$850 Fidget Cube
All right, fine.
Well, you just go ahead and keep being smug.
I'm not being smug.
I take no pleasure in being right all the time, Casey.
Oh, God.
Please tell me you could hear my eyes rolling.
We got a few pieces of feedback about some phrasing.
Yeah, this is when we were talking.
What was the topic we were talking about?
We'll get to it later in the fall.
But in fact, the assistive touch thing anyway.
And I kept referring to I was trying to refer to the region on the map that I'm visualizing in my head that includes not just China.
I didn't want to always say China because it's like, yeah, it's big and it takes up a lot of room in that region.
But it's not the only country there.
It also encompasses all the other countries that are sort of around China.
And I kept saying the Far East region.
which is apparently a very Eurocentric and not favored and slightly insulting term because it's just, you know, deciding like east of what?
East of like where people who get to name things are or whatever.
So anyway, Far East will be excised from my vocabulary to the best of my abilities.
And we'll go with many suggestions.
People said East Asia.
Which, I mean, I guess Asia's the landmass, and it's not the eastern part of it.
You can just say Asia, but I'm going to try not to say Far East.
And if I slip up, just tell me again, live, in real time, and Marco will edit it out, and I'll correct myself on the air.
But there you go.
Fair enough.
We need to talk about our friendly wager.
There's some confusion in the ranks, and I am also confused.
Well, it's not time for any money to change hands.
We'll just start by saying that.
Yes, I would concur.
Luke Brewster called this to our attention earlier today in the 10.1 beta, which was released as we record just a few hours ago.
In accessibility, in the reduced motion section, there is now autoplay message effects, which to John's credit, at first glance, appears to be a sub setting, which I told him would never happen with regard to messages.
that was so long ago that was like that was practically a week ago so you know you don't have to be so smug john although i would be if i were you i'm just saying i get myself until like ios 11 that's called adding padding oh god uh autoplay message effects is its own setting however um some have said and i don't have a link handy but we'll put in the show notes
Some have said that it's not quite so simple and that it doesn't appear to give you any sort of lasers.
It just messes with some of the simpler ones, like Whisper, maybe.
I haven't tried this.
I'm not on the beta.
Yeah.
i don't i don't have this installed i do but for reports from people who haven't installed and marco will give a report as well the reports i've heard so far is that it does nothing that the setting appears and the setting only appears when you turn reduce motion on so if reduce motion is off you don't even see the setting only when reduce motion is on do you get the second setting and then no matter what you put that second setting at it appears to do nothing do you have uh experiments that counter uh contradict this marco
that has been my experience exactly where i i just installed it you know an hour ago just trying to get it done before the show so i could try it out and uh we we didn't try all the effects uh but but i did try the full screen lasers and stuff and they they will say sent with lasers but they don't allow you to send them like you can't 3d push the the up arrow thing it doesn't do anything uh which i believe is the same as whenever you have any reduced motion turned on right mm-hmm
and yes and and i had tiff send me lasers and as far and you know it still says sent with lasers but it does not do any of the animation um as far as i could tell it really appears to do nothing so that thing is like not not hooked up an interface builder as they say basically somebody forgot to like if def it out for the release like they were working on it and didn't finish it in time and somebody just forgot to comment it out basically uh so anyway and this is this is not one of the public facing betas by the way i think if you are i'm not sure but uh if you're on the public beta would you get this one or no
there is no public beta yet for this version uh i i think panzerino said it was going to come out on friday uh but i don't know i don't know if that's for sure i wonder if that will be different but anyway um that's motion on the front of the one dollar wager from the last episode uh but no no decision yet because obviously a this is not a shipping version of the operating system so it doesn't really matter what's in it and b what's in it is a switch that does nothing
And so on the topic on this broader topic, we got a lot of feedback about it, as you would imagine, based on the tail end of the last show.
I was not tallying the feedback, but I wasn't either.
But I mean, impression wise, I think we will all agree that there were most of the feedback we heard.
was from people who agreed with me.
That doesn't mean anything.
Not so fast.
It's a self-selecting group, but you don't agree with that?
I would say most.
Like, it's more than 50%.
That's all I'm saying.
I agree with you with caveats.
I mean, certainly more than 50% of the words agreed with you.
LAUGHTER
I agree with you by and large.
I will say that early on for the first couple of days, it seemed like it was pretty darn close.
You were probably in the lead, but it was close.
And then after that initial wave of people who listen in the first like 48 hours, then you just ran away with it.
You're also not seeing the feedback that's sent directly to me.
well why would people tell you that you're right that's like a trump claim like well i'm hearing from lots of people yeah they email just me because my email address is on the web or they at mention just mean don't mention the show and i got a lot of that i also don't see the people who are just mentioning you or emailing you so there is that still that dark matter but uh the ratios for the people who emailed just me seemed about the same as the public one you know
Anyway, this is not a democracy.
The only role, I think, that the feedback plays, aside from curiosity and audience participation, is the only data points we have to measure the idea that there could perhaps, for example...
be people out there who use reduced motion for a reason that casey decides is legitimate and also want to send lasers right and we had several people like that right in to say i am that person i need to reduce motion for what i believe is a legitimate reason but i want to send lasers and the question might have been maybe there's nobody like that or maybe you know whatever so
people chimed in with that uh opinion to at least give a few data points to those people out there and again that doesn't mean anything about whether apple should add another option and by the way i suggest that they add this option to messages because messages has settings too or if it doesn't it can have them right because if you try to add the settings in accessibility itself what are you going to do add a number of like a little options for every single application that wants to have to be like there's a place for those settings and it's in messages now i feel like apple gets kind of a pass if they're going to put it in
The general section of the accessibility section, because messages is like, well, is that really an app or is it part of the OS or whatever?
But this is not a scalable solution to UI.
And my original suggestion was put the setting in messages, because if you make an application and it has behaviors or whatever that you think you should hide if reduced motion is on.
but some of them are borderline make the default to hide them because that's a safe default but if you feel like you're taking away too much or that there may be a substantial portion of your audience that wants to modify that behavior that's the perfect opportunity to add a setting to your settings to your settings for your application that when reduce motions on i also want to xyz be able to use the rocket launcher or whatever so we'll see how this turns out
Yeah, it was interesting reading the feedback because there were a couple of people that seemed like they genuinely had an accessibility issue.
And some of them weighed in my favor, some in yours.
The thing that struck me so funny was so many people who were just passionately opposed to the Zoom animation, oftentimes with no ailment associated.
They just freaking hate it and then somehow think that it's okay for...
For that to be off, but balloons or lasers to be on, like they're entitled to have the exact perfect thing.
It's not about entitled.
Here's the problem with this whole angle, which no one really said in the feedback, and I was hoping someone would bring it up, but they didn't.
The problem with your stance is that it hinges on...
someone you perhaps in this case being the decider about what is and isn't a quote-unquote legitimate use of of accessibility feature once like some things you think are clear-cut you're like oh well there's legitimate there's illegitimate you see that you need it or you don't need it but once you have anointed yourself the official authority on what is and isn't what you consider to be a air quotes legitimate
accessibility issue yes you are bidding you you're you're bidding people and it's like there is a gray area in the middle you can you can maybe we can all agree on the endpoints but there is a gray area right so i think that's just not a tenable standpoint i obviously think that who cares what that spectrum is if people want to use the feature they want to use the feature and
totally removing a major feature of iowa 10 is a bad idea but anyway listen to that rant you can hear all this stuff again uh the few points that we did that i didn't really hammer on that much but that a lot of people said in the feedback is a lot of people are very mad that they can't send the effects right if you have so fine reduced motion is on for you but you can't even send them to your friends like it's a feature is totally gone in case people aren't clear about this you can't send somebody lasers forget about whether you can see them like say you have reduced motion on because you can't have motion on your screen
not being able to send them feels punitive, right?
Because there's no legit reason for that, right?
And, you know, and whatever, like, that's the first version of the operating system.
It was a .0, .1, or whatever.
They could change that, but that's why I feel like, you know, it can't stand.
And the other thing is about, you can't use small text.
I mean, that's not a motion thing at all.
So there are certain things that...
you can make arguments against regardless of this debate we're having about whether you need this extra setting but anyway that's a brief rehash of last thing with uh with uh last episode with hopefully less yelling but either way i think at this point i think at this point we're all just sitting back and waiting um and i don't feel particularly compelled by the feedback that
that the world is on my side or anything like that.
Because like I said, it's a self-selecting group.
The people who are going to write in are going to be the people who are like all worked up like I was.
Right.
So it's not a representative sample of anything.
And I'm assuming most of the people listen to our show are nerds and nerds are the ones who like to have these features and so on and so forth.
So I probably agree with you, Casey, that a lot of the people really are like, look, there's, you know, I want settings for everything and so on and so forth.
And I understand how that's not going to work.
But in this specific case, I think this passes muster as a case where Apple will actually add a switch.
And I'm hoping these little hints at a potential switch that might do something someday.
mean that i'm right and by the way final bit on this i did file a radar on it i filed an enhancement request because this is not a bug there's nothing worse than people who file bug requests and they list it as like severe bug or this is not a bug you're asking for an additional feature that doesn't exist it's an enhancement request is it there's a choice for it right there anyway i filed an enhancement request asking for the specific functionality it was closed as dupe
so i did i feel like i have done my official you know good platform citizen duty uh and i have done the thing and now i just wait can we get like i filed stickers made like the i voted yeah i should it's for radar people it should anything to encourage people to do it because obviously it's not a it's a thankless process for most of the time
is uh is there some way that you could send me that radar number so i can file a radar that says ignore john's ridiculous radar about how he wants to have his cake and eat it too you can do that go ahead if anyone wants to file a radar it's a it's you can anyone could file a radar there's a feedback form on apple site somewhere but developer accounts like you can get whatever you need whatever like free developer account without giving apple any money or anything i think if you just have an apple id you can get to the point where you can file a radar
As long as that soup is just right, John.
Not too hot, not too cold, not too motiony, not too little motion, just right.
All right, so a lot of people in East Asia have written in to tell us about whether or not the assistive touch thing...
versus the physical home button is real.
To recap, we had said that we had heard or read some reports that people in East Asia use the assistive touch feature, even if they are fully able-bodied, because of various different reasons.
But the most common one was not wanting to damage a home button that is considered to be fragile, whether or not that's actually true.
We had a lot of people write in
And I would say the overwhelming majority of people that live in East Asia or have spent significant time in East Asia have written in to say, yes, this is a thing.
And generally speaking, it's either about keeping something very expensive in good tip top shape or because there is a phobia of breaking your home button in the same way that Americans seem to be convinced that force quitting apps is helpful.
Not just overwhelming majority, I would say.
I think we didn't get a single piece of feedback that contradicted what we said.
The only thing that varied were the percentages.
Okay, that's fair.
Some people said, like, it's 90%, I see it all the time, or it's like 20%, but nobody said, hey, those articles you read were totally not representative, not a single person.
