.
John:
And now they're making, you know, the aperture like you just you've got to get as much light in as you can.
John:
And you have to be able to collect as much of that light on the largest area to get ideal would be the entire back of the phone is a giant sensor.
John:
But that's that's fantasy tech that doesn't exist at this point.
John:
Or even something like that, what, the Litro thing where you have like a thousand little cameras collecting the light field and doing all the crap.
John:
Like we said on the shows, we were talking about my big fancy camera.
John:
There are environments, primarily indoors or at night or whatever, where you're never going to get a good shot.
John:
with an iphone with its tiny tiny sensor with the current technology of light gathering and so that's why these big cameras for most people's lives you take a lot of pictures indoors and they're going to be dotty or they're going to be blurry and they're going to be noisy and this you know there's nothing you can do about it and
John:
if you look at anyone's sort of social media feed people take tons of pictures with their phones in dark environments and they look terrible um eventually they will not look terrible every little advance every every extra bit of light we're able to claw out of the environment and gather on a sensor means we're getting better and so apple continues to claw up that slope um
John:
And we'll get to the whole, you know, dual camera angle they're trying to pitch here.
John:
But as far as the 7 is concerned, I think this is a significant advancement of the camera.
John:
But in the grand scheme of things, sort of like it's one of their good years, but it's not a gigantic advancement.
John:
It is just like one of their good bumps to the camera for the single camera I'm talking about only.
Marco:
I mean, this is, again, this is one of those things that we're going to have to see in reviews and in practice how it actually turns out.
Marco:
Because, like, you know, they'll say whatever they want on stage.
Marco:
And, you know, every iPhone has the best camera we've ever put into an iPhone.
Marco:
You know, like, so that's, you know, of course it got better.
Marco:
We won't know how much better for, you know, until we get these things.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It sure did sound like it was a good year for it.
Marco:
So, I mean, you know, even with the single camera model without going into the giant one yet, it sure does seem like it's a good year for it.
Marco:
I mean, that is a pretty notable aperture improvement.
Marco:
That is a substantial, you know, lens optics, you know, count of having the six elements and everything.
Marco:
So, like, it sounds good.
Marco:
And the optical element stabilization is good.
Marco:
So...
John:
we'll see how this turns out but it's probably a pretty good upgrade year even for the regular 7 non-plus yeah this is one of the factors in me wanting to upgrade because remember i have a 6 not a 6s so this is a huge leap over the 6 and as i do find myself taking a lot of pictures of my 6 because the camera is not that terrible i would love to be able to take pictures in slightly more challenging environments so this if you have a 6 this is a definitely a reason to get this phone just your pictures will come out much better because a two-year advancement is big if you have a 6s
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think someone's going to do a comparison test and show me the practical realities of single camera seven versus single camera success, especially the success plus, which is my wife's phone.
John:
I'm not sure how big of a jump that's going to be, but they're making progress.
John:
They're doing all the right things other than the bulge is still there.
John:
But I think they've just given up on that now.
Marco:
Also notable is the inclusion of the wide color gamut photo shooting, which that is something that is very hard to find and do well in other cameras.
Marco:
They exist sometimes or they have different color profiles they can use, but dealing with that is kind of a pain in the butt.
Marco:
And so to have this be built in and just all your photos shot on the iPhone are just going to have wide gamut support and you're going to view them on the iPhone, which itself also has wide gamut support on its display and it'll just work like that's awesome.
Marco:
And that's that is not an easy thing to do.
Marco:
And that's pretty good.
Marco:
The other thing to mention with the with the both camera capabilities thing is raw shooting.
Marco:
I really am going to be interested to see how this turns out.
Marco:
The idea here is, for basically a very quick overview, most photos you get out of most cameras are JPEGs.
Marco:
The camera has done some processing to interpret the raw sensor data from the sensor to apply things like normalizing colors and white balance and sharpening, usually more sharpening and contrast boosting than you might realize, basically to try to make every photo look
Marco:
And to apply slight processing, if there's flaws in the lens, if the lens has slight barrel distortion or slight vignetting where the corners don't capture quite as much light as the middle, things like that, those will all be corrected in that same procedure as you convert from the raw sensor data to the JPEG that you then store and show the person.
Marco:
high-end cameras for a long time have offered the ability to save raw files which basically just skips all that processing or defers it to later and saves onto the onto the flash card the actual raw sensor data which is massive and then to view those and process them requires your computer or whatever else to do all that all that conversion and generation and everything the advantage to that is that if you you know usually the advantage of that
Marco:
Not only is if you want to do less messing with the original data and you want to do that in your own controlled way to do it either differently or to do less or more of it.
Marco:
There's also other major advantages like JPEGs have a certain limit of how much dynamic range they can apply or they can represent.
Marco:
So what the difference is between 100% white and 100% black is.
Marco:
jpeg has you know just like a certain limit of how much precision can be stored there so there's a limit of how much dynamic range you can store in a jpeg raw it doesn't have any kind of inherent limit there it's basically whatever the sensor can represent uh so if you're if you have areas of the picture that are blown out that are bright white and you want to like pull some detail out of there or if you have areas that are just black and like there might be some detail there and those shadows that you might that you might want to pull out
Marco:
You can do that much more effectively with raw files because if that data was on the sensor at all, it's still there and you can process that and you can get a lot of detail out of that way more than you can out of just processing a JPEG because the JPEG already had all the like very, very fine granularity thrown away in the processing step to make it from the sensor to a JPEG in the first place.
Marco:
Also, there's things like white balance on a raw is a lossless operation.
Marco:
So you can you can tweak the white balance and colors as much as you want on a raw file.
Marco:
And it's not actually like destructively editing that in any way.
Marco:
And you don't lose anything by doing that.
Marco:
So raw files are great for pro photographers.
Marco:
They're a bit of a pain to work with.
Marco:
They're they're really huge, but but they're they allow you a lot of flexibility.
Marco:
Now.
Marco:
A camera like this, you might think, wow, this is going to be great.
Marco:
I can't wait to have that kind of flexibility on my iPhone photos.
Marco:
The problem, though, is that when you get to a very, very tiny sensor like this with a very tiny lens that sells for something like $40, whatever the part is, the camera on the phone is a very, very constrained camera in both size and cost.
Marco:
So chances are the processing that the iPhone does to make its JPEGs,
Marco:
is really necessary to make them look good uh chances are that it's doing a lot of corrections to things that you like basically i question whether there's any more quality to be had from the raws on ios on iphones because apple is really good at this kind of processing they're probably doing the best they reasonably can with their own built-in processing but
Marco:
So the idea of somebody else being able to tweak more data from those raw files, I think is possible, but unlikely.
Marco:
And what it's more likely to be is just larger, slower to process images that don't have all the nice balancing and contrast and sharpness and lens corrections that the built-in ones will have.
Marco:
So again, we'll see how that goes.
John:
I think there's a headroom there.
John:
I think they hinted at it was showing the Lightroom demo is that
John:
If you really want to, you know, the way I think of the raw to JPEG thing is that going from raw to JPEG is a lossy operation.
John:
You have to pick an exposure level.
John:
And if you pick an exposure level where all where this all these shadows are black or all these highlights are blown out to white, you're never going to get any new information out of that black is black and white is white.
John:
Whereas if you still have the raw and if you have it in a program like Lightroom.
John:
you can pick a particular shadow area and expose that differently to pull out detail from the shadows over there.
John:
But then in these highlights over here, expose it different.
John:
Like you can actually, because the raw sensor data is behind there, treat different areas of the photo differently based on the subject matter.
John:
And you're right that you will have to reapply all the stuff that Apple does, particularly probably noise reduction in anything that doesn't have really bright light because it's going to be noisy on a little sensor.
Yeah.
John:
But I assume the ability to basically process the image in more or less the same way Apple does it will be available to third parties.
John:
And then on top of that, it's all just like, what do you want to do artistically speaking to this particular photo?
John:
So I think you will be able to pull out shadow detail and highlight stuff if you're willing to put in the time to treat different images of the area differently.
John:
I think you're right that the compromise for the entire image is probably Apple's probably doing the best you can imagine.
John:
But
John:
the option the option makes sense and i think it opens up the market for applications more serious photography applications on the phones especially if i mean you didn't mention anything about 4k 60 frames per second uh it's not there video right but so it will be in a few years and that will open it up for you know for video apps and video editing and stuff like that so anyway
John:
I encourage anything that gives these iOS devices more of a pro bent, and I think this is a move in that direction.
John:
Of course, it also means that you just fill up your photo allocation even faster.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the other thing, too, you know, if Apple really works on this, like, full stack, which they probably should and probably will...
Marco:
What this could also enable, depending on how well they do it, is this could just enable the built-in editing controls in the Photos app.
Marco:
If there's a setting somewhere that says always shoot in RAW or something like that, if you can get it in the Photos app, then the Photos app could itself...
Marco:
keep doing over and over again all the cool Apple processing stuff as you adjust the various sliders and things to edit the RAW.
Marco:
So if you have, you know, as you said, if you have a different opinion of what the highlights and shadows should be and what the white balance should be, you can have all that being done non-destructively on the RAW and still have all that processing done on the way out to view, to display and to disk.
Casey:
It's not quite that simple, though, because Rene Ritchie had tweeted earlier, presumably because he was briefed by Apple, the camera app shoots JPEG.
Casey:
Only third-party apps can do RAW.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
Well, hopefully in the future that might be a setting.
Marco:
Well, yeah, the setting is called Fill My Phone Five Times Faster.
Marco:
Well, look, they have a setting for video quality.
Marco:
By default, the iPhone 6S could shoot 4K and does a pretty good job of it, but that's not on by default.
Marco:
By default, it's 1080p.
Marco:
I think it might even be 1080p 30, but it can also do 1080p 60 and 4K 30.
Marco:
And 4K is like is about a gig a minute at that at that at their bit rates.
Marco:
So like that's, you know, you figure they're selling a 16 gig phone that can shoot a gig a minute worth of video.
Marco:
That's kind of a problem.
Marco:
So it's disabled by default, but it's still an option for those of us who bought the 128.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So, you know, it was optional, but, you know, it's it's more practical for people with with the bigger phones.
Marco:
this is the same kind of thing if they want to sell these big phones here's a reason here's a way that like power users will want to buy the bigger phone so they can do this uh so absolutely this is the kind of thing that they hopefully will do in the future because it seems weird to have that capability and to only let third-party apps use it and to not do anything with your own built-in photos app that everybody uses and that has lossless editing controls
John:
I'll just add an SD card slot.
John:
Don't worry.
Casey:
Yeah, that's it.
Casey:
We should also talk about Phil's extra credit project, which was depth of field adjustments and enhancements by way of the magic of software and these seven pluses to two lens camera system or two camera system.
John:
Before we get to the depth of field thing, we just talk about the two cameras on their own merits before the software update that's not even going to be out when the phones are out, right?
John:
So the two cameras by themselves is you have two choices.
John:
You can take from this camera or from that camera, and one of them is zoomed in twice as much as the other.