So I'm going to, you know, put a confirmed stamp on this one and say, according to the people who purport to live there, who send email and tweets to our podcast,
that article is it's a real thing yeah and there were some really good reasons for it i mean you know as you mentioned casey like a lot of a lot of times it's because you know these devices these are expensive devices and depending on where you live it could be relatively more or less expensive compared to like you know typical life expenses there and so it really is a thing where people want to like protect this thing that they've heard wears out or that they had an iphone before and it did wear out and they had to like
get an expensive service, because not everyone can just walk into an Apple store everywhere they are and get a replacement for free.
A lot of times, there's more involved processes.
A lot of these places, there are no Apple stores nearby, and you have to mail it somewhere, and that might be expensive and very time-consuming.
There were lots of good reasons why, basically, for a lot of people, getting an iPhone with a failed part serviced is a big ordeal or expense or both.
And so...
There were a number of iPhones, I would say at least the 4 and 4S and maybe even the 5, where the home buttons did wear out for a lot of people.
It was a widespread problem.
And so there is basis for this.
There is a very good reason why people have this.
What I thought was very interesting about this feedback also is that...
Many people said that turning on assistive touch is like the routine thing for the phone salespeople to do as they set up your phone with you before you even go home with it.
So you're walking out of the cell phone store with it already enabled because the person there either did it for you and didn't even mention it or explain to you why you should always use this thing and then turn it on for you.
Yeah, I thought that was fascinating.
And for the people who are sighted those reasons, by the way, we had variations in the feedback.
I think we had some objections to the idea that it was about resale value, that it wasn't as mercenary as that, that it's just like they don't want a broken thing.
And like Marco said, they don't want a broken thing because it's a pain for them to get it fixed.
Either it's expensive or...
you know it's just more of a pain right so it wasn't like people like i'm never going to sell my phone but i still do this it's really really common now to to most of these people like this is another example of humans being bad at risk assessment and and good at pattern matching gone awry a little bit because if you're never going to resell your phone and if you're never going to touch the home button it doesn't matter if it's broken
You know what I mean?
Like, logically speaking, if you're never going to use the home button and you're never going to give it to anybody who uses the home button, then why are you worried about wearing out the home button?
Because no one's ever going to touch the home button.
Use it until it breaks and then use assistive touch.
And the reason I suggest this for the most part is because I think having assistive touch all the time is...
a little bit of a burden that's my that's what i would think about you know because you have this thing that's on the screen and you're always moving it around to get out of the way because it's always on top now to counter that many people wrote in to say actually assisted touch is awesome it's an advantage it's not it's not a burden that i have to move it out of the way or rather that burden is counteracted by the abilities that i have with the touch that i don't have without it i had never even heard of these things but apparently people
love the idea that they can sort of uh use features that would be harder to access if they didn't have assisted touch because this touch is always on the top and you can do all sorts of stuff from it that you sometimes that you can't do at all one person was saying that you can turn off the shutter sound for the the camera that apparently you can't do at all without this feature but just having quick access to the functions that are revealed under it um makes it worth having on the screen all the time
Well, apparently it's a lot faster once you get good at it.
People were saying just having it right where your thumb is rather than having to reach.
And I know people are starting to roll their eyes, but I'm being serious.
Rather than having to reach down to the bottom of the phone to hit the home button, having that little white orb just hanging out right there is...
In many cases, faster.
And I'm just, as we're recording, looking at the assistive touch setup.
So it's general accessibility.
Or if you're John Syracuse, just random customizations you'd like to make assistive touch.
And then you can turn it on.
You can customize the things that are there.
So the defaults on my phone are notification center.
device, whatever that means, control center, home, and Siri.
But you can add or remove the number of icons.
I presume I can, yeah, type an icon to change.
And there's all sorts of different things you can do, including take a screenshot, for example.
So it is pretty cool what's available.
I still find this to be an annoyance for me because I'm lucky enough to be able-bodied and not have to have it.
But I can see why someone who is perhaps used to it or just assumes like this is the way it's supposed to be.
I can see how it would be kind of convenient and neat to have it around.
Orientation lock is the one that kind of turned my head.
I'm like, yeah, I wish I missed the orientation lock on the iPads, you know, and like having orientation, even though it's just in control center and, you know, it's not that far away.
But, you know, some apps have to do the double flick to get it up.
And anyway, yeah.
if it was always available like if you if you get what i'm saying is that if you get used to having it there if it's like if it's the cultural thing to do because that's what this is this is not a technical thing and this is not not even a preference thing one at the point where where the person you buy your phone from is setting up for you that it's a cultural thing at that point there's no longer anything to do with personal preference let alone accessibility so fine it's a cultural thing to have this thing on um
But hopefully there are some advantages, and there are.
It's breeding a set of users who are good at flicking that little puck around the screen and who each person customizes it to do the features that they want to have quickly accessible.
The cost is that they're flicking this little thing around the screen that's on top.
Now, I would say to the people who care, because maybe you don't.
Maybe you're happy, like, this is the way we do it all here, and this is just how you use a phone.
I don't care what you say about it.
That's fine.
But I would say try it without assistive touch.
Uh, use the home button until it breaks.
Once it breaks, go back to assistive touch.
Um, if you're not reselling your phone, I feel like that may give you a glimpse at how all I can speak over is the U S but how I think most people in the U S are using iOS.
Uh, and I guess the US side of it is maybe try assistive touch.
See what everyone else is doing, smushing that little puck around the screen to get it out of the way of the stuff they're trying to read and see if you think it's an advantage.
Maybe you get into a habit of leaving it right near your thumb of height, you know, whatever grip you have on your phone.
Uh, that could be a good thing.
But, uh, it's hard for me to get away from the notion that people are badly, badly misassessing the risk of breaking home buttons on the current iPhones, even on the four, I would say.
Uh,
universally using assistive touch for fear of home button breakage is a terrible decision rationality wise but if you set that aside and say whatever let's just pretend they're doing this you know there there can be advantages and uh
i think it's something that apple will have to i mean maybe they already are that's why we talked about last time maybe they're looking at this and that's why they made the home button that doesn't move um but that apple will have to think about if they're ever going towards this mythical home button that we've discussed where like the whole iphone is screen and you just put your finger somewhere on the screen for touch id and the home button is on the screen like the fully screen iphone i'll be maybe that's not gonna be next year's maybe next year is just gonna bring in the margins on the phone right
But everyone has been talking about it for years and years.
What if it was all just screen and the home button was a screen?
And remember in the early days of the iPhone, it was basically religion amongst the Apple nerds.
Like, no, don't you understand the genius of the one physical button?
And it's true, that was genius, but things evolved.
Yeah, we also said that that was the one best screen size that we would always use.
Well, speak for yourself.
I'm saying the Apple nerds are all wrong.
It's obvious I don't include myself in that group.
Yeah.
uh but yeah like things had their time in place right that things evolve i think a good example of that is even apple had to eventually concede to the notion of right click like they don't put two buttons on their mice but you can right click on them right so things do evolve and it's best not to be stubborn like apple is by not putting a legit right click button on their mice and making you lift your other finger which is annoying
anyway um things do evolve and it could be that the phones eventually evolve to the point where they're all screen and if they do evolve to the point where they're all screen guess what entire section of the globe has been practicing for years and years using a phone entirely touching the screen without touching the home button yeah and so maybe they can learn something from the use of assisted touch over there to influence how not to screw this up when they finally take away the home button entirely and marco goes ballistic
i'll be fine i mean the current the one of the seven already is mediocre so it's fine they're easing you into it they're small degrees of anger yeah same thing you know with the headphone jack it's like yeah okay now like here's what the here's what they're gonna do they're gonna start leaking to the wall street journal and bloomberg in february that the next iphone is not gonna have a home button at all and it'll be all screen and then we'll all get mad about it over the summer and then by the time the fall comes around everyone will be like dud has no home button that's old news
i think you've got a while to go on that because i i think my my based on nothing my impression is that the we're not there yet for the touch id like to go to go through the screen yeah yeah there was a patent about it a few years back but that's that's a whole different thing from being able to ship a billion of them especially since especially since next year's iphone is oled right so i think next year is all about oled and the screen and getting everything tucked in there i think
They can't do OLED at the same time as they figure out some magical technology to bury Touch ID under it.
So I'm going to guess based on nothing next year is OLED, but Touch ID will not be on the screen.
Yeah, I mean, and in all fairness, like pretty much every other manufacturer has figured out how to put touch sensors on the back of the phone.
And I always assume that would be bad and weird.
But from people who actually use them, they seem to be OK with it.
So that could be another solution.
The whole back of the phone is supposed to be a camera, not a touch sensor.
Right now, the whole back of the phone is a fingerprint.
What do you call it?
Like the things at the police station where they take your fingerprints.
Exactly.
That's why it's perfect.
If it's already going to be covered in fingerprints, might as well use it for Dutch ID.
All right, but you won't even need your finger there.
They'll unlock automatically just from your leftover finger grease.
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Oh.
Moving on, Scott O'Reilly, who is creator of The Dash, prior sponsor of the show, he made a discovery a few days back.
He was, I guess, listening to regular headphones with the lightning-to-headphone adapter and had paused his headphones, or paused, I should say, paused the phone and whatever it was playing.
He came back after five minutes, and he couldn't use the little bulbous, dongle-y thing on his headphones in order to restart audio.
So he dug into this a little bit and eventually made a truly wonderful demonstration video, which we'll link in the show notes, where he left a recording for some total of like six or seven minutes, but basically played a little bit, I believe, of our show, paused it by way of the headphones, and then let it sit for five minutes, came back.
And sure enough, when he tried via the headphones to unpause it, it didn't work.
And so this was quite the brouhaha because when a new phone comes out, that's what everyone goes looking for.
And somewhere, although I don't have a link handy at the moment and we'll put something in the show notes, we'll find it later.
Apparently Apple has said to someone some way, somehow that, yeah, this is a bug.
We're going to fix it.
Yeah, and ATP Tipster said earlier in the chat, for whatever it's worth, that we should probably expect a 10.02 update roughly in a week or two.
I think he said next week.
That will fix that bug along with the microphone cutting out bug that has hit both me and Tiff during phone calls and a bunch of other little bugs.
So hopefully this will be fixed quickly.
it's good to get that feedback too because especially with the lighting headphones where we're like we don't know what the rules are of this new light right this headphone portless future like is this like is this to say people like is this to say battery or is this a feature that's supposed to be there but i was like it was so nice to hear very quickly from apple sources through whatever means they have like no it's just it's not supposed to work that way they'll fix it hopefully they will actually fix it because if this ends up being like oh we'll try to fix it again
every point release and it keeps being wonky that's going to be bad um but anyway it's not they're not supposed to work like this it's not a a feature that's like well now that you're gonna have the headphone port i'm sorry you pause too long and it's gone i love the idea of atp tipster as like a pr outlet for apple wow
And to be fair, ATP Tipster just provided us a link to 9to5Mac, where the headline is, Apple says a fix is coming for lightning headphones bug that causes playback controls to stop working.
Apparently, they made the statement originally, though, to Business Insider.
For some reason.
Yes, as much as it pains me, I'll put that link in the show notes.
Isn't there any other site they talked to?