John:
Which is nice.
John:
It's pretty straightforward.
John:
I was looking for maybe a little bit more magic, which they kind of delivered on in their extra credit assignment.
Marco:
But essentially... Well, there is some magic in that it appears that you can zoom smoothly between those two focal lengths as well.
John:
I think it was just tap from 1x to 2x and slide from 2x to 10x, but that's all software after that.
John:
that is that is how i heard it as well as what john is describing that one to two is a jump and after after two it's a um gradient you might be right i mean they don't have they could do a smooth slide they just go oh here's here's here's the one x image and i'll software scale until you get to 1.999 and then i'll switch the other camera but the bottom line is you have two different cameras presumably both have equally high quality sensors they're just one is telephoto as they said and one of them is wide angle and
John:
And that alone, even if that was the only feature they had, that you have two choices of two different cameras, is nice because the default one is like wide angle because you want to take a picture of a group of friends or whatever.
John:
But every once in a while, you see this a lot with like parents trying to take pictures of kids at like assemblies or camp things or whatever.
John:
And you know they're so far away.
John:
They're holding up their phone in the audience.
John:
You know their kid is going to be a speck because it's a wide angle lens and they're towards the middle or the back.
John:
There's no way they're going to even be able to recognize their kid's face.
John:
If they had a 2x zoom on that, that would go a long way towards them being able to recognize where little Timmy is in the picture.
John:
So that's a great idea.
John:
And hey, the 7 Plus is gigantic.
John:
You have plenty of room on the back.
John:
You've already got a wart there.
John:
Why not make it a double wart?
John:
Hell, put five cameras on there at five different zoom levels.
John:
Just keep adding cameras along the top of it at different zoom levels.
John:
This is a little bit barbaric.
John:
It will be looked back on as like, remember when we couldn't do the entire back of the camera as a sensor?
John:
And instead, we just kept adding more cameras.
John:
But for now, I think it's a reasonable compromise.
John:
And then what I was looking for after that is, okay, you got the two cameras.
John:
It's good.
John:
They are good for all the things they're good at.
John:
What kind of magic can you do with these two cameras when they work together?
John:
And the magic is not shipping on release and...
John:
Not that amazing, especially in light of the light field cameras and all that other stuff where they're like, we just gather all the light and do these amazing things in software.
John:
Apple has less ambitious goals, but I think the result will be a little bit better.
Casey:
So real time follow up.
Casey:
Serendi Caldwell has said you can absolutely pinch or really scroll to zoom between each lens, but the button allows you to be specific.
John:
right but like i said i think all it's doing is software zooming the one until it gets to actual two and then it switches like it'll be fun to play with that and go like get it up to 1.99 and switch it to and watch it all of a sudden get clearer you know because then it goes to the other line well just like put your finger over one of the lenses and just like see when it switches yeah oh that's an interesting point i didn't think of it that way that's funny
Marco:
yeah no i mean so this is this is going to be great like this is one of the reasons why i'm most likely getting the plus uh that i want this and and like i love shooting photos with my iphone like many people do i shoot tons of photos with my iphone i shoot most of my photos with my iphone to have there be finally like a new optic to it that's that's built in it's always there you know you've always been able to get a little like a little like bolt-on lenses that you like
Marco:
slide on somehow or that rest there clip on or something and they're okay but it's never as good as having the built-in one that's always there so to have this this additional lens on there is going to be great my my only little nitpick i you know with me there's always a nitpick is that i do kind of wish it was a little bit more zoomed in uh they so the the regular lens that's always been there um i had said a few episodes back that it was a 35 millimeter equivalent most of the time that was wrong it's actually a 28 millimeter equivalent in most recent models
Marco:
And so the new one being twice that is a 56mm equivalent, which they said in the presentation.
Marco:
And so it's similar to a 50mm lens that many people have used, but only on full frame.
Marco:
If you've used a 50mm lens on a Rebel or a smaller camera that's not full frame, it's actually more zoomed in than what you're getting with the iPhone.
Marco:
The iPhone, that is really...
Marco:
They kept calling it a telephoto, but I don't know any photographer who would describe a 56mm lens as a telephoto lens.
Marco:
That is a medium lens or a normal lens.
Marco:
The 28 that you normally get with it is a wide.
Marco:
So anyway, they now have a wide and a normal.
Marco:
I do wish they would have gone a little further, maybe given like an 85mm equivalent.
Marco:
That would have been great because...
Marco:
As you get a little further into that range, it starts looking a lot nicer for portraits and just pictures of people in general.
Marco:
The more you get in there, the better it looks generally.
Marco:
You have to take a couple steps back sometimes, but it's usually worth it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
hopefully they will move in that direction.
Marco:
I mean, in my wildest dreams, heck, add a third one.
Marco:
As you were saying, John, you got camera one, camera two, go below it, add a giant circle that's as wide as both of those.
Marco:
Give me a 135 there or something.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
Probably not going to happen, but...
Marco:
uh you know physics is kind of a problem here in a number of ways but uh you know to have to have something a little more zoomed in would be nice um also the the 56 millimeter lens i believe it has a lower aperture than the wide ones i believe on the side it said it was an f f 2.8 uh so the the zoomed in lens will be worse at uh low light situations and
Marco:
Whether it can produce genuine background blur, which we'll get to in a minute, is not going to be as good as if it were f1.8, but because it is more zoomed in, basically the more zoomed in you are, focal length-wise, the more background blur you can tend to produce, especially if your subject is fairly close to you.
Marco:
So the formula for background blur usually is...
Marco:
subject very close to you and also using a very long lens like a very zoomed in lens that's how you get blur and you can actually get blur on today's iPhones on every iPhone basically you can get some background blur if you have something close up enough like you got to be pretty close because it's a pretty wide lens on a little phone sensor but if you put something really close to your iPhone you will get a blurred background if the background is far enough away from you
Marco:
so anyway new new dual lens camera thing just for the sake of photography just basic photography that is awesome and the ability to very quickly switch the fact that it isn't only a pink zoom the fact that you can just hit that little button and it toggles to 2x that is awesome and i will probably use that a lot so you're going plus club i think so for that reason alone the the blur thing they show so let's talk about the blur thing you want to want to intro that
Casey:
Yeah, I certainly can.
Casey:
But before I do, John, are you going plus club?
John:
No.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I went back and forth on this and I'm pretty sure and we'll talk about why in a moment I am not going plus club either.
Casey:
So.
Casey:
Before the presentation today, there was a lot of debate, especially because of the invitation that Apple had sent, a lot of debate over whether or not the Plus, with its supposed two-camera system that we now know is real, if it would be able to provide some really, really good bokeh.
Casey:
And I think we've talked about this in the past, but bokeh is that background blur that Marco was just talking about.
Casey:
So it's where you have a typical...
Casey:
Yeah, please email me.
Casey:
So it typically, and I'm oversimplifying, but typically this is with a portrait, although not necessarily always, where you have, you know, the person relatively close to you, like Marco was just describing, and then the background is considerably more blurry.
Casey:
You know, hopefully the person is not blurry at all, and the background is very blurry.
Casey:
And people were saying beforehand that this 7 Plus will be able to give you legitimate, honest-to-goodness visual bokeh or that background blur.
Casey:
You can play those depth-of-field tricks.
Casey:
Now, Phil said he gave his engineers an extra credit problem.
Casey:
And the extra credit problem was I want to see Boca like you get out of a DSLR or equivalent.
Casey:
And that's one of the reasons I bought my Micro Four Thirds was because I wanted to be able to do the same sort of thing.
Casey:
I want to be able to see that coming out of an iPhone.
Casey:
And so coming later this year, I believe they said, certainly later in an iOS 10 update, I
Casey:
7 Plus users will be able to do a portrait mode in the camera app that will synthesize the background blurring and give you synthetic bokeh.
Casey:
I really admire what they're doing here.
Casey:
It is really impressive, and I really think they're on the right track to something really awesome.
Casey:
But?
Casey:
The fact that it's totally synthetic...
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
That's why it's not the right track.
John:
The right track is to be able to pull that off optically.
John:
Like, eventually, with the, again, mythical sensor that is the entire back of your camera with just light field gathering involved.
John:
Like, to fake it, it's like you would...
John:
taken a picture and then given to todd viziri and told him uh pretend the background was blurred and like have them go in and mask out the part like i mean it's doing more than that because it's not just give me a flat image let me find the people and blur the background because that would be awful i think it's also using the dual cameras to do it to make a depth map so it figures out like it's picking a focal distance then it's trying to make a depth map by i'm assuming using like stereo vision from the two cameras and figuring out what's close and what's far by like you know how far the images diverge from each other whatever making a depth map
John:
and then picking its focal plane and then saying anything behind that then just applying like a blur filter to the stuff that is right behind it in these focal planes like and i guess that can look okay in the shots but i honestly i think that the photos they chose to show us off were bad photos to show it off with like
John:
i the backgrounds were so sort of bland that the blur didn't show anything like why didn't they do foliage foliage is like the go-to right it's green with splotches of yellow with the light going through it and like that's that's what you want to see the blur on and they didn't show any of those for like a sky a gray sky with a suspension bridge and then a couple of lights which i guess are pretty standard like the imitation had lights in them um and i had that person standing in front of a light field but
John:
i was not all that impressed with the shots and i worry that as this fake algorithm tries to make these depth maps and then just like does gaussian blur in the back that it's going to look like that that it's going to look like a picture that a computer found the edges of your head and then blurred everything behind it and that's i'm not looking for that well because that's exactly what's happening and you know this is not new you've been able to get apps on the app store instagram does this you know that's why i thought it was kind of funny like
Marco:
to have Instagram up there to say, oh, we can't wait to use all this new stuff.
Marco:
It's like Instagram's existing app has a background blur feature that does this.
John:
And there's, of course, lots of others.
John:
But that's got to work on 2D.
John:
It doesn't have the advantage of the depth field.
John:
So presumably the depth field, you don't have the problem of edge detection around their heads because you actually kind of have an idea.
John:
Because in an actual camera shot with depth of field...
John:
the the focal plane that the things that are actually sharp are actually pretty narrow and so like the person's ears could start to be a little bit blurry because they're farther back than their eyeballs or their nose right and so you can't just find the edges of their hair and then blur everything behind it so the depth thing does give them an advantage but when they showed that said expansion like how many depth levels is finding and really how much depth can you find from two cameras that are within millimeters of each other right it's it's a challenging problem
John:
I always wonder if, like, it could have gone 3DS style and had the two cameras be separated more widely to get better depth on it.
John:
But honestly, the only, like, fake it till you make it, sure.
John:
But eventually you should make it, which is do it for real with actual light.
Marco:
Yeah, well, because the problem is the way they're doing it.
Marco:
So, you know, the general principle here of find the subject.
Marco:
keep that in focus, and then the rest of the background apply a basic blur image filter to.
Marco:
That approach has been around for a while, and the new thing they're doing, as you said, they've made advancements here in finding the subject, defining the edges of the subject, defining the area that will be sharp, and then blurring everything else.
Marco:
That part they've made advances on, but this whole technique of take a regular photo that doesn't have good background blur because it doesn't have shallow depth of field in practice, and then blur the parts that are supposed to be blurred in software.
Marco:
The whole problem with this approach is that the resulting picture, that's not how real background blur looks.
Marco:
If you do that technique, even if you do that technique perfectly, even if you perfectly define which exact pixels in the frame are supposed to be sharp and which ones are supposed to have the blur effect applied to them, it still doesn't look right because that isn't how that actually looks in practice.
Marco:
The regular image blur effect is not producing the same look you get from the out-of-focus areas in a shot at the field photo.
Marco:
so it never looks right and i agree i think the photos they picked they didn't really do themselves a lot of favors there i don't think those are very good examples and if that's the best they could come up with that might not be a good sign for for the the usefulness of this feature or the or the the overall quality of this feature um one thing it did show off is i thought it did show like you could see like their cheekbones were in focus but their ears were a little bit out of focus that showed the the hey we're using depth we're not just doing edge detection because you couldn't do that with it with the filters
Marco:
they actually weren't using depth properly like if you actually look if you see like you can you can look at certain areas of some of the photos and it's like you know this because if you know in in real photography there is there's a plane of of what is in focus and that plane is not actually perfectly flat it's actually you know curved but because that's optics and physics but anyway there's a plane of what's in focus so generally speaking it's it's close to flat for most purposes so generally speaking you know if if you are if somebody has like you know
Marco:
two two things on their face like let's say like you know like their their eyelash and their chin like two things that are like the same depth away from the camera the like if one's in focus the other should be in focus and that's and apple's test photos even had flaws like in that kind of logic um it just it didn't and and also i thought one thing i noted on on twitter during the time i thought that the
Marco:
whatever is defined as the subject in focus, the edges of that, like in the one that was the portrait of the guy, his shoulders or his ears, they should have been in focus based on what was being shown and how it was supposed to be, basically what it was simulating.
Marco:
The edges should have been in focus there, and they weren't.
Marco:
And so there were...
Marco:
I'm not saying that average people are going to notice that necessarily and be able to nitpick and all these little things like that.
Marco:
But I think people do generally notice like, hey, that looks fake or that looks like a filter.
Marco:
That doesn't look real.
Marco:
I think people do notice that.
John:
They should save the... I don't know.
John:
Maybe they're doing this because we don't know.
John:
We don't have the thing into shipping later.
John:
But if they took the picture and saved either the JPEG and the RAW plus also saved the depth field...
John:
that would have let you say look here's the regular picture you took and if you want you can try this effect but it's basically lossless having to choose at at the time even if you just say the jpeg with the depth field you can still apply it after the fact having to choose at the time you take the picture you could like i fear for people who accidentally put it into that mode and don't quite understand why all the pictures are all messed up like they try to take a picture of a landscape with that thing on and it goes haywire
John:
it'd be much better if they just took the best pictures they can, honestly, from the optics and sensors they have.
John:
And if you want to be fancy and save a bunch of depth fields, another, another set of channels and have a fancy app, they can apply them selectively and maybe it'll make some picture look better.
John:
That's fine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, this is a nice little trick.
Marco:
You know, it's fun.
Marco:
People are going to have fun with it for a little while.
Marco:
But the thing is, if you have a 56mm f2.8 lens, you probably can get some background blur.
Marco:
Like, you know, not as much as you would on a larger sensor with those specs.
Marco:
But if you just get a subject close to the lens and have a background that's not that close to you, like, you can get blur that's real optically.
Marco:
Again, probably not a ton of it, but you can get some.
Marco:
And if they just highlighted that, I think that would have just been a little bit... I don't know.
Marco:
I think it would look better.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I really think that this is the easiest way... Well, it was a poor choice of words.
Casey:
I really think that having this bokeh-like effect...
Casey:
is the best way to make someone that is interested in more prosumer level photography like I am.
Casey:
And I'm getting better at understanding the academia behind it, if you will.
Casey:
But if you had told me like two years ago, oh, you can get this depth of field effect from your brand new iPhone, it really would have made me think twice about spending $1,500 on a micro four thirds camera and a really nice lens.
Casey:
So I really think they're going in the right direction.
Casey:
Obviously, I agree that doing this synthetically is definitely cheating.
Casey:
But as we've all been saying, particularly Gruber and MG Sigler, we are marching closer and closer toward not necessarily needing a DSLR for most people.
Casey:
And that's a great thing.
Casey:
I think that's a wonderful thing.
Casey:
One of the biggest drawbacks, however, to this simulated bokeh is that
Casey:
the way you access it is by going into the camera app and selecting portrait mode, which implies to me that it's been tuned in such a way that it is looking for faces.
Casey:
And I think they said a little bit about this during the presentation, but it's tuned for faces.
Casey:
And I don't know if it's really going to work, at least for now, very well with things that aren't faces.
Casey:
And there are times, like some of the pictures I'm most proud of,
Casey:
Some of them don't include faces.
Casey:
So I've put in the chat and I will put in the show notes, a picture that I took at the beach a year or two ago, which has that background blur, but I don't know how to phrase this.
Casey:
I deployed it tactically, kind of like you deploy Merlin tactically, but there's no faces in this picture.
Casey:
And so how would that work with this simulated bokeh?
Casey:
Would it work?
Casey:
Like this is where I think it all starts to fall well on its face.
Casey:
But yeah,
Casey:
Again, a step in the right direction.
Marco:
I appreciated how Phil positioned it during the presentation.
Marco:
I mean, and in case you didn't say it earlier, I think Phil was awesome.
Marco:
I think he was clearly the highlight of the show.
Marco:
He really had a lot of good stuff to say.
Marco:
He delivered it well, with one exception, which we get to about the headphone thing.
Marco:
But overall, I like Phil today a lot.
Marco:
And I think the way he set expectations here was good.
Marco:
He said right in the keynote that this is not going to replace SLRs for pros.
Marco:
This is not going to do that.
Marco:
And that's really good to hear.
Marco:
It's good to keep expectations realistic and to tone down the hyperbole and stuff because if you set expectations...
Marco:
uh accordingly then people will be pleased like but if you if you say we're going to kill slrs for pros or for you know for people who really like shooting real like real background blur stuff like that if you say that and then your solution to that is just software blur like that would be a big disappointment so they actually did it you know pretty well
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Let's do our fourth sponsor for this evening.
Casey:
This was unsolicited, but it's the right thing to do.
Casey:
And I think we did this last year.
Casey:
Dear friend of the show, Stephen Hackett, his eldest son has been affected with childhood cancer.
Casey:
And for the month of September...
Casey:
It is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And so we'll put a link in the show notes to a brief post that Stephen put up on his website, 512pixels.net.
Casey:
And it is a really touching post about what it's like to be the parent of a child with a young child with cancer.
Casey:
And so obviously we always like it if you are a patron of any of our sponsors.
Casey:
But I know I speak for all three of us in saying we would really, really super mega ultra like it if you could scrape together any amount of money to donate to St.
Casey:
Jude's Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
And there'll be links to all this in the show notes, probably in our sponsored by section.
Casey:
And I've donated, Marco's donated.
Casey:
I don't know if John has donated yet, but I know I can, I am speaking for him and saying that if he hasn't, he will.
John:
Already did.
Casey:
Oh, there you go.
Casey:
And this is, even though I am lucky enough or we are lucky enough not to have children with cancer, it's still near and dear to Stephen's heart.
Casey:
And by virtue of it being near and dear to his heart, it's near and dear to ours.
Casey:
So if you could scrape together even just a couple of dollars and throw it St.
Casey:
Jude's way, I think all three of us would really appreciate it.
John:
Absolutely.
John:
This is a reverse sponsor.
John:
They're not giving us money.
John:
We're giving them money.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
The reverse sponsor.
Casey:
I like it.
Casey:
So next on the list, Retina HD display.
Casey:
We've sort of kind of covered this already.
Casey:
There is a wide gamut color.
Casey:
No True Tone, though, which I'm disappointed by.
Casey:
I'm lucky that I haven't yet been ruined by seeing a True Tone display, or if I have, it's been for seconds.
Casey:
But I was looking forward to getting a True Tone device in my new...
Casey:
in my new iPhone, and as it turns out, not so much.
John:
No room for the light sensor.
John:
They need to remove another port.
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say that... Sorry, the lightning port is gone.
Casey:
Yeah, just like that.
Marco:
No, they won't get rid of that because that's actually giving them lots of income and stuff.
Marco:
No, they'll get rid of the volume buttons, as you said earlier.
Marco:
They'll remove the microphone because no one talks into their phones anyway.
No.
Marco:
Well, now we have another solution.
Marco:
You can buy a Bluetooth wireless microphone now for $169.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
So yeah, I was disappointed by that.
Casey:
But the display in general, they also said it was 20% brighter, which is, that's cool.
Casey:
So I dig it in general, but I am sad that there is no true tone display.
John:
And it's not OLED.
John:
We're saving that for next year.
Marco:
Yeah, it did seem like, you know, given how they usually do things like, you know, first we're going to introduce this cool new advanced thing on one of our devices, then it's going to move to the other ones.
Marco:
Like the fact that you had it on the iPad Pro 9.7 and then to not have it on the following flagship iPhone is odd.
Marco:
You know, I think you're right, John.
Marco:
It probably was just for like light sensor space reasons.
Marco:
But it does seem like an odd omission.
John:
also lead times i think i imagine the lead times and even though this phone came out after the small ipad pro i think this phone was probably developed uh had a longer lead time in development and so that's kind of the same reason the 12.5 inch didn't have the the good the quote unquote good or best display uh even though it was only out only a little bit before like i think it just comes down to lead times and the fact that it's so tight in there so don't worry it'll be on the 10th anniversary phone
John:
Unless there's something specific about it in terms of processing and screen tech that makes it not fit in the thing, but I don't know of any limitation that just makes it not compatible with a phone-sized device for the foreseeable future, so I expect to see it in the next phone.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
Next on the list, audio, not headphone audio, just audio audio.
Casey:
And Phil said the new iPhone has stereo speakers, which all of us I think were expecting, but all of us were kind of fearful, or most of us anyway, that there would be two speakers on the bottom of the phone, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose.
Casey:
But oh no, there's a speaker on the top and speaker on the bottom, which I'm actually pretty excited for.
Casey:
I listen to stuff off my iPhone semi-frequently.
Casey:
I listen to podcasts fairly frequently.
Casey:
Occasionally, I'll listen to music if I'm too lazy to go turn on my main amplifier in the family room or connect to some other speaker system.
Casey:
I actually very rarely listen to any sort of headphone with my iPhone.
Casey:
We'll talk about that in a minute.
Casey:
But I'm really excited to have the stereo speakers because occasionally I watch movies on my iPhone.
Casey:
It doesn't happen often, but enough that I'm excited about it.
Casey:
And two times the volume –
Casey:
Heck yes.
Casey:
I am all in on that.
Casey:
Really excited.
Casey:
Genuinely.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be snarky.