Did they talk to iMore or Dalrymple?
Anybody else?
I don't think so.
Everyone else reported on the Business Insider article.
I hate when that happens.
That's the worst.
All right, moving on.
But that was a very interesting find by Scott O'Reilly.
And I was really pleased to see that demo video.
And it wasn't sensational.
It wasn't look at me talking for 20 minutes about how awful this is.
It was just very plain as day.
I'm going to show you what happens.
Make of it what you will.
So well done, Scott O'Reilly.
It was failure to communicate in tweets, though, because that was the problem.
I remember he originally tweeted about it.
People were like, I tried to do it, and that doesn't happen for me.
It was reading comprehension and difficulty of fitting a thought into 140 characters or whatever it is with the new limit rules.
because it was like it doesn't happen to me and like wait are you playing the song and then it cuts out after five minutes or are you like people didn't understand what was going on and a video was just the most straightforward way to say this is what i'm doing look here it is and then then everyone finally understood what he was talking about and then everyone could see that this is a real thing that happens
Yeah, I didn't understand either.
And I thought he meant with any sort of headphones.
I tried it with my lightning ones and I was like, oh, this works great.
What are you talking about?
And then it turns out it was the adapter that was the problem.
So fair enough.
Speaking of, this isn't in the show notes here, but we should probably talk about it.
Apparently the teardown, a teardown has been done and there is a digital analog converter in the lightning to 3.5 millimeter headphone adapter.
Yep, it's basically exactly what we speculated last time, which was, yes, there's probably a little tiny DAC amp in the headphone adapter because that's just easier and they're really cheap.
And it's probably at the lightning end of the cable.
And sure enough, the teardown verifies all that is exactly the case.
Nothing really exciting here.
You're still confused about this.
The last show I was talking specifically about the lightning earphones.
Obviously it's in the lightning end on the adapter, but just the plain old earphones that don't have an adapter, the ones that come in the box.
That's the strangely funny part is the promise of digital audio is that the digital signal will get a couple of millimeters out of your phone before it gets converted.
Obviously it's going to get converted by the adapter, but even the headphones it looks like, which makes sense because they're going to use the same little lightning connector end,
the headphones the audio turns analog as soon as it hits the adapter and then it's just plain old dirty analog signals going over those wires to your ear pods which apparently don't have any little dax in them although looking at the size of these chips it seems like they could have fit in the ear pods if they wanted to but then why get two when you can just have one why improve the quality over the wire to those terrible little ear pods
Yeah, I know.
It doesn't make a difference.
It was just... Although, from what I understand, I've read conflicting reviews on this from people who have tested out the new AirPods.
But most... I read a couple of reviews that said they sound exactly like just a wireless version of the wired ones that we've had for years, which would be pretty disappointing because the wired ones sound terrible.
But most of the reviews have said the sound notice will be better.
So I am actually now curious about them.
I do...
i i have my doubts on whether they will fit me uh at all whether i'll be able to wear them comfortably but some people have said that they could never comfortably wear the other ones but these are now comfortable to them so i'm interested yeah i've read i've read that as well too and i don't i don't understand that because every picture like they look the same is there something is there a scale thing on the picture is a perspective thing
well part of it could be like if if the weight of the wire is pulling on if that yeah like that could affect how how it fits for you um in practice but i don't know i i think it's unlikely i will end up liking them and if if i hate them i'll just give them to tiff but uh because she wears those earpods sometimes so um that's fine i should probably test all the police headphones that exist in the world anyway for my big headphone review
But, yeah, basically, I'm curious about them.
Everyone says they work really well.
I'm pretty happy with my Bluetooth headphones, my little Sennheiser Bluetooth things.
But, you know, if force comes to force, I guess I'll get something to review.
My one reservation on AirPods, which I think every review has pointed out so far, and many people on Twitter have pointed out as well who are speculating about it,
I do think that it will be annoying to not have any kind of meaningful remote control ability on them except either Siri or PlayPause.
Like to not have an easy volume control.
Or your watch.
But that's still not as fast as reaching for the clicker and hitting a button.
And yeah, not my watch.
No, that's the bed you made yourself.
Even with the Apple Watch.
By the way, on my watch, telling the time 100 times a day is way faster than telling the time on your Apple Watch.
It also doesn't need to be charged ever.
But anyway, that's the bed you make, Casey.
You just need to buy a winder for it.
It wasn't for the ones I was wearing.
Yeah, that's the thing.
That's the best part is that that's really a thing.
You can get your watch case with an automatic winder.
It's totally optional.
It's totally barbaric.
You can also hire a man named Jeeves to wind them for you.
That sounds amazing.
Can you ask him stuff too?
Anantech, or Nantech, or however you pronounce this, reports on a Chipworks report that says there's three audio amps in the phone.
And so they say, this is a non-tech and in tech, however you pronounce it, one interesting aspect of the Chipworks report is that they unexpectedly found a third audio amplifier.
Chipworks was expecting to find two, one for each of the speakers, but came up with a third.
The firm believes that the third amp may be for headphones, which in turn would mean that Apple significantly revised the Lightning port specification for the iPhone 7.
Previously, Lightning has only carried digital audio, which doesn't require an amp in the phone itself.
So now this was written before this teardown that we were just speaking of.
So why the third amp then?
obviously it's because it's easier to put that in there and then you can make a go no go on the headphone port removal at any time that's my guess like there's three there's three in them and there's three in the success right or there would be you know there would be one for the headphone not three because there's only one speaker but anyway you know what i mean like
it's there for the headphone jack that's not there that's totally a thing i mean do you remember what was it i think it was like a an ipod touch or something that if you took it apart you saw there was like a hole for where the thing was supposed to be this is just part of hardware manufacturing you cover your bets those those little chips cost nothing if they have the space for it they're going to put it there so then they have the option once they finalize the spec and all the electrical you know blah blah that's my guess unless they were just totally wrong and misidentified a chip unless it's used for some other purpose someone in apple hardware can tell us but
It's totally plausible to me that that's just a thing that they put there that they didn't happen to use.
I mean, it's also possible the second one could be used for the second speaker.
They might not be running one amp to drive two speakers.
Maybe they have one in each of them for various electrical convenience reasons or better cable routing or less power.
That's what I said, but there's three of them, though.
Right.
Well, one for each speaker and one for, oh, yeah, I guess.
Yeah, math is hard.
Well, it could be for the microphone.
I mean, you know, these things are so cheap.
And like anytime you're running analog audio traces on a circuit board in a digital device full of various, you know, interference sources, you have to be pretty careful where you can run those without picking up noise and other problems on the analog signals.
And because these little DACA amp chips are so tiny and so dirt cheap, you can basically put them wherever you feel like, wherever it's convenient for the rest of your needs.
So if it's most convenient to have another one for the microphone and not use the same one that is used by the bottom speaker, then they can do that.
It's really no big deal.
These chips are tiny and cost nothing.
Anyway, if the goal was to figure out whether the adapters use a DAC, the best way to do it was to open up the DACs, and that's what people did.
Although, people have opened them up and melted off all the plastic and seen the little number on the chips.
But because Apple uses so many custom things and everything, I don't know if anyone has tracked that number down and said definitively that this is a DAC amp thing, but that's what everyone believes it to be, and it totally makes sense.
So I would consider this matter settled until somebody says, wait, wait, wait, that chip actually isn't doing what you think it is.
All right.
So, John, you seem to be claiming by way of the show notes and links to Twitter that you are semi clairvoyant.
Would you like to talk about this?
No, I was just thinking about, like, I was thinking about the Jet Black phone because, you know, I'm still in the deciding mode of whether I'm going to get Jet Black or not and whether I'm going to use it without a case.
And anyway, like I said, I got to see it in person and so on and so forth.
But we're at the phase now where people have their Jet Black iPhones and are posting pictures of their various scratches or in the case of Christina Warren, their gigantic dents.
and saying this is what a jet black iphone is going to look like either fingerprint wise or the scratches or whatever and i have to decide you know whether that's worth it to me and so on and so forth and it made me think again about a topic that i i have visited in past podcasts and i tried to do some research so i was like isn't there an episode where i talked about this and in doing my research i found out there's like 900 episodes where i talked about this and
i talk about all the time for like cumulatively hours so uh you know it's good that i don't remember my past that well but anyway because i did all the research i'm not going to bore you all with it now we'll put a bunch of uh links in the show notes to me talking about the issue of electronics and how they wear as you use them like how when as they get older do they look crappier and you like them less or do they sort of develop a patina or like
become familiar and like you you love them more as they age and they become sort of worn in you know that that dichotomy has been discussed in many by many people on the web and in fact these early episodes of hypercritical where i talk about this i'm just citing a blog post that themselves comes from years earlier um and i think the last time it came up in uh in our little circle in a big way was with the iphone 5 with the original black back and the iphone 5 where the black would scratch off and you'd see the aluminum color and everything
That was the jet black of the day where I was complaining about the scratches.
And at that time, this was 2012, I tweeted that an iPhone with three scratches may look awful, but best case, an iPhone with 5,000 scratches would look like the Millennium Falcon.
And that was me trying to give my view of like...
All right, so one or two scratches is like, oh no, my beautiful, perfect iPhone 5 is now scratched.
With a thousand scratches, everyone loves the Millennium Falcon, man.
It looks like a hunk of junk, but it's got it where it counts.
You love the Millennium Falcon because it looks worn and lived in and everything.
that's what i was trying to get at i don't know if the jet black iphone qualifies for that i don't know if any of apple's current products do but god i talked about it so much on these podcasts so we'll put links we'll put links to these blog posts some of them by koi vin uh someone who had that original iphone that was really worn down it looks super awesome uh and the links will have time stamps in them using marco's cool overcast time stamp jumping feature uh that works really well with cbr audio um
So you can jump directly to the timestamp and listen to me talk about this for a long time and I'll spare you from it now.
Ed Ryan writes in to say the Bluetooth stack almost certainly doesn't bit stream without decoding to PCM first, you'd have no volume control.
Marco, you want to kind of translate that into regular human for me?
Sure.
So last episode, we were talking about Casey, your audiophile friends.
They had a concern that in order for audio to be transmitted to Bluetooth headphones, it was generally being recompressed as some other kind of lossy format, depending on the headphones in the phone.
And, you know, that could be used different codecs, whether it was the old HTTP SBC thing or whether it was something more advanced like aptX or AAC.
Basically,
Any audio sent to Bluetooth headphones is being encoded in some kind of lossy format in order to make that transmission happen in a practical way.
And so one of the options that, John, you had asked about was, what if you have an AAC audio source...
and you have headphones and a phone that can transmit over Bluetooth in the AAC format, would there be some kind of intelligence there that it could just pass it through untouched so it wouldn't be decoding it and then re-encoding it and possibly incurring a quality loss there?
And Ed Ryan's pointing out here that basically if you don't decode it and then re-encode it back to the headphones, if you don't do that, you generally can't adjust the volume.
And that's technically not entirely true.