Casey:
I am genuinely excited for this.
Marco:
No, that's... Because, like, I mean, I also... I use my iPhone speaker all the time, usually for listening to podcasts.
Marco:
And to have... And, you know, sometimes like YouTube videos, too.
Marco:
And, like, to have any extra volume there...
Marco:
especially in the podcast use case, is going to be used a lot.
Marco:
People are going to love that.
Marco:
And I think the whole thing with worrying about it being two on one side or whatever, there's a lot of people who are like, oh, well, you're not going to get a lot of stereo separation there.
Marco:
And the point of adding more speakers on a little phone like this, the point is not stereo separation.
Marco:
It is not positional accuracy.
Marco:
It is not like audiophile quality here.
Marco:
I say this as an audiophile.
Marco:
It is not for this purpose.
Marco:
The main reason that we would want it and would benefit from it is volume and additional directionality.
Marco:
If you look at the iPad line,
Marco:
The iPads for years had that one dumb speaker on the bottom, basically as if they were a giant iPhone, just having one right in the corner there.
Marco:
And then in the iPad Pro generation this last year, they basically made it so that there's a speaker on all four corners.
Marco:
And they treat it as two with one being the woofer.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
The result of this is that iPad speakers now are so good that compared to what they were before, having just the one-on-one side...
Marco:
They are way louder at max volume.
Marco:
Also way clearer, just way higher sound quality you get by just having four drivers working together to produce one set of sound.
Marco:
Basically, you can drive them a little bit less harshly and have a little less distortion.
Marco:
And then you have...
Marco:
you have them firing now in two directions.
Marco:
And so that helps fill a room or a space better and more effectively, or even just like around a table or around a chair.
Marco:
It's better to have it coming out of more sides than just in one direction off to the side.
Marco:
On the phone, it's going to be a little bit different because what they did was they have the speaker on the bottom in the same place it always was.
Marco:
And the second speaker, they've basically, it seems like they've just kind of amped up the earpiece speaker where people's phone call voice comes out like that up top.
Marco:
Oh, is that right?
Marco:
That is the second speaker.
Marco:
Oh, I didn't know that.
Marco:
Yeah, there's no top grill.
Marco:
The second speaker is a louder, amped up earpiece speaker.
Marco:
So what remains to be seen, basically, what you're going to have, if you're holding the phone in landscape view with the home button on the right, the way you'd probably watch a YouTube video or a movie...
Marco:
You basically have like one speaker, that's where the old one always was, coming out into your right hand.
Marco:
And the second speaker then is pointing towards you from like your left thumb.
Marco:
So the sound is coming out at two different angles.
Marco:
And it's coming out from two probably different sounding speakers because they're not only pointing different directions, but they have different types of enclosures and ports around them to let the air in and out.
Marco:
So it's probably going to sound weird if you try to treat it sideways like that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I really am interested to see how this is in practice.
Marco:
Where it would be great is things like podcasts and music where you're laying the phone down on a table or maybe in your car.
Marco:
A cup holder is a very popular one.
Marco:
Things like that where you're just putting the phone down somewhere and you just want volume.
John:
Your car is cup holder?
John:
I don't understand how you people, like Marco, the audiophile, and just anyone in general can tolerate the sound coming out of a phone, even for podcasts.
John:
It's for podcasts.
John:
I can't even, even for podcasts, I can't even understand what they're saying.
John:
Cup holder in a car?
Marco:
Have you ever used overcast, man?
Marco:
I fixed this problem.
John:
Is the car not running?
John:
Maybe you have better, maybe in your electric car with no internal combustion engine or your BMW is better sounding.
John:
my iphone playing audio in my running car it's not me it's i hear from my customers who people do this because i know people do this because lots of cars don't have good audio input options i know but it just sounds so terrible so incredibly terrible and i think i mean the ipad pro the the small ipad pro with the four speakers huge upgrade in sound and
John:
And yet still awful.
John:
Still awful.
John:
And so the phone, I totally applaud the extra volume.
John:
I think that's great.
John:
Anything you can give to give you more volume with less distortion so you have a chance of understanding anything, all of this is great.
John:
But I still think the world's worst $5 earbuds are better than playing that damn phone on a counter.
John:
And I don't understand how the two of you with your house full of Bluetooth speakers choose to take your phone and chuck it on your kitchen counter instead of just Bluetooth-ing to a speaker.
John:
Because, as we'll get to, Bluetooth sucks.
John:
that's why i have a house full of bluetooth speakers and i hardly ever use them because they're a pain in the butt to each to each his own improvements in sound quality are good i'm glad that i'm glad the two speakers aren't next to each other although it does not give them a convenient excuse for why the headphone port is gone because guess what they didn't replace it with two speakers down there the other one is up on the top and
John:
The one facing towards you, I think that's a benefit because everyone has done, I think, the iPhone cup where you cup your hand to aim the sound at you and are shocked by what a difference that makes.
John:
Having one actually pointed at you, it's got to be a big upgrade.
John:
So all thumbs up on this.
John:
There's not room in this phone to put giant empty cavities like there is in the iPad Pros, right?
John:
So thumbs up on making it better, but...
John:
uh i i still don't quite understand maybe it's because i'm getting old and my hearing is going bad but i i feel like it's not like unless and well because it's terrible because it is terrible but like unless and well and that like i can't even understand what people are saying you know i have a feature in overcast that minimize the distortion when you're using the speaker i've actually profiled this and measured it if i if i ever willingly listened yes i know i've used that feature just to see if it made it better and it does make it a little bit better but it still sounds like garbage so i put my earbuds in
John:
It's not your fault.
John:
The speaker is the size of a pencil eraser.
John:
Not even.
John:
It's terrible.
Marco:
I actually have very low expectations for the quality that I'm going to get out of the earpiece speaker.
Marco:
Just because there's no room there for porting or shaping the sound at all or having a nice wide output port.
Marco:
It's just a little slit.
John:
like so it's that's gonna be maybe they do the same thing with like you're saying with the ipad like where they they just send certain frequency cutoffs to the that like use one as a tweeter or something who knows i mean the biggest thing is volume like that's you're right like double the volume that's that's that's the headline feature sorely needed everybody loves it thumbs up
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So next on the list, we've got four more.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
How long is the show going to be?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Next on the list, Apple was courageous, and they dropped the headphone port.
Casey:
John, can you explain to us why using the word courage was an interesting choice?
Marco:
Before we get here, can we just marvel at the skill of Apple PR during this transition?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know if Apple PR leaked it that early.
John:
I think the parts leak leaked before Apple PR did.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
I think Apple PR leaked to major public, you know, parts leak all the time.
Marco:
But like you had like the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, you know, major public publications publishing as fact that the next iPhone was going to have the same exterior case design and lose the headphone jack.
Marco:
So you see all the bad news early.
Marco:
So then by the time it actually comes around, now it's like it's like old news.
Marco:
It's like no one's like, well, some people are talking about it.
Marco:
But like most of the analysis and reviews of this thing are now just like, oh, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Old, you know.
Marco:
As you know, it's like, oh, it's such genius.
John:
I don't attribute it to the genius of PR because I totally don't think it's a PR thing.
John:
If you want to attribute the cleverness of doing this, attribute it to the people who made the decision of what's going to be in the product.
John:
And that's not PR.
John:
PR doesn't decide.
John:
PR takes the product that's there.
John:
And I know marketing has more of an influence than Apple's products and other companies.
John:
But in general, the clever thing was to decide that this phone...
John:
And not the next year's eight is going to be the one where they drop the head of important.
John:
Once they made that decision, it was inevitable that it would leak early and it was inevitable that everything would come out.
John:
And then maybe you can credit PR later for confirming to the big publications that, yes, this really is true to get that all out of the way.
John:
But anyway, we talked about that all in the last show.
John:
This show, as Jason Snell put it in a six colors post.
John:
I think it was the number one thing that he wanted to learn from this event is, Apple, please tell me why you removed this port.
John:
Like a justification.
John:
We've all talked about many possible justifications.
John:
Now Apple had its time on stage to tell us in its own words why they did this.
John:
And the more I've been thinking about it, the more I'm kind of glad...
John:
that they didn't that they didn't go small like for example that stereo speakers pretend they they had added a second speaker but it was right next to the other one next to that little grill that actually isn't a grill in front of anything right if they had actually done that it might have been easy for them to say uh you know we removed the headphone jack you might be wondering why well once we removed it we had room for the second speaker and it's twice as loud isn't that a great like
John:
They didn't think small.
John:
They didn't say, let me just look at the physical design of this phone, tell you what is in the space where the headphone jack used to be, because there's something there.
John:
It's not an empty space.
John:
If you look at the little picture, they show, you know, you could see there's not this big place that holds the headphone jack.
John:
So there is something there.
John:
And they could have said, we don't have the headphone jack, kind of like many people did with the MacBook One.
John:
We don't have the second USB port because look at the thing that's there.
John:
And if there's not a millimeter to spare, I don't have a square to spare, right?
John:
They didn't say that.
John:
they said they led with the number one thing of courage.
John:
They took the high road, which is basically saying, look, we get rid of crap all the time.
John:
We get rid of things that are old.
John:
We make buttons not move.
John:
The reason we say courage is because we know people are going to be angry about it, and it takes someone with the guts to drop...
John:
legacy serial ports or the floppy drive or optical drives from desktop computers that are gigantic.
John:
We do that despite the fact that we know there will be backlash because we think it's the right thing to do in terms of driving progress and we're willing to take the yelling.
John:
Which isn't really a justification.
John:
It's more of an explanation.
John:
Why does Apple do things that make us mad?
John:
Because they think it's right and they're willing to take the heat.
John:
And the more I think about it, the more I say that that is the in the absence of any actual concrete, really compelling explanation, like it makes our phones, you know, now our phones don't break or something like fantastical or whatever.
John:
that is the real honest and only explanation is that this is a thing that apple does because they think it's the right thing to do and come at me haters like that's what that's what they basically said which i find the more i think about it more satisfying than specific reasons that i could nitpick at because this is not a specific reason it is merely an explanation and i say yep that's why they do it
Marco:
I mean, if you look at all the reasons that we've all been arguing about all summer about why this is good or bad or justified or unjustified, the whole summer we kept saying, let's wait and see what Apple says on stage because let's see what their reason is.
Marco:
And it is disappointing to basically hear their reason is we felt like it.
John:
It's not what we felt like.
John:
They did say they feel like it's moving progress forward.
John:
That doesn't mean anything.
John:
If you were looking for a justification, there's nothing that... Because we've gone through all the reasons.
John:
There's nothing they could say that is compelling enough to...
John:
like there's a trade-off, like we all know about the inconvenience and problems.
John:
What is balancing that on the other side?
John:
There is no specific feature or attribute of this phone, and there could never be any specific feature or attribute of this phone that would explain that adequately.
John:
The only explanation is the actual explanation, which is...
John:
They do things like this to sort of, you know, push the human race forward to quote from their ads.
John:
And they know people are mad about it and are going to be mad justifiably, not like unjustifiably.
John:
Like they know there are reasons to get mad about it.
John:
Why does Apple do these things?
John:
Because I mean, courage is a little bit overblown, but because they're willing to take the heat for that.
John:
They're willing to plow bravely forward, allow people to be legitimately angry at them for legitimate inconveniences.
John:
Because they believe they will come out the other side eventually.
John:
They came out the other side of all the other ones.
John:
They're going to come out the other side of this.
John:
And you can, as we did, argue about, is it too soon?
John:
Is it too late?
John:
Like, did they get rid of the floppy too soon or too late?
John:
Or was it exactly the right time?
John:
Maybe they were a little bit early on the floppy.
John:
Did we come out the other side of that?
John:
Yes, we did.
John:
Time was on their side.
John:
A lot of...
John:
our determination 10 years from now about this did they go too early too late or was it a mistake because they could backpedal like the glass front and back phone were they too early too late or was that not a great idea turns out probably not a great idea with the current formulation of glass so they didn't do that again they're going to try it again maybe with the the iphone 8 or whatever next year so maybe they'll come back to it but anyway we'll have to be able to make those determinations in hindsight but their their explanation i'm like i said i i
John:
It makes sense to me, and I feel like it's the only thing they could possibly say, and it's better than them trying to shuck and jive and dance and try to, like, convince you.
John:
Because they're not going to convince you.
John:
It is going to be inconvenient.
John:
And their main point was, we are willing to take your anger.
John:
Bring it to us.
John:
And we will bring it to them.
John:
And people will bring it to them.
John:
And hey, they put the adapter in the box.
John:
So they did basically everything they can short of not doing this.
John:
And I totally believe this is something that would have to happen eventually.
John:
Infinite timescale, blah, blah, blah.
John:
This is when they've chosen to do it.
John:
They're willing to take the heat.
John:
I think they'll mostly be okay.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I agree that they did this in the best way they could.
Marco:
If they're going to remove the port...
Marco:
you know, good job including the adapter in the box and good job making additional adapters $9.
Marco:
It'd be nice if you, if the adapter was also a charge through adapter because people do that a lot, but okay, we'll take what we can get for now.
Marco:
Third parties will sell that.
Marco:
I guarantee it.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
But anyway, I mean, it was timing wise, like if they did this without the AirPods, which we'll get to in a little bit, I think it would also be a little bit weaker.
John:
So, I mean, again, the AirPods are a wild card.
John:
We don't know how well they work and what they're going to be like.
John:
And we'll talk about them in a little bit.
John:
But I think everything is in place for...
John:
For this to be fairly judged in hindsight five years from now, I guess we'll all just wait for the USA Today stories to come out about it and the complaints in or whatever.
John:
But as you said, the tech press already went through this.
John:
The mainstream press is going to have a big thing about it.
John:
It's too late.
John:
If this turns out to be a colossal mistake, it's too late for them to fix it on next year's phone by this point, which is kind of sad.
John:
It's kind of like it was too late for them to fix it on the 4S, right?
John:
But when the 5 came out, no glass on both sides.
John:
But I think they'll mostly be okay.
John:
And if anything, I think they spent more time trying to justify it than they needed to.
John:
Like they could have just done, who is it, Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather, who signed off his last broadcast with the word courage.
John:
They could have just done that and then just moved on.
John:
Yeah, the Courage thing, that was tone deaf.
John:
I mean, not tone deaf.
John:
There's something to it.
John:
Like I said, in the abstract, when talking about companies, why do some companies use things and other ones don't?
John:
it does come down to i don't know boldness it's it is courage in you know in the context of companies making decisions about their products like if that is your frame of reference within that frame there are moves that are more courageous courageous and less courageous and apple has historically been a company that's willing to do the more courageous things even if it falls on its face sometimes
John:
That's the defining characteristic of Apple as a company.
John:
And so if you don't want to, that's not the same as like real courage, real life.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
It's a bunch of companies picking features for their products.
John:
But I'm hard pressed to find a better word.
Marco:
Again, the genius of Apple PR, there is nothing really left for me to say about the headphone jack removal at this point.
Marco:
You know, we waited for there to be a reason.
Marco:
There wasn't one.
Marco:
None of the reasons they gave with the exception of courage.
Marco:
were reasons that you had to remove the port to achieve.
Marco:
They could have launched AirPods.
Marco:
They could have promoted lightning headphones and launched some of their own lightning earpods.
Marco:
They could have done all those things without removing the headphone port.
Marco:
Removing the headphone port was not a necessity for any of those advances.
Marco:
So the courageous part was really just saying, all right, well, I guess we're going to
Marco:
Anger everybody here and to do something that serves a few of our goals and doesn't really serve any of yours.
John:
Well, but it serves.
John:
It's just like the floppy disk, though.
John:
Like what?
John:
What did it say?
John:
Having a floppy disk help users?
John:
I was like, well, we think we should you should use different room.
John:
What different room will we need?
John:
there's not any good different removable media zip desks are crappy and usb keys are really slow and small and dingy well we think in the future you won't miss the floppy disk because other stuff will eventually replace it yeah but what about now i miss my floppy disk now well they're doing the exact same thing with the audio part again this doesn't justify it doing it this instant but they're saying like well but what do i do for my headphones oh digital audio interface on lightning blah blah blah never mind the half the things they should plug into there like i'm assuming their earbuds are not using digital audio because there's no dac inside their little earpods right anyway um
John:
But they're saying the AirPods are their thing.
John:
Like, oh, you know, we think there's a better way for you to hear sound in your ears that come out of your phone than plugging in with this really old port.
John:
And they're offering an actual concrete product, not just like speculatively, like here are the AirPods.
John:
Maybe the AirPods suck.
John:
And that will definitely make it the wrong time to have done this because people want to plug their things in.
John:
But on the other hand, they do have...
John:
they do have answers why remove it makes more room in the phone and we think there's better ways for you to listen to audio um and i you know if the airpods end up being really good and don't have any of the downsides of bluetooth that don't cut out on you and the sound quality is pretty good and they magically connect everything and everything syncs up whatever
John:
I think that probably will be a better way to listen to audio from your phone than having a string going from your pocket up to your ear to get snagged on things.
Marco:
Oh, it'll be great for the people who are willing to spend $160 to buy those AirPods, who don't lose them, who they are charged up for, and who can actually wear them.
Marco:
One of the problems I have is like Apple is replacing this port that I can use any headphone I want with, with a new, with, you know, allegedly, you know, all these better things.
Marco:
One of the major ones of which is advanced earbuds.
Marco:
Well, I can't wear earbuds because of whatever is wrong with my ears that makes them hurt like hell.
John:
You got mutineers, yeah.
John:
I know a lot of people have mutineers, but you have the adapter.
John:
Like, it's not like you don't have any solution.
Marco:
Yes, but what I'm saying is like there's lots of people, like that old analog port, one of the things great about it,
Marco:
is that it is universal.
Marco:
It satisfies so many different people's needs and desires.
Marco:
And it is so broad in what it enables for so many different use cases.
Marco:
And Apple is replacing it with something that's actually extremely narrow.
Casey:
I think I need to be the voice of reason on this one.
Casey:
I don't see why this is such a big problem, given that they're including the adapter in the box.
Casey:
And BuzzFeed had a really great article that actually Marco had sent to us privately before we recorded, where they talked to several different Apple employees and executives.
Casey:
And so Dan, is it Riccio or Riccio, said, this is a quote, it was holding us back from a number of things we wanted to put into the iPhone.
Casey:
It was fighting for space with camera technologies and processors and battery life.
Casey:
And frankly, when there's a better modern solution available, it's crazy to keep it around.
Casey:
I think that that's legitimately what they thought.
Casey:
Like one of you was saying earlier...
Casey:
I don't think this was nefarious.
Casey:
I don't think this was ill-intentioned.
Casey:
They genuinely just wanted the space in there.
Casey:
And one of the things we haven't talked about yet is that the battery life in the 7 is, I would say, considerably better than the successes that it replaces.
Casey:
Some of that is because of a much better central processor, which, again, we'll talk about sometime between now and tomorrow when we finally stop.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Some of that is also, I believe, because of a bigger battery.
Casey:
And let's suppose the battery is exactly the same size for the sake of discussion.
Casey:
There's a different placed taptic engine that presumably is a little larger.
Casey:
There's things taking up space in this camera, in this phone.
Casey:
And I am more than willing to give up a headphone port that I personally don't...
Casey:
use very often at all in order to get those advancements.
Casey:
And the thing that really bothers me that I truly don't understand is the entire internet getting their junk on a wad because they say Bluetooth sucks.
Casey:
I use a really shitty pair of Bluetooth headphones constantly.
Casey:
I use them 40 hours a week at work.
Casey:
I don't... These headphones are like $20 brand new.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I don't have any problem with them.
Casey:
I use them for a day or two, and then I charge them overnight.
Casey:
I don't find any latency issues whenever I... If I'm watching a video, as long as I'm on the Mac...
Casey:
If I'm watching a video using either Safari or any of the like QuickTime, any of the media players that are built into the Mac, no problems with latency.
Casey:
They sound just fine for a regular person.
Casey:
To Marco, I am not saying they would sound good enough.
Casey:
To me, they sound just fine.
John:
He listens to his phone on his counter.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't listen to music like that.
Casey:
Well, either way, either way, either way.
Casey:
The point is, I don't have any issues with disconnections.
Casey:
And if I do, it's very rare.
Casey:
And it's only when I haven't been using them for the last 20 minutes and they've like timed themselves out and gone to sleep.
Casey:
I'm not saying these problems don't exist from other people, but...
John:
golly i don't understand why i'm the special friggin snowflake of bluetooth and why i am the only one that doesn't have this problem you're not using it in a challenging situation like bluetooth has a bunch of things that it's supposed to do and it does a whole bunch of them really badly uh pairing quickly uh it depends on your device and my car doesn't do a good job oh that's a disaster
John:
sharing a device between multiple things also a disaster if you only ever have it paired with one thing that you never move it away from and it sits in one place like but but you're not you're not challenging like the job of bluetooth is not just to fulfill that one use case you have the job of bluetooth is to be this wireless low power tech and i would say power wise i'm assuming apple's one uses less power than bluetooth too uh
John:
In theory, because we haven't tried this yet, Apple Solution is technically better than Bluetooth because it fixes the things that are clunky and annoying about Bluetooth, and I assume it also uses less energy.
John:
So, I mean, that's why I tweeted the thing.
John:
I'm happy to see Apple moving beyond Bluetooth.
John:
They keep waiting and doing these different Bluetooth standards, and it's just...
John:
It's just annoying for me.
John:
We have one little shared speaker in our bedroom that my wife uses sometimes from Bluetooth and I use sometimes from Bluetooth.
John:
And I hate the fact that when I go to try to play from it, I can't just select it because, oh, now it's paired with my wife's phone and I have to go and manually reconnect it to my phone, right, by going through a series of screens.
John:
Their attempt to solve this with this little magic case that you open up the lid on and it brings up a thing, who knows if that works?