There are, like, in the way the files are represented, in the way audio is represented in these lossy forms...
it is actually possible in many cases depending on the format to adjust the volume without transcoding it basically to actually modify the encoded compressed data because a lot of times it's represented as like frequency volume frequency volume and so you can just like drop those volume values now it's not it doesn't know you can't always do it depending on the exact encoding but it is technically possible to do that in some cases and
However, that's a lot of complexity in addition to all the other complexity that would be involved in passing this bitstream through unmodified or minimally modified without decoding to regular samples first.
So basically, this isn't happening.
And I should also point out a friend of the show, Mark Edwards, from Django Software, makers of the amazing iStat Menus app, which everyone here except John uses.
True story.
Yeah.
He's an audiophile and one of the good ones.
And he and I had a Twitter exchange earlier.
Basically, my position last episode on whether Bluetooth lossy codecs matter, my position is basically Bluetooth headphones have such mediocre...
Headphone drivers, like the actual speaker parts of the headphones, they're so mediocre on almost everything that's out there that whatever quality loss you might incur by effectively double encoding your music would be undetectable compared to the poor quality of the headphones themselves.
You'd need better quality headphones to really hear that difference.
um and so mark took me to task for that understandably um he's right um you know that that is kind of a separate issue like head bluetooth headphones could get better maybe the reason they don't have better drivers is because when you put better drivers in bluetooth headphones maybe they sound crap because of the double encoding so that is totally a valid counter argument uh to what i was saying which i didn't really consider but um
Thanks to Mark Edwards for pointing that out.
He's right.
It is possible this is audible and maybe we'll do some experiments and try.
But the bigger problem right now is that Bluetooth headphones are generally pretty mediocre sounding.
So if this is a problem, we can't tell.
One more thing on the bitstreaming.
The solution to that, if they wanted to bitstream, is you've got to put the volume control on the headphones.
And obviously that's not going to work on little tiny earpods, but if you had big honking headphones, you can bitstream to them, and the DAC would be in the headphones, and the volume control could also be there in theory.
Not that I think they're going to do that, but.
Many Bluetooth headphones have volume control built in.
And it's kind of like one of the ways that they differ is like some of them, when you push the volume buttons on the headphone, it just controls the source device's logical volume for that headphone.
So like basically you'd have one unified volume control.
And if you push the button on the headphone, it's not like doing that reduction in the headphone.
It's sending the command to the phone saying, hey, drop your volume by one increment or whatever.
So some headphones do that and some, especially older ones, maintain their own volume control in addition to the phone's volume control, which is, it allows more control, but it's also kind of annoying.
Like if the phone is set really low and you keep pushing up on the headphone, it's like maxed out and you can't tell why it's too quiet.
So it's kind of annoying there.
But anyway, usually having one unified volume control being, you know, the headphone controls are actually telling the phone what to do.
That is generally better, which would have this problem.
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So we should talk about what phones we have and the process by which we retrieve them.
And since I got so angry at John last episode about his preposterous claim that accessibility is also his personal private stereo set.
Not my claim.
Do you want to tell me again that I think the default should be different?
Because you seem to be stuck on that one for a while, too.
No, I'm just poking.
So I think this is the time when Marco and I get angry at each other, but we need to meander to that.
What did you end up getting, Marco?
And why were you on the news exactly?
okay so i was on my we went to go we did an in-store pickup to get tiff's phone um as i mentioned last week i had some order trouble and then some waffling and then some order trouble with the waffling order and so basically i was unable to to make an online order for what i ended up ordering which was a jet black regular size seven anyway we so we went to go pick up tips on day one mine wasn't gonna be ready on day one it was gonna be like you know mid-october or something
And it just so happened that while we were waiting online, a local news anchor wanted to do a segment on the incredibly long lines at Apple stores.
Meanwhile, the line wasn't long at all, but that's beside the point.
Obviously, it's the news.
They're going to do whatever they want anyway, regardless of the truth.
So, you know, the news anchor just asked the people who were right in front of her, which happened to be me and this other guy.
She just asked us like, hey, we'd be willing to go on camera live for the local news.
And
tell you know why we're waiting online what our favorite features the new iphone are uh and whatever else and we said sure and there you know there were no questions asked besides that you know they didn't she didn't ask what we were going to say well she did but then i i lied um i said i was talking about the camera how great it was um because that's what she wanted your story changes
She didn't ask what we were going to say.
Well, she did ask what we were going to say.
She kind of prompted us with like what she wanted us to say, you know, in the journalist standard of like implying like, here's what you, here's what I want to hear.
So, and she didn't ask who we were or anything.
She didn't know that I was like an Apple person in some capacity.
Like she had no idea.
It didn't matter.
It didn't come up.
So fine.
So yeah, turns the camera on and I give a more sarcastic answer than I think everybody was expecting.
And it was fun.
So we could pick up Tiff's phone.
It was fun.
It's fine.
We'll get it back, whatever.
So I, in the meantime... Well, slow down, slow down.
So what did Tiff end up with?
Which model?
Regular size gold.
Meanwhile, here I am.
When I went into the store, I was able to finally see and pick up and feel both of the black models.
And I decided right then, oh my God, I have to have the Jet Black.
Because the way it feels, it is so... If, like me...
you have been out there unhappy with the 6 and 6s because they are slippery and they're hard to hold without a case, you want the Jet Black iPhone 7.
Because it feels like... The back of it feels even more grippy than the screen.
If you put your hand on glass and you feel the glass screen, that is grippier.
Your hand sticks to it better than it does to the slippery aluminum back of the phone.
On the Jet Black, it's the opposite.
The Jet Black, the phone is even grippier than the screen.
It feels about as grippy as the old plastic phones did or the iPhone 5C, the only kind of newish one.
Very, very grippy, very easy to hold.
The fact that it looks really cool from most angles and in most conditions, that to me is secondary.
I don't care how the back of the phone looks really.
I mean, I've lived with an ugly backed phone for the last two years.
I think the 6 and 6S design looked hideous from the back.
And for the 6S, I ended up using one of these D-brand vinyl skins for the second half of my ownership of it to cover up half the back just to give it a little more grip.
The Jet Black 7 is even grippier than that D-brand vinyl skin was.
It's so nice and grippy.
So I immediately thought, I don't care how quickly this thing scratches, how bad it looks.
I don't look at the back of my phone when I'm using it, but I'm always feeling the back of my phone when I'm using it.
So grip matters more to me than looks.
So of course I go home and try to get a jet black phone and I'm going through like eBay and everything and it's just a disaster.
Trying to buy anything ever on eBay, or sell it for that matter, is always a bit of a disaster.
eBay is just a horrible place full of horrible people trying to scam each other, with eBay being one of those people trying to scam the sellers.
Anyway, it's wonderful.
It was a mess trying to get it on eBay.
I did try a bit on a few, but the phone I wanted retailed for after tax about $800, and they were going on eBay for $1,200 and up.
So I was like, I don't really want to spend $400 extra just for the privilege of getting it a little bit sooner.
I started talking about it on Twitter, and I was contacted by a guy named Chris Rees Hansen.
He's the author of Dovenote Software, so I should give him a plug.
He really went above and beyond here.
Dovenote, like the bird, dovenote.com slash pace is his main app.
It's an app called Pace that lets you take breaks on the Mac while you're working.
It's pretty cool.
chris from dove note software contacted me on twitter and he said hey i have a jet black one that i just opened i decided i didn't want that color so i'm going to return it but if you want to sell it to you at cost wow this is pretty cool that is super cool if he would have just sold on ebay he could have could have made 400 bucks right but he didn't he was a fan of the show he wanted he wanted you know help me out awesome and the box comes
I'm signing for it with my UPS driver, and I'm like, this is really light.
Oh, no.
This box seems like... Is there really a phone in here?
Did he just send the phone itself and not the packaging, maybe?
It feels really light.
And even the UPS driver's like, yeah, there's no phone in here.
It's way too light.
I'm like, okay.
So I...
go inside open it up and kind of go fish through it and it's full of packing peanuts and only packing peanuts oh no and the packing slip with the phone you know the apple packing slip and a little card from chris saying hey hope you enjoy it he's you know nice guy and uh the plastic wrap to an iphone box which you can identify by the little green pull tab arrow on one side oh no
Chris, we had some common friends, so I was pretty sure he wasn't the scammer here.
So I contacted him, and I'm like, hey, we have a problem here.
And he was super great about it.
So it turns out he dropped it off at the store.
He has a receipt at the store saying it weighed seven pounds when it left the store.
Oh, goodness.
And it arrives with me weighing nothing and being filled with packing peanuts.
Seven pounds, you say?
Yeah.
yeah go on go on just keep going just plow bravely ahead all right yeah you know there so he immediately refunds my money and you know if you're if you're the buyer in this situation if you use paypal and you pay the goods rate not like the sending people cash rate which eliminates the fee look there's a reason you pay those fees those fees cover you as the buyer and when you're buying things you should always do that option of the goods rate where there where there is a fee you
Even if the seller makes you pay the fee, which is actually, I think, against PayPal's terms of service to ask you to do that.
But regardless, even if the seller makes you pay the fee, you need to do it that way because that protects you in situations like this.
So anyway, I didn't have to file a claim because he's a nice guy and he immediately refunded the money.
He's like, I'll deal with it because it was insured.
So he goes and deals with UPS and it's still in process, but he's, he's, he's working with them.
I feel so bad for this guy because like here he was doing me this favor.
Yeah.
He's trying to do you a solid.
Yeah.
So now we've learned don't send an iPhone right during iPhone mania time because, and it's like, you know, it's, it's obviously an iPhone box because people who like people who work for UPS have seen a billion of these boxes over the last few days.
And it's, he sent it in the same box that,
that's like the perfect opportunity if you're like you know anyway so it was stolen now now chris is like stuck dealing with all this insurance crap with ups and i feel really bad for him so please look at his app pace by dove note software making me feel a little bit better oh that sucks so much so then then i i was like you know what screw this i am not gonna try to buy another phone on the internet like i'll just try i'll just get it through apple whatever however long it takes i
don't care i'll just and this i have bought so many things online ebay amazon everywhere else individual sellers people on forums i've bought and sold so many things online this is the first time i've ever had something stolen so
So I emailed my business rep at the, or, you know, the Apple retail business rep at my two local stores on Monday morning, just basically saying, you know, right after this whole happened, basically saying like, hey, if there's any kind of waiting list you can put me on anything, please, you know, I could really use one.
One of the stores said, sorry, we can't really do it.
We don't know what we're going to have.
The other store said, yeah, I got two right here.
You want to come pick it up right now?
You need both?
Wow.
Wow.
so i monday i i went in on monday monday around lunch and picked up my brand new jet black iphone 7 128 gig t-mobile unlocked i finally have it through a regular means and hopefully everybody buys pace by dev note software so that chris is less put out by this whole ordeal and uh everything is fine now and you like it
I think I love it.
So here's the thing.
As I said, the Jet Black finish is amazing.
If you don't have one of these yet, if you have any chance to go handle one in a store, I strongly suggest you do it.
If you're on the fence about whether you want Jet Black...
Really, really go try them.
If you really value the grip of your phone, I'd say just order it blind.