John:
But there is a real problem they're trying to address.
John:
Just because your use case doesn't run into any of those problems doesn't mean that Bluetooth...
John:
can't be bettered and i think because bluetooth is such a common complaint like it's not terrible it's better than nothing it's good for the wireless things we use it for i do use bluetooth speakers it's nice but everyone who uses it a lot and uses all the different cases sees the weak spots and so is looking for usually the next version of bluetooth that's going to fix all this uh but in the end eventually we're just willing to throw ourselves at the mercies of apple's proprietary thing it's kind of like i said before about the
John:
The little RF dongles for Logitech mice.
John:
Who knows what tech they're using there, but the batteries last forever and I never have any problems with it and I'm kind of glad they're not Bluetooth.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, my main concern with things like this, the reason why I resist these things and I complain about these things when they happen...
Marco:
It's very similar between the headphone jack removal moving to Bluetooth and buttons on trackpads and home buttons moving to 3D touch, vibration motors, whatever else.
Marco:
The main reason I complain about this kind of stuff is that the things that were there before, the simple, old, established ways of doing things, headphone jacks, buttons...
Marco:
Those things have incredible advantages in simplicity and reliability.
Marco:
And I mean simplicity, not just like electrically or mechanically, but like using them.
Marco:
There's great simplicity there.
Marco:
And there are so many cases in technology these days where we take something that is incredibly simple, that has worked forever like a button...
Marco:
and we say you know what we have a great solution to this problem this problem by the way that we've just invented that we're now calling it a problem and we're now saying it's inevitable these things are going away even though that was not necessarily the case before but now we're going to solve this problem everything in air quotes i can't make enough air quotes for this whole discussion everything in air quotes here we're going to solve this problem of this old thing that works just fine by making a new thing that is better but more complicated
Marco:
And we're saying it's better because in some ways it is better.
Marco:
In some ways it's more advanced.
Marco:
Maybe it's wireless.
Marco:
Maybe it allows software control where there wasn't software control before.
Marco:
Whatever the case.
Marco:
That's what's so compelling about these things.
Marco:
They are better in many big ways.
Marco:
But they also get worse in a number of big ways that we tend to gloss over or minimize.
Marco:
Like, oh...
Marco:
Yeah, you can't just plug anything in anymore.
Marco:
Now you've got to do this pairing dance.
Marco:
Or you can't actually... This button is never going to ever feel like a button again.
Marco:
There might be now software-introduced delays into when this button feels like a button.
Marco:
Like, there's... We do this to so many things in technology, and it...
Marco:
you know in general we do get ourselves ahead and we do make progress i think on the whole but i do think it's worth evaluating these things very critically with lots of scrutiny these decisions we make before we say yes it is definitely better yes we need to get rid of this thing yes we need to replace this thing that has worked fine for 100 years
John:
But if you're just applying the blanket where every time there's any change like that, you're just always resistant.
John:
You're not good at identifying which ones are the ones, like I said, when I was speculating about the non-moving track matter, which of these ones will you look back on 10 years and say, I can't believe I ever used the mechanical one, right?
John:
The mechanical one, Fierce Barbaric and Broken.
John:
And which of the ones are you going to say, in hindsight, it was a terrible mistake to move all these things to be solid state or whatever, and it should have, like the car interior, you need a certain number of knobs.
John:
Yeah.
John:
if every time they do that move, your instinct is always to say, this is a mistake and you're making things worse, then you're probably not, you know, the task is to discern, to look back at your history of judging these things and see, when was I right?
John:
When was I wrong?
John:
And how can I apply that to new things that are like this that are presented for me?
John:
Will this be something that in hindsight I will look at and say is a no brainer?
John:
Like I think we all agree the floppy drive was, or will it be something that we look back on and say that was a terrible mistake, like so many things in car interiors in the 80s and 90s
John:
uh that ended up to be terrible ideas they said you know what let's let's go back to to uh the old idea because this new one turned out to be bad and that's the challenge of of figuring out technology now the headphone port i feel like because it is a port and because we have so much past experience with ports um
John:
There is something on the side to say this is something we should get rid of.
John:
There's also something on the other side because unlike all the other parts we talked about, this is so old and so common.
John:
It's way more common than the serial printer port that was expunged from Max or whatever, right?
John:
So it's difficult to judge, but...
John:
I don't know if this is going to end up being a mistake.
John:
All I can say is that their presentation of it was, I think, honest and direct.
John:
And like Casey said, they have reasons.
John:
None of those reasons justify it.
John:
In the end, I think the most important thing is that Apple thinks there's a better way to get audio out of your phones.
John:
And they may be wrong because none of us have tried their new solutions.
John:
But the public will decide in many years if Apple's things have a reputation.
John:
Even if Apple sticks to its guns, the reputation is, oh, I was getting an iPhone, but...
John:
Just, you know, I like iPhones, but just be aware that they're annoying to use with audio.
John:
That will not be a success for Apple if that's what everyone says about iPhones in five years.
John:
But in five years, if no one mentions this and the headphone part is gone from all phones, I think you have to put a notch in the win column for Apple on it.
John:
and say people are cranky there was massive inconvenience just like there was with all those transitions and we got through it right now i'm gonna give them better than 50 chance that they're gonna pull this off oh i think they they are definitely gonna pull this off because no one else is making iphones for people to buy instead like that i mean like do you think android phones android phones will drop the headphone point that's what i'm saying pull it off as in like eventually nobody shipped floppies with their pcs anymore although i shouldn't say that because i'm sure there's some pc you can buy with a floppy driver but anyway i
Marco:
I'm pretty sure you could still pay Dell like $30 to put a floppy drive in your new tower.
John:
$30?
John:
Boy, that's too much.
John:
No one's buying them anymore.
John:
They're a specialty item now.
John:
But anyway, they will succeed if this slowly fades from all products just like floppy drives did.
Marco:
I mean, it will just because they... Well, it'll at least fade from phones because they've now set the standard.
Marco:
Will it fade from MacBooks and iPads too?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think it certainly says something that the MacBook has only one other port and yet they included a headphone port.
Marco:
But that MacBook is like really old.
Marco:
They deem that important enough for that.
Marco:
No, I mean...
Marco:
I guess I'm done arguing this, but I just... I disagree with the fundamental premise that this port was doomed, period, and had to be replaced.
Marco:
I disagree with the time that it had to be replaced now.
Marco:
I don't think that's courage.
Marco:
I think that's other factors, that's other attributes, but I wouldn't call that courage.
Marco:
And I'm sad that... If it's not courage, is it caution?
John:
What word would you just... It's not caution.
John:
um it's not it's not uh timidness it's not maybe hubris well yeah but like hubris would be like maybe hubris would say we believe there's a better way like to believe that you have such a better way and actually you're mistaken you really believe you have a better way than this headphone port that has proven itself overland i think that's a reasonable word to use but hubris tends to go
John:
Hand in hand with courage and that to really believe you have this better way and to, you know, I mean, there's a fine line between courage and stupidity, I guess.
John:
And hubris is where that line is drawn, I suppose.
Marco:
I mean, the reality is, again, they're going to be fine.
Marco:
And we are going to stop.
Marco:
We're just all going to accept this as normal and stop talking about it in like a week.
Marco:
It's going to be fine.
Marco:
But I do think we've lost something here, and I don't think this was necessarily the right decision.
Marco:
I think this was a decision made that's more in Apple's interest than its customers' interest.
Marco:
It's making the product worse for Apple's interests.
Casey:
Oh, I disagree.
Casey:
So I understand that there are a lot of people that are not living the fancy Bluetooth lifestyle.
Casey:
Erin in her car does not have a Bluetooth connection.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
But at some point, we have to say enough is enough.
Casey:
This is the future.
Casey:
And they, Apple, if we believe them, if we take them at face value, they have fixed all of the common complaints about Bluetooth or they were never a problem in the first damn place.
Marco:
With a whole bunch of asterisks.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
So look at the people, look at the things everyone complains and moans about when it comes to Bluetooth.
Casey:
Oh, you have to charge it.
Casey:
Oh, now I have to worry about charging because, oh, life is so difficult and I have to worry about charging.
Casey:
Oh, well, look at you get three hours of charge on the AirPods for 15 minutes.
Casey:
Like I could go and use the restroom in more time than it takes for these things to charge and give me three hours of charge.
Casey:
How long are you spending in the restroom?
Casey:
I'm speaking facetious, but my point is... Does that include a shower?
Casey:
He dropped his phone on the toilet.
Casey:
He had to fish it out.
Casey:
Okay, well, let's say, okay, I could jump in the shower.
Casey:
I was thinking about it at work.
Casey:
The point is, you can go and talk to a friend at work in 15 minutes, and next thing you know, your AirPods are charged.
Casey:
So I don't believe... And if you find that charging is that freaking difficult, oh, come on.
Casey:
I don't see why that's a problem at all.
Casey:
And so pairing, that has been fixed with the AirPods.
Casey:
And if it's fixed with the AirPods and fixed with all these Beats headphones, you have to assume that this is going to trickle down to other devices and other manufacturers, probably through an MFI program.
Casey:
It will probably be a common thing.
Marco:
Oh, just like the battery case trickled down?
Marco:
All the fancy integration that has with the phone that other battery cases can't do?
Casey:
Yeah, but I don't view that as an Apple-to-Apples comparison at all.
Marco:
Oh, I think it's very much so.
Marco:
I think Apple is very much okay with making standards and things and extending things that its own products get special treatment in the system and get...
Marco:
get more capabilities or better capabilities than what third-party stuff can do.
Marco:
I would not at all expect Apple to share the abilities of this new W1 Bluetooth chipset that's in these things and all the various software integrations with like pairing it with the quick little window and seeking your pair progress between all your different devices.
Marco:
I would never expect that to come to anything else that is not an Apple-branded headphone.
John:
I don't know about that.
John:
I give that a reasonable chance that they'll do that just because I mean, obviously, they'll they'll charge you for it.
John:
They'll make money off it.
John:
It'll be more than just license fee because this is an Apple design chip that you'll probably have to license from them.
John:
But I don't I mean, I don't think it's likely because that tends not to be the thing.
John:
But I think it's within the realm of possibility because
John:
there are a lot of again if this if this pairing thing works we're just assuming it does but if it really is as good as they say it's kind of in apple's interest to have as many products as possible yep that all only work with their things so i'm i'm gonna wait and see on that one um it really just depends on how much money they think there is or should they even bother because like yeah there's an accessory market for it but we shouldn't bother because bluetooth fills that need but
John:
If there's a lot of interest and it doesn't cost them a lot of money to license these chips, you know, we'll see.
John:
The AirPods aren't even shipping it, so who knows what the, maybe the limitation is the new W1 chip or whatever.
John:
So it could be that W1 isn't licensed, but the W5 is.
John:
But it all depends on how successful this is and how successful the AirPods are and how successful Apple is at convincing people that they really do have a better way for you to get audio out of your phone than to plug it into the headphone port.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So they've done batteries and charging as well as you possibly can in the year of 2016.
Casey:
They've done pairing from everything we've been told and taking them at face value as well as you can in 2016.
Casey:
Importantly, because you were right in calling me out on my love of my Bluetooth headphones at work.
Casey:
To be fair, I never, ever pair those things with anything else.
Casey:
And it's a frigging nightmare if I go to do that.
Casey:
But with the AirPods, that's been fixed.
Casey:
And apparently it's easy as pie and uses iCloud, which is really scary.
Casey:
As soon as you pair with any of your devices, like freaking magic, all of your devices are paired.
Casey:
So if we believe that iCloud is magical.
Casey:
So that's been fixed.
Casey:
The switching has been fixed.
Casey:
The pairing has been fixed.
Casey:
I kid you not...
Casey:
I don't ever see latency on my really crappy $20 Bluetooth headphones as long as I'm not in Chrome.
Casey:
If I'm in Chrome, it's latency city.
Casey:
I'll be the first to tell you.
Casey:
But on Safari, on QuickTime, on Preview, on QuickLook, anything else, it's fine.
Casey:
I never get disconnected because my arm is in the way.
Casey:
I can walk like 20, 30 feet away.
Casey:
I'm still connected.
Casey:
I can still listen to music or podcasts or what have you.
Casey:
I don't see how latency is an issue.
Casey:
I don't see how any of this is an issue.
Casey:
And, okay, the one thing you can come back to and say is, well, what we had was fine.
Casey:
Okay, I guess it was fine.
Casey:
And if you want to continue to have that thing that was fine, use the freaking adapter.
Casey:
But in the end of the day, Apple wanted to make a phone that was the same size.
Casey:
That was a design constraint for better or worse.
Casey:
And I'm getting dragged over the coals in the chat because, oh, we could have just made it bigger and added space for the headphone port.
Casey:
Sure, they could have.
Casey:
But for better or worse...
Casey:
good right or bad wrong or indifferent doesn't matter the point of the matter is they wanted to keep the thing the same size and in order to do that and make the improvements they wanted they had to ditch the headphone port it says it in the spud fees but buzz feed article they had to do it and so
John:
you're going to the macbook one argument again it actually kind of doesn't say that by the way it shouldn't shouldn't have gone like they didn't have to like they could have made room they there was room in there they they could have gotten room out of it somehow they did it with all the other phones they could do it again that's like maybe they said that buzzfeed article but on stage they shied away from that because like i said there is something where the headphone port was and that something is essential if you were to cut it out with an exacto knife the phone will not function anymore
John:
but that's again true with the macbook one if you had designed it from the beginning as they did with the 6s and the 6 you can find room for it surprisingly that's not that's not the whole thing i think one of the the angles on it that they mentioned in passing that we haven't really talked about too much is the idea that it's a unitasker that that port only serve one purpose as opposed to the multitasking lightning port they can do all sorts of different things that's there's a plus and minus there and that multi-purpose means like oh but what if we want to charge at the same time it's multi-purpose and it's just one port maybe they should have three lighting ports in the bottom and then they'll solve this problem right but uh
John:
You know, there are other reasons to think that, like, you know, if you don't believe, like, that this thing was inevitably doomed.
John:
It's hard to let go of something that's been around for so long because it's so compatible and it's so ubiquitous.
John:
But really, in the grand scheme of things, holes in computers that only perform one function and that function never changes over the years.
John:
that don't have a good life like you know we're we want ports to do multiple things how at this point we have a port that like does power and runs monitors and you can run ethernet over all in the same port obviously if you just have one of those ports it's crappy but like there are so many trends moving that direction there's also minuses for wires that that i feel personally uh
John:
when i have my thing plugged in uh and there's a wire snaking from my arm so i think i do get it caught on things and yep we've all had the thing where your pods get yanked out of your ears and i am instantly infuriated by that sensation i hate it and that's why i've been looking into these wireless things like i'm not saying this justifies it but there's there is another side and everything that i've mentioned does not benefit apple except for the part where i pay them 160 bucks for the little ear pods um
John:
But there are consumer benefits on the other side of it.
John:
So at this point, I'm still willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, which is why I'm willing to even try this phone out.
John:
If I try the phone out and it turns out their wireless solution is crap and I miss my headphone port, I'll be the first to say it.
John:
But right now, I'm willing to give it a go.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Let's move on.
Casey:
Performance was the last major category they had where they talked about the A10, which is the new chip.
Casey:
It is four core.
Casey:
There are two high-performance cores, which are 40% faster than the outgoing A9, and two high-efficiency cores, which run at 20% of the power of the other two cores.
Casey:
And that's a really interesting and really clever way of trying to squeeze a little more juice or a little more runtime, I should say, out of these phones.
Casey:
And it reminds me a lot to channel neutral.
Casey:
Reminds me a lot of the North Star that was the first to shut down cylinders if you didn't need a bunch of power as you were driving on the highway, for example, and just maintaining your speed.
Casey:
So say you had this humongous V8 in your Cadillac.
Casey:
The thing would just shut down half of the V8 in order to save yourself a little gas.
Casey:
Maybe it wasn't the North Star.
Casey:
Maybe it was a different one.
Casey:
But that same idea happened all over the place and still goes on from time to time.
John:
And it doesn't go on from time to time.
John:
It is everywhere.
John:
Cylinder deactivation is like a standard feature of every car with an engine that's too big for it nowadays.
Casey:
Yep, exactly.
Casey:
But sounds like it's really good.
Casey:
The performance improvements are impressive as always.
Casey:
The GPU, apparently six core, 50% faster than what's in the A9.
Casey:
Three times what's in the A8, that's in the six models.
Casey:
And most importantly to me, apparently we've found plenty of other things to talk about this episode, but most importantly to me, they said you will get two hours more than a 6S when you're using the 7, roughly, and one hour more on a 7 Plus than you got on the 6S Plus.
Casey:
So we are actually seeing an increase in battery life, even without making the device bigger, which I am super on board with.
Casey:
I am genuinely stoked about this.
Casey:
And in fact...
Casey:
I was really debating going Plus Club this year because of that two-camera system like we were talking about earlier, and also because of the improved battery life.
Casey:
And granted, I would still get a lot more battery life if I went Plus Club with the 7.
Casey:
But the fact that I feel like I'm on the ragged edge of comfortable on battery life on my 6S Plus, and this is going to give me another two hours in theory, well, that should be great.
Casey:
I should be good to go outside of conferences.
Casey:
And then I'll use the super proprietary humpback if I need to.
Yeah.
John:
but i i am all on board i think this is all great things not terribly unexpected outside of the battery stuff but all good things all around well the battery stuff we expected too this is exactly what we talked about if they use the same case for three years in a row and the system on a chip becomes more efficient and this is before we even like this is better than you even thought because not only does the system on chip become more efficient from a new process but they have the little the low power sort of limp mode things which is a very clever design i'm not sure if other phones are doing that but
John:
I think it's mostly unprecedented in desktop CPUs where you would have non-uniform cores.
John:
Like you have these wussy cores that are just like one third of the die area, but otherwise presumably fully functional.
John:
And you use them when you need to instead of just power cycling things or disabling cores.
Marco:
Well, there's the whole there's the arm big dot little thing.
Marco:
But and I think this is just one of those implementations.
Marco:
But I don't know of any other devices that use it in the phone or computer space.
John:
Yeah, and it'll only get better as they, I'm assuming the A11 and so on and so forth, get better about like being able to switch between them faster and getting smarter about when to use them and all sorts of other stuff.
John:
So anyway, we get the benefit of same size case, bigger battery because there's slightly more room or maybe even the same size battery.
John:
Lower power system on a chip equals more battery.
John:
And I was saying like 10, 15 percent, you know, I can't do the math in my head, but two hours.
John:
That is that is, you know, if that is even remotely close to true, that is something that everybody will notice.
John:
And it is.
John:
almost exactly i mean mark are you asking for double battery life but i think oh no i was asking for four or five times more battery life that's well you know like i mean we have to you know again you're gonna be carrying around a bar so but if that two hour figure is remotely close to true i am really happy about that as someone who doesn't have battery problems with my phone because i feel like that is the substantial battery improvement we're talking about now granted again they got it by using the same size case for three years and you can probably kiss that goodbye for next year's super skinny phone but enjoy it while you can
Marco:
yeah i mean this is great news if it if it works out the way they say with real world use and it might apple apple is they have you know kind of a mixed record of like adhering to their benchmarks from you know from reality usually if you do the things that are in their benchmarks usually they're actually pretty good but the question is is more like whether real world use is well reflected by the benchmarks and
Marco:
In this case, what we've seen for most recent advances in battery life in devices, phones and laptops, the vast majority of recent advances have not really been in reducing the amount of power while you're using it heavily.
Marco:
It's mostly been in reducing power used while it's pretty much idle or doing very, very simple tasks.
Marco:
And that's what this most likely is.
Marco:
Because of that new asymmetric core design, where you have the low-power cores and the high-power cores, that's awesome.
Marco:
Because of that, that's going to be most likely a savings only in idle and low-power states.
Marco:
I bet when it's in the high-power states, it's still going to kill your battery just as much as it did before, maybe even more now.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
Here's the reason I have some question on that, because...
John:
If the wimpy cores are enough to accomplish the task, for instance, imagine there's a task that uses a lot of GPU, but you need just enough CPU that you can use the wimpy cores, you'll still get the savings when quote unquote working flat out.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like I'm imagining, say there's a game that you can play
John:
The game is like two years old and you can run the whole game just using the wimpy cores.
John:
You will see a huge savings just playing that game flat out.
John:
I don't know if we're close to that point.
John:
I don't know what the threshold is, but because we've come so far, you show that graph and everything.
John:
Those two quote unquote wimpy cores.
John:
are like faster than the iPhone 5 or whatever.
John:
Like, I don't know what the actual specs on them are, but like there is some past phone that we used to think was fast that these little wimpy cores are faster than.
John:
So I feel like this one is more like you're driving most of the time on four cylinders and only when you put your foot down do they all come on.
John:
But this is just speculation because I have no idea what the threshold is.
John:
But what it comes down to is I think there are an increasing number of tasks on your phone that...
John:
can be handled by the weak cpus like he picked like email and maybe even web browsing is like that and you just save the big guns for when you really need it as opposed to the situation we are on like macbooks where it's like look if you're just going to be compiling software for hours everything's going to be running max and you know what can you do or you're playing a game desktop games just run everything in max there's no game that you're running with like the wimpy course but on phones who knows
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it remains to be seen also, like, as a developer, can you set, like, your process affinity to one of the – like, can you say, run this thread only on the Wimpy cores?
Casey:
Damn it, I was going to ask that same question.
John:
I really doubt that.
John:
This is totally the kind of thing that Apple is going to want to have complete control over because they're going to, you know, they're going to tweak it.
John:
They're going to be like, well, the first version, we have this very simple algorithm, which isn't that great, and the second version –
John:
In the A11, we can change states like 100 times faster, and we're much smarter about doing it based on data.