Just get it because it really does make a big difference.
Mine is, of course, already has some minor micro abrasions on it, but I don't care.
You can only see them in certain lighting.
It's very much like I would compare it to clear coat scratches on a black car.
where the black layer itself does not appear to be scratched but if you like move it around the light and catch catch like the glare of the light you will see a little fine scratches here and there mostly around the edges and uh it's fine i don't care it's it's amazing and if this ends up looking like the millennium falcon cool if it ends up just looking like a scratched up old classic ipod with the steel back i don't really care about that either as long as it continues to feel anything like it feels it's
I couldn't care less how much the back scratched because it feels so incredibly good.
And if I didn't have it feel that good, if it was as slippery as the other ones, I would put some ugly case or vinyl decal over it anyway.
So like either way, like I'm not seeing the perfectly clear back of the phone.
I would also point out on the fingerprint issue that the ones I saw in the store for the matte black model, it seems that the matte black one is actually pretty bad about fingerprints too.
The difference is they're harder to wipe off.
uh the the jet black has i've heard from a couple people who have apple pr connections that apparently the jet black does have the oleophobic coating along the whole back side of it um so it does wipe off easily just like the screen basically if you like rub it on your on your jeans or whatever uh so getting fingerprints off of it is fine if you actually care honestly i don't care because i don't look at the back but if you're concerned about fingerprints the matte black i would say is is really no better um because
The fingerprints show up just as much on it and they don't come off as easily.
They kind of just like dull or smear if you try to wipe them off.
So anyway, that's my thoughts on the case and the color so far.
The home button I am kind of mixed on.
I don't hate it as much as I thought I would.
I don't love it.
Some people love it.
That's fine.
I started out on the setting number one, the weakest.
I have now since moved to setting number three based on Mike Hurley's urging on upgrade that that is the one true setting.
That seems okay so far.
It's a little loud for me, honestly, but oh well.
And yeah, that's about it.
So far, so good.
I haven't used the headphone jack yet because I hardly ever use wired headphones.
And that's it.
I have so many thoughts.
Before you have your thoughts, can I ask Marco a quick question about the Jet Black as a potential purchaser?
A couple people asked you this, but I didn't see your answer.
What about wetness combined with the surface?
It's very tacky because it's very smooth, but if your hand is slightly wet, does it suddenly become a slippery little pill?
if your hand is just like slightly sweaty it'll actually be really grippy it'll be better that way um if your hand is like soaked then i think picking up any phone is going to be a problem well this one is waterproof that's why i asked like because it's waterproof you could use it in the rain like in the apple ads or you could like you know drop it in the water i don't know like it just seems like it's a confluence of events here this is the first phone where you can actually get wet without you know
terror that you're going to destroy your phone and it also seems like the one that might be the slipperiest with water what i'm asking for you to do is get your phone wet and try this no it's not going to happen if your hands are frequently like dripping wet like you just submerge your hands in water and then you have to handle your phone or the blood of your enemies you know whatever sure then maybe choose a different one um but you know for for everyday regular use by in most conditions the grip of this is incredible
I'm going to have to bring a wet sponge to the Apple store, aren't I?
Because you're not going to do this for me.
Honestly, I think it would have to be really wet to make that.
You've seen all the videos.
People are dropping these things in the water, taking pictures underwater with them.
It potentially can get wet.
Because that's the thing.
If the grip is entirely based on it being super smooth and grippy like that, if it suddenly becomes very slippery, that's something I want to know about.
Not that I plan on using it in the rain, but
It's conceivable that I just washed my hands and I'm going to hurry and walk into the other room and grab the thing.
And if it squirts out of my hand, I'm going to be sad because it may be waterproof, but it's still not quite drop proof.
I think the the the estimation by I think it was Jason Snell or no, it was Gruber who said this on this week's talk show.
Basically, like if you're if you're a person with extremely dry hands all the time, then maybe you might want to go feel one in the store to see if it's going to be a problem for you.
i don't have that problem my hands are always like warm and and not like sweaty but like you know slightly moistened i guess i don't know sorry for grossing everybody out but uh so for me it's perfect because it is really incredibly grippy if your hands are if your hands have any normal level of moisture really i think it's only if your hands are extremely dry like in the middle of winter and you have to like cover them in lotion to in order for them not to fall apart maybe before you've lotion for the day it might be a bit dry and
Or if your hands are literally like in water, you know, then it might be a little more slippery.
But I don't think those are common occurrences for most people who are going to be buying it.
It rubs the lotion on its iPhone.
Oh, or else it gets the hose again.
Hey, you got a rubber end.
Look at you.
That got aggressive.
Anyway, I put a link in the show notes for the seven pounds just to save you guys.
Okay.
I've never heard the flop house.
I know.
I know.
You know, I heard that you can just jump right in anytime and you'll be fine.
I went to the Apple store today and this was my first time seeing or handling a jet black iPhone.
I went to buy a extra headphone adapter too because I know myself enough to know that it's just wise to sprinkle these little things all over the place rather than rely on myself to remember to take it with me when I might need it.
So, for example, Erin's car, we play our iPhones by way of a cassette adapter because her car was built like one of the last years that cassettes were sort of a thing.
So I'm going to just leave one of these little adapters in her car.
And the advantage of it being only $9 is that, you know, $9 is not free, but it is not an exorbitant amount of money.
So I just grabbed a couple.
While I was there, I looked at the Jet Black iPhone.
I picked it up.
The first thing I noticed was, holy God, I need to dip my hands in Clorox because I've just touched a thousand fingerprints.
And that I did not really like.
I am holding my matte black iPhone in my hand.
And admittedly, at a couple of angles, you can see some fingerprints on it.
But generally speaking, the only thing I see is all the fingerprints on the Apple logo, which looks to me to be more of a Jet Black-esque material slash color.
I did not notice when I was holding the Jet Black phone, which I held for a grand total of maybe 15 seconds.
And probably very gingerly.
Yeah, I did not notice that it was tackier, but I can't tell if that's if that means that in my estimation, Marco is wrong and that it's not tackier or the fact that it wasn't slippery.
made nothing registered does that mean you know what i mean so like i didn't think to myself oh this is super slippery so maybe that means it was tackier now i deeply regret not having thought to like examine the two of them side by side i was kind of in a rush and i had declan with me and so i didn't want to just stand there for an hour playing with these things while he's looking at me like dad are you serious right now
But I'd like to go back and try it again.
But I do not see a lot of fingerprints on my Jet Black one.
And having seen, excuse me, on my matte black one, and having seen the Jet Black one in the store, to my eyes, I actually think the matte black looks better.
Hand on heart, I really do.
And I was scared to look at the Jet Black one because I expected to think to myself, oh God, I've made a terrible mistake.
But I really think the matte black looks better.
And it occurred to me just a day or so ago, I think what this is, is my unbelievable unbridled love for the black book, the black polycarbonate MacBook from years ago.
I wanted one of those so hard.
And it was like $70 or $150 more than the equivalent white one.
And so I didn't do it when I bought my initial Mac.
And I missed having the black MacBook.
I thought it looked so good.
And this, to me, is the black book of iPhones.
And I just love the look of it.
And that doesn't make Marco wrong.
But I love the look of this matte black one, which I know John is not helping you because I know Marco was really effusive about his jet black.
I'm really effusive about this one.
I think this one looks so much better than the Jet Black to my eyes.
I definitely feel, for me, I made the right choice.
Well, and I think we largely agree on the relative benefits of them.
The question is just priorities, really.
It's like, you know...
What gives you more joy or what is more functional to you when you're choosing your phone's color and finish, basically?
Normally, we don't even have these kind of choices that make any difference at all.
This time, we actually do have a choice.
So basically, the question is like, would you want one that looks kind of fingerprinty a lot of the time and is going to be scratched up pretty fast but feels this particular way?
or would you want one that you know like the one you have the matte black one that looks more consistent over time and generally you know a lot of people really do find it very attractive I find honestly I find the black one a little bit boring and a little bit dated looking because like for years so much nerd stuff has just been available in black and like and I know not necessarily iPhones but you know it's a it's personal preference I guess you know I find it kind of kind of boring looking to be just flat black and
and and honestly the jet black one it just so happens that i like the way it looks but i really don't care how it looks because it feels so good that's why i'm willing to ignore the scratches so basically it comes down to john like do you first of all with your type of hand do you find it a lot grippier do you care and then which do you know if the answer to those things are yes then basically which do you prefer having a phone that you love the way it looks or having a phone that feels this particular way
well the other thing that's in the mix for me is cases because i i always had cases on my ipod touches and i have a case on my first iphone um and the jet black one because my first iphone was a six which as we all know is way too slippery um with this but the jet black the question for me is like can i go caseless can i if this is grippy enough can i go caseless with it and for me the equation is all right so
If I decide that it's grippy enough to go caseless, can I tolerate then the disaster that will be the back of that phone from the scratches?
And I have to sort of get to Marco's place where it's like, look, just who cares how it looks?
Or I got to I got to believe it's going to look good when it's all scratched up so far.
All the pictures that I've seen on Twitter have scratched up ones.
Do not look good to me.
And I would just have to sort of resign myself to say, well, you know, just don't worry about it.
Like you're in exchange.
You're getting a smaller, lighter phone because you don't have a case on it or whatever.
But on the other side of this is if I if I go to the store and it's like a toss up or I can't quite decide or whatever.
but i decide that like the jet black as grippy as it may be is not as grippy as like my leather case or whatever i just decide i like the leather one for whatever i may end up getting a jet black one just so i can ensconce it in leather and preserve it so it actually is perfect because it's never actually seen the light of day because from the day the second i took it out of the box i put a case on it and so that it will be perfect under there and i could see the perfectness peeking out on the bottom or the speakers are and just know in my heart of hearts that there is an unblemished
perfect jet black back on this thing so that's a factor and then the final factor is first of all it won't by the way yeah i really like matte black yeah that's a question you get a little piece of grit in there but i'll try really hard um the matte black i really like as i was thinking the same thing like the main function of this matte black is just to make us all wish that apple had had this technology because the black book did not stay pristine because it was made of plastic and it wasn't you know it didn't hold up and showed fingerprints like crazy
i mean you're saying the matte black one does too but i i see the pictures of the matte black and it's a look that i like if jet black didn't exist i'd be like boy that matte black isn't that great guys no more space gray like matte black you know i i like the matte black no no i'm talking about the the black book the the plastic the black plastic map that showed fingerprints like crazy but you're saying the matte black phone in the store also showed fingerprints
Not as much as the jet black, obviously.
But I'm saying it shows way more fingerprints than the old space gray ones.
Yeah.
But mine have always been a case.
So anyway, I've got some research to do and I've got to go to the store.
The other thing I was thinking about, two things in this topic.
One, the jet black finish with it being grippier and everything.
They can make that in colors.
They could, you know, you can imagine if they keep this finish, right?
If this becomes sort of like a signature finish of iPhones, maybe the super duper cool glass one, the back of all of them are that super glossy, highly polished aluminum.
It just so happens they don't all come in black.
Can you imagine, you know, Lifesavers colors like the old IMAX, but with this super glossy thing?
And by the way, this is a neat thing that we left out of the show notes last time.
Someone had noticed that the, what is it, like the wallpapers they give you with this weird blob of gel exactly matches the color of some of the Lifesaver IMAX plus the original one, which I thought was neat.
Yeah.
But I can imagine this finish, if it ends up being successful, being a signature of the iPhone going forward.
But as I said to Marco on Twitter today when he was talking about what are the things that we're going to look back on about the iPhone 7 and think those didn't quite work out or those complaints were legit and he was saying the home button and a few other things, my suggestion was that...
probably the finish on the back of the iphone 7 will not be an ongoing thing not the aesthetic look but i feel like if they're going to make another version of that finish if they decide to do that they'll work a little bit harder on the scratch thing right like that i feel like this is not where
they wanted it to get they love how it looks they had to put in a little warning about scratching if they have the technology to say like the 6s being slightly less slightly less slippery than the 6 they could say oh it's got the same awesome finish that you love from the 7 but now it is more scratch resistant not perfect you know it's not going to be like the stainless steel dlc thing because that apparently is not a process that you can do with aluminum and they're not going to make it out of steel because the foam would weigh a ton um but i can imagine this shiny glossy finish being a thing because
it looks cool right um and if you could make it less scratchy that would be cool and if you could do it in different colors that would also be cool so um i see potentially a future in that or this would just be like a one-off thing where this was the glossy black one and they go on to whatever they've already had in mind for the age but anyway i'm not any closer to decision gotta see these things in person um and hopefully by the time i get it all the weird bugs with like the headphone connectors and everything will all be worked out so thanks for uh dealing with that guys
they'll also have the uh the option for reduced motion and messages already done by then right right guys just on to we're on schedule for that okay go ahead all right so just a couple of minor follow-ups to what you just said uh first of all um your your potential option of buy the jet black anyway and just put it in a case and keep it pristine forever it won't actually work because first of all as you mentioned yeah a little piece of grit might get back there or whatever and scratch it i'm real i'm really careful
yeah so am i and i've had this phone for two days and it's already scratches on it it wasn't in a case it was never in a case and some of them are along the bottom edge where the speakers turn into the i know i said the speaker that i said the speaker grill would be poking out i understood that would be exposed
so yeah i mean it's just like just handling this having it in a pocket with lint in it i mean this thing like i am very careful with my stuff most of most of my electronics that i own and use after i'm done using them look brand new they like they look totally unused they have no wear on them whatsoever
this phone i've had for two days and it already is scratched so i will say if you are the kind of person who thinks you know what i can get a jet black and just be really careful with it no that's not going to happen uh so you have you really you have to be okay with it scratching if you're going to get it um but and you know if like me if you are so you know enamored by the by the feel of it that you don't care then it might be right for you
And I also would say I do think that you are probably right.
This is probably going to be a one-off.
I don't expect this color to return in future years simply because I think it is probably very expensive and more complex for them to do.
And also I think...
the way it ages is not going to be received well.
I think people are going to look back on it kind of like the scratchy iPod Nanos and old classic iPods with the steel backs.
It won't be that bad because the scratchy iPod Nano was on the front.
That's true.
So that was a problem.
But even if they can improve it, because that's the wild card.
Like I said, I really don't feel like they're going to do this exact back again.
But this aesthetic, I think, has legs, right?
And so if they can improve the process somehow, like come up with some super hard clear coat that resists scratching and doesn't look like a disaster...
like ceramic i think as aesthetically it would be really nice i mean obviously it's probably also expensive and you know somebody can you imagine like if they had like bright candy colors under that kind of gloss that's a good looking phone yeah i mean i would even say like like a white one what let's not go crazy
White on the back and black on the front.
There we go.
Yeah, exactly.
Business in front, party in the back.
If they had like a white glossy finish, I don't know anything about this process.
I don't know whether it's possible to do it in different colors or whether this can only be done in black because of some component that's used in it.
But if it could be done, if the same finish could be done in white, I bet the scratches would be very hard to see.
So you heard it here first, kids.
John Syracuse would like a mullet foam.
I was just identifying as a thing that could be made.
I'm just messing around.
The home button, hashtag Mike was wrong.
The correct setting is the middle setting.
Additionally, I hated, hated this home button for six hours.
And now I freaking love it.
I...
Don't know why I love it, to be completely honest with you, but it just feels so much more crisp than the home button on my iPad or even my 6S, which I still have for at least a little while.
I grab the iPad or if I just pick up the 6S for whatever reason, those feel just positively mushy by comparison.
and i don't care for it all at all i feel like like double clicking for lack of a better word the home button to bring up multitasking i feel like i can do it quicker and it's more reliable on the new phone i have um guided access enabled so if i really need a break for a minute if uh declan's in the car or something like that because he hates the car
Um, and I want to give him like Plex to look at and look at Daniel tiger or Sesame street or what have you.
I've got it access ready and waiting to be enabled.
So he doesn't, you know, navigate away from the app I want him to use.
So a triple tap oftentimes, or a triple click, I would oftentimes fire that accidentally.
Well, maybe not often, but definitely regularly fire a triple click by accident with physical home buttons.
I have yet to do that on this one.
And you know what?
As stupid as it sounds, and I'll be the first to say it's stupid, I just kind of like being on the home screen and mashing away at this home button and feeling the Taptic Engine.
I really think it feels better and crisper.
You've got an $850 fidget cube.
I do.
It's great.
I love this thing.
Click in your pen caps and hit your home button.
Yep, that's right.
No, I really do love this thing.
I think one is too gentle.
I think three is just overbearing.
I think two is just right.
It was weird at first because it is very...
clearly not the same feel as a physical button.
As many people have said, particularly those who had review units, it's not the same as the trackpad, which despite what Marco believes does feel like an actual click.
You cannot discern the difference unless you're Marco Arma.
oh no no no wait wait wait wait wait i never said the force touch trackpad doesn't feel like a click i said it feels like a bad button and the old one was a good button and you can totally tell and you can totally tell the difference don't tell me you can't tell it's a yeah it's a pretty it's a pretty apparent difference the force touch might be good enough for lots of people but that doesn't mean it's not worse it's definitely much more convincing than the reports say because you if like you said last time if you didn't tell someone especially someone who's not marco that it was this wasn't a button they wouldn't figure it out but once you tell them they're like oh yeah i can see that
And like I said, the trackpad does move.
I wonder if the home button moves.
Has anyone gone in macro on that and see does the home button move?
Because the trackpad moves just because it's a big thing and it flexes.
But I wonder if the home button moves at all.
I don't think it does.
And I will say, too, like, I actually find the four-struck home button on the 7 less crappy than the four-struck trackpads.
I actually, I think...
Give me another couple days, I'll probably even like this.
However, I've been using a Force Touch Magic trackpad for a while now, and I still don't like its click.
The Force Touch on the trackpads, I think, stays mediocre.
But the one on the phone, I think you get used to pretty fast.
I really don't mind and, in fact, like the trackpad.
But be that as it may, I really like the home button.
Setting number two is the right setting.
The best way to describe it, which I'm stealing from either Panzerino or Snell or somebody, is that it feels like the whole bottom of the phone.
Not that it's...
Yeah.
Um, but I've come to really like it and it's, it almost feels more obvious, even at setting two that, yes, I have engaged the home button.
So I freaking love this thing.
The one downside that I found, which I almost never run into, but it is striking.
The difference is if you have the phone sitting on say a table or something like that, and then press the home button, it feels amazing.
very, very weird.
Either you don't feel it at all, or this is particularly on like a hard surface, a surface.
So like I have a glass desk.
So putting it on my, my mouse pad, which I have to use like an animal that feels about the same, but on the glass, you can barely feel the darn thing moving at all, which is super, super weird.
And I don't care for that at all, but it's so rare that I have the thing sitting on a flat surface like that and pressing the home button that that doesn't really bother me.
But that is something worth noting.
And as a friend of the show, Mike Hurley, had also noted, the ring that kind of enables touch ID is the same thing that enables listening, for lack of a better word, that you're pressing the home button.
So if you don't have the right kind of capacitive gloves, or if you like put your shirt between your thumb and the home button, you can no longer tap or press the home button, which to me isn't a problem at all, but it is very peculiar.
And it makes you realize that this is all just software and hardware trickery.
Yeah, I actually hit this like in the like I have next to my bed.
I have I have an iPhone dock and I've gotten in the habit of like when I wake up in the morning to check the time, I will just like kind of push my pinky into the home button to just make sure it doesn't unlock the whole phone and everything.
I just want to see the clock on the phone.
And so now I kind of can't it doesn't work very well anymore because I've gotten in the habit of only pushing this little tiny bit of the home button with my pinky.
And, you know, you kind of have to activate that touch ID ring to make it work at all now.
If you had a mechanical clock next to your bed, as soon as you looked over, it would tell you the time.
No, but it wouldn't be lit up.
Whereas the Apple Watch, when it's close to the time you're supposed to wake up, automatically lights up for you.
It's the future.
Radiation can solve that problem.
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uh speakers the speakers on the new phones are indeed louder uh they are in stereo which i haven't watched very much on my new phone in terms of like video or what have you but i have had it playing some podcasts from time to time and oh man these speakers are so much louder and i love it have you used yours much uh marco
Not a ton, but I have used them and tested them here and there.
And yeah, it's better.
I wouldn't say it's like twice as loud perceptually, and maybe in certain conditions it might be.
Their claim of it being twice as loud might have been like a decibel level measurement where it can be...
It could be funky.
But anyway, it is definitely noticeably louder and of better quality, and that's what's important.
I'm pleasantly surprised that I thought, because the speaker, there isn't one that fires out the top edge.
It's just the earpiece that speaks during phone calls.
That thing is now just loud enough to be a speaker.
And so you have that one firing straight ahead, and then you have the one on the bottom where it's always been firing kind of down.
away from the phone.
So these are firing at two different angles.
And so I thought it would sound weird, but it doesn't really.
It just sounds like the whole phone is making one loud sound output, which is exactly what you want.
So I'm actually very pleasantly surprised by it.
I expected it to be useful from a utility point of view of just getting more sound out of the phone, but it actually is better quality than I expected.
Yeah, completely agree.
Two thumbs up.
The AirPods, obviously none of us have them yet.
When they were first announced, I thought, eh, that's clever, looks cool, but eh.
But a few different things have happened over the last few days that have made me think,
You know, I think I do want those very much in the watch style.
First of all, I've been using the lightning ear earbuds from time to time.
And I really think in that having the cables come off of them really does pull on them enough to try to pull them out of my ears.
And I really think not having the weight of the cables would make a huge difference.
Additionally, there's been a handful of times that I've or even perhaps most of the time I've only had one of the earbuds in because I want to be able to hear Declan or, you know, maybe I'm he's asleep and Aaron's out and I just need to make sure that I can hear the monitor or what have you.
For whatever reason, I've only had one in.
And not having the phone or perhaps it's the earbuds, whatever, force mono when only one of them is in.
I can't say I've noticed it, but I can just think to myself, man, it would be nice if I knew that everything that I could hear, I was hearing through just one of the AirPods.
And additionally, there's been a handful of times when I'll go for a walk with Declan where it would be kind of nice to be able to just not have wires or maybe even leave my phone at home and just use my watch and have these things just magically transfer from the phone to the watch would be really nice.
So at first I thought, yeah, I don't really have any interest in the AirPods.
But within just a few days, I've convinced myself that's going on the Christmas and Hanukkah list this year.
even if the sound quality ends up being no not meaningfully better than the regular ear pods the wired ones which means not very good i think a lot of people are going to buy and use these things and like them just for the utility factor i mean that's the thing with bluetooth audio like in many ways as we've discussed as in many ways bluetooth headphones are worse than wired headphones or at least more complicated you know at best
but it really is a lot more convenient in a number of big ways in practice and that's why like you know that that's why my walking headphones are these terrible sounding little tiny relatively inexpensive sennheiser bluetooth ones because i'm listening to podcasts so the quality doesn't matter very much and it's just so much more convenient with bluetooth headphones that have no wire and have nice nice big button controls on the ear cup
And so I think people are going to feel similarly about the AirPods, where if you really want big thumping bass and everything for music, you're probably going to go with Beats or some other headphone that's more for that purpose and tuned for that.
But if you just want basically headphones as a utilitarian object that are primarily serving a functional role for you and you don't really care as much about the quality,
then I think they're going to be really great.
Again, my only reservation about them is how inconvenient will it really be in practice to not have a lot of remote control options, to not have the volume control, to not have the seek buttons.
And in practice, I think most people won't care because most people...
could only ever use the volume control and play pause uh most people didn't never even knew that you could like you know double click or triple click or click and hold that middle button to do other things like like the seeking and stuff so it you know that might end up not mattering at all um to most buyers of it but to geese like us i think you know people who were aware of their remote control gestures i think it's going to be
a notable omission but otherwise they do seem like they're going to be pretty compelling and i might get a pair just you know as i said just to see like can i get away with this because there are situations where i would probably want those like my my walking bluetooth bluetooth headphones i can't put those in my pocket they don't fit in pockets but these i can like put them in their little case which i think their case does fit in pockets a little thick right but it does fit right
Isn't it like a dental floss size roughly?
Yeah, roughly.
It looks like a Tic Tacs or something.
It's definitely pocketable.
So like there are lots of occasions where I would like to have headphones with me, but I don't have a pocket to devote to them.
So I would love to have these for those kind of situations if I can wear them without pain.
So time will tell on that front.
But they are probably going to be very practical and very compelling in real world use.
So we're going to get you some ear spreaders so you can start preparing.
Wow.
Wow.
That's the problem, right?
Your ears are too small.
They don't fit in there?
Honestly, I don't know what the problem is.
I think my ears are not too small, but just don't have exactly the right type of shape for them to sit properly.
I don't know.
I don't know what the problem is.
Whatever the problem is, they don't sit very well in there, and it hurts.
What are those things they call that you put in shoes?
Shoe trees?
yeah the things that hold them open yeah you need ear trees wow your tree ear tree shaped like ear pods that's apple's next big product the world will conform to our ear pods we measured a thousand ears get in line i mean couldn't you just take the wired ones that come in the box for free and just shove those in there all the time i don't know it's still it's still open for debate whether they're exactly the same shape as the wireless ones
Goodness.
All right.
Well, I believe that's it for today, right?
I think so.
All right.
Thank you very much to our three sponsors, Betterment, Linode, and Pingdom.
We will see you next week.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't move.
Riffola, I have been barking up this tree so many times, and Marco refuses to listen.
Oh, IEMs?
Yes, I know.
Yeah, no, there was one time where like in 2006 or so, I did try one of the like entry level.
I think it might have been one of the Shure ones or Edemonic.
I forget which one I did, but I did try like an entry level IEM with like a few different various tips on it.
And I had to return it.
I could not even that I like it was just it hurt.
I couldn't wear it.
Well, the custom mold one is whatever I'm pitching you on.
Let me pour some goop into your ear.
But I feel like the custom mold, like, first of all, you know, I think the cheapest custom molded ones are like $700-ish, like somewhere in that price range.
Oh, yeah.
For you, that's so damn expensive, Mr. I spend gazillions of dollars on headphones on a daily basis.
But to spend $700 on something that I will almost certainly not be able to use and that I can't return or resell, that is not a great sell.
I understand where you're coming from, which is why I'm only going to slightly beat you up.
But the whole point of custom poured IEMs is that they are built for Marco Arment.
They are perfect for Marco Arment because they literally put goop in your ears to make a mold of your ears.
Oh, I know.
I know.
It is by design, by definition, perfect.
That is the whole point.
But what if the problem isn't the shape?
What if the problem is like my ear is too sensitive there or whatever?
the problem isn't like crap in his ears it's like they're perfect if you want something that perfectly wedges itself in your ear canal this will perfectly fit in your ear canal it's like no i don't want something filling up my ear canal i want there to be air in my ear canal and maybe a little bit of wax and some hairs because i'm old yeah like
I find... I mean, people who love and can use IEMs more power to you, I find them a little gross.
And I also like... The amount of isolation they provide is not usually something I want.
Like, if I'm not walking... That's actually... That's a fair point.
I don't want full isolation.
Like, my little...
Stupid Sennheiser ones are these, you know, relatively small on-ear headphones.
So they are closed back, but there's not much ceiling that's actually happening.
So I'm not very isolated from the world.
So I can hear things like traffic, which is pretty important when I'm walking.
So especially because, you know, I'm often walking in the street with my dog.
So, you know, to be able to hear cars coming is fairly important.
See, that I have no argument for.
But the, oh, I don't think it'll feel good.
Oh, just go try it.
Just so I don't have to complain and moan at you for the rest of my life.
If you want to pitch him, if you want to get him to use these things, you got to go to the audiophile angle and say, people say that the real best sounding earphones are the ones that jam themselves up inside your ear like little eels.
That's the way to go for it.
i again i've never i've never you know benefited from this but people do say that iems are really amazing and like the quality you can get out of a good pair of iems is really something so that's what's going to bring you over the edge eventually if anything ever does it's not going to be the idea that you know that it'll be better than the bluetooth ones you're using yeah and i i'm i'm predicting now that i think you'll switch to the ear pods if they in any way manage to stay in your ears if they don't obviously then whatever you'll just give them the tiff but
Because I feel like they're just going to be so much more convenient than those big... I'm one of those people who would feel weird walking around outside, walking the dog with big headphones on.
I know yours aren't big.
They're not big.
They're bigger than earpods, put it that way.
Somehow in my world, I feel okay with earbuds going on a walk.
I don't feel okay with a thing that goes over my head.
Anyway, I think once you use the earpods... Honestly, I find earpods... I think earpods look a little bit dumb.
They do.
They're a little dumb.
I will grant you, but...
But they're certainly less conspicuous from a distance than the big thing on your ears.
Yeah.
And I think probably you'll be able to hear more with earpods.
As someone who wears earpods every day when walking around and stuff, I think they don't do much noise isolation at all.
Like, I think you'll be able to hear more traffic, which I think is a good thing because you really shouldn't be walking around on roads with earphones on.
No, I would actually want that.
Or just do one ear.
If you're just doing podcasts, just do one ear and listen in mono.
Something you can't do with a headset, right?
I do it all the time.
Take one off and just stick it next to my ear on my head.
Put it forward.
That's even more ridiculous.
It's still on your head.
It's still squishing.
Anyway, one ear pod and a dog is all you need.
so earlier today there was a rumor that apple was in talks to buy mclaren who makes supercars and many many other things works works on an f1 team or is an f1 team at whatever strollers strollers different company right yeah it's a different company
They were going to buy McLaren, then they were going to make a strategic investment in McLaren, and then, no, they're definitely not looking at McLaren.
No, they're not.
No, nobody's looking at us.
Leave us alone.
So what do we think about this?
Is this a thing?
It doesn't sound like this is a thing, but if it was a thing, then certainly both companies would be saying, oh, no, that's not a thing.
Well, this is a McLaren spokesperson official comment.
Obviously, Apple's not commenting.
Well, sometimes they do on these things to deny them.
But the McLaren says, we can confirm that McLaren is not in discussions with Apple in respect of any potential investment.
I don't know who this heck says in respect of.
It's probably some weird Britishism.
But anyway.
in respect of any potential investment that doesn't rule out them buying them outright that's just an investment so all they have denied is the investment they didn't even bother to deny buying them outright so i feel like this is a bad job from corporate pr if you're gonna do the thing where you just deny everything whether it's true or not but either way obviously it seemed like the goal of the pr was no no no forget everything you heard that's all bs which is fine go ahead and do that and then you know three weeks later it can turn out to be different either way
You have to deny everything.
You can't issue a denial that you forget to deny one of the possibilities because now I can't help but read that and say, oh, so I guess they're not investing in you.
They bought you out.
But anyway, setting aside the corporate PR speak, my question on all this is of all the car companies in the world that Apple is going to buy.
Does it make sense that they would buy McLaren?
Obviously, Tesla doesn't want them because they're mad at each other and whatever, right?
Because we've talked about that deal in the past, like they would be a good fit, but that Musk doesn't want to do it.
And, you know, whatever.
They have some bad blood there that marriage doesn't seem like it's going to happen, although it totally makes sense strategically for both companies if Apple wants to get into cars.
But McLaren?
But, like, tell me the synergies.
Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't know anything about McLaren, but I thought the same thing of like, you know, if Apple is really making a car and if they really are, you know, if it's what we expect it to be, which would be
most likely only electric cars uh most likely for the mass market starting at the high end probably first and then coming down you know over time as they could similar to what tesla is doing right like it seems like and that's why like if you're thinking about like would apple buy another car company if they wanted to get into the car business it seems like yeah tesla is the obvious one to buy because it seems like whatever apple would do in the car business would be very close to what tesla is already doing in the car business
And there would just be like lots of duplicated effort for Apple to reach where Tesla already is.
So or the other angle is the thing that neither Tesla nor Apple are good at.
Tesla is a newish car company.
They haven't been building cars for very long.
Their original cars are based on Lotus things like an Apple has never built a car.
One of the other investment or strategic partnership or purchase things you can do is find a company that has been building cars forever and kind of knows how to do that in the way that it has been done in the past.
A company with car manufacturing experience, mass car manufacturing experience.
tesla doesn't have that and apple doesn't have that so you could also say oh maybe they go with like a honda or something because it's like oh or toyota or bmw we keep hearing them talking to bmw about things and those companies that do that you know whatever that company's called magnus steer or whatever that does like the you know the subcontractor for bmw those kind of deals make sense to me because it's complimentary apple's bringing one thing but they don't know how the hell to make a car and in that respect tesla doesn't really know how the hell to make a car either
they're just kind of figuring out as they go along they're doing a good job but they don't have the years and years of experience in terms of like the toyota assembly line and mass market things uh mclaren does not make a lot of cars let's be honest they don't know how to make thousands and thousands and thousands of cars yes the only synergy i see is mclaren has that apple aesthetic where everything is beautiful and clean and super expensive and the the pictures of their factory are amazing and did you see that uh what is that netflix thing
it's uh it's some supercar thing at apex the story of the supercar or something it's on netflix it's a documentary it's so so but you get to see a lot of shots of the inside of uh the factories of these various car makers less so ferrari because i have a feeling ferrari didn't want to participate in this at all which is kind of a shame but you can kind of tell we couldn't get much access to ferrari anyway um everything looks beautiful mclaren car factory looks like you would imagine an apple car factory would look but guess what they're building supercars there
They're building cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That is not what the tree that Apple's barking up.
And by the way, they also have an F1 team and they all do a bunch of other stuff that is not really have any particular synergy with Apple.
Maybe Apple might someday make a car or something related to the cars.
Is Apple going to get into F1?
now i feel like we're reaching yeah that's the thing i mean like if apple were to buy or strategically invest a lot in another car company i would i would expect it to be somebody who makes a lot of cars or who already has the kind of car in development or the kind of skills that apple would be using for things like electric cars mclaren seems to have neither of those you know it's a very different kind of company
um if i had to put forth you know a company that maybe might be it i'd say maybe nissan because they have the leaf project that actually oh please you're killing me here no no but but now look nissan is a company that needs a lot of design help let's be honest they need a lot of help in every area of making cars at this point they are really lost their way lately
yeah but most mostly in design choices where they what they do have is a successful electric car that that is already like they already have a lot of the stuff required to do that they have a massive network of factories showrooms dealers service centers parts like they have all the stuff that is hard and they can make lots of cars at reasonable prices so like these are all the challenges of like
doing a new car company especially a new consumer focused car company that's that's going to try to sell lots of cars so a company i mean maybe not exactly nissan but a company like nissan would make way more sense to invest in or partner with or to just outright buy if that was possible um that would make way more sense if if apple wants to do what we think they're trying to do then apple don't buy it don't buy nissan please
of all the car companies i mean i would say you'd be better off buying gm than nissan that's how bad i think wow that's that's a lot um i would say and matt drance put this idea in my head um what about lotus like but what do they what do they have
They have design aesthetically and chassis design, for sure.
Well, Apple doesn't need the aesthetic part of it.
The chassis design, sure, but the chassis design for sort of these beautiful, extremely low-volume racing cars that Apple is not making, and the Lotus cars are lightweight and don't have giant battery packs in them.
Except, I mean, the Tesla Roadster was effectively a Lotus Elise, wasn't it?
Right, but Lotus didn't put that battery in there.
Elon Musk framed it behind the back seat.
Well, the thing is, you can look at what Tesla has done in a relatively short time.
And Apple, there's no reason why Apple couldn't do the same kinds of things.
So the basics of just making an electric car, getting it designed, built, certified, safe on the road, and getting it into people's hands, getting a sales network going, getting a charging network going if they're not going to use standards, all that stuff...
Tesla did it so Apple could do it too, plausibly.
Tesla did it in a relatively short time, relative to people like Nissan, a relatively short time with a lot of budget constraints and a lot of trying to prove the idea first to people and try to get people to even...
consider an all electric car and especially a very expensive one um so you know tesla had had to do all that themselves and they did so apple could like there's nothing stopping out from doing it where apple would need help is in the more mass market stuff so like yeah they can make their own chassis they don't they don't need someone else to to make a chassis if they if they feel like it
They don't need someone else to do design.
Whatever McLaren's designing, Apple would have their own opinions.
It's almost like if you're buying a house, if you're looking at houses to buy, and you walk into one and there's this two-year-old, nearly brand-new kitchen.
And it's all designed the wrong way.
But you're just like, man, it would be really wasteful to buy this place and to hate this kitchen, even because it's brand new.
And what are you going to do?
Remodel a brand new place?
That's incredibly wasteful.
That's bad.
I think McLaren being involved in the design of the Apple car would have a similar thing.
You have an already established, highly opinionated design company here that would conflict with whatever Apple would want its design to be.
So you, you don't want like two very opinionated people on the same thing fighting for power.
That's the same problem.
That's the whole reason why Apple probably will never buy Tesla because like Elon Musk would not let that happen because he doesn't want to have Apple come in and tell him what to do.
He wants to do things his way because he, you know, he's running the show and he's done pretty well so far, all things considered.
So like he doesn't want Apple coming in and tell him what to do.
Like,
So if Apple's going to buy or substantially partner with another company, it's going to have to be the kind of relationship where the other company will do the stuff Apple sees as boring, maybe beneath them, or just really uninteresting.
And Apple will do the stuff that Apple likes to do.
So software, UI, design.
So the other thing is the notes related to this is this other story from...
you know, like 10 days or so ago, about the rumor that Apple has changed the focus of their car project, shifting from an emphasis on designing and producing an automobile to building out the underlying technology for an autonomous vehicle.
That's a quote from this story that we'll link.
It was in the New York Times, actually.
So it's like, hey, we're not building a car anymore.
Instead, we are whatever the hell...
of building out the underlying technology for an autonomous vehicle it makes it sound like they're making like self-driving software but you can't really do that without a target car so i'm not quite sure i mean this is kind of the the trickle out of the rumor that we had been hearing for many months about oh uh the project titan the car project has had this big reorg and big bob mansfield has come in and and reshuffled things and so that that seems like a thing that's happening but
a big reorganary shuffling i don't we don't know the details and so this is the first trying to pin that down say oh what really happened is they're shifting their emphasis under from designing and producing a car but you don't really shift them it's like either you're making a car you're not making a car you can't accidentally make a car like you know
that's that's a pretty big shift it's like so are we going to manufacture build and sell a metal thing with wheels or are we not or are we just going to work on like software and you know so i don't know i don't know what the hell's going on over there all i know is this project to spend a lot of money and we've talked about it for a long time and there's still no car so chop chop apple you got maybe three more years to show something for this i mean from these stories coming out too it sounds like there's still everything's still in a lot of flux so it sounds like whatever apple is doing is probably not imminent
we always expect like 2020 but at this point i feel like you have to decide if you're you know if you haven't decided whether you're building a car yet i don't see you having a car to sell in 2020 like it takes a long time for these things so i don't i don't know what's going on if you're like restructuring the place and laying off a bunch of people like now in in late 2016 uh that's that doesn't bode well for a 2020 launch date of a brand new car like that's a car is a lot harder to ship than other things like it's there's a lot involved here
Yeah, and I can imagine them partnering, like bringing McLaren back in.
Because the aesthetics are so similar and because you can imagine them starting with something expensive, it wouldn't be ridiculous for them to partner.
McLaren would help them manufacture this electric car that's like...
apple and mclaren co-branded high-end like the apple's version of the tesla roadster that's like i don't know i feel like that would just be a weird thing to do but there are synergies here car companies do stuff with each other all the time everyone's using toyota's hybrid systems volvo is reselling its self-driving stuff people using transmissions from all the entire fleet of part sellers like zf and everything that supply parts to the entire industry like
in the car world it's not as if there are these islands that make cars so i think anybody bmw all these rumors you've heard apple's been talking to bmw forever would totally be willing to partner with apple and any kind of thing that they want to do related to cars i just keep pulling back to apple deciding apple what do you want to do because there's lots of car companies that will partner with you in various ways there's probably car companies that would let you buy them probably including nissan uh because you know i don't think mclaren would let them buy them because i don't think mclaren's hurting for money at this point um
But there are so many possibilities.
Apple just needs to decide what it is they want to do because it's fine to waffle in secrecy, but at this point, the car project is practically an open secret.
Even Tim Cook can't help but hinting at it.
And if you have nothing to show for that five years from now, in one respect, it's good that Apple didn't ship something crappy, but in another respect...
that's a hell of a boondoggle.
Like it's fine to have projects and then canceled them when they don't work out, but allowing a project that's assuming this much money to go on for, you know, five or 10 years, it's like a certain point.
It's, I'm not going to, you know, some cost fallacy is making you not want to cancel it and canceling it may still be the right thing to do.
But canceling it five years earlier would have been the righter thing to do.
So to go back a step when we were discussing who could Apple buy, if that was the answer, let me throw a really, really peculiar idea at you.
What about BMW?
Because I don't really understand how all this business-y stuff works because I actually do work for a living instead of just running around and talking about stuff.
But the owners of BMW are Stefan or Stefan Quant, Suzanne Clatton, who I believe is also a Quant by birth.
The two of them own 50% of the company and the public owns the other 50%.
If you could convince at least 1% of the public to sell, would that work?
And I mean, the BMW market cap as per Google is $50 billion.
So could it be done?
I mean, they have the money.
Yeah.
The problem with buying those big companies is like the same thing with the F1 team.
It's like if you buy BMW, I feel like the only way that's going to fly is if you buy it with the intention to continue for at least the short term, continue being BMW, which means continuing to sell cars and, you know.
regular non-electric cars and hybrid cars and develop like if you're not going to do that if you're buying them to say okay and all existing bmw lines are canceled like you've just killed half the value of the company and then the question is does apple want to continue running bmw as bmw
as like a claris type thing like a wholly owned subsidiary that you're content to continue to follow bmw's plan for future cars slowly transitioning to electric doing all that stuff while in the meantime also doing some appley thing it's much better and much simpler when you can buy companies that like apple does all the time these little companies that you can entirely consume and say whatever the hell you were working on before that's great and everything but we are either taking the technology from it or just taking the employees or just like it's going to transform and come out as an apple product and
the products you were making before are gone even if we use like the code or the technology or the people or whatever you have just become part of apple you can't do that with bmw you can't buy them and say forget about all those cars that you were making before no one will ever see them again from now on we just take you and all your expertise and and factories and people and designers and we'll make an apple car and i think that doesn't fly because it destroys too much value that's currently in bmw
I mean, that's fair, but they took Beats, and Beats is still largely Beats, isn't it?
I mean, I don't feel it's that different.
Yeah, that's the Claris thing.
Holyone's subsidiary with its own brand, but that's a pretty big exception.
And is Beats still their biggest acquisition?
It might be.
I would assume.
Anyway, that's a weird one, and we talked about it at the time.
Do they get to stay Beats or become Apple's headphones?
They stay Beats, but I think continuing to sell headphones is a much easier fit than Apple saying, we want to buy this company that makes a whole line of cars and continue to sell that whole line of cars.
It's not as if Apple bought Beats and Apple had been making its own line of Beats-like headphones for years and then continued to sell both of them.
Like, it didn't.
It just didn't have headphones like that, and now it does, and it's branding them as Beats.
And Clarisse is the counterexample where they spun off, quote-unquote, this company to make all these things, and it just kind of withered on the vine.
It's still out there, I think, but it never really...
it was never really allowed to fly free and nor was it like supported by the apple mothership in a way that could make it really succeed i think also i mean the big reason why they wouldn't buy bmw is that bmw is the anti-apple their cars are full of buttons there's just buttons for everything there's buttons everywhere there's physical knobs and buttons sometimes there's not a button to sync the right and left climate control i hear yeah oh goodness