John:
You've got to give them time to ramp up on this.
John:
I can't imagine them giving core affinity attributes, that type of low-level thing.
John:
It just doesn't seem like something they would do.
Marco:
yeah also like can you use all four cores at once or like do when the high power one is on does it deactivate that low power one i think you can use all four because i'm thinking of those geek bench scores and i bet like the reason you get the multi-thread boost is i think you can use all four at once yeah maybe
Marco:
i don't know we'll find out but yeah this that that is very you know just as a programmer that is very interesting to me to have to have this kind of architecture and you know even if i can't manually direct it or or hint it to do things the way i think they should be done um it will still be cool to try to target things to those low power cores you'd be like all right let me try it you know it's kind of like the people who like back before the prius had a plug-in variant when they would like try to
Marco:
get their prius to stay on only electric mode for like as long as possible and their daily driving and it's like i feel like as a developer like how how can i write this this queue or this thread or this entire app to try to stay on the low power core the entire time or as long as possible there'll be a wwdc session with some you know ios instruments demo showing you that like as we can see here in the graph this big jump that's when it goes up to the bigger core so if you can keep it down below them
Marco:
yeah exactly so yeah that that's gonna be cool i'm looking forward to this i i do i'm a little i'm kind of like wait and see skeptical on the battery claim simply because it sure does sound like they just improved idle power without really addressing like usage power but uh we'll see
Casey:
So all in all, what would you say, since I haven't heard anything about ratings, and certainly I know that John loves to give numerical ratings, what would you say about the presentation today?
Casey:
I thought it was really good.
Casey:
I can't say, off the top of my head, I can't say I was really disappointed in anything.
Casey:
I'm not in love with the synthetic bokeh, but I still think it's a move in the right direction-ish.
Casey:
I was really pleased with this, and I think they did a really great job.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, overall, pretty good event, pretty good presentation, pretty good quality overall.
Marco:
And the products they announced seemed like nothing was incredibly surprising, except maybe the replacing of the Watch 1 CPU with the Watch 2 CPU.
Marco:
That was pretty cool.
Marco:
Other than that, nothing was an amazing surprise necessarily.
Marco:
But overall, solid updates to the watch and the phone.
Marco:
I do obviously very much miss the Mac as a thing that was updated and talked about ever.
Marco:
But hopefully that will be resolved soon.
Marco:
I really hope so.
Marco:
And otherwise, though, for what was announced today, pretty solid updates.
Marco:
And I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the new phone.
Marco:
Well, getting both hands around my new phone, that's for sure.
Marco:
One won't be enough.
John:
john yeah i missed the days when i didn't know things like it was kind of disappointing that we knew almost everything here but uh i was excited by the things that i saw almost all the things they were doing uh well there was there was no surprises except pleasant ones let's put it that way because all the things that were potentially disappointing we knew about and the pleasant surprise we didn't talk about the storage tiers but like you know we knew about all that ahead of time we knew the you know
John:
basically knew the the 32 128 256 thing or whatever but the things we didn't know about were pleasant we didn't know about the the series one getting the new cpu and we didn't know about the 6s and the 6s plus uh getting rid of the 16s which is a pleasant surprise and yeah not typical of tim cook's apple and needless to say absolutely the right thing to do but 16 is ridiculous um it would be better if the current line was 64 128 256 but beggars can't be choosers this is positive progress so
John:
I mean, when I came out of the event, I was excited to try the products they showed.
John:
I mean, I'm excited to see my wife's inevitable new watch and see her play Pokemon Go on it and the GPS features.
John:
I'm excited to check out the new phones and see what the new surface is like and the grips and stuff like that.
John:
I'm excited that the new phone is faster and that the camera is better and...
John:
You know, we knew there was going to be no Macs for the most part.
John:
I still I still believe that they will be updated this year and I'll be probably more excited about that event than this thing.
John:
But overall, I was satisfied with the presentation and happy with it and thought it was fun.
John:
Done well.
John:
I even kind of like the weird musical act at the end.
Casey:
Sia is very good, actually.
Casey:
Awesome.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Well, thank you very much to our three sponsors this week, Hover, Tracker, and Betterment.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, 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-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
tech podcast so long we did it i can't believe this is so long i know so hot in this room so i uh i decided i'm about to go to portland for the last xoxo and i decided a few days ago you know in advance of ordering the new iphone you know in about 24 hours now i think
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
Oh, God, yes.
Marco:
So in advance of that, I decided, let me switch back to my plus that I had for a few days and take it on the beginning of this trip.
Marco:
And that'll kind of help me, give me one final thing like, do I want to go plus?
Marco:
Because I really want...
Marco:
the features and the battery of the plus.
Marco:
I want the, I want that camera.
Marco:
I want the big battery.
Marco:
And when I'm actually using the plus to do things, I do love having that big screen, uh, that I love having the extra screen space.
Marco:
I love seeing like Instagram photos bigger.
Marco:
I love seeing any photos bigger, seeing my own photos and, you know, taking camera photos and processing and everything, just extra space and web pages, et cetera.
Marco:
So I thought, all right, let me move back to the plus for a few days as one final sanity check to see if I can really like, you know, live with it as, as a size.
Um,
Marco:
My Plus is 64 gigs.
Marco:
My 6S that I've been living on is 128.
Marco:
And I use iCloud Photo Library.
Marco:
Can you see where this is going?
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
So, to transfer your current backup from a 128 gig device to a 64 gig device, when you're using iCloud Photo Library...
Marco:
so problem number one i tried i had forgotten about the size difference try it and of course it says oh sorry we can't restore this back up to this phone because there's not enough space okay so i go i go to my to my success okay how do i how do i clear space from this device
Marco:
Now, I've heard over the years that Apple's slowly getting better at this process.
Marco:
There's still some way to go, I would say.
Marco:
So, problem number one.
Marco:
When you're using iCloud Photo Library, it smartly manages your storage.
Marco:
Which means that unless the phone is incredibly low on space, it never deletes anything.
Marco:
However, it also doesn't give you a way to delete anything without actually deleting it from your iCloud Photo Library.
Marco:
It's like deleting it everywhere.
Marco:
You can't... So...
Marco:
Normally, all the pictures and video that you take on the phone, even after they get uploaded to iCloud Photo Library, as far as I can tell, they don't leave the phone.
Marco:
They don't get deleted off the phone even when it's safe to.
Marco:
The old way to do this was to import your photos into a photo app on your computer and then use the photo app or use image capture to open up the phone as if it were a camera and delete all the photos off the phone that way.
Marco:
Because there's nowhere in the system settings on the phone anywhere where you can delete photos out of your photo library.
Marco:
That's just not a thing.
Marco:
So as far as I can tell, I looked all over the place and couldn't find any.
Marco:
And in retrospect, that's probably a good thing that isn't a thing because people would do it accidentally.
Marco:
Anyway, but even with iCloud photo library, you can't say, all right, there's no button that says, please free up as much space as you safely can.
Marco:
Anything that's in iCloud, please delete it off my phone right now.
Marco:
There's no button to do that anywhere.
Marco:
so i like remove all the music i remove all the podcasts i'm not listening to i remove some big games i never play because who cares i remove garage band all these things eventually the only thing i can do is i have to get rid of this giant block of photos because everything else is not making enough space
Marco:
To do this, I had to disable iCloud Photo Library, which is kind of a scary thing to do.
Marco:
Here I am on my computer.
Marco:
I have it in Photos app right there.
Marco:
So I know I'm not losing anything.
Marco:
And that's all backed up, even if iCloud gets all crazy.
Marco:
I have a Mac backup through Backblaze, through Time Machine, through SuperDuper.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So I know I'm safe.
Marco:
Still a crazy thing to do from your phone, like to disable that.
Marco:
And then, because image capture won't let you delete photos off the phone if iCloud Photo Library is enabled.
Marco:
So the thing I had to do, and I'm not sure if I could do anything better, what I had to do was disable iCloud Photo Library on the phone
Marco:
open up image capture on my mac have it select all and delete all like 16 000 or whatever it was something like that photos that were on the phone many of which i didn't even shoot on the phone were just copied there for photo library purposes uh like you know through sync delete everything that way then back that up restore that to the to the 64 gig phone and then re-enable icloud photo library on the
John:
on the phone then.
John:
Like, all this was to avoid iCloud backup, I guess.
John:
Because that's the other alternative, obviously, if you don't have the sizes.
John:
You were trying to do like an iTunes backup and transfer.
John:
What if you just said, I'm just going to use iCloud backup for everything?
John:
I suppose that probably... Yeah, because...
Marco:
that i assume that would work it would but it has other pain is that you're waiting for the apps to download and waiting for you to come back and then i and then i get none of my keychain items so i have to re-enter all my passwords everywhere and that sucks that's true like that like i like i'd rather have a brief severe sucking of something than have like then have like going three days of annoyance as i have to re-enter all the passwords into everything
Marco:
Anyway, yeah, so this phone is ridiculous.
Marco:
This is so big, but I am kind of living with it right now, and I really want that good camera setup.
Casey:
And I'm sorry, you said that's a 6 Plus or 6S Plus?
Marco:
It's a 6 Plus, which is interesting.
Marco:
You know, going back to, you know, I mean, 3D Touch, I don't miss because I hardly ever use it for anything.
Marco:
I occasionally will use it for cursor movement within a text block, but usually nothing else.
Marco:
I do miss the faster Touch ID sensor quite a bit.
Marco:
That is a big thing I notice.
Marco:
And the 6 Plus, before the 6S Plus, also was... It was the first Plus phone, and it kind of didn't have enough RAM, and the GPU was kind of not powerful enough.
Marco:
So, like, there's, like, animations a little bit sluggish sometimes, and, like, just, like, certain things are, like, a little bit ooh, you know?
Marco:
But for the most part, it's fine.
Marco:
I kind of...
Marco:
It kind of makes me think like, wow, buying a new phone every year is kind of wasteful because this two-year-old one is fine for the most part.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
It's not great.
Marco:
It's not fast by my 6S standards, but it's good enough for most of what I'm doing with it.
Marco:
Touch ID is slower and that sucks, but I'm living with it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Yeah, I think even though in so many ways it is worse, in so many ways it's harder to hold, I still don't like the way Springboard rotates.
Marco:
I still hate the way that apps like Mail and Messages get the half iPad view in landscape mode.
Marco:
And as a result of hating the way it does landscape in every possible way, I usually have to keep the plus phone in rotation lock mode, which is great until I want to look at a photo.
Marco:
So it's a little bit annoying in those ways.
Marco:
but I really do love having the additional screen space.
Marco:
I love typing on it.
Marco:
I'm way more accurate with the text input on it, just because it's a bigger keyboard, fits my thumbs better, I guess.
Marco:
So I guess I'm going to go plus, but I'll decide again in 24 hours when we have to order them.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Well, it's a little over because it's 3 in the morning.
Marco:
I'll be in Pacific time, though.
Marco:
I'll be at XOXO.
Marco:
So I'll be exhausted, but I'll be awake.
Marco:
You jerk.
Yeah